Tag: New books

Book previews, historical, mystery, new releases, reviews

Out Today: A Case of Life and Limb – Bonus Review

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The first book featuring Sally Smith’s barrister and (very) reluctant detective Gabriel Ward was a BotW back in April and as the sequel is out today and I read it as soon as I could after finishing that first one, today I have a bonus review of it for you.

We rejoin Gabriel in the run up to Christmas 1901 where he is about to tackle a difficult libel case, representing an actress who says that a tabloid has impugned her reputation. But then a mummified hand is delivered to the Temple’s treasurer and Gabriel is once again pressed into service to try and find out what is happening without inviting the police into the Inner Temple. And as more body parts arrive – including one with a fatal consequence – it becomes clear that someone has got a grudge against the Inner Temple itself.

Sally Smith has come up with another twisty and intriguing mystery and has also continued to build out the world that she created in the first book. Gabriel’s world and circle continues to expand, and his cloistered and sheltered life is a great device to enable her to explain the background to things and the rules of the world without it feeling like an info dump. And Gabriel’s growing friendship with Constable Wright makes for a great unlikely duo who actually compliment each other really well.

I would have read another one of these straight away had that been an option, so the sooner Sally Smith can write a third one the better – and hopefully enough people will buy this to get in on our shelves this time next year. My copy came from NetGalley, but my paperback copy of the first book came from a bookshop so I’m hoping this one will be findable in stores too. I’ll certainly be looking out for it. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too.

Authors I love, Book previews, Series I love

Out Today: New Rivers of London

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Happy New Rivers of London Week! Book 10 in Ben Aaronovitch’s series, Stone and Sky, is out today and I am very, very excited! It’s three years since we last had a full length novel in the series – since Amongst Our Weapons in 2022 we’ve had two novellas, both set in the US but one in the present day with Agent Reynolds, and one in the past with Nightingale in Jazz Age New York. Now they were both great, but I am so excited to see what’s happening to Peter. We’ve had a few hints in the graphic novels because the last three have been beyond the end of Amongst Our Gifts, but it’s not the same as a proper novel. My copy has already arrived – early in fact, except I was staying in London (and it was hot hot hot) and so the only problem is I’m off on a trip for work tomorrow and I don’t dare start it because I’m not sure I’ll get it finished before I have to leave and I don’t want to trek it away with me part finished and when I know I’ll buy books at the airport…

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: A Murder for Miss Hortense

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I previewed this one last week as it came out – and I’ve since finished it so I’m coming back around to give a review because it is a really great set up and a really nice read.

Cover of A Murder for Miss Hortense

And so the set up: Miss Hortense is a retired nurse who lives in a Birmingham suburb after coming to the UK from Jamaica in 1960. When a body turns up in the home of one of her acquaintances, she is drawn into investigating. She’s pretty fearless – she’s had to be to survive more than three decades in nursing and living in an area that wasn’t exactly welcoming when she first arrived. A lot of the signs point to a connection to the Pardner network, which she was instrumental in setting up back in the 1960s soon after her arrival when the Jamaican community were struggling to get help from banks. But she left the pardner under a cloud years ago. For years Miss Hortense has been at the centre of the community, she knows all the histories and a lot of secrets but the investigation leads her into areas she would rather not think about, and dangers that she thought she had put behind her.

I really enjoyed this – Miss Hortense is very independent and self-reliant, and somewhat abrasive at times, but she makes for a fascinating lens to look at a very tight-knit community that is hiding plenty of secrets. I really liked the language and the also the fact that it has a different setting to so many murder mysteries and doesn’t info dump you with stuff, it expects you to be smart enough to figure things out already or go and find out. I went off down a rabbit hole about pardner schemes because I had never heard of them before, which was fascinating, but it’s also such a great (and realistic) device to be causing tension in a community. I read this in less than a day, and would happily return to the world of Miss Hortense – and I hope that there is a sequel. She’s certainly well placed to be able to investigate something else…

My copy came from NetGalley, but this is out now on Kindle and Kobo and in hardback. I will be keeping an eye out in the bookshops to see if I can spot it in person so to speak.

Happy Reading!

Book previews, bookshops

Books in the Wild: New Releases

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I’ve been wandering the bookshops again in search of new books to add to the ever expanding want to read list on Goodreads, and I’m back with my results. The good news is that they’re all hardbacks, so I was able to resist buying them because of a) price and b) the fact that hardbacks impulse buys sit on my shelves for a lot longer than paperbacks. And paperbacks can sit there for a long time…

Honestly non-fiction hardbacks are the hardest thing for me to resist, but also the things that take me longest to read. Here you can see the new Hallie Rubenhold which I mentioned in my 2025 preview back in January, but also Edward White’s Dianaworld which I hadn’t heard about until I saw it in the store – and then came home to find a review of it in the latest Literary Review which only made me want to read it more. I also hadn’t come across The Fall of the House of Montague before and that looks right up my street too – it’s all about the collapse of the fortunes of the Dukes and Earls of Manchester across four generations. I’m also tempted by The Dream Factory, but given that I already have at least four books about Shakespeare (or his plays) on the bookshelf waiting to be read I didn’t even let myself pick it up!

This selection of hardback fiction was facing the entrance – I really want to read the Emily Henry but I’m restraining myself because I’m fairly convinced there will be an airport paperback version of this that I can buy next time I fly somewhere, if there isn’t a deal on the ebook first. Open Heaven is described as “heartrending” and I think we know I’m not in the market for that, the Isabel Allende sounds interesting, but I still have at least one of hers on the Kindle waiting to be read but the Sayaka Murata sounds interesting – about a world where most babies are conceived by artificial insemination and marriages are sexless – but also I’m still not in the market for dystopian future stories!

And then finally we’ve got Julie Chan is Dead in the wild, The Marble Hall Murders – which like the Emily Henry I’m hoping will have an airport paperback version (although it is huge and possibly unmanageable as a physical copy), and the new S J Parris which is the start of a new series and which I have on my kindle waiting for me to read. Apart from that we have a few thrillers that are clearly too scary for me and Fair Play by Louise Hegarty which is a murder mystery where two thirds of the blurb sounds like I would like it and then the final sentence makes me wonder: Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play is the puzzle-box story that brilliantly lays bare the real truth of life – the terrifying mystery of grief.

That’s your lot today – have a lovely weekend.

Book previews

Out Today: The Elopement

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I mentioned Jane Austen yesterday, and today I wanted to mention Gill Hornby’s new book which is the third that she’s written around Jane Austen’s family. I really enjoyed Miss Austen and Godmersham Park and I’m looking forward to reading this one. Looking at the blurb this is focusing into a family that Austen’s niece marries into and the family from Godmersham Park. I suspect this will be really easy to get hold of – the others have been and of course we’ve just had the TV adaptation of Miss Austen (which I really need to get around to watching) which may lead to increased visibility for this unofficial trilogy of Austen-adjacent novels.

Book previews

Out Today: Mrs Spy

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Anyone fancy a Lady Spy novel set in the 1960s? Well this is out today and sounds intriguing. This from the blurb:

Maggie Flynn isn’t your typical 1960s mum.

She’s a spy, an unsuspecting operative for MI5, stalking London’s streets in myriad disguises. 

Widowed and balancing her clandestine career with raising a Beatles-mad teenage daughter, Maggie finds comfort and purpose in her profession – providing a connection to her late husband, whose own covert past only surfaced after his death.

It goes on to say that there’s a Russian agent and her husband’s death may have been because he was betrayed by someone on home soil. And as you can see from the cover above it’s got a “Thursday Murder Club for Spies” line on it. If I can just get over my need for comforting familiarity, this will be jumping right to the top of my list!

Book of the Week, detective, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: Underscore

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For this week’s pick I’m reporting back in with some good news: the new Vinyl Detective is pretty good.

The set up is this: the granddaughter of an Italian film music composer is trying to reissue his music. But because he was suspected of carrying out a murder, some of his masters were destroyed and records themselves are somewhat hard to find. So she enlists the Vinyl Detective to try and track down the rarest of them all for her – the one for the movie where the murder happened. Oh and if he can clear her grandfathers name that would be great. But trying to stop her are the grandchildren of the murder victim…

You may remember that I was a little trepidatious about this one, because I didn’t love the last book in the series. But this was a really good read. It’s got a good mystery, a real sense of the musical genre it’s tackling and lots of food. Plus the extended gang is very much in evidence if you have read the other books in the series. Plus as a bonus for me, there’s lots of action in and around Barnes and Richmond, which are both places that I have stayed in a fair bit in my efforts to avoid the long commute back and forth to London at various points.

I’m going to say this will work best if you’ve read at least some of the others in the series, but it’s also an excuse to post the shot of them all here and to comment on the fact that this book’s cover animal is a dog. You’re welcome. I’ve already seen this in the shops so in should be relatively easy to get hold of in paperback as well as in all the usual digital formats.

Happy Reading

Book previews

Out This Week: New Vinyl Detective

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Happy new Vinyl Detective week. Underscore, which is the eight in the series came out on Tuesday and I have my pre-order in my grubby little hand! This time we’re in the world of Italian Movie Soundtracks, which is a great excuse for me to drop a video of one of an ice dance routines into this, because there have been some really good programmes to Italian film music. Anyway, I continue to be impressed with Cartmel’s ability to find new genres to use for this series, although I didn’t love last year’s instalment Noise Floor as much as I have liked previous books in the series. Fingers crossed this is a return to full form… If you want to dip back into my archive, check out my Series I Love post from 2022 here.

Series I love post was 2022, last year got a out today.

Book of the Week, detective, historical, mystery, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: The Edinburgh Murders

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I’m breaking a couple of rules this week because somewhere along the line I had managed to miss that Catriona McPherson had started a new series – and that we were on to the second book in it. But as The Edinburgh Murders came out last week I am at least timely!

Covers of The Edinburgh Murders

It’s 1948 and Helen Crowther is a welfare almoner for the newly formed NHS in Edinburgh. It’s not an easy or a popular job, and her home life isn’t simple either but she keeps on going. While she’s at the bath house with one of her clients, the body of a man is found boiled to death in one of the cubicles. And then another couple of bodies turn up and Helen finds herself investigating because she’s noticed a few things that are worryingly close to home.

This has a great setting and a cleverly put together mystery to solve. I found Helen a really interesting character, and her job gives her an excellent excuse to be sticking her nose into other people’s lives. There aren’t as many historical mystery series set in the immediate post war period as there are set in the 1930s so that make a really nice change as well as the Edinburgh setting. I’m pretty sure this will work best for you if you’ve already read the first book, but I haven’t and I still enjoyed it! Like with McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series, the mystery is darker than you often find in historical mysteries, but it’s not too graphic although there are a couple of gruesome moments its more implied than right there on the page.

My copy came via NetGalley, but it’s out now in the UK on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback. I couldn’t find the first one of these in the shops last week when I was looking, so I don’t know how easy the hardcover version of this is going to be to find though.

Happy Reading!

Book previews

Out This Week: New Rosie Danan

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Happy New Book post Thursday. This week it’s a new book from Rosie Danan – who wrote The Roommate and Intimacy Experiment which were the subject of a double BotW post back in 2021. Her new book is called Fan Service and is a second paranormal romcom – following last year’s Do Your Worst. Now I have a mixed history with romances with supernatural or fantasy elements but I enjoyed the Jen DeLuca that had ghosts, so I’m prepared to give this a go. In Fan Service the star of a werewolf detective show finds himself in need of help from the woman who runs a fan forum for the show after he has an… unusual experience one full moon. I’ll be watching out for this, but also sort of hoping that the release coincides with a price drop for Do Your Worst – or in fact either of them appearing in a bookstore on a Buy One Get One Half Price table…