This has been a week of mostly communcal reading. We’ve been travelling and have had family staying, so we’ve been listening to audiobooks together. Now I’m ready to settle back into a routine and pull out some books from my TBR that I’ve been neglecting. So here’s what’s been happening this week and what’s up next.
This has been a good reading week. I’ve read two new releases that were five-star reads and found a new (to me anyway) Urban Fantasy series to follow. The only disappointment of the week was a crime novel that was so poor it’s finally convinced me to give up on the series.
‘Shadow’s Messenger’ (2016) is the first book in an seven-book series by T. A. White, featuring twenty-eight-year-old Aileen Travers who was turned into a vampire against her will two years ago when she returned from Afghanistan. Now she’s trying to make a life for herself in the supernatural world that goes unseen by most of the people living in Columbus, Ohio. She works as a messenger for a courier service that deals exclusively with supernaturals, while trying to stay off the radar of the vampires (who would try to force her to join a clan and serve a century-long apprenticeship) and hiding her fanged state from her family.
T. A. White dropped Aileen into the middle of mystery that had her out of her depth, more or less constantly under threat and forced her to work closely with vampires, witches, werewolves, and sorcerers, none of whom trusted each other and all of whom tried to take advantage of Aileen’s ignorance of how the supernatural world works. To find a way to survive and remain free. Aileen has to discover who or what has been killing supernaturals of all kinds and find a way to stop the violence.
There was lots of intense action, engaging world-building, and a decent mystery but what I liked best was how Aileen dealt with the powerful people she kept being kidnapped by or attacked by or threatened by. She was marvellously unimpressed by patriarchal structures. She used humour to undermine the self-importance of her would-be overlords and she used her wits to figure out what was going on and how she could survive it.
‘Beautiful Ugly’ (2025) was my first Alice Feeney and it was astonishingly good. Given that it was about a recently widowed thriller writer retreating to a remote, barely inhabited island, I’d expected a sort of bookish domestic psychological thriller. To my surprise, the book has quite a spooky, menacing atmosphere from the start, more like a slow burn horror novel than a domestic mystery. I was drawn in immediately, both by Alice Feeney’s excellent writing and by the perfectly pitched narration of Richard Armitage and Tuppence Middleton.
For much of the book I had no idea where the story was going but I knew that I absolutely had to find out. I loved how hard it was to tell truth from lies, deception from delusion and paranoia from necessary caution.
The ending left my head spinning, it was so suprising and so perfect. This was a five-star read with great storytelling, great narration, great suspense, and a clever, satisfying conclusion.
‘Three Day In June‘ (2025) was Anne Tyler at her best. I recommend the audiobook. It’s four hours and twnety-four minute long and we listened to it in a single sitting. J. Smith Cameron’s narration made the prose shine. Her tone was a perfect match for the personality of Gail Baines, the main character: slightly dry, sometimes judgemental, sometimes funny, always trying to be honest with herself about how her day was going.
In the space of a few hours, Anne Tyler crafted an intimate portrait of a woman in her sixites, facing difficult changes in her life, reflecting on her past and considering her future, all while coping with the stresses of preparing for and attending her only daughter’s wedding.
There was no drama here. No dead bodies. No gaslighting. No evil villains. Just real people with real lives trying to do the best they can. It was wonderful.
‘Murder At Land’s End‘ (2024) was a one-star read that helped me decide that I’m done with this series.
The writing in this book had all the same faults as in ‘The Lost Girl’s Of Penzance‘ and ‘The Hidden Graves Of St. Ives‘ but this time, the writing wasn’t redeemed by a decent plot.
The mystery had an interesting start but fizzeled out halfway through. The final solution was plodding and unconvincing. What kind of murderer goes to the trouble of staging a scene and leaving false trails for the police only to confess as soon as they’re put under a little pressure?
The way the investigation was conducted lacked any credibility. Finding the source of a quote *For men must work and women must weep“, a key clue in the case, took my search engine a few seconds. It took the police a couple of days.
I found Lauren’s earnestness, combined with her naivety, annoying. How did she ever get promoted to DI?
The side plot relating to the Lauren’s family was even more of a damp squib than the main plot and ended the book with a confrontation that simply didn’t work.
I bought four books this week, one continuing an Urban Fantasy series, one a newly released thriller, one a Welsh murder mystery that I stumbed across and one a debut novel that seems to be a nightmare come to life.
Aileen has a few rules for her life. Do her job and go home safe. Keep the supernatural world away from her human family. Stay off the vampire radar. And, above all, don’t get involved in spook politics.
But when Liam comes back into town bringing a mystery that threatens the life she’s built, she finds every closely guarded rule flying out the window as she sinks ever deeper into the supernatural world.
Ultimately, it may be the people she loves the most who pay the price in the high-stakes game that vampires call life.
I bought ‘Midnight’s Emissary‘ as soon as I finished ‘Shadow’s Messenger‘, the first book in the Aileen Travers series. I like Aileen, I’m intrgued by the supernatural world she’s trying to find a place in and I’m looking forward to seeing the trouble she’ll get into next and how she’ll cope with it.
Poe Webb, host of a popular true crime podcast, invites people to anonymously confess crimes they’ve committed to her audience. She can’t guarantee the police won’t come after her “guests,” but her show grants simultaneous anonymity and instant fame—a potent combination that’s proven difficult to resist. After an episode recording, Poe usually erases both criminal and crime from her mind.
But when a strange and oddly familiar man appears on her show, Poe is forced to take a second look. Not only because he claims to be her mother’s murderer from years ago, but because Poe knows something no one else does. Her mother’s murderer is dead.
Poe killed him.
This is a roll of the dice, as I’ve never read Carter Wilson before. Normally, I’m not a fan of books with a True Crime podcast setting but the twist putting the podcaster on the spot appeals to me. The audiobook sample sealed the deal. I think this is a story that will work well with two narrators.
Greta Pugh is dead.
The small village of Bethesda, Wales, is no stranger to tragedy. Once a thriving, prosperous community, the town has been marred by an ever-deepening class divide. But now, with rich and popular Greta Pugh found murdered in the local quarry, everyone in Bethesda is rattled, and all their secrets are at risk.
No one is more aware of this than Greta’s friends, especially Shane, a classmate and the son of the Pughs’ cleaner. Everyone knows more than they’re letting on, but when the police and the media descend with all their probing questions, there’s soon nowhere left to hide the answers.
As Shane watches the investigation unfold, he grapples with everything he knows about the Pugh family and all he’s learning about the people around them. Each revelation brings the town a step closer to the truth of who killed Greta…but only one person may truly know why.
I stumbled across this when it was reviewed on GoodReads. It caught my eye because it’s a small town drama set in Wales. I see lots of mystery books set in Ireland and Scotland but almost none set in Wales. I don’t understand that. Where are all the Welsh mystery writers?
Anyway, I’ve found Manon Steffan Ros, so she can be my starting point. Manon Steffan Ros writes her novels in Welsh and sometimes translates them into English. As far as I can tell, ‘Greta’ (2024) is her translation of her novel ‘Llechi‘ (2020). The Welsh title mean ‘Slate‘ and the main character is called Gwenno Evans not Greta Pugh but the story seems to be the same.
Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. Then she hears a noise – old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs…
In that split second, she has three choices.
Should she hide? Should she run? Or should she fight?
.’Nightwatching‘ (2024) is Tracy Sierra‘s debut novel. What appealed to me from the reviews I’ve read was the nightmarish quality of the novel. I’m hoping for something dark, tense and frighteningly real.
This week, I’ve pulled three books from my TBR pile: an historical fiction mystery that made a lot of noise in 2024, the first book in a Nordic Noir series that came out fifteen years ago and has since been made into a TV series and the second book in a YA Vampire-with-a-twist series that I started last year.
Sixteen-year-old Roger has vanished. Days pass and Västerås Police do nothing, blaming his disappearance on teenage antics. Then Roger’s pale, mutilated body is found floating in a shallow marshland pool, his heart missing, and the experts descend.
They need Sebastian Bergman: widower, psychologist, top criminal profiler and one of Sweden’s foremost experts on serial killers. Since losing his wife and child Sebastian has become numb to the outside world and has no interest in taking on the murder case – until he is blindsided by a secret from his past. Desperate for access to confidential police files, he agrees to join the investigation and it’s not long until the brittle web of lies and deception seizes his full attention…
I read Hans Rosenfeldt’s ‘Cry Wolf‘ back in 2022 and had a lot of fun with it. It was the first book in a new series but there’s no sign of the second book yet so I went looking for his back catalogue. I found ‘Sebastian Bergman‘ 2010 a.k.a ‘Dark Secrets’, the first book in a four book series which he co-wrote with Michael Hjorth. It’s since been turned into a TV series. I’m hoping for a good Nordic Noir series to follow.
Washington, D.C., 1950
Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades.
But when the mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours – a poised English beauty, a policeman’s daughter, a frustrated female baseball star, and a rabidly pro-McCarthy typist – into an unlikely friendship.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their troubled lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. And when a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
‘The Briar Club‘ (2024) was one of my wife’s favourite books of 2024, which is recommendation enough for me. I hoping for the combination of a decent mystery with a period setting and a subversive feminist twist. The premise is clever and the characters are diverse so this should be fun.
In the far Alaskan north, there are places the winter sun cannot reach. Places where light won’t shine for months. These are the places we hunt the monsters who feed on fear.
So begins the Killing Season.
For the next 65 days, we will face the darkness. Some will hunt the aswangs in the ever-night, but I, Ollie Andrews, am here for one purpose: to search for answers to my past.
They told us to fear the arctic tundra and the monsters hiding in the deep, dark shadows. But, locked inside a base known for driving even the best hunters mad, I fear it’s not the outside we should worry about, but the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves.
The real monsters are within.
When a brutal murder brings with it the secrets of Fear University – and the threat of an unknown killer on the loose – we all must fight to stay alive. But with madness and paranoia setting in during a whiteout snowstorm, all we can do is hope we don’t destroy ourselves before the sun finally rises again. Because no matter how hard we fight, reality will always threaten to tear us apart.
And when faced with the most terrible of truths, even the strongest break.
I finally got around to reading ‘Fear University‘ last year, after it had sat on my shelves since 2018. It turned out to be an engaging and original Urban Fantasy series, centere around Ollie Andrews, a young woman who can’t feel pain. Ollie carries more scars than most Urban Fantasy heroines and she trusts no one. ‘Fear University‘ was a compelling mix of intrigue, violence, hormones, haunted pasts and relentless tension. ‘The Killing Season‘ raises the stakes, taking the Ollie north, into the dark and the cold, to face creatures who feed off fear. I’m looking forward to an intense romp with a few twists along the way.
Mike Finn's Fiction 