Left on the Shelf

Amazon US

About the Author

Rue Baldry is an author of novels and short stories. Her novel, Dwell, will be published by Northodox Press in February 2026 and her short story collection, Nice Things, will be published by Fly On The Wall Press in December 2026.

She was born in 1969, the year of Woodstock, the Stonewall riots and the moon landings, and raised in Essex in the UK, and Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. In 1988 she moved to York to study English Literature, fell in love with the city, and with the man she married in 1992. She is still living here with him. They now have five children, who are all adults. She has a BA in English Literature from the University of York and an MA in Literary Theory and Creative Writing from the University of Leeds.

You can also find Rue at:

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(ARC and media courtesy of the publisher/author)

(all opinions are my own)

(Bookshop.org affiliated)

A Wish for Beth by Audrey Davis - #bookspotlight #blogtour

I am thrilled to be shining the spotlight on this book today, A Wish for Beth by Audrey Davis.

It is a heartwarming paranormal cosy romance set in a small Scottish village, featuring a flamboyant genie, three unexpected wishes, and a second chance at love after loss.

The Blurb

Love, second chances, and a dash of magic… what could possibly go wrong?

Beth Calder’s life so far:

Marriage falling apart? Check.Heartbreak she can’t quite move past? Check.Fresh start in a quiet Scottish village? Check.Discovering a genie inside a pinball machine? That’s new.

Arriving in Cranley is meant to be Beth’s chance to begin again. A job as head chef at The Jekyll and Hyde pub, a cosy place to call home, and a village that doesn’t ask too many questions feel like exactly what she needs. Romance is firmly off the table.

That becomes harder to hold onto when she meets Kieran, a thoughtful and quietly charming tech developer who understands more than she expects. It becomes even harder when the pub’s dusty basement reveals a glitter-loving genie with a habit of interfering and a belief that Beth’s story isn’t over yet.

With three wishes she doesn’t quite trust and a heart still holding onto the past, Beth must decide whether to keep playing it safe or risk everything for a chance at something new.

In Cranley, even the most unexpected kind of magic can help you find your way forward.

A Wish for Beth is Book 4 in the Cranley Wishes series. Perfect for readers who love small-town charm, gentle paranormal romance, and uplifting second-chance love stories filled with warmth, hope, and a touch of magic.

Book Details

ISBN: 978 1036733957

Publisher: Vinci Books

Formats: e-book and paperback

No. of Pages: 336 (paperback)

Series: Book 4 in the Cranley Wishes series

Purchase Links

Amazon US

About the Author

Audrey Davis is the bestselling author of sparkling romantic comedies that blend warmth, wit and just a touch of mischief.

She burst onto the scene with A Clean Sweep and its prequel A Clean Break, before bewitching readers with her ghostly romcom The Haunting of Hattie Hastings, first published as a trilogy and later as a standalone novel.

Her feel-good Cranley Wishes series began with A Wish for Jinnie and went on to delight fans with A Wish for Jo and A Wish for Wilma. Along the way, she also delivered the laugh-out-loud Lost in Translation (2021). Her latest standalone, The Lexicon of Love, charmed readers in September 2025.

Originally from the UK but now settled in Switzerland with her husband, Audrey divides her time between writing, shopping, cooking, and indulging her love of red wine. She’s a voracious reader, a keen storyteller, and never fails to get a little giddy when readers reach out.

You can also find Audrey at:

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(media courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)

(all opinions are my own)

Tuesday, 9 June 2026

Lisa Doyle is Absolutely Fine by Mo Fanning - #bookreview

Lisa Doyle's father left her two things: a battered blue armchair, and his talent for making a terrible situation catastrophically worse...

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I am required to make it clear at the beginning of my reviews that I received this book for free from the author. I have not been paid for doing this and all opinions are my own. I am Bookshop.org affiliated, which means I earn a very small amount of money if you buy from there using my direct link. Although I include purchase links to Amazon, I am not affiliated with them. I include them to make it easy for you to navigate to them if you so wish.

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The Blurb

Lisa Doyle is fine. Absolutely fine.

At least, that's the story she's been telling herself.

Her best friend is getting married. Everyone around her seems to have a partner, a plan, and a life that makes sense. Lisa, meanwhile, has four glasses of wine in her, a talent for making bad situations worse, and a growing sense of being left behind.

So she does what any sensible woman in a crisis would do. She announces that she's engaged.

There is only one problem.

Brian does not exist.

Now Lisa needs a fiancé before the wedding, her actor flatmate is far too willing to get involved, and the real Brian, who is very much married and very much her boss, is starting to look at her in ways that suggest this lie may have got seriously out of hand.

Warm, witty, and painfully recognisable, Lisa Doyle is Absolutely Fine is a grown-up romantic comedy about love, pressure, friendship, and the exhausting performance of holding everything together when you're quietly falling apart.

My Review

I enjoyed reading this wonderful romantic comedy very much.

The main character, the titular Lisa Doyle, was wonderful and was easy to relate to. Feeling as though she is the only one not getting married, one drunken evening Lisa posts on her social media that she is engaged to Brian. However, Brian doesn't exist and it is also the name of her boss. What follows is some very funny and poignant narrative which kept my attention throughout the novel.

It was so easy to empathise with Lisa. The reader realises that her actions are the result of loneliness and my heart went out to her. However, she digs herself into a deeper hole when her actor flatmate, Andy, assumes the role of the nonexistent Brian and is introduced to her family and friends; not forgetting on her social media.

The author has created a wonderful cast of characters in this book. The minor characters are just as charming, and I adored Lisa's family and friends.

It is obvious from the beginning that Lisa's lie is going to blow up in her face at some point and, when it does, I loved the way the author allowed those close to her to treat her with kindness, understanding and compassion.

The book had a fun premise which completely delivered. This isn't the first novel that I have read by this author. There is a link to my review of his book, Rainbows and Lollipops, at the bottom of this post.

This was a fabulous book which I highly recommend. Publishing on 18th June, it is worth getting your hands on a copy. It is perfect for readers of Mhairi McFarlane, Beth O'Leary, and Marian Keyes.

Book Details

ISBN: 978 1068394720

Publisher: Spring Street Books

Formats: e-book, audio, hardback and paperback

No. of Pages: 344 (paperback)

Preorder Links

Bookshop.org

Direct From the Author

About the Author

Mo has always believed stories can do two things at once: make you laugh and make you feel less alone. That’s what he tries to do on every page that he writes.

He didn’t grow up planning to be a novelist — but he grew up needing books. They were his escape, his company, and his way of making sense of the world. Now, he gets to create those escapes for other people. His novels explore love, loss, friendship, and the messy, hopeful business of being human.

At the heart of it all is a simple promise: even in life’s toughest moments, there’s humour, there’s connection, and there’s always a glimmer of light. That’s the world he writes about, and he's thrilled to be sharing it with others.

You can also find Mo at:

Other Blog Posts Featuring This Author

Rainbows and Lollipops

(ARC and media courtesy of the author)

(all opinions are my own)

(Bookshop.org affiliated)

Monday, 8 June 2026

Deadly Truths by Paul Gitsham - #guestpost #authorinterview

I am so excited to be welcoming the author Paul Gitsham onto the blog today. Paul is the author of Deadly Truths and today he is going to be talking about why he sends his authors to Coventry. First, a little about the book...

The Blurb

How do you solve a murder when you’re shut out of the investigation?

Young detectives, Robinson Ellington Foxe and Amy Kennard, don’t want to work at Coventry’s Moat Lane police station. Neither do their colleagues want them there. But it’s the last chance for two officers for whom doing the right thing has cost them their futures.

Despite a murder on their patch, they are lumbered with investigating a series of high-profile burglaries. But when a thief is killed in the house of an influential businessman, Foxe and Kennard are convinced it is linked to their cases and want in.

The official investigation is a whitewash, but Robbie and Amy keep investigating anyway. As they uncover a web of deceit and corruption, reaching to the very top of the force, their own difficult histories are weaponised against them, and they find themselves fighting for their careers and their lives.

Welcome to Left on the Shelf Paul. Over to you.

Why send my detectives to Coventry?

Or rather, why aren’t more authors setting their crime fiction series in Coventry? This is the question I found myself pondering as I started planning my new Foxe and Kennard series. By the time I came to write the first in the series, Deadly Truths, there was no doubt in my mind where my two detectives would ply their trade.

Full disclosure, I’m a Coventry kid. I was raised here and lived with my parents until leaving for university in the mid-nineties. Since then I’ve lived in Bath, Cambridge, Manchester and even Toronto. You don’t have to look too hard to find crime novels set in and around those cities. But try the same with my hometown and there are slim pickings.

Which strikes me as really odd. Because Coventry has so much to offer a writer. Obviously, there’s the crime rate. Coventry is a mid-sized city and is plagued with the same problems as any of its contemporaries, such as Liverpool, Manchester or London. Once an engineering giant, and the heart of the UK car industry, the massive economic shifts in the 80s and 90s devastated the local economy, leading to a huge rise in unemployment and its accompanying social ills. Inspiration for any crime writers, whether historic or more recent is not hard to find. This is no Midsomer!

Then there is the city’s layout. Coventry has been rebuilt repeatedly since the medieval period. Littered all around the city are remnants of the city walls and ancient buildings, interwoven with the evidence of hundreds of years of building and rebuilding. Obviously, one can’t mention rebuilding without referencing the second world war, specifically the devastating blitz on the city centre that destroyed our beautiful cathedral and flattened the city’s heart. Since then there have been waves of regeneration, some more successful than others. Move out the city’s (in)famous inner ring road and Coventry is a patchwork quilt of areas of extreme wealth, the well-to-do middle classes and extreme poverty, with everything in between. Suburbs such as Tile Hill, Canley and Earlsdon feature large, expensive houses rubbing shoulders with mid-range terraces and “temporary” post-war social housing still occupied eighty years later. As any social historian or crime writer will tell you, those extreme contrasts are the perfect catalyst for crime.

The way I see it, if there can be terrific series set in Bradford (such as A.A. Dhand’s Harry Virdee and Liz Mistry’s Nikki Parekh to name just a couple), then why not Coventry?

I never cut my ties with Coventry, since I still had family and friends who lived here. But it was my Essex-born-and-bred wife who suggested we move back to Coventry a few years ago and this fully crystalised my decision to set my next books here. Not only would it now be easy to set my books in a real, living, breathing city – something which I have always admired about Ian Rankin or Peter James – but I was also starting to see Coventry through my wife’s eyes. My impressions of Coventry are now a mixture of thirty-year old memories, coloured with the emotions of a teenager, and the fresher memories of my wife who has only ever seen Coventry in recent times. Where I see the ghosts of shops and businesses decades gone, my wife sees attractive new developments with opportunities for young people and aspirations for the future.

Which led to the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that became the Foxe and Kennard series. Posh-boy former London detective DS Robinson Ellington Foxe and proud, working-class Salford lass DC Amy Kennard had to be outsiders. Having left their previous forces under a cloud, they don’t want to be working in Coventry. Nor do their new colleagues want them here. And it is this pariah-like status that provides the necessary internal conflict that is the lynchpin of any good story. It also allows me to describe Coventry through fresh eyes.

Hopefully there is something for all readers, both Coventrians enjoying a book set in the city they love and newcomers visiting somewhere new through the pages of a book. Deadly Truths is out now, with book two, Home Truths, ready to preorder for November. Book three is due next May and book four is currently being written. The crime fiction world will be getting to know Coventry a lot better over the next few years…

Many thanks Paul for being on the blog today

Book Details

ISBN: 978 1068730535

Publisher: Straw Hat Crime

Formats: e-book and paperback

No. of Pages: 336 (paperback)

Series: Book 1 in the Foxe and Kennard series

Purchase Links

Bookshop.org

About the Author

Paul Gitsham is the author of the Foxe and Kennard British detective series, the DCI Warren Jones series and the standalone domestic thriller, The Aftermath.

Brought up in Coventry, he started his career as a biologist. After gaining a PhD in molecular biology, he worked in laboratories in Manchester and Toronto, before retraining as a science teacher. Along the way he had spells as the world’s most over-qualified receptionist and spent time working for a major UK bank, ensuring that terrorists, foreign dictators and other international ne’er do wells hadn’t embarrassed the institution by managing to deposit their ill-gotten gains in a Children’s Trust Fund.

Paul’s final school reports from primary school said that he would never achieve anything if his handwriting didn’t improve. A somewhat kinder note urged him to become the next Roald Dahl. If anything, his handwriting has got worse and unless Mr Dahl also wrote police procedurals under a pseudonym, he has failed on both counts.

Paul is a member of the Crime Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers organisation and lives with his wife in the West Midlands in a house with more books than shelf space.

You can also find Paul at:

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