2023 - Book Challenge - Second thread

New to this group. I haven't kept a tally of the number of books I have read this year but it must be in the 40's. My recent favourite is:

You get that from me by Charlotte Butterfield

I picked this up form a bookshelf in a hotel we were staying in. I really enjoyed it and have bought another book by this author.

I really loved the characters. It was funny and touching.

Some blurb about the book:

^Stella thought she knew how her life would turn out. A stellar career, the perfect husband (not like her own good-for-nothing dad), two gorgeous children, a dog to take on muddy countryside walks. But here she is: forty, single, living with her mum and grandmother, and trying to choose the ideal sperm donor out of a catalogue.

When all three women start writing down their stories for Stella's unborn child, the secrets and memories woven into the house begin to resurface. You can't choose your family - but maybe you can choose what you make of it...^

A Roman Shadow by H L Marsay. It’s a crime series set in York. Very entertaining and highly recommended if you enjoy cosy crime.

I’ve had notification from the library that I can collect the latest Cormoran Strike novel, The Running Grave.

Feel excited. Has anyone else read it and is it as good as the others?

85-A Matter of Time-Claire Askew. This is the first time I've read this author, and I'm glad I've found her. This fast moving story begins when an ex-prisoner takes a three year old child hostage and disappears somewhere in the Scottish Border hills. A team of Edinburgh police are called in to help.
I shall look for more of Claire's books as this was enjoyable and not too long.

#54. The Private Patient by PD James.

The Courage Tree by Diane Chamberlain Book 72

This is an easy read but an implausible storyline. An 8 year old girl goes missing on returning from a Brownies' camping trip. She is seriously ill with kidney failure and normally has regular dialysis but is trialling a new treatment.

Somehow after a car crash on the way back from the camp, she is the sole survivor, walks miles in a dense forest with only one shoe and presumably no food/water .... and so it goes on.

I did finish it because I've run out of books but wouldn't recommend it.

84-Time of Death-Mark Billingham. Two teenage girls go missing and Tom Thorne's girlfriend Helen Weeks persuades him to cut short their holiday and investigate because she grew up in the town at the centre of the search. The local police are none too pleased with London cops muscling in on their patch.
I've read several of the Tom Thorne series and have never been disappointed, and this is a must read.

You’re very kind, Sparkle! I don’t usually manage to come up such comments.

No 42. Bournville by Jonathan Coe. I found the book a bit ‘knowing’ in that he was clearly writing with knowledge of what the future held, but the last part was heartrending and I am sure will chime with many people.

#55 The Devil's Right Hand Lilith Saintcrow.
This is the third in the Dante Valentine series about a female necromancer and bounty hunter living in a future where there was an 'Awakening' of extra sensory talents. Her life partner is a 'Fallen' demon and she herself has been transformed into something other than human. It's exciting and the characters well written but dark and dystopian. I will choose something a bit lighter for my next read.

Just started Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Enjoying it so far.something different.
Just finished Ann Cleeves’ Telling Tales.

Ha! Musicgirl just finished his follow up to that, I very much enjoy them too, I like the way he puts himself at the heart of his own books.

57 The Twist of a Knife - Antony Horowitz

In which Antony tries to bring his writing partnership with grumpy, taciturn Hawthorne to an end. However, when his new play "Mindgame" opens and a critic who savages it, is found brutally murdered, Antony finds himself implicated in the murder and the only person who can really save him is of course Hawthorne. In an Agatha Christie esque style scenario, where most of the cast and those associated with Sunday Times critic Harriet Throsby have an axe to grind as to their dealings with her, it's very much a case for Hawthorne to unofficially unravel!

#60 was A Line to a Kill by Anthony Horowitz. I really love this series, which has Anthony Horowitz acting as a biographer to a taciturn ex-Met officer turned private detective Hawthorne. There is a lot of comedy as well as the murder mystery.
#61 was Agatha Raisin: Devil’s Delight by M C Beaton with R W Green. I quite enjoyed it as an easy, cosy read.

SueDonim

I recently read French Braid, Terribull. I do love Anne Tyler, she writes of big issues within small worlds.

I like Anne Tyler books too. You put it beautifully, SueDonim when you say she writes of "big issues within small worlds".

Cackle by Rachel Harrison, a cosy, fun read for this time of year. A light 'Witches of Eastwick' kind of feeling, didn't think it was for me but I loved it.

#53. A Certain Justice by PD James.

I recently read French Braid, Terribull. I do love Anne Tyler, she writes of big issues within small worlds.

I picked up The Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier from our village swap kiosk yesterday, and as I'm a fan of hers from reading Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, I just had to start reading. I had not heard of this title before and now I know why. I struggled to get through 70 pages and gave up. Not what I was expecting. So have any of her fans enjoyed this?

55 The Trap - Catherine Ryan Howard

Another Irish based crime thriller, I seem to be reading quite a few of them lately. In this unsolved disappearances, and in particular the main character, whose sister is one of a handful of women who never came home she takes personal risks, by taking matters into her own hands when she goes out nights alone and allows herself to be picked up by random drivers, almost willing the abductor who is thought to grab unsuspecting women whilst they are walking along distracted by their respective phones, the smashed phone by the side of the road a clue to the killer's modus operandi.

56 French Braid - Anne Tyler

Moving away from crime and to inter- generational family dynamics that Anne Tyler paints so well, this author always manages to hold my attention without the aid of dead bodies, skeletons in the cupboard, in fact not a lot happens, which is great testament to her writing. This is the tale of Mercy and Robin, their marriage, their three children, the easy one, the spiky difficult one and the youngest more complicated one. Their childhood unfolds through memories of a family vacation by the lake and later on their mother's desire to be more than just a housewife when she decamps to a studio to pursue her artistic ambitions and her gradual withdrawal from the family home to artist residing full time at her studio. Nevertheless whilst living apart somehow the marriage survives, albeit on her terms. As the story progresses the children of the marriage, grow up, form their own relationships and the narrative continues through their retrospective memories of childhood and parenting their own children. Ann Tyler's books, whilst often quite uneventful are beautifully nuanced in her descriptions of both small town America and relationships within families that are far more complicated below the surface.

I recently read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. A little different, for sure, but very thought provoking.
And I am still reading This is Happiness by Niall Williams. It's a slow read but a very pleasant one, I find. A lyrical taste of an Ireland he assures us has gone.

83-The Heatwave-Katerina Diamond. A sleepy Devon town is the backdrop of this thriller, where two teenagers with very different family backgrounds become best friends. With a dual timeline you discover that one of them ran away to the Lake District and has now a family of her own. She feels drawn to return to Devon when history repeats itself and a girl is missing. Are these two events connected? An unputdownable thriller that left me thinking 'Well I wasn't expecting that!' A great read.

44. Kick Back, Val McDermid
I thought this was a bit bizarre. The plot revolves round disappearing conservatories, real estate and mortgage fraud, not the most inspiring of subjects and as dull as it sounds for the most part, though there is a murder in the mix. It was written in the 90s, and discussions about technology haven’t aged well - how to conceal a floppy disk and whether to invest in a mobile phone the size of a brick, plus all sorts of fancy equipment needed to record a conversation, etc. It ended very abruptly too, and I had that “Is that it?” feeling. Much as I usually enjoy a Val McDermid, I don’t know whether I’ll bother with any more of the Kate Brannigan series. As a private investigator, maybe the poor girl just doesn’t have chance to investigate the sort of exciting cases Tony Hill and Karen Pirie get.

#52. The Lighthouse by PD James.

Book46
My Mother, Munchausens, and Me - Helen Naylor

Helens memoir of growing up with a narcissistic mother, who feigned illness throughout her childhood.
Elinor, is a vile, cruel manipulative middle class woman, who cannot bear not to be the centre of attention.
Helen loves her, and her self diagnosed condition of ME leaves everyone running around in circles after her. Even then there are discrepancies in her illness, like being perfectly well on a holiday to the states.
But it’s only when she decides she has Parkinson’s that the cracks start to show, as it’s far more difficult to fake symptoms.
She is a hideous monstrous woman, yet still she has her loyal friends.
I may be judging harshly, but I think if I were Helen I would have walked away years before, I also feel her husband Peter was incredibly patient.
Well worth a read, at times shockingly awful, a wasted life.

41 Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair. The author wrote six books between 1952 - 1960 then never produced another despite living for another 30+years.

This is set in a postwar village and follows the minutiae of the characters who live there, a la Jane Austen. It’s funny and wry and I miss the characters since I finished the book!

82-Chaos-Patricia Cornwell-Kay Scarpetta has a cyber stalker, but when a young girl is found dead is there a link? When strange burns are found on other bodies with traces of a material that doesn't exist on earth, the FBI take over the investigations. Can drones murder people? Another good thriller to get you guessing.