Book Review Alert: Lady Avely’s Guide to Truth and Magic by Rosalie Oaks

Reviewed: March 10th, 2024
Released: February 16th, 2014
Genre: Magical Cosy Mystery

Regency widow shouldn’t be hunting spectres all night.

Lady Judith Avely’s magical gift for divining the truth makes her prodigiously good at lying. To absolve a guilty secret, she travels to the exiled Duke of Sargen’s estate, but the last thing she expects is to run into the duke himself, who is lamentably now even more attractive than in his volatile youth.

The duke has his own concerns: he has returned home to a haunted house, with skulls floating about and a footman apparently bashed by a book. Such vulgar circumstances are best avoided, but the duke needs Judith’s unique talents to help uncover the culprit – even if it might put her in the sights of a killer.

With the help of a tiny vampiric acquaintance and a continuous supply of drinking chocolate, Judith should be able to solve the uncanny mystery…if only the duke will stop making improper remarks about her mobcaps.

A lady who can discern lies, the duke who lied to her, and a gothic cosy mystery full of bats, skulls, and cocoa.

Lady Avely’s Guide to Truth and Magic features a mid-life heroine, a slow-burn second-chance romance, and a magical version of Regency England. Read My Thoughts…

Book Review Alert: Tea, Cake and Murder! by K.J. Heritage

Reviewed: February 8th, 2024
Released: February 7th, 2024
Genre: Cosy Mystery

A talented spell-weaving witch on the run is forced to find magical refuge in a mystery novel, playing the role of Emily Crookshanks, amateur sleuth and professional flirt.

Waking up with no idea who or where she is, Emily finds herself in the quaint 1920s English countryside village of Little Pucklewick, uncomfortably sharing tea and cakes with the not so Reverend Wilson-Smallsey, the village’s rather pompous womanising vicar.

After a series of shocking murders, Emily hooks up with the village doctor, a rather dashing ex-RAF fighter pilot known to his chums as ‘Ceddars’. Working together, they uncover clues and interrogate suspects.

Add an inept inspector, various pompous ladies from the regular vicarage get-togethers, a dashing explorer recently returned from the Orient, his very attractive career-minded secretary, and a whole host of motives and clues, including a series of nasty accusatory posters, and Emily finds herself in the middle of a most confusing and frustrating mystery.

But more than the murders, Emily suffers from terrifying visions of attack and desperate escape. And just what are wands and spell-weavery, and the smartphones and hi-def televisions she occasionally glimpses in her mind?

Despite everything, Emily knows that to survive, she must solve the mystery and, to do that, she must keep going to The End. Read My Thoughts…

Book Review Alert: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Reviewed: October 15th, 2021
Released: May 13th, 2021
Genre: Murder Mystery

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.

But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late? Read More…

Book Review Alert: Door to Door by T.L. Brown

Reviewed: September 8th, 2021
Released: October 31st, 2020
Genre: Paranormal Mystery

Two worlds collide when Emily Swift turns thirty and her late father’s journal lands on her doorstep… Seventeen years after Emily Swift’s father died, a door is opened to a new world, an Empire led by peculiar men and women called Salesmen – transporters of magical items. These Salesmen have the unique ability to travel from place-to-place, and even world-to-world, simply by stepping throug

Now that Emily is thirty, it turns out that she can “door travel” too, stumbling unplanned into kitchens, bathrooms, and alleyways as her connection to the Salesman Empire is revealed. Fueled by the cryptic notes and sketches in her father’s journal, Emily discovers the real reason behind his death: he was targeted and assassinated by the Fringe, a terrorist group of rogue Salesmen. Read More…

Book Review Alert: Boxset one: The Lucas Rathbnone Mysteries 1-5 by Saffron Amatti

Reviewed: August 14th, 2021
Released: January 31st, 2020
Genre: Cozy Mystery

Lucas Rathbone talks to ghosts.

Well, ghosts talk to Lucas. He’d rather they didn’t.

But it’s solve murders or be haunted forever, and he has enough of that as it is.

In the first five Lucas Rathbone Mysteries, Lucas must solve crime to rid himself of ghosts, avoid a ruthless gang he accidentally crossed, and stop people meeting a untimely death, all while battling for a love with the odds stacked against it.

What could go wrong?

I love cozy mysteries and this boxset of Lucas Rathbone mysteries set in the 1920’s is perfect for a nice evening of gentle reading. Read More…