Hello 2026.
I am so pleased to be looking ahead to another year of reading and reviewing. The month of January always excites me as there are so many new books due for publication in the year ahead. There are also the older ones which I have not yet had time to read - everything from books published last year, going right back to the classics that I still haven't got around to reading. There is just so much reading potential attached to the beginning of a new year.
However, let's begin with this month and the books which I am looking forward to reading.
A Slow and Secret Poison by Carmella Lowkis
1922, Wiltshire. When Vee Morgan accepts the job of gardener at a crumbling stately home, she's hoping for a fresh start where nobody knows her troubled history.
But Harfold Manor is shadowed by grief and the memories of long-faded glory, its rooms haunted by the only surviving member of the family, Lady Arabella Lascy. Vee is fascinated by her enigmatic new employer, a woman obsessed with the curse she believes has killed her family one by one. A curse that is coming for her next.
As Vee immerses herself in the world of Harfold, she finds herself increasingly entranced by Arabella and the secrets that poison her.
But Vee has her own things to hide: secrets that caused her to flee Cardiff, secrets that estranged her from her own family, secrets that might finally catch up to her…
Winterbourne by Elisabeth Wolf
Within the walls of Winterbourne dwells a secret room, with an unspeakable collection of books.
Librarian Anne Adams has found the perfect escape: a job cataloguing the library of Winterbourne, an architectural masterpiece on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland. Surrounded by an awe-inspiring landscape, the library is magnificent, with priceless first editions, a librarian's dream.
However, Anne's early weeks in her new job are beset by obstacles - no internet, a house plunged into darkness every night and unexplained mysteries on the island. After weeks of isolation, upon meeting the mysterious owner Lucien Broussard, Anne is puzzled. Eloquent and well-travelled, his reclusive nature seems uncharacteristic. But after finding a cryptic clue within the pages of a book, Anne discovers that Broussard's collection includes everything from the mundane to the books no one should ever open . . .
Magic Uncorked by Annabel Chase
A magical secret is about to shake things up for the ladies of Lake Cloverleaf…
For Libbie Stark, Friday night cocktail club is a lifeline. Whatever her problems, whether her stubborn boss, unruly teens or deadbeat boyfriend, time with the women of Lake Cloverleaf always feels like a tonic.
But when tragedy strikes on the Fourth of July, Libbie discovers a magical secret. Witches are real. Only they aren’t born – they’re created. When a witch dies, her powers pass from one generation to the next. And a local witch has chosen to pass her powers onto the ladies of the cocktail club.
With the help of a magical recipe book, Libbie must harness her new powers and use them to shake up the comfortable life she settled for. As Libbie learns to finally live on her own terms, sparks fly with handsome local lawyer Ethan Townsend, and she discovers it’s never too late to restore a little magic to your life…
The Dubrovnik Book Club by Eva Glyn
In a tiny bookshop in Dubrovnik’s historic Old Town, a book club begins…
Newly arrived on the sun-drenched shores of Croatia, Claire Thomson’s life is about to change forever when she starts working at a local bookshop. With her cousin Vedran, employee Luna and Karmela, a professor, they form an unlikely book club.
But when their first book club pick – an engrossing cosy crime – inspires them to embark upon an investigation that is close to the group’s heart, they quickly learn the value of keeping their new-found friends close as lives and stories begin to entwine…
In the Blink of an Eye by Yoav Blum
A locked room. A dead scientist. A time machine.
Professor Yonatan Brand, a world-renowned physicist, amateur magician, and hot-chocolate enthusiast, dreamed of unlocking time itself. He mapped every danger, every paradox, every temptation of hubris. But when his body is discovered inside his sealed study, Brand leaves behind one impossible crime—and a machine that might have killed him.
Enter Benjamin “Bunker” Kronovic, a washed-up actor, and Abigail Canaani, a reclusive librarian. They’re not seasoned detectives; their usual cases involve lost pets and unpaid bills. Now they must face something far stranger: a corpse, a time machine, and a circle of Brand’s childhood friends, each guarding secrets darker than the past itself.
As Bunker and Abigail stumble through a mystery where time is as treacherous as truth, they discover that the question isn’t just who killed Professor Brand, but when.
In the Blink of an Eye is a locked-room mystery with a science-fiction twist, blending razor-sharp suspense, mind-bending paradoxes, and two unlikely detectives you’ll never forget.
My Year of Casual Acquaintances by Ruth F. Stevens
When Mar Meyer's husband divorces her for another woman, she reacts by abandoning everything in her past: her home, her friends, even her name. Though it's not easy to start over, Mar is young-looking, fit, and ready for new adventures—as long as she can keep things casual.
With each passing month, Mar goes from one acquaintance to the next. Among them: a fellow gym member down on her luck, a flirty hip-hop instructor, a bossy but comical consultant, a kindly older gentleman... and Charlie, a handsome best-selling novelist who wants more from Mar than she's able to give. She learns something new from each encounter. But can she change enough to open herself up to happiness and true connection?
Surrounded by an ensemble of quirky, endearing characters, Mar follows a tortuous and unpredictable path as she navigates the first year of her reinvented life. My Year of Casual Acquaintances is packed with laugh-out-loud moments mingled with scenes of loneliness and self-doubt that will put a lump in your throat.
The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan
The mystery has haunted generations since the Second World War: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?
Now, thanks to radical new technology and the obsession of a retired FBI agent, this book offers an answer. Rosemary Sullivan unfolds the story in a gripping, moving narrative.
Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal teenaged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with her family and four other people in Amsterdam during World War II, until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But despite the many works – journalism, books, plays and novels – devoted to Anne’s story, none has ever conclusively explained how these eight people managed to live in hiding undetected for over two years – and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.
With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents – some never before seen – and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilising methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together the months leading to the infamous arrest – and came to a shocking conclusion.
The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the riveting story of their mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behaviour of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.
Abigail by Magda Szabo
It is late 1943 and Hitler, exasperated by the slowness of his Hungarian ally to act on the "Jewish question" and alarmed by the weakness on his southern flank, is preparing to occupy the country. Foreseeing this, and concerned for his daughter's safety, a Budapest father decides to send her to a boarding school away from the capital.
A lively, sophisticated, somewhat spoiled teenager, she is not impressed by the reasons she is given, and when the school turns out to be a fiercely Puritanical one in a provincial city a long way from home, she rebels outright. Her superior attitude offends her new classmates and things quickly turn sour.
It is the start of a long and bitter learning curve that will open her eyes to her arrogant blindness to other people's true motives and feelings. Exposed for the first time to the realities of life for those less privileged than herself, and increasingly confronted by evidence of the more sinister purposes of the war, she learns lessons about the nature of loyalty, courage, sacrifice and love.
Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight
Pen and Alice, childhood best friends from Toronto, are in their first year at the University of Edinburgh. Each has come to the city for her own reasons.
Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she'll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father's - now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox - lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lennox's centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents' secret, just as she's falling in love for the first time . . .
Meanwhile Alice, an aspiring actor, sees university as her route to the West End and beyond. The star of this year's theatre production, she's making the most of the power she wields as an object of desire - until an affair with her tutor begins to slip from her control.
Witty, warm and wildly unputdownable, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is at once a love story and an irresistible mystery, a celebration of female friendship, and a study of how looking back can help us move forward.
The Baby Farm Murderer by Stephen Jakobi
A forensic study of the trial of Amelia Dyer, one of Britain’s most prolific serial killers, thought to have murdered up to 400 babies.
This book explores how life in Victorian England created the ideal conditions for Amelia to establish herself as a baby farmer, taking infants from desperate women in exchange for payment.
It examines what motivated her to kill and go on killing: her need for money versus her role as custodian in a cult that worshipped Lucifer and delves into her personal life, taking evidence from hundreds of contemporary trial and government records, memoirs and newspaper articles, and investigating what it was about society and policing in the late nineteenth-century that allowed her to get away with it for so long.
The nineteenth century was a horrible time to be a woman in England.
The lack of legal and effective birth control affected even the highest in the land.
Queen Victoria, after having given birth to nine children, was advised by physicians for the sake of her health to have no more.
Her diaries complain of ‘no more fun in bed’ as the only legal and safe way to avoid pregnancy was abstinence from sexual intercourse.
It was against this backdrop that Amelia Dyer carried out her monstrous campaign.
In 1856, she began advertising in local papers under assumed names and reassuring backgrounds, offering to adopt newborn babies in exchange for fees that varied according to the means of the mother.
Her 40-year-long killing spree only ended with a local police force sting operation.
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