Sam's Fireside - Cosy Book Reviews & Recommendations

“Hollowpark Hall protected its own, and she would never leave.” The Belladonna Maze is another book that's been sitting on my NetGalley shelf for far too long, and, as usual, as I was reading it, I found myself wondering why I'd left it for so long! This one gave me all the feels! It's packed with mystery and suspense, and twists that might have appeared somewhere at the back of my mind, but ones I didn't actually believe — until I had to! 😱 I love a dual-timeline story, and The Belladonna Maze didn't disappoint. We flit back and forth between the 1840s and 2007 to discover the secrets of Hollowpark Hall and its maze, the secret passages and the residents who never leave. 👻🏚️ Thank you to @megbatsbooks for suggesting we read this one together. I'm finding it a lot more fun to buddy read than I thought I would! 📚💕 A very belated thank you to Head of Zeus for the free copy of The Belladonna Maze by Sinead Crowley. All thoughts are entirely my own. 📚💕 About ...

"To think of any one of them not there anymore was to think of a hole at the heart of a mosaic." I really enjoyed this story. It sent me reeling back forty years to my days of reading the Famous Five and Secret Seven books by Enid Blyton. It had the same sort of cosy mystery feel for younger readers. 🥰📚 I loved that Meredith, Macy and Colin joined forces to try to solve the murder, with the assistance of a dotty old lady who also lives in the hotel. 🔍🏨 This is one of those stories where you want to be a kid, living alongside the kids and helping them solve mysteries. With secret passageways, corridors and lifts that guests aren't allowed in, it's exciting and fun, and a really cool way to introduce kids to reading and enjoying books on their own. ✨🔎 Thank you to Scholastic for the free copy of Murder at the Ivy Hotel by Emily Hourican. All thoughts are entirely my own. 📚💕 About the Book Twelve-year-old Meredith and ten-year-old Macy feel like the luckiest girls...

“All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.” I'm probably not supposed to like this quote, but I do! 😂 All this kid is doing is speaking the truth as he sees it! The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time  was my July read for #NeglectedFaithfulsReadingChallenge 📚 and one that has been sitting on my shelf for a few years. Now, the dog dies — right at the beginning — and this isn't a spoiler, it's what much of the book is about, but I still wasn't prepared for it! 😲 Christopher, a teenage boy with autism, then sets out to solve the mystery. 🔎 I really enjoyed reading the story from the point of view of a neurodivergent child. I was fascinated by how his brain worked, with the lists, patterns and his absolute need to tell the truth. 🤔 I wasn't as interested in the dog mystery itself, but all the challenges that Christopher and his family faced as he attempted to make his ...

"The sun's reflection flares hotly in the swathes of plate glass". @megbatsbooks and I read The Fall together and it really was a case of wondering whether anyone else was going to die?! 😳🔪 I read The Long Weekend a few years ago but I haven't read anything else by Gilly since. The Fall was equally as good. It kept me on my toes and every time I turned the page, it seemed that something else was going to give me those gasp-out-loud moments. 😱 I think Meg and I both decided that there was something 'off' with most of the characters, to be honest. Any one of them could be capable of murder and yep, it wasn't until close to the end that things started to become clearer, at least for me. 👀 I love a book where the house is stunning, with all mod cons (that actually don't always work), and Gilly transplanted me right in the middle of Nicola and Tom's amazing house, so I was quite happy wandering around there and wondering how anyone would want to kee...

“I felt like I needed to throw a dish towel over his penis and wait an hour to let it rise.” 😂 I couldn't help myself with this quote - sorry, not sorry! I'm sure I'll need to censor it for some platforms! 🙈 Anyway, #thatbonkersbookclub chose  Yesteryear  for our Chiller Shelf for July and, quite honestly, I'm still unsure how I feel about it. Weird is the first word that springs to mind, with religious coming a close second. 🤔 Also, since when has the phrase 'trad wife' become a thing? It's only within the last year or so that I've even heard of it - maybe that's just me. 🤷‍♀️ As I'm sure was the author's intention, I was left wondering throughout much of the book exactly why Natalie was in 1855. Was she time-travelling? Was it a reality show? Was she ill? 🧐 You won't get any spoilers from me, so you'll need to read it or ask someone else. 😉 I have rated it quite highly on the places where a star-rating is necessary, but really...

“The lights went out in the carriage, and when they came back on, the man was looking at me...” 👀 The Stranger at the Wedding has been sitting on my shelf for a while, so I chose to read it for the #NeglectedFaithfulsReadingChallenge for June. 📚 I've been pondering this review for a while, and I'm still unsure how I feel about the book. I enjoyed it, honestly I did, but the multiple timelines and points of view were extremely confusing – and this is coming from someone who loves both of these! 😵‍💫 It would have helped if there had been some indication of whose point of view we were reading from and what year we were in! Anyway, that aside, apart from having to really concentrate on the story, I did enjoy it. It was packed with twists and turns that I just didn't see coming, and very definitely had many unlikeable, dodgy and narcissistic characters! 😬 The ending tied it all up nicely, even if it was fast and unexpected. 🔀 Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing for the gift...

"Sally lifts the fishfingers from the grill pan and turns off the gas under the tinned spaghetti." This quote is so English and so comforting. 🇬🇧✨ I love fishfingers and spaghetti hoops, ideally with homemade chips! 🍟 Anyway, I digress. This is my first book by Simon Michael, and I really liked it. A lot of the book is written across two timelines, 1942 and 1970, and is set predominantly in a tiny village in France. Much of it is loosely based on true events and characters, which makes it all the more chilling. 👀 Once Charles arrives in the small French village, he discovers, in a somewhat strange way, that he is surrounded by secrets, strangers, and a lot of anger. Seemingly without reason, he is thrown into the middle of the village's version of a court case and finds himself defending the accused. ⚖️ Eventually, all the mysteries are solved, but not without upset and danger along the way. 😬 Even though this is the eleventh Charles Holborne thriller, it doesn't...

"I love you, Betty! Forgive me. You aren't to blame!" Jack Kendall is our protagonist in  Mountain Crossing , and this is our first insight into him as an investigative reporter in Jay B. Greene's new series. I enjoyed the whirlwind way in which the story progresses, jumping from one manic scene to another, with a number of very unlikeable characters who, quite frankly, would be far better off walking into the Jamaican mountains and never returning! 😆 I think I liked Jack... I'm still on the fence 🤔. I'll let you know after the next book! What I can say is that he's definitely better off without his wife. When she goes missing, I'm not sure I'd have been bothered to go and find her! 😂 There are a few strange characters who tag along with Jack as he sets out to find his wife, and it seems that, in his eyes, they're completely disposable. They're there to help him in his mission, and he doesn't much care what happens to them afterwards...

“People are willfully blind if it’s something they don’t want to believe.” 👀 I listened to The Lake of Lost Girls for the #LetsEarItAudiobookChallenge for May 🎧📖. One thing it has confirmed for me is that I don't enjoy a podcast within a book, particularly when it's an audiobook 😅 While the story itself was brilliant ✨, with an ending I did not see coming 😳, the podcast narrators spoilt it for me. One was supposed to have an English accent 🇬🇧 and the other an American accent 🇺🇸. However, never have I ever heard anyone speaking with an English accent like that! 😬 Just hire one narrator from each country, for heaven's sake! That aside, I really enjoyed the dual-timeline storyline 🔄, which switched between 1998 and 2022, with a different sister taking centre stage in each timeline—Jessica in 1998 and Lindsey in 2022 👭. I loved how each suspect was built up to the point where I was convinced it might be them 🕵️‍♀️, only for the plot to head off in a completely diff...

“There’s no need to be afraid of the dead. 👻 It’s the living you have to watch out for. 😬” I first listened to Daisy Darker back in 2022 when I was on holiday in Cyprus. 🌞 We had moved out of one house and our new one wasn’t ready, so we were nomads for about a month! 🧳 Because I had so much going on, I never got around to writing a review, so when #thatbonkersbookclub decided to read it in April, it was the ideal opportunity to pick the book up again and finally write my thoughts. ✍️ Now, considering I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night, it came as no surprise that I didn’t remember much of what happened. 😅 No spoilers for those of you who haven’t read it, but I did remember all there was to know about Daisy! It was just as thrilling a read as last time around — characters I wanted to smack, others I felt like throwing in the sea 🌊, and one or two who definitely needed a huge hug. 🤗 I do enjoy a locked-room murder mystery; it often makes me think I’ll be able to wo...

“Have dinner ready… be happy to see your husband and greet him with a warm smile.” The Woman in the Cabin was my April read for the @hook.me.a.book challenge – the  #NeglectedFaithfulsReadingChallenge – and a book that’s been sitting on my shelf for way too long 📚✨ It was dark, full of all sorts of wrongness… and I loved it so much 😈 I had to keep reading. I needed to know if Mary was going to be okay 😰, whether the control-freak husband was going to hurt her 😡, and just what other madness he had up his sleeve 👀 I think this book will send readers one of two ways: you’ll either be completely intrigued (like I was) and desperate to keep turning the pages 📖🔥, or you’ll be hugely frustrated by our female main character — like, kill the b*****d already! 😤 And if you’re big on women’s rights, this might make you properly angry at how any man could treat a woman like this 💔 However you feel, if you enjoy a captive thriller, you’re going to love this one 🖤 If you’re thinking of ...

"The feeling of being watched was just a symptom of her anxiety..." 👀 Full disclosure, I read this one over two years ago, but for some reason I didn't write a review, so when @megbatsbooks wanted someone to buddy read it with her, I thought it would be fun to read it again and see if I remembered much of it. 📚 I remembered bits correctly, particularly who one of the dodgy characters was, but I was wrong about other parts. I had killed someone off, but in fact he was alive and kicking at the end! 😅 Having worked for the NHS for many years, I understand and appreciate the lack of funding, lack of staff, lack of beds, etc. But this story goes way past the normal everyday frustrations and shows a deeper, darker (thankfully incredibly rare) and fictional insight into what happens when one or two unstable people take control. 🏥 Talk about gaslighting at work - poor Dr Wilson must have thought she was going round the twist when all the unexplainable things were happening t...

"2020 has a sci-fi ring to it, I feel, like it might be the year of alien landings 👽 or the one when the gamma rays get us." The Other Passenger is my March read for @hook.me.a.book challenge – the #NeglectedFaithfulsReadingChallenge 📚. It reminded me of why I enjoy a thriller, and after reading this I have decided to try and read some more this year. Let's see how that works out! 🤞 The story switches between the beginning of 2019 and the end, as we roll over into 2020, with Jamie as the most unreliable narrator I've ever heard — honestly — by the middle of the book, I wasn't trusting a word he said! 😅 I was kept guessing throughout The Other Passenger. Just when I raised my eyebrows and thought to myself, "really, that's a poor twist, I don't like that if it's the ending", Louise threw a complete curveball ⚾, turned the story on its head and went streaking off in a completely different direction, which had me hooked all over again! Even ...

“We’ve got to treat men like humans, even if some do inhuman things.” My third of @hook.me.a.book challenges is the #NeglectedFaithfulsReadingChallenge, which I’m using to read physical books that have been sitting on my actual shelf for far too long! 📚✨ First up is Truth Be Told by Kia Abdullah, the second book in the Zara Kaleel series. I’ve just checked and I read the first one at the end of 2022, so yes — I’m a bit behind! 😅 In my experience, male assault isn’t something that’s covered often in books, and it’s a difficult subject to write about. However, Kia handles it with sensitivity and a great deal of research, which I really appreciated. 💛 Zara has her own issues to deal with alongside her work as an assault counsellor, and then she takes on Kamran’s case — not an easy one to manage. I went through a whole range of emotions while reading this: angry, empathetic, and sad, often towards the same characters. 😡💔 The immaturity of youth is portrayed in the boys who attended Ha...