Currently Reading

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too? Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

The Death of Remembrance (DCI Daley #10) by Denzil Meyrick (ARC, Polygon)

Glasgow, 1983, and a beat constable walks away from a bar where he knows a crime is about to be committed. It is a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

In the present, an old fisherman is found dead by Kinloch’s shoreline and a stranger with a deadly mission moves into town.

As past and present collide, D.C.I. Jim Daleymust confront old friends, new foes and ghosts who will not be silenced.

Seek the Singing Fish by Roma Wells (eARC, epoque)

Growing up in the lagoon town of Batticaloa, a young girl, with an unquenchable curiosity and love of the natural world, is entangled in the trauma and turmoil of the Sri Lankan civil war.

Uprooted from everything she holds dear, tragedy and betrayal set in motion an unforgettable odyssey.

Torn from east to west, struggling with what it means to belong, she desperately seeks a way home to the land of the singing fish.

The Transfer Problem by Adam Saint (eARC, Deixis Press)

Ethan, an introverted banker with a traumatic past, falls in love with Anna, an enigmatic scientist with whom he shares an academic interest in the philosophy of existence and consciousness. But with the reappearance of Ethan’s rogue brother Robert – a hacker who is forbidden from using technology – the hypothetical turns all too real: Robert convinces Ethan to let Anna transfer a conscious mind into Ethan’s trading algorithms.

But when Anna’s experiment goes well – too well, in fact, with world-altering consequences – Ethan finds himself on the run, searching for answers to Anna’s mysterious past and looking desperately for a way to give humanity its future back.

The Transfer Problem asks what it means to exist, to be real, and to be human. But it also asks an even bigger question: how far would you go to avenge yourself?

Recently finished

The Fire Killer (DI Barton #5) by Ross Greenwood (Boldwood Books)

Villager by Tom Cox (Unbound)

How To Save a Life by Clare Swatman (Boldwood Books)

News of the Dead by James Robertson (Hamish Hamilton)

Deep in the mountains of north-east Scotland lies Glen Conach, a place of secrets and memories, fable and history. In particular, it holds the stories of three different eras, separated by centuries yet linked by location, by an ancient manuscript and by echoes that travel across time.

In ancient Pictland, the Christian hermit Conach contemplates God and nature, performs miracles and prepares himself for sacrifice. Long after his death, legends about him are set down by an unknown hand in the Book of Conach.

Generations later, in the early nineteenth century, self-promoting antiquarian Charles Kirkliston Gibb is drawn to the Glen, and into the big house at the heart of its fragile community.

In the present day, young Lachie whispers to Maja of a ghost he thinks he has seen. Reflecting on her long life, Maja believes him, for she is haunted by ghosts of her own. (Review to follow)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Companion by Lesley Thomson (ARC, Aria Fiction)

James Ritchie was looking forward to a boys’ day out with his son, Wilbur – even if he was a little late picking him up from the home of his ex-wife, Anna. Annoyed by his late arrival, and competing for their son’s attention, Anna leaves the two of them to their day with the promise of a roast dinner when Wilbur returns.

But Anna will never see her family again. That afternoon, James and Wilbur are found dead, the victims of a double stabbing on the beach.

DI Toni Kemp, of Sussex police, must unravel a case which has shocked the county to its core. What she discovers will lead her to Blacklock House, a grand country mansion, long ago converted into flats. Here in the middle of nowhere, where a peacock struts the lawn, and a fountain plays intermittently, seven long-term residents have seen more than they should.

But this is a community who are good at keeping secrets…

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared my review of Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov.

Tuesday – I published my review of Young Women by Jessica Moor as part of the blog tour.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is my weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.

Thursday – I published a guest post by Orna Ross, author of the historical novels, After the Rising & Before the Fall as part of the blog tour.

Friday – I shared my Five Favourite May 2022 Reads.

Saturday – I published my review of crime novel, The Fire Killer (DI Barton #5) by Ross Greenwood as part of the blog tour. I also took part in the monthly #6Degrees of Separation meme forging a chain that began with Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.

After-the-Rising-and-Before-the-Fall-Cover-EBOOK-scaled-1

New arrivals

The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne and Horowitz #4) by Anthony Horowitz (eARC, Century via NetGalley)

“I’m sorry but the answer’s no.”

Reluctant author, Anthony Horowitz, has had enough. He tells ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne that after three books he’s splitting and their deal is over. The truth is that Anthony has other things on his mind. His new play, a thriller called Mindgame, is about to open at the Vaudeville Theater in London’s West End. Not surprisingly, Hawthorne declines a ticket to the opening night.

The play is panned by the critics. In particular, Sunday Times critic Margaret Throsby gives it a savage review, focusing particularly on the writing. The next day, Throsby is stabbed in the heart with an ornamental dagger which turns out to belong to Anthony, and has his fingerprints all over it.

Anthony is arrested by an old enemy . . . Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw. She still carries a grudge from her failure to solve the case described in the second Hawthorne adventure, The Sentence is Death, and blames Anthony. Now she’s out for revenge.

Thrown into prison and fearing for both his personal future and his writing career, Anthony is the prime suspect in Throsby’s murder and when a second theatre critic is found to have died in mysterious circumstances, the net closes in. Ever more desperate, he realizes that only one man can help him.

But will Hawthorne take the call?

The Sweetheart Locket by Jan Gilroy (eARC, Orion via NetGalley)

What if the key to your present lies in the past?

London, 1939. On the eve of the Second World War, Canadian Maggie Wyndham defies her family and stays in England to do her bit for the war effort. Torn between two countries, two men and living a life of lies working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Maggie’s RAF sweetheart locket is part of who she is…and who she isn’t.

San Francisco, 2019. Over twenty years after Maggie’s death, her daughter Millie and granddaughter Willow take a DNA test that’s supposed to be a bit of fun but instead yields unexpected results. Willow has always treasured her grandmother’s sweetheart locket, both family heirloom and a symbol of her grandparents’ love story. But now she doesn’t know what to believe. She embarks on a search for the truth, one she doesn’t know will reveal far more about herself…

Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain by Amy Jeffs (riverrun)

Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland is a new illustrated mythology of Britain, set in its wildest landscapes.

It begins between the Creation and Noah’s Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants from an age when the children of Cain and the progeny of fallen angels walked the earth, to the founding of Britain, England, Wales and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans.

These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong, inhabited with characters now half-remembered. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning artworks and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary.

We visit beautiful, sacred places that include prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge, mountains such as Snowdon and rivers including the story-silted Thames in a vivid collection of tales of a land steeped in myth.

The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Picador)

In Strasbourg, in the boiling hot summer of 1518, a plague strikes the women of the city. First it is just one – a lone figure, dancing in the main square – but she is joined by more and more and the city authorities declare an emergency. Musicians will be brought in. The devil will be danced out of these women.

Just beyond the city’s limits, pregnant Lisbet lives with her mother-in-law and husband, tending the bees that are their livelihood. Her best friend Ida visits regularly and Lisbet is so looking forward to sharing life and motherhood with her. And then, just as the first woman begins to dance in the city, Lisbet’s sister-in-law Nethe returns from six years’ penance in the mountains for an unknown crime. No one – not even Ida – will tell Lisbet what Nethe did all those years ago, and Nethe herself will not speak a word about it.

It is the beginning of a few weeks that will change everything for Lisbet – her understanding of what it is to love and be loved, and her determination to survive at all costs for the baby she is carrying. Lisbet and Nethe and Ida soon find themselves pushing at the boundaries of their existence – but they’re dancing to a dangerous tune . . .

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday)

Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing.

But it’s the 1960s, and despite the fact that she is a scientist, her male peers are very unscientific when it comes to equality. The only good thing to happen on her road to professional fulfilment is a run-in with famous colleague Calvin Evans, legend and Nobel nominee. He’s also awkward, kind and tenacious. Theirs is true chemistry.

But life is never predictable and three years later Elizabeth Zott is an unwed, single mother and star of America’s best loved cooking show Supper at Six. Her singular approach to cooking – ‘take one pint of H2O and add a pinch of sodium chloride’ – and empowering message prove revolutionary. Because Elizabeth isn’t just teaching housewives how to cook, but how to change their lives.

The Vanished Days (Slains #3) by Susanna Kearsley (ARC, Simon & Schuster)

There are many who believe they know what happened, but they do not know the whole of it. The rumours spread, and grow, and take their hold, and so to end them I have been persuaded now to take my pen in hand and tell the story as it should be told…

Autumn, 1707. Old enemies from the Highlands to the Borders are finding common ground as they join to protest the new Union with England, the French are preparing to launch an invasion to carry the young exiled Jacobite king back to Scotland to reclaim his throne, and in Edinburgh the streets are filled with discontent and danger. Queen Anne’s commissioners, seeking to calm the situation, have begun settling the losses and wages owed to those Scots who took part in the disastrous Darien expedition eight years earlier.

When Lily, the young widow of a Darien sailor, comes forward to collect her husband’s wages, her claim is challenged, and one of the men who’s assigned to examine her has only days to decide if she’s honest, or if his own feelings are making him blind to the truth, and if he’s being used as a pawn in an even more treacherous game.

A story of intrigue, adventure, endurance, romance…and the courage to hope.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

Book Review: Portable Magic by Emma Smith
Blog Tour/Book Review: Villager by Tom Cox
Blog Tour/Book Review: How To Save A Life by Clare Swatman
Book Review: The Death of Remembrance by Denzil Meyrick
Book Review: News of the Dead by James Robertson

Tag: Currently Reading

#WWWWednesday – 8th June 2022