A New Year with Tea with Tales

On our first meeting for 2025 we met on an unseasonably cold wet and windy morning and shared our memories of rainy days.

After listening to a short extract from Emma Manners' book The Accidental Duchess: from farmer's daughter to Belvoir Castle we talked about the books we had read over the Christmas break.

Royal Secret was another good read for our Lucinda Riley fans. Initially published in 2000, the author revised and updated this spy novel in 2018 with the new name of Love Letter. Our reader also enjoyed the NZ vet and romance writer Danielle Hawkins’ biography Two Shakes of a Lamb’s Tail: the diary of a country vet.

Three of our readers are enjoying the Cormoran Strike mystery series by Robert Galbraith. However none of them liked the sixth book, The Ink Black Heart, and are hoping number seven, The Running Grave, is better.

Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope is the main character in Ann Cleeves’ detective series set in Northumberland. The first book, The Crow Trap, was a little hard to get into but worth preserving with, says one of our readers.

Another detective series with a female detective is Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli and Isles series. The first books in the series are The Surgeon and The Apprentice and our reader is looking forward to reading all thirteen books. She adds a warning that the books are very graphic.

A strong recommendation comes with our next book: A Train in Winter: a story of resistance, friendship and survival by Caroline Moorhead. This factual account tells the story of the 230 French women resisters who were rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. This very serious read was hard to put down for our reader.

Michael Gilbert’s book Death in Captivity is a Second World War mystery told with light-hearted amusement.

Mystery novels were certainly popular this month with Number 13 in Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series, Resurrection Men, added to the mix. Moving up Scotland from the setting of Edinburgh to Aberdeen, another reader recommended Stuart MacBride’s Logan McRae series, with Dark Blood and Shatter the Bones enjoyed and shared. 

Just like Lucinda Riley, Janet Evanovich has re-edited two of her earlier standalone romance novels: Hero at Large and Thanksgiving. Our reader deduced that romance had changed since he was a young lad.

Our last reader has been enjoying several Agatha Christie novels.

Posted by Miss Moneypenny

8 January 2025

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