Tag: series I love

mystery, Series I love

Series I Love: The Three Dahlia Mysteries

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The third book in the Three Dahlia mysteries came out this week, and there is a fourth coming in November, so it seems like a good time to talk about Katy Watson’s mystery series.

So as I wrote in my Book of the Week Post about the first book, The Three Dahlias, the Dahlias of the title are three actresses who have all played the same character – Dahlia Lively, the heroine of a series of 1930s murder mysteries. Rosalind was the first to play her in the original movies, Caro played her in a long running TV adaptation and now Posy is taking the lead in a new movie. In the first book the women are all at a convention at the home of the author who wrote the series when a murder happens. In the second book, A Very Lively Murder, the murder happens on the set of the new movie. And now, in the third, Seven Lively Suspects, the trio are at a crime festival where Caro is due to speak about her new book about their first investigation. But before they arrive a podcast team asks them to be part of their new series about a murder five years ago where they are convinced that the wrong man was convicted.

I really like this series. I was sceptical about how Katy Watson was going to find more ways for the Dalhias to get tangled up in murders, but this third instalment is actually pretty ingenious and makes sense without it feeling like they’re bringing murder wherever they go (a la Jessica Fletcher!). We have a fourth coming in November – A Lively Midwinter Wedding – which is teed up at the end of Seven Lively Suspects.

These are hardback first releases – so the first two are in paperback now, and the latest is a hardback. And of course they’re on Kindle and Kobo too. I bought the first two (in hardback!) but I got the latest via NetGalley, which may mean at some point I end up buying the third in hardback as well because I do like a matching set…

Have a great weekend everyone.

Series I love

Series I Love: Lumberjanes

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Happy Friday everyone, the sun is out, we’ve had the longest day and in the US the summer break is underway and children are heading off to Summer Camp, which means that it’s an ideal time to write about the Lumberjanes series.

The Lumberjanes are a group of girls spending their summer at a scout camp, which is presumably somewhere in New England, and though they never really say. The camp looks like any other camp you might have seen in American popular culture, but its environs turn out to be inhabited by various magical and mythical beings and across the course of the twenty volumes they meet them and battle some of them.

I’ve finally finished reading the series – for some reason the final two didn’t turn up at on my order at the comic book store when they first came out and I’d got so distracted that I’d forgotten about it until a month or so back when I looked at the shelf and saw it only went to 18. I can’t quite explain why I love the series so much – except that it mashes up loads of the stuff I loved as a child with great art and some jokes. It’ll make you smile – and if you’re actually the age it’s aimed at, it’ll teach you some valuable life skills for navigating the world. I guess that’s why it won a tonne of awards.

You can get these really easily – any good comic store will have them, as will any bookshop with a graphic novel section. They are in eformats too, but I find graphic novels really hard going on e readers so your mileage may vary on that too.

Have a great weekend!

Series I love

Series I Love: Crown Colony

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The eighth book in the Crown Colony series came out this week, so it’s the perfect time to talk about Ovidia Yu’s historical mystery series set in Singapore.

Our heroine is Su Lin, who in the first book steps in as governess for the acting Governor of Singapore. Su Lin’s family life is complicated – both of her parents are dead and she lives with her grandmother, but because she had polio as a child she’s seen as unlucky. She’s been educated at the mission school and her family are influential in the Chinese community so she has an outsider type perspective on almost everyone in someway but also understands a lot too.

I’ve read six of the eight – and that’s taken me through from the 1930s until the end of World War 2. There are a lot of mystery series set in the 1930s, and a few of them have tackled the war period – but I can’t think of another one that’s set out side of Europe. I loved the Singaporean setting of Ovidia Yu’s Aunty Lee series, and it’s even more fascinating in the past. I’m a history graduate but most of the bits that I’ve really studied have been British or French history – so it’s always really interesting to learn something new as well has having a good mystery.

The six Su Lin Mysteries that I have read have all been in Kindle Unlimited at some point – and I’m hoping that the arrival of number eight means that number seven with become a KU title soon, and as soon as it does, I’ll be all over it.

Have a great weekend everyone.

bingeable series, Series I love

Series I Love: Goldy Schulz

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It’s just over a year since the first book in this series was Book of the Week, and now I’ve read nearly all the books in the series that I can get at a sensible price, so it seemed like a good time to write a series post about them!

At the start of the series, Goldy is a recently divorced single mum running a one woman catering business in a town in Colorado. Her biggest problem is her ex-husband, John Robert Korman aka the Jerk (so named for his initials), gynaecologist and wife beater. In the first book Goldy’s former father in law drops dead at a wake that she is catering and she becomes a suspect. And this is just the first murder Goldy stumbles across in the course of her catering business. They’re not always under suspicion of being poisoned by her food, but in a fair number of cases they could have been – at least initially!

In my BotW post for that first book, Catering to Nobody, I noted my annoyance that the series title gives away a future plot development in the series – aka that Goldy has a different surname and that she gets married again (and to someone you meet in that first book), and I appreciate that I am doing the same here, but that’s how you’re going to find them easiest. And finding these is some of the challenge, because this is a series that started in 1990…

I bought everything I could on Kindle – but as you can see from this picture, of the seventeen books only six of them are on Kindle (in the UK at least) and then the rest I have acquired second hand. And that’s where I have come undone – because some of them are super expensive or impossible to get. I’ve read 13 of the 17, and have one more in the post on the way. But as I’ve read the last book in the series – or at least I assume it’s the last because it came out more than a decade ago – so I’m going for the series post now.

And what I really like about these is the group of regular characters that pop up – as well as Goldy and her son Arch, there is also Tom who she marries, Julian who is almost an adopted son and then Marla, the Jerk’s other ex wife. Between Goldy and the side characters there are plenty of ways to be involved in murders and to get information about them. Also it has recipes. And some of them are recipes that you might want to cook, and actually be able to cook even with the American measurements! I was trying to think of a series to compare them to, but I struggled a little bit – they’re not necessarily funny or witty like some of the other mystery series I like, but they’re not super scary or thriller-y either. I’ll keep thinking!

As I said, these can be a bit of a challenge to get hold of, but here’s the link to the Kindle series list to get you started.

Happy Reading!

books, series, Series I love, Young Adult

Series I Love: Fence

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So this week I’m adding the the graphic novel series that I’ve written about in my series posts – with Fence – a series I’ve been reading for years and hope goes on for more years to come.

Fence is the story of the members of a fencing team at the prestigious Kings Row boarding school. The main characters are Nicolas – the illegitimate son of a legendary fencer but keeping that secret, at the school on a scholarship and having had very little formal training but with bags of potential – and Seiji Katayama a hugely talented but deeply mysterious fencer whose presence at Kings Row is a bit of a surprise to the fencing world, who thought he would be at a better school. Because Kings Row is good – but it’s not championship winning good at the moment, so could this year’s team be the ones to change that? There are other members of the team and we see their stories too, but the Nick and Seiji strands are the main ones.

We’ve got to six collected editions now – and we’ve see the guys at school, at practice, in matches and most recently at a training camp with all of their main rivals. The boarding school element is what drew me to it originally – my love of Girls Own boarding school stories is well known here, but the rivalry aspect and the art just spoke to me. And the art has been consistently really good through the whole series so far – there are various different people doing different things here and there and although the styles vary, like with Lumberjanes they’re consistent in their own way and all really nice too look at.

There’s also a couple of novels now – I’ve read the first but not the second and they get more into the other members of the team and away from Nick and Seiji and I’ve enjoyed that as well. My only gripe really is that there is so long between each book. But then that’s a fairly common gripe for me with graphic novels – but I know they take a long time to draw and that they come out in single editions first so I cope!

You should be able to get Fence from any good comic book shop – they’re on Kindle as well and the first one is at a really reasonable price – although my experience with reading graphic novels on Kindle is distinctly mixed so your mileage may vary.

Happy Weekend everyone!

Series I love

Series I Love: Heartstopper

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I’ve been saving writing about this series until after Volume five – because at the end of the fourth book it said five would be the last. Except that it’s not – and as there was a two year gap between four and five because Alice Oseman was working on the Netflix series, I’m not going to wait until after book six!

Heartstopper is the story of Charlie and Nick. They both attend the same grammar school but they’re in different years and their school experience has been very different. Charlie is an anxious over-thinker who has been bullied because he’s openly gay, while Nick is the star of the rugby team and friends with everyone. But when they meet they become friends and both of their lives start to change.

And I don’t really want to say much more because: spoilers ahoy and it all takes a while to develop, but over the course of the five volumes so far we’ve seen the gang experience first love, navigate relationships, deal with school bullies, take exams, go on school trips and in Volume five it’s time to look at universities. I love the art, I love the characters – and I recognise some of their experiences from when I was at school – and I definitely wouldn’t want to be back in a secondary school. And as I mentioned, it’s also been turned into a Netflix series – so here’s the trailer for the first series if you want more of an idea about what’s going on:

I’m not going to lie – I haven’t watched the show yet, because I wanted to wait for the books to be finished first, but that was when I thought it was one book to go. So now who knows what I’ll do – there are two series and series three finished filming at the end of last year. One of my friends *loves* the series and I know he’ll be waiting anxiously for the next one. But if you’ve watch the series and haven’t read the books I can recommend them too. You should be able to buy the books pretty much everywhere – I get mine from the Comic Book Store because I like to support them, but they’re in all the bookshops – and as I discovered the other week the new one is in The Works too!

Have a great weekend!

bingeable series, books

Series I love: Chicago Stars

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I said yesterday that I was going to try and resist buying the new Mary Russell mystery if I could – and so far the main reason I could is because I had pre-ordered the latest Chicago Stars book and it dropped onto the Kindle on Tuesday morning, just in time for my post Super Bowl slump- and so I’m taking the opportunity to write about them today!

So this is a series of connected romance novels what the characters are linked to the (fictional) Chicago Stars NFL team. Susan Elizabeth Phillips has been writing these for a while now (twenty-ish years) so we’ve been through a generation (in sports terms) of players at this point, but I think that’s a good thing! What thus series specialises in is feisty women and men who are used to having it all their own way – and’s that’s a dynamic I can really get on board with. I’ve written about couple of the other books in the series already, so I’m going to focus on the latest one next.

Simply the Best is the story of Rory, half sister of the Stars’ quarterback and Brett, a hot shot sports agent. They definitely shouldn’t have hooked up at a party, but even worse they’re now having to work together to try and track down a missing football player and solve a murder. There’s tones of snark and banter – and I loved the addition of a mystery to the plot. The last couple of books in the series, I’ve thought they might be the last one, but I’m fairly optimistic that there is going to be another one after this one at some point!

Happy weekend everyone!

books, Series I love

Series I Still Love: Royal Spyness

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The latest book in Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness series came out this week so I’m taking the opportunity to have another little chat about how much I love this series. It’s the 1930s and our heroine is Georgiana, a cousin of the king and granddaughter of Queen Victoria (just go with it and don’t think too hard about that bit) who is trying to build herself a niche in a changing world and runs parallel to some key events in interwar history.

When I wrote about my original series I love post, there were 15 books in the series- but now we’re up to 17 and well into 1936, which is obviously a Big Year for the Royal Family – and has turned out to be a big one for Georgie too. At this point every time a new Royal Spyness book comes out, I wonder if it’s the last one and whether we’ve nearly reached a logical ending for the series. I haven’t read the latest one yet so I don’t know if it is this time – but I really hope it’s not because these are such good fun, and Georgie is such a lovely heroine that it’s always fun to spend time in her admittedly body-strewn orbit! If you take away the royal connection they’re very similar to Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple series – with a fairly innocent heroine, which makes for a lot of entertainment when Georgie finds herself among the Happy Valley set whereas Phryne Fisher (for example) wouldn’t have been shocked, but would probably have found it all very tiring!

I’ve been able to borrow these from the library and buy them in stores so hopefully if you’re interested you can get hold of some of them, although this latest is Kindle or American hardback import only at the moment.

Have a great weekend!

books, new releases, Series I love

Series I love again: Blessings

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I know. I’ve already written about Beverly Jenkins Blessings series more than once, but the latest book in the series came out here this week – after a gap of three and a half years so how could I not!

You can find my first post about the people of Henry Adams here, but the basic plot is that when she divorces her rich but cheating husband, Bernadine Brown uses part of her divorce settlement to buy a historically black town in Kansas on eBay. Over the course of the series you can see Henry Adams come back to life and flourish. There’s a regular cast of characters who cover multiple generations, there’s always a romantic element – although it’s not always the main focus – as well as whatever is happening in the town. It’s strongly influenced by faith – after her divorce Bernadine wants God to tell her what her purpose should be after being so fortunate as to get so much money – and buying the town is what she feels that he wants her to do. And the latest in the series is mostly focusing on Reverend Paula and the new guy in town.

I realise I’ve got this far without really talking about the narrative structure – which is that it moves around from character to character looking at the different strands of the story. Its a bit like Tales of the City – although Blessings isn’t written to be read in episodes and the overarching plot is more connected together than TotC tends to be.

Anyway, A Christmas to Remember came out this week, I had it pre-ordered and had finished it within two days despite all my efforts at moderation (and it would have been less except that I had to work and also had theatre tickets). Last week I mentioned Sweet Mercies and if you’ve read that or Small Miracles, the first book about the Sisters of St Philomena, this has lots of similar vibes – although those have less romance than these do and maybe a bit more God. Or at least a different way of dealing with God. And the narrative moves around in a similar way.

Ms Bev writes brilliant historical romances as well – I’ve written about a couple of them – so there’s plenty to go at in her back catalogue if you read one of these and like it.

Have a great weekend everyone.

books, series, Series I love

Series I Love: Stockwell Park Orchestra

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It’s nearly the end of my 2023 Proms odyssey, and I’m still looking for romances with musicians or orchestras, and I’ve already recommended you some books featuring bands. So now I’m going to take the opportunity to write about a great series that features an orchestra in it – Isabel Rogers’s Stockwell Park Orchestra series.

This is a light comedy series about the members of an amateur orchestra, who meet weekly to rehearse and regularly perform concerts to a pretty high standard. The only trouble is there always seems to be some kind of drama going on in the background. There is a core group of main characters – most of whom are in the orchestra, although one notable exception isn’t – and there are also some regular side character for extra comic relief. So far the adventures have included a dead conductor, a continental tour and a certain level of fame.

There are four books in the series – two of which were Books of the Week. And as I said in both of reviews – I’m a band person, a lapsed clarinettist with a dislike of public performance and love of being part of music happening, but these guys are much better than I ever was. And because of that I find it quite hard to judge how these will land with people who aren’t musicians – or who don’t have experience with bands. But if you are someone who has experience with large groups of artistic types, I’m fairly sure you’ll recognises some of the personality types here. No news yet on whether there will be a fifth, but I’m really hoping it’s going to happen.

They’re available from all the usual ebook retailers, but if you get them direct from the publishers, Farrago Books, you can buy them as a set with a handy discount *and* get a free short story featuring the gang. Here’s the link. Enjoy!