Tag: Recommendsday

Recommendsday, romance

Recommendsday: Famous people romances

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A couple of years ago now, in spring 2023 I read a pair of books about a famous person and a normal (or normalish) person – Nora Goes Off Script and Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. Since then I’ve read a bunch more because it really seems to be a trend, and since then we e had a positive rash of romances about campus people and normal people, or just involving famous or famous adjacent people. And I suspect the flood is not over yet because Parasocial relationships with famous people means these things sell. So for this week’s Recommendsday I’ve got a bit of a round of some of the others that I’ve read. And be warned, this is less a list of recommendations, more a survey of my reading…

The Break-Up Pact by Emma Lord

The premise here is good (if a bit far fetched) – with two former best friends doing some fake dating to reclaim the narrative after their respective relationship breakups go viral – but the reality of it is that I found it a really frustrating read. Neither the hero nor the heroine seems capable of using their words ever, and almost everything about their relationship (or lack thereof) and everything that goes wrong could have been sorted with a proper conversation. Add to that the fact that the heroine is both too stupid/naïve to live as well Peak Not Like Other Girls and the hero is incapable of making a decision on his own, and the only reason I made it to the end of this was to see if her ex got sufficient comeuppance for dumping her for his reality TV show co-star. Spoiler: he did get some comeuppance, but not really at the hands of the heroine. Which given how the rest of the book had gone for her was unsurprising by that point. Deeply, deeply annoying.

Love Songs and Ferry Tales by Julie Farley

This is a famous person-normal person type romance set on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Although there were things I liked about it, the pacing didn’t feel quite right to me – the ending wrapped up far too fast and didn’t quite resolve everything that the prior narrative felt it should have done. And your tolerance for deception may impact how much you enjoy the romance as the heroine doesn’t know the hero’s real identity for quite a lot of the book (and your ability to believe she wouldn’t have recognised him). A couple of the characters are meant to be British – but you wouldn’t really know except for odd bits of (not remotely accurate*) British trivia dropped in from time to time- which as a Brit really annoyed me! Also for me her brothers tipped over from fun comic relief into meanness. So not entirely successful for me – in fact I downgraded it a star on Goodreads while writing this review when I realised how much about it annoyed me!

How to Fake it In Hollywood by Ava Wilder

Grey’s role in a long running show has just ended and she needs to give her career a boost. So she agrees to a fake relationship with a troubled heartthrob. Ethan is newly divorced, newly sober and in mourning for his best friend; but he wants to produce the last movie they wrote together so he agrees to the plan to try and get everything back on track. And obviously sparks fly. This is another where I have distinctly mixed feelings. I bought it off the back of the preview, but for me the rest of the book doesn’t live up to the promise of that. It’s a fake relationship trope which I love but there’s not enough character development and growth here for me. There are some similar issues going on with Ethan and the hero to Funny You Should Ask, but in that book you get to spend large amounts of time with later Gabe and see that he really has changed and got a handle on stuff. You don’t have that here, and I’m not sure that I actually wanted them to end up together – I think Grey deserved better or at least more time to see that Ethan really has sorted himself out. Never mind.

I also read Melissa Ferguson’s Famous for a Living a year or two back which probably falls within the scope of this post- it’s about an influencer who goes to work at a national park in Montana after her career implodes and a rugged park ranger. When you read it, it’s more a voyage of self discovery than a romance – and there’s a lot of heavy lifting on that front done at the end. Still I did want to visit the national park afterwards, even if I didn’t love the book!

And that’s your lot. You could probably add Thank you for Listening to this list, but I’ve already written about it once and this is meant to be stuff I haven’t told you about before, but I did like it more than I like any of the three I have written about here so there’s that in its favour!

Happy Humpday!

*spoilers ahead: the hero grew up in Watford which is described as “Our town is far enough outside of London to not be a commuter town. Most people work in the factories and businesses nearby” and at one point says “ Sam and I took the Tube in a couple of times in high school, but we never had enough money to do anything once we got there.” The idea that Watford is not a commuter town is absolutely laughable and that someone living there would only have been into London from there a couple of times as a teen is frankly insane. I commute through Watford every week day and it is a) only 15 miles from central London and b) inside the tfl network so is actually massive commuter area as is evidenced by the fact that my train fills to full and standing only every time it stops there. Its like saying that no one from New Jersey commutes in to New York to work. Thus I suspect that the author has never been to Britain.

Recommendsday, reviews

Recommendsday: August Quick Reviews

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As ever, the first Wednesday of the Month is quick reviews day and I’m back with three more books I read last month that I haven’t talked about yet.

Murder-Sur-Mer by Hugh Morrison

This is the third in Morrison’s Clarice and Cliff series and sees our titular leads tying the knot and heading off on honeymoon to France. Of course crime follows them there – in the form of a murdered jewel thief in their hotel room. The French police seem to them to be making slow progress and determined to look in the wrong places so they take it upon themselves to try and solve the crime. I don’t like this series as much as the Rev Shaw mysteries but this was a light, easy read even if I had the rough outlines of the solution figured out fairly early on. I don’t know if the fact that I’ve been listening to the Miss Marple series has made me a bit fussier at the moment but that can’t be ruled out as a factor in my opinion on this one. Still I liked it the most of the books I’m writing about here today – and I’ll be keeping an eye for the next one – they’re definitely a step above the J G Colgan that I mentioned last month.

The Truth About Love by Stephanie Laurens

This is the twelfth book in Laurens’ Cynster series. I’ve read the first six and then 14th as well. This one was written 20 years ago, which probably counts as an old school romance at this point and it did feel a bit like it – that or my tastes have changed, although to be fair I did start reading historical romances of this sort in around 2008 so it’s not that old school for me! Anyway our hero is Gerrard Debbington a painter who is desperate to paint the gardens of Hellebore Hall, but the only way the owner Lord Tregonning will let him do that is if he also paints a portrait of his daugher, Jacqueline. And Jacqueline is (of course) our heroine, she’s been the target of rumour and innuendo since the disappearance of her suitor and the death of her mother, and is hoping the portrait will help clear her. And of course they fall in love but also solve the mysteries. And I was much more interested in the mystery solving than I was in the romance, but maybe that’s just me. It’s a bit gothic and a lot overblown (anyone actually believe that a portrait can reveal guilt or innocence?) but as I found it on the bookshelf at the hostel I didn’t spend anything on it and and so I can’t complain too much. That said, it was a really useful indication of how my reading tastes change and evolve – it’s the first Laurens I’ve read in some years and as I didn’t love it, I took the opportunity to clear some space on the to-read shelf by checking for any physical copies of Laurens on there and moving them to the charity shop bag!

The Murder on the Enriqueta by Molly Thynne

I read this thinking it was going to be another murder on a boat story – but although the first murder does indeed take place on a voyage from Argentina to Britain, despite what you might take from the blurb the main action happens after that boat journey in London. Chief Inspector Shand is on board ship for that murder and finds himself drawn into events in London because also on board ship is the widow of Lord Dalberry, making her way to England after the death of her husband where two young cousins of her husband encounter her. In terms of plot this is as bonkers as some of the maddest of the Girl’s Own books – I’m talking C Bernard Rutley and Rita Coutts level madness here – but it’s no where near as easy to read. I’ve read two of Thynne’s other books and enjoyed them much more than this one which I can’t really recommend.

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Recommendsday: BLCC mysteries about artists

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Verdict of Twelve was a BotW in July and Sky High back in April, but generally my rate of reading BLCC books has slowed a little this year as I try to do some work on the actual to read pile and the Netgalley backlog. But I’m back now with another BLCC round up. And all of these actually feature artists – which I only realised as I added the last review, it wasn’t at all intentional but as I do like a mystery about artists I’m embracing it and changed the title of the post accordingly – it was originally the much more boring BLCC Summer 2026!

The Double Turn by Carol Carnac

Adrian Delafield used to be a celebrated painter, but these days the old man is a recluse at his home in St John’s Wood, jealously guarded by his housekeeper Miss Trimming. But when she is found dead at the bottom of the stairs, and Delafield is found badly hurt after seemingly trying to help her, the police – and some of people around the household are not convinced it was an accident – despite the fact that the house was locked tight. This is a relatively recent release, hot on the heels of the success of other Carnacs for the BLCC and it’s a really good one. This is a nice variation on the theme – Delafield is very much a relic of a prior artistic era, a curiosity that has been (mostly) forgotten. His household is fascinating – and has that staple of the mystery genre: a religious fanatic, but there is a backstory to it (more than you get in many of these!) that means you do come to understand how Miss Trimming might have turned out the way she did. Well worth a look – probably my favourite of this selection.

Death Knows No Calendar by John Bude

This is the second half of a BLCC double bill of John Bude. I did read the first one as well, but I’m focusing on the second one (which is the better one of the two). It’s a locked room mystery in an artists studio with plenty of candidates for the killer to be investigated by local retired soldier Major Boddy. This has a more adventure-y streak than a lot of Golden Age Crime, but Bude does tend towards that at times. This is listed as being part of the Inspector Meredith series, but don’t be fooled – he’s not in it, but it is apparently in the same universe as the ones that do. If you haven’t read any Bude before and you’re not wedded to reading a book about an artist, I’d start with The Lake District Murder or The Cheltenham Square Murder.

The Spoilt Kill by Mary Kelly

Cover of the Spoilt Kill

The artist in this one is primarily a designer of pottery patterns, so it’s maybe a little stretch, but she’s clearly doing other drawing in her spare time (you see them as part of the plot) so I say it counts! Anyway an old established pottery company in Stoke on Trent is having its designs stolen by the competition and then undercut. So they call in a private detective to investigate where the leak is coming from but while Hedley Nicholson is investigating, he finds more is going on than just industrial espionage – even before a worker is found in a vat of liquid clay. This isn’t quite in the common way of mystery books as it’s very character driven and introspective and feels noir-ish in the way it paints a picture of the Potteries and the people Nicholson encounters while he’s investigating. I think I liked The Christmas Egg more, but both are grittier and darker than many other BLCCs – and are also set in the post-war period rather than the interwar one. There is another book featuring Nicholson available in the series and I suspect I’ll read it when I get a chance.

That’s your lot – this time… Happy Humpday!

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Recommendsday: August Kindle Offers

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I always think of August as being Peak Summer, but I think that’s because the whole month was summer holidays when we were at school and that sort of thing sticks with you doesn’t it? Anyway, another bumper batch of books on offer for you this Wednesday – hide your wallets!

Lets start with this week’s BotW The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy, which I bought last weekend on the recommendation of Portugal Friend who bought it on our pre-Bristol Jolly and have obviously now devoured and recommended. Also on offer are previous books of the week: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Cathy Yardley‘s Do Me A Favor, Christina Lauren‘s The True Love Experiment, and although it’s £2.99 not 99p I’m mentioning it anyway: A Case of Life and Limb, the second Gabriel Ward mystery which I absolutely adored last year and have since listened to on audiobook as well.

In other things I’ve read recently there’s How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days (fresh from the July Quick Reviews), Alexandria Bellefleur‘s Written in the Stars, G M Malliet’s Death in Cornwall, the fourth St Just mystery and the first one after the series restarted but it should be said that all four of those new ones are in Kindle Unlimited too. Slightly longer ago (how did I read this last summer already?!) is Alex Hay‘s The Housekeepers and Julian Clary‘s A Curtain Call to Murder. Sadly I’m not seeing Clary as Herod in JCS this summer but he has got a new novel out in October, which from the description looks like it could be a sequel to this so I shan’t complain too much!

Orlando Murrin’s second Paul Delmere mystery Murder Below Deck is on offer (still no news on whether we’re getting a third in that series) as is the third Three Dahlias book Seven Lively Suspects, There’s also Marple, the Miss Marple short story collection I mentioned in my anticipated books post the other week, my mileage definitely varied but others liked it more. The same could be said for Maggie Stiefvater‘s The Listeners which I thought had great promise at the start but then tailed off.

In books I like there’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré, the final Ruth Galloway book The Last Remains – but you really should read the series in order, Josephine Tey‘s The Franchise Affair, the second Rivers of London book Moon over Soho, Emma Straub‘s Modern Lovers and Annabel Monaghan‘s Same Time Next Summer.

In things I have on the pile but haven’t read yet, there’s The Secret Lives of Murderers Wives, Kirsty Greenwood’s latest Romantic Hero, and the second in Ashley Herring Blake‘s Clover Lake series, Get Over It April Evans ahead of the release of the third book at the end of September. In things I bought while writing this post, there’s Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 and the new Rachel Lynn Solomons Extracurricular, which has teacher-student stuff going on so may or may not work for me but I liked her previous stuff enough that I’m taking the chance.

And if that’s not enough, I don’t know what would be!

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: July 2026 Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month and you know what that means – it’s Quick Review o’clock. So here we go with three reviews of books I read last month that I haven’t already talked about!

Unselected Journals of Emma M Lion by Beth Brower*

It’s 1883 and Emma M Lion has just arrived back in London to take up residence at her home. But there are obstacles in her way as this first volume of her journals from Lapis Lazuli House details. This is novella length and very amusing – but leaves you with a lot of questions about Emma’s backstory, which presumably get answered in the following volumes. It’s a great way to make you read more and more, but sometimes when you’re reading it and missing great dollops of information so that you can decide what’s really going on I did find myself being a little cynical about the drip-drip of information. But the fact that I’ve gave it four stars on Goodreads shows you how much I enjoyed it despite that slight side-eye! Apologies for the terrible photo – I read it on NetGalley but I also spotted it in the wild while I was out in Bath last week!

How To Lose a Lord in Ten Days by Sophie Irwin*

This was… not what I was hoping for. I should have been more literal with the title’s equivalence to the romantic comedy of a similar name and been more prepared for the prank war that ensued between the heroine and hero for most of the book. It was too cringe-embarrassing for me and I ended up really disliking the pair of them because of it. And I’m still not sure by the end what they actually saw in each other beyond someone to play tricks on, and as that’s not what I think of as a successful relationship I didn’t really buy the ending. I liked Irwin’s first book, liked the second one less and then this one less than that. Her next book is an “official” Georgette Heyer novel (which is why I read this one now) and now I have a slightly trepidatious feeling about that – but here’s hoping it’s more like A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting than what has come since.

Broadcast Murder by J G Colgan

Cover of Broadcast Murder

This is my third Colgan – and I was hoping this would be closer to The Christmas Alibi than Murder on the Bernina Express, but alas it’s the latter. The idea is good but more work is needed on several fronts. Firstly, I had the murderer spotted too early, secondly it needs a bit more research and thirdly it needs a better edit. In fact the thirdly could maybe be the firstly because if you had a good editor they’d spot some of the issues and flag them so they could be fixed. Because some of them are small (but careless) – like the white line that’s at the bottom of the cover design (that I’ve cropped off in my photo) and some of them are small but annoying like this one which I maybe the only person it annoyed but again: “The lift was old. It had the kind of brass fittings that spoke of a time when even functional objects were expected to be beautiful, and the kind of creaking, groaning movement that spoke of a mechanism that had been in constant use for longer than anyone cared to remember.” Why is it annoying? This is a book set in 1937, the lift in question is in Broadcasting House, which opened in …1932. So if you know, it lifts you out of the story and makes you read everything else more critically. So in summary: promising but needs more work before it’s released to the demanding masses (like me!) especially given the British-Library-Crime-Classic-alike cover style.

And that’s your lot for this month – a reminder of the other Recommendsdays in July which were Sports Romances 2, Summer New Releases and First in Series 2 and the Books of the Week were The Shampoo Effect, The Verdict of Twelve, American Fantasy and A Taste for Murder.

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Recommendsday: First in mystery series 2

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Happy Wednesday everyone, and I’m back today with another post of first books in mystery series, to follow on from last year’s dedicated mystery series post and to a lesser extent this post which does at least have a non mystery in it too. As you know I’m always looking for my next bingeable series to add to my lists as other series finish, which can go either way (I’ve read – or tried to read – some real dross over the years) but with all of today’s series I’ve read at least one more in the series already.

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

This is the first in a (now long-running) series about Guido Brunetti, a Commisario of police in Venice. This was actually written in the early 1990s – but it doesn’t feel dated in style or the actual mystery, it’s just the lack of mobile phones and references to lire, marks and a character who may or may not have been an actual Nazi that remind you that this is thirty years old. Anyway, in this first in the series, Brunetti is investigating the death of a renowned conductor who dies in his dressing room of cyanide poisoning in the interval of a performance of an opera that he was conducting. I really loved the portrait of Venice in the book (this was written a few years before I visited Venice as a child and I loved that) and the characters are all really well drawn and developed. It’s perhaps a little bit darker than the sunny orange cover and mass market mystery size would have you believe – but not so grim that I wouldn’t read more of them if they came my way. I picked this up in Judd Books by the way, which is a total example of what I meant in that post about discovering something completely new to you.

Murder at the Fitzwilliam by Jim Eldridge

Screenshot

This is the first in a mystery series set in the 1890s, where our detective is former Detective Inspector Daniel Wilson, who helped investigate the Jack the Ripper murders when he was a police officer. Now retired, he’s working as a private enquiry agent and is called in to investigate after a body is found in the Egyptian collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. As well as a hostile police officer, he also has to content with Abigail Fenton, an archaeologist who cataloguing the museum’s collection and found the body. This is a pretty easy read, there are a few twists to the mystery as the body count rises although I had the culprit worked out relatively early on. I would read more of these if they were in Kindle Unlimited – but at the moment only this one is.

Scot Free by Catriona McPherson

Cover of Scot Free

This is the first in a contemporary, American-set murder mystery series from Catriona McPherson, of Dandy Gilver fame. Our heroine is Lexy Campbell, a fish out of water transplant from Scotland to California. She made the move because she’d fallen in love but now, mere months later, she’s divorced and heading back home, just as soon as she clears one of her counselling clients of murdering her husband. This has a lighter and more humorous tone than her historical series – I think it’s aiming for Steph Plum sort of vibes. I’m not sure Lexy is a great counsellor, as she seems pretty clueless about her own personal life but it was fun enough that I’ve read the second one since reading this. How many more I read may depend on whether they turn up in Kindle Unlimited though!

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Sports Romances 2

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After doing Books with Sports earlier in the year and first sports romances post back in 2024, I’m back with a sequel because we are now deep into the Summer of Sport – England play Argentina tonight for a place in the World Cup Final on Sunday, the Wimbledon finals were last weekend and the Commonwealth Games start next week – I’ve got two sports romances for you too. And it’s only two because the reviews are slightly extended, because I had *a lot* to say!

Abby Offsides by Anna McCallie*

This is about an American social media manager who runs away to the UK and gets a job working on a Premier League club’s social accounts. The club is basically Liverpool (but it’s called Mersey) and soon Abby’s forming a friendship with the club’s latest signing – Lachlan – who is returning to the club he grew up at. When she has to move out of her flatshare, she moves into his spare room, but is it really a friendship or is there chemistry for something more? I think this is going to be a divisive one – and it’s worth noting that the blurb and cover are very different on the UK and US version. The UK cover is the one above – the US one is the one below.

The US is more women’s fiction coded, but the UK one has a very different sell and blurb – including on NetGalley where I got it from. And the difference is something so fundamental to the plot that I might not have requested it if I didn’t know about it – and that is that the hero is married. This isnt me Toones in the UK blurb, but the US one does has a reference: “despite the nagging guilt she feels about Lachlan’s mysterious wife who didn’t relocate with her husband.”

I’m not a hardcore no cheating in my novels person, but it’s a tricky line to tread. And the problem is that this is trying to tread it with a heroine who met the hero in the workplace, and is not acting at all professionally – beyond the wife issue, Abby is also keeping it a secret from her bosses that she’s living in his flat and to top it all off she’s working in sport, which is an area where women struggle to be accepted and treated as equals and has been told by her boss that they’re not interested in employing people who want to be WAGs. And yet, there she is. Oh and the whole reason she’s in the UK in the first place is because her fiancé cheated on her… I think under normal circumstances – with any other conflict at the centre of it – this would have been a book where I would have read it, and then realised afterwards when I was trying to analyse it that I had more issues with it than I thought. But because I was already analysing and thinking about the cheating issue I was reading with a more sceptical and critical lens than I might otherwise have been. But your mileage on this may vary depending on whether you were expecting “a novel” or “a romance”. This came out at the end of June and it’s 99p on Kindle and Kobo this month – so if you want to read it and tell me what you think, the outlay is small!

First and Forever by Lynn Painter

Duffy is a huge fan of her local NFL team, but she’s become enemy number one with the fans after she shoved the team’s mascot away from her for being a creep. She goes on to a TV show to try and clear her name – only to find herself face to face with Connor Cunningham, the team’s star player. The team is on a terrible run, but Connor is their star – and desperate to stay with the team who he suspects are going to trade their best players away as part of their rebuild plan*. So when the team ask him to take Duffy out on a date after their TV appearance generates some good press – he just can’t tell her what’s going on. You know where this is going.

This reads a bit new adult, and Duffy is a bit Not Like Other Girls as well as oblivious, but I’d rather have Duffy than Abby from the last book. A simple conversation could have fixed the issues in their relationship and Duffy’s family are terrible to her in a sort of oblivious way rather than a mean one, but it’s pretty readable and non-toxic NFL romance. Do I prefer the Chicago Stars series? Yes. But is it better than any of the Tessa Bailey Sports romances I’ve tried? Also yes. This is a pretty new release – it came out at the end of May and it’s also 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment, so again it’s not a big outlay and I liked this more than I liked Abby Offsides, so this one is more of a recommendation than the other one.

Also, this is a great opportunity to tell you that if you read that last post and remember me mentioning a massive hanging plot thread in the Simone Soltani book that the third book in that series, Crash Into You, comes out in August and is about the driver at the centre of that hanging plot thread – so we finally know that Zaid suffered two broken wrists which is not as life threatening as the first book implied (although definitely potentially career threatening) unless I’m missing something mega. Given that I didn’t love Cross the Line and the blurb for this says it’s also a pregnancy plot, I will probably give this one a miss – but that may well be right up some of your streets.

On the books I’d like to read front, Playing for Keeps by Alexandria Bellefleur which came out in January, is sports adjacent – featuring Poppy, a publicist for an NFL quarterback and Rosaline, the publicist for a popstar whose two client start a romance (yes, it’s also Tayvis adjacent) and I’ve got The Open Era on the Kindle although I’m not sure that’s actually a romance-romance for all that it’s recommended for “fans of Heated Rivalry and Challengers”.

Happy Humpday!

*This is an actual thing that NFL teams do try when they’re doing really, really badly – the Miami Dolphins seem to be currently trying it for the second time this decade!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: July 2026 Kindle offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, and while we swelter through another heatwave (at least it’s July this time I guess?) it’s time for some Kindle deals.

Lets start with some of the ones that I bought while writing this post Kills Well With Others by Deanna Raybourn, which is the sequel to Killers of a Certain Age, which is 99p and I think for the first time. The third Castle Knoll book – How to Cheat Your Own Death – which only came out in April is 99p too, as is Uniform Justice by Donna Leon which is is the 12th in the Commissario Brunetti series which I’ve just started reading. And I also bought The Final Problem, which is a murder mystery set on a Greek Island whee an aging actor most known for playing Sherlock Holmes finds himself investigating a death and Murder at Canterbury Cathedral by Jim Eldridge whose Museum Mysteries I’ve been reading recently.

Sticking with mysteries/thrillers but moving to stuff I have actually read, there’s The Queen Who Came in from the Cold the fifth H M the Queen Investigates book; Dissolution, the first Shardlake book; Murder Before Evensong, the first Canon Clement; Mrs Spy by M J Rowbotham, Missing in Soho the second Misty Divine book and The Comfort of Ghosts, the final in the Maisie Dobbs series which is also in Kindle Unlimited.

Away from mysteries, recent BotW The Heir Apparent is 99p as is new release Abby Offsides which I read last week about (and have thoughts on that I will share at some point!), the new Ashley Poston, The Someday Garden, which is also in Kindle Unlimited for those of you who subscribe, Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, as well as the much older One Day by David Mitchell which is about to be a musical as well as a movie and a TV series and Julie Soto’s Forget Me Not which I read back when it had a much less goth-y cover! The Eights – which I have on the physical pile – is 99p, and in non-fiction Travellers in the Third Reich is 99p and I can really recommend it, as I can also with The Formula.

A couple of my favourite Georgette Heyers are 99p this month – Venetia and These Old Shades as is What Happens in London from Julia Quinn‘s Bevelstoke series. And Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Casting Off is 99p too – this is my favourite in the Cazalet series I think (because it ties everything together so well) and I actually saw someone reading a paperback copy of this on the train last week and it made me *so* happy.

In stuff I haven’t read but that sounds interesting, there’s Hannah Bonham-Young’s Out on a Limb about a friends with benefits that turns to more in what I suspect is a pregnancy plot, I also bought Father Material which is down to 99p just a month after release, and First and Forever by Lynn Painter and The Lives and Deaths of the Princesses of Hesse which is a biography of four of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. And surely that’s enough for this month. I hope your wallet has fared better than mine did when I was writing this.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June 2026 Quick Reviews

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It’s the first of July and it’s a Wednesday and normal service is resumed after the chaos in the posting schedule at the start of June and so that means it’s Quick Reviews time! And it’s a very mixed bag of genres this month – but also in how much I liked some of them. But here we go – three more books I read last month that I haven’t already told you about.

An Untidy Death by Simon Brett

Cover of An Untidy Death

This is the second in Simon Brett’s Decluttering series. Our lead character Ellen, is a declutterer (not a cleaner) and in this one she’s called in by a daughter worried about the state of her mother’s flat. Ellen isn’t too worried – yes the flat is a mess, but Ingrid seems to know what she’s about. But then the flat burns down and Ingrid is found dead inside and Ellen isn’t so sure it’s the accident the police think it is. I read the first one last year last year and thought it was only OK but this one is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment so given how much I like most of Brett’s other series I came round to see if I liked it more than the first – and the answer is not really. The mystery itself is pretty good but the murder victim was probably the most interesting (and likeable) character in the book. I found Ellen’s family quite hard work – and that sort of bled into Ellen as well. I think I’m probably calling time on this series at this point.

Under the Milky Way by Jess K Hardy

This is a novella linked to the Bluebird Basin series our hero is Madigan’s brother Darryn, who spends Labor Day in Balsam Falls every year after visiting his brother . Hannah our heroine is newly an empty nester and is hoping to take her mind off it with a weekend at a remote cabin in Montana. Except that when she gets there, there’s already someone staying there. So they end up spending the weekend together, and find a connection between them – but can it last beyond the weekend when their lives are (literally) in different places. This is a fun quick read with two older characters finding love and figuring out how their lives fit together.

Castle in Northumbria by Lorna Hill

I am a long time fan of Lorna Hill’s Sadlers Wells series, but haven’t read as many (any?) of her other books, which were out of print when I was the right age to be reading them. They are now available through the Girls Gone By and I picked up this one – which is the fifth in the Marjorie series – a while back (actually two book cons ago!) and finally got around to reading it as part of the pre-book con clear out. And I think the problem is that I was coming in to a series with no existing relationship to any of the characters and although I usually like a kids go on a holiday story (see Swallows and Amazons) I found a lot of the characters in this really annoying! The claim to fame for the series is that it’s where Guy Charlton comes from – and obviously I’ve come across him in the Wells, and he’s much less likable in this than he was in Jane Leaves the Wells! On the bright side after reading this I went back and read two of the Wells books (including Jane leaves) and they were still good – although reading Guy across both series makes me realise that he has a bit of a thing about threatening to spank people!

And in case you missed them, the Books of the Week in June were Dolly All the Time, And Then There was the One, Receipts from the Bookshop and Star Shipped and the other Recommendsdays were Early June new releases and Pride Month.

LGTBQIA+, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Pride Month 2026

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It’s the last Wednesday of Pride month and so it’s time for some pride month reccs before it’s too late.

How to Fake It In Society by K J Charles

Cover of How to Fake It in Society

This was one of my purchases while writing the offers post and it was so much fun. Titus Pilcrow is a younger son who’s been making his own way in the world as a shopkeeper, right up until he marries a wealthy woman on her deathbed. Now he’s got more money than he could have dreamed of – and suddenly people are coming out of the woodwork to try and get a share of it. The Comte de Valois is one of them. Nico was courting the woman that Titus married until not long before her death – and he really needed that money. So he inveigles himself into Titus’s life to help him accustom himself to his new life – and to try and make some money out of it. Except that he finds himself liking Titus a lot more than he expected. I read this in no time at all – started it on the train to work, carried on reading it at lunchtime, then on the train home and finished it in the evening. K J Charles does a really good line in Adventurers – see also The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting – and I love that as a trope in romances (See also The Masqueraders) and I only wish I’d been able to pace myself and made it last longer!

The Gay Best Friend by Nicolas DiDomezio

I’ve had four goes at writing the plot summary for this – and all of them have been unsatisfactory. But basically Domenic is caught in between his childhood best friend Patrick and Patrick’s fiancée Kate who is now maybe a closer friend that Patrick. Domenic is invited to both the stag do and the hen party and both Patrick and Kate want him to be on their side and report back (or lie if necessary). Domenic is also just broken up with his own fiancé and had to cancel his own wedding. Unexpectedly at the bachelor party is Bucky, a professional golfer and possibly Dom’s replacement as Patrick’s best friend – who was meant to be playing in a PGA tournament that weekend but is “injured”. I didn’t really like any of the characters much – especially not Domenic, who is A Lot. He’s living a life he doesn’t want, not at all over his childhood issues and is such a people pleasing doormat I wanted to shake him. At least 90 percent of his problems are of his own making – and add on to that that he keeps getting drunk and spilling other people’s secrets and it’s just really hard to have any sympathy with him. I’m not going to lie, I read this in an evening, but the more I think about it, the less I like it and the more it annoys me – which is a shame because I really liked the blurb for this – and also for some of DiDomizio’s other books which I’m now not sure I want to risk!

Puck by Samantha Allen*

Cover of Puck

Puck is a reality show producer on a dating show called Homewreckers, where they specialise in putting couples together and then ripping them apart again. So when the go to their college best friend Mia’s wedding to the man Puck is convinced is the wrong guy, they decide to deploy the skills from their day job to stop the wedding. The only person standing in their way is Robyn, the maid of honour and Mia’s new bestie. This is described as Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired and yes there are two couples who Puck is meddling with so that all checks out. The problem really is that Puck isn’t really very likeable and that the romantic plot for them seems shoe-horned in as a bit of an afterthought. Robyn and Puck seem to be hate banging more than anything else as they barely exchange a pleasant word with each other. I do wonder if the romance was addd to try and expand the potential readership (we romance readers sure are voracious) because the rest of the plot definitely more well developed even if I didn’t really enjoy it.

And that’s your lot – I’m sorry it’s a bit of a mixed bag in terms of whether I liked them or not, but as with so many books, your mileage may vary. The common theme between The Gay Best Friend and Puck Hard to Like Main Characters and my tolerance for that is low at the moment. But if you are better with that than me at the moment, then I think The Gay Best Friend is the one to try – it’s sort of rich people problems adjacent and Dom has at least maintained his friendships, which Puck really hasn’t.

Happy Humpday!