This week’s background image is taken from the coastal fort in the old town area of Funchal , Madeira, which is where I’ve been doing my reading this week. It’s been a mixture of bright sunny days when I’ve been too busy to read and warm, wet days when having a book to read is a blessing. 

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

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This week, my three audiobooks were all entertaining, but both of my Kindle reads disappointed me. I have been reading an excellent Kindle book this week, Iain Reid’s ‘Foe‘, but it’s intense and beautifully written, so I’ve been taking it slowly. I’ve also been listening to Stephen King’s ‘Firestarter’, which is long, vivid and gripping. I’m hoping to finish both of them next week.

Watch what you wish for… Some inheritances are literally death.
My life has been turned upside down by my inheritance, but my only complaint is the cat that came along with the new house.
I swear he’s judging me as I settle in and try to make new friends in my new small-town Louisiana neighborhood.
And just when I start to settle into my new job and get back to reading my classic novels, I’m pulled chapters deep into a mystery.
The Beauty Queen in the town has been offed. Someone has killed the darling.
Wouldn’t you know it? An innocent man has been framed.
I shouldn’t get involved, but somehow, my cat seems to have a way with finding clues in some of my favorite stories. Not that any of that makes sense.
Why would it?
The cat is the sleuth, I’m the amateur, and we have alligators in the backyard.
Throw in a dead body, a book club that’s filled with suspicious characters, and you have my new life.
And I thought being a librarian in Louisiana was going to be dull.

I had hoped that ‘The Great Catsvy‘ would be the beginning of a comfort read cozy mystery series for me, told partly from the point of view of a cat. I ended up setting it aside at 35% because, while the cat was interesting, Jade, the librarian from whose point of view most of the story was told, was boring and not very credible. 

My review is HERE

When Willow Brown was seven, she had her first vision. Her death played out like a movie. Her second vision came along shortly after that, when she predicted her father’s cancer diagnosis. 
Her mother always wanted her to hide her gift away. That’s what she called it, a gift. 
It was never a gift. 
In one of Willow’s more recent visions, she saw her great aunt dying peacefully. What she couldn’t predicate was that Aunt Cora would leave her a house in Florida and a cat, forcing Willow to go back to her hometown to sort out affairs. 
But it turns out Aunt Cora is a little less dead than anyone thought. The old psychic inhabits the body and mind of the cat – and she’s hellbent on teaching Willow how to properly use her psychic gifts.
When Willow’s childhood best friend is murdered, she has no choice but to get involved, putting her on a collision course with the vision she’s been running away from all her life.

‘The Scrying Game’, the first book in a supernatural cozy mystery series, exceeded my expectations. It was a cozy mystery with a credible female lead ( a cop rather than an amateur sleuth), a solid murder mystery and an interesting magic system. I’ll be reading the next book in the series as soon as it becomes available as an audiobook. In the meantime, I’ll be sampling the back catalogue of this husband and wife writing duo who publish as Catherine Zane Thomas

My review is HERE

The house guests at Styles seemed perfectly pleasant to Captain Hastings; there was his own daughter Judith, an inoffensive ornithologist called Norton, dashing Mr Allerton, brittle Miss Cole, Doctor Franklin and his fragile wife Barbara , Nurse Craven, Colonel Luttrell and his charming wife, Daisy, and the charismatic Boyd-Carrington.

So Hastings was shocked to learn from Hercule Poirot’s declaration that one of them was a five-times murderer. True, the ageing detective was crippled with arthritis, but had his deductive instincts finally deserted him?…

‘Curtain‘, the 44th and final Poirot novel, was published in 1975 but written during World War II. Agatha Christie stored it and ‘Sleeping Murder‘, the lastJane Marple book, in a bank vault for more than thirty years. 

‘Curtain’ is a much stronger novel than ‘Elephants Can Remember’, the previous Poirot novel in order of publication. It’s an engaging mystery with a truly spectacular denouemont. I thought it was the perfect end to Poirot’s career. I loved that the story was told once more from Hastings’ point of view and that the mystery was set at Styles, the scene of the first case that Hastings and Poirot worked together on. 

It’s going to be hard to give this a review that does it justice without including spoilers, but that’s what I’m hoping to do next week. 

The London Borough of Hackney is run by the crime syndicate Bai Ze. One night an expensive horse carriage arrives at their headquarters. Behind the carriage is the leader of the Bai Ze, Mr. Quin, hanging at the end of a bloody rope. The journey here has stripped him of his clothes and shredded most of his skin off him. He rasps one final word to his second in command: ‘Mogwai’. It’s the Cantonese word for the devil. In London the normal order of the criminal syndicates has been broken and a new dangerous villain is playing to win the entire game.

It is also ruining the business of the Bohemia – the secret underworld club. The members are being killed and club owner, Irene Adler, must seek the help of the only person who can solve these mysterious murders – Sherlock Holmes.

Somewhere at the other end of all these murders lies the truth about Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty.

‘Becoming Sherlock, The Magician‘ was an entertaining end to this innovative trilogy about a near-future Sherlock Holmes. It brought together the threads from ‘Becoming Sherlock: The Red Circle‘ and ‘Becoming Sherlock: The Irregulars’ via a complex and surprising mystery with Moriarty at its heart. 

This was another fine performance by Alfred Enoch. I’ve enjoyed the whole series. I hope that Sarah Naughton will write more books in this series.

As the daughter of Jamie Austen—the most lethal female assassin the CIA has ever known—Ellie enters the Agency with expectations she never asked for and a legacy she can’t escape. Her first assignment is supposed to be simple. Quiet. Routine. Travel to the Cayman Islands. Identify a suspected CIA mole. Report back.
But routine ends the moment Ellie realizes she’s being watched.
Hunted by terrorists who know far too much, Ellie is forced to kill to survive—and with that single act, the mission shifts from investigation to all-out pursuit. Someone has compromised the operation from inside, and every move Ellie makes confirms the unthinkable: the mole is closer than anyone suspects.
With the clock ticking and enemies closing in, Ellie must prove she’s more than her mother’s daughter. Because if she fails to uncover the traitor in time, the cost won’t just be her career—it will be her life.
In the world of espionage, secrets are inherited, betrayal runs deep, and apples don’t fall far from the tree.

I got this novella free from Amazon. I knew from the sample that the writing was flawed, but I got pulled in by the action scenes. This pattern repeated until I’d read the whole thing, much to the annoyance of my Inner Pedant, who thought I’d wasted my time. 

My slightly ranty review is HERE

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This week’s books are all speculative fiction of one kind of another. Two are by author’s new to me. One is by an author I’ve only just found and one is by an outhor I last read nearly fifty years ago.

Laurie is sixty-five and living with Alzheimer’s. Her daughter Amelia can’t bear to see her mother’s mind fade. Faced with the reality of losing her forever, Amelia signs them up to take part in the world’s first experimental merging process for Alzheimer’s patients, in which Laurie’s ailing mind will be transferred into Amelia’s healthy body and their consciousness will be blended as one.

Soon Amelia and Laurie join a group of other merge participants: teenage Lucas, who plans to merge with his terminally ill brother Noah; Ben, who will merge with his pregnant fiancée Annie; and Jay, whose merging partner is his unwilling addict daughter Lara.

As they prepare to move to The Village, a luxurious rehabilitation centre for those who have merged, they quickly begin to question whether everything is really as it seems.

‘The Merge‘ is a debut speculative fiction novel by British author Grace Walker. This is a roll of the dice that I hope will mean that I’ve found a talented new author to follow.

Constance Campbell has made a few questionable decisions in the run-up to her 40th birthday. So in a way, moving 2,000 miles away from everything she’s ever known makes perfect sense.

Creel Creek, Virginia, is the last place either of her ex-husbands would ever think to look for her. What better place to hide from her humiliations than a town too small to warrant a mention on a map?

Laid off, and recently divorced from husband number two, this former workaholic moves in with her estranged – and very strange – grandmother. A grandmother who informs Constance that she comes from a long line of powerful witches. And on the day she hits the big 4-0, she’ll come into her powers.

It turns out that she’s not the only paranormal person in town. Under the sleepy surface, the small town is teeming with supernatural beings.

When Constance finds the town’s resident vampire dead, things go from surreal to scary. The local sheriff is convinced that a killer is lurking in the shadows, hunting anyone with supernatural abilities…including witches like her.

I I enjoyed ‘The Scrying Game’ so I’ve gone back to the first book that Christine Zane Thomas published in their Witching Hour series. I’m just hoping that it isn’t too much of a romance for me.

The first interstellar ship, John Glenn, fled a solar system populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology, and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn’s crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology, but by some miscalculation they have landed in the wrong system. Short on the antimatter needed to continue to Ymir, they must shape nearby planet Harlequin’s moon, Selene, into a new, temporary home and rebuild their store of antimatter through decades of terraforming. 

Gabriel, the head terraformer, now leads this nearly impossible task; his primary tools the uneducated and nearly illiterate children of the original colonists, born and bred to build Harlequin’s moon into a virtual antimatter factory. With no concept of the future and with life defined as duty, one girl, Rachel Vanowen, begins to ask herself, what will become of the children of Selene once the terraforming is complete?

I haven’t read any Larry Niven since I finished ‘Ringworld‘ back in the 1970s. I was surprised to find that’s he’s still publishing novels, even as a cp-author. Still, this one got good reviews so I’m going to give it a try.

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.

I figure ‘So Far Gone ‘is either going to be great or awful, so consider this an act of optimism. I completely understand the urge both to punch a conspiracy theorist and to throw a smartphone away, so I’m in sympathy with the main character. I’m also curious to know how someone who is bipolar ever managed to be a detective.

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For my next reads, I’m going to listen to a recently published ihstorical fiction mystery and continue with two series that I’m enjoying, an Urban Fantasy about a cat and his human partner in Leeds, and a crime series about a sheriff with a traumtic past and a complicated present.

A man from Callum’s past shows up claiming he lost the last herd of unicorns — and his sister.

Should be a hard pass, but Callum can’t resist a damsel in distress.

Now G&C London, Private Investigators, are diving into Leeds’ magical underbelly, dodging criminal dynasties, cross-dressing trolls, attack lizards, and philosophical donkeys.

Find the sister. Get out before the Watch gets involved.

Why? They’ve killed me three times already.

Yeah. I preferred extinct unicorns

This will be my third visit with Gobbellino London. So far, we’ve had mages, Lovecraftian tentacles from another dimension and zombies, so adding unicorns wasn’t that much of a surprise, but adding aggressive, carnivorous unicorns was irresistible.

Cornwall, 1910. On a remote tidal island, the Viscount of Tithe Hall is absorbed in feverish preparations for the apocalypse that he believes will accompany the passing of Halley’s Comet. The Hall must be sealed from top to bottom – every window, chimney and keyhole closed off before night falls. But what the pompous, dishonest Viscount has failed to take into account is the danger that lies within… By morning, he will be dead in his sealed study, murdered by his own ancestral crossbow.

All eyes turn to Steven Pike, Tithe Hall’s newest under-butler. Fresh out of Borstal for a crime he didn’t commit, he is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. His unlikely ally? Miss Decima Stockingham, the foul-mouthed, sharp as a tack, 80-year-old family matriarch. Fearless and unconventional, she relishes chaos and puzzles alike, and a murder is just the thrill she’s been waiting for.

Together, this mismatched duo must navigate secret passages, buried grudges and rising terror to unmask the killer before it’s too late…

I dn’t always do well with historical fiction, especially humorous historical fiction but. f this lives up to its potential, it’ll be a lot of fun and should begin a new series for me to follow. It all depends on whether the humour works.

Twenty-seven years ago, Sheriff Bree Taggert’s father killed her mother, then himself. Now Bree and her younger brother, Adam, find human bones on the grounds of their abandoned family farm. The remains are those of a man and a woman, both murdered in the same horrible way. 

When the investigation determines the murders occurred thirty years ago, Bree’s dead father becomes a suspect, forcing Bree to revisit the brutal night she’s spent most of her life trying to forget. The only other suspect is an unlikely squatter on the Taggert farm who claims to know secrets about Bree’s past. When he mysteriously disappears and Bree’s niece is kidnapped, the cold case heats up.

Bree has stoked the rage of a murderer who’ll do anything to keep his identity – and motives – a secret. To protect everyone she loves, Bree must confront a killer.

This will be my fourth visit with Bree Taggart. So far, they’ve been entertaining three-star or three-and-a-half-star reads for me. The mysteries work well, and the sense of place is strong, but I’m ambivalent about how the series leverages Bree’s traumatic past. I think ‘Right Behind Her‘ will be the book that decides whether I continue with the series.