Tag: Recommendsday

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommensday: May 2026 Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of May and so we’re back to Kindle offers and the post that is traditionally the most expensive for me to write in any given month!

OK, lets start with a recent BotW Katherine Center’s The Love Haters, which is 99p, as is the first Tuga book Welcome to Glorious Tuga and given that book two is out in paperback next month I wouldn’t be surpised to see a price drop on that in June. There’s also the third Emmy Lake book, Mrs Porter Calling, the middle Kiss Quotient book The Bride Test and for £2.89 you can pick up Love and Other Brain Experiments which was a BotW back in March.

Also in romances that I’ve read, there’s Sarah Adam’s When in Rome which has a very Taylor Swift-figure goes to small town and falls in love vibe about it, but which was a little too New Adult for my tastes and then there is Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail from Ashley Herring Blake‘s Bright Falls series which I liked a lot more.

Among the recent releases there’s the new Kate Claybourn Paris Match, and the new Cat Sebastian Star Shipped which I would totally be buying if I didn’t already own a copy (even if the copy is at my parents. In other books waiting on the TBR shelf there’s Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, the sequel to The Maid, The Mystery Guest; S J Paris’s Traitor’s Legacy and last year’s Ashley Poston Sounds Like Love,

In mystery there is recent release A Murder in Eight Cocktails; the first Ruth Galloway book The Crossing Places; the third Canon Clement Murder at the Monastery; the Rivers of London novella, What Abigail did that Summer; the third Three Dahlias book, Seven Lively Suspects; the first in Simon Brett’s latest series Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse ahead of the release of the sequel later this month; the third Cesare Aldo Ritual of Fire; the third Grave Expectations book, The Grapples of Wrath; the first Flavia De Luce book The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie – presumably to coincide with the new TV adaptation and there’s also the latest Hamish MacBeth, Death of a Groom and a much earlier one The Death of a Glutton as well as the second Agatha Raisin The Vicious Vet.

In other fiction, there is Curtis Sittenfeld‘s Prep; the third Cazalet Chronicle, Confusion and The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House which was a featured review a looooong time ago (in a time before BotWs I think). In non-fiction there’s Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls; the Spinal Tap ‘memoir’ A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever; Dan Jones‘s The Hollow Crown and Ronan Farrow‘s Catch and Kill.

In things I bought while writing the post there is the first in Rhys Bowen‘s Molly Murphy series, Murphy’s Law; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold which I have been eyeing up in bookshops since the stage version was on in the West End at the start of the year; The Chinese Gold Murders which likewise I have been eyeing up in bookshops for a while; Nancy Goldstone’s The Rebel Empresses (likewise) and Mark Galeotti’s A Short History of Russia. And surely that is enough for this month…

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommensday: April 2026 Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month and of course you know what that means. So here I am with three reviews of some of the other books I read in April.

Madonna of Darkness by Hugh Morrison

This is the latest book in Hugh Morrison’s series about Reverend Shaw, a vicar in the 1930s who also has a bit of a sideline in stumbling across murders and intrigue. This one sees him at a fete in a neighbouring village where a new vicar has been causing ructions within the community with his views. But when the troublesome minster is found dead in the church shortly after cancelling the fete he starts to investigate. This has got religious art, more of Morrison’s son than we have previously seen and quite a lot of adventure-thriller along with the mystery.

The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula*

I’m reporting back in on this one as I featured it in release week. As I said in that post, I was hoping for something in the Emily Wilde, Legends and Lattes ends of the spectrum when I started reading it, but having finished it’s actually closer to the Shades of Magic ends of the spectrum. It’s not a apocalypse-end-of-the-whole-world scenario here but it is very much life and death and future of society one. It’s also got a lot more religion in it than I was expecting – I wasn’t expecting a religious inquisition and battle between church and magic type situation from the blurb either. It felt a lot like Philippa Gregory Tudor fiction-type stakes but in a Victorian setting and with dinosaurs (and Gregory does have magic in some of hers so maybe that’s fair?) and that wasn’t really what I was hoping for – and I’m note sure that’s what the blurb is selling so there may well be a mismatch of expectations of readers going in with what is delivered. There is a second book and there are plot threads left hanging, but I’m not sure I care enough to slog through it when it comes out to find out!

Mr Campion’s Fox by Mike Ripley

One of my holiday reads was a new murder mystery by Mike Ripley that’s coming out at the start of June. I enjoyed it (more on that closer to the time) and when I was looking at Goodreads I realised that Ripley has written some Albert Campion continuations and that I had some of them on the pile and went back to try one. This is 1960s set and sees Campion recruited by the Danish ambassador to observe an unsuitable man that his daughter has become entangled with. But when the daughter goes missing and the boyfriend turns up dead, Albert – along with his wife and son – are in the middle of a mystery again. This has got all the regulars that you could hope for in a Campion book and the setting was reminiscent of Sweet Danger (one of my favourites of the season) but I didn’t love the actual writing style – it wasn’t quite Allingham and I think I might like Ripley more when he’s writing as himself. I do have another of these on the pile so I will give that a go and see how that one pans out.

And that’s your lot for this month. In case you missed them the other April Recommensdays were Recent Romance reads, Non-fiction about Literary Figures and What I read on my Holiday. The books of the week were Sky High, While You were Seething, D is for Death and How to Solve Your Own Murder.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups

Recommendsday: What I Read on my Holiday Spring 2026 edition

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Happy Wednesday everyone. As you know now I was on holiday for nearly the last two weeks, so it seems only fair that this week’s Recommendsday is a round up of some of the books that I read on my sunlounger. You will be hearing about some of the others too, but here are the ones that don’t obviously fit in with something else that I have planned or that I thought I ought to report back on,

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman

This is the fifth Thursday Murder Club mystery, and I would have read this last holiday if the last holiday hadn’t started (inconveniently) the week before it was released. Now I know that I don’t usually review later books in series because: spoilers, but we left the gang at a moment where things had changed at the end of the last book and I wanted to report back in on what the mood of the next book was. Now this is going to be slightly euphimistic (for spoiler based reasons) but I think the theme of this book for the core gang in many ways is recovery. But there’s also a really good heisty-murder mystery plot going on that keeps you entertained. I read more bits of this than I should have done out loud to Him Indoors (it’s a wonder he puts up with me) and it also made me teary eyed a couple of times. I continue to be in awe of Richard Osman – he comes up with great plots and interesting characters and knows exactly what he’s doing with how he writes his books to make them appeal to the widest possible audience, fully aware that for some (lots?) of people reading them they may be one of a very few books that person reads each year. That said if he makes many (any?) more in jokes about the casting of the movie version of the first book I might revise my opinion.

Murder on the Bernina Express by J G Colgan

This is a much less enthusiastic review I’m afraid, but I’m putting it in here because I read this after having recommended (ish) Colgan’s Christmas novel back in December. This is a murder mystery thriller set on a train travelling Switzerland on the eve of the Munich Conference of 1938. While the train is stopped on a famous viaduct (for weather reasons) a man on board is murdered. The murderer can only be someone on board, but the Swiss police can’t get to the train. And so the investigation is conducted remotely – with the train’s conductor (and eventually some of the passengers) enlisted to help. This is a great premise, and I think there’s a good plot in there. But it’s really let down by continuity issues, contractions and poor editing and proof reading and feels like it was published in a rush to try and follow up on that first book. In my review of that I said that it was readable but didn’t stick the landing, this is less good than that – I found myself having to go back and read sections more than once because I thought I had missed a piece of information or because something didn’t make sense. I think there is still potential here but the author really needs to take a bit more time over the process and do at least one more editing pass before they put things out – I’m not sure if I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt to read another one after this one, which is a shame because I think there is promise there.

Betrayal by Tom Bower

Last holiday I read Andrew Lownie’s Entitled, so this holiday I bought this year’s “big” royal book and to be honest it was a bit of a disappointment. I get that Meghan and Harry are a couple that seem to inspire strong reactions and so perhaps the writers just cater to one side or the other but that’s not what I want. I want something that feels at least like it’s trying to be even handed and came to a conclusion after doing the research (rather than finding the data that backs the author’s hypothesis up) but maybe I’ve just read Gaudy Night and it’s discussion about sound and unsound scholarship too much and this is popular non fiction. That said, the Lownie felt more rigorous than this for sure and it’s a similar market. But perhaps the principals on both sides of this are so entrenched that as an author your sources are either one side or the other and that’s it. I remain convinced that at some point there will be a good book about this whole saga though.

That’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, non-fiction, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Non fiction round up – Literary Figures edition

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It’s been a while, so for this Wednesday’s post I have a non-fiction Recommendsday for you. And as promised yesterday, it sort of ties in with D is for Death a little bit which is a delightful coincidence that I didn’t really realise when I started reading D is for Death after I finished Square Haunting last week – which was the last book I needed to finish reading to finish this post off!

Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

This is a group biography of literary and academic women who are loosely tied together by having lived in Mecklenberg Square. The most celebrated of the five is Virginia Woolf who is the final of the five, but the one that I was most interested in (unsurprisingly) was Dorothy L Sayers – who was living in Mecklenberg Square when she created Peter Wimsey. I’ve written about my love of Sayers’s Gaudy Night before, but the problem at the core of that book, can a woman have her own life and intellectual pursuits and identity and be in a relationship, is a key theme running through this whole book too. The early 20th century was a time when a woman’s right to an academic education was still a matter of debate, and several of the women in this book were at the vanguard of the fight. I found some of the lives more interesting than others (as is always the case) but definitely wouldn’t have heard of or known anything about some of the women without having picked the book up because of the Sayers of it all. Definitely worth reading and one of the more successful group biographies I’ve read. And just to tie it back to D is For Death, here’s a link to a podcast where Harriet Evans and Francesca Wade are talking about Gaudy Night. You’re welcome.

Five Love Affairs and a Friendship by Anne de Courcy

Cover of Five Love Affairs and a Friendship

Anne de Courcy turns her focus on Nancy Cunard in this one. Cunard was an heiress (her father was one of the shipping line Cunards) and was part of a pre-Great War literary circle and then went on to spend the 1920s deeply enmeshed in the literary movement in Paris. She was a muse to many writers of the time – some of whom were also her lovers – and set up her own literary press, before going on to fight racism and fascism. She led quite a sad life in many ways – and this book doesn’t shy away from that, but it’s a really interesting read and a good look at the Parisian side of the roaring twenties. I’m not sure it’s your best place to start with de Courcy though – if you haven’t read any of her books before I might start with The Fishing Fleet or Chanel’s Riviera.

The Crichel Boys by Simon Fenwick

paperback copy of The Crichel Boys on a sun lounger

This is a group biography of Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys who bought Long Crichel Rectory in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Later they are joined by Raymond Mortimer to form a sort of surrogate family and literary Salon (per the author) that lasted across the rest of the century. I’d never heard of this before I saw the book, but they seemed adjacent to the sort of inter-war Bright Young Things set that I’m always fascinated by (and have read a lot about at this point) so I gave it a go. The big problem for me is that there’s not actually enough to say about the core four (so to speak) so it has to expand out to the rest of their circle. And while that does include Nancy Mitford, Cecil Beaton, various Bloomsbury-set types, Benjamin Britten and more, in doing that there’s a lot of jumping backwards and forwards in time as you get sections on various people and it starts to get very confusing. So not entirely successful, but not a disaster either – Square Haunting definitely worked better!Almost the best thing about it for me was the passing mention of Gervase Jackson-Stops and Horton Menagerie – which is just down the road from where I grew up.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday, romance

Recommendsday: Recent Romance Reads

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It’s Wednesday again and today I’ve got three reviews for you of romance novels that I’ve read in the last little while. These are all new – or relatively new – releases. The is the newest because Alisha Rai came out last week and the Jeevani Charika is the oldest and came out in November.

Enemies to Lovers by Alisha Rai*

Sejal’s got some issues: her parents were on both the wrong side of the law, also each other and sometimes her. This means that there are also some unsavoury people after her and she’s been trying to lie low. Krish’s brother has gone missing, and he’s pretty sure Sejal’s crime family have got something to do with it. So he does what any self respecting brother would do: pretends to be an FBI agent and persuade Sejal to help him find his brother. This means an epic cross country road trip where a grudging truce starts to seem like it’s turning into something else. I have a mixed record with career criminals but I love a road trip novel and I’ve really enjoyed some of Alisha Rai’s other series (including the complicated characters in the Forbidden Love series) so this was a no-brainer for me to read. However – it is the second in a series and I hadn’t read the first so I think I would have got more out of it if I had. That said it’s a twisty romantic-suspense that’s at the less scary end of the spectrum with really interesting and complicated protagonists who are both hiding plenty of things from each other and from themselves. It took a bit longer than I was expecting for me to get into it, but I did enjoy it a lot.

How Can I Resist You by Jeevani Charika*

Vidya is on a work trip to Waterloo Bay. Or at least that’s the main reason that she’s there. The other reason is that her sister came to a work party and hooked up with one of Vidya’s colleagues and can’t remember who and as the sensible sister Vidya is trying to find out who it is – based on a vague description and a shoulder tattoo. One of the suspects is Leo – handsome, furstrating and above all a colleague. This is a fun rom-com with a buttoned up rule following hero and a heroine who feels like she’s always trying to fix her sister’s problems. This took me a little bit to get into, I think because of the involvement of a trope that I don’t love (which I can’t tell you because it’s a spoiler) but it’s only a tangential thing mostly and once I got into it I was properly up and running. I liked the work trip setting – all the worrying about the HR issues that are thrown up by trying to see a colleague’s tattoo on a part of their body that is usually covered by clothing from Vidya and from Leo’s side the fact that Vidya’s a colleague and he’s been burnt by that before. Also there’s a seagull. This is the fifth book by Charika that I’ve read and although The Winner Bakes It All is still my favourite, this is pretty good too.

Falling for the Rabbi by Jennifer Wilck*

Josh is a Rabbi whose grandmother has got a matchmaker involved to try and find him a partner. Except when he turns up on the first date that the matchmaker has arranged she has bought her best friend along with her – a best friend who happens to be the same person who is buying his grandmother’s house. Emma is buying the house so that she can fulfill her dream of starting her own business and opening a bookshop. The two of them have more chemistry than Josh does with his actual date, but are there too many obstacles in the way for them to have their happy ending. This was my first actual Harlequin-Harlequin romance in I don’t know how long and I thought the premise was really promising. However it felt a little 2D in the execution – the side characters felt very black and white and you didn’t really get to know a lot about Josh or Emma’s inner life beyond her issues with trust and his with change. Now I would say that this is partly a limitation of the format, except that I’ve read some really good Harlequin/Mills and Boons that managed to flesh out the characters and conflicts really well – and this is a Harlequin special edition, so I think it actually has more pages/word count at it’s disposal than some. Still, it’s always nice to read a romance with a bookshop owner and it was a perfectly find way to pass a few hours.

Happy Humpday everyone!

books on offer

Recommensday: April Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday in April and so it’s Kindle Offer day! Yay! Hide your wallets – mine took a bit of a hit while I wrote this I have to admit, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

Cover of The Astral Library

Lets start with the new (or new-ish) releases that are on offer: there’s Rachel Joyce book that I mentioned in my post about Quinns, The Homemade God, which is 99p this month. I bought that, but I also bought the new Kate Quinn book The Astral Library which is a time travel novel with a hidden library and traveling inside books and which I’ve heard so much about since it came out in February.

On the mystery front, there’s the Andrew Taylor A Schooling in Murder, the Rivers of London novella The October Man, The Pie and Mash Detective Agency that I mentioned in Quick Reviews last week, the fourth Shardlake book Revelation, Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin is 99p and in Kindle Unlimited.

On the romance front there are a couple of former BotW’s on offer in Emily Henry‘s Happy Place, Kristina Forest‘s The Neighbor Favor, recent pick The Future Saints, the second Emmy Lake Yours Cheerfully which isn’t entirely a romance but still fits best in this section and The Rosie Effect which was a featured review back in the day rather than a BotW. There’s also Annabel Monaghan’s It’s A Love Story, Kirsty Greenwood’s Love of my Afterlife, Trisha Ashley‘s Leap of Faith, Crazy Rich Asians and To Sir Philip, With Love aka Eloise’s story is on offer.

The latest series of Bridgerton is a Cinderella retelling which neatly takes me to Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser which is 99p and moves me neatly into other fiction! Also on offer is Vianne by Joanne Harris aka the latest Chocolat novel, the thirteenth 44 Scotland Street book by Alexander McCall Smith The Peppermint Tea Chronicles, The second Cazalet Chronicle Marking Time is also on offer as is

In classic fiction there’s Nancy Mitford‘s The Pursuit of Love, Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, one of my teenage favourites A Town Like Alice (once she gets out of the prisoner of war march at least!) and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The Terry Pratchett offer this month is Only You Can Save Mankind, the first book in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy for middle grade readers. The Georgette Heyer is The Corinthian which is one of her girls-dressed-up-as-boys plots, and the Poirot is A Death in the Clouds.

In other stuff I bought while writing this: Brigands and Breadknives the third Legends and Lattes, the fourth Before the Coffee Gets Cold book Before We say Goodbye, 10 Marchfield Square which has finally gone on offer presmably because the sequel came out a couple of weeks ago. And if that’s not enough for you I don’t know what is!

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March 2026 Quick Reviews

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It’s the first day of April and it’s also a Wednesday, so I’m back with the quick reviews from last month. This was an interesting one to pick – because there were quite a lot of books from last month that I want to write about, but a lot of them fit into other posts that I’ve got planned, but in the end it’s worked out ok – with three murder mysteries so it even feels a bit cohesive! The stats are coming up – but I think it’s fair to say that I did quite well on the to-read pile front and on the NetGalley one too, and this post reflects that: two books from NetGalley – both recent releases – and one from the pile.

A Murder in Eight Cocktails by Kelly Mullen*

Willa is a recent (early) retiree who has turned herself into an ASMR cocktail influencer. When she’s invited to the launch of a new bar, she’s excited to make content for her account – even if her husband is less than enthusiastic. But when she arrives at the even she discovers it’s being hosted by her ex-husband and things go from bad to worse when the owner of the bar is found dead on the rocks below the ocean-side bar. The police think it’s suicide, but Willa isn’t convinced, and soon she’s teaming up with her ex-husband and her current husband to try and figure out what really happened. I wanted to like this more than I did, but I found the way that Willa bounces between unhappiness with her husband’s “dullness” and enthusiasm for working with her ex-husband quite trying. I think the push-pull was meant to create tension in the story (beyond the murder mystery) but I thought it reduced the reader’s sympathy/empathy for Willa because she never really gives concrete examples of the problems in her marriage or tries to address them with her husband (she just seems to get exasperated) and is written in a way that suggests that she might jump ship to her ex. The mystery was interesting though – although I’m not sure about an emotional support chameleon…

The Pie and Mash Detective Agency by J D Brinkworth*

Jane Pye and Simon Mash are a couple who start taking a private detective class in their free time and end up investigating a real live case as part of their final assessment. A woman called Nellie Thorne has been reported missing by her boyfriend – except that she is not the first Nellie Thorne to go missing, there have been at least five of them over the last fifty years. Can these two wannabe PIs work out what has happened to all the Nellies? Ok, I’m not going to lie, this didn’t really work for me. I was hoping it would, but I found it quite hard going. There is some fun dialogue between Jane and Simon, but you never really got to know them that well – what their personalities are like and why they are a thing – beyond the snark. The mystery was quite convoluted and I felt like it couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to go all out into the surreal/fantastic or stay in the cozy crime lane. Hey ho, this happens – the cover is lovely though.

Fishing for Trouble by Elizabeth Logan

This is the second book in a cosy crime series set in Alaska. Charlie has taken over running her parents diner after moving home following a broken engagement in San Francisco. In this it’s high summer, with long days of daylight and lots of seasonal workers. But when one of those seasonal workers collapses and dies in her diner, Charlie starts to investigate. So this didn’t really work for me. Charlie doesn’t have a lot of personality beyond liking her cat (shown by buying him loads of cat toys she can run from her phone while she leaves him home alone all day) and being a bit immature as well as somewhat too stupid to live. It’s a shame because the details of life in Alaska make for a nice change from most cozies.

A quick reminder of the other posts from March – the Recommensdays were Books set in the Tower of London, and some first in series books; and the Books of the Week were The French Bookshop Murder, Slow Dance, The Love Haters, Murder at Gulls Nest and Love and Other Brain Experiments.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday, series

Recommendsday: First in series…

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Happy Wednesday everyone, this week I’ve got a mixed bag of first books in series that I have recently read – we’ve got one fantasy, one historical mystery and one cozy crime, which may not be entirely representative of my general reading over the year, but is actually fairly representative of where my reading is at at the moment, minus a romance but I’m mostly reading standalone romances rather than series at the moment so I didn’t have one I could include!

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

After having enjoyed Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter so much last month, I went out and bought the first in Heather Fawcett’s previous series (yes I know, I’m repeating an author, but hey I make and break my own rules) about a professor who studies faeries and folklore. Emily Wilde has gone to visit a village in the far north to study the Hidden Ones, their local fae. She doesn’t want to talk to the locals and she is less than pleased when one of her colleagues from Cambridge turns up to help her. I really loved the world building and the characters are great. I felt like Fawcett did a really good job of explaining how the world works without info dumping on you and the two main plot strands – what are the fairies up to and who is Wendell Bartlett – provided plenty of action without being too stressful. Cozy fantasy so good I have already acquired the rest of the trilogy…

Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claud Izner

This is the first in a series of books featuring bookseller Victor Legris in late nineteenth century Paris. In this it’s 1889 and Paris is a buzz with the World Exposition. Victor witnesses a woman’s death on the viewing platform of the brand new Eiffel Tower and doesn’t think that the official explanation is the right one. Soon he’s ducking and weaving around Paris trying to work out what happened and who did it and more people start to die. The original French version of this won the Prix Michel-Lebrun in 2003, which is a prize for French crime novels, which I thought was a good sign, but I was obviously reading it in English and although the mystery is good I found the writing style quite hard going, but that could of course be the fault of the translator. I bought this on my trip to Paris about 18 months ago so it’s taken me a while to get to and I do have the second on the shelf already ahving spotted it cheap second hand. So I’ll give that a go at some point and see if it grows on me.

Jammed with Secrets by Selina Hill*

This is the first in a new series of small town cozy crimes and sees Sadie, a disgraced chef return to her home town to try and rebuild her life. She’s trying to do this by running food trailers at a local music festival when a member of a 90s boyband is found dead in one of them. Not satisfied with the police investigation, Sadie starts to investigate herself to try and save her business. The actual murder mystery plot was pretty good – but the problem here is Sadie. There are some issues with her backstory that make it hard for the reader to sympathise with her and entirely understandable why the people in town wouldn’t want to eat her food. This is a problem entirely of the author’s own creation – and made me wonder why it wasn’t set up differently. And that’s all I can say without spoilers, but this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you want to go and find out what I’m talking about!

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: The Tower of London in books

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Happy Wednesday everyone. Having recently read a mystery that was set in and around the Tower of London – and walking past it on my way to the theatre, it got me thinking about books that I’ve read set there. And so here I am with a very mixed bag Recommendsday for you.

Now obviously there are any number of history books that feature the tower given that it was the major seat of power and royal residence from the eleventh to about the fifteenth century and then less a residence more a prison from the Tudors onwards. So you can basically pick a history book about a major figure in English history and the Tower will feature in it. I’m not good with recommendations for history pre-Tudors, but I have read two of Dan Jones three books of medieval history (The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses, also known as The Hollow Crown) and I have the third one (Henry V) ready to go on the Kindle. And if you want to read Tudor history, the David Starkey books are an accessible place to start.

And as you know there is a lot of fiction written in and around the Tudors – I’ve written about Philippa Gregory’s series before, but there is also the Shardlake series where the Tower pops up, and obviously Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – which I’ve read two of but can’t bring myself to read the end of because I know how it ends for Cromwell and Mantel has done such a good job of making you like him!

If you only know one thing about the Tower of London, it may be the story of the Princes in the Tower, aka Edward V and his younger brother Richard, who disappeared after being put into the Tower by their uncle and guardian the Duke of Gloucester, who then turned himself in to Richard III. What actually happened to them is one of the big debates in history and so crops up in a lot of fiction. The most famous is probably Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, where her series detective Alan Grant is ill in hospital and uses the time to try and solve the mystery himself. It regularly crops up in lists of best mystery books ever. The Chronicles of St Mary’s series also hits up this time period in Plan for the Worst, but given that this is book 11 in a quite complicated series, I wouldn’t advise starting your St Mary’s journey there.

Now one series you can pick up midway through without being completely lost are the Daisy Dalrymple books by Carola Dunn. Book 16, The Bloody Tower, sees new mum Daisy picking up the threads of her journalistic career by writing an article about the Tower of London. It sees her spending a night there so that she can witness the ceremony of the keys – and then stumbling across a dead body the next morning. I think this was the first novel I read with the tower in it – and it’s got a lot about the day to day of the Tower in the 1920s in it as well as the murder mystery.

And then that brings me up to the book that got me thinking about writing this post – Murder at the Tower by N R Daws. Mrs Bramble is a palace housekeeper at Hampton Court, but when her friend Reverend Weaver is accused of a murder at the Tower of London after a congregant drops dead during a service, she heads there to help clear his name. At the Tower she finds secrets and feuds and a long list of suspects. And a long list of suspects is the thing that I think caused me the most issues with this – the huge cast of characters meant it was hard to follow who was who. I also didn’t love the writing style which just added up to a bit of a disappointing read for me overall. This came out earlier this month and I requested this from NetGalley because I really like a historical mystery – and I wanted to see whether being in conjunction with Historic Royal Palaces made for any different details than other mysteries that I have read that are set in and around the Tower of London. I didn’t realise this was the second book featuring the same characters or I might have thought twice because I do like to read in order.

And that’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March 2026 Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of March and so I’m back with some Kindle offers. There’s a big old Kindle Sale going on at the moment which means that there was a lot to chose from and also that it was a relatively expensive post to write – so I hope you appreciate it!

Cover of And the Crowd Went Wild

The first one is a new release from last month and one that I already told you that I was excited about: the new Chicago Stars book from Susan Elizabeth Philips, And the Crowd Went Wild is 99p and I clicked on it just as fast as I could and as you know I have already finished it! Also from the very recent releases (which I also haven’t read) is And Now, Back to You by B K Borison, the second book in their Heartstrings series, which features competing meteorologists and the storm of the century. Former BotW and 2024 Emily Henry release Funny Story is 99p as is Christina Lauren‘s The Paradise Problem, Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date from Ashley Herring Blake‘s Bright Falls series, Casey McQuiston’s Red, White and Royal Blue and one of the books I mentioned in last week’s Quick Reviews, The Fundamentals of Being Good Girl.

Moving on to mysteries, Jeremy Vine’s Murder on Line One is on offer too which I’m assuming is because the sequel comes out in late April. Elly Griffiths‘ first Brighton Mystery, The Zig Zag Girl, is 99p as is Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Sutanto (which is also in Kindle Unlimited), The Witness at the Wedding (the sixth Fetherings book), The Marlow Murder Club and Death Comes to Marlow (that’s the first two in that series), the second Canon Clement A Death in the Parish and the first Dahlia mystery The Three Dahlias,

Just a couple of non fiction books to mention: Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died is 99p, as is comedian Adrian Edmondson’s memoir Beserker! and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. It’s not on offer on price, but Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe‘s Vanderbilt is is currently in Kindle Unlimited. And Laurence Rees’s The Nazi Mind is £1.99

Still on the shelf waiting to be read are Gill Hornby’s The Elopement, Maz Evans’s Over My Dead Body which are all 99p this month. I still haven’t read the first Castle Knoll Files book but the second, How To Seal Your Own Fate, is 99p because the third is out next month too. We have to wait until the middle of May for the second series of Rivals, but if you’re bored of waiting, the fitfth in the Rutshire series Appassionata is 99p this month.

Rebecca Yaros’s The Fourth Wing is on offer again – I still haven’t read this, and the to read pile is so huge I’m residting the urge to buy it because it will be literal years before I get around to reading it, but it has been incredibly popular and well reviewed obviously so is a good deal. In other things that I haven’t read (although to be fair I did try and read this one but gave up!) is Outlander, the first in Diana Gabaldon’s series of the same name which is a very successful TV series too. Catch Her If You Can, he latest Tessa Bailey is 99p too – I’ve decided (after reading three of hers and giving up on a fourth) that Bailey is not my thing, but she’s tremendously popular which is why I came back and tried again (and again) after disliking the first one of hers that I read.

And finally, there are two Terry Pratchett’s on offer: Men at Arms so you could start the City Watch series and Tales of Wizards and Dragons which is a short story collection for young readers and ne of my favourites, Regency Buck, is the Heyer on offer.

Happy Humpday!