17th January 2026

I was a bit dubious going in after not enjoying Hindle's previous murder mystery as much as I had hoped, but luckily I was wrong and this one's great fun.

It's New Year's Eve, and a murder mystery party has been organised to try to drum up some business from the dilapidated local hotel - but everyone's got a challenging life at the moment and are looking for ways to solve it... which may or may not include killing off one of the players.

It's a really clever little classic mystery, with a solid cast of characters with proper backgrounds, connections, and unresolved histories. I liked the various point of view characters, and that we got to spend time in several heads, not just one. The more contemporary setting was nice but didn't detract from a story that feels pretty timeless.

I did manage to spot the conclusion coming, but I don't think that's a negative at all - the perfect mystery is the one the reader solves just before the characters.

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17th January 2026

This prequel to the first book in the series gives some extra background to how the situation at the start came about. This confusingly makes it chronologically the middle book of the series, but as far as I can tell they can be read in any order and still work.

However my memory of the first book, after just two years, is too hazy to really understand all the context and how it fits in - whether there are overlapping characters or settings, or whether it's just serving to set the scene for the world.

As a standalone, I think it struggles a bit. Part of the beauty of the main books of the series is the depth and the detail and the amount of slow steady worldbuilding that can happen, and deep relationships that the reader can develop with the characters over the course of a thousand pages. This skips all that and feels shallow by comparison.

This book is split into two halves called Before and After. Which makes sense from the perspective of most of the plot. But one thread only appears in the Before half and isn't followed up on in the After, which felt very weird and like a forgotten or pointless bit of plot. Perhaps had I better memory of the original novel it would fit more comfortably, but as I read it came across as a mistake.

Ultimately I suppose I'm mostly disapointed that this wasn't a big main book in the series, and didn't deliver the level of enjoyment I was hoping for.

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10th January 2026

Deep into the Chronicles of St Mary's now, we find Max preganant and heading toward having to stop jumping back to witness historical events in contemporary time. As always, chaos ensues.

I found this book incredibly readable. It's funny and action-packed and the narrative flows at the perfect rate to hold my interest.

Yes it's silly, and nobody's thinking about fancy pants awards, but it's entertaining and ultimately that's what I'm looking for in storytelling.

I can't quite believe how much fun these books are, and I'm wondering why I don't pick up the next one sooner each time.

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3rd January 2026

I a run-of-the-mill 1992 adventure, the Hardys repeatedly visit New York after one of their friends buys a counterfeit baseball card, and the whole world acts as if this is the biggest possible crime that anyone could ever commit.

There's possibly the most peril of the entire series - every chapter seems to see the brothers knocked out, locked up, dropped on, or otherwise endangered leading to massive cliffhanger fatigue.

Educational, perhaps, but not the most engaging.

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31st December 2025

The Dahlias return for a fourth mystery, this time set in a classic setting of a remote Scottish castle, snowed in for the winter, and thus providing a neat set of suspects to investigate.

It's a challenging mystery with a lot going on amongst all the suspects, and within our group of stars. For the first time all three of their partners have been brought along for the ride too, adding some interesting new elements to the dynamic but also supplementing their number in a convenient manner.

Some very distracting red herrings popped up along the way, one in particular that distracted me away from what was really going on, but which was seemingly never actually followed up on by the characters.

An enjoyable adventure, and I look forward to many more.

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29th December 2025

The sixth book of the Wheel of Time - and I've left it a little while since the fifth - and it does remind me of why I thought this was where it started to drag before.

The book covers a significant set of moments in the ongoing story, but does feel a bit like it's dipping into soap opera territory.

There are two really strong segments of the book - one in the middle and one at the end. Both of these feel vital to everything and switch into really compelling reading, and only the first was something I'd remembered from my previous reading.

But everything else feels a bit slow and draggy. The narrative moves between characters and locations at pace, which I remember being something that differs from later books. In one case however, there's a brief section near the start and then those characters seem entirely forgotten about until suddenly needed later.

Still a great series, but I'm less inspired to immediately pick up the next book.

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6th December 2025

I bought this after seeing the subsequent book by the author advertised as coming soon, and being intrigued by the cover and blurb. So to some extent maybe went into this one unprepared.

This is the story of Hana, who inherits a special pawnshop from her father, where customers pawn choices from their past that they have always wondered about, to stop them weighing on their minds.

The cover quotes repeatedly describe this book as Studio Ghibli-esque, and that I can strongly agree with. The problem for me is that I'm not particularly a fan of those films, and equally the book didn't really work for me.

It's a journey of metaphysical wonder through a fantasy world that's built short chapter by short chapter, but this means it feels like we're flicking around from concept to concept at such a rate that it's hard to take in any of the characterisation or believe in the relationships between the characters.

I can quite imagine that other readers will love it, but it's not for me, and so I've decided not to pursue the other book by the author that had originally caught my attention.

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