Reading Wales 2024

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

The sixth Reading Wales celebration (aka Dewithon 24), a month-long event during which book lovers from all parts of the world are encouraged to read, discuss and review literature from and about Wales, began on Saint David’s Day, 1 March, and ends today.

I’ve finished reading two books one , I let You Go, set mostly in Wales and Maiden Voyages by Siân Evans, a Welsh historian, which I’ll write about in a later post.

I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Synopsis

A tragic accident. It all happened so quickly. She couldn’t have prevented it. Could she?

In a split second, Jenna Gray’s world descends into a nightmare. Her only hope of moving on is to walk away from everything she knows to start afresh. Desperate to escape, Jenna moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast, but she is haunted by her fears, her grief and her memories of a cruel November night that changed her life forever.

Slowly, Jenna begins to glimpse the potential for happiness in her future. But her past is about to catch up with her, and the consequences will be devastating . . .

My thoughts:

I loved I Let You Go, Clare Mackintosh’s debut novel, part psychological thriller and part police procedural. It won Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2016, beating J K Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith. I’ve had this book since 2017 and I started to read it then but it begins with a tragedy, as five year old Jacob is killed by a hit-and-run driver, and I didn’t feel up to reading it at that time and put it back on the shelf for a while. Clare Mackintosh, a former police officer, is a member of Crime Cymru, a consortium of Welsh crime writers who promote Welsh crime fiction.

This is a difficult book to review without giving away spoilers so I’m not going into detail about the plot. It is set partly in Bristol, England where Jacob is killed, and then moves into a small coastal village in Wales where Jenna is trying to make a new life for herself. It’s heart-wrenching reading as Jenna tries to put the past behind her and at times I thought this was a romantic novel. But it’s not, as it becomes clear that there are secrets in her past that haunt her. It’s almost a book of two parts and the second half is dark and violent, full of suspense and menace, and really shocking twists and turns. The characters are fully rounded, extremely well-drawn and realistic. The settings are vividly described, especially of the beautiful Welsh coast line. I could picture it so well and it made me long to be there.

After a slow start this became a book I didn’t want to stop reading. It’s a powerful novel that kept me glued to its pages and it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. I’ll certainly be reading more by Clare Mackintosh.

The Hunter by Tana French

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

A short review

Penguin UK| 7 March 2024| 409 pages| E-book review copy| 4*

Synopsis

It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in the village. They’re coming for gold. What they bring is trouble.

Cal Hooper was a Chicago detective, till he moved to the West of Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or less – in his relationship with local woman Lena, and the bond he’s formed with half-wild teenager Trey. So when two men turn up with a money-making scheme to find gold in the townland, Cal gets ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey. Because one of the men is no stranger: he’s Trey’s father.

But Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

Crackling with tension and slow-burn suspense, The Hunter explores what we’ll do for our loved ones, what we’ll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide, from the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller Tana French

I’ve loved several books by Tana French, especially The Searcher, the first Cal Hooper mystery, so I was really looking forward to reading the second, The Hunter. I wasn’t disappointed and enjoyed this one almost as much. Like The Searcher this is a slow-burner, a book to savour, not one to rush through.

Two years have gone by since the events told in The Searcher. Ex-Chicago detective Cal Hooper is now settled in Ardnakelty, a remote Irish village and Trey Reddy is now fifteen. Trey’s father, Johnny who has been absent from the village for four years suddenly returns. But Trey is suspicious of her father’s true motives and doesn’t trust him, or the rich Londoner, Cillian Rushborough, Johnny met in London. The two of them are out to fleece the villagers, claiming there is gold on their land. But just who is scamming who?

I liked the slow build up to the mystery – there is a murder, but the body is only discovered later on in in the book. And it is the characters not the murder that are the focal point. I loved Tana French’s beautiful descriptions of the Irish rural landscape. It’s the sort of book I find so easy to read and lose myself in, able to visualise the landscape and feel as if I’m actually there with the characters, watching what is happening.

Many thanks to Penguin for a review copy via NetGalley.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Spring 2024 To-Read List

Published on by Margaret31 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is The topic this week is Books on My Spring 2024 To-Read List. These are all from my TBR lists. But this does not mean that I will actually read all these books or even some of them this Spring, as I’ve said before, I am a mood read and when the time comes to choose the next book to read it could be a newly published book that takes my fancy or another book from my TBRs.

I would like to read at least one of them though!

  1. The Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks (The Brontë Sisters Saga Book 1)
  2. The Couple at No 9 by Claire Douglas – domestic noir
  3. Beware the Past by Joy Ellis – crime thriller
  4. Camino Winds by John Grisham – murder mystery
  5. Weyward by Emilia Hart – historical fiction
  6. Nero by Conn Iggulden (on my NetGalley Shelf – publication date 23 May 2024 )
  7. Dead Man’s Time by Peter James (Roy Grace Book 9) – crime fiction
  8. The Waters of Eternal Youth by Donna Leon Brunetti 25 (A Commissario Brunetti Mystery)
  9. The Death of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware – a murder mystery
  10. The Lady of Sorrows by Anne Zouroudi (Mysteries of the Greek Detective Book 4)

I’ve listed them in A-Z author order. Would you recommend any of them and which one would you read first?

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh, a book I’m currently reading. It won Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2016, beating J K Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith. I’ve had this book since 2017 and I started to read it then but as it begins with a tragedy I didn’t feel up to reading it and put it back on the shelf for a while. I picked it up again recently when I discovered that Clare Mackintosh, a former police officer, is a member of Crime Cymru, a consortium of Welsh crime writers to promote Welsh crime fiction. And as March is Reading Wales Month I think it’s a good time to read it now.

Book Beginning:

Prologue: The wind flicks wet hair across her face, and she screws up her eyes against the rain. Weather like this makes everyone hurry: scurrying past on slippery pavements with chins buried into collars.

and then Chapter One:

Detective Inspector Ray Stevens stood next to the window and contemplated his office chair, on which an arm had been broken for at least a year.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head if Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

Ray sighed. Puberty had turned his son into a grunting, uncommunicative teenager, and he was dreading the day the same thing happened to his daughter. You weren’t supposed to have favourites, but he had a soft spot for Lucy, who at nine would seek him out for a cuddle and insist on a bedtime story.

Description from Amazon:

A tragic accident. It all happened so quickly. She couldn’t have prevented it. Could she?

In a split second, Jenna Gray’s world descends into a nightmare. Her only hope of moving on is to walk away from everything she knows to start afresh. Desperate to escape, Jenna moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast, but she is haunted by her fears, her grief and her memories of a cruel November night that changed her life forever.

Slowly, Jenna begins to glimpse the potential for happiness in her future. But her past is about to catch up with her, and the consequences will be devastating . . .

~~~

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with the Word ‘Death’ in the Titles.

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Books I’m Worried I Might Not Love as Much the Second Time Around (I love re-reading, but there are some books that hit so perfectly and I loved so much that I worry reading them again wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe the books I read when I was younger wouldn’t be favorites anymore. Or maybe some books just don’t age well?)

But as I don’t re-read very often I’m focusing on Books with the Word ‘Death’ in the Titles.

  1. Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes – What struck me most about this Inspector Appleby mystery is that it is essentially a ‘locked room’ mystery. Dr Umpleby, the unpopular president of St Anthony’s College (a fictional college similar to an Oxford college) is found in his study, shot through the head.
  2. Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie is set on the West bank of the Nile at Thebes in about 2000 BC. She based her characters and plot on some letters from a Ka priest in the 11th Dynasty.
  3. Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn, the first book in her Daisy Dalrymple series. It’s a quick and easy read, a mix of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, set in 1923 at the Earl of Wentwater’s country mansion, Wentwater Court.
  4. Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds, a kind of locked room mystery, only this time the ‘locked room’ is a plane on a flight from Paris to Croydon.
  5.  Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong, his first book featuring Chief Inspector Chen. It won the Anthony Award for Best First Crime Novel in 2001.
  6. Death Has Deep Roots: a Second World War Mystery by Michael Gilbert. Set in 1950 this is a mix of a courtroom drama, a spy novel and an adventure thriller. 
  7. Death in the Tunnel by Miles Burton, a British Library Crime Classic, first published in 1936, about the death of Sir Wilfred Saxonby who was found in a first class compartment of the 5 pm train from London to Stourford.
  8.  The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz. Divorce lawyer Richard Pryce was found dead in his home, having been hit on the head by a wine bottle, a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, and then stabbed to death with the broken bottle.
  9. A Death in the Dales is the 7th book in Frances Brody’s Kate Shackleton series of historical crime fiction books set in 1920s Yorkshire. 
  10. Death Under Sail by C P Snow This is a classic mystery, a type of ‘country house’ mystery, but set on a wherry (a sailing boat) on the Norfolk Broads, where Roger Mills, a Harley Street specialist, is taking a group of six friends on a sailing holiday. When they find him at the tiller with a smile on his face and a gunshot through his heart, all six fall under suspicion.

Stacking the Shelves March 2024

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Several years ago I used to take part in the Stacking the Shelves meme. This meme is now hosted by Marlene at Reading Reality and the details are on her blog, as well as a huge amount of book reviews. Why not visit her blog if you haven’t already found it? The gorgeous graphic is also used courtesy of the site.

It’s all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may they be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical stores or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course e-books!

These are the latest e-books I’ve bought:

The descriptions are from Amazon.

Homecoming by Kate Morton

A breathtaking mystery of love, lies and a cold case come back to life, Homecoming is an immersive, twisting epic from the bestselling Kate Morton, told with her trademark intricacy and beauty.

Adelaide Hills, 1959. At the end of a scorching hot day, in the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery. Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most mystifying murder investigations in the history of Australia.

London, 2018. Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, a phone call summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, has suffered a fall and is seriously ill in hospital.

Seeking comfort in her past, Jess discovers a true crime book at Nora’s house chronicling a long-buried police case: the Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. And within its pages she finds a shocking personal connection to this notorious event – a crime that has never truly been solved.

~~~

This Impossible Brightness by Jessica Bryant Klagmann

After the mysterious disappearance of her fiancé, Alma Hughes moves to a remote island in the North Atlantic, where she hopes to weather her grief and nurture her ailing dog. But the strange town of Violette has mysteries as well.

Townsfolk say that the radio tower overlooking their town broadcasts messages through their home appliances, their dreams, even the sea itself. When lightning strikes the tower, illuminating the sky in a brilliant flash, Alma finds herself caught in the unexplainable aftermath of one of Violette’s deadliest storms.

As the sea consumes the island, threatening its very existence, the deaths and lost memories of the recently departed also devastate the community. Alma, with a unique link to the lost, may be the only one who can help them move on. But to do so, she must confront a tragic loss of her own.

On this doomed island haunted by echoes of the departed, Alma searches for meaning in her future—and dares to discover the power of hope among the living.

~~~

Everything is Everything: a Memoir of Love, Hate and Hope by Clive Myrie

As a Bolton teenager with a paper round, Clive Myrie read all the newspapers he delivered from cover to cover and dreamed of becoming a journalist. In this deeply personal memoir, he tells how his family history has influenced his view of the world, introducing us to his Windrush generation parents, a great grandfather who helped build the Panama Canal, and a great uncle who fought in the First World War, later to become a prominent police detective in Jamaica.

~~~

An Instance of the Fingerpost: Explore the murky world of 17th-century Oxford by Iain Pears – Oxford in the 1660s. Sarah Blundy stands accused of the murder of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College. Four witnesses describe the events surrounding his death: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause, determined to vindicate his father; John Wallis, chief cryptographer to both Cromwell and Charles II, a mathematician, theologian and master spy; and Anthony Wood, the famous Oxford antiquary. Each one tells their version of what happened but only one reveals the extraordinary truth. Brilliantly written and utterly convincing.

~~~

The Great Deceiver by Elly Griffiths – book 7 of 7 in the Brighton Mysteries

Magician Max Mephisto, now divorced and living in London, is on his way to visit daughter Ruby and her new-born baby when he is hailed by a voice from the past, fellow performer Ted English, aka the Great Deceiver. Ted’s assistant, Cherry, has been found dead in her Brighton boarding house and he’s convinced that he’ll be accused of her murder.

Max agrees to talk to his friend, Superintendent Edgar Stephens, who is investigating the case. What Max doesn’t know is that the girl’s family have hired private detective duo Emma Holmes (aka Mrs Stephens) and Sam Collins to do some digging of their own.

The inhabitants of the boarding house, most of whom are performing in an Old Time Music Hall show on Brighton pier, are a motley crew. The house is also connected to a sinister radio personality called Pal. When a second magician’s assistant is killed, Edgar suspects a serial killer. He persuades Max to come out of semi-retirement and take part in a summer show. But who can pose as his assistant? Edgar shocks the team by recommending someone close. . .