There is a new Veronica Speedwell out this week and it features an appearance from Lady Julia Brisbane (formerly Grey) and so I’m taking this opportunity to remind you about my post about the Lady Julia Grey series. Yes it’s only a year since I wrote it (to coincide with the release of the Killers of a Certain Age sequel, which I still haven’t read and is out now in paperback) but how could I resist the opportunity to write about Julia (especially given that I’ve written about Veronicaquitea lot). There are five full length books about Lady Julia and her continuing encounters with mysteries and corpses. They are set in the late Victoria era, as opposed to Veronica’s Edwardian, so I’m expecting an older (though probably not more wiser) Julia in her appearance in A Ghastly Catastrophe. They have the wit and snark that you get from Veronica, but the romantic element is quite different because Julia and Nicolas get married about half way through the series, whereas Veronica and Stoker have… a different relationship dynamic. And yes, I know that’s a spoiler for the Julia books, but her married name is in Deanna’s post, and it’s a series that started 20 years ago. All of that said, these are really cheap on Kindle at the moment – you could pick up all five full length novels for well under £10 at the moment, which is a total bargain and will give you many hours of happy reading.
It’s nearly the weekend, and so I’m following up last year’s romance novel series post with a post about a duo of romance novellas, the second of which came out at the end of December so I’m even vaguely timely with it.Is it a series if there are only two books in it? I mean, they go together because they’re grouped together on Adele Buck’s website and on Goodreads, but is it a duology or do those have to be more strictly related content? These have a common through line, but less of an actual link, so what you’re actually getting here are two bonus reviews.
The first is The Wedding Bait. Tove’s daughter is getting married. This is a cause for celebration, except for the fact that her terrible gaslighter of an ex-husband has decided to come to the wedding and is bringing wife number six with him – who is just five years older than their daughter. So that her ex can’t taunt her about being single she hires a man to pose as her date for the wedding. Patrick is technically a retired escort now but he agrees to take Tove’s assignment. But when they get to the wedding, sparks start to fly. This is so much fun that I actually read the whole thing again when I picked it up to double check something while I was writing this. The chemistry between Tove and Patrick is really well written and there is lots of lovely snark aimed at the ex-husband too.
In Meet-Cat, our heroine is Astrid, mystery novelist, widow and mum of two grown boys. When a cat wanders into her fifth floor apartment she’s somewhat concerned about where it might have come from. But it turns out she has a new neighbour in the next door flat. Ben has taken in his daughter’s cat when she moved away and couldn’t take Willow with her. But the cat seems to have taken a liking to his new next door neighbour and the two of them end up with a bit of a time share arrangement – forcing them into each other’s company. Astrid is fiercely independent and part of the joy of reading this is her and Ben finding ways to be together without her feeling like she’s giving up her freedom by wanting someone in her life.
Both novellas are a delight – the through thread (in case you didn’t guess) being self sufficent, older female heroines who are happy and don’t need a relationship to fix them, just to make their lives even better. I’ve written about some of Adele Buck’s other books before – the Centre Stage series, Fake Flame and The Anti-Social Season – and if you’ve read any of those and like them then try this. But if you haven’t and you want to dip your toe in, these would be a good place to start.
These are available on all the usual platforms where you get novellas – Kindle, Kobo etc but also from Adele’s storefront on Smashwords, which is actually where I bought her All for You novels from which I think are the last things of hers I haven’t read yet!
The latest Library Lovers book, Booking for Trouble, came out in hardback in the US on Tuesday, This is the sixteenth in Jenn McKinlay’s series about Lindsay Norris, a library director in Briar Creek, Connecticut, and sees Lindsay getting involved in a murder after heading out on a book boat to some of the islands in her library’s patch, inspired by bookmobiles (or mobile libraries as we have here I guess?) that she’s seen in other areas.
But this also is my chance to talk about the demise of the mass market paperback in the US. These aren’t available on Kindle in the UK, so I’ve been buying in the paperbacks for years from the US. There are a couple of series like this, where I rely on these smaller than average (and cheaper than average!) paperback copies to get my fix. But sales have been dropping, and more and more books have switched to the larger and more expensive trade paperback format. Various people have been writing about it, but here’s the New York Time’s article from the start of the month, and Publisher’s Weekly’s from December. As a voracious and speedy reader, the price point and convenience of mass markets – especially secondhand – has been a boon for my reading – particularly in my early days of romance reading when the likes of Eloisa James and Sarah MacLean weren’t always getting UK releases. There are series that I want to finish – or continue reading – where I definitely can’t justify the hardback price for them. And given my love of matching sets, a size change is definitely not what I want either! This is one of a number of series where I’m going to have decisions to make as the next books come out.
It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow and after 2024’s Improbable Meet-Cute series of Originals, Amazon are back with a second set themed around the idea of a second chance after a meet cute. nd I have read them all so you don’t have to. I was really optimistic after the first three, because I really liked all of them, but then it went downhill a little. So I’m going to focus on the ones that I really liked.
The Christina Lauren has a marketing consultant who ends up in the wrong zoom meeting and then gives a brutal critique of the presentation she sees. This leads the company boss to offer her a job, but their emails turn flirty and soon she’s torn between him and her hot but mysterious neighbour. This is a a wild premise, but the banter is good and I raced through it. I’ve mentioned before that Christina Lauren can sometimes come down the wrong side of my tastes when it comes to workplaces and professionalism, but this navigates the workplace romance dynamic neatly and has an actually competent heroine who is good at her job and flirting on the side. It also has just the right amount of plot for the length, which cannot be said for some of the others in the series!
Time Will Tell has a heroine who gets a letter from her deceased grandmother revealing a long held secret – and leading her to a time capsule and a lost love affair. This starts an email conversation with the grandson of her grandmother’s lost love all the way over in England. This is also just the right amount of plot for the length, and the main characters felt really three dimensional. It was my first time reading Hannah Bonam-Young, and I would definitely give something full length a chance on the basis of this.
In Second Act Romance, an emergency replacement is drafted in to play Bex’s leading man when the cast of the musical that she’s in comes down with food poisoning. But it turns out that he’s the same guy she shared some onstage fireworks with years before. Now they’re working together again, and can they work out the misunderstanding that stopped their first encounter going any further. I’m a bit mixed on JulieSoto, but her entry in this series is probably my favourite thing I’ve read of hers. It’s a bit bonkers, but I went with it.
Of the other three, Death to Valentines Day has far too much plot for the length that it is – a murder and and romance in less than 100 pages! – and that means that there’s not a lot of time for characterisation so everyone feels quite caricaturish and over drawn. Valentine’s Slay is (thankfully) not actually a vampire story, but it is the most outlandish in terms of plot. On the other hand, it’s also the spiciest so some may like it best because of that – although for me I’m not sure I’d be up for sex about an hour after waking up buried alive, but hey danger boner is a staple of romance novels so what do I know. Anyway, although I have some reservations, they’re all short and as they were in KU I didn’t have to pay for them, so all in all a nice way to read some romance before Valentines day and try out some new authors as four of the six were new to me.
There are a couple of new books out this week that I’m looking forward to reading. Yesterday I mentioned the new Holly Stars mystery, but today I’m taking an opportunity to mention that Ashley Herring Blake has a new book out by doing a reminder of my post about her previous series, Bright Falls. Bright Falls is a trio of small town romances featuring snappy dialogue and some of my favourite romance tropes – including fake relationships.
The new book is Get Over It, April Evans and it’s the second book in her new Clover Lake series, following up from last year’s Dream On, Ramona Riley. Clover Lake is a lakeside town in New Hampshire – the first book featured a movie filming in the town, and the second features a resort in the town and their summer staff. I still need to read Ramona Riley – I bought it at Saucy Books in the autumn – so maybe the arrival of April Evans is the kick that I need!
As you know I didn’t read a lot last week, but I did get intermittently very cold feet watching the figure skating, so for today’s series post, I wanted to point you back at my post about Trisha Ashley’s books set in Lancashire. Yes it is late January and several of these are Christmassy, but hey, I’m allowed to go a bit rogue!
We’re a week out from Christmas and I’m about to get deep into holiday novellas, so I thought for today I’d remind you about Jackie Lau’s Holidays with the Wongs. OK only one of these is a Christmas book, but they’re a lot of fun and all of them have a meddling family trying to set people up. You can find my original post here.
Happy Friday everyone, it’s very, very cold where I am in the UK* and I’m seriously starting to think about starting Christmas shopping. I know. It’s still November. Anyway, after a romance series last week, here is a murder mystery one for you.
It’s the 1930s and the County Guides books follow “the People’s Professor” Swanton Morley around the UK as he writes a series of guidebooks. It is seem from the point of view of his newly recruited (at the start of book one) secretary Stephen Sefton, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who has a slightly shady past. Also travelling with them is Morley’s daughter Miriam. Everywhere they they stumble across a body and this – and Morley’s attitude – makes them unpopular with locals and the authorities alike.
As you know I really like a historical mystery series and the 1930s are one of my real sweet spots for that. And the fact that each book moves to a different part of the country makes for a good way of varying the setting and giving opportunities for new characters to be introduced each book without expanding the core group and leaving hanging threads for the next book.
These are very much in the books where I love the premise but sometimes find the reality disappointing. This is mostly because Morley is set up as deeply irritating and at times Stephen can be too and that leaves you with no one to really root for – you share the exasperation of the locals with these annoying people who are telling them how to solve a murder! But that said, I liked them enough that I followed them through all five books in the series – even though it has taken me a while and they got harder to find.
I got the first few of these from NetGalley, a couple from the library and then bought the final one on Kindle. I have occasionally seen paperbacks in the shops – new and secondhand but I suspect at this point Kindle or Kobo will be the easiest way to get hold of these, although, neither Kindle or Kobo have managed to link the five books together as a series which is both annoying and weird because it makes it hard to give you a proper link to click and so all I can do is link you to the list of Ian Sansom ebooks and tell you that the order is: The Norfolk Mystery, Death in Devon, Westmorland Alone, Essex Poison and The Sussex Murders.
Have a great weekend everyone.
*although obviously as nothing to winter in some places, but the UK is not made for the cold.
In Wednesday’s Recommendsday, I wrote about From Russia With Love which is a spy adventure with the Cold War and Russia as a key protagonist. This week also saw the release of the latest H M The Queen Investigates novel which is also venturing into Cold War spying Territory – with a title that evokes John Le Carré. I mentioned The Queen Who Came in from the Cold back in January in my series releases post, and I think it’s the last book from that post to be released (that hasn’t been bumped back into 2025*). In this book it’s 1961 and the Royal Yacht is heading for Italy for a state visit, but on board the Queen and her private secretary are investigating a possible murder that someone thinks they saw from the Royal Train. I really like this series as you know and I’ve been looking forward to this for more than a year so I’m hoping it will live up to that. I think it’s a sensible decision to move the series back in time, but I remain sceptical about how many scenarios there actually are to keep this series going. But given that I thought similar about the Royal Spyness books and they’re still going I may be surprised! If you haven’t read any of this series, do go back and check out my series post about them – the first is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and the other three are at sensible prices on Kindle as well.
*there are two of them that have slid back into 2026 – the final Thursday Next book which should have been this month but which I sort of half expected to slide given how long we’ve been waiting already and the now final Phryne Fisher book, which presumably was slowed down by Kerry Greenwood‘s final illness.
For the last couple of years around Halloween I’ve written a series post about a Charlaine Harris book and this year I’m completing the set with the the last series in what turn out to be the connected worlds of her paranormal books.
In Midnight Crossroad, Manfred Bernardo has just arrived in town looking for somewhere quiet to live and work. But the seemingly quiet one stop light town has secrets hidden behind its doors and he’s about to discover what they are. If you’ve read Harris’s Harper Connelly series, you’ll have met Manfred (and his grandmother) there and if you’ve read Lily Bard you’ll have met fellow Midnight resident Bobo in those books and these are not the only points were the books crossover with other Harris worlds. Midnight and its environs are populated by vampires, were-creatures and the supernatural and given that Manfred himself is a psychic, he’s soon drawn into the drama that is going on.
In fact looking back at my BotW post for Midnight Crossroad I remember how hard it was to describe the plot there – and the trilogy as a whole is like that too. Although each book does have a plot of its own, it’s all very much building towards the climax in book three. Which is where my problem with the series was – because after all that build up, the ending was actually a bit anti-climatic – more of a whimper than a bang although the references back to other series in the final book are good. And given that Harris hasn’t returned to this extended universe since – she’s written six books in a YA series called Gunnie Rose that is set in an alternative history magical US – it’s a shame that that is the final moment and not something more explosive. But then there’s a bit of a history of the last books in Harris series being a bit of a disappointment to fans – see the brouhaha when the final Sookie Stackhouse book was published!
Any way, if you’re a Harris reader they’re worth a look and if you saw the TV series based on the books back when that was around (or have watched it on a streamer since) then it’s interesting to see what they did or didn’t change.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 