It’s been a week of warm, sunny days, with rain falling politely at night. It was a week peppered with annoyingly time-consuming but necessary personal admin that almost took he shine off the days. Except it was also a week of memorable moments: we had a good lunch in the open air at an Italian restaurant in a pretty courtyard in Bath; while we were in the centre of town, on a busy weekday, we saw a peregrine falcon. small but fierce, pinning a not-yet-dead pigeon to the ground and glaring at anyone who might challenge it; and we saw the incredibly powerful “& Sons” at the cinema.
Anyway, here’s what I read and bought this week and what’s coming up next.
My reading week didn’t go to plan. ‘The Uninvited’, a book I’d requested as an inter-library loan, turned up unexpectedly and shouldered its way to the front of my reading queue. It was good but strange. Then I stumbled across a thriller series featuring a formidable seventy-five-year-old ex-FBI agent who now acts as something between a landlady and housemother to government agents in Washington, DC. I meant to skim the first chapter to see if I wanted to buy the book. I ended up reading the whole thing in twenty-four hours and buying the next two books in the series. That left me with only enough time to finish ‘Scorched Grace ’, a book I’d meant to read a few weeks ago but hadn’t gotten around to yet.
Still, I had a fun reading week, which matters a lot more than following a reading plan.
A seven-year-old girl puts a nail-gun to her grandmother’s neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious?
As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry. Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger’s Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioural patterns, and an outsider’s fascination with group dynamics.
Nothing obvious connects Hesketh’s Southeast Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behaviour of his beloved step-son, Freddy. But when Hesketh’s Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father.
The Uninvited’ (2012) was a bold take on the end of the world as we know it, both in terms of the nature of the apocalypse and the description of its progress. Liz Jensen gave me an insider’s view of the rapid, uncontrolable slide from “I need to analyse a few incidents of anomalous behaviour”, through “This looks like a global pandemic of violence that we need to contain and then neutralise” on to “The world I knew has been fundentally and irrevocably changed and there’s nothing I can o about it. I may not even be able to explain it”, finishing with counting the personal cost of living with the new normal.
I enjoyed this book for the boldness of its ideas and the clarity of the protagonist’s world view but, for me, it never became a page-turning I-have-to-know-what-happens-next thriller. It reminded me of listening to 1970s high-concept rock albums: I admired what they were doing and the ideas lit up my mind, but nothing got my foot tapping.
My review is HERE.
When Saint Sebastian’s School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding community are thrust into chaos. Unsatisfied with the officials’ response, sardonic and headstrong Sister Holiday becomes determined to unveil the mysterious attacker herself and return her home and sanctuary to its former peace.
Her investigation leads down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets in the sticky, oppressive New Orleans heat, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way.
Sister Holiday is more faithful than most, but she’s no saint. To piece together the clues of this high-stakes mystery, she must first reckon with the sins of her checkered past-and neither task will be easy.
At the halfway point, I was ready to give up on this book, not because of the writing, which was skillful, but because I couldn’t understand the source of Sister’s Holiday’s faith, both in God and in herself as a sleuth. Then, about 60% through, her traumatic backstory snapped into vivid focus and everything started to make sense. Not necessarily rational sense but emotional sense. the kind of sense that needs and nurtures belief.
The mystery here is not twisty, nor is the story tense but the exploration of who Sister Holiday is, who she wishes she was and who she’s striving to become was compelling and complex. The ending was unexpected, dramatic and quietly but fundamentally devastating.
What I want to know now is: what does Sister Holiday do next? I’ll be buying the next book in the series to find out.
Meet former FBI agent-turned-boardinghouse landlady Ethel Fiona Crestwater. Her age affords her precious invisibility. She can outthink and outshoot most men—and women—half her age.
When someone murders one of her boarders, Ethel springs into action—much to the surprise of her double-first-cousin-twice-removed, Jesse, who has recently come to stay with her while he attends university. As he watches her photograph the crime scene, conceal evidence, and speed-dial the Secret Service Director, Jesse realizes that there’s much more to Ethel than appearances suggest.
When Jesse is assaulted and the gym bag full of cash Ethel had hidden is stolen from the basement, the pair decides it’s time to launch their own unofficial investigation. With no one to trust but each other, this unlikely duo learns that the only thing truly worth risking your life for is family.
I don’t normally give 5 stars to light entertainment books like this, but this one did what it set out to do so perfectly that it deserves it.
This was so much fun that I read it in 24 hours even though I hadn’t planned on reading it at all.
It was clever, cleanly written, engaging, exciting and hopeful. Oh, and the lead character was someone I’d like to meet (as long as she didn’t suspect me of doing something she disapproved of). .
This week, I bought nine books. I know it’s a lot, but there was a sale on. I picked up the next Elizabeth Strout in the Amgash series and the next book in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series in a 2-for-1 sale on Audible. I bought all six of the Kindle books for £0.99 each.
’Tell Me Everything’ (2024) follows on from ‘Lucy By the Sea’ (2022), which I read and enjoyed in March.
’The Sideways Life of Denny Voss’ (2025) appeals to me because Denny thinks very differently than the people around him. That he is accompanied by a blind and deaf Saint Bernard dog doesn’t hurt either.
‘Justice Hall’ (2002), the sixth book in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series, has been on my read-it-soon list since I finished ‘O, Jerusalem’ (1999) four years ago. It’s past time for me to get back into this series.
‘Lucky’ (2021) showed up on a BookBub list of cheap books. When I looked it up, I saw it had just been turned into an Apple TV series that looked fun, so I decided to give the book a try.
I bought ‘Dangerous Women’ (2023) and ‘Desperate Spies’ (2025), books two and three in the Secret Lives series, because I had so much fun with the first book, ‘Secret Lives’ (2022), this week. I’m going to read them soon, even if I can’t fit them into Halloween Bingo.
I bought ’ Hidden in Shadows’ (2021) and ‘Hidden in Memories’ (2022), books two and three of the Åre Murders series, because they were on sale and I’ve been meaning to get back to this series since I read ‘Hidden in Snow’ back in 2022.
‘Wave Goodbye’ (2026) is a roll of the dice. It seems to be a self-published debut novel by a British businessman who was last in the public eye when he walked out of the 8th series of Big Brother (2000), after learning of his 104-year-old grandmother’s death. The premise is intriguing. I’m interested to see what he does with it.
It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been.
Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
On the surface, Denny Voss’s life in rural Minnesota is a quiet one. At thirty years old, he lives at home with his elderly mother and his beloved blind and deaf Saint Bernard, George. He cleans up roadkill to help pay the bills. Though his prospects are limited by a developmental delay—the result of an accident at birth—Denny has always felt that he has “a good life.”
So how did he wind up being charged with the murder of a mayoral candidate—after crashing a sled full of guns into a tree?
As Denny awaits trial, his court-appointed therapist walks him through the events of the past year. Denny’s had other scuffles with the law, the first for kidnapping a neighbor’s cantankerous goose. And then there was the time he accidentally assisted in a bank robbery. It seems like whenever Denny tries to do the right thing, chaos ensues.
Untangling the events around the murder reveals even more painful truths about his family’s past. He’s always been surrounded by people who love him, but now it’s up to Denny to set his life on a new course.
A mystery begins during the Great War of 1918, when young Gabriel Hughenfort, dies amidst scandalous rumours that have haunted the family for years. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are called upon to uncover the truth. A missing diary, a purloined bundle of letters and a trail of ominous clues comprise a mystery that will call for Holmes’s cleverest disguises and Russell’s most daring journeys into the unknown!
Lucky Armstrong is tough, talented and in real trouble. Having just pulled off a million-dollar heist with her boyfriend, she’s preparing to start a brand new life, complete with new identity, when everything goes sideways. Suddenly Lucky finds herself completely alone, without the help of either her father or her boyfriend, the two figures from whom she’s learned the art of the scam.
When Lucky discovers that a lottery ticket she bought on a whim is worth millions, her elation is tempered by one big problem: cashing in the winning ticket means she’ll be arrested for her crimes.
As Lucky tries to avoid capture and make a future for herself, she must find a way to confront her own past and learn what it means to be independent and honest . . . before her luck runs out.
At first it appears a mugging gone horribly wrong: one man dead and a woman left in a coma one Friday night in Washington, D.C. The woman is Arlington police detective Frank Mancini’s niece and lives in the boarding house run by retired FBI-agent-turned-landlady Ethel Fiona Crestwater. Ethel and Frank are old friends, and so she volunteers to investigate the crime on Frank’s behalf, as his hands are tied by jurisdictional issues. But what appears at first a random robbery soon proves more diabolical.
Then the Chief Justice’s life is threatened, and Ethel and her double-first-cousin-twice-removed Jesse Cooper will have to breach more than boundaries as they investigate a case that could have supreme consequences—for the nation and for their own lives.
For seventy-five-year-old former FBI agent Ethel Fiona Crestwater, her age is nothing but an advantage when it comes to ferreting out secrets. Who’s going to notice the little old woman in the corner? Besides, Ethel might be officially retired, but she knows everyone in DC law enforcement―and is smarter than all of them combined.
When a former colleague asks Ethel for help, she agrees without a second thought. But the favor throws Ethel back eighteen years, to the botched sting operation that resulted in the murder of an innocent young woman by a Russian gangster―and nearly ended Ethel’s own life too.
Soon, Ethel and her young tech-whiz sidekick Jesse, her double-first-cousin-twice-removed, find themselves in the crosshairs of some very bad―and very desperate―men who’ll do anything to get their hands on the state secrets they’re seeking. Ethel will have to use all the skills she’s learned during her long career if she’s to save the day, and keep both herself and her beloved cousin alive.
In the Swedish ski resort of Åre, crime is rare. Certainly nothing so brutal as the murder of Johan Andersson, a former Olympic skier found bound and beaten to death in the forest. According to his distraught wife, he didn’t have any enemies in the world. To Detective Inspectors Hanna Ahlander and Daniel Lindskog, the crime proves otherwise. But what could have provoked such rage? And in whom?
As Hanna and Daniel search for answers, Rebecka Ekvall, a vulnerable pastor’s wife, is trapped in an abusive marriage. Isolated from her congregation, she’s afraid of her husband and even more fearful for her life. Because Rebecka carries a fateful secret. But she isn’t the only one in Åre with something to hide.
As Hanna and Daniel continue to untangle the dark histories of a growing list of suspects, they realize that Johan’s murder is just the beginning of a disturbing case about survival and revenge—at any cost.
On Easter weekend, a guest at a luxury ski lodge in Åre is stabbed to death in her plush suite. She’s Charlotte Wretlind, a property developer who planned to restore a nearby mountain hotel to its long-gone glory days. It was not a random attack. It was an act of pure aggression leveled against a woman with plenty of enemies.
As the murder spreads panic among tourists and Åre residents alike, Detective Inspectors Hanna Ahlander and Daniel Lindskog face a shady staff, a dogged press, and multiple suspects. But the case takes a turn when a cleaning woman from the lodge is found strangled to death in the woods—and Charlotte’s son goes missing.
Hanna and Daniel plunge into a winding investigation tangled with damaged relationships, corrupt power players, betrayal, and, for Daniel, a personal struggle to process the memories of a painful past. As more troubling questions arise, one thing is certain: Åre’s killing season has only just begun.
Billionaire Suzanne Pollard loses her mother Mavis and vows to offer a better experience to those facing death. She buys a cruise ship, names it the Wave Goodbye, and fills it with people in their last year of life. It becomes a floating bucket list. Deeper friendships are forged faster than in normal life, through sharing some incredible experiences and fears.
Join Suzanne, the passengers and crew in bake off, X Factor-style talent show, an orgy, a drugs party, a trip to the Northern Lights, Sicily, and African safari.
I have a few good books in progress at the moment, ‘The Dog Stars’, ‘Mad Mabel’ and ‘We Are All Ghosts in the Forest ’,so I’m only adding two more to my reading list for this week.
These are also the first two books that I’m reading as part of Halloween Bingo 2026, a game where I’ll be reading twenty-five books, matched to my Halloween Bingo Card, between now and Halloween.
The days aren’t yet dark enough for horror novels, so I’m making a soft start with a cosy mystery and a cosy fantasy with a dragon in it.
Meet Rona Parish, a feisty biographer with a talent for digging up murder and mystery wherever she goes — and Gus, the golden retriever, nipping loyally at her heels!
Rona jumps at the chance to write about Theo Harvey, a famous author who drowned in stranger-than-fiction circumstances. But is she diving head-long into danger?
Six months ago, Harvey was found floating face-down in a peaceful stream. Not far from the quaint little cottage where he penned his bestsellers.
His drowning is a puzzle the police can’t solve. So now Rona’s on the case — ready to dig deep to find the answers Harvey’s grieving widow craves.
But someone out there doesn’t appreciate her snooping.
It’s not long before Rona finds a sinister note tucked into her golden retriever’s collar, warning her to drop the project while she still can . . .
‘Murder Most Bookish’ (2003) is the first book in a ten-book cosy mystery series. I was drawn to it by the title and the dog on the cover (initially there was a woman, presumably Rona, the main character, standing next to the dog, but she’s since been edited out).
I bought the book because Rona sounds different from the every-woman amateur sleuth that cosy mystery writers love. She’s a well-known biographer, and she’s married to a man that her friends describe as her semi-detached husband because they live in separate houses so they can both work at home.
I’m hoping that this will become a comfort-read series for me.
Miss Mildred Percy inherits a dragon.
Ah, but we’ve already got ahead of ourselves…
Miss Mildred Percy is a spinster. She does not dance, she has long stopped dreaming, and she certainly does not have adventures. That is, until her great uncle has the audacity to leave her an inheritance, one that includes a dragon’s egg.
The egg—as eggs are wont to do—decides to hatch, and Miss Mildred Percy is suddenly thrust out of the role of “spinster and general wallflower” and into the unprecedented position of “spinster and keeper of dragons.”
But England has not seen a dragon since…well, ever. And now Mildred must contend with raising a dragon (that should not exist), kindling a romance (with a humble vicar), and embarking on an adventure she never thought could be hers for the taking.
‘Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care & Feediing of Dragons’ (2021) is the first book in a cosy fantasy series. I’m always cautious about buying this kind of book in case it’s too wholesome for me. I was sold on this one because the opening paragraphs made Miss Percy sound like someone I’d like to spend time with:
“Great Uncle Forthright was dead, and Mildred’s toast had gone soggy on one side.
It wasn’t the most pleasant of ways to begin one’s day. The death more than the toast, of course, though Mildred had only spare memories of her Great Uncle Forthright and the soggy toast rushed into the lead as an immediate impediment to her current happiness.”
Mike Finn's Fiction 