The third in Ellie Alexander’s Novel Detectives series came out on Tuesday so having already mentioned Glow Job which was out on Monday in yesterday’s post I thought I’d mention this one today. As you may remember this is the continuation series that has spun off Alexander’s earlier and completed Secret Bookcase series featuring the same main character and her new detective agency. This third in the new series has a reclusive heiress who has disappeared from her mansion and Annie and Fletcher are called in to investigate. I love a fancy house mystery so I’m optimistic for this one, although the murder rate around Redwood Grove where this series is based is frankly alarming at this point!
Happy Thursday – and happy new Three Dahlias day! We have two books in the series this year and the first of them, Death on a Lively Sea sees our three heroines on a super yacht in the Med with a property mogul whose father died recently in a death that he doesn’t think was natural and who is convinced he’s going to be murdered next. And so he’s done the only thing a sensible billionaire can do: invite all the suspects on a two week cruise and get some amateur detectives along to try and work it all out. I really enjoy this series – and I love that Katy Watson is finding settings for the books that pay homage to the settings of Golden Age mysteries as well. I’m really looking forward to readng this – and to reading the seventh book which is a Christmas mystery set on a sleeper train in Swiss Alps (see above again) and is out at the end of November.
We are past the halfway part of the year now, and almost all the books that I mentioned in my anticipated books post at the start of the year have come out – even if I haven’t read all of them – and we have a better sense of what’s coming in the autumn. And so today: we have the stuff I didn’t know about back in January and that I’m desperate to read!
Let’s start with some continuations of other author’s series because there are two that I’m really interested in. The first is a new Miss Marple novel, written by Lucy Foley and comimg out in early September. Foley wrote one of the stories in the Marple short story collection a few years back and has now written a full length novel called Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel. According to the blurb there’s a murder in a gondola on the way to the top of a mountain at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps and as cracks and tensions among the remaining guests emerge, Miss Marple is there in the shadows to work out what happened. Given that the Sophie Hannah Poirot continuations have been sucessful, it’s perhaps unsuprising that they’d try the same thing with Marple. I had mixed feelings about the short story collections, but that was mostly because there was no internal continuity among them – and then the last story did something unforgivable. But Foley was right at the start of that collection so I’ll definitely read this.
The other interesting continuation is a bit more unexpected: Georgette Heyer. I know. It’s being billed as “An official Georgette Heyer Regency Romance” and I would love to know how this came about. It’s called Henrietta and it’s written by Sophie Irwin, who wrote A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting, which I really liked, A Lady’s Guide to Scandal which I liked less, and How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days, which I have on the shelf waiting to be read. The blurb for this has a soldier returning from three years away to find everything changed, and a heroine who has been in love with him for years and is trying to make herself the society success she has always dreamed of and is hoping that he will notice in the process. This one is out next month.
Also out in August is a new book from Lissa Evans. My Name is MacKenzie Bly is being billed as a coming of age novel “perfect for fans of Sue Townsend” so it feels like a bit of a step change from things like Old Baggage and Small Bomb at Dimperley. It’s about a 14 year old boy whose best friend has just moved to New Zealand and is struggling through the trials of teenage life. Evans has written for middle graders before, but this isn’t specifically being marketed as YA and it’s under the Transworld Digital imprint rather than a specialist so I’m interested to see what it is like to read style-wise.
Coming up in under a week (so maybe I shouldn’t even be including it?) is the new Rachel Lynn SolomonExtra Curricular about a former popstar who enrolls in college and discovers she’s got chemistry with one of her professors. I’ve got a mixed record with professor-student romances – I loved the movie Never Been Kissed as a teenager but these days I only notice the ick – but the heroine in this is 26 and the blurb says that her past comes calling for her so I’m optimistic this is going to be on the right side of my tastes. Looking further ahead again to October and we have a second novel from Bonnie Garmus. I loved Lessons in Chemistry (I really should get around to watching the adaptation of that) back in 2022 and now this autumn we have her follow up: Peck & Peck following a new grad in the 1980s getting a job in the literary world. I can’t wait.
I’m expecting the Garmus to be very buzzy and very everywhere – and although I will be reading that one, there are a bunch more buzzy books coming out this autumn that I probably won’t be (because they’re likely to end in tears and/or devastation) but I’m going to mention because I know other people will be reading. Firstly there’s the sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, Life Out of Order (also in October) featuring the daughter of Henry from the original and according to the blurb “a kaleidoscopic story of love, resilience and hope when time is running out.” Then there’s the new book from John Green Hollywood, Ending, which is about a behind the scenes love story between two actors and the blurb calls it “tender, heartbreaking, and shrewdly funny,” and given I’m not over The Fault in Our Stars yet, I just can’t risk it even though I love a Hollywood-set novel, but if you can, that’s out in late September.
And because it wouldn’t be a second half preview without some non-fiction (because we all know most of that comes out timed for Christmas), there’s Lucy Worsley’s Kings and Queens: An Unusually Personal History using her experience from her years as Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces to look at the royalty who lived in the palaces she worked in. There’s also new books from Dan Jones whose Castles looks at history through twelve iconic strongholds from around the world and Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Cauldron about the making of the modern Middle East.
And finally to report back on a few loose ends from that January post: Dark Reading Matter has moved again – but only slightly – to October. The fourteenth Frances Brody did slide again – to March 2027, but it does at least have a title now: Death at the Yorkshire Show.
When I wrote about Mrs Spy in my Recommendsday post, I mentioned that there was a sequel coming, so it only seemed right to come back around and mention that it is out today. It’s called The Spy and the Snake and according to the blurb sees Maggie on a mission in Budapest pretending to be the wife of a British defector. As the blurb mentions that Maggie’s daughter is away at university I think we must have jumped on a year or two from Mrs Spy, so I’m looking forward to seeing what changes have happened in the interim and how a few years more experience have changed Maggie.
For the second week in a row, the new release is from an author where I’m a bit behind on their back catalogue. But with Beatriz Williams I have more of an excuse than Ashley Poston because her books can be much harder to get hold of over here. Her 2024 and 2025 releases still aren’t available on Kindle in the UK – which means I suspect that the hard copy versions I can see on Amazon are US editions and the only page for this new one on UK Amazon is a large print edition. Still The Beach at Summerley did arrive on Kindle eventually so fingers crossed for these latest three. Anyway, that’s an awful lot of talk without saying what this book is actually about, so here we go:
Lucy is a young widow, who returns to her family’s New England estate for the summer with her young daughter to mourn her father only to discover that the property is in a mountain of debt and the man who doomed her friendship with her teenage best friend is vacationing next door after an accident ended his NFL career. Because it’s Beatriz Williams there is also a historical element – this time about a fabled pirate treasure from the early eighteenth century. The location of Lucy’s family home is Winthrop Island which has also featured in other Williams novels so I really do feel like I need to read the back catalogue first, but if you’ve already done that (or you’re not as fussy as me about things like this!) then I think this sounds like an amazing summer holiday beach book.
This one has been out in the US for about a month now, but the new novel from Emma Straub is out in the UK today. American Fantasy is set on a cruise for fans of a 90s boyband, where thousands their now grown up fans are on a ship with all five band members. One of the cruisers is Annie who’s really only there to keep her sister happy, but reconnects with a part of herself that she’s forgotten and (per the blurb) “By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has accessed a new sense of possibility.” If this is going where I think it might be going, it’s joining a number of books along the same lines in the last few years – but this being Emma Straub I could be completely off base with where this ends up. So I’m looking forward to reading it, and expecting to see it in the shops quite a lot.
The third Theatreland mystery featuring stage manager Hattie comes out today and the fact that I’ve picked this to highlight this week should probably not be a surprise to you as the first book was a BotW back in February and the second one was one of my favourite new books of last year. According to the blurb, Hattie Breaks A Leg sees Hattie struggling to find work because of all the enemies she’s made. And that’s why she finds herself working on a one night only vanity project. But when a friend comes looking for help to escape serious trouble, she finds herself sucked into a cat and mouse game with some shady types. I really enjoyed the first two books and I’m really looking forward to reading this when my preorder arrives (hopefully today). And because I think it’s a bit under the radar I’m happy to keep banging on about these because I think they deserve it
Hattie Breaks a Leg is out today in paperback, on Kobo and in Kindle Unlimited. I’m hoping that it will relatively easy to find in bookshops too – I’ll be keeping an eye out and reporting back!
Kate Clayborn has consistently written some of my favourite books of any year that she has published a book, so it would be remiss of me not to mention that she has a new book out this week. It’s called The Paris Match and it’s about a woman who heads to Paris for her former sister-in-law’s wedding, where she accidentally gives the bride cold feet and ends up butting heads with the best man who wants her to fix it. I love the sound of this, and I love a book set in Paris. I had this pre-ordered in paperback (as you can maybe tell because of the photo!) and I’m planning on making this my post Easter reading treat. In the meantime, you can read my posts about The Other Side of Disappearing, Georgie, All Along, Love Lettering and the Chance of a Lifetime series.
The stats are coming up tomorrow as a Good Friday treat for you all, but before we get to that given that I’m on a run of cozy fantasy books I wanted to mention this one, which came out on Tuesday and which I’m already reading (but haven’t finished yet so this isn’t a review!). This is an alternative history type historical fantasy in a world where magic is real and Mary Anning (who was a real life fossil collector and palentologist) is a struggling fossil dealer who wants to be accepted into the Geomagical Society of London but is stymied by her gender and her lack of formal higher education. But one day she is out fossil hunting after a landslide when a pterodactyl egg hatches in her hand. Ajax could be the thing that makes her career – but the emissary from the society is her former fiancé and soon she is stuck between rival factions of the society with their own agendas. This is blurbed by Heather Fawcett (as in Emily Wilde and Agnes Aubert) which is why I requested it – so far (just over a third in) it’s a bit less cozy and has more religion than I was expecting, but I’m interested to see where it goes and how it all gets resolved.
I’ve got one for the historical romance fans this week, while you wait for the second half of the latest series of Bridgerton to arrive next week! This is a paperback release of the first two books in Alexandra Vasti’s Halifax Hellions series – In Which Margo Halifax Earns Her Shocking Reputation and In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint – rather than something new-new, so serious fans may have read already. I have Vasti on my to-read-once-the-pile-goes-down list because so many people in the romance communities that I hang out in are huge fans of her books, and she’s also a really interesting interview, which is usually a good sign too. This is out in Kindle next week, but in the meantime Ladies in Hating, which came out in September is on offer on Kindle for 99p!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 