August reads and autumn plans

 I'll be honest, I didn't get a lot of reading done in August. This is down to lovely family visitors and other stuff I wanted to do... I love reading of course but I also love to do jigsaw puzzles, watch TV shows, cook, and then there's my current crop of tomatoes and a glut of apples to be dealt with. There's one thing, I'm never bored!

So, I read 4 books in August,

The Cat Who Caught a Killer - L.J. Shearer 

The Marlow Murder Club - Robert Thorogood 

Star Trek, Strange New Worlds: The High Country - John Jackson Miller

Several members of the Enterprise crew get stranded on a planet after a shuttle-craft crash. They all end up on different parts of the planet and we mainly follow Captain Pike as he gets embroiled in the business of the town he lands near. He soon discovers that technology is banned here and trying to use science as a way of making life easier is swiftly punished. It seems the planet is not ruled by the people who live there but by beings from elsewhere, not only that, the people he thinks are indigenous, are not. They have been kidnapped from their home planets: one of them was Earth and he knows this individual from when he was a teenager. There was a definite good sci-fi yarn lurking here in this plot, but I found it overly wordy and lacking in the trademark humour that's very apparent in the Strange New Worlds TV series. Still, it picked up about halfway through and was never less than readable. This is the first Strange New Worlds fiction book that's been published, there are two more and a fourth coming out this month I think. 

Happy After All - Maisey Yates.  I saw this reviewed on Lark's blog - HERE.

Amelia has retreated from a hectic life in LA, connected to the film and TV industry. She's a writer who has bought a rundown motel complex near the Joshua Tree NP in California, to do it up and run while she writes her romances. She knows she has run away from a couple of things that've happened to her and an unhappy childhood. Nathan walks into the motel looking for a place to write. It turns out he's a famous author of war thrillers, writing under a psuedonym, the two writers should get along but Nathan is uncommunicative to the point of being surly. Amelia senses a mutual attraction but also senses a determination in Nathan not to give way to it. So, the events of this book take place over several years and we watch as Amelia slowly breaks down Nathan's defenses. We're also drip-fed information about what happened to Amelia and eventually discover Nathan's tragic past. This is not a light romance, it deals with grief and loss and and how individuals cope with this. There is lightness, the old ladies who live in the hotel are a delight, and the setting, in the California desert, sounds very authentic. It is also quite spicy in places so beware of that if it's not your bag. Overall I enjoyed this one but found there was a bit too much repetitive introspection for my taste. I would certainly read more by this author though as the comedic style of writing suited my sense of humour.  

So, I know it's not officially autumn until the 21st. but our weather here in the UK has turned autumnal and as the weather forecast boffins treat the 1st. as autumn, who am to argue?

So these are a few possibles for me for the next two or three months:

 

As you can see, there are four of the British Library's weird stories books, I may just cherry-pick various stories from each of them. A reread of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which I've been promising myself for several years, and book 2 of the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

Add to that I have an autumn folder on my Kindle Fire and a few ebooks I want to get to are:

Kraken - China Miéville 

Nephthys - Rachel Driscoll

The Nameless Ones - John Connolly

The Harbour Lights Mystery - Emylia Hall

The Mountains in the Sea - Ray Naylor

Babel - R.F. Kuang 

The Frozen People - Elly Griffiths

If I read half a dozen from the photo and this list combined then I will be a happy bunny. If not, it matters not. 

I hope you have some fun reading plans for autumn too? I also hope you're all keeping well and finding some good books to read. 
 

A couple of cosy crime yarns

I seem to have been reading a bit of cosy crime recently so this post will focus on two books from that genre. In all honesty, it's not my 'go to' section of crime fiction, I prefer mine  slightly more edgy, but I'm nothing if not contrary, so here are two cosies.

First up, The Cat Who Caught a Killer by L.T Shearer.

Lulu Lewis, recently widowed and a former police detective, now lives alone on a canal boat in the area of Maida Vale in London. Conrad is a calico cat... 'calico' being a colouring which is black, white and ginger. But that's not what is really unusual about him... the really strange thing about him is that he can talk. So, Lulu's mother-in-law is in a carehome. She has Alzheimers but otherwise is very healthy, so when she dies suddenly Lulu cannot believe it's not a suspicious death. Of course, no one believes her - old people die, it's a sad fact of life. But something isn't right, her other son is back from Spain with his new wife and acting suspiciously, the carehome might've been negligent over a lost watch. Things mount up and, with Conrad's help, Lulu begins to investigate. This was one of those 'okay' reads. I didn't think the writing was any great shakes, too much explanation, dialogue guilty of being not quite how people speak, that sort of thing. But Conrad the cat was a fun character and I liked the canal setting in Maida Vale although we did not need to hear the name of every surrounding street, over and over. It was a decent enough case and kept me reading to the end but I doubt I'll be reading any more of this four part series. 

Next, The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood.

Judith Potts lives in Marlow, a very pretty, historical town in Buckinghamshire in the UK. She's 77, lives alone, but is very happy with that situation. She sets crosswords for a living and likes whiskey and nude swimming in the Thames. One night, while out doing exactly that, she hears what she thinks is someone being assaulted or murdered but because she hasn't got anything on, she can't get out and investigate. Eventually, a body is found and it's the owner of an auction house who was an acquaintance of Judith's. The police do not really take Judith's ideas on the case seriously so Judith ends up enlisting the help of the Vicar's wife, Becks, and a dog walker, Suzie. They're a bit reluctant to get involved but Judith manages to convince them that there's more to life than their everyday, rather humdrum, lives. I enjoyed this and although I called it a 'cosy' it's a bit more than that with its good writing, humorous tone, and 'real' people with real foibles. I didn't guess who the culprit was but then I am quite easily fooled by murder mysteries. I suspect I enjoy the journey more than arriving at the destination. I think I will read on in this series and there is a TV adaptation which I'll try to take a look at. 

So those are actually the only two books I've read this month, having dnfed a couple quite far in. And sometimes, 'shock-horror', books take second place to some other thing you suddenly discover. For me it's a 'new to me' Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds. I had absolutely no idea it was so brilliant and have been devouring the first two seasons. And am now reading this:

The story, that of several crew members of The Enterprise being stranded on a planet where technology is banned and the Luddite rules enforced by rulers from yet another planet, is an interesting one, and the world-building quite good too. The execution of said intriguing tale is, sadly, a little mundane. Strange New Worlds has a huge amount of humour and it's lacking in this book. The cover's nice though. :-) 

I hope the August heat is not too unbearable if you're in the northern hemisphere. In the UK we're in the middle of our 4th. heatwave this summer, although our heat in no way compares in ferocity to many other parts of the world. Stay cool and I hope you're finding some good books to read and keeping well. 

Books Read in July

 Where did July go? I don't mind... it's not my favourite month by any stretch of the imagination... but it just whizzed by. Possibly because I had two lots of visitors? Which is always nice but means I'm behind with reviews and also commenting on my favourite blogs. I will try catch up. 

So, I read six books in July. Some I reviewed, some I did not. I wish I had the time to review everything, but I can at least mention them all here.

32. The Half Bird - Susan Smillie. This is a non-fiction book about a woman who sailed from the UK to the Med. and around it. Well, supposedly. She didn't actually get going until about halfway into the book, and the first half just felt like a load of waffle. The actual sailing around the Med. bit was quite good - there just ought to have been more of it. 3 stars

33. An Act of Foul Play - T.E. Kinsey 4 stars

34. Not to Be Taken - Anthony Berkeley 4stars

35. Godmersham Park - Gill Hornby.  

Thirty one year old Anne Sharpe is from a genteel family, until her mother dies and Anne suddenly realises she has no home and nowhere to go. She has to resort to being a governess and gets a job at Godmersham Park, the home of Edward Knight (formerly Austen) and his family. Her charge is Fanny Knight, aged 12, an enthusiastic, likeable, intelligent girl. Things could be worse. But a governess holds a strange position in a large household, neither a fully paid-up member of the servants, nor a proper family member. Things are difficult, made even more so when the servants take against her. Still, she is very much liked by Edward's brother, Henry Austen, who has charm aplenty and the sort of personality that wishes to know about everyone. So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I thoroughly enjoyed this fictional account of the life of Anne Sharpe. In real life her and Jane Austen really were friends but not a lot more is known about the friendship. Sadly, Jane herself does not appear until halfway through the book. Until then the book concentrates on the indignities Anne suffers and you feel very sorry for her. Henry Austen takes centre stage quite a lot and he is full of ambivilence, something he was in real life apparently. His charm made him popular but the target of said charm needed to be careful. This is Gill Hornby's second book about the Austen family, Miss Austen, which concentrates on Cassandra Austen, was very good too. And now there's a new book out - The Elopement - how that fits in with the family I don't know, but I assume it does somehow and I will be reading it. 5 stars

36. Hyperion - Dan Simmons. This was a reread for me. I read it first in 2016 and my review is HERE. I saw mention of the whole series of four on Youtube recently and decided I wanted to read the next three, but would need to refresh my memory by rereading the first book. It was every bit as good the second time around, if not better. I see I reserved book 2 from the library but clearly never read it, I have bought it now and plan to read it in the autumn. 5 stars (I gave it 4 in 2016.)

37. Walking the Woods and the Water - Nick Hunt. The author plans to follow in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor who walked from The Netherlands to what was then Constantinople, back in the 1930s. How much have the countries he passed through changed, are people's attitudes the same? Some very interesting answers ensue. Enjoyed this one a lot. 4 stars 

So, I was pleased with my July reading month. I read 4 fiction novels and 2 non-fiction travelogues and they were all quite varied. Only The Half Bird was a bit disappointing, the rest were all top-notch. And now we're into August, another of my least favourite months, roll on September! Hopefully there will be some more good books read during August but as yet I'm not sure what they will be. 

 Happy reading and I hope you're all keeping well. 

 

Two crime yarns

 I am, of course, waaaay behind with book reviews, three books to be honest, so I'll try (hoho) to be brief and deal with the two crime novels first. 

 First up, An Act of Foul Play by T.E. Kinsey, this is book 9 in the author's 'Lady Hardcastle and Flo' series.

Lady Hardcastle, amateur sleuth and sometime spy, and her sidekick and maid/companion, Flo, are celebrating Lady Hardcastle's birthday with an evening out in Bristol. They're attending a comedy play and have thoroughly enjoyed the first half. Everyone but Flo take themselves off during the intermission and she can't help but notice a lot of noise coming from behind the curtain. Sure enough, when the curtain rises for act two, the actors strolling onto the stage to engage with the actor who should be there to meet them, find him dead in a chair. Of course, the two women can't help but get involved but find themselves having to work with a new, rather clueless, detective. There's nothing for it but for the two to go undercover and join the acting troupe. This is another fun instalment of an excellent comedy crime series. By comedy, I don't mean it's a laugh a minute, the comedy is in the relationship between Lady Hardcastle and Flo and the banter they engage in. If I'm honest, theatre set scenarios are never my favourite: I don't know why... but we all have our foibles. But this was good, and fun, and never less than enjoyable but not my favourite in the series.  I gather for the next couple of books the two go into 'spy' mode rather than whodunnit, that too is not my favourite genre but I own them so will read them to see how I get on. Although this series is on the lighter side, I would not refer to them as 'cosies', the humour and the writing take them out of that category in my opinion. 

Next, Not to Be Taken: A Puzzle in Poison by Anthony Berkeley, one of the excellent, now very long, series of vintage crime novels reissued by the British Library. 

So this is one of those very English forms of vintage mysteries (published in 1938) set in a quintessential country village, Annypenny in Dorset. (That county is full of these villages still.) It concerns a group of six individuals, all friends and very much involved in each other's lives. The narrator is Douglas, a fruit farmer and he lives with his wife, Frances. Just up the lane from them is John Waterhouse and his wife, Angela. He's a retired engineer of sorts who has worked all around the world. Angela is frail in the manner of one who enjoys her illnesses. And then there's the doctor, Glen Brougham who lives with his sister, Rona, she's as clever as he is but without the qualifactions. What happens when John Waterhouse dies is the business of this story. The doctor treats him for indigestion type problems when he complains of pains and feeling unwell. When he dies 'natural causes' goes on the death certificate but an almost estranged brother isn't happy and demands a proper autopsy. It turns out John's been poisoned and it's clear it must be one of the five people closest to him, but why would any of them want him dead? So Anthony Berkeley is not one of my favourite rediscovered authors. I find him clinical and always looking on the unpleasant side of people's natures. And this book is like that too 'but' I liked it a lot more than the previous two books I've read by him. I enjoyed the village setting and the closed circle theme, the slow reveal of secrets is something I enjoy too, no one is quite what they seem in this type of book. The doctor's analysis of Angela and the reason for her mystery health issues I found quite fascinating. Berkeley does human nature very well, despite his tendency to always think the worst of people. This book was apparently part of a competiton... it was published in a newspaper in instalments and at a certain spot the book stopped and people had to send in their solutions. I gather no one got it quite right. Berkeley is still not my favourite Golden Age crime writer but am glad I gave this one a go as it really was excellent. 

 

Books read in June

 So, here we are, halfway through the year. Incredible. Wherever you are I hope the summer heat is not too intense - those in the northern hemisphere of course. (I have no idea whether anyone in the southern hemisphere, Oz or NZ etc., reads my blog.) We've had a couple of short heatwaves but our 'heatwave' temps are not comparable to places where the heat is serious. It doesn't get to 40C (104f) here, for instance, which it frequently does in other countries. So it's all relative. I personally hate anything over 30C (86f) and am really not a summer fan at all! Give me autumn or winter, and I'm mostly happy with spring too, but not summer. 

Anyway, enough of the weather report. Books. I read 6 in June, with not a dud among them, so for me, it was a good reading month.

26. A Book of Bones - John Connolly 

27. Death Rites - Sarah Ward 

28. Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky 

29. Pandora - Susan Stokes 

30. Lessons in Crime - edited by Martin Edwards (to be reviewed)

31. Death Sentence - Damien Boyd.

This is book six in Damien Boyd's 'Nick Dixon' series. It starts with a frightening death, underwater in a cave. And that's left hanging until a long way into the book. The real start is the discovery of a dead body in a WW2 pillbox on the side of of a canal in Somerset. It turns out to be a man named Alan Fletcher, and someone has killed him and  made him inhale brick dust before he died. It's bewildering and Nick Dixon and his team get nowhere until they discover that the dead man was a decorated Falklands war veteran and begin to investigate what happened to him in that war. This series is one of the best police procedural series you will find anywhere. It's painstaking in its attention to little details and I find it fascinating. The main characters have lives and partners, Nick lives with one of his former junior officers so she has had to be placed elsewhere within the Somerset police force. But none of this overwhelms the plot of each story and neither are there sob stories and angst and alcoholics and God knows what else. It's ordinary life as we know it, late home from work, both tired, so grabbing takeaways or nipping to the pub to sit by the fire with pie and chips. It does help of course that I know most of the settings of each book because I live in the next county to Somerset and have lived there in the past. It all feels so real. Another terrific instalment of this excellent series. I'm waaay behind, this one was written in 2016, so this year I want to read more and catch up a bit as there are now fifteen books!

So there you go, I couldn't choose a favourite as I enjoyed them all - all were four or five star reads... that's a good reading month.

I hope you're all keeping well. I say this as several of my blogging pals are not having a good time at the moment with health issues of spouses and bereavements. And I don't know if anyone remembers the lovely Pat from the blog, Here, There and Everywhere. We became good friends almost from the moment I started my blog in 2007, sharing a love of books and Star Trek and chatting on the phone occasionally. Very sadly, she passed away a couple of weeks ago, her health had not been good for years but it was still a real shock. She will be sadly missed. So please take of yourselves.
 

A couple of titles

So, just catching up on reviews of two books I've read over the past couple of weeks. So far, I seem to be having a decent reading month. I've read just 4 books but all were good. 

First up, Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

So, this is book two in the author's 'Children of Time' trilogy. I read the first book eighteen months ago (I actually thought it was much more recently than that) and my review is HERE. I can't see any other way to speak about book two other than to reveal spoilers to book one, so please, if you're going to read this series, STOP HERE! Okay. So, representatives of Kern's world from book one, the spiders, and of the human ark ship from Earth, take off in a space ship to find other planets that were terraformed by humans. They find a planetary system. Flip back a couple of thousand years to read what happened here. Terraformers came from Earth but things go pear-shaped when they lose communication with Earth, a disaster has happened there. The terraformers are on their own. Something then happens to one of them, they think it's a minor accident: it's not. Flip forward again and the spiders and humans are approaching the system with no idea what they'll find. What they find is the result of experiments one of the scientists was doing thousands of years ago. Right, so this can easily be read as a standalone but probably best to read Children of Time first. But Children of Ruin is a whole new, very scary, ballgame. I'd say bordering on sci-fi horror, it certainly would be if it were a film and not a book. As I found with book one, it's not the people who stick in my mind it's the world-building and ideas. It's not always easy to follow, and is perhaps overly wordy, but goodness me, I look back at it and see a fantastic book. What an amazing writer Adrian Tchaikovsky is. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads as it wasn't quite the book that Children of Time was, it's a 4.5 really. But if you like a bit of hard science fiction, you can't really go wrong with this series. I've just checked Fantastic Fiction for the title of the next book, Children of Memory, only to find this is not a trilogy at all, book four is due out in 2026! Excellent. 

Lastly, Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman.  

It's 1798 and Pandora 'Dora' Blake wants to be a designer of exotic jewellry. She lives with her uncle in a shop of antiquities that used to belong to her parents. They were archaeologists who died when Dora was eight and since then the famous shop has gone downhill, her awful uncle filling the shop with tat. There's no tat in the basement though, and when a beautiful vase is delivered and goes straight down there, Dora decides to investigate surrepticiously. She's aided by Edward Lawrence, a stranger who comes to see her one day. He's trying to gain entrance to the Society of Antiquaries and wants her help. Dora realises that the two can help each other in achieving their dreams, but not how much danger this is going to place both of them in. So this is a sort of Gothic mystery combined with a bit of Greek myth, based on the story of Pandora opening the box etc. It wasn't quite as myth based as I was hoping, I felt the link between Dora and the vase was not fully explored. It was very good on London of the late 1790s, the squalor and the crime in particular and how hard it was for 'everyone' to survive let alone for a woman to try to get a foothold in what was considered the male preserve of jewellry designing. Hermes, the magpie, was an interesting touch. The uncle was a bit 'too' awful, verging on being a caricature. All in all, I did enjoy this one but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, rounded up from 3.5 as I'm more inclined to do that than round down. 

So, my current read is this:

 I absolutely love an academic mystery so this is a 'must read' for me. Martin Edwards has done a fantastic job of collecting together an excellent clutch of short stories based in schools and colleges. I'm three quarters through and will review it when I've finished. 

A couple of quick reviews

 

So we've had 'No-mow May' here in the UK and that's my excuse for one of my lawns looking like this. In actuality my gardener, who cuts the grass, couldn't do it last week as it was raining too hard. And if I'm honest, I absolutely love how cheerful this looks and how many insects and birds it attracts. These are not dandelions, as some people think, but something called Catsear (Hyphochaeris radicata) and they're what happens when you don't keep a perfect lawn. I have lots of lovely clover too and the bees 'really' love that! Important to keep them happy these days. 

Anyway, this is a book blog not a horticultural, 'Monty Don' fangirl page. :-)

My first book for June (started in May in fact) was A Book of Bones by John Connolly. Anyone who's been reading this blog for any length of time knows how much I adore this series. This is book 17 and my interest is not flagging at all. 

So this is basically a continuation of book 16, The Woman in the Woods, which I see I did not review properly. In that, an individual named Quayle wreaked havoc all over the US, but ultimately in Maine, looking for the missing pages to an Atlas which, when complete, will alter the world - and not in a good way. Quayle returns to London after these events and it's there that Parker, Louis and Angel head after a stop-over in The Netherlands to gather information. In the UK, the body of a woman has been found in an abandoned village near Hadrian's Wall, connected to The Familists from book 16. The police are investigating and realise that there's a connection to other bodies discovered all over England. When Parker arrives in the UK is he going to be a help or a hindrance to their enquiries? This was 675 pages long but as usual with John Connolly, it didn't feel like it at all: I whipped through it. It's different to others in the series in that it's half police procedural as Connolly concentrates a lot on the Northumberland police trying to trace the woman's killer. There are also little 'weird' stories inserted into the text, from the past. This worked very well for me and added to the mystery of what The Fractured Atlas is. What Parker actually is - and Louis and Angel - is also known to readers of this series, oddly one of the police officers actually put her finger right on it but was joking when she said it. That was a bit of an 'Oh' moment. I've just discovered that there's more about the history of this 'Atlas' in Connolly's second book of short stories, Night Music, which I own but haven't read. I shall be doing that thing very soon. I must add that this is not a series for people who don't want to read about people dying in nasty ways. And Connolly does not mind who he kills. It's not quite Game of Thrones, but not everyone survives! Just sayin'. I plan to try and catch up with this series this year, I have five left to read as book 22 came out last month. 

Next, Death Rites by Sarah Ward. I thought the author was new to me but when I checked I realised I'd read In Bitter Chill, the first of her Peak District series about DC Childs. Death Rites is the first book in her 'Carla James' series, set in New England. 

Carla James is an English archaeologist from Oxford. She lost her husband recently and is looking for a change of scenery to take her mind off her loss. She gets a position at an elite university in the town of Jericho, 'somewhere' in New England. The body of a woman is found in a country area outside the town. It's surrounded by various objects or artifacts and Carla is called in for her opinion on these. None of it makes a lot of sense to her but she can't resist continuing to look into the murder, and that's when she starts to find connections with a handful of other killings and suicides that have happened over the last few years: the connections could lean towards the occult. The police actively try to dissuade her from investigating but their antipathy does nothing but spur her on. But who, on the university campus can she trust? And why won't the police listen to her? So this was very well written and pacey - a pageturner so I read it quickly. I think I saw the series mentioned by a blogging friend but I'm afraid I can't remember who. I found Carla a bit annoying at first, possibly too pushy and overstepping the mark at times. Then I saw how obstructive the police were being and I started to get annoyed that they couldn't see what was in front of them... and it didn't help that they were not pleasant people. At one stage Carla does not know who to turn to for help and I have to confess to thinking, 'Call Charlie Parker!' The setting of a New England university town felt realistic, we drove through a few when we were over there at various times. But I do wish the author had said which state it was in. There is apparently a Jericho in Vermont and it looks lovely, but too small to have a uni. Anyway, an interesting start to a new series. Will I read more? I'm not sure. It was good enough but I have a 'lot' of books on my tbr mountain, so we'll see. 

So now I have to choose a new book... think about me at this difficult time.