As you may have noticed, I read a lot of books on my holiday. But actually this week’s BotW was an easy choice because Him Indoors read The Roanoke Girls after me and really enjoyed it too – and he doesn’t read anywhere near as many books as me and our tastes don’t always coincide.
My very pretty ARC of The Roanoke Girls – which has all sorts of nice touches to it
Lane Roanoke goes to live with her grandparents and her cousin Allegra after her mother’s suicide. They live on a large estate in Kansas and are top of the town hierarchy. But Lane only spends one summer there. 11 years later, Lane returns to the estate after Allegra goes missing. Roanoke girls have a history – they either run away or they die. Which has happened to Allegra and what is the dark secret that threatens the Roanoke girls?
I can’t say any more than that about the plot – because it will spoil it. This has been billed as a provocative thriller – and I’d agree. It’s dark and shocking and won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But I was absolutely and totally engrossed and gripped. I couldn’t stop turning the pages, even if on occasion it was from between my fingers with horror. The Roanokes are by turns fascinating and horrifying and it is a great book to read on the beach. In fact, it’s a great beach book – because if you read it on the sunlounger it will help chase the darkness away. Although rural Kansas is fairly hot and steamy, so that might not work.
I’m still thinking and digesting it a week on – but I think it might be my go to summer holiday book recommendation. For people who can cope with the darkness…
I lucked into an advance copy, but the Roanoke Girls is out now in hardback from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones and on Kindle and Kobo. The paperback is preorderable – but it’s not out until September, which might be too late for your holidays.
So you’ve read my interview with the fabulous Duncan MacMaster, now you want to know what I thought of the book don’t you?
As mentioned yesterday, Hack tells the story of Jake Mooney, a ghost-writer who lands the biggest job of his career, writing the autobiogaphy of 80s TV star Rick Rendell. But when he arrives on Rick’s luxury paradise to start work, people start trying to kill him. Suddenly the most lucrative job of his career could also be his last one. But Jake’s used to dealing with scandal and he’s not going to go down without a fight. What is it that’s in Rick’s past that people are willing to kill to keep under wraps?
The cover of Hack by Duncan MacMaster
This is so much fun. Rick was the star of a (fictional) rival of Miami Vice and the book is paying homage to that like mad and it’s great. Jake is trapped in glamorous locations with glamorous people but someone keeps trying to murder him. As the book goes on he gets more and more battered and bruised, but some how manages to keep getting up and carrying on chasing down the bad guys. As Duncan said in his interview with me, Jake is a rank amateur, with no sleuthing skills at all – and that makes him great fun to read as he bumbles and crashes his way around the island stumbling upon clues and trying to stay alive.
Hack is very different from Duncan MacMaster’s first book for Fahrenheit Press, A Mint Condition Corpse. As Duncan said in the interview, in that Kirby’s a Holmesy, Poiroty type of sleuth – who can make great leaps of deduction out of nowhere and who has staff and piles of money to help him along the way. Jake is emphatically not that. But the two books do (perhaps unsurprisingly) share the same sense of humour and a wry look at the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of people, even if the lead characters and settings are very different.
There’s also a great cast of supporting characters – including Rick’s ex-wife who is an aging and faded star who is trying to revive her career in all the wrong ways, and Rick’s daughter who improbably seems to be falling for Jake – despite his terrible Hawaiian shirts, paunch and increasing injury count.
If you’re in need of a dose of sunshine to escape the grey of the weather at the moment, Hack will do that for you – and make you laugh and take you away from whatever’s bothering you. I got my advance copy from Mr Fahrenheit* who took pity on me and my twitter moanings during my last batch of nightshifts and sent me this to cheer me up. And it worked. I was reading it in my lunch break (at 3am), I was reading it on the train home – and if I hadn’t got to the end just as I was arriving into my station, I would have stayed up to finish it. And I really like my bed after nightshifts. And I nearly raved about it in Book of the Week that week – but it would have been cruel to taunt you by telling you about it when you couldn’t read it.
Hack is out now – and you can get a copy if you click here. And if you missed the interview, you should definitely check it out by clicking here.
Happy Reading!
*OK, so his name is Chris, but he is Fahrenheit Press, so in my head he’s Mr Fahrenheit à la Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.
Today’s Recommendsday book is Annette Dashofy’s latest cozy crime No Way Home, which came out yesterday and which I’m currently reading. This is the fifth novel in her Zoe Chambers series about a paramedic and deputy coroner who gets entangled with the crimes in her neighbourhood. No Way Home sees a rash of teen drug deaths in Zoe’s home town, the death of a popular town commissioner and the disappearance of Zoe’s best friend’s son in New Mexico – which sends Zoe out of her comfort zone and across the country to try and help find him.
The cover definitely does the New Mexico end of the story well!
This is the second book in the series that I’ve read (I read the first a few weeks back now) and they’re well-put together murder mysteries with an interesting cast of characters and a “detective” who has a great excuse for getting involved in investigations and a job that gives her access to information. Having skipped a couple of books there are some developments in this that I’ve missed, but nothing that means I can’t follow this book (and no spoilers so far for the plots of the other books).
Catnip wise, they’re set in small town, rural Pennsylvania with farms and horses and there’s also a slow burn romance going on too. As yet, no crafting or bakeries! Zoe is a little foolhardy at times, but never quite into Too Stupid To Live territory so far and I’m really quite enjoying this. Here’s hoping it doesn’t all go wrong in the final quarter.
My copy came from NetGalley and although I think it is an actual physical release, it’s super expensive over here, but it’s more reasonable on Kindle.
This week’s BotW is the latest from long-time auto-buy author of mine, Trisha Ashley. If you’ve been here a while this choice will not surprise, you because you’ll know that I’m a big TrishaAshley fan. I’m on her mailing list, I go to her London readers’ tea party, I keep her books on the special downstairs bookshelf of books I might need to have handy to read again AND I have copies of most of them on Kindle. So you can imagine how delighted I was when I got an advance readers copy of her new book The Little Teashop of Lost and Found – and how much willpower it took not to squeal all over the place, read it straight away and then immediately blog about it. But I have been restrained. Very. It helped that I had to pack all the book piles away for the fireplace work – and that they still haven’t been properly unpacked. It helped that I knew I had nights coming right before it was due out and that this would be the perfect book to save as a post-nights* treat to myself. But still. Points for will power for waiting to read it so that I could post this the week that it comes out. Anyway, you want to hear about the book, not about my crazy fangirling, so here we go.
Check out my attempt at pretty photography. I like the contrast of the daffodils and the book cover.
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found tells the story of Alice, abandoned on the moors above Haworth as a baby, adopted and then abandoned again in various ways by various people as she grows up into adulthood. Always feeling like an outsider, after her latest setback she buys a rundown cafe in Haworth in the hope that being close to where she was found might help her find the home and the family that she’s been searching and longing for. While she’s setting up her tea emporium – and writing her book – she makes friends and starts to try and unravel the mystery of who she really is. But will she get her happily ever after?
Trisha Ashley’s heroines tend to be looking for a second chance at love and have tragedy in their past – and Alice is no exception.** She’s had so many knock backs and tragedies that it’s a wonder she’s still in any way optimistic about the future. And life in Haworth isn’t plain sailing at first, although she soon acquires a surrogate family to help her along. I liked the interludes with extracts from the dark and twisted fairy tale that Alice is writing and I loved the secondary characters – the Giddings family, Lola and the rude waitresses with the hearts of gold are all brilliant. And I really liked the other intercut sections that I can’t talk about without giving too much of the plot away – they’re so cleverly done that I had to go back and reread some of them at the end in shock to check I hadn’t missed something earlier!
This is warm, witty and uplifting as well as being a great slow-burn romance where the reader and every one else around the heroine can see what’s going on so much more clearly than she can. This is also (obviously) set in Yorkshire rather than the more traditional Trisha-world of Lancashire but there are some familiar faces here despite that. If you’ve read the novella Finding Mr Rochester you’ll spot some characters from there – in fact I need to go back and read it again to see exactly how many characters from that pop up in this.
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found is out in hardback on Thursday (the 9th) and you can get your copy from Amazon (for a bargainous £6.99 at time of writing), Waterstones and Foyles or buy it on Kindle or Kobo. The paperback isn’t out until June, but you can pre-order that from Amazon, Waterstones and Foyles too. I need to get myself a copy too – because the ARC doesn’t have all the recipes in the back!
Happy Reading!
*Proof reading this was a real hoot – I wrote this when I was still quite nightshift-brainy and when I came back to check it, well lets just say it was a haven for unfinished sentences, typos and mismatched tenses. I think I’ve fixed them all, but hey, if a few have crept through, I’m sorry!
**In fact I think the heroine’s backstories are getting sadder – Tabby from Christmas Cracker had been in jail (she was someone else’s dupe), Cally in Wish Upon a Star had a seriously-ill daughter, Izzy in Creature Comforts had been involved in a serious car crash, now Alice abandoned at birth. I don’t know how the books still end up being so cheerful and uplifting!
I’m on my second week of nights, so I’m hoping that when this publishes, I’ll be asleep. Or if not asleep, just waking up well rested and raring to go. Fat chance Fingers crossed. Anyway, this week’s BotW returns to a familiar face to regular readers – yup, it’s another Fahrenheit Press book. In fact I had to go back through the archives to make sure I hadn’t already talked about Christy Kennedy, aside from the brief mention in last week’s Half-Term Reading* because The Ballad of Sean and Wilko is the fourth in the 10-book series.
The covers are all quite dark and brooding – and Camden
In the Ballad of Sean and Wilko we rejoin Christy Kennedy as he investigates the murder of the frontman of a 70s band who is found dead in his locked dressing room mid-show. Kennedy has to pick his way through a tangle of complicated relationships – professional and personal – to try and figure out what happened. Then another body turns up, in another locked room.
Christy Kennedy is a Northern Irish detective with a fondness for the Beatles and a soft spot for a local journalist called ann rea (no capital letters – like kd lang). He has a methodical approach to solving mysteries and you know as much as he knows (most of the time). There’s a collection of supporting characters who are interesting in their own right and who never feel like fillers. And late 1990s Camden is a character in itself, painted with love and affection
Paul Charles started writing the Christy Kennedy series nearly 20 years ago and they have aged well. The music may be on CD or vinyl and there may not be many mobile phones, or much talk of the internet but because it was written at the time it all feels perfectly natural. Charles has worked in the music industry and boy does it show. I’ve learned so much about the mechanics of the industry from these books – particularly this one – but it’s all worn very lightly so you only realise later how many facts are packed in there.
Anyway, to summarise: good murder, great setting, excellent detective. What more could you want. The Ballad of Sean and Wilko is available on Kindle for the bargain price of £1.99. I got my copy as part of my Fahrenheit Book Club subscription which I have banged on about enough already.
Now I’m off back to bed. I can only hope this post makes sense. My brain is not a very coherant place right now.
Happy reading.
*Which I’m obviously now regretting because it’s making me sound repetitive and I hate that. But I did like it best out of last week’s books so sod it, and let it be a lesson to me to plan better in future.
I had such a tough job picking a book for BotW this week, because I really didn’t read anything that I whole-heartedly loved. I started reading a lot of books and then gave up on them, and I finished a few – including a real stinker. But in the end I plumped for Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars by Miranda Emmerson.
As I mention below, Im not quite sure the cover for this is quite right.
Anna Treadway is a dresser, working in a London theatre and living above a Turkish cafe in Soho in 1965. When the actress who she works with disappears, she sets out to try and find her as the trail grows cold and the newspapers lose interest. As she hunts for the mysterious Iolanthe Green she finds herself in new world of jazz clubs, police cells and backstreet doctors.
Whilst this wasn’t perfect, it was an interesting idea and a great cast of diverse characters. It’s got an interesting mystery that’s well thought through and several different plot strands which tie together quite nicely. Underneath the mystery of where Iolanthe has gone there are issues of prejudice and race and people struggling to be heard and believed. From the look of the (UK) cover and some of the write ups I was expecting it to be ultimately more uplifting, but perhaps given the issues that it’s dealing with, I was being unrealistic.
This is Miranda Emmerson’s first novel and it does a great job of creating the atmosphere of 1960s London and the grimier side of life. In fact that was what I liked best about it – the mix of people thrown together, some times living side by side without ever intersecting. I think I would have liked more of Anna’s backstory and I wanted a bit more of what happened next at the end, but I pretty much always want more of what happened next at the end!
My copy came via NetGalley, but you can get Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones or on Kindle and Kobo. It only came out a couple of weeks back so it’s hardcover and the ebooks are priced accordingly too I’m afraid. The paperback is out in July, so it may drop a little then, if you want to add it to your wishlist and wait it out.
The schools have broken up, offices are starting to wind down and although I’m only midway through my run of nights, it really is starting to feel a lot like Christmas. So if you’re already in full-on festive mode, here are some Christmassy reading suggestions for you. All my links in this are to the Kindle editions – partly because there are so many e-specials in here, but also because it’s so close to Christmas now you’re probably not going to be able to get the actual book in the post in time.
As with every year there is a healthy crop of new festive novellas about. In the main, I think they mostly work for people who are already fans, rather than people who are new to the author, but if you’re a fan of Katie Fforde, you can check in with some old friends in Candlelight at Christmas, or with the characters from Cathy Bramley‘s Plumberry School of Comfort Food in Comfort and Joy. Alex Brown returns to Tindledale to write a emotional story about finding a new love in Not Just for Christmas. Liz Fenwick has written a Christmas Carol-inspired novella, A Cornish Christmas Carol, for those of you who want to see a Scrooge converted. And there are short stories from Jennifer Crusie, Donna Alward and Mandy Baxter in It Must Be Christmas– I liked the Crusie the best, but be warned it’s been previously published (I discovered I’d already read it) and I think it’s a little expensive (over a fiver at time of writing) for what it is as I thought the other two stories each had a problem or two with them.
I reviewed Sarah Morgan‘s Christmas novel Miracle on Fifth Avenue for Novelicious – it’s wonderfully Christmassy even if it’s not quite grovelly enough in the resolution for me. Morgan writes excellent Christmas stories – I read the first book in her Snow Crystal trilogy, Sleigh Bells in the Snow, a couple of weeks back and that’s great as well. I’m currently trying to resist the urge to buy the other two in the series. It’s not new, but I read Tessa Dare‘s Spindle Cove fill in Once Upon A Winter’s Evethis year – and whilst I took an early dislike of the hero and didn’t think it was long enough for him to be able to redeem himself fully, I know that other people have loved it. I’ve also read the last in Sabrina Jeffries‘s Hellions of Halstead Hall series this year, ‘Twas the Night after Christmas, which is actually mostly set in the run up to Christmas. I found the characters a bit stubborn and the central plot device is a bit melodramatic and overblown, but other people ha
There’s also no shortage of Christmas books in the series that I follow and I’ve read quite a few of them this year. The latest in Robin Stevens‘ Wells and Wong series , Mistletoe and Murder is a Christmas one – as I’ve already mentioned in a BotW post and you’d be fine starting the series there if you really wanted to. And I think Donna Andrew‘s Duck the Halls would be fine for someone to read if they haven’t read the other 15 Meg Langslow books – although you’d be missing the background to Meg’s eccentric extended family so she might come across as barking mad. I’m behind in the series (because I collect them in papberback but wait for the secondhand prices to come down because of the backlog) so there’s another Christmas-y Meg after this one, The Nightingale Before Christmas as well as an earlier festive one, Six Geese Are Slaying. Alan Bradley‘s fourth Flavia de Luce novel is set at Christmastime. In I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Flavia is cooking up a trap for St Nick but a film crew is snowed in at Buckshaw and a murder is committed. The fifth in Kerry Greenwood‘s Corinna Chapman series, Forbidden Fruit, is a Christmas book – but it’s Christmas in Australia which makes a lovely change from snow scenes and roaring fires. It also has recipes at the back, which is always a bonus – and one of things I like about Trisha Ashley‘s books. I’ve mentioned her a fair bit here before – but she has some fabulous Christmas books – particularly my favourite A Winter’s Tale, which I usually re-read at this time of year.
Some of the series have Christmas fill-in novellas too – in Jodi Taylor‘s Chronicles of St Mary’s series When A Child is Born sees Max and the gang in England for Christmas 1066 and all does not go as planned (but then when does it ever?) and A Christmas Present had me in tears twice as Max goes back in time to avert a double tragedy. this year I’ve also enjoyed Silent Night and Twelth Night, the two Christmas fill-ins in Deanna Raybourn‘s Lady Julia Grey series but much as I love her, I really do think you need to have read the other books to be able to get the best out of them.
This is a real monster list (much longer than I thought it would be when I started writing it) and I hope this has provided plenty of Christmas-y reading for you – but if this is still not enough, here’s last year’s Christmas-themed reading post with some more suggestions.
A quite while back now (September, yikes) I had a little look ahead to some of the books that I was excited about this autumn. And now I’ve read a few of my picks, I thought it was time to give you an update in the form of a bonus post…
Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple(6 October)
I was worried about hating this, but this is neither good Semple or bad Semple – it’s somewhere in between. But the good news here, is that I’ve worked out what I like about Maria Semple’s writing and what I don’t. I don’t like being inside the head of her female leads – they’re self-centred, middle-aged quirky-to-the-point-of-irritation and they drive me crazy. But viewed through the eyes of someone else (more normal) they can be funny and touching. And that’s why I liked …Bernadette – because she’s not there for most of the time and it’s Bee who’s trying to work out what’s going on. This didn’t make me tear my hair out like This One is Mine did, but it did make me vaguely annoyed. So lesson for the future: if Semple’s next book is written from the perspective of a woman with children then I won’t bother reading it.
The Wangs vs The World by Jade Chang(3 November)
Well I liked this, but I didn’t love it. May be I was reading it too soon after Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, or maybe the fractured elbow was impeding my sense of humour. I think my problem is that there wasn’t a family member that I loved – and I wanted to fall in love with one (or more of them). Each of them has a frustration (or two) about them which stopped me from embracing this as fully as some of the people I’ve heard recommending it have. It’s a good road trip book and it was funny in places, but it wasn’t hilarious. And I really wanted it to be.
The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch(3 November)
I loved this so much. So much. There’s magic, and the super-rich and posh school kids and all sorts of new complications. If you like the other books in the series, I suspect you’ll like this – but the overarching story is not finished yet and there is a frustration that comes with that, along with a delight that there should/will be more from Peter and the Folly. I read it too quickly – once I started reading it that is – and now I suspect I may have a long wait until the next installment appears. I’ll have to console myself with the graphic novels in the interim.
I still haven’t read Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson(22 September) or How to Party with an Infant by Kuai Hart Hemmings(8 September) because I haven’t managed to get copies of them yet, but I live in hope that one or both of them may appear in my Christmas stocking…
I know, you all looked at my list of books I read last week and just knew that this was going to be my pick for BotW didn’t you? So sue me. Today feels momentous and a little terrifying with what is going on in the world, and what better way to take your mind off what may or may not be about to occur than a charming children’s novel about school girls solving mysteries.
A Christmas book in early November? Bite me.
Long standing readers will be familiar with my love of Robin Stevens’ Wells and Wong series (see here, here, here and here) and Mistletoe and Murder (which incidentally shares its name with a Daisy Dalrymple mystery which is also very good) is the fifth installment in the series and sees the girls spending their Christmas holidays at Cambridge visiting Daisy’s brother. But of course the girls can’t help but run into an investigation – this time in competition with their rivals at the Junior Pinkertons. But soon suspicious accidents have turned deadly and the girls are in a race against time to figure out who did it and why.
I’ve said before that these books are the perfect blend of Agatha Christie and St Clares stories and I stand by that – they’re brilliant and inventive and I wish they’d been around when I was the “right” age. I practically gobbled this up in one sitting, which was a mistake because I’d already read the Halloween short story and now I have to wait months and months and months for the next one. This would make the perfect Christmas book for the young reader in your family – or the big kid if you’re like me. It’s the perfect escape from the trials and tribulations of the grown-up world.
But if you’re not into middle grade fiction (more fool you) and still want some escapism, I can also heartily recommend Gail Carriger’s latest novella – Romancing the Inventor – in which we see one of the most beloved side characters in her steampunk world, Madame Lefounx, finally get over the pesky Angelique and find love again. It probably works best if you’ve read the Parasol Protectorate series, will work even better if you’ve also read the Finishing School series. I loved it – it’s a great, fun love story with some guest appearances from old favourites. What more could you want?
Robin Stevens’ Wells and Wong books should be available where ever children’s books are sold (if they’re not, ask them why), but here are links to Mistletoe and Murder on Amazon, Kindle, Waterstones, Foyles and Kobo.
Romancing the Inventor is one of Gail Carriger’s self published works – so it’s not quite as available in the shops, but you can get it on Kindle and on Kobo or special order it in paperback from Amazon, Waterstones and Foyles.
I know, I know, I know. This is a day late. I have excuses – relating to post nightshift haze and then a few days away and only remembering I hadn’t written this post at 11pm after a couple of cocktails. And as drunk blogging doesn’t end well, I thought it could wait til the cool light of day and rational thought, especially as this week’s pick is Important to me.
So this week’s BotW is Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors and Trailblazers who changed history. Written by Sam Maggs, this is a series of potted biographies of women who you may not have heard of, but who have played an important role in various areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, Espionage and Adventure – aka areas that tend to be seen as traditionally masculine. There are 25 featured women – but at least the same again get bite-sized mentions too. I’m a history graduate (admittedly specialising in British and European history) and there were a lot of names here that I had never come across before – and many fascinating stories.
I’m definitely not the target market for this – which is written (I think) very much with tweens/early teens in mind – and some of the language started to annoy me a little, but that’s because it’s written in a vernacular that is not really mine, although I do think that the choice of language will appeal to the intended audience. It’s got lovely illustrations for the 25 women, which is a nice touch. My copy was an e-galley for my kindle e-reader so I don’t think I got the full effect, but from what I’ve seen the actual book itself looks attractive and appealing.
This would make a good book for an upper-primary school/middle school age girl and would also be a great addition to school libraries for that sort of age of child. I’ve said there that it would be a good book for a girl – because I think young girls need reminding that they can have adventures too, and be brave and daring and that careers in things like science and tech aren’t just for boys. But boys need reminding that too – and that there have been women through history doing important things, often against the odds and against societal expectations. I saw this video last week, and it may have been the nightshifts, but it got me all emotional. And it’s an important message for children to get – girls can be anything, do anything – nothing is a man’s job – or a woman’s job.
Anyway, lecture over. As I said, my copy was an e-galley via NetGalley, but this is out now and you can get it from Amazon, Waterstones and Foyles as well as on Kindle and Kobo – although I think it would look best in the hardback actual book.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 