I had real problems chosing my BotW this week – a fair few things that I liked, but several were sequels where you really need to have read the preceeding book. So I went left field and I’m going for Mystery and Mayhem – an anthology of middle grade mystery stories.
Mystery and Mayhem in the wild! (ie a bookshop)
Now I was attracted to this because it has stories from Robin Stevens and Katherine Woodfine who I’ve read and really liked recently. But there are lots of stories to like here. They’re not all historical – some are set right here and now – they’re not all tie-ins to other books (and even if they are you don’t need to have read the novels they’re linked to), there’s all types of heroes and all types of mysteries.
I enjoyed them all – and even worked out who had done it a fair few times, which wasn’t a problem, because the introduction basically tells you to try and figure it out for yourself! I’ve also got a big old list of authors to go find more stories by now, but only once the pile is shorter obviously.
If you’re a grown up who likes kids books still (aka my kind of person) then this will fill an afternoon nicely. If you have a upper primary school age kid (aka middle-grader) who has read some Wells and Wong or some Clockwork Sparrow and is looking for something else to try, this would be a good place to find some ideas. Equally if you’re desperate for your under 11 to get into murder mysteries but you think they’re too young for Agatha Christie (they probably are, I got the heebie jeebies from reading Miss Marple and Poirot in year 6) then this would really work really well for them too.
My copy came from NetGalley, but I’m hoping this is going to be everywhere – I know it’s in Waterstones because that’s where I took my photo – but here’s the link for Amazon, Kindle and Foyles as well. Go forth and read crime for kids!
Easter is upon us again – early this year – and so I thought I’d throw some suggestions out there for books for reading over the bank holiday weekend, or the Easter holidays if you’re lucky enough to have them.
The Night That Changed Everything by Laura Tait and Jimmy Rice
I love the cover of this book – can’t explain why, but it just speaks to me
Rebecca and Ben are perfect for each other – blissfully happy, they’re made for each other. But when a secret from the past is accidentally revealed, their love story is rewritten. Can they recover? Is it possible to forgive and forget? This came out yesterday (Thursday), but I was lucky to have an advance copy which I finished on the train home from work just after midnight on Thursday morning. I really, really, enjoyed Rebecca and Ben’s story – which, as you can probably tell from my synopsis, is not your traditional romantic comedy. It nearly had me crying on the train – which doesn’t happen very often (in part because I try not to read books that will make me cry on the train!) and I had trouble putting it down. I didn’t even notice I’d arrived at Euston on the way to work on Wednesday I was so engrossed – if it wasn’t the end of the line I would have missed my stop! On top of everything else going for it, I had no idea where it was going. I suspect this is going to be on a lot of beach reading lists this year – get there ahead of the game and read it now. I’m hoping this will be in the supermarkets and all over the place – but here are the traditional links: Amazon, Kindle, Waterstones, Foyles, Kobo.
Death of a Diva by Derek Farrell
Danny Bird has lost his job, his boyfriend and his home. So of course the logical solution to this is to take over a dive of a pub owned by a gangster and try and transform it into a fabulous nightspot. But then his big act for the opening night turns up dead in the dressing room surrounded by a cloud of powder that’s definitely not talc and he’s the prime suspect in a murder inquiry. This is funny and clever – I was laughing out loud as I tried to figure out who was responsible. Danny is a fabulous character – and is surrounded by a great supporting cast. There’s lots of potential here – this is another winner from Fahrenheit Press – who you may have noticed have been providing a lot of my favourite crime reads recently. Get your copy on Kindle and badger Fahrenheit on Twitter to get it on other platforms. I got my copy free when it was on promotion a couple of weekends ago (it came out before the Fahrenheit subscription) – this weekend their free book for Easter is Fidelis Morgan’s Unnatural Fire – which is high on my to-read pile – as I loved The Murder Quadrille as you may remember.
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
Harriet and her granddaughter Grace are governesses at the same house, nearly 50 years apart. Grace has been raised on stories of Fenix House – but once she’s arrived it’s clear that her grandmother may be a less than reliable narrator. I reviewed this for Novelicious (check out my full review here) and basically this is the book that is going to fill the Victorian-time-slip-upstairs-downstairs gap in your life. Secrets, lies, families, relationships -they’re all there in this twisty and intriguing book – which had me poleaxed at the end. If you liked Letters to the Lost, or the Mysterious Affair at Castaway House, or any of Lauren Willig’s stand-alone novels like The Ashford Affair then this is for you.
Jolly Foul Play by Robin Stevens
Hazel and Daisy are back on the detection trail after Deepdean’s new head girl is found dead during a fireworks display. I haven’t finished the latest Wells and Wong mystery yet (it’s another that came out on Thursday – I started it as soon as my pre-order dropped on to my kindle) but if it’s half as good as the other three it’ll be a delight. One for the 8 to 12 year old in your house – and your inner child as well.
What am I going to be reading this Easter weekend? Well, I’m hoping to finish Hazel and Daisy’s adventures on my Good Friday commutes, then I think I might try to fill the Night Circus-shaped void in my life with Ben Aaronovitch’s Broken Homes or my urge for more time-slip books with the rest of Beatriz Williams’ latest or Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters. Any other recommendations gratefully received in the comments – although I’m meant to be on a book-buying ban!
This is a strange BotW post for me to write – as there were two other books that nearly beat The Murder Quadrille last week, and nothing that I liked as much as them this week. But I have a rule about not carrying over picks that weren’t used in a previous week. So Shawn Reilly Simmons’s Murder on the Half Shell gets the nod – but I enjoyed it more this paragraph implies. Trust me, keep reading!
Murder on the Half Shell is the second book in The Red Carpet Catering Mysteries. The plot: Penelope Sutherland runs a catering company that works on film sets, she’s on an island in Florida catering a movie – but it’s not all plain sailing. The director is difficult, the leading lady has a seafood allergy and it is hot, really hot. Then two of the waitresses she’s been using go missing after a crew party and Penelope’s former culinary school instructor turned celebrity chef is the prime suspect. But she’s sure he didn’t do it and starts to look into it herself.
Food-related cozies are such a massive trend at the moment. There’s a lot of cupcakes, bakers and coffee shops and so a catering company is a nice variant. One of the problems I often have with cozy series is that there’s a lot of murder going on in a very small area. I’m not sure how long a real cake shop/coffee shop/bakery would last if bodies kept turning up outside them and that does sometimes affect how I feel about a series as it goes on – depending obviously on how the author handles it. But the location catering idea means that there’s potential for the series to move around a bit. This of course makes it a little harder to maintain a large gang of supporting characters, but it does stop the Cabot Cove effect. The flipside is that with location moving around does it does mean that the murders might start to seem to be following the lead character around – the Jessica Fletcher effect. But there are ways and means of dealing with all of these issues – and we’ll see how Red Carpet Catering copes if the series continues.
Penelope is one of the more appealing heroines I’ve recently read in the genre too. She’s not too stupid to live (or at least not often), she’s not too obviously encroaching on police territory in a way that would get her arrested and she still manages to spend enough time at her business (or have staff manning it) that you can see that she’d stay solvent. I guess I’m trying to say that Murder on the Half Shell has a good premise, lead character and is solidly executed. I did think that some of the set-up and diversionary tactics were a little heavy-handed at times – the “obvious suspect” evidence particularly – but it wasn’t enough to annoy me. It’s not as humourous as my favourite books in the genre, but again, that’s not really a problem if the mystery is interesting – and this one is.
Murder on the Half Shell was a perfectly nice way to spend a couple of train journeys – my copy came from NetGalley and I liked it enough to go back and get the first book in the series from there too. If you fancy dipping your toe in the world of cozy crime on location, you can pick it up on Kindle (for £1.99 at time of writing).
This was a tough choice. A really tough choice. I had two contenders for BotW this week and it was so hard to decide. In the end I went for Ilana Fox’s The Glittering Art of Falling Apart – as comes out on February 11th. I’m not telling you what my other option was, because it’s part of a series and can’t help but feel that a blog post may come on it further down the line…
The Glittering Art of Falling Apart is a timeslip novel set in the 1980s and the present day. And there’s a country house involved. And as regular readers will know, this is just the sort of thing that I love. The present day heroine is Cassie – obsessed with trying to keep the abandoned Beaufont Hall in the family, despite her mother’s reluctance to talk about her childhood there. Tenancious Cassie wants to know more. Back in the 1980s, Eliza is breaking free from her family for the bright lights and glamour of Soho. But will it bring her the future that she craves or is the price to heavy?
If you’ve read a few timeslip type novels you will probably have a few ideas about where this story is going (I certainly did), but this is so well put together, that it doesn’t matter. Often in books like this a location is a character in the book – I was expecting Beaufont Hall to take that role, but actually it’s Soho that is the start location in The Glittering Art of Falling Apart. Ilana Fox paints such a vivid picture of this patch of London in the 1980s you can almost smell it. And there’s also a really clever use of music to help create the atmosphere as Eliza tries to make her mark on Soho. I had OMD’s Enola Gay stuck in my head for two days but the lovely people at Orion have pointed me at the playlist that Fox has put together for the book which has given me some ideas for a bit more variety!
I haven’t read any of Ilana Fox’s novels before, but from reading the descriptions of them it seems like this may be a bit of a shift. If you like books like Harriet Evans A Place for Us or Rosanna Ley’s The Saffron Trail, this may be the book for you. My copy came from NetGalley*, but I think this should be fairly widely available when it comes out – it feels like it might be the sort of book that goes into the supermarkets (and I hope it does) – but here are some links if you want to pre-order (or buy if you’re reading on Thursday or later) Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones, Kindle and Kobo.
One final note – at time of writing this, I spotted previous BotW The Astronaut Wives Club on a deal on Kobo for 99p – which is a total bargain – and Kindle seem to be price matching it. Go forth and purchase!
*And this seems like a good point to remind everyone of my standard disclaimer – I review everything I read over on Goodreads but I only recommend stuff here that I genuinely like. The books I read are a mixture of books that I’ve purchased myself, books that I’ve been given and e-proofs via NetGalley. I try to acknowledge where the books that I review here come from in the interests of transparency, but being given a book for free doesn’t influence the review that I give it – I’m always honest about my thoughts.
This week’s BotW is Kristan Higgins’ latest romance Anything For You – which in a stroke of serendipity is out today! For those of you who are all Christmas’d out, this would make a great break from the festivities. It has a winery, some star-crossed lovers and a whole lot of fun.
Anything For You tells the story of Connor and Jessica. They’ve been hooking up in secret for years and now Connor wants to take it public – and make it official. But Jessica thinks things are fine as they are – and she has her brother to look after, her brother who really doesn’t like Connor. So with Connor down on one knee and telling her it’s all or nothing, how sure is Jessica that marriage isn’t for her?
This is such a good read. Jessica and Connor have such a tangled backstory – which is explained really well in a series of flashback-type sequences in the aftermath of the proposal. They are both really complicated, well thought out characters. Connor has quite a privileged background (I mean he’s not a billionaire or a billionaire’s son, but there’s some money there) but a difficult relationship with his parents. Jessica has dragged herself up from a trailerpark whilst bringing up her little brother in the process – she’s got trust issues, abandonment issues and a bit of an inferiority complex. Watching them work out their problems is a really engrossing read.
And they are proper problems that need a proper resolution. I’ve read a lot of romances where the obstacles keeping the hero and heroine apart aren’t really obstacles – or are easily resolved. But these two have something real and tangible to work out. And the resolution is really well worked out – it doesn’t involve one of them suddenly doing an abrupt character change or an about face. They work out their problems and grow and mature to a solution.
And if that sounds too serious – don’t worry! There’s plenty of humour here too – Connor has a fabulously funny relationship with his twin sister Colleen (aka Dog Face) and the two of them have some great sparky exchanges. And Con and Jess have their moments too. Add to that a very stabbable events planner and some meddling friends and the angsty bits are well balanced out.
This was my first Kristan Higgins – but I’ve already found another one in the Kindle backlog pile so that may well have jumped its way closer to the top. My copy came via NetGalley, but you can get yourself a copy from Amazon or Amazon.com – although it doesn’t seem to be available on Kindle in the UK or the US at the moment.
So, after gifts for him, her and children, for Part Four of my Christmas book recommendations, I’ve come to books I want for Christmas. As you know I read a lot of books and have a big backlog anyway, but this is my wishlist. Perhaps it’ll give you some more ideas for gifts – or maybe it’ll give you some ideas about what to ask other people to get you!
Fiction
I’m hoping to find some Deanna Raybourn in my stocking. I’ve really enjoyed her Lady Julia Grey series, and I’m hoping that Santa will bring me some of her standalone books – which are more expensive over here as they’re US Imports – like Night of a Thousand Stars, City of Jasmine or A Spear of Summer Grass (which after months of being c£7 for Kindle has dropped to £2.99 at time of writing, but I now can’t buy because I might be getting it for Christmas!) or the first book in her new series A Curious Beginning.
Another American import on my Christmas list is The Lure of the Moonflower – the final book in Lauren Willig‘s Pink Carnation series. I’m desperate to know what happens – I have the second last book sitting on my shelf ready to read, but I don’t dare start it because I know as soon as I read it I’ll want to read the last one *now* and then i’ll end up buying it before Christmas comes!
I’ve seen glowing reviews, but heard mixed word of mouth on Elena Ferrante‘s Neapolitan trilogy, so I’m curious to read them but can’t justify buying them myself with the to-read pile in its current state. So if anyone fancies buying me My Brilliant Friend, I’d really appreciate it! I’m also after the last in the Tales of the City series – The Days of Anna Madrigal.
Regular readers will know of my love of detective stories and cozy crime, so I’d be delighted if the latest Grantchester novel from James Runcie turned up on Christmas Day – Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins is in a rather expensive US paperback edition or hardback (which would match the ones I already own better) at the moment. I’d also be happy to find the next book (that I don’t own) in the Tasha Alexander‘s Lady Emily series (Dangerous to Know), or one of Catriona McPherson‘s Dandy Gilvers that I haven’t read (like …and the Reek of Herrings),
Non Fiction
I don’t tend to buy myself a lot of non fiction, what with the pile being so big and so much of it coming out in hardback first, so Christmas is a a really good opportunity for me to get a few things that I can’t justify buying with the to-read pile in its current state!
I mentioned in my Gifts for Her post that I’m not big on Roman history, but I do quite fancy Mary Beard‘s latest SPQR, but hardbacks do tend to linger on my shelf somewhat, so perhaps her Confronting the Classics might be a better choice and likewise fill in some gaps in my education. Also on the history front, I really want to read Anita Anand’s Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, especially after seeing the documentary based on it on BBC One a few weeks back – which is still on iPlayer for a few more days. I’m a big fan of Helen Rappaport‘s books (she’s a great speaker too) and I’d quite like her Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses, even though I usually find the Russian Revolution too unbearably depressing!
From this year’s crop of celebrity autobiographies and memoirs, my picks would be Sue Perkins‘ Spectacles and Drew Barrymore‘s Wildflowers or maybe Grace Jones‘s I’ll Never Write My Memoirs which is about an era which I’m fascinated by and was hoping that The Boy would ask for, but he hasn’t! She’s not a celebrity in the traditional sense, but I’m an occasional reader of The Bloggess and Jenny Lawson‘s second book Furiously Happy is on my want list – I’ve read the kindle preview and am really interested by it. It’s only in hardback at the moment, but as I still haven’t got her first book, Let’s Pretend this Never Happened, I would be happy to receive that instead/as well!
Those who know me in real-life know that I don’t wear a lot of make-up. But despite this, I do watch a lot of YouTube make-up videos. And Lisa Eldridge is one of my favourites. Consequently I’d really like her history of make-up Face Paint, but can’t justify buying it for myself. Hint. Hint. At the quirky end of the book spectrum, I’ve got a fancy for How to Climb Mount Blanc in a Skirt, and either of Shaun Usher‘s Letters of Note books – the new one sounds fabulous
On the aspirational home front, I’d really like Marie Kondo‘s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying because I am a bit of a hoarder – even when it’s not books! I’m sure The Boy would be delighted if I could find away of jettisoning some of my stuff happily, although obviously he’d be even happier if I could stop acquiring the clutter in the first place!
Miscellaneous
I know my reading habit can intimidate people and scare them off buying me books (in case I already have it or have read it) but I’m always delighted to get a book voucher – be it a National Book Token or a Kindle voucher and I try to spend them on something I consider a treat – like a nice hardback or an ebook that’s over my usual price limit. After chortling over their Bad Sex Awards for years, I’ve been eyeing up a subscription to Literary Review but can’t really justify buying myself it!
What don’t I want? No cookery books please (unless it’s a Mary Berry I don’t already have) as I still haven’t worked my way through everything I want to cook from the ones that I already have and the cookery book shelf is getting full. Don’t buy me the Booker shortlist – I’ve got so much to read already, I’ll never get around to them – as my attempts to try and improve my award-nominated book hit rate show!
And finally, if you really want me to love you forever, you could pre-order me a copy of The Rogue Less Taken from Sarah MacLean – one of my favourite purveyors of smart, funny and sexy historical romance – and do it from her local Indie bookshop Word in Brooklyn, because I really want the US version (the UK one doesn’t match my collection, but I’ll link you to it anyway in case you want it for you), and Word will send it to me signed and with bonus goodies. But even nightshift brain can’t really justify spending $22 shipping a $7.99 book to the UK. Even if I did do it for Never Judge a Lady by her Cover last year – which is also not as nice in its UK edition, which is something I never though I’d say about an American edition of a romance book. But if you do, let me know, because I may yet weaken and buy it anyway, and it would be stupid for two of us to do it….
Finally something I can take a photo of! And US romance authors don’t really do UK signings!
So there you go, Books for Him, Books for Her, Books for Kids and Books for Me. And still to come from me before the big day will be a round-up of Christmas-themed reading. I know. I’m spoiling you.
This week’s BotW sees normal service well and true resumed with Silent Nights – a book of Golden Age detective short stories set at or around Christmas. This is one of the British Crime Library’s reissues – I’ve read quite a few now and have discovered some really good authors that I was previously unaware of and who help me with my cravings for “proper” classic crime.
As well as familiar names like Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle and lesser known but still in print authors like Margery Allingham, there are others I hadn’t heard of before and who I’ll now try and investigate. Some of them have had long out of print titles recently republished in the same series, some of them are even more obscure than that.
There’s also a really good variety of types of mystery. The Conan Doyle is a Sherlock Holmes, complete with leaps of deduction unfathomable to the normal person, The Sayers is a Wimsey locked room-esque short story about a missing necklace. There’s also really quite creepy suspense in the form of Ethel Lina White’s Waxworks, a story based around a chess problem, another which leaves you to work out who was arrested (with an explanation at the back of the book) and a poisoning with a really nasty old man.
I enjoyed all of the stories in Silent Nights. The weak point for me was the chess-based story, but that was because chess isn’t really my game. I also really appreciated the biographical notes about each of the authors at the start of the stories – complete with information about other notable titles.
If you’re looking for some Christmas reading, this might be a nice, bite-sized place to start, and equally it would make a nice present for any fan of classic crime – particularly those who haven’t ventured much beyond the obvious suspects. It’s also not violent or graphic so might work for the cozy-crime lover in your life too. Talking of Christmas present ideas, I have many more to share with you – and they’ll be posted very soon as I know this is prime Christmas shopping time!
My copy of Silent Nights came from NetGalley*, but you can the very pretty paperback from Amazon or I’ve seen it on the speciality Christmas displays in several Waterstones stores as well as Foyles in Charing Cross Road – so it may have made it into your local bookshop too. And the Kindle version is a bargain £2.99 at time of writing, so you could treat yourself to a bit of festive sleuthing without having too big an impact on your Christmas Present Buying Fund! Several of the other British Library Crime Classics are a similar price, I can recommend Mavis Doriel Hay – Her festive story Santa Klaus Murder as well as Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell are all under £3 at the moment – as well as books by J Jefferson Farjeon and Christopher Sprigg.**
* And as usual, I only feature books here that I genuinely like – I’ve read 25 books from NetGalley in the last quarter, but only a few of those have made it to a review on here (although they all get reviewed over on Goodreads).
** Back on full disclosure again – I bought Murder Underground and Death of the Cherwell for myself, but have read various Farjeons and Sprigg’s Death of an Airman via NetGalley over the last year.
It will be absolutely no surprise to you regular readers that this week’s BotW is Trisha Ashley’s latest – A Christmas Cracker. You can see my previous musings on her work here, here and briefly here. I’m not usually a Christmas book in October kind of person (although I seem to have read a few of them already this year) but I’m always read to make an exception for Trisha. Her books are totally my catnip. Warm and humourous, with heroines on journeys and a variety of different types of heros. Her heroines have usually made had problems in their love lives before – whether through picking Bad Men or through mistakes and misunderstandings. I always think of them as second chance romances (as in slightly older people, and not their first love affair), but I know that the “proper” definition of that trope is the “we met when we were young but it didn’t work out, but now we’re trying again” type of story, although Trisha has written a couple of those and they’re really very good.
Why can I never get a good photo of a book with foil lettering on the cover?The heroine of A Christmas Cracker is Tabby. She’s ended up doing prison time for a crime she didn’t commit, her fiance has dumped her and given her cat away, one of her friends lied about her in court and her life is generally in tatters. Then she gets a second chance from Mercy. She’s been working in Africa for years, but has retired and come back to try and rescue the family cracker business, which is floundering. She thinks that Tabby could be the breath of fresh air that it needs to save it from the chop. But Mercy’s nephew Randall think’s Tabby is a con-woman and out for what she can get – he’s got his own plans for Marwood’s Christmas Crackers and he’s watching her like a hawk…
I’m hoping that you’ve read that and thought – “Gosh that sounds generally delightful and festive too” – and it really is (if you didn’t, I’m sorry – I haven’t done it justice). Tabby is a wonderful and relatable heroine. I was initially sceptical about a lead character who starts off the book in the clink, but I shouldn’t have doubted Trisha – it’s a masterstroke. Trisha Ashley’s books have a long history of giving us quirky/fun older/elderly lady characters too (Great Aunt’s Hebe and Ottie in A Winter’s Tale, Mad Aunt Debo in Creature Comforts, I could go on) and Mercy is another great addition to the list – she’s a bundle of energy in light-up trainers who sees the best in everyone and will give hospitality to anyone.
Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about A Christmas Cracker – I got an e-copy via NetGalley – but I went out at the weekend to buy myself an actual copy as well. And not just because I have all her other books in paperback (and most of them in ebook as well) and I have a thing about sets and completion, but because I wanted to read it again, in a proper book, so I can pick out my favourite scenes so I know where they are in the book so I can go back and read them again.
If you only read one Christmas book this year (or before December at any rate) make this it. It should be everywhere – Tesco were selling it for a very special price of £2 at the weekend (so cheap that I almost wanted to go and buy it somewhere else in case it meant the author royalties would be smaller) and I’d expect it to be all over the place in the other supermarkets and bookshops. If I’ve sold it to you as being so good that you can’t wait to go to a shop (and you wouldn’t be wrong), the Kindle and Kobo editions are £2.99 at time of writing. Prices aren’t quite as special for the paperback at the online retailers, but here are the Amazon, Waterstones and Foyles links just in case.
This week’s BotW is Jenny Valentine’s Fire Colour One. I do try to mix my choices up a bit – although when I go on a massive reading jag of one author that doesn’t help – so here’s some new YA fiction. I got my copy via NetGalley and raced through it in two train journeys.
Iris likes lighting fires. She doesn’t like her mum – or her mum’s boyfriend. She’s lost touch with her best (and only) friend Thurston. Then the dad that she hasn’t seen for years gets in contact to say he’s dying. Her mum is delighted – she wants Ernest’s art collection to fund her lifestyle. Iris is angry. But her dad has things he wants to tell her.
Now, it took me a while to warm to Iris. She’s a bit difficult to like at first, but then you see what she’s dealing with. And she’s dealing with a lot. Her mum sees her as an inconvenience and really isn’t on her side. Her mum’s partner is the most narcissistic guy I’ve come across in a book this year. Iris can control the fires. She can’t control her life, or stop her dad from dying (and she’s not sure she wants to either).
Death is such a theme in YA literature at the moment, that I was worried that this book was going to leave me miserable and upset*, but I got to the last page with a tear in my eye and a smile on my face. Then I went back and read the last chapter all over again. I can’t really say much more about why the end worked for me, without giving it away and that would really spoil the book, but it’s clever. Really clever. And I’m desperate to know what Iris does next.
So, I didn’t read a lot last week, but I’m still thinking about this one – and I’m wondering if there are any teenagers in my life that I can buy it for (I’m not sure there are). I know that I’ll go back and read it again too, which is unusual for me and YA fiction that’s not boarding school stories. I’ve added Jenny Valentine’s other books to my to-read list too
This week’s BotW is Louise Candlish’s The Sudden Departure of the Frasers – which was my Curtis Brown Book Group book for April, but which didn’t get finished until last week because that was when the discussion was.
This has such a striking cover I know I would have looked at it in the shop, I’m not sure if I would have bought it without the Book Club
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers tells the story of Christy and Joe Davenport, who have just bought the house of their dreams in a leafy London area they never expected to be able to afford. The previous owners, the Frasers, renovated the house and then abruptly disappeared. As the Davenports settle in to their new home, Christy becomes obsessed with why the Frasers left and particularly what happened to Amber – beautiful, popular, charming and the centre of the social whirl – and why the atmosphere on the street is so tense.
This is another book that I probably wouldn’t have picked out for myself – but ended up really enjoying* – in fact, I read the vast majority of it across the course of one afternoon and evening because I got sucked in and then I Needed To Know. It’s one of those books where you can’t put it down because your brain is frantically trying to work out what has gone on and you just need to read one more page/chapter/section because then you might be able to figure it out.
One of the reasons this book worked so well for me is that the setting and the characters seem utterly believeable. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had the fantasy that one day the dream home that you’ve always wanted will pop up on the market miraculously in your price range despite being worth oh-so-much more usually. And then obviously the old adage about “if it looks too good to be true, maybe it is” springs into your mind. Now scenarios like this usually lend themselves to horror or ghost stories (definitely not my thing) but this is neither. It’s a gripping little thriller, which will mess with your head but not leave you with nightmares about blood and gore and ghosts.**
Now I am breaking one of my own rules in writing about this now – because The Sudden Departure of the Frasers doesn’t come out until the 21st. But after a long deliberation I’ve put it up as this week’s BotW – because a) it was really good, b) if I didn’t BotW would probably be another Janet Evanovich (the obsession continues) and c) it will be a really, really good beach read, so preorder it for your holiday and you’ve one less thing to worry about!
You can pre-order The Sudden Departure of the Frasers from all the usual outlets – here is a selection of links – Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles and Kindle – and I suspect that when it does come out it may pop up in your local supermarket as it’s being published by Penguin.
* Which illustrates why I have such a massive to-read pile. I like so many different books. And if I had bought myself this, it would probably have sat of the shelf for years because of the backlog because it’s not obviously a book that I’d like. Then you’d get another of my patented posts saying that I loved it and I can’t believe how long it sat on the shelf and why didn’t I read it sooner. I know. I’m a nightmare.
** I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there isn’t any blood or gore or ghosts. It’s not that sort of book. But you know what I mean.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 