ramblingmads

A body in the begonias — and a tricksy killer who knows just how to disappear into the foliage. It sounds like a case for the Charity Shop Detective Agency!

When word of Arthur Oliver’s murder reaches Dogs Need Nice Homes Charity Shop, Fiona, Daisy and Partial Sue — the retired trio behind the till — are aghast.

They all loved the handsome retired doctor and his swoon-worthy fitness videos. But someone in the sleepy little seaside town of Southbourne is not a fan . . .

Arthur is found dead at the local garden centre. Stabbed in the back with a pair of designer shears.

The police don’t have a clue whodunit. So now Fiona, Daisy and Partial Sue are on the case — their adorably scruffy terrier Simon le Bon trotting closely behind. The deeper they dig into Arthur’s secrets, the more they realize that no one in this case is quite what they seem.

From jilted exes to bitter rivals, the ladies’ list of suspects is growing by the minute.

The clock is ticking for our sleuths to crack the case.

Before the killer returns for a final round of dead-heading . . .

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After studying to be an architect, Pete realised he wasn’t very good at it. He liked designing buildings he just couldn’t make them stand up, which is a bit of a handicap in an industry that likes to keep things upright. So he switched to advertising, writing ads for everything from cruise lines to zombie video games.

After becoming disillusioned with working in ad agencies, he switched to writing thriller novels (or was it because he just wanted to work at home in his pyjamas?). He soon realised there’s no magic formula. You just have to put one word in front of the other (and keep doing that for about a year). It also helps if you can resist the lure of surfing, playing Nintendo Switch with his son, watching America’s Next Top Model with his daughter and drinking beer in a garden chair.

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My thoughts: The Charity Shop Detectives are back with their latest case, a doctor turned influencer, who’s a hit with the ladies, found stabbed in the back with garden shears at the local garden centre, a place the victim often visited.

Was it a jealous lover, or husband, or is there an angry neighbour lurking behind the hedges?

This series is a lot of fun, although it always makes me hungry!

Partial Sue always makes me laugh, Daisy lives on her own sweet, daffy planet, and Fiona, of course, keeps them on task as much as she can.

As they whittle down the list of potential suspects, they fit in a day out in London, for crucial research (and some strawberries with cream), time to eat a lot of delicious food with their new friend Lolly, and take Simon Le Bon the dog to investigate a few things.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.

Individually, the deaths of three elderly people aren’t suspicious. But when DCI Christine Caplan discovers the victims are linked and the truth of their identities twists the investigation ever darker, one question haunts Caplan’s every step: who needs these people dead… and how many names are on their list?

Four siblings. Three dead bodies. One twisted bloodline.

DCI Christine Caplan should be celebrating her daughter’s wedding. Instead, a journalist gives her a lead on a potential murder case with four whispered words: Witness protection. Suspicious death. The dead woman is Juniper Greene — a recluse found alone in her cottage, the doors locked from the inside.

Officially, nobody cares. And since Caplan’s team is days from being shut down, she has nothing to lose by following the faintest trace of evidence. What surfaces is a family that shouldn’t still exist. Four estranged siblings—two buried, two vanished or living under names that aren’t their own.

One by one, these relatives are being picked off.

It isn’t a family tree.

It’s a murder tree.

And someone is chopping it back to the roots. Caplan has to save the survivors. But can she find them before the killer?

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CARO RAMSAY is the Glaswegian author of the critically acclaimed Anderson and Costello series, the first of which, Absolution, was shortlisted for the CWA’s New Blood Dagger for best debut of the year. The ninth book in the series, The Suffering of Strangers, was longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize 2018.@CaroRamsayBooks | caroramsay.com

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My thoughts: DCI Christine Caplan is celebrating her daughter’s wedding when a body washes ashore, possibly linked to an ongoing case, but she’s more interested in the apparent accidental deaths of several elderly people, who when she investigates are in fact connected.

It all seems to link to a care home, and a man there, called Bernie. His carer, Dorothy (Doro) attracts the attention of Caplan and her team, she has a sick child and Bernie has been giving her money, could she be behind this series of deaths?

This was a really clever and compelling case, it was rather fiendish and felt a bit like a Golden Age crime novel – I was completely hooked.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of the book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.

Two brothers. Two daughters. One deadly legacy.

Every family has secrets. Some are worth killing for.

Shiv has spent years trying to leave Peasedale behind. With Mason Tucker finally free from prison and her son, Pip, growing into a happy young boy, the future feels brighter than it has in a long time. Then Hunter Piper appears.

For decades, the Piper name has been synonymous with tragedy, violence and loss. Now Hunter has come back to claim what he believes is his, bringing with him a daughter no one knew existed. Jeanie.

As old wounds reopen and long-buried secrets begin to surface, Shiv finds herself drawn into a deadly conflict rooted in the darkest chapter of her family’s history.

When Pip vanishes, the race to find him leads back to the place where it all began—the shack in the woods.

But some truths should never be uncovered. And some daughters inherit far more than their father’s name.

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Heidi Field was raised in the beautiful countryside of the South of England alongside her parents and two sisters.

Before becoming a writer, Heidi worked as a freelance Sports Massage Therapist and later achieved a degree in Zoology at the age of thirty. She went on to raise two boys and became stepmother to three more children.

In her early forties, Heidi completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. She began the course hoping to become a children’s fantasy writer but left with a burning desire to write contemporary mysteries and psychological thrillers.

Heidi loves placing relatable people in extraordinary situations, challenging them, pushing them to their limits and watching them fight for their sanity.

She is the author of The Peasdale Woods Killers series, a gripping collection of British psychological thrillers exploring dark secrets, fractured relationships, moral ambiguity and the devastating consequences of one crime.

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My thoughts: This is the last book in this series and now it’s Shiv and Mason’s turn. Released from prison after Shiv and Pip get him exonerated, Mason is hoping to finally have a quiet life, but the Piper family isn’t quite done yet.

When her uncle Hunter and his creepy daughter Jeanie show up on her doorstep, Shiv is immediately on high alert. Nothing good, apart from Mason, has come from her father’s family and the timing feels off. Why now, when Mason is released, why not at any point in her life previously?

She’s also worried about how they immediately start to get their claws into Pip, inviting him to their lake house, and on camping trips, signing him out of school and laughing when Shiv gets cross.

But things are only going to get worse when it becomes apparent that they definitely have an alterior motive. Hunter idolised his brother, and blames Mason for his arrest and death. Can Shiv and Mason protect the people they love from this last vestige of evil Pipers?

Filling in the story of Gunner Piper before his arrest as a serial killer, and laying out the truth about his awful family and terrible childhood, didn’t make me sympathetic, he was still a monster, even if not quite the one the rest of the series showed him to be.

I still felt sorry for Mason, who had been a victim too, and Shiv who genuinely didn’t deserve any of this, we can’t choose our parents unfortunately. When Pip comes close to danger, she’s a lioness, determined to take on her evil relatives to save him, no matter what.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.

Gamache receives a puzzling phone call at his home in Three Pines, instructing him to go to a remote, forgotten area in Quebec to find a dead body, a puzzling mystery unspools that tangles the past, present, and the future.

‘There’s a body in Lost Nation.’ But the line goes dead before Chief Inspector Armand Gamache can question the caller.

The head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec has no idea where Lost Nation is, or who woke him in the small hours of the morning at his home in Three Pines. What he does know is that the man was terrified.

When he and his team of Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste find both place and body, the situation only grows more bizarre. The unidentified dead man appears to be from an era more than a century old. He’s lying in a long-abandoned cemetery, on top of a grave with a date, but no name. 

Adding to the mystery, the early morning call appears to have come from Gamache’s friend and neighbour, Clara Morrow. While she denies any knowledge of it, it becomes clear there is some connection between her, the Morrow family, and Lost Nation.

Soon, Gamache and his team are faced with tracking down not just the legend of Lost Nation, but a lost ship, lost documents belong to an eccentric Victorian botanist, and a mysterious plant not seen in a century, that might save, or take, countless lives.

As the ghosts begin to gather, Gamache realises that the body on the grave is far from the only death. To solve the crime and avert catastrophe he must look to rancid secrets and old lies no longer dead and buried.

LOUISE PENNY is the #1 bestselling, multi-award-winning author of the Chief Inspector Gamache novels, set in her home province of Québec, Canada.

Her books, including State of Terror written with Hillary Rodham Clinton, have sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, topped international bestseller lists, including the New York Times, and been translated into 32 languages.

The recipient of both the Order of Canada and l’Ordre national du Québec, her country’s highest civilian honours, her Three Pines Foundation reaches out to those in crisis and offers financial and emotional support, with a special focus on literacy as well as dementia care.

Her husband, Michael, died of dementia in 2016. She lives with her golden retrievers Muggins and Charlie in a village south of Montreal.

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My thoughts: This is one of my favourite series, although I’m sure I want to move to Three Pines, there’s a lot of murder going around. But I love Gamache and his friends, I think foul-mouthed poet Ruth is my favourite character, she’s rather delightful.

This time the case starts with a phone call telling Gamache that there’s a body in Lost Nation in the early hours, not that whoever it is tells the detective what Lost Nation is. I love the way he involves not just his team at the Suretè, but also the residents of the village to get answers. 

The case involves a forgotten village, secrets, a plant and a botanist no one remembers, a tragedy that never seemed to be in the history books – in a way, it could be called All These Things We Have Forgotten. 

It’s absolutely compelling and fascinating, and while the plant at the heart of it is inspired by a real one, and a real botanist, that one doesn’t possess the incredible potential of the fictional.

Gamache and his brilliant mind have solved some shocking crimes, but this one is so twisted and convoluted that it almost defeats him and his team (professional and villagers) when the links between all the threads of the case don’t seem to be there.

Louise Penny is an incredible writer and really hooks you in, I raced through this book, desperate to understand all of the mysteries and strange coincidences that made this such a brilliant read.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.