Tag: Recommendsday

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: August Quick Reviews

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It’s a bit of a NetGalley special this month, with all three reviews coming from there albeit some more recently than others because oh boy I’m so behind. And every month I say I’ll do better, but every month I’m choosing between making the physical pile smaller or reducing the NetGalley list, and the actual pile is in my eyeline from the sofa and so… well. Maybe this month is the month. Anyway, to the reviews.

A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor*

Let’s start here, because this one came out in the US yesterday (it came out here in the UK back in June). This is a murder mystery set at and around a girls boarding school during the tail end of World War Two. One of the teachers left school for the holidays and never came back – the school thinks she’s done a flit, but actually she’s dead and her ghost is lingering around the grounds trying to find out who murdered her and how to expose her killer. I’ve read and enjoyed books in Taylor’s Marwood and Lovett series, and enjoy both murder mysteries and school stories so I was hopeful that this would be in my reading wheelhouse. However I found it quite hard to get into, with very slow pacing and a large cast of pretty unlikable characters to try and get to grips with. I kept going because I did want to find out who the murderer was, but by the end I was more frustrated than satisfied – for reasons which are pretty hard to describe without giving spoilers. So I’m chalking this up as a not for me, more than anything else, although I find myself thinking back on it with more fondness than I had when I was actually reading it!

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann*

Agnes and her friends live in Sunset Hall, as a sort of commune of old people pooling resources so they can stay independent. At the start of the book one of the residents is dead in the garden and just as they’re figuring out what to do about it, a policeman turns up because one of their neighbours has been shot. So they decide the solution to their dead body is to work out who killed their neighbour and pin the murder on them. Except it’s really a lot harder to do than they expect. I finally got around to reading it after seeing the sequel in a bookshop last week and nearly buying it before I remembered I’m not meant to be buying sequels when I haven’t read the first one yet and pulling my finger out. And… I liked the blurb for it more than I enjoyed reading it. I found the writing style really hard to get into and I don’t know if that was the translation (it was originally in German) or just the author’s style, but that combined with the shifting point of view and uncertainty about what was real and what wasn’t just made it a not for me. Which is sad because a group of feisty senior citizens and a murder has often been a thing that I have enjoyed. Hey ho.

Any Trope But You by Victoria Levine*

Romance author Margot’s career has just exploded with the leak of her secret alternative unhappy endings that she has written for all of her novels. She decides she’s going to reinvent herself as a crime writer, and her sister books her into a wilderness retreat to try and get her started. But when Margot arrives in Alaska she finds the ranch is run by a handsome doctor who has given up his cancer research to return home and care for his injured father – it’s like she’s walked straight into a romance novel… This is leaning into romance tropes by amping them up to 11. And I respect that. For me my issues with it fell into two categories: the exaggeration of the trends made the heroine really really annoying to me (she is willfully and wildly unprepared for her trip to Alaska and really refuses to take instructions or listen almost to a too-stupid-to-live level), and I wanted there to be more fun in the fact that this is happening. I wanted it to be more of a fun romp but actually it’s taking itself quite seriously. And given how many of the current crop of romance novels seem to be writing exaggerated tropes with a completely straight face, that meant it didn’t really seem that different to everything else to me. But it did tick Alaska off my 50 states challenge for the year!

And finally, a quick reminder of the Books of the Week this month which were The Celebrants, The Art of Catching Feelings, A Star is Bored and The Wombles at Work, and the Recommendsdays which were Norfolk-set books and Short Stories.

Happy Humpday.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Short Stories

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Happy Wednesday everyone, this week I thought I’d do a whistle stop tour through some of the short stories and short story collections I’ve read recently.

The Ex-Wives Club by Sally Hepworth

I’m starting with my favourite – Sally Hepworth’s story about a celebrity chef and restaurateur who is found dead in his walk-in freezer the evening after his three ex-wives dine at his restaurant. There are plenty of reasons why each woman would have wanted him dead and the shifting perspective reveals the secrets that are below the surface. It’s only about 80 pages and very easy to read in one gulp. It’s part of the Alibis short story series, which is by authors of psychological suspense but this felt more like a domestic drama to me – the rest of the series definitely looks too scary for me though!

Sinister Spring by Agatha Christie

Another of the seasonal collection of Christie short stories, again featuring all the names you would hope for – Miss Marple, Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence and Parker Pyne. It’s got a good mix of stories and although I found some easier to solve than others, there are a couple of really good ones here. As with the other three seasons, this is rotating in and out of Kindle Unlimited, and if you spot it while it’s in, it’s worth a read.

Abscond by Abraham Verghese

And finally, a change of pace with a short story about an Indian American teenager in 1967 who is caught between the expectations of his parents that he will become a doctor and the fact that he is a tennis prodigy who wants to turn professional. Then, suddenly, everything changes. This is really beautifully written and packs a lot of emotional punch for something that is under 40 pages long. I haven’t read any Abraham Verghese before and I’m glad I picked this one up.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books set in Norfolk

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Having spent a couple of days last week wandering around Norfolk, for this week’s Recommendsday it seemed like an obvious choice to talk about books set in the county.

I’m starting with the most obvious books – because they’re the ones I’ve read/binged the most recently: the Dr Ruth Galloway series. They’re mostly set around north Norfolk – up around Kings Lynn and Hunstanton (which we visited on our trip) as well as Norwich (and occasionally further afield). And as I’ve also written about them in two other posts, so this is all you’re getting on Ruth today.

I have got another mystery novel set though: The Norfolk Mystery by Ian Sansom. It’s the late 1930s and Spanish Civil War veteran Stephen Sefton gets a job as secretary for Swanton Morely “the People’s Professor”. Morely is planning to write a series of guides to the different counties of England and the first stop is Norfolk. Accompanying them on this trip is his daughter Miriam, but the trip soon turns into a murder investigation. This is the first in a series set and suffers a bit from needing to set up the premise and the characters (who aren’t always that sympathetic!) but I liked it enough that I went on to read the next three books in the series too, although I’m still to read the fifth and seemingly final one.

I’m not going to miss an opportunity to recommend some Laurie Graham, and Future Homemakers of America is set on and around a US Airforce base in the early 1950s. The future homemakers of the title are five wives of US servicemen stationed in Norfolk who initially seem to have very little in common except that their husbands are all in 96th Bomber Wing. The book opens with the death of George V when the women meet Kath, a local, when they go to watch the funeral train go by. It’s been years since I read this, but writing about it has made me want to read it – and its sequel The Early Birds again.

Also in line for a re-read at some point are the Arthur Ransome’s set in the Norfolk Broads. I don’t think I’ve read Coot Club in 30 years – it’s one of the ones that doesn’t have the Swallows and Amazons in it, just Dick and Dorothea from the previous book in the series Winter Holiday. Ramsome was smart to expand the series out beyond the original characters, but Child Verity didn’t appreciate that at all! Anyway, as well as Coot Club, Big Six is also set in Norfolk – and that is one of the ones that I don’t own and in fact I’m not 100 percent convinced I did actually read it even back then!

Still in the classic children’s books area of my reading is Margaret Finds a Future by Mabel Esther Allen*. Margaret is an orphan and at the start of the book the aunt who was her guardian has died leaving behind debts which mean she can no longer stay at her boarding school in Wales. Instead she moves to a stately home in Norfolk (described one of the most famous in Norfolk besides Holkham and Blickling) where another aunt is a custodian. This was one of my early forays into career books (as opposed to boarding school books) and it’s a bit old fashioned, but I enjoyed reading it – and in fact read about 75 pages of it again while I was writing this post – and it has some atmospheric descriptions of Norfolk too.

And finally to end, as you may have noticed, I don’t often read award-nominated books but Rose Tremain’s Restoration is one of the ones that I have read. It tells the rise and fall of Robert Merivel in Stuart England. He starts as a medical student, gains the patronage of the King and is given an estate in Norfolk when he performs a service to the King. And when he falls from favour, he finds work in Norwich. I don’t want to spoil the plot too much, but if you like historical literary fiction you should read it.

Happy Humpday!

*Who also wrote my beloved Drina series as Jean Estoril

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Recommendsday: Mysteries set on film sets

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A few weeks back I wrote about the 18th Royal Spyness mystery, which featured a movie being filmed at Georgie’s house, and that got me thinking about other mystery books that are set on or around movie sets.

Of course the most recent one that I’ve read is the latest Daniel Clement mystery, A Death on Location. This sees a movie crew take over Champton to film a historical epic and many of the locals sign up to appear as supporting artists – aka extras. But when one of them dies after filming a ball scene Daniel finds himself caught up in another murder investigation with Neil. I actually had the culprit for this one spotted early doors, but not the reason why so I enjoyed finding out the why of it all (and if I was right obviously). I continue to find this series very readable, but I’m not sure how many more scenarios Richard Coles will be able to come up to put Daniel in the way of bodies!

Going back to May, I read A Knife to Remember by Jill Churchill, which is the fifth book in the Jane Jeffries series, which is a 1990s written series. In this there’s a crew filming in the field behind Jane’s house and is using her backyard as part of the behind the scenes. The visitors seem to be riven with rivalries and then the set designer is found murdered and it goes from there. I really like this series, they are very easy reads and shorter than the average cozy these days which always leaves me wanting more. Unlike the Goldy Schulz series, these don’t seem to have been picked up for Kindle, so I’m having to resort to the second hand sellers to try and get some more at reasonable prices.

The fourth Flavia De Luce I am Half Sick of Shadows sees Flavia’s home invaded by a film crew in the run up to Christmas, and a snow storm trapping villagers there too. Flavia ends up investigating the death of one of the film contingent as well as whether Father Christmas really exists. I had a few moments with the early Flavia books, and I also read them out of order which I don’t think helped, but Flavia in this one is an engaging mix of innocence and omnipotence which works really well.

I’m sure there are more that I can’t remember at the moment, but that’s ok – I can always do a second post!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books set in Hotels

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Happy Wednesday everyone! After a week in a hotel, with a sense of serendipity between life and reading, I’m back with a post about books set in hotels.

The Listeners by Maggie Steifvater*

So this is the book that first got me thinking about this post. As I mentioned on my preview post, this is set in a West Virginia hotel that’s been commandeered to hold Axis diplomats in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It covers the staff as they try to deal with providing luxurious accommodation to people who are part of the enemy, but in particular the hotel’s manager June and FBI agent Tucker. For me this was a case of the blurb being better than the book itself. The pacing of this was too slow for me, and the magical realism elements didn’t ever seem to come to fruition the way that I was expecting them too. But it inspired the rest of this post so that it something!

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

I read this a lot longer ago, but there’s a reason that this has been adapted for TV, made into a film and was nominated for the Booker Prize when it came out. Mrs Palfrey moves into the Claremont after the death of her husband. The characters are really well drawn and the picture of life presented is so vivid that you really can imagine the inmates of the Claremont going about their lives. The ending is somewhat melancholy – but not entirely unexpected. THis was my first Elizabeth Taylor when I read it and I have gone on to read more – including At Mrs Lippencote’s, which I wrote about not that long ago.

Bellweather Rhapsody by Katie Racculia

Hundreds of students have gathered at the Bellweather hotel for a statewide festival. Among the attendees is Minnie Graves, who 15 years ago was at the hotel when a notorious murder-suicide took place. She’s back to face her demons, but when a music prodigy disappears from the same room that the tragedy took place in, the hotel is once again the scene of an investigation. I didn’t like this as much as I did Racculia’s Tuesday Mooney, but it’s a bit like a Wes Anderson film but in a book. The cast is quirky, the plot is twisty and it’s funny as well as mysterious. Also it’s six years now since Racculia’s last novel, so I do hope there’s another one soon.

I’m currently revisiting Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel for the first time in probably 20 years and for the first time as an audiobook, which is also a lot of fun especially as I’ve watched the TV adaptation a bunch of times and it’s fun remembering what the differences are. And of course The Body at the Library, which also features a hotel as a major part of the plot and there’s also Nita Prose’s The Maid and its sequels (which I still need to read).

If you’ve got any more books with hotels as a major plot point (and I’ve read A Gentleman in Moscow already) do put them in the comments!

Happy Reading!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: July Kindle Offers

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Happy Wednesday everyone, it’s the second Wednesday of July and so it’s time for the Kindle offers post. There seems to be a bit of a dearth of 99p offers at the moment – I was hoping they were saving them for Prime day deals (that runs until Friday) but nothing much seemed to have changed when I checked back in after the deals started…

Lets start with Fiction. Cathy Yardley’s Do Me a Favour is 99p, this was a BotW basically this time last year and Yardley’s previous book Role Playing was a bonus review – that one is £1.99. And both of them are also in Kindle Unlimited. Kate Claybourn’s most recent book The Other Side of Disappearing is £2.99, but there are also £1.99 deals on a few of her earlier books too. The new Annabel Monaghan It’s a Love Story is 99p, as is Christina Lauren‘s The Soulmate Equation. The second in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Tales from the Cafe, is 99p as well.

In other stuff I’ve written about there’s the third Canon Clement mystery, Murder at the Monastery, the first Shardlake mystery Dissolution, Gabriele Gamez‘s The Next Best Thing, which as I said didn’t really work for me, but clearly has for other people. There are also quite a lot of deals on Alexis Hall books, ranging from £1.99 to £3.99 but also with quite a few of them – and others – in Kindle Unlimited. I haven’t really seen this happen before, so I’m just going to leave the list here so you can have a look and see what the options are. There’s also the fourth Robert Langdon mystery Inferno,

On the non-fiction front, Mary S Lovell’s The Mitford Girls is 99p, I assume because the TV series is out because Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love is also 99p and the complete omnibus of Jessica Fellowes’ Mitford Murders series is £3.99. There are also offers (albeit not quite as good) on a couple of Lovell’s other books, I have enjoyed The Riviera Set (it’s on my hardback non-fiction shelf in fact) and Straight on Till Morning. David Mitchelll‘s Unruly is £1.99, and Philippa Gregory‘s Normal Women is 99p.

If you’re a Pratchett reader, Mort and Eric from the Discworld series are on offer for 99p this month, as is the first in the Johnny Maxwell series for kids, Only You Can Save Mankind. The Georgette Heyer on offer is My Lord John, which is her novel set in the Wars of the Roses and is one of the few of hers that I’ve never managed to get to the end of (the other two are Simon the Coldheart and Royal Escape). The first in Simon Brett’s new series Major Brickett’s and the Circus Corpse is 99p too, I read this when it came out, and it’s not my end of the Brett oeuvre but it may work for other people better than it did to me.

In things I bought while writing the post, there’s The Last Word, which is the fourth in Elly Griffiths Harbinder Kaur series is 99p, but sadly the deal on one of the books that I bought seems to have been a really short term one – the new Emily Henry Great Big Beautiful Life was £1.99 briefly but is now back up to £9.99. It wasn’t marked as a one day only just a limited time deal but the limited time appears to have been less than three days. Sorry guys. In stuff I haven’t read yet, the latest Eloisa James, Hardly a Gentleman is 99p, as is Ali Hazelwood’s The Deep End, as is Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which has been nominated for a bunch of awards. The second in the Assistant to the Villan series, Apprentice to the Villain, is 99p. I need to try and read the first one to see if I like it before I can take advantage of this offer! Also on the pile waiting to be read is Victoria Levine’s Any Trope But You. And my willpower to resist the Alicia Thompson cover is wavering, as Never Been Shipped is also 99p!

The Formula One season is in full swing at the moment – it was the British Grand Prix just a few miles from my house (even if I wasn’t in it at the time) last weekend and there are are a few motorsport romances on offer: there’s the second in Simone Soltani’s Lights Out F1 driver romance series, this one is called Ride With Me – I still have the first one Cross the Line waiting on the pile to be read. There’s also Slipstream by Madge Maril and Racing into Love by Laney Kate at 99p, and Pole Position by Rebecca J Caffrey and Offtrack by Esha Patel at £1.99 ( Esha Patel’s Overdrive is £2.99 as well).

And that’s your lot for today – Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Quick Reviews

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It’s July so I’m back with the quick reviews from last month.

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

I love the way that Barbara Pym looks at slices of normal (or normal-ish) women’s lives and relationships in ways that are witty and also sad. Leonora is a middle-aged woman who is attractive and knows it. She’s got a collection of male admirers, but her latest are an antiques dealer and his nephew. She prefers the nephew, James, although the uncle (Humphrey) is more “suitable” and plays the two of them off against each other, whilst trying to detach James from his other relationships. It’s darker than some of Pym’s earlier novels, but it’s very good.

Copper Script by K J Charles

The new book from K J Charles has Aaron, a Met Police Sergeant, who is trying to figure out how Graphologist Joel is able to tell people’s lives and personalities from their handwriting. Aaron is convinced it’s a con, but Joel’s skills are very real. And soon the two of them are trying to solve some crime. I read this in single day and enjoyed it a lot. If you like K J Charles, this will probably work for you.

The Chow Maniac by Vivian Chien

I read the first two in this series a few years back (I bought the first one back when I was in Washington) and spotted this eleventh and most recent in the series in Foyles last week so took the opportunity to check in again as they’re quite hard to get hold of over here. And Lana’s life has moved on quite a bit – she’s still got the boyfriend but she’s much more established in her sleuthing. This sees her investigating whether a series of deaths among the Asian community in Cleveland might actually be murder, and connected to a secret society. Lana is still verging on too stupid to life, but I enjoyed reading it.

And that’s your lot this month

Best of..., books

Recommendsday: Favourite reads of the year so far

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We are nearly at the halfway point in the year, so I thought today I would take the opportunity to mention my favourite reads of 2025 so far. Now it should be noted that these are not all new books and I think principally that’s because I’ve had a few absolutely chronic binge reads that means that I’ve just read less other stuff all together so the mix of new to old is very much skewed in favour of the old at the halfway mark of the year.

I’m going to start with the not new stuff, because there is more of it. Lets start with the a murder mystery and A Case of Mice and Murder. This is an edwardian era mystery set in essentially a closed community – the barristers of the Temple. I loved it and have recommended it a few times now. The sequel is out next month and is just as good. Next up is Legends and Lattes, which is sort of Terry Pratchett-esque but with very low takes and a very cozy vibe. I still need to read the second book in the series, which is a prequel and there is a third book coming in the autumn. And then there is On Turpentine Lane a fun romantic comedy with a mystery subplot that had me smiling and laughing the whole way through. And obviously the main binge was that six week period where I read the entire Dr Ruth Galloway series, so I should really mention those as well.

On the new book front, my favourite is probably The Favourites, which is one of the better portrayals of figure skating in fiction. I’ve seen a lot of other skating fans who have enjoyed it too, but really is a melodrama about intertwined relationships that uses the sport as a driving factor – you definitely don’t need to know the difference between an axel and a salchow to enjoy this (particularly as it’s set in ice dance and they don’t do jumps!). I also really enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest short story collection, Show Don’t Tell. I remain someone who prefers novels to short stories, but I like Sittenfeld’s writing and ideas so much and this is really good, especially if you’ve read Prep because you get to revisit the characters years down the line. There are a couple more new releases that I’ve enjoyed but that are later books in series which usually means I don’t review them because: spoilers. But the latest Vinyl Detective was a return to form and was a BotW pick and Murder Below Deck, the second Paul Delamere book was also a really fun read.

That’s your lot today,

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Mitford-related books

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I’m trying to be timely this week – there’s a drama series about to start about the Mitford sisters, so I’ve been back through my reading lists to come up with some ideas for anyone who watches the series and wants to know more!

So lets start off with Nancy Mitford’s own The Pursuit of Love. The Radletts are based on Nancy’s own family and you follow them through their adventures and love affairs in the years between the Wars. It’s a funny and smart social satire and I raced through this when I first read it, and went straight on to Love in a Cold Climate. Nancy was one of the Bright Young Things after she made her society debut and her writing (like her friend Evelyn Waugh’s) is full of real people and incidents that she has fictionalised – some times very, very lightly.

Jessica Mitford also wrote her own memoir of the family – Hons and Rebels. Now if you watched the trailer for outrageous above, you may have noticed that there was a lot of competing politics going on among the siblings. And Decca was the communist (as opposed to Diana who was the Fascist) and so her memoir is very much coming at it all from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the aristocracy and privilege that her family had. She’s not as witty as Nancy, but she’s also maybe not as mean as Nancy could be.

Cover of The Mitford Girls

I read Harold Acton’s biography of Nancy years ago, but I have never got around to Mary Lovell’s Mitford Girls even though I’ve got her Riviera Set on the keepers shelf. So I’m going to take this as a cue that it’s time to finally get around to that, and borrow mum’s copy and read it! But I have read D J Taylor’s Bright Young Things, which covers several of the sisters as it surveys the hedonistic generation of party goers who it has to be said were mostly Not Great People.

Talking of Not Great People, I should add that I have read one of Diana’s books – her biography of the Duchess of Windsor and I do not recommend. Diana was in the Duchess’s social circle and the final line of my good reads review is “Worth reading if only as a lesson to retain your critical faculties when you read any non fiction book to remind yourself what the author’s objectives may be.” Which is to say that it was even more biased than I was expecting it to be, and I was expecting it to be really quite biased. Nany however was actually a good biographer – and her book about Madame De Pompadour is actually pretty good.

If 1920s/1930s society is your sort of wheelhouse, you might also want to check out my Happy Valley Set and non-fiction Rich People Problems recommendsdays and if you’ve got any recommendations for me, please do put them in the comments.

Happy Reading!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Kindle Offers

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We are in the sixth month of the year, so this month I have leant into the holiday books end of the kindle offers. I was going to say that for me holiday books are romantic fiction and light crime, but that’s a lot of what I read when I’m not on holiday too. But for the purpose of buying in advance, that’s what I’m after. I’ll do you a post in a few weeks of what I’m looking to buy at the airport this year, because those are slightly different things! Anyway, to the offers.

Last year’s Emily Henry Funny Story is 99p, as is this year’s Mhairi McPharlane Cover Story, which I haven’t read yet but which sounds a lot of fun (people who can’t stand each other forced to pretend they’re in a fake relationship to save an undercover investigation). Christina Laurens’ The Paradise Problem is also 99p – I loved this when I read it earlier this year. There’s also Victoria Hislop’s The Island, which I read years ago and enjoyed, and Sarah Adams’s When In Rome about a burnt out popstar in a small town, which was once of the first of the crop of Taylor Swift-inflected romances I read. And the new Rachel Lynn Solomon What Happens in Amsterdam is 99p too (I bought it while writing this!)

If you’re a bit higher brow than me for your sun lounger books, then Tracy Chevalier’s The Glass Maker is 99p – I have this waiting to be read on the Kindle but just haven’t got to it yet because I’m still in that world of wanting to know going in that I’m going to get a resolution, preferably happy at the end of books. If you want some Romantasy, then Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart is 99p – this is the first in a completed trilogy so you can read straight through to the end if you like it or there is Rebecca Ross’s Divine Rivals, which is the first of two – and it should be noted that I haven’t read any of these!

Moving on to the regular author check in: we’re still in a world of the Georgette Heyer murder mysteries being the ones on offer – this time it’s Footsteps in the Dark, the Discworld offer this month is Equal Rites and Borrower of the Night, the first in Elizabeth Peters’s Vicky Bliss series is 99p too.

And that’s your lot this month – enjoy!