July seemed to fly by and I don’t think it stopped in the middle. It was a very hectic month for us with the usual Carnival in the village, Youngest and Fiancee getting married and moving homes and us getting ready to go away on holiday as well as getting work finished of course. Anyway that meant that I did not get July’s Book Club picks done but here they are :

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This is Book 1 of Dr Olivia Winter, Forensic Psychologist. She has built her career on interviewing and assessing serial killers. This direction began because she was the only one of her family to survive a serial killer and the worst bit, the killer was her father. He has been in prison ever since but Olivia is still fighting to understand the reasons why. One thing that Olivia does not do is work on live cases until now. There is a serial killer working in London and near to where she lives and the police have no ideas and want her to come in and assess the cases to see if she can help them. Can she do this?

I gave this three stars as the story was good although very slow in parts. This is the first book in a series so they may get better, will probably give another one a try.

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Mia Wright is a modern day influencer and has a huge following on YouTube, Instagram etc but she is different in that all her posts about the family farm and their kids is done in the old fashioned way. Cooking every meal from scratch, decorating their farmhouse with homemade things and generally living a life from at least 80 years ago. Journalist Jenny Kaplan needs a good story to raise her flagging career and her Editor suggests she goes to Mia’s farm and spend a week there watching her make her podcasts and write about that. Mia decides it is worth a go especially as her Sister loves Mia. Everything seems fine when Jenny arrives but as the days go on something dark begins to happen and the week goes from bad to worse, can Jenny save her sanity and leave at the weeks end?

I almost DNF’d it! The premise is good but then when you actually got into the dark aspects of it, it started to go off on tangents that you had to read very carefully to understand what was happening. I got to the end of the book and then wished I had DNF’d it!!! It was extremely slow in places and Ms Langan got lost in too much detail which did not need to be in it. It could have probably ended two or three chapters sooner than it did and by the end it was like a damp squib.

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Angela Wong was the most popular girl in school and then she disappeared and no one could find her at the time or in the fourteen years since. Her best friend Georgina Shaw helped with the searches but since graduating college has worked in the same town and then Angela’s body is found and Georgina is arrested, along with her then Boyfriend, for Angela’s murder. Georgina is convicted but her old Boyfriend, Calvin James, went on to be a full blown serial killer. Geo is eventually released but Calvin has escaped from prison and while Geo is living at her Dad’s the murders begin again and the cops think Calvin is back and they think Geo knows where he is.

Again this got two stars as it was rather depressing book with no real twists and you got to the end and it was like okay not really a surprise and the ending was just meh!!! Should have probably DNF’d this too!!!!

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1883 and Emma M Lion has returned to London after being a companion to an elderly relative for a few years. However she has now returned to the beautiful home that her father left her. However because it is not the done thing in 1883 to leave a house to an unmarried daughter her cousin, Archibald, has been looking after it along with her inheritance of money too. When she arrives Archibald fobs her off and will not see or discuss with her the money or her house until she confronts him and finds out he has spent almost all of the money. Emma’s journal tells us all about it and her life and how she is going to get out of the mess she has not created.

I have seen this book recommended by several people including one woman I follow on Instagram who has now read all of the books in the series. I liked it, it is not long and as it is written in journal form you keep up with the story. It is a bit like reading someone’s personal diary so it is a bit of a guilty pleasure! I will now be collecting the other books in the series.

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Ellen is on the train home to London when a young woman with a baby asks Ellen to hold the baby whilst she takes a call. Ellen is happy to help and is busy keeping the baby happy when she sees the young woman on the platform of the station they have just pulled into. Ellen does not think much about this, as she thinks the signal must be better on the platform, until the train pulls out of said station with the young woman still on the platform leaving Ellen holding the baby! She finds a note in the Baby’s changing bag which says please keep her safe and trust no one especially the Police. Then begins a week of mess and scares and Ellen fearing for her life.

If you have been following me for a while you know that I love T.M. Logan’s books and have now read them all. However this one did not do it for me. The story was very slow, quite thin and frankly very annoying. The mystery did not develop very well and then the ending was again no surprise and just well thin again! Hence the two stars.

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Sadie, Will and their two sons have moved into Will’s deceased sister’s house to look after her daughter who is 16 and does not want them there. Sadie wanted to move her to their home in Chicago but Will felt as she was almost finishing school this would not be a good idea and feels that their sons could do with a change of place too. Having only just moved in one of their neighbours, Morgan Baines, is murdered and the villagers on their small island in Maine start to suspect the new family. Truths start to come out and everyone will be caught up in the aftermath.

It was boring as hell, did not make sense at all and the ending was just unbelievable and not in a good way. Should have DNF’d it!

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So July for me was not a good reading month! Three books I should have DNF’d one was okay and the Emma M Lion book was the only one which I enjoyed!!! I need to get better at picking books. Sometimes I am influenced (!) by reviews on Instagram and I think you can get caught out by that because some of these people have been sent books to read by the Publishers or Authors and they then give them good reviews, even if they think they were bad. Next month you will see one of these books in my list!!!!!

I think I am going to stick to the books that I choose from the bookshop rather than be swayed by someone else’s opinion. In fact that has just came up when I saw a Bookstagram person asking the question “have you ever had a book which everyone else loved and you hated?” Definitely and it was another one I had seen around and highly recommended and was a genre that I would normally pick up and read, “When The Moon Hatched”! This is the one where the Author had swallowed a Thesaurus and proceeded to put all the words in each and every sentence! It was actually unreadable. So I put this book forward as my opinion! Well this one woman had a right go at what I said!!! She said she really enjoyed the book and it was all about world building etc. I responded and said that I was glad she had enjoyed it and my comment was nothing about the story but that I felt it was unreadable in my opinion. Everyone has a right to their opinion but you should not have a go at someone who has a different view to you. Needless to say I blocked her!!!!

I hope your reading month was good and I will be back later in the week with what I read in August and whilst we were away.