Tag: series

historical, Series I love

Mystery series: Brighton Mysteries

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Given that I binged three of this series just last week, today’s series pick may not surprise you. The only downside to having read three of them last week is that I’ve now run out and read another Elly Griffiths series from start to end and there are No More. Hey ho.

The Brighton mysteries start in 1950, when DI Edgar Stephens finds a body of a girl that’s been cut into three – which reminds him of a magic trick invented by a friend of his that he served with during the war. Edgar goes to hunt out Max for his help and finds him still touring the variety circuit of seaside towns around the country. And that’s how the seven book series gets underway – initially with Edgar and Max and mysteries and as you go through the seven books more characters joining them. Max’s involvement becomes a little less central to the mysteries in later books where you see more of Edgar and WPC Emma Holmes at work – but he’s always part of the mysteries because they are all so connected to the theatre and entertainment industries.

The seven books cover more than 16 years, so a lot changes in the characters lives as you follow them through – but also you see the world changing too: from post war austerity through to the swinging sixties and the changes in attitudes that that brought with them. Brighton also changes a lot during that time – with the rise of TV, the death of end of the pier variety and vaudeville and the coming of cheap package holidays. It’s a great time to set a book – and the mysteries are good too. I think they’re pretty good on accuracy too – I spotted one complete howler* in the last book but it’s the first time I remember finding one of those in all seven of the books, so I’ll let it off. Anyway, these are good very readable mysteries that you can get sucked into reading one after another – the way you can with Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series too.

You should be able to get hold of these fairly easily- they’re on Kindle and Kobo and I’ve been able to buy them in bookshops too.

Have a great weekend!

*a price that would be insane in a pre-decimalisation world – so possibly some confusion about when that happened.

series

Series Redux: Vinyl Detective

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Vinyl Detective books on a shelf

Happy Friday everyone. For today’s post I wanted to point you all back at the Vinyl Detective series by Andrew Cartmel. It’s been nearly four years since I wrote my original series post and we’ve had two more books in the series since then so I thought I would come back around to it. These are mystery stories based around a never-named record collector and record hunter for hire and his group of friends and associates. Each book focuses on the hunt for one specific record in a different genre – so far we have done jazz, 1960s rock, World War II era big band, 1970s electronic folk, punk, death metal, electronic dance music and Italian movie sound track music. The EDM book is my least favourite, so I was pleased when the Italian film music one was a real return to form.

I came to this series because he was one of the Rivers of London graphic novel authors and worked with Ben Aaronovitch on Doctor Who and so I think if you like Aaronovitch’s writing, you will like these. So far this hasn’t hit any of the music genres that I have any real depth of knowledge on – but I’m hoping that it does soon (so either classic musicals or boybands of the late 1990s I guess?) so that I can look for hidden easter eggs of knowledge because I think there’s loads of insider jokes in there that I’m missing because I don’t know enough. I’m hoping we have more coming, but Cartmel also has second series going now with the Paperback Sleuth books and he could do a fourth in that series next – or something different altogether I guess. Anyway, these should be fairly easy to get hold of in any bookshop of a decent size or a decent crime section.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Children's books, Series I love

Children’s series: The Vanderbeekers

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Happy Friday everyone, and this week I have a middle grade-series to talk about to make a bit of a change for you!

The Vanderbeekers is a series of seven middle grade novels about the Vanderbeeker family. There’s mom and dad and five kids, and they live in a brownstone in Harlem. In the first book the family are at risk of losing their home when their curmudgeonly and reclusive landlord decides not to renew their lease. Across the series they face various challenges in a sort of kids on a quest sort of way, but dealing with a range of real life issues – gentrification, financial problems, family problems, growing up and (potentially) leaving home and culminating in the most serious in the final book where one of the siblings is diagnosed with cancer.

What I really love about this series is how well drawn and well developed all the child characters are. They each have distinct and different personalities and there are different relationships between then depending on their ages and their positions in the family. It feels like a very real and realistic portrait of a family. It’s also a lovely depection of a community – the Vanderbeekers are very rooted in their area, which is why the threat of losing their home hits so much in the first book. It’s not just about the fact that it is upheaval, it’s that they will find it hard to find somewhere else in their neighbourhood – let alone somewhere else that’s big enough considering their current (beloved) home is bulging at the seams already. I’m not sure the book ever used the word gentrification, but that’s what’s going on as the families who have been living in the area find themselves being priced out and squeezed out of the area. And the importance of community is a big theme through the books. In a time when the internet and online culture can make the world feel more fractured than ever, it’s great to have a middle grade book series that is set in the present, but stresses the importance of real life community and friendships.

Now I’m not going to lie, this are a little harder to get hold of in the UK. I read a lot of the series via my US library card when I had that, and then when it expired I ordered the last two in paperback as they came out – which was a year behind the hardback releases. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them in UK stores, but it’s definitely orderable if you want, and they’re also on Kindle at a sensible price – the second one is even in Amazon Kids at the moment.

Have a great weekend!

Authors I love, series

Series Redux: Lady Julia Grey

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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 Veronica quite a 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.

Books from the Lady Julia series
romance, series

Novella Series: Golden Years

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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!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book previews

Out this Week: New Library Lovers

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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.

romance, series

Romance Series: Improbable Meet-Cute Second Chances

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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 Julie Soto, 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.

Have a great weekend!

series

Series Redux: Bright Falls

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Covers of the Bright Falls books

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!

series

Series Redux: Trisha Ashley’s Lancashire books

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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!

Have a great weekend!

series

Series Redux: Holidays with the Wongs

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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!