Review: The Christmas Love Letters: a gorgeous, heartwarming new Christmas romance to cosy up with this winter

The Christmas Love Letters: a gorgeous, heartwarming new Christmas romance to cosy up with this winter by Sue Moorcroft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Maddy Austen lives in the small Norfolk village of Nelson's Bar with her daughter Lyla and her great aunt Ruthie. Life has been hard for Maddy after her husband Adey disappeared nearly seven years ago leaving her pregnant, with mounting bills, a flooded house, and no home insurance.

But Maddy pulled through and now she and Lyla survive on the rent she receives on her old cottage and her carer's allowance for looking after Ruthie who is sight-impaired and has asthma.

A few weeks before Christmas a man visits Ruthie to say that he has found evidence that Ruthie had an affair with his late father, Nigel, and that Nigel and his wide Sindy adopted the child that Ruthie had with Nigel after she was born. The man, Raff, and his sister Ffion have found the love letters which Ruthie sent to Nigel and Ffion would like to meet Ruthie.

But just when it looks like Maddy's life is coming together and she can have Adey declared presumed dead after being missing for seven years, Maddy starts receiving text messages from a withheld number, which might be from Adey. Is he still alive after all this time? Will he want half the cottage? And how will this affect her developing romance with Raff?

The trouble with romance novels is that we readers get very set in our ways and I leaped to the conclusion that Maddy's romantic interest was going to be someone else so I was not predisposed to like as the romantic lead. Even when it was clear that my initial assumption was wrong and the individual in question was not the good guy, I just couldn't get over it. To be honest, I got a lot of things wrong about this novel, which probably proves the saying that if you assume you make an ass out of you and me, I was wrong about who sent the text messages (and why).

If you like a small-town holiday romance featuring School nativity plays, Christmas markets, misunderstandings and a HEA then look no further.

I was offered an ARC by the publisher Harper Collins via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: The Good Part

The Good Part by Sophie Cousens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lucy Young is feeling a bit of a failure. All of her friends are getting on in life, good jobs, buying their own homes, steady boyfriend/girlfriend, getting married, solvent. And she's none of the above. She might be in her dream industry of TV, and she might have just got a promotion, but she still lives in the smallest room in a horrible flat share where water from the bathroom above her frequently leaks onto her bed. After a disastrous night out with her friends which ends in a row, and her having no money to get home, Lucy stumbles into a little newsagents with a wishing machine (a bit like that fabulous film Big starring Tom Hanks) and wishes that she was at the Good Part of her life, the bit where she has a home and a family and a good job.

Lo and behold, when Lucy wakes up the next morning she's in bed with a strange man, a bit older than her usual type but foxy nevertheless and surprise, surprise he's her husband! They've got two children, a big home in the suburbs, and Lucy runs her own highly successful company making children's TV programmes. The only downside? Well she's over forty, which is a bit of a shock when she first looks in the mirror. On the plus side she's got a talking car.

If you read my reviews you'll probably have a good suspicion that I love a time travel/alternate reality story and this one had the added bonus of being set in the future. I loved that Lucy's son knew she wasn't his real mummy (especially asking her his middle name - because an alien wouldn't know that but his real mummy would LOL). It was good seeing Lucy trying to cope with being a mother of two when she has no experience of children, of trying to run a company when she had only been making teas and doing photocopying the day before.

I also liked the way that Lucy was faced with the dilemma of staying or going back and what each choice would mean - that was clever.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: Come As You Are

Come As You Are by Jess K. Hardy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Ashley is a forty-six year old divorcee with an adult child. She and her mother run a family ski resort for the local community. But they are losing money, not least because her mother invests in whatever takes her fancy, and her slimy ex-husband Chuck runs a rival resort and keeps trying to buy them out.

Her mother's latest scheme is to hire ex-cons from Little Timber Sober Living Home for minimum wage, rather than the college kids they normally hire.

Matthew 'Mad' Madigan was a famous Rockstar back in the day, but he partied too hard and was put in prison for selling heroin. Twenty odd years later he runs the sober living home and looks after the men. It's difficult to find places willing to employ ex-convicts and after the mill closed Ashley's resort is their best hope.

This was pretty enjoyable fluff. In the best traditions of the film White Christmas, Madigan suggests putting on a show to save the resort. Ashley's ex-husband is a snake, there are lots of misunderstandings, but it all comes right in the end.

My only gripe was that Madigan doesn't sound/act like a fifty-three year old man and Ashley doesn't act/sound like a forty-six year old woman. I would say they come across as twenty years younger at least.

This was a Kindle freebie in July 2023 and is also available on the Kindle Unlimited subscription.

View all my reviews

Review: The Daughter of Time: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery

The Daughter of Time: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. This was voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990 and I can see why.

Inspector Alan Grant is in hospital after falling through a trap door. He's bored and so his friend the actress Marta Hallard suggests he uses his detection skills to solve an historical mystery and brings him a number of pictures of famous people's portraits like Lucrezia Borgia and Louis XVII. The Inspector (I just can't bring myself to call him Alan) dismisses all of them until he is struck by one. He doesn't recognise the face, but is struck by the character in the portrait, the air that he is

Someone used to great responsibility , and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist.

Imagine his shock then when he turns over the picture to find that it is Richard III, notorious for having ordered the murder of his two nephews who were staying in the Tower of London. The Inspector shows the picture to all his visitors (medical and personal) and each of them sees something different in the portrait, but none of them suggested that his face suggested the level of cruelty and depravity that would be required to order such a thing.

Reading up on the history of the time, Grant realises that the primary authority for the widely held belief that Richard III had his nephews killed was Sir Thomas More, generally an unimpeachable source, but a man who was only eight years old when Richard III died at the battle of Bosworth field, so his account is based on hearsay - anathema to a policeman! Moreover, every book he reads seems to describe Richard III as being both a loyal, devoted brother, a wise leader, someone who was loved and respected, a peacemaker, someone who forgave his enemies. So how does that reconcile with the man who would order the murder of two of his nephews?

And so, with the help of an amiable American history student, Grant decides to investigate, using contemporaneous historical records, what actually happened to the two princes and how to reconcile the contradictory claims about Richard III's personality.

I must admit I have always found the Plantagenet dynasty and the Wars of the Roses to be an incredibly confusing period, not least because everyone seems to be called Elizabeth or Edmund or Edward or Richard and I was relieved when Inspector Grant said he too had difficulty keeping it straight in his head. At least I had seen the TV series about Henry Tudor (Henry VII) which at least allowed me to think of the actors' faces for certain characters like Elizabeth Woodville.

Anyway, Grant and his history student, Brent Carradine, uncover lots of inconsistencies and reveal a very plausible account of what actually happened to the princes. I have subsequently googled several of the sources mentioned in the book and found that they do exist and will forever be grateful to Inspector Grant for Tonypandyism and the examples given to support his argument.

Please don't be put off by the fact that this is about such a confusing time in English history, or what you know from your schooldays about Richard III, or even by the fact that all the action takes place in Grant's hospital bedroom. It is a fascinating piece of detection and truly deserved all the accolades.

My only gripe is that the Kindle version I read had a number of dreadful mistakes (including spelling Marta incorrectly) which spoilt things, so I returned it and purchased another version (still only 77p). Also I prefer the cover on this version published by Evergreen.

View all my reviews

Review: Murder in Tuscany

Murder in Tuscany by T.A. Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When DCI Daniel Armstrong retired from the Met Police in London his colleagues, as a leaving present bought him a stay at a creative writing course in a villa in Tuscany hosted by author Jonah Moore. It is debatable whether or not they knew that it was for writers of erotica :)

Dan has split from his wife of thirty years, his devotion to his job and inability to switch off in social situations were major factors and his retirement was too little too late. So this course is as much to think out his next steps in life as to learn whether he could take up writing as a second career.

His fellow students are nothing like the perverted men he imagined, instead they are mostly women. Ranging from two mature ladies from Littlehampton, a history professor who wants to write a novel about Roman orgies, a brother and sister from Canada who want to write erotica, and several more novices who want to learn how to write.

Dan can't help but notice that their host, Jonah is a heavy drinking letch, he ogles several of the female guests, even fondles one of them all under the nose of his wife Maria and sister Millicent. Despite the course being touted as being taught by Jonah the actual lessons are given by Millicent and a woman called Serena who has had several novels published. He also notes that there is something suspicious about Will and Rachel the brother and sister from Canada.

When their host is found dead after lunch, stabbed through the heart with a silver dagger he was awarded for one of his novels, almost everyone is a suspect. Apart from Dan who was visiting Commissario Virgilio Pisano, an acquaintance of one Dan's colleagues, delivering a bottle of scotch.

The plot thickens when the pathologist finds that Jonah was not only stabbed; he had also ingested a lethal dose of cyanide, and a non-fatal dose of Oleandrin. Was one person responsible for all three attempts or could the villa house three separate would-be murderers?

I enjoyed this, I have seen other reviews which complain about the way in which Dan objectifies Charlotte with references to her short skirts etc. I didn't get that vibe at all. In fact, I thought T.A. Williams was a woman until I came to write this review. I saw Dan's remarks (internal) as more the awakening of an interest in a woman other than his wife and how he was surprised by suddenly noticing her attractiveness on a personal basis rather than objectively as he would have done when he was married.

I liked this, although the luscious descriptions of the food and countryside dud have me googling the price of cottages in Tuscany and thinking about booking a holiday LOL. Some of the reveals were a little predictable, but others came as a surprise. I will definitely read the next in the series.

Read on my Kindle Unlimited subscription.

View all my reviews

Review: The Recipe for Happiness

The Recipe for Happiness by Jane Lovering
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Seren is a live-in housekeeper and cook at an older person's drop-in centre in a small Yorkshire village. Her brother Andrew and his husband Greg are constantly trying to get Seren to come out of her shell and meet people (men) but she's comfortable with staying close to home, using her culinary skills to cook for the rambunctious guests, even if their palates reject anything remotely different (like adding cheese to mashed potato). The trouble is, Seren never goes anywhere other than shopping in the local shops and visiting Andrew once a week. Truth be told she's scared of getting lost.

Then one day a new employee joins the drop-in centre. Ned is a general handyman, but his eyes suggest a bigger story. Seren worries he could be homeless, or at least living in his car, or maybe he's just been released from prison. Initially prickly towards each other, these two lost souls develop a tentative friendship. But it takes Seren's accidental adoption of an abandoned dog for her to start expanding her horizons.

OMG the angst! Ned had angst, Seren had angst, arguably Andrew had angst. I do get that maybe it takes two broken souls to coax each other into a better life but really did there have to be this much angst?

I genuinely had no idea where this was going. At one point I suspected that Ned was actually the dog in disguise (or vice versa)!

Anyway, I liked it but I didn't love it. I could have done without the recipes and I felt it ended a bit abruptly.

Read on my Kindle Unlimited subscription.

View all my reviews

Review: The Remarkable Rise of Amanda Appleby

The Remarkable Rise of Amanda Appleby by Trish Morey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amanda Appleby thinks she's living her best life. As they celebrate her plastic surgeon husband Rufus' 50th birthday in their forever home which she has totally renovated surrounded by friends and their two children. Then Amanda stumbles across Rufus and the belly dancer she hired as entertainment entertaining themselves in a very adult way on her bed.

Everything she valued crumbled into dust, especially when it turned out Rufus had mortgaged the house to the hilt and sold the London flat to subsidise his share of a loss-making horse-breeding syndicate. Walking out of a marriage after 25 years with only £78,000 to show for it is devastating, luckily Amanda still owns the tiny fisherman's cottage in St Ives that belonged to her parents. Once a holiday home it's now her permanent home.

Having spent 25 years being a homemaker and mother, with just the occasional bit of volunteering at a charity shop Amanda is pessimistic about her chances in the job market, until a boozy night with her next door neighbour watching Fifty Shades Darker gives her the idea of self-publishing a novel on the internet about achieving the highest selling price for a house and downsizing - two things she has just done with some success. Writing tongue-in-cheek, eg talking about throwing out your ex with the rest of the clutter, the book soon becomes a success, Amanda gets an agent and a publishing deal for a second book.

Amanda's new agent is of the shark variety and soon has her appearing on chat shows and being interviewed by women's magazines, but when she finds herself a contestant on a Blind Date-type dating show for the more mature person she realises she and her agent may not be reading from the same agenda. When Amanda refuses to parrot the cheesy lines the scriptwriter has written, instead making it very clear to the audience that she is not interested in dating an insurance salesman from Scotland, the audience loves her and the show gets record ratings. The show decides to capitalise on the success of Amanda's appearance and decide to end the series with a viewers' choice of contestants, but this time they want to ensure that Amanda is chosen to draw viewers in to the second series where they will show the outcome of the date. So they stack the odds and get the grumpy scriptwriter, a frustrated author called Jack, to be the male contestant, on the proviso that he picks Amanda, by bribing him with a three day trip to Santorini as the prize.

Can three nights in Santorini turn enemies into lovers, or at least friends?

Meanwhile, Amanda's agent has signed her up as a blogger for a man-hating website and is pushing hard for her next book to be about revenge, whereas Amanda feels her first book was cathartic enough and can't summon enough venom to suit her agent. Is she just a one-hit wonder and what will Amanda do to further her career.

I really enjoyed this. Its nice to have a fifty-year old MC, even if TBH she could just have easily been thirty or forty years old, no embarrassing hot flushes for her. The story could have gone in several ways, but as befitting more mature MCs there was no histrionic misunderstanding. I will look out for the previous book in this series.

I received an ARC from the publisher Tule in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: To Love and Be Wise: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery

To Love and Be Wise: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery by Josephine Tey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well that didn't go the way I was expecting. After the last book which barely featured Inspector Grant I hoped that this one would feature him a bit more. And it did at first.

Inspector Grant goes to a noisy literary party to meet his friend, the actress Marta Hallard. Whilst there he sees an extraordinarily attractive young man loitering on the outskirts looking a little lost and introduces him to their hostess the author Lavinia Finch as the young man, Leslie Searle, is looking for her nephew Walter Whitmore, a famous radio broadcaster. In the way of the fabulously wealthy, Lavinia invites Leslie to spend the weekend at her country pile in Orfordshire (Oxfordshire?) to meet Walter, since they apparently share a mutual friend. After Lavinia bought her gothic monstrosity she sparked a bit of an exodus such that the small village houses any number of artistic types, including Marta, a dancer, a playwright, and a writer.

Leslie is a famous American photographer, spending half the year photographing celebrities on the West Coast and the rest of the year photographing nature. His presence in the small village acts as a catalyst, despite impeccable manners he seems to be a catalyst, causing dissent and discontent wherever he goes. Despite his growing concern that Leslie is becoming too close to his fiance, Walter agrees to co-author a travel book with Leslie, but partway through their journey Leslie disappears after a spat with Walter in the local pub. Has Leslie left of his own accord? Did he fall into the river on his way home? Was he pushed? Given the delicate nature of the investigations and the celebrities, the local police call in Scotland Yard and Inspector Grant finds himself looking for a missing person. But throughout the investigation Alan can't help but feel like he's being shown a game of smoke and mirrors.

After the first third of the book where Inspector Grant is mainly conspicuous by his absence, although the reader does get treated to motives for all of the key players to want to kill Leslie, once Alan is called in we are treated to his usual methodical investigation with the occasional flash of inspiration (or gut feeling). As I suspected in one of the earlier books, Alan comes from some wealth and has inherited enough to never have to work again, which perhaps explains how he hobnobs with actresses and meets the aristocracy on equal terms.

As with all the previous mysteries, I feel that there are lots of things which the reader doesn't see/hear which help to uncover the truth, very much of the fantastical Sherlock Holmes type of investigation rather than showing the reader all the clues so that they *could* guess the truth.

I think I'm going to give myself a break, a palate cleanser if you will, before starting what has been described as the greatest crime novel of all time - at this moment I remain sceptical.

View all my reviews

Review: The Franchise Affair: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery

The Franchise Affair: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery by Josephine Tey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, what a peculiar novel. How this can be billed as an Inspector Grant mystery when he barely appears in the book and definitely has no hand in solving the mystery I cannot imagine!

Robert Blair is a comfortable forty-year old solicitor in the small town of Milford. He is senior partner in his family's law firm and his life is totally predictable. Until recently he was very happy with his life but just lately he feels a mild concern that this is all there is. Late one afternoon, just as he is about to leave he gets a call from Miss Marion Sharpe, a relative newcomer to Milford, requesting his assistance. Initially believing it to be a traffic summons (something he does not deal with as a general rule), he is intrigued when she tells him that Scotland Yard are accusing her and her widowed mother of imprisoning and beating a fifteen year old girl, trying to force her to become their maid.

The girl, Betty Kane, presents very well, she describes the house and its contents very well and identifies the room she says she was locked in for a month before she managed to escape. Her story is very plausible and she seems a credible child. However, much of her descriptions would fit any large house and the police initially decide not to take any further action. However, Betty's brother is incensed and tells her story to a sensationalist newspaper which then prints pages and pages of accusations against Marion and her mother and the incompetence of the police. The inflammatory article grabs the attention of the public and they start to visit Franchise House in their bus-loads, shouting abuse, and defacing the property. Robert realises that he must discover the truth of where Betty really was for the month she was missing, otherwise Marion and her mother will be hounded for the rest of their lives.

This was a good detective story. However, the amount of vitriol that was spouted about various women in this book was distasteful. There was sneering about a farm labourer's daughter's clothes and her implausibly white teeth. Marion on several occasions tells Robert she wants to punch and generally beat up Betty, indeed there was some comment to the effect that she was someone who should get used to be punched a lot. Bettys mother was similarly portrayed as a monster, Robert's kindly Aunt Lin was painted as a religious dimwit, etc, etc.

Also, it was interesting that some of the quack notions attributed to the Archbishop are now the way we think about things, eg that the Irish were oppressed by the British (there were better examples but I can't think of them now).

As with the previous novels, there is a lot of casual racism, this time about the Irish - but it is of its time.

One other thing, I find it difficult to know precisely when these books are set. I thought the first book was set after WW1 because it was published in 1929 but I suspect the later books may be set after WW2, although Inspector Grant appears not to have aged.

Anyway, I have just started the next book and Inspector Grant is front-and-centre so all is good with the world.

View all my reviews

Review: Talk to Me

Talk to Me by Jules Wake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Olivia has been in love with her friend Daniel for years, just when she thinks they might finally be getting together he ends up with her gorgeous flatmate and work colleague Emily. Emily is beautiful and very high maintenance, and she may have told Daniel a teensy little fib about Olivia seeing a married man - it's a hot button for Daniel as his mother had an affair so he is totally disgusted that Olivia could do something like that.

Although Olivia and Emily work for the same advertising and marketing company their jobs couldn't be more different. Predictably Emily works in the fashion and make-up section while Olivia works in the construction team, spending most of her days slogging round construction sites talking to beefy guys in Hi-Vis jackets.

Olivia's family are convinced that she is still pining for her scummy ex and won't listen when they say she's over him (because obviously she can't tell them that she's pining for Daniel who knows her family really well), so they guilt her into going on a speed-dating evening organised by a cousin. When Emily gets wind of the speed dating event, which is taking place in a swanky hotel, she invites herself along and, despite dating Daniel ticks three boxes for guys she's like to see again.

As others have said, as a romantic comedy this works really well, but introducing a stalker (one of the rejected speed-daters) into the mix threw the balance of the novel off and it didn't seem to know whether it was a rom-com or a thriller.

Read on my Kindle Unlimited subscription.

View all my reviews

Review: Warrior's Hope

Warrior's Hope by Rebecca Zanetti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hope Kayrs-Kyllwood is an anomaly, the only known female vampire she can visit dream worlds but can't heal herself and is no stronger than a human. She is the Lock in the prophecy of how to kill the immortal evil Ulric, along with the blood of the three Keys and The Seven. Now all grown up, she is the strategic leader of a small group of Realm warriors rescuing Enhanced women before they can be kidnapped by the Kurjans.

There has been a love triangle practically all of Hope's life between her best friend, half-demon Paxton and the heir, now leader, of the Kurjans, Drake. Hope believes her fate is to bring peace between the Kurjans and the Realm with the help of her childhood friend Drake.

And so it ends, after sixteen novels did Rebecca Zanetti deliver the goods, or like so many others did the series end with more of a whimper? Let me put you out of your misery, it was spectacular! There are epic battles, betrayals, many, many betrayals, surprises and a deeply satisfying resolution of the Ulric problem.

LOVED it.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: The Love I Could Have Had

The Love I Could Have Had by C.J. Connolly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Olivia should be the happiest woman in the world. She's engaged to her childhood sweetheart and best friend Jake. She has her own interior design business and has just totally transformed their little fixer-upper into a palace. They are getting married in just a few months' time, in a wedding that she has perfectly planned. Jake is so thoughtful, but she just feels a bit anxious, they've never even kissed someone else how can they be sure that they should be together? Also Jake is so thoughtful and always buys her her favourite white roses, but sometimes it would be nice to get some other flowers. Also Jake left town to go to law school and now he's ready to settle down and start a family, but Liv has never left her hometown, she'd like to travel the world for a few years before she thinks about kids (mind you how she thinks she can travel the world and run her own business I don't know).

They are having a picnic at their special place, a lake in an abandoned quarry that no-one ever visits. Liv walks off while Jake packs up the picnic, both of them naked as jaybirds, when Liv slips and falls off the edge of the quarry, but instead of being dashed on the rocks below, or miraculously falling into the lake, Liv ends up in an alternate universe where she died at that same quarry when she was twelve years old, in her reality Jake saved her, but in this reality he couldn't.

No-one believes she is Olivia, her grieving parents and sister think she's a confidence trickster who has stolen a dead child's identity, even when the DNA tests prove she is their daughter her father still finds it hard to believe.

Meanwhile Jake is going frantic trying to find Liv who has just vanished into thin air. The police search the woods and drag the lake but can find no trace of her. Where could she have gone with no phone, no clothes, and no money? Suspicion inevitably falls on Jake, did she run away because she didn't want to get married? Or did they have an argument?

The book alternates between Olivia in her new reality, a woman with no social security number, unable to tell people who she is, unable to get a job, or a mortgage, forced to live in her parents' pool house and be treated like a child, and Jake desperately searching for her in his reality.

This was an interesting take on the alternate reality switch, really brought it home that without basics like a birth certificate and social security number you really are nobody in modern society. forced to work cash-in-hand illegally. However, my overwhelming feeling when I finished this book was, what was the point? The blurb bills it as a chance for Liv to do all the things she couldn't do in her other life, but that was negated by the fact that she couldn't tell people who she was or get a job or live alone because she had no papers, so she didn't have a chance to live a different life. Also, she was still in love with Jake so how could she truly explore a life where she didn't love him?

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: 10 Things That Never Happened

10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Four and a half stars.

Sam Becker is the manager of a bed and bath showroom in Sheffield, one of four owned by Jonathan Forest. Sam is a good boss to the bunch of misfits who work there, but he's not such a great store manager; they are over-budget and missing their sales targets. When he's called down to the Croydon head office and store by Jonathan he's told to shape up, fire the most unproductive staff, and cut costs, or he'll be fired. Long story short, things get a bit heated between Sam and Jonathan, Jonathan screams that Sam is fired and so are all the staff of his store, and Sam ends up falling through a Nexa by MERLYN 8mm sliding door shower enclosure, cutting his head and getting a concussion.

When Sam first comes around he is a bit disorientated, so when the doctor asks what he can remember he says he can't quite remember. Then when Jonathan arrives and starts being nice, Sam goes to say 'Who are you, and what have you done with Jonathan Forest' but only gets the first bit out before Jonathan thinks he's got amnesia. Sam decides to play along, firstly because its funny, and secondly because he hopes temporary amnesia will mean he and the other staff from the Sheffield store aren't fired. Later Sam also thinks that if Jonathan gets to know him better, he might see that a less dictatorial leadership style would work better.

With no-one to look after Sam, Jonathan agrees to look after him for a couple of weeks, until the amnesia clears up and the doctor gives the all-clear on the concussion. Sam may have been a teensy bit influenced by that rom-com classic Overboard starring Goldie Hawn :).

Jonathan lives in a palatial home, but he's all alone and doesn't seem to have friends (or a boyfriend), he doesn't cook, or have a hobby, all he does is work 24/7. But stuck at home watching Pointless all day long is driving Sam around the bend, so he offers to cook dinner. The next thing you know, Sam is brokering peace between Jonathan and his extremely voluble family (parents, grandparents, aunts, cousins, sister etc) over why Jonathan won't host the family Christmas in his five bedroom, three reception room, mansion. Oh and he's also offered to arrange the works Christmas party.

This is Alexis Hall at their best, its not just the cover that's reminiscent of Boyfriend Material, its also that light-hearted fun, frothy writing that just seems effortless. I'm not sure where the title comes from - but who cares. My only quibble was that Alexis says that they wrote Sam as a Scouser, but all I heard in my head was Newcastle, although TBH I'm pretty useless at accents.

Anyway, a lovely, lovely holiday romance, featuring far more toilet seats than I would normally expect in a romance, an amnesia prank that gets out of hand, and a crabby boss with a soft heart.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: A Shilling for Candles: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery

A Shilling for Candles: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery by Josephine Tey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Christine Clay, a famous actress/singer is found drowned after swimming in the sea early one morning. At first it is thought a tragic accident, until the button from a man's overcoat is found tangled in her hair, and her fingernails are broken from (presumably) having fought off her murderer. There's a plethora of suspects: her husband; her boyfriend who has written several songs for her; the young man who was staying with her in a friend's cottage; her leading man; her closest rival, the list goes on.

Inspector Grant's chief suspect is Robert Tisdall, the young man who was staying with Chris at the time of her death. His explanation for why he came to be staying with her, his reasons for driving off in her car, and his explanation for the loss of his coat are all extremely flimsy, but Grant believes him ... until a codicil to Chris' will emerges giving Tisdall a very large motive!

This is unusual in that there are chunks of the book where Grant doesn't feature at all. Instead we follow the charming Erica Burgoyne, daughter of the local police superintendent, who is extremely clever and observant, although of course most people just class her as a tomboy, and then the tabloid journalist Jammy Hopkins who has his own views on the potential murderer and (of course) what the police are doing wrong.

I found the first book a bit disappointing(view spoiler)[ because frankly there were no clues as to the murderer's identity and Grant would not have uncovered their identity/motive if they hadn't confessed to save an innocent from being wrongly prosecuted (hide spoiler)]. No such disappointment with this novel. Although I had no clue as to the murderer's identity, and Josephine Tey did a good job of throwing lots of potential suspects into the mix, the motive and the means for the murder were all there and the character was present throughout the book. However, discovery of the potential murderer's identity was only achieved by Grant happening to read a six-month old article about Chris at the barber's (don't think too hard about why a barber's shop would have a Hollywood stars magazine) which just happened to have the clue to unlock the case.

Am I a hopeless romantic to see a romance blossoming between Erica and Grant later on? Or is it just that she has a crush? I do hope we see her again.

View all my reviews

Review: The Man in the Queue

The Man in the Queue by Gordon Daviot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have tried and failed to read Nicola Upton's first Josephine Tey novel, finding the language stilted and not being engaged by the story. As I saw yet another Nicola Upton book available as an ARC on NetGalley I was surprised to find that Josephine Tey was herself a novelist in real life and the Upton books are an homage. Without further ado, I googled the books and for the princely sum of 77p purchased the first book in the series (I think I could have bought the entire collected works for 99p, but I like to write individual reviews and I hate having an unfinished book).

A man is murdered in a queue waiting to see the final London performance of the musical comedy Didn't You Know?, stabbed in the back with a small silver dagger. No-one saw the murder, and there is nothing to identify the victim. Enter Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard, his origins are as yet a mystery although we find out that he is of medium height, slight in build and dapper, but not like a tailor's dummy. Later on I felt there were some hints that he may have aristocratic ancestry given that possessed ancient tweeds and fishing rods (although that may also have been common for the middle classes, I don't know) and his initial expectation of looking down on a stockbroker he meets in Scotland.

I love the idea that in the 1920s a shop assistant would recall who he sold a box of ties to three weeks ago, or that a railway porter would be able to describe all the people who boarded a train - how times have changed.

I have to confess I was completely wrong about the identity of the murderer.

Warning, this book is of its time and therefore there is some casual racism/the British belief that they were superior to the rest of the world. Nothing truly awful but a few throwaway comments like

... the foreigner's rat-like preference of the sewers to the open

and the 48 instances where she refers to a character as "the Levantine", even after Grant knows his name.

Having said that, I did enjoy this novel and I am debating whether to buy each Kindle edition individually since they are mostly only 77p and have lush covers or splash out £1.99 on the Delphi complete works.

View all my reviews

Review: Say You’ll Be My Jaan

Say You’ll Be My Jaan by Naina Kumar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Meghna is a modern Indian woman, she dates, she is a primary school teacher in Dallas and a frustrated playwright. Her parents and older brother are all engineers and she feels that her parents don't recognise her job as being as important as an engineer. When her mother offers to introduce her to a suitable Indian boy she is unsurprised when he turns out to be an engineer, after all if your daughter won't be an engineer she could at least marry one. Reeling from the news that her one-time boyfriend Seth, AKA the one that got away, is getting married, Meghna agrees to meet the guy.

Karthik is an HVAC engineer in New York. His parents' dysfunctional marriage has put him off the institution, also he sees far too much of his dismissive, angry, aggressive father in himself - if he's turning into his father he couldn't inflict that on a woman. As it is, Karthik spends much of his time trying to make up for his father's coldness and anger to his mother. So despite his decision to never marry, when his mother asks him to meet some nice Indian girls he can't say no - but he does insist on limiting the time to one year. Little did he know how many women his mother could introduce him to in a single week.

By the time they meet, Karthik has been on numerous of these arranged meetings but this is Meghna's first. She finds him cold and robotic, but he is mesmerised by her beauty and her laugh, and her smile. Although he intends to make an excuse for not seeing Meghna again, just like all the other girls, when his father makes a disparaging comment at family dinner Karthik finds himself saying that he is going to ask Meghna to marry him!

Meghna and Karthik strike up a deal. They will be fake engaged to friends, colleagues, and family for three months until after Seth's wedding where she has been persuaded to be the Best Man. That will release Karthik from the relentless introductions which are dominating his weekends, and have the side effect of making him appear more committed for a promotion at his firm.

As family and wedding events force the two of them to appear engaged on multiple occasions Meghna begins to see the real man behind the stilted, closed-off facade and realises that Karthik is 100% supportive of her. Meghna also starts to see that her deep friendship with Seth may be a bit one-sided with her giving all the time and Seth doing the taking.

I really liked this, I thought Karthik's fears were well articulated and his actions were in accordance with those fears, ie even when he felt like he might be falling in love with Meghna he was afraid of losing his temper and hurting her so wouldn't take it further. I also like Meghna's character and that she wasn't the scapegoat/the one who had to change.

My only minor criticism is that Meghna and Karthik were very Westernised Indians, TBH it felt like the only reason they were Indians was to introduce the idea of parents choosing their partners. It feels like a silly criticism but I wanted them to be a bit more Indian, rather than characters who could be white Americans if you removed the arranged marriage part?

Anyway, a lovely opposites attract, fake-relationship, romance.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: Baby Does A Runner: The debut novel from Anita Rani

Baby Does A Runner: The debut novel from Anita Rani by Anita Rani
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Baby Saul is a successful modern Indian woman, with a good job and her own apartment in Manchester. However, she seems to have hit a glass ceiling at work and the death of her beloved father has knocked her sideways. When she finds a bundle of love letters addressed to her deceased grandfather from a hitherto unknown first wife, Baby is determined to get to the bottom of this family secret by going to India and discovering what happened to change the loving man described in the letters into the angry alcoholic she recalls.

Baby hasn't been to India since she was a child and holds many common misconceptions about her ancestral homeland, a fact that her auntie's neighbour Sid takes great pleasure in disabusing, accusing her of undertaking some kind of Eat, Pray, Love journey and mocking her for her assumptions about how backward India would be compared to London.

Despite their mutual antipathy, when he hears that Baby intends to travel to Amritsar alone, Sid offers to accompany her. As an avid historian, Sid is fascinated by the letters which were written in the mid-1940s, the time of Partition and can't wait to show(off) Baby the real India as well as his own knowledge of India throwing off British rule. As Baby learns more about the history of India, and the horror of Partition in 1947, she feels as though a previously stunted part of her has been given room to grow.

I wanted to like this, but I really struggled to understand where Anita Rani was going with this. The romance is fairly weak, enemies-to-love, forced proximity, mixed with a smidge of instalurve. It didn't help that I found Sid to be an obnoxious know-it-all he liked nothing more than to lecture Baby - from the very first moment they met he was telling her she was wrong - who needs a substitute-Daddy? Yes, Baby didn't know much about the British rule of India, but that could be said about the British rule of Kenya, or Barbados - by and large British children aren't taught about the atrocities and oppression of British colonisation of any countries and Baby's family were keen to avoid discussion of the past, they believed moving to the UK had wiped the slate clean and it was a new start for all. Then when Baby learns about the horrors of Partition, it is almost as a throwaway line in a voicemail to her BFF at home in the UK, if Anita Rani wanted to educate her readers about Partition then maybe the novel should have been structured differently? Sid also seemed remarkably silent about the atrocities that former neighbours visited upon each other during partition, or blamed the violence, murders, rapes, etc on the British for drawing an arbitrary line across India to form Pakistan - when the reason for partition was because the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in India could not agree on how an independent India would be run and violence was already escalating in many Indian cities. Now I'm obviously British, so maybe I'm leaning too heavily in favour of my own country.

Anyway, it wasn't really a romance, it didn't really go into any depth about Partition (maybe if she ditched the romance and made it all about tracing what happened to Baby's grandfather's first wife and two children through Partition), it was a little bit Eat, Pray, Love in the way Baby 'found herself' travelling around a foreign country where she barely spoke the language, just because her grandparents and mother were born there. TBH it felt a bit like when Americans claim they are Irish because their great-great grandparents were Irish (and I know I few English people who do the same). Maybe worst of all, most of the book felt like we were being told things rather than seeing them. Even the exhaustive lists of food at every meal felt like it was being rammed down the reader's throat.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: Just Another Missing Person

Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Four and a half stars.

I absolutely loved Wrong Place Wrong Time when I read it last year. I honestly read it and then boom a section would end, the story would change and I would say (Out loud) WTAF? I didn't see any of it coming and I was blown away by the way such a bizarre concept could create such a tense mystery. So long story short, when I saw this available as an ARC I requested it immediately.

Julia is a dedicated DCI. Her only regret is that an incident that happened a year ago with her daughter prevented her from investigating the disappearance of a young woman, Sadie, who was never found.

Now a second young woman has disappeared a year later and Julia vows to do everything in her power to find her, dead or alive. But there are lots of oddities about Olivia's death, not least that she was seen entering a dead-end alleyway and never left. Olivia had recently changed her phone, her job, and moved into a new flatshare - are any of these things connected to her disappearance? Even her social media posts seem off.

Then a masked man breaks into Julia's car and tells her he has evidence of what happened a year ago, evidence that would end Julia's career and put her daughter in prison. He will expose Julia unless she plants evidence to incriminate a man and get him arrested for Olivia's murder.

Now Julia has to go against all her instincts in order to protect her daughter, while still searching for Olivia.

This was plenty twisty and turny, although I don't think it quite reaches the heights of the previous novel, also I sort of guessed part of it, although I also got it wrong - so maybe the truth is that I spotted that something might be important and part of the mystery.

Anyway, loved it, read it in a single day and couldn't put it down.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: Escape to Starshine Cove

Escape to Starshine Cove by Debbie Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

When Ella Farrell finds her boyfriend in bed (at least it was their spare bedroom) with his twenty-year old PA she realises she feels nothing but relief. She packs a few belongings, takes a leave of absence from her job as a locum and takes her boyfriend's car on a trip to rediscover her youth.

Unfortunately, in peak Summer her four partners in crime are either on holiday or have moved away, leaving Ella to drift aimlessly along the south coast of England until her boyfriend's swanky German car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

Searching for a garage, or at least a phone signal, Ella stumbles across a stray dog and then a village so picturesque that she thinks it must be a hallucination. The kind but eccentric villagers organise for a garage to tow her car, feed her, and give her a room in the local pub/hotel for the night. The village of Starshine Cove has somehow escaped being on any maps, adding to its Brigadoon qualities.

At first Ella is keen to leave Starshine Cove as soon as possible, but when she realises she is choosing sleeping in her car in the car park of a motorway services hotel over a beautiful room in a charming village she sees the error of her ways. But can Ella stop running from herself long enough to find a home?

This is typical Debbie Johnson, small village, quirky characters, beautiful scenery and a charming romance.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: The Weekend Trip

The Weekend Trip by Joanna Bolouri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Five flatmates are leaving Dublin University, they spend the weekend at Erin's beachside house that she inherited from her grandparents. They make wishes and promise to be friends forever.

Ten years later, Erin is a successful actress and widow, she's determined to sell the house but wants one last party with her old college friends so she invites them, and partners for a final weekend.

Alex is a best-selling author. Tara is a recovering drug addict, Becky is a successful massage therapist, and Beth is a teacher with MS. And the other halves? TROUBLE. Each of them comes to the weekend with secrets they want to hide, not least Alex who met Tara's new boyfriend on the flight over and made an instant connection.

Can you ever resurrect old friendships? Have the friends move on? Can you be friends when you hide the truth about your life from them?

I really enjoyed this, as we all get older we do leave friends behind, not intentionally and it can be hard to reconnect but these women push past that and find some deeper truth.

Recommended for anyone who thinks everyone else has it all together.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: Love on the Brain

Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I get it, I really do, Ali Hazelwood is a bit of a one-trick pony. Thing is, when she does it well I like to read it.

Bee is a neuroscientist, demeaned and belittled by her male colleagues and bosses. Then she is selected to co-lead a NASA project to create helmets for astronauts which enhance their cognitive skills. She's overjoyed at the opportunity, until she discovers that her co-lead is Levi Ward, someone she knew from college who has always had the utmost distain for her, even refusing to participate in experiments where she was involved.

Then when Bee and her assistant arrive at NASA they find that none of their equipment has been ordered and all of Bee's emails to Levi go unanswered. With her career and reputation on the line what can Bee do?

So, because its Ali Hazelwood obviously Levi has been madly in love with Bee since he met her; he's six foot four and she's five foot; there's a ridiculous number of misunderstandings which could easily have been resolved if one of them had said more than "I don't hate you ..." and then lapsed into silence. Also, Bee has an obsession with Marie Curie which means we get treated to more stories about her life than is strictly necessary (or interesting). However, the story was fun, I like Levi and Bee and the plot moved along at a brisk pace.

View all my reviews

Review: The Last Train Home

The Last Train Home by Elle Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 2005 two tipsy people are chatting on the late night tube in London, then the unthinkable happens, the train derails and many are injured. Tom, an investment analyst for a merchant bank in the City helps Abbie, a retail journalist, off the train and to safety.

What happened that night creates a bond between the two of them, a friendship turned star-crossed lovers as they discover they have so much in common - even working in office buildings opposite each other. But every time they get close something happens to tear them apart. Are they fated to be together or is this a case of never to be?

I loved this. I loved a trip down memory lane to the recent past, memories of the London bombings (ONG I remember that so clearly), London winning the bid for the Olympics, the financial crash, all brought to life as Abbie and Tom's lives swirl around intersecting only to twirl away again.

It sort of reminded me of the film Sliding Doors, even though there wasn't that much in common, maybe that vibe of coulda, shoulda, woulda, or perhaps more prosaically it is that Abbie only just caught that tube, a few seconds later and she would have missed it and never met Tom that night.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews

Review: The Boyfriend Candidate

The Boyfriend Candidate by Ashley Winstead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Alexis Stone is a librarian. After her boyfriend cheats on her and accuses her of being boring in bed she determines to prove him wrong by having a one-night stand, her first. Little does she know that the guy she almost has a one-night stand with, saved by the fire alarm at the hotel where they were about to hook up, is actually Logan Arthur, a half-British hotshot running for Texas governor against the incumbent Republican candidate. Logan has been trying to clean up his act after being accused of being more serious about chasing women than politics so when a photo of him carrying Alexis out of the hotel goes viral his campaign asks her to be his fake girlfriend. After all, Alexis' big sister Lee is a State Senator so they could have met through her, and being a librarian is a worthy occupation.

Soon Alexis is being taken to exclusive bougie hair salons and being bought fancy clothes (all very Pretty Woman which both Logan and Alexis acknowledge). I was really enjoying this. But then Alexi went from some sort of cardigan-wearing, only has friends over sixty, mouse-like woman into a woman that all the men have been in love with, and all the women find fascinating. It felt like Alexis' back story had served a purpose and it had been abruptly jettisoned.

Also, as a British person, it pains me to hear Spurs ever described as the Hotspurs, its Tottenham, Tottenham Hotspurs, or Spurs. Also there's a reference to Logan's Britishness which talks about him always eating fish and chips and brisket - I'm fifty-six years old and I don't know what brisket is, we'd just say roast beef.

Anyway, rant over. Alexis is sweet, she definitely finds her voice during Logan's campaign. Also she and Logan keep committing each other to campaign activities like being the keynote speaker at a rally, or making a commercial for Alexis' mother's animal sanctuary. It's pretty clear right from the start that Logan is completely smitten but Alexis just thinks he's a really good actor :)

It's a political, meet-cute rom-com.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews