Tag: new releases

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews, romance

Book of the Week: Finders Keepers

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It’s Tuesday and I’m using this week’s BotW to report back in on the new Sarah Adler, which came out back at the end of June, but which I bought in paperback which hampered my reading of it what with having started it right before I went to Ghana.

Quentin and Nina were best friends when they were at school, right up until they weren’t. But now they’re both back in their home town for the summer and living next door to each other again. Nina was expecting to be moving in with her boyfriend and getting ready for the new term as a professor. Instead she’s single, homeless and jobless. Quentin is back from Europe and also newly single and suggests resurrecting the treasure hunt that that they were trying to solve that last summer when they fell out. Surely after nearly two decades they can figure out what went wrong that summer – in the hunt and between the two of them?

Is it a second chance romance if they weren’t ever really together the first time and they just had massive crushes on each other? Because that is what we have here. It should also be noted that I absolutely loved Mrs Nash’s Ashes, and really liked Happy Medium despite the presence of ghosts and fake mediums. This is making the hat trick of BotWs for Adler’s first three novels but I liked this the least. But that’s because it turns out two of the main things it’s doing are not really my favourite tropes: this has got an incredibly oblivious heroine with anxiety problems that make me stressed and the two of them need to use their words more. If they had done that then they wouldn’t be in the mess they are and I wouldn’t find it so stressful to read and could probably deal with the cringey bits of their treasure hunt better.

But I’m still recommending it because I know that this is very much a me thing and I know other people are going to really love this. Yes I’m hoping adler’s next one goes back towards the vibes of Mrs Nash’s Ashes and gives more sunshine-but-quirky but given where we are in romance at the moment with a lot of college age pairings and early 20s heroines who are learning to adult I will still take it. Because that’s not where I am in my reading life at the moment and you just need to look at my post from The Works on Saturday to start seeing why that’s a problem right now!

I’ve got this in paperback so I’m hoping it will be one of my easier picks to get hold of and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too for £2.99 at the moment (but who knows how long that will last given that it’s nearly the end of the month.

Happy Reading!

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.

Book previews

Out today: Island Calling

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Welcome to Glorious Tuga was a book of the week almost a year ago, and today the sequel is out. It’s planned as a trilogy, so don’t go expecting everything to be resolved at the end of this one but the blurb is promising the arrival on the island of Charlotte’s mother, determined to drag her daughter back home to England and the career Lucinda thinks her daughter ought to have. I loved the characters as well as the setting when I read the first book, so I’m looking forward where we go next. I’m hoping that the angst level stays pretty low (similar levels to book one please) because that’s what I need in my reading at the moment! I saw the first book in a bunch of shops last year so I’m hoping this one should be fairly easy to find.

Side note: you’ll noticee that we’ve got a new cover style since last year – the first one got a redesign with the arrival of the paperback and the sequel has followed that. I think it’s really pretty but it’s bad news for those who have the first in hardback and like a matching set…

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: New K J Charles

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We have a bit of a surprise new release today – I only found out about this one about ten days ago when Amazon sent me one of those “new release from an author you like” emails and was surprised to see it was a new release coming very soon. Anyway, K J Charles‘ latest is Copper Script which is set in the 1920s and features a Metropolitan Police Detective and a graphologist who can work out people’s lives and personalities from their handwriting with freakish accuracy. I pre-ordered this off the back of that email – so I have a copy dropped onto my Kindle just waiting to be read once I’ve finished the current Mitchell and Markby….

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 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 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!

Authors I love, Book of the Week, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: Show Don’t Tell

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Happy Tuesday everyone and today I’m back with a new release (it’s under two weeks since it came out, that totally counts as new still) collection of short stories from one of my favourite authors.

This is a new collection of short stories from Curtis Sittenfeld, mostly looking at various aspects what it is like to be a women, usually a woman in her forties, in the Mid-West of America. It’s her first full collection of short stories since 2018’s You Think It, I’ll Say It which was also a Book of the Week when I read it in 2019 (and which is probably the only book of hers I don’t own. I should fix that). Since then she’s written Rodham, her alternative history of Hillary Clinton, and Romantic Comedy which was one of my very favourite books of 2024 and which I now want to go back and read again. It should also be noted that there is a bit of overlap here with some short stories having appeared elsewhere individually or in a mini collection. But given that I didn’t write about any of those at the time I’m feeling ok about recommending this – just if you are a fan (like me) you’ll have read some before and you may want to calibrate your expectations of new stuff accordingly.

Anyway there are not enough stories about normal women, with normal lives doing things and this is full of them. As with that last collection there is just enough action to keep things moving but not so much that you don’t get to know the character. And once again Sittenfeld has picked out a few things that are happening in the world and done interesting and often witty takes on them. It’s just lovely. Really really nice. I rationed myself to make it last longer. It’s that sort of book – and you can do that with short stories if you just let yourself read one in a sitting.

As you could see from my photos at the weekend, this is getting shelf space on display in the bookshops, but it’s also available on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!