This has been a great reading week. It was nice to spend some time reading a physical book (a large print version from my local public library). I’ve also started planning for Halloween Bingo, which will drive my reading in September and October. And I have a couple of exciting books set up for next week.

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This week, I’ve had one five-star and three four-star reads as well as one book that I set aside. One was a police procedural, inspired by the Long Island murders. One was an escapist fantasy about a woman in her seventies going after the people who scammed her. One was a grim but hopeful novella about a possible near-future San Francisco. One was me returning to a cosy Urban Fantasy series. The only diappointing one was an historical fiction mystery/ghost story.

When a young woman makes a distressing middle-of-the-night call to 911, apparently running for her life in a quiet, exclusive beachside neighbourhood, miles from her home, everything suggests a domestic incident.
Except no one has seen her since, and something doesn’t sit right with the officers at Hampstead County PD. With multiple suspects and witnesses throwing up startling inconsistencies, and interference from the top threatening the integrity of the investigation, lead detective Casey Wray is thrust into an increasingly puzzling case that looks like it’s going to have only one ending…
And then the first body appears…

Rod Reynolds was a new author to me. I found his books in my local Public Library and thought I’d give them a try. He’s a British author who sets his crime stories in the US. ‘Black Reed Bay‘ (2021) is the first book in his latest series.

This was a very engaging novel. The mystery was solid. The police officers and the people whom they interviewed all felt real. The writing was skillfully simple, avoiding melodrama and clichés, making every word count. The pacing was perfect. Pushing me forward and raising the tension continuously. I believed in Casey Wray, the main character, and was absorbed in how she saw the world. 

I’ll be going back to my library for the next Casey Wray book, ‘Shatter Creek‘ (2025).

Mrs. Loretta Plansky, a widow in her seventies, is settling into retirement in Florida while dealing with her 98-year-old father and fielding requests for money from her beloved children and grandchildren. Thankfully, her new hip hasn’t changed her killer tennis game one bit.
One night Mrs. Plansky is startled awake by a phone call from a voice claiming to be her grandson Will, who needs ten thousand dollars to get out of a jam.
By morning, Mrs Plansky has lost everything. Law enforcement announces that Loretta’s life savings have vanished, and that it’s hopeless to find the scammers behind the heist. First humiliated, then furious, Loretta Plansky refuses to be just another victim.

‘Mrs Plansky’s Revenge’ (2023) was a wonderful read. It was one of those rare books that I really did find uplifting. The plot requires some suspension of disbelief (or at least of the jaded, cynical way I normally regard the world), but I completely believed in Mrs Plansky. She’s a wonderful creation: determined, clever, self-deprecating and… nice. But not so nice that she’ll let you get away with cheating her.

I think Spence Quinn has hit gold with this. I’m glad to see that the next book, ‘Mrs Plansky Goes Rogue’ (2025) will be available as an audiobook next month.

You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food—the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around—for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war.
But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis. To keep their doors open, they’ll have to call on their customers, their community, and each other—and find a way to survive and thrive in a world that wasn’t built for them.

‘Automatic Noodle‘ (2025) is a remarkable speculative fiction novella. It’s original, engaging, thought-provoking and hopeful. I think it makes a particularly poignant read given the current attempt by Project 2025 to dismantle democracy in America.

I read it in a single sitting, not just because it’s short but because it’s compelling, relevant and well-written.

I recommend the audiobook. Em Grosland’s narration made the novella even more engaging.

My review is HERE

Suspicious deaths on the Skipton city council don’t sound as though they should have anything at all to do with the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute, and DI Adams would rather like to keep it that way. But when the councillor for Toot Hansell becomes the latest victim, Alice Martin, chair of the W.I. and RAF Wing Commander (ret.), steps straight in to take his place.

Before DI Adams can so much as say lemon drizzle cake the ladies of the Women’s Institute are lurking around farmyards in the company of dragons, farmers are vanishing, the invisible dog’s developed a caffeine dependence, and Alice is already in as deep as she can get. In deep, and facing a killer that seems to know far too much about her. Enough, perhaps, to turn the tables….

I didn’t enjoy the last Beaufort Scales book, ‘Manor Of Life And Death‘(2020), as much as its predecessors, so I’ve been reading other Kim Watt series instead. I decided it was time to go back to Toot Hansell, where the ladies of the WI are much more formidable than the local cloverly dragons, and see if things had improved. 

I had a good time. There was a decent mystery that was a little grittier than the earlier books. I liked that all of the main characters, including the dragons, continue to develop, and their relationships with each other become more complex. All of which was improved byKim Watt’s perfectly timed humour. 

England, May 1945
Monkshill Park School for Girls seems a world away from the violence that engulfed Europe during World War II. Yet its lonely, decaying grounds have witnessed a murder.
Annabel Warnock, a teacher with a secretive past, left for the holidays and never came back. Both teachers and girls assume she simply walked out, but the truth is quite different. Her body tumbled from the Maiden’s Leap, a viewpoint on the clifftop Gothic Walk, and was washed out to sea.
But Annabel herself is still trapped at Monkshill, unable to move on. As she haunts the grounds and school, she discovers a hidden world – students, staff and servants are riven with deadly rivalries and dangerous tensions.
And one of them is her killer…

The premise for this book hooked my imagination. The novel itself sent my imagination to sleep. I set it aside at 26%

My review is HERE

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My reading in September and October will mostly be driven by squares that I get on my 2025 Halloween Bingo Card. Making sure that I have the right choice of books on hand has given me the perfect excuse reason to shop for more horror and crime books. Most of the books I bought this week fall into that category. In theory, this means that I’ll be buying fewer books in September and November, but there’ll probably be a gap between theory and reality.

Anyway, this week’s books should all be good fun when I get to them.

Every month at St. Pete’s Tavern in rugged western Montana, a meeting is convened by the Basic Bigfoot Society’s members—both of them. Jute and Vergil are lifelong friends, bound by an affinity for the elusive North American Wood Ape. Their monthly meetings and annual expeditions are a tradition that keep their friendship alive when so much else about their small town has fallen away.

But things are about to get exciting for the Basic Bigfoot Society. Dr. Marcus Bernard, the country’s foremost Bigfoot “expert,” approaches them with a proposition that seems almost too good to be true: to join their next expedition, along with an ambitious young documentarian, Vicky Xu. Thankfully, Vergil’s daughter Rye is home from college, and decides to tag along in order to make sure her dad and Jute aren’t made fools of. Once in the woods, strange things begin to happen to them that seem to defy rational explanation. Is this a hoax? Or are they on the precipice of the greatest anthropological discovery ever?

I’m a sucker for Bigfoot stories, especially if the tone is kept light, so I picked up ‘American Mythology’ even though the author is new to me and it’s his first novel not aimed at the Young Adult market. Giano Cromley is from Montana originally, and he’s an English professor who is also a qualified tracker so he should have the right background for writing about tracking down Bigfoot. I’m hoping that the humour in this one works for me and that there’s enough of a plot to keep me engaged.

Goblin seems like any other ordinary small town. But with the master storyteller Josh Malerman as your tour guide, you’ll discover the secrets that hide behind its closed doors. These six novellas tell the story of a place where the rain is always falling, night-time is always near, and your darkest fears and desires await. Welcome to GOBLIN. . . .

A MAN IN SLICES: A man proves his “legendary love” to his girlfriend with a sacrifice even more daring than Vincent van Gogh’s-and sends her more than his heart.
KAMP: Walter Kamp is afraid of everything, but most afraid of being scared to death. As he sets traps around his home to catch the ghosts that haunt him, he learns that nothing is more terrifying than fear itself.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HUNTER!: A famed big-game hunter is determined to capture-and kill-the ultimate prey: the mythic Great Owl who lives in Goblin’s dark forests. But this mysterious creature is not the only secret the woods are keeping.

PRESTO: All Peter wants is to be like his hero, Roman Emperor, the greatest magician in the world. When the famous magician comes to Goblin, Peter discovers that not all magic is just an illusion.

A MIX-UP AT THE ZOO: The new zookeeper feels a mysterious kinship with the animals in his care . . . and finds that his work is freeing dark forces inside him.

THE HEDGES: When his wife dies, a man builds a hedge maze so elaborate no one ever solves it-until a little girl resolves to be the first to find the mysteries that wait at its heart.

I thought Josh Malerman’s ‘Bird Box‘ (2014) was a near-perfect horror novel. The tension was almost unbearable. The fear was visceral. The people were real. The plot was a perfect mix of heartbreak and hope.

I wanted to read something of his for Halloween Bingo this year. I’ve picked ‘Goblin’ (2017) because I’m intrigued by the idea of five linked novellas. Also, that’s a wonderful cover.

There’s a fine line between ‘eccentric’ and ‘a danger to oneself and others’. That’s certainly what DI Adams is thinking when a body turns up in Rose’s freezer. 
Rose might not look like an octogenarian black widow, but it’s the inspector’s job to follow the evidence. Alice and the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute couldn’t disagree more. Certain that Rose is responsible for nothing worse than a little forgetfulness, they’re not going to let her be sent to jail or an old folk’s home. If certain detective inspectors have rather limiting beliefs regarding what constitutes helping the police with their investigations, then that is their problem. Alice and the W.I. are in a desperate race to clear Rose’s name before DI Adams has no choice but to arrest her. 
Finding the real murderer would be easier without lurking journalists hunting dragons, too…

Reading ‘Game Of Scones‘ this month got me back into th Beaufort Scales novels, so I’ve picked up the next one in the series.

Maybe this is a ghost story . . .
Andrew Larimer has left his past behind. Rising up the ranks in a New York law firm, and with a heavily pregnant wife, he is settling into a new life far from Kingsport, the town in which he grew up. But when he receives a late-night phone call from an old friend, he has no choice but to return home.
Coming home means returning to his late father’s house, which has seen better days. It means lying to his wife. But it also means reuniting with his friends: Eric, now the town’s sheriff; Dale, a real-estate mogul living in the shadow of a failed career; his childhood sweetheart Tig who never could escape town; and poor Meach, whose ravings about a curse upon the group have driven him to drugs and alcohol.
Together, the five friends will have to confront the memories—and the horror—of a night, years ago, that changed everything for them.
Because Andrew and his friends have a secret. A thing they have kept to themselves for twenty years. Something no one else should know. But the past is not dead, and Kingsport is a town with secrets of its own.
One dark secret . . .
One small-town horror . . .

It feels like Ronald Malfi has been around forever (although his first novel was only published in 2000), but I’ve never read one of his books. ‘Small Town Horror’ (2024) seems like a good place to start. It’s a perfect fit for Halloween Bingo, and I’m hoping I’ll be catching a writer at the peak of his game. 

On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is found crushed to death, Tindall’s case goes from missing person to homicide.
In the course of solving murder cases, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan has seen all manner of ugly death. But there’s something particularly gruesome about this one, the body crushed beneath the marble and iron of an old Saxon church tower. With rubble blocking off access to the crime scene, no one can get close enough to inspect the body. What little evidence is available—a burned match, a black thread, an earring—doesn’t bode well for a quick and easy solution.
Even the legendarily cool-headed great detective might begin to crack when a second body turns up. And then an important file goes missing from Sloan’s office. How does it all connect?

I’ve developed a taste for Catherine Aird’s gentle, witty police procedural novels featuring Detective Inspector Sloane and set in the fictional English country town of Berebury, West Calleshire. She started the series in 1966 with ‘A Religious Body’ and published the twenty-fifth book, ‘Inheritance Tracks’, in 2019. ‘His Burial Too‘ (1973) will be my sixth visit to Berebury. For me, part of the appeal of the series comes from revisiting the England of my youth, although a Southern middle-class version that I was never familiar with.

This is the definitive collection of Shirley Jackson’s short stories, including ‘The Lottery’ – one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century, and an influence on writers such as Stephen King.
In these stories an excellent host finds himself turned out of home by his own guests; a woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for her husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson’s best-known story, a small farming village comes together for a terrible annual ritual. The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these tales of wasted potential and casual cruelty by a master of the short story.

I read Shirley Jackson for the first time two years ago. I started with ‘Dark Tales’, a short story collection that was pulled together in 2016 and then read ‘The Haunting Of Hill House‘ (1959) for the 2024 Halloween Bingo. I was astonished at Jackson’s skill as a storyteller. I decided to make reading one of her books a Halloween Bingo ritual.

‘The Lottery‘ was published as a standalone short story in 1948. This collection of twenty-five short stories, of which ‘The Lottery’ is the last, was published in 1949 and is the only short story collection published during Shirley Jackson’s lifetime. My plan is to read two or three stories a week throughout Halloween Bingo.

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner. But the bloody messes don’t bother her, not when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train.
But the killer was never caught, and Cora is still haunted by his last words: bat eater.
These days, nobody can reach Cora: not her aunt who wants her to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, not her weird colleagues, and especially not the slack-jawed shadow lurking around her doorframe. After all, it can’t be real – can it?
After a series of unexplained killings in Chinatown, Cora believes that someone might be targeting East Asian women, and something might be targeting Cora herself.
Soon, she will learn . . . you can’t just ignore hungry ghosts.

I’ve been havering about adding Kylie Lee Baker’s ‘Keeper Of Night‘ fantasy series to my TBR. When I saw that she’d produced a standalone novel and that it was being promoted on Amazon for £0.99, I decided to use it to sample her work. I love the original title for this novel (which doesn’t seem to be being used in the UK), ‘Bat Eater And Other Names For Cora Zang.’

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Next week, I’m reading a crime novel with a twist and, a newly-published fantasy novel. Both of them are by authors I know I will enjoy.

Career criminal Longview Moody, on the run from killers, assumes his dead twin brother’s identity as the new chief of police of a Texas town that’s being terrorized by a Mexican drug cartel. To pull off the deadly deception, Longview desperately works to become the kind of cop and man that his brother was. But when the two lives he’s living converge, he’s forced to embrace the violence within him to get justice…and vengeance.

I went back through Robert E Dunn’s back catalogue when I finished. ‘A Dark Path‘ and found this standalone novel. It’s the only novel of his that I’ve found available as an audiobook. The premise sounds fun, in a dark way. It reminds me a little of the TV series ‘Banshee’, although I hope it’s not as violent. 

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Nial Sarnin is twenty-one—far too young to have lost her beloved husband, Jika. One year after his death, Nial prepares to fly a kite sewn from his wedding shirt, believing it will carry Jika’s spirit to the stars.
But instead of drifting gently skyward, the spirit kite moves under Nial’s direct control, revealing her as a Kitemaster—a rare gift in a world forever ruled by winds and magic.
Her newfound powers attract Captain Wolf of the kiteship Midnight Rain. With runaway Prince Vikaan, Wolf seeks to thwart Queen Kavaya’s ruthless ambition to dominate the skies and conquer all neighboring kingdoms.
Nial may hold the key to stopping Kavaya’s brutal reign and saving countless lives—including those she loves most—but only if she learns to master her extraordinary gift in time.
Every gust of wind promises hope, renewal, and a chance to reshape a world teetering on the brink in this inspiring tale of loss, resilience, and transformation.

I love the worlds and the people Jim Hines creates. He’s become an automatic buy for me. In the introduction to ‘Kitemaster‘, Jim Hines says that this is a book that’s been twenty years in the making. It’s certainly a little different from his Princess books or his Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series. I’m hoping for something engaging and exciting.