Tag: trilogy

Fantasy, series

Fantasy Series: Legends and Lattes

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Happy Friday everyone. If you’re in the UK you may well be watching election results today – as people who’ve been around here for a while will know, I really love election results days so I will be spending my day watching the results come in. But for those of you who aren’t elections nerds, here’s a series post for you.

The Legends and Lattes series are low stakes cozy fantasy novels. Each novel does (sort of) standalone but has a connected set of characters. The first book that was published was Legends and Lattes which was a Book of the Week when I read it a little over a year ago, and that was followed by a prequel Bookshops and Bonedust and then a third book Brigands and Breadknives which was published in the autumn last year.

I think the peril levels are highest in the third book, but there’s still pretty low stakes – and if you’ve read anything about the series you’re pretty sure that it’s going to work out ok in the end because that’ what the promise is. There’s some chaos, there are some weird and wonderful creatures – including but not limited to a creature who lives in a bag and a talking sword – and there are lots of laughs and more than a few feels. They are very easy books to sit down and gobble up in a sitting. And for all that they are cozy and you might think you should read them in autumn, they’re also delightful when read on a sun lounger as I did with book three!

Now if you want to read these, it’s perfectly find to read them in publication order (that’s what I did after all) and the good news is that Legends and Lattes is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you’re a member there. And they’re pretty easy to get hold of – I’ve seen them in all sorts of bookstores.

Have a good weekend everyone

series

Series: Vera Kelly

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Breaking away from the romance theme of the last few weeks for something different today. And this series is actually a trilogy, but it’s my blog and I’m not changing my title rules. Sorry, not sorry.

Anyway, to the books, which are about a female spy turned detective and have such great covers that how can you not want to pick them up? In Who is Vera Kelly, we meet our heroine in New York in 1962, where she is struggling to keep her head above water, working nightshifts at a radio station. But when she’s noticed by the CIA she suddenly finds herself in Argentina trying to infiltrate a group of student radicals and wire tap a politician. But after a coup she finds herself abandoned and has to find her own way home. In Vera Kelly is not a Mystery, she is rebuilding her life after the events of Argentina and in the final book, we’ve reached 1971 and she finds herself trying to solve her own girlfriend’s disappearance.

As you will all know by now I love mysteries, adventure capers and snarky heroines and this has all of that and an interesting setting to boot. If you like the Kinsey Milhone series, then you might want to try this. I wasn’t that familiar with the situation in Argentina in the 1960s, so that was interesting even beyond the spy caper and then the all of the detail of life for queer people in America in the 1960s and early 70s is also really interesting. And obviously it has clever mysteries for you to try and figure out. But mostly you’re there for Vera and to see how she manages to get herself out of the situations she finds herself in and how she manages to build a life for herself.

I originally heard about the first book when it came out in the US in 2018 and really wanted to read it, but it wasn’t easily available in the UK (imported only on amazon and not on Kindle at all) so I had to wait until I was in the US for the midterms – which is why my copy of Who is Vera Kelly is a different size to the copy of Lost and Found. And the situation was similar with the second one – until it won the Sue Grafton memorial award (see my comment above about being interesting to fans of the Kinsey Milhone series) at which point we suddenly got the second and third books in paperback and they all appeared on Kindle. As you can see I found the second two in Foyles the other week in the mystery department and this week I found the latest one on the romance shelves! And even better – the first one is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment in the UK if you are a subscriber and want to give it a try.

Happy Friday everyone.