A varied week of reading – with a touch of pretty much everything. And I finally had the time to sit down and concentrate on The Night Circus, so the Still Reading list is down to one…
Read:
The Indecent proposal by Louise Marley
Bella and the Beast by Olivia Drake
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
Ships, Stings and Wedding Rings by Jodi Taylor
Death of a Diva by Derek Farrell
It Happened One Season by Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, Jacquie D’Alessandro and Candice Hern
The Guides of the Chalet School by Jane Berry
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Started:
Along the Infinite Sea by Beatriz Williams
Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
Still reading:
Freya by Anthony Quinn
The books from last week’s spending spree turned up and I realised that the book piles by the sofa are now getting tall enough (in some cases) to interfere with the curtains. Thus I am seriously contemplating a buying ban on actual books. So this week I only purchased 2 ebooks – and one of them was free. I’ll keep you posted on the piles.
Hello gentle reader. As you may have noticed, I do quite like a good romance novel. I’m more of a historical romance reader than anything else, but I do sometimes stray into contemporary and to a lesser extent paranormal. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why some books linger on the to-read pile and it’s led to me contemplating what my favourite and least favourite tropes are in the romance genre. Once you’ve figured out what you like and what you don’t like, it makes it much easier to wade through a genre where there are so many books to chose from. And it also makes it easier to work out what you might like when you’re trying a different type of romance from the ones you usually read.
Lets start with my pet hates…
Accidental Pregnancies/Secret pregnancies
Oof. I think this is my absolute least favourite. If an author that I adore writes one of these, I’ll probably read it, but apart from that I give these a wide birth. I think this is probably all bound up in my own fear of accidental pregnancy, but these do absolutely nothing for me except make me want to scream with rage. Accidental secret pregnancy plots will have me hurling a book across the room if I happen to encounter them.
Secret Children
Following on from the pregnancy problem, I like secret children only slightly better. It has to be really good for me to be able to get past the fact that you’ve stopped the child’s father from being a part of their life for x years. And given that the whole idea of the plot is usually that the heroine will reunite with the father, then the reason’s for the secret tend to be a bit lame/spurious. And as far as contemporary romances go, in the days of the internet and social media it’s easier than ever to keep in touch with people and harder than ever to keep this sort of secret…
Amnesia
Just no. Luckily you don’t find it very often any more (although there is a bit in one of my favourite author’s latest novels, but it’s a late on twist so I just about coped with it) because people have (thankfully) realised that Amnesia is rare, and if you’ve got it, you may well have other stuff going wrong too which is harder to fix. I can’t think of a single romance with amnesia as a main plot point that I’ve read and enjoyed. And I’ve been down lists of amnesia romances on Goodreads and it hasn’t jogged my memory either. I understand there’s a pregnant-with-amnesia sub-genre, which sounds like my idea of hell, although Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have a very witty review of the hilariously titled Pregnesia.
My favourites:
Girls dressed up as boys
Twelfth Night has been my favourite Shakespeare play since we studied it when I was 11 (side note: check out the amazing Globe production of it with Oscar Winner (squee) Mark Rylance as Lady Olivia – clip below!) and I love plots with girls dressed up as boys. From Leonie in These Old Shades, through Harriet in Duchess by Night, Callie in Nine Rules to Break when Romancing a Rake (and that other Sarah MacLean one which not a traditional “breeches” role and is a massive spoiler if you haven’t read the rest of the series) and many more besides, it’s a plot device that will often get me to pick up a new author. It’s usually only found in Historical Romance although if you know of any good contemporary ones, please put them in the comments!
Fake engagements
This is one has to be deployed cleverly, because breaking an engagement would ruin the heroine socially so she’d have to have a good reason to do it, but it’s popular device in more recently written historicals, there’s something I love about couples who enter into these for nerfarious reasons of their own and get more than they bargain for. Because of the above social consequences, it’s not a plot often employed by my beloved Georgette Heyer – I can only think of one fake engagement in her books and that’s False Colours, which almost doesn’t count because Kit is pretending to be his twin brother throughout in a lovely twist. Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I is a great example
Marriages of convenience
Following on from those fake engagements, I do love a marriage of convenience plot, although conversely I think my least favourite Georgette Heyer is A Civil Contract – but she does have some crackers too like April Lady and Friday’s Child (my mum’s favourite). When cleverly executed they can be wonderful fun – Eloisa James’s The Ugly Duchess, Mary Balogh’s At Last Comes Love and Quinn’s To Sir Philip with Love is a fun twist on the idea. To be honest, it’s fairly hard to mess up a marriage of convenience – there are lots of ways a lady can accidentally get compromised – and there’s lots of reasons why people might enter into one (keep lands, escape an evil guardian, get an inheritance etc).
I do read other stuff of course – I like house parties, rake-y heros, beta heros, guardians and wards (but only the sort who don’t do anything about it until the wards are of age), friends to lovers, best friend’s sibling and much much more. To be honest, beyond my pet hates above there’s not much I won’t give at least one try (except the Tragic Lives aisle of the bookshop). All recommendations for things that might tick any of my boxes are gratefully received – in the comments below please!
Hmmmm. What to say about this week’s reading – distinctly children’s book heavy? I had a spree with a dealer a few weeks back and they were just what I needed for my post-nightshift recovery. And I finally finished The Shadow Hour at the weekend – once my brain had got back in gear!
Read:
Heartsong Cottage by Emily March
The Bronte Plot by Katherine Reay
Chiltern School by Mabel Esther Allen
The Ballet Family by Mabel Esther Allen (Jean Estoril)
The Ballet Family Again by Mabel Esther Allen (Jean Estoril)
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
Started:
It Happened One Season by Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, Jacquie D’Alessandro and Candice Hern
Still reading:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Freya by Anthony Quinn
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
Oh dear. I had a bit of a mega spending spree over the weekend. I paid for it (mostly) with vouchers, but still added a lot more to the to-read pile than I’ve taken off it. Whoops.
Back on the cozy crime for this week’s BotW with G M Malliet’s first St Just mystery. I’ve read a couple of Malliet’s Max Tudor series before – dishy vicar with a Past in rural village – which I’ve enjoyed so I was interested to read more from this author.
Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is a best-selling mystery writer, who delights in tormenting his adult children by constantly rewriting his will. Then he announces his engagement and the whole family gathers to “celebrate”. But when his eldest son and heir turns up dead, suspicion, greed and malice run riot in the house. Detective Chief Inspector St Just and Sergeant Fear must try to track down the killer before someone else ends up dead.
The whole Beauclerk-Fisk family are hugely dislikeable and this adds a certain something as you read about their machinations (some subtler and cleverer than others). There’s also a lot of references to classic crime – so if you’ve read a lot of Christie you’ll enjoy that too. Sir Adrian has distinct Luther Crackenthorpe tendencies and is stuck writing books about a detecting spinster who he has grown to hate and tried to kill. His writing methods and plot accuracy (as described) also feel like a bit of a comment on someone too.
DCI St Just features less in this than I was expecting, so you don’t really get to know him massively, so I’d need to read another book in the series to make a proper judgement, but he comes across as quite well – fairly inoffensive, not overly flamboyant or extravagant – and obviously as a police officer he has a perfect right to be investigating the crime which was not the case in one of the other cozies I read recently which didn’t work anywhere near as well.
It’s not perfect, but it is a fun mystery with a good few twists before you find out who actually did it. Get your copy from Amazon or on Kindle. My copy was second hand – but I have seen some of Malliet’s books in store in The Works too.
A relatively slow reading week. My second run of nights happened over the weekend and I’m tired and cranky and can’t concentrate on complicated books – my aim for the coming week is to finish The Night Circus and The Shadow Hour – both of which I started and was enjoying before the nights but don’t have the brain power to concentrate on at the moment
Read:
The Record Set Right by Lauren Willig
The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson
Snowflakes on Silver Cove by Holly Martin
The Jade Lioness by Christina Courtney
Death of a Cozy Writer by G M Malliet
A Death at the University by Richard King
Started:
Freya by Anthony Quinn
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
Still reading:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
I was so good and well behaved on the nights – no books bought and not much else either! I did nearly buy a new Kindle (I want a Paperwhite so I can read in bed when I can’t sleep) but I couldn’t quite justify it.
A day late (sorry!) but here are the February stats – no library books or non fiction this month – but quite a lot of progress really, especially if you consider the nightshift factor. Talking of nights, I restrained myself and didn’t buy any books in the early hours – but I had already bought some earlier in the month!
*Includes some short stories/novellas/comics (2 this month)
Now that is what four nightshifts can do for the to-read pile – I actually finished my 7th book of the week on the way home from the last night shift on Friday morning. You’ll notice that the two books that are still on the go are ones where I need to use my brain a bit – and my brain is frazzled so it was light reading only! But I did finish all my February new releases from NetGalley before the end of the month (with 3 days to spare!) – which is unusual for me. Now I just need to work on the slight backlog from the autumn when everything got a way from me a bit…
Read:
Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes
Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection by Julia Lee
The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth by Katherine Woodfine
Murder on a Silver Platter by Shawn Reilly Simmons
A Summer at Sea by Katie Fforde
The Duke’s Accidental Wife by Erica Ridley
The Stylist by Rosie Nixon
Ghostwriters Anonymous by Doreen Wald
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone
Started:
The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson
Still reading:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
I was very, very virtuous and only impulse bought non books on the nightshift. The pile is still massive though!
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).
Two longstanding books finished this week (with most of the reading of them done this week) and a few nights away from home and a bit of a social life means not as much read as I was hoping at the start of the week. I also had a lot of stuff on the go and tried to prioritise getting some of them finished over starting new stuff that I could have read quicker.
Read:
Murder on the Half Shell by Shawn Reilly Simmonds
The Prince’s Boy by Paul Bailey
The Edge of the Fall by Kate Williams
The Feud in the Fifth Remove by Elinor M Brent Dyer
Villa America by Liza Klaussman
Started:
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone
Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection by Julia Lee
Still reading:
Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Stylist by Rosie Nixon
A big old order of republished classic school stories arrived this week (hence the Feud in the Fifth Remove on the read list) and a couple of kindle books which were on a deal and recommended by the Smart Bitches crew.
Late night train journies really help with the book reading, but I need to sort out this habit of mine of starting big thick books that are too chunky to take in my handbag to work! I also read a couple of single issue comics, but they don’t have Goodreads entries, which I guess means I can’t count them!
Read:
Sisters on Bread Street by Frances Brody
The Little Shop of Happily Ever After by Jenny Colgan
The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl by Melissa Keil
The Murder Quadrille by Fidelis Morgan
Lumberjanes Vol. 2: Friendship to the Max by Noelle Stevenson
The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow by Katherine Woodfine
Started:
The Stylist by Rosie Nixon
The Prince’s Boy by Paul Bailey
Still reading:
The Edge of the Fall by Kate Williams
Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Villa America by Liza Klaussman
My headphones broke midweek and in ordering new ones, I may have bought 5 second hand books to get me free delivery on them. I would have been buying then at some point anyway…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 