Storm Goretti hit yesterday, bringing snow and ice that wrecked roofs, left thousands without power and shut down much of the rail network. I only know about this from the news. Bath seems to have it’s own microclimate., so although other parts of Somerset had trees blown down and roads blocked, my early morning journey was dark and wet but completey unremarkable – until I saw how many trains heading anywhere north or south had been cancelled.

My wife and I have been putting the long dark evenings to good use by listening to audiobooks together. We were fortunate enough to find two five-star reads to listen to back to back,

Anyway, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.

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This was a reading week full of of contrasts. I had two books that I set aside, one that was only fun if you were a fan of a series that was coming to an end and two excellent eads that were also outstanding examples of how good an audiobook can be.

Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.

As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.

With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

I was delighted to find that the fourth book in The Thursday Murder Club series was as good as the first. I liked that the focus went back to the lives and loves of The Thursday Murder Club members. 

The mystery was solid without being extravagant, and The Thursday Murder Club’s involvement didn’t depend on something from Elizabeth’s past catching up with her. Everything, including the mystery, was about friendship, trust, and death. 

Like the first book, this one was enlivened by small, accurate details of how our day-to-day lives work, highlighting our small vanities and self-deceptions in a way that promoted empathy rather than sarcasm. 

Joyce’s journal entries were wonderful. Each entry was a little masterpiece of storytelling and character building. 

The storyline around Stephen’s battle with dementia was heartbreaking. It wasn’t sentimental, nor was it brutal. It was honest and realistic, which made the sadness harder to bear but easier to accept. 

I thought Fiona Shaw’s narration was first-rate. It was a performance, not a reading. It was controlled and focused, getting the most from the text. It was a great example of what an audiobook can be. 

Am I a murderer? You tell me . . .
You probably already know my name. Lucy Chase, the woman who doesn’t remember murdering her best friend.
Even though they couldn’t find enough evidence to charge me, I know you all think I did it. That’s OK. I realise being found wandering the streets the next day covered in her blood wasn’t a great look.
Believe me, I’m as frustrated as you are. I’d love to know if I’m a murderer – it’s the sort of thing you really should know about yourself, isn’t it?
And now, thanks to true-crime podcast Listen for the Lie, I finally have the chance to find out. But will I be able to live with myself if it turns out it was me?
And if it wasn’t, will digging into the secrets of the night I forgot make me the next target of whoever did?

Ignore the ugly, brash, clichéd cover and the cheesy title. This is an exceptional book, especially if you listen to the audiobook version, which is outstanding.

It has a clever plot, complicated characters, and deliciously tantalising exposition, including an inspired use of podcast segments to move the story forward. 

It is absorbing entertainment. My wife and I listened to it with rapt attention over three successive evenings. It not only kept us guessing, it had us discussing the characters as if they were people we’d met.

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford have just become the proud owners of an old house in an English village. Along with the property, they have inherited some worthless bric-a-brac, including a collection of antique books. While rustling through a copy of The Black Arrow, Tuppence comes upon a series of apparently random underlinings.
However, when she writes down the letters, they spell out a very disturbing message:
M a r y – J o r d a n – d i d – n o t – d i e – n a t u r a l l y…

‘Postern of Fate’, the fifth and final Tommy and Tuppence mystery, was published fifty years after we first met the two of them as young adventurers in  ‘The Secret Adversary‘. It was nice to visit with them one last time and see who they had become. It’s not one of Christie’s best books, but I’m glad to have had the opportunity to see her saying goodbye to two of her favourite characters.

My review is HERE

UPSTAIRS, MADAM IS PLANNING THE PARTY OF THE SEASON.
DOWNSTAIRS, THE SERVANTS ARE PLOTTING THE HEIST OF THE CENTURY.
When Mrs King, housekeeper to the most illustrious home in Mayfair, is suddenly dismissed after years of loyal service, she knows just who to recruit to help her take revenge.
A black-market queen out to settle her scores. An actress desperate for a magnificent part. A seamstress dreaming of a better life. And Mrs King’s predecessor, who has been keeping the dark secrets of Park Lane far too long.
Mrs King has an audacious plan in mind, one that will reunite her women in the depths of the house on the night of a magnificent ball – and play out right under the noses of her former employers…

‘The Housekeepers’ is a serious revenge story, set in Edwardian England and fuelled by the rage of clever, competent women who have been treated badly. The plot is clever, complicated, and steeped in a history of betrayal and exploitation. It showed every sign of becoming a tense, exciting heist story. Yet I set it aside at 30% because the prose kept me at arm’s length from the characters, and I realised that I didn’t care what happened to them. 

My review is HERE

If you hear her knock, it’s already too late . . . 
Willow is in need of an escape. A former sitcom star, she’s been publicly shamed on the internet after posting something she really shouldn’t have.She checks in to Camp Castaway, an adults-only retreat based at an old campground in the woods.
It’s the first night and the campers gather round the fire to tell some ghost stories. That’s when Willow hears the tale of Knock Knock Nancy. A local urban legend about a witch, brutally beheaded in this very woodland.
They say her restless spirit knocks on doors late at night. If you answer, she’ll take your head.
Willow doesn’t believe in ghost stories. But the next day, a camper has vanished under mysterious circumstances. And then that evening, in her cabin, Willow hears it . . . .
Knock, Knock, Knock.

This was a misbuy on my part. The people were too bland and self-absorbed to interest me and the plot wasn’t funny enough or scary enough to engage me. I decided I was too old and jaded for this one and set it aside.

My review is HERE

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I bought widely this week: a book of short stories about the experience of second-generation immigrants to the US; a Young Adult Science Fiction novel about revenant warriors; a Swedish novel about an old man facing death; the fifth Thursday Murder Club book; and a contemporary mystery set in small, ancient Scottish coastal town.

The stories in Who’s Irish? show us the children of immigrants looking wonderingly at their parents’ efforts to assimilate, while the older generation asks how so much selfless hard work on their part can have yielded them offspring who’d sooner drop out of life than succeed at it. With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen looks at ambition and compromise at century’s end and finds that much of the action is as familiar–and as strange–as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.

I’m a third-generation Irish immigrant to the UK, and I spent nearly two decades living in a foreign country that could never be home, so stories about immigrants assimilating into, challenging, or changing a culture call to me. I haven’t read Gish Jen before, but I know she has a good reputation as both a short story writer and a novelist, so I’m hoping this will serve as a good introduction to her work. 

Wren Connolly died five years ago, only to Reboot after 178 minutes. Now she is one of the deadliest Reboots around . . . unlike her newest trainee, Callum 22, who is practically still human. As Wren tries to teach Callum how to be a soldier, his hopeful smile works its way past her defenses. Unfortunately, Callum’s big heart also makes him a liability, and Wren is ordered to eliminate him. To save Callum, Wren will have to risk it all.
Wren’s captivating voice and unlikely romance with Callum will keep readers glued to the page in Amy Tintera’s high-stakes alternate reality, and diving straight into its action-packed sequel, Rebel.

Amy Tintera’s ‘Listen For The Lie‘ was a five-star read this week. It was also her first novel written for adults. Impressed with her writing, I delved into her back catalogue and found ‘Reboot‘. The premise seems promising, so I have high hopes for this one.

Bo lives a quiet existence in his small rural village in the north of Sweden. He is elderly and his days are punctuated by visits from his care team and his son.
Fortunately, he still has his rich memories, phone calls with his best friend Ture, and his beloved dog Sixten for company.
Only now his son is insisting the dog must be taken away. The very same son that Bo is wanting to mend his relationship with before his time is up. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotions and makes Bo determined to resist and find his voice.

A very small percentage of books get translated into English. Most of them are by men, and most have been in print in their original language for years before they’re translated. That Lisa Ridzén’s debut novel ‘When The Cranes Fly South‘ got translated from Swedish to English a year after its publication AND was issued simultaneously as a Penguin audiobook, marks it as something special. Plus, the cover has a dog on it, so I had to take a look. 

According to Penguin, Lisa Ridzén got the idea for the novel “through the discovery of notes her Grandfather’s care team had left the family as he neared the end of his life. She was also inspired by her research into masculinity in the rural communities of the Swedish far north, where she herself was raised and now lives in a small village outside Östersund.”

I’m sure this will be a deeply emotional read, but I think it will also be a rewarding one. 

Who’s got time to think about murder when there’s a wedding to plan?
It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.
But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who fears for their life, the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code, and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into their most explosive investigation yet, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?

The fourth book in this serie was so good that I had to buy the fifth book right away.

In this corner of Fife, summer nights meant parties on wind-blown beaches, wrapped in hoodies and denim jackets, pretending you weren’t cold in the stubborn evening light.

JOANIE, 2013. Desperate to flee the claustrophobia of St Rule, Joanie has been looking forward to her big escape. But at the eleventh hour this dream slips through her hands. Devastated, Joanie falls into the orbit of an enigmatic couple – a pair of charismatic academics at the town’s university – who offer her a new kind of freedom.

CAMERON, 2023. When Cameron arrives back in St Rule for Christmas, a question burns in his mind: whatever happened to Joanie? It’s been a decade since he saw his former friend. But as he starts to look for answers, it becomes clear that someone wants to keep this secret buried at all costs. How far should he go in pursuit of the truth?

I like how dark ‘Bluff‘ sounds and how rooted it seems to be in the Scottish coastal landscape.

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All this week’s books are from my TBR (acquired in 2017, 2020 and 2025). There’s an atmopheric mystery set in rural Scotland, a Canadian techno-thriller and American thriller about two strong women with traumatic pasts.

They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men.

Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.

In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.

Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.

Buying Francine Toon’s second novel, ‘Bluff’, reminded me that ‘Pine’ is still in my TBR pile. I bought it as soon as it was published in 2020, intending to save it for the next Halloween Bingo. Somehow, it never made it to the Halloween Bingo cut, and I forgot about it. I think it’s time to drag it to the surface and immerse myself in some Scottish atmospheric mystery.

In cyber-security, RED TEAM plays attack. BLUE TEAM plays defence.

Marty Hench’s career in tech is almost as old as Silicon Valley. He’s the most accomplished forensic accountant in town, an expert on the international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (there’s more crossover than you might imagine).

Marty was born to play attack. If there’s a way to get under the walls and bring the castle down, he’s the one to do it. There’s no better financial Red Teamer in the Valley.

Now he’s on the trail of a stolen key, one that unlocks an illicit backdoor to billions in crypto. More than reputation and fortune is on the line – Marty’s adversaries are implacable criminal sadists who will spill oceans of blood to get what they want.

Finding the stolen key is going to be the least of Marty’s problems: now he has to save his skin. To do that, he’ll have to play defence. And Marty hates playing the Blue Team.

This was reviewed by a Canadian reviewer who I follow, and it sounded like my sort of thing. Cory Doctrow is a new author for me. I looked him up and added his blog to my regular reading. He has the industry background to make this an informed insider read as well as a thriller. I’m looking forward to it.

Claudia Bishop’s perfect life fell apart when the aftermath of a brutal assault left her with a crumbling marriage, a newborn daughter, and a constant sense of anxiety about the world around her. Now, looking for a fresh start with a home restoration project and growing blog, Claudia takes on a crumbling old house—one that unbeknownst to her has an ugly history and may hide long buried secrets.

For Zoey Drake the defining moment of her childhood was the horrific home invasion murder of her parents. Years later, she has embraced the rage that fuels her. Training in the martial arts has made her strong and ready to face the demons from the past—and within.

Strangers to each other, and walking very different paths in the wake of trauma, these two women are on a collision course—because Zoey’s past nightmare and Claudia’s dreams for her future take place in the very same house. As Zoey seeks justice, and Claudia seeks peace, both will confront the monsters at the door that are the most frightening of all.

I bought ‘The Red Hunter’ back in 2017 and then lost track of it. I found in in my TBR pile when I added ‘The Kill Clause‘ and ‘Christmas Presents‘ to my LibraryThing. I enjoyed both of those books so I decided it was time to read that book that I thought was hot in 2017.