Category: reviews

‘Bridget and Eileen sit like two old friends, except that one is dreaming while the other is dead.’

But when Eileen introduces her new dead friend, Bridget’s dream is in danger of becoming a nightmare.

Life is simpler when Omisha is just grieving for the tragic loss of her father, Harish. Yes, she is hiding away in a dingy coffee shop instead of going back to university. And she is using her best friend’s brother because she is too young for commitment. Oh, and there is the disgusting possibility that her uncle has been getting up close and personal with her mum.

She wishes she could go back to those halcyon days because now, her dad has sent her a message from beyond the grave. A message delivered by complete strangers who she has no reason to trust:
‘He was murdered.’

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Author Bio –
Rita Mistry has been living on the Wirral for a little over a decade, having been drawn to the ‘dark side’ from Liverpool by her wife, Anne. She has had a number of jobs over the years, such as door-handle packing, stationery selling and burger flipping, but she has mainly spent her working days computer programming which is a small departure from her first degree in English Literature.

Having always wanted to ‘be a writer’ and doing nothing about it until beginning perimenopause, she completed her Masters in Creative Writing with The Open University in 2023. With inspiration from
the Bard of Avon, she has finally completed – and is excited to share – her debut work.

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My thoughts: This was a very entertaining read, I liked Bridget and Sally and their adventures into helping solve crime. 

Omisha is the first recipient of Bridget’s new found ability to speak to the dead. Bridget thought she was dreaming but it appears she was visiting her old friend Eileen in the afterlife. When she’s introduced to Harish, it becomes clear that she’s now a conduit to the living.

After delivering her message to Omi, and throwing her entire life into chaos, Bridget has serious regrets but what else could she do? Pretend she didn’t know that Harish was murdered?

Omi buries her head in the sand to begin with, but realises she needs answers in order to get her life back on track. Was her dad really murdered and did her uncle do it?

She decides an (not very) anonymous note will get things sorted out while she finally breaks up with her situationship, Luke. Then she can think about going back to uni.

As her plans unravel a bit and secrets come to light, have Bridget and Sally done the right thing in getting involved? One chaotic meal will tell all. Anniversaries abound as everyone finally gets answers and puts their dead to rest. Unless Eileen has made another friend….

Funny and entertaining shenanigans ensue, making this a delightful debut and hopefully the start of a new series of crime solving with input from the deceased! 

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

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.

One of the world’s favourite detectives returns . . . for the final time?

Former Detective Hillary Greene has solved some of the toughest cases in Thames Valley Police’s cold case history. But this could be the one that breaks her.

Ten years ago, sixteen-year-old Angela Manning stepped off her school bus, and vanished. By morning, her broken body was found at the bottom of a disused Oxfordshire quarry. The inquest returned an open verdict. No murder weapon. No forensic evidence. Only one elderly witness, who glimpsed two shadowy figures standing on the cliff moments before Angela fell.

Now Hillary and her team must uncover what really happened that night. Angela was pretty, popular – and determined to become an actress. She dazzled the local amateur dramatics group she belonged to – but not everyone admired her confidence. Some loved her. Some envied her. And some had very good reasons to want her gone. Hillary and her team must retrace the schoolgirl’s final hours.

Because someone knows the truth about what happened on that lonely cliff edge. And they’ll do anything to keep Hillary from discovering it.

This is the case that Hillary’s boss, Superintendent Rollo Sale, has never been able to forget. Now he’s about to retire, he asks the cold case team to pull out all the stops. This could be Hillary Greene’s final investigation.

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Faith Martin was born in Oxford, and has spent all her life within twenty miles of the university city, even working at Somerville College for six years before turning to writing full-time.

Faith has been writing for nearly 30 years under four different pen names and has had nearly 50 books published so far. She began writing romantic thrillers as Maxine Barry, which Joffe Books are in the process of re-releasing as brand new eBooks. Then she turned to crime, and as Joyce Cato wrote classic-style whodunits, since she’s always admired the golden-age crime novelists.

But it was when she created her fictional DI Hillary Greene, and began writing under the name of Faith Martin, that she finally began to become more widely known. Her latest literary characters WPC Trudy Loveday, and city coroner, Dr Clement Ryder, take readers back to the 1960’s and the city of Oxford.

Having lived within a few miles of the city of dreaming spires for all her life, both the city and the countryside/wildlife often feature in her novels. Although she has never lived on a narrow boat (unlike DI Hillary Greene!) the Oxford canal, the river Cherwell, and the flora and fauna of a farming landscape have always played a big part in her life – and often sneak their way onto the pages of her books.

Her hobbies include walking her now ageing dog, wildlife-watching, reading and (reluctantly) gardening.

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My thoughts: Former DI Hillary Greene has been handed a case by her boss, it’s one he could never solve, the mysterious death of a sixteen-year-old girl ten years ago.

She wanted to be an actor and was the leading light of a local am dram society, but not particularly well liked. There’s actually quite a lot of suspects.

As Hillary and her colleagues re-interview the people who knew Angela best, and try to piece together her last day, and why she was at the quarry to begin with.

At the same time, it becomes clear that the cold case unit is going to be closed, Hillary has to figure out what she wants to do next, and it’s actually good timing for Claire, who is dealing with family problems, so this might be their last case. If they can solve it.

I’ve read several of the books in this series, they work pretty well as standalones as well as a series, the cases are always clever and the characters interesting, as it is here. The am dram group are all very unpleasant in different ways, and Angela was probably quite annoying. But not enough for someone to kill her, surely?

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

The police say Calvin Cross died naturally.

Former Scotland Yard detective Ember Lockhart lost her career following a scandal. Now working as a private investigator, she is hired by Amelia Cross to investigate her husband’s sudden death on a flight into Heathrow. Calvin had been frightened before he died, and the corrupted USB stick he left behind suggests he had good reason.

As Ember begins asking questions, she is followed, warned and threatened to abandon the case. With reluctant help from her former colleague and ex-lover, Leo Campbell, she traces Calvin’s death to a secretive technology company involved in political blackmail and corporate espionage involving an elaborate plan to destabilise the British government.

Then Amelia is murdered, and the evidence is carefully arranged to frame Ember. Charged with killing her own client, Ember must prove her innocence while pursuing an organisation prepared to eliminate anyone who gets in the way of their ultimate political goal.

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Deborah Stone is the best-selling author of four gripping psychological thrillers that keep readers turning pages late into the night. Her novels have won multiple awards and critical acclaim, establishing her as a standout voice in contemporary psychological suspense and thriller fiction.

Her new crime thriller, Buried In Silence, will be available for pre-order on September 30, 2026 and will be released on October 14, 2026. Her last release, Nowhere Man (October 3, 2024), is available in paperback, Kindle, and as an audiobook. It follows the success of Semi-Detached (April 3, 2023) which was recently honoured with the Chill With A Book Readers’ Award. Deborah’s second novel, Me and My Shadow, received the prestigious Chill With A Book Premier Award, given only to books that earn outstanding ratings across all reviewer categories. Her debut, What’s Left Unsaid, won the Runner-Up Prize for Best Book of 2018 in the same awards and remains a reader favourite.

In addition to fiction, Deborah is the author of the highly respected non-fiction guide, The Essential Family Guide to Caring for Older People, a finalist in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards 2022. A recognised expert on elder care, Deborah frequently appears on BBC, ITV, Sky, and Channel 5, offering expert advice on aging, care planning, and family support. She contributes regularly to national newspapers and lifestyle magazines, helping families navigate the complexities of caring for older relatives.

She lives in London with her husband and their delightfully mischievous golden retriever.

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My thoughts: A man dies of an apparent heart attack on an aeroplane, his wife insists it wasn’t a natural death but the police disagree. So she hires former Detective Inspector Ember Lockhart to investigate.

What follows involves being framed for murder, explosions, boxes of offal, threats, kidnappings, senior members of the government, MI5, CEOs and millionaires determined to control the country. Not what Ember, or her former colleague Leo expected at all.

It’s all very heart racing and gripping as Ember, Leo and his subordinate Rohan attempt to untangle it all, find out who really killed Ember’s client and her husband and put a stop to the evil schemes of a rather vile rich and powerful person.

I really enjoyed this, I like Ember, she’s clever and headstrong, prone to charging full steam ahead into things, but Leo is there to rescue her and try to get her to rein in her impulsive nature. They make a good team, whether it’s hunting a killer or just dodging his nosey neighbour!

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