This was the final week of Halloween Bingo. I had a great time and I almost made it to a Blackout Bingo. Now, I’m lookng forward to my Jane Austen 250th Anniversary Binge Read.
So, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.
The three books I read this week all dealt with the supernatural. I had a ghost and her roomate investigating a murder in Boston, a Police Officer facing down Fae Lord in the Yorkshire Dales, and a family-run funeral parlour putting down the rising dead in Southeast Texas in 1999.
Ruby Young is slowly adjusting to her new life in Boston. A big part of that is her unexpected roommate—the ghost of the woman who lived there before. For Cordelia Graves, she may no longer be breathing, but it’s still her apartment and Ruby is the somewhat unwanted houseguest. They’re both happy they’ve managed to become friends, which is a miracle considering they struggle to communicate with each other. Cordelia even set Ruby up with her old job.
When Ruby discovers the body of a delivery guy at work, the new life she’s been building hangs in the balance. The last time Cordelia dragged Ruby into a murder investigation, it was almost two ghosts living in the apartment, not one. Determined to protect Ruby, Cordelia tries to shield her from the investigation, but Ruby has other ideas. It will take both of them working together to navigate the fine line between the dead and the living to bring a killer to light.
‘Death At The Door‘ (2025) is the second book in the series about two unusual roommates: Ruby Young, a twenty-something woman who has left home for the first time to make a life for herself in Boston and Cordelia Graves, the ghost of the previous tenant in the apartment Ruby has rented and whom only Ruby is aware of.
I described the first book in the series, ‘A New Lease On Death‘ as a:
“…gentle entertainment. It was too low-key to be a thriller, too cosy to be horror and too simple to be a mystery AND YET it was a lot of fun to listen to. What I enjoyed most was watching a friendship grow between the naturally solitary, forty-something.-and-now-deceased, native Bostonian Cordelia and the perky, outgoing barely-twenty, first-time-ilving alone, new-to-the-city Ruby”
The same description applies to ‘Death At The Door‘. There is another murder for Ruby and Cordelia to solve, but the main interest for me was learning more about Cordelia’s life, watching Ruby finally start to be less naive and having Cordelia’s ex-con brother appear on the scene.
The mystery was quite good. I enjoyed the descriptions of the dynamics between the owners and developers in the small software company Ruby works at as a receptionist Office Manager (the job Cordelia used to do at the same company). The pacing of the story was relaxed but didn’t drag.
I like Corderlia and Ruby well enough to want to read the next book in the series.
The only niggle I have is how Ruby and Cordelia communicate. Ruby can’t hear or see Cordelia unless Ruby gets very drunk. In the first book, it was amusing to see Cordelia and Ruby struggling to find a way to communicate. The idea that Ruby can’t read cursive made me smile, and the use of a fridge magnet poetry set was cute and ingenious. In this book, I got a little tired of all that. If Ruby is too lazy to learn cursive, then maybe she could buy a Scrabble set or a Ouija Board or, even better, a set of fridge magnets like THIS ONE. I hope that Olivia Blacke doesn’t persist with this in the third book.
There’s more than one way to get to Faery. It’s getting back that’s the problem…
DI Adams is not having a good summer. Her house has been hexed. Her DCI’s muttering about mental health breaks. Her invisible dog keeps disappearing at inopportune moments. And to top it all off, her parents have just turned up, determined to experience all Yorkshire has to offer.
And they’re going to get more than they bargained for, because someone else has turned up too.
He calls himself Velmyr Duskthorn, Lord of the Fae, and he’s demanding a powerful book Adams doesn’t have, can’t get, and couldn’t hand over anyway – unless she fancies starting an inter-species war.
But when her parents go missing, the whole game changes.
Now Adams is racing against rogue portals, dangerous sheep, and trigger-happy farmers, plus the closing net of her own colleagues. Her allies are thinning out fast, but she still has her duck, her Dandy, and one very large stick. And this is her family.
So if Faery wants to fight? Come on and give it a go …
‘Hexed In Hawes‘ (2025), the lastest DI Adams book, was one of the best yet. It had has a lot more tension and threat in it than the earlier books. Partly it was that the Big Bad Adams was squared off against was a scary Fae Lord,and partly it was that the Big Bad’s target was Adams’ parents.
Underneath the tension, is a gentle current of humour. It’s a book filled with cheerful chaos, where moments of tension ofen just burst into unplanned, noisy, disruptive action that somehow feels like a benediction.
I love meeting Adams parents. They explain a lot about her. The banter between her father and her mother made me smile.
I also liked that, even though the Big Bad is scary, Kim Watt managed to ridicule his sense of entitlement and his narcissism in a way that made Adams’ contempt for him clear. In the end, I think it was clear that Adams is scarier that a Fae Lord. I think she’s the only one who can’t see that.
It’s 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with… normal business. The dead die, you bury them. End of story. That’s how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny―Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore’s soft-hearted daughter, have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter Luna, alone.
But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy’s body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it’s clear that the Strigoi―the original vampire―are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town.
As more folks in town turn up dead and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi’s return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes, the dead aren’t the only things you want to keep buried.
Maybe it was the cover or the title or the publisher’s synopsis, but I went into ‘Bless Your Heart‘ (2024) expecting a cozy supernatural mystery with quaint Southern characters and a lot of humour. It’s not that kind of book at all.
This is a story about four generations of tough Southwest Texas women running a small-town funeral parlour, whose lives have been shaped, perhaps even blighted, by their knowledge that the dead sometimes rise and by their self-appointed role of putting them back in the ground when they do.
This is a horror novel filled with violence, death and gore. These risen dead don’t shuffle around aimlessly, murmuring “Brains”. They hunt, they rip people apart, and they grow stronger with every kill.
I thought the Evans women were well-drawn. Each was formidable in their own way. The relationship between the generations was credible.
The secret at the heart of the story was revealed with skill and made sense of a lot of the action.
The action scenes were tense and often blood-soaked.
I’ll be back for ‘Another Fine Mess’ (2025), the second book in the series.
‘
Only two books bought this week, although one of them is a collection of the first five novels in a series. I hope I like the series.
A dark, riveting thriller set in 1920s Hollywood about “the greatest horror movie ever made”, the curse said to surround it, and a deadly search, decades later, for the single copy rumoured still to exist.
1927: Hollywood studio fixer Mary Rourke is called to the palatial home of “the most desirable woman in the world”, silent movie actress Norma Carlton, star of The Devil’s Playground. When Rourke finds Carlton dead, she wonders if the dark rumours she’s heard are true: that The Devil’s Playground really is a cursed production. But nothing in Hollywood is ever what it seems, and cynical fixer Rourke, more used to covering up the truth for studio bosses, finds herself seeking it out.
1967: Paul Conway, film historian and fervid silent movie aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumour: that a single copy of The Devil’s Playground-a Holy Grail for film buffs that was supposedly cursed and lost to time-may exist. His search takes him deep into the Mojave Desert, to an isolated hotel that hasn’t changed in forty years but harbours only one occupant-and a shocking secret.
Separated by decades, both Rourke and Conway begin to suspect that the real Devil’s Playground is in fact Hollywood itself.
My wife and I are listening to this together in the evenings. We’re about halfway through. It’s an entertaining read. Sometimes the descriptions become too adjective-heavy, but the plot and the characters are engaging. Each of the three timelines has a different storytelling style. They’re intercut skillfully. Part of my fascination is trying to guess how the stories in the three timelines will converge.
Vega Bloodmire has no problem with the label “villainous witch,” though she draws the line at being called a self-centered hag. It’s everyone else who minds her unscrupulous ways: the unruly students she turns into frogs, her mother who fears what will happen if the world discovers their ghoulish family secret, and the wimpy teachers at the magical boarding school where she works who only care about propriety and rules.
Yet when the bodies pile up, the community needs someone with moral ambiguity to solve their problem and bring wrongdoers to justice. Part amateur sleuth, part vigilante—and all parts wicked—Vega Bloodmire is the witch to call.
This Series Collection includes books #1 to #5: ‘Too GhoulnFor School‘, ‘Ghoulfriend‘ ‘Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun‘, ‘Party Ghoul‘ and ‘Gone Ghoul‘.
This is a complete roll of the dice. I’m hoping for something, light, funny but with a plot. It may turn out to be too Young Adult for me but I’ll be content if it keeps my interest and makes me smile. Besides, the whole collection cost £0.99 so, as they used to say, “Never mind the quality, feel the width.”
This week, I’m reading the final Miss Marple novel, the first novel that Jane Austen sold for publication and a debut thriller set in New Zealand. It should be a fun week.
A letter from beyond the grave One last request An unsolvable crime
When Miss Marple receives a letter from the recently deceased millionaire Jason Rafiel, she’s not sure what to make of it.
Knowing her deductive skills, he challenges her to solve a crime. If she does so, she will inherit £20,000.
The only problem is that he has failed to mention who was involved, or where, and when the crime was committed. Jane Marple is intrigued.
Since October 2020, I’ve been part of a Goodreads Communuty, called ‘Apointment With Agatha‘, that was set up to read an Agatha Christie novels each month in the order that they were published. We started with ‘The Mysterious Affair At Styles‘ (1920). Five years and sixty-four books later, we’ve reached ‘Nemisis‘ (1971) the final Jane Marple novel. I greatly prefer Marple to Poirot. I love how clearly she sees the world and how expertly she manipulates the limited vision of others. I’ve never read ‘Nemsis‘ before but I’ve heard good things about it. I’m hoping that it will turn out to be the best of the Jane Marple novels.
16th December 2025 is Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary. I’m celebrating the anniversary by reading her six novels, in the order that she wrote them, in the six weeks leading up to the anniversary. ‘Northanger Abbey’ is the first book that Jane Austen sold for publication (although, for some reason, the publisher who bought the book didn’t publish it, so it only hit the market years later when Austen bought back the rights.
This is a short, light-hearted satire on the Gothic novels that Jane Austen read as a girl. I’m hoping it will make me smile.
One girl escaped. But the forest took another…
A young girl wanders into the small town of Koraha, her hands stained with blood. She won’t speak, but her path is tracked through New Zealand’s unforgiving wilderness to a cabin – and the scene of a double murder.
The townsfolk know this cabin; it has a violent history. Twenty years ago, another girl was forced to flee, leaving her siblings and father behind. But now that her family’s secrets have led to more victims, Effie has no choice but to return to the bush and face the truth of what happened there… and why she ran.
‘The Vanishing Place‘ (2025) is a debut novel by Zoë Rankin. I came across it on Twitter, thought it looked interesting and put it on pre-order. I often enjoy thrillers and mysteries set in New Zealand because, while I can relate to the people, their history and culture is full of fascinating differences.
Here’s Zoë Rankin’s bio from Penguin Random House:
Zoë Rankin grew up in a tiny village in Scotland. She spent many years traveling in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and eventually settled in New Zealand. She has always been as passionate about writing as she is about exploring the outdoors, which she often does with her equally adventurous husband and two- and four-year-old daughters.
Halloween Bingo came to a close yesterday. I had a great time playing the game. I enjoyed choosing and readng the books and seeng the books the other players chose. I almost made it to a Blackout Bingo. I still have one book to finish. I didn’t want to rush it so I’m going to finish it over the weekend.
I read twenty-four books for Halloween Bingo over September and October. The three books that stood out most for me were all speculative fiction: a post-apocalyptic tale, a Halloween fantasy and a First Contact Science Fiction novel.
Mike Finn's Fiction 