Pallas commented on Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste
The book is dedicated to her haters, that's hilarious as I'm reading it because of the Cait Corrain drama.
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Read lots and lots of cozies but I can feel a thriller spell coming on. Also like gardening and history, sprinkled with some fantasy. (PS. It's Greta Garbo in the pic... I need to stop assuming people know that)
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2024 Reading Goal
15% complete! Pallas has read 15 of 100 books.
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Pallas started reading Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste
Here we go, got an audio arc from Netgalley
Pallas reviewed Glory Be by Danielle Arceneaux
A bit meh
3 stars
Glory is a woman of a certain age, her husband has left her, her mother has died and now she finds her best friend dead. The police say suicide but Glory refuse to believe it.
Glorys daughter Delphine, a lawyer from New York shows up after her marriage falls apart and together they try to find out what actually happened.
I don’t like Glory much, she’s kind of rude and judgmental, she gets better but…
No spoilers, Delphine is not a nice person either. (She does something more than once that is a big no no for me).
Despite this there’s some humor and fun in this, nice to read something that isn’t as cookie cutter as the majority of the murder mystery books that I read.
Some cursing in this one, know some hate that.
Pallas finished reading Glory Be by Danielle Arceneaux
Pallas set a goal to read 100 books in 2024
Review of 'The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Feels like the author picked difficult task. How do you sum up a vast time period without focusing on a specific topic? We get a little of this and a little of that without any real focus. Some parts are better than others but all in all maybe the author took on too much and should have focused on one topic. It feels a little vague but with some interesting parts.
Pallas reviewed How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin
Review of 'How to Solve Your Own Murder' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Netgalley read
Annie is summon to her rich eccentric great aunt Frances to meet for the first time, of course Frances turns up dead before they can meet. And of course great aunt Frances has made her death into a game, solve my murder and get the whole estate.
Fun idea but our main character is isolated and don’t feel I really get to know her and she has no quirky sidekick or similar. She does have her friend and mom on the phone at times but very little camaraderie or friendly interactions for her. I never really warmed to her. And you’d think that someone that wants to be a cozy author (our main character) would be smarter than putting herself in mortal danger.
Parts of the book is aunt Frances diary entries from the 1960’s, they don’t read like they are from the 60’s and takes you out …
Netgalley read
Annie is summon to her rich eccentric great aunt Frances to meet for the first time, of course Frances turns up dead before they can meet. And of course great aunt Frances has made her death into a game, solve my murder and get the whole estate.
Fun idea but our main character is isolated and don’t feel I really get to know her and she has no quirky sidekick or similar. She does have her friend and mom on the phone at times but very little camaraderie or friendly interactions for her. I never really warmed to her. And you’d think that someone that wants to be a cozy author (our main character) would be smarter than putting herself in mortal danger.
Parts of the book is aunt Frances diary entries from the 1960’s, they don’t read like they are from the 60’s and takes you out of it a little. All in all, it’s alright.
I had the audio version and the lovely Alexandra Dowling does a wonderful job reading it.
Pallas reviewed Recipes for love and murder by Sally Andrew (A Tannie Maria mystery)
"A bright new talent makes her fiction debut with this first novel in a delicious …
Review of 'Recipes for love and murder' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I want to read cozies from around the world and I found this South African one and half way through it I thought I have to make some soentjies for company when I read the next book (there are recipes at the end of the book, 2 chocolate cakes! But none for soentjies.)
Tannie Maria is adorable and has conversations with her food. She used to have a recipe column in the local paper but higher ups says they need to have an agony aunt so she gets the job but combines it with her love for food. One letter writer decides to leave her abusive husband and when a dead one is reported Tannie Marie knows it’s the same woman and along with her friends at the paper they investigate the murder.
Charming and fun and I will read the rest. There’s also a TV series that I will …
I want to read cozies from around the world and I found this South African one and half way through it I thought I have to make some soentjies for company when I read the next book (there are recipes at the end of the book, 2 chocolate cakes! But none for soentjies.)
Tannie Maria is adorable and has conversations with her food. She used to have a recipe column in the local paper but higher ups says they need to have an agony aunt so she gets the job but combines it with her love for food. One letter writer decides to leave her abusive husband and when a dead one is reported Tannie Marie knows it’s the same woman and along with her friends at the paper they investigate the murder.
Charming and fun and I will read the rest. There’s also a TV series that I will look into. There’s a little cursing in this one.
Pallas reviewed Queens of London by Heather Webb
Review of 'Queens of London' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Netgalley read.
TW: Animal abuse
We get to follow 4 women in London 1925 and their life slowly becomes intertwine, Diamond Alice the leader of the Forty Elephants gang, Lilian Wyles one of few female police officers, Dorothy a naïve shop assistant and Hira a young girl from the right side of the track that finds herself on the streets.
There were moments when I thought this was going in a “Heat” kind of way and having Diamond Alice and the Office Lilian Wyles squaring up against each other but no.
A little long, a shorter version where the author is willing to turn it up a little and put the characters in some real danger and having to make some hard choices and this would have been great. A little too slow and not much at stake, things turn out alright too quickly.
I had the audiobook and narrator …
Netgalley read.
TW: Animal abuse
We get to follow 4 women in London 1925 and their life slowly becomes intertwine, Diamond Alice the leader of the Forty Elephants gang, Lilian Wyles one of few female police officers, Dorothy a naïve shop assistant and Hira a young girl from the right side of the track that finds herself on the streets.
There were moments when I thought this was going in a “Heat” kind of way and having Diamond Alice and the Office Lilian Wyles squaring up against each other but no.
A little long, a shorter version where the author is willing to turn it up a little and put the characters in some real danger and having to make some hard choices and this would have been great. A little too slow and not much at stake, things turn out alright too quickly.
I had the audiobook and narrator Amy Scanlon does a good job and gives each of the characters their own voice.
Pallas reviewed The Wharton Plot: a Novel by Mariah Fredericks
Review of 'The Wharton Plot: a Novel' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Netgalley audiobook.
Not sure how I feel with this constant inserting of real life people in fictive stories but I know nothing of Edith Wharton so I don’t min (but had this been Jane Austen).
Edith finds herself drawn into the murder of a fellow writer, David Graham Phillips (also a real person) who she just met and didn’t like.
It’s a slow pace story and not that much mystery, more about Edith casting a very sad shadow over everything. She was a real downer and appeared so lonely and isolated.
As a mystery is not very engaging. Nice writing but that’s it.
The narrator Kitty Hendrix (now that’s a name for a cozy mystery heroine) does a good job reading.
2.5 rounding up as the writing is not bad.
Pallas reviewed A Taste for Poison by Neil Bradbury Ph.D.
Review of 'A Taste for Poison' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Didn’t go too deep and didn’t just glaze over things either. Maybe seen as an intro to something more specific and pick up a book about that next.
Pallas reviewed Murder in Venice by Martha Bond
Review of 'Murder in Venice' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Only 200 pages and it felt like an early draft that needed some meat on those bones. I don’t feel I can say much about it. It didn’t suck but it didn’t bring anything to the table.
Review of 'The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
So I wanted to read about female private detectives in the early 1900’s, surely that must have been a thing because there were plenty of fictive lady detectives. I went to Trove and quickly found ads for Maud Wests services and some of her daring deeds, amazing, prefect. Some one must have written about this woman? Googled Maud West and found this book.
The book starts with the author going to Trove and finds the same stuff I did, make me feel so good about myself, I’m a proper sleuth and I don’t need to dig further as someone much better than me had already done it. So pleased that Susannah Stapleton got there before me so I had this book to read!
There’s three storylines in the book, we get to learn about Maud and the world she lived in, how the author did her digging. And then we …
So I wanted to read about female private detectives in the early 1900’s, surely that must have been a thing because there were plenty of fictive lady detectives. I went to Trove and quickly found ads for Maud Wests services and some of her daring deeds, amazing, prefect. Some one must have written about this woman? Googled Maud West and found this book.
The book starts with the author going to Trove and finds the same stuff I did, make me feel so good about myself, I’m a proper sleuth and I don’t need to dig further as someone much better than me had already done it. So pleased that Susannah Stapleton got there before me so I had this book to read!
There’s three storylines in the book, we get to learn about Maud and the world she lived in, how the author did her digging. And then we have Mauds own stories of her adventures.
Pallas reviewed Elementary, she read by Vicki Delany (A Sherlock Holmes Bookshop mystery)
When Gemma Doyle, owner of Cape Cod's Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium, finds a rare …
Review of 'Elementary, she read' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I thought this book was older than it was because I thought, surely people are tired of the Sherlock character and wouldn’t write yet another? But no, they did. You know the character that says blunt things because they are so good at deducting things (when the plot calls for it and yet the MC is clueless and not observant at all at times).
Two other pet peeves in this one, “stupid cop insists MC is a suspects because who the heck knows” and “I figure out the killer because of how the author wrote them, not solving the puzzle”
Pallas reviewed Rex V Edith Thompson by Laura Thompson
Review of 'Rex V Edith Thompson' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I was looking for true crime books about 1920’s England so this should have been great… it wasn’t.
It could have been half as long, felt like there were a lot of repetitions.
The main topic of the book are the letters Edith Thompson wrote to her lover Freddy Bywaters. I would have liked to have more a picture of the actual crime.
Also feel that the author was biased and took some liberties and wrote an unnecessary colorful language.
“…but before that the two figures of Thompson and Bywaters, enmeshed within an eroticized haze…”
“… it was the first and only time that she truly understood how sex could be with this man; she gave herself to him, lost her perpetual awareness, and either climaxed or came very close.”
Um, based on what? Or maybe the author read some different letters and didn’t share them with the rest of …
I was looking for true crime books about 1920’s England so this should have been great… it wasn’t.
It could have been half as long, felt like there were a lot of repetitions.
The main topic of the book are the letters Edith Thompson wrote to her lover Freddy Bywaters. I would have liked to have more a picture of the actual crime.
Also feel that the author was biased and took some liberties and wrote an unnecessary colorful language.
“…but before that the two figures of Thompson and Bywaters, enmeshed within an eroticized haze…”
“… it was the first and only time that she truly understood how sex could be with this man; she gave herself to him, lost her perpetual awareness, and either climaxed or came very close.”
Um, based on what? Or maybe the author read some different letters and didn’t share them with the rest of us, I didn’t get this but oh well.