Verity Reads Books (lots of them)
In which our heroine attempts to tame the to-read pile
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.
Have a great weekend!
Advent starts on Sunday, and so I thought now was a great time to remind you all about the Ministry is Murder series given that they’re all set around a church community in Ohio. Your intrepid sleuth is Aggie, the wife of the a minister in a small town in Ohio who is trying to find a balance between what the church thinks the minister’s wife should be doing for them as part of her husband’s job but also having her own life and an extra income to help the family out. You can read my original post here and the BotW post for Beware False Profits. They’re still not on Kindle or Kobo as far as I can see, but they do seem to be relatively easy to get hold of in the US in paperback format. These were my Ohio books for Read the USA for years – but never fear, I’ve found another Ohio-based cozy crime series to replace them with on this year’s list.
Have a great weekend everyone.
The movie comes out next week and we’ve got a little over a month to go until the release of book five, The Impossible Fortune, so it seemed like to point you at my posts about Richard Osman’s series about a group of crime solving group of pensioners from a retirement complex in the south of England. You can find my review of book one here, and my series post here. Of course this series has also spawned a gagillion lookalike covers and books – you can read Smart Bitches Trashy Books’ post about the covers here and listen to Sarah’s conversation with Kayleigh Donaldson about them here. And no I don’t know where my copies of the first and second ones are. Probably on loan somewhere. I think. I hope.
Have a great weekend!
The fifth Dahlia Lively book came out while I was in Ghana the other week and was waiting for me when I got home, so this Friday I want to point you back in the direction of my series post about the Three Dahlias. The blurb for the new book promises Posy and Caro performing in two different plays in the West End when murder occurs, with Posy under suspicion amid tensions between our trio. I’m really looking forward to reading it. And we know there is a sixth book coming – but at the moment that is the last contracted book (per Katy Watson’s newsletter) so that could be it…
So back in November last year I did a post about Ellie Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series after the release of book four, but this week the final book in the series, A Body at the Book Fair, came out and I wanted to return for a quick update. First a recap of the set up: Annie works at a specialist mystery bookshop in a small town in California, but she actually trained as a criminologist before her best friend was murdered during their final project. In each book in the series she’s solving a murder of the week, but also inching closer to solving the mystery of what happened to her friend.
Back in November, I was getting fed up with waiting for the resolution of the murder and enjoying the murders of the week more. And as the series went on on, the mysteries the books have been trying to solve seemed to get less complex because of the need to move the other story on. But until the final instalment, the books had had mostly been satisfying on one front or the other: either the murder of the week was good or the progress on the background investigation made up for it. But in book six I’m not sure either side of the story works – the mystery-of-the-week is very thin, and the background mystery felt a bit anticlimactic too, for reasons which I can’t really explain without giving you spoilers.
At the end of the final book there is a note from Ellie Alexander saying that there is a spin off series coming in 2026 called The Novel Detectives, featuring Annie and her friends. And as I still like the characters and the set up, I’m hoping that this will be much more of a the murder of the week but with developments in their personal lives as the running strand and will get back to what I liked about the earlier books. I’ll be looking out for the first one anyway and will keep you posted!
Happy Friday everyone – and this week we had a new book out in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. I’ve written about this series a couple of times, and while I retain my reservations about the massive age gap between Mary and Sherlock, I really enjoy the mysteries and the way that they weave all sorts of threads together. I will freely admit that I have read more books inspired by Sherlock Holmes than I have of the original Conan Doyle books, so if you’re more of a Holmes afficianado than I am, your mileage may vary.
My original series post for these came after after Castle Shade, which was the seventeenth in the series and the new one is book 19. In Knave of Diamonds Mary’s uncle reappears in her life after a long absence to ask for her help with his problems, one of which is his involvment in the disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels, which is why his family disowned him in the first place. After a couple of books on the continent (Romania in Castle Shade and France in the Lanterns Dance) it looks like this one may see Mary and Sherlock head across the Irish Sea. I’m looking forward to reading it when I can get hold of it.
This latest is a hardback release so prices on the Kindle edition of Knave of Diamonds is commensurate with that. But the first two in the series are in Kindle Unlimited and the next three are £1.79 before the price jumps to £5.99 and then £7.99. But these are fairly easy to find in the shops new and used so there are options here if you want to try the series out.
Have a great weekend!
I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I wrote about Ovidia Yu’s Su Lin mysteries, also known as the Crown Colony series, but it has because there is a new one out next week! I am still stuck at number six – because number seven hasn’t gone into KU yet or dropped to a price that falls into my Kindle range. But I do own number eight because that has. But I’m stubborn and I’m refusing to go out of order because I’ve done everything else in order. Also and this is also related, be warned: if you’re behind in the series, do not read the blurb for the upcoming ninth book The Rose Apple Tree because it’s got a huge spoiler in it for something that has clearly happened in one of those two previous books – it’s hard to tell because book 7 doesn’t have a plot summary attached to it in the blurb at all, just “The next title in the Mystery Tree series, exploring Singapore after the Japanese retreat and in the aftermath of WWII” and book 8 is tagged as being set in 1949 and book 9 in 1947. And i am not reading the samples to find out because: spoilers.
Any way, I have really enjoyed reading these Singapore-set murder mysteries which have taken us from the Abdication crisis through to the end of the Second World War, from Su Lin’s teenage years to adulthood as she straddles the line between the Singaporean community and foreigners in power – which started as the British and then changed to the Japanese during the war.
The first six are still in Kindle Unlimited and they’re well worth a look, and as you can see, you can also find them in some of the bookshops with larger mystery sections.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Given that I seem to be on a massive binge of Ann Granger’s Cotswold-set mystery series, it would be remiss of me not to do a quick reminder about them. This is a mystery series that started nearly 30 years ago, but are still a lot of fun. In fact sometimes I think I like the older series better because there is a lack of internet and mobile phones. Anyway, our duo are Meredith Mitchell and Alan Markby, who meet in the first book (which I own in paperback, hence it’s absence from the photo) when a death occurs at the house where Meredith is staying. She works for the Foreign Office and is on leave from a posting abroad, he is the policeman sent to investigate. And so it continues, with the two of them tangled up in crimes, usually fairly rural ones. I’ve got as far as the a point where Meredith is working in London but has finally bought a house in Bamford (the main town in the series) although in book seven the mystery is set away from there in a different part of the Cotswolds. The solutions are twisty and in rereading them I’m almost enjoying them more than first time because they hold up so well.
As you can see these are easy to get hold of on Kindle, although perhaps slightly harder in actual book form because it tends to be Granger’s more recent Campbell and Carter or her Victorian mysteries that you see in the shops. Have a great weekend everyone.
We’ve had events marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week, and so I thought I would mention one of my favourite series that’s set at least partially during the Second World War today – and that’s Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet series. I wrote a full post about the books back in 2020 and you can read that here.
The end of the war comes during the third book and as I love the children’s stories (or at least they were children at the start) the third and the fourth books are my favourites of the series in many ways. Here’s a bit from Archie and Clary’s VE Day celebrations
Showers of golden stars from rockets occurred in the crocus-mauve sky and the Palace was floodlit, and round the statue of Queen Victoria an enormous snake of people were dancing the hokey-cokey, singing and stamping their feet, and beyond, near the railings, people were chanting, shouting for the King. There were thousands of them, so many indeed and sometimes so tightly packed that they had held hands all evening in order not to get parted, and sometimes they had to shout to each other to be heard, but sometimes they simply sang whatever everyone else round them was singing: ’Land of Hope and Glory’, ’God Save the King’ and bits of the hokey-cokey.
Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Anyway, I love them, they’re wonderful and if you haven’t read them, you should. They always seem to be in print and I own them in paperback, ebook and also some on audio. That should give a sense of how dear to me they are. And as they’re not short, if you like them you have about 2,000 pages of them to enjoy.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone.
I mentioned a few small town series in my post on Wednesday, but I’m taking the opportunity this Friday to remind you about the Fool’s Gold series. There are twenty full length novels in Susan Mallery’s series set in a small town in California as well as twenty five novellas of various lengths. The novels come in groups – friendship groups, or siblings, or business partners – where they all getting paired off one book after another. Overall the series covers about six years in the life of the town. They’re very easy to read – and even easier to read one after another. As I said in my original post there is a slightly higher pregnancy ratio plot than I would usually go for, but they’re so relaxing I let them off. If you don’t want to start at the beginning, I suggest you start with the group of retired sportspeople that start at book 14.
Have a great weekend everyone!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 