I saw this meme on It’s All About Booksand thought, I like this!! So, I decided to do it once a month also. Many thanks to Yvonne for initially posting this!!
This post is what it says: Places I travel to in books each month. Books are lovely and take you to places you would never get to. That includes places of fantasy, too!!
Bon Voyage!!
Please let me know if you have read these books or traveled to these areas.
Countries I visited the most:England, United States, Austria, Germany, Scotland, Italy
States I visited the most:Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois, New York, Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey, California
Cities I visited the most:London, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles
Here is what I am currently reading, recently finished, and plan to read from Thursday to Wednesday.
Let me know if you have read or are planning on reading any of these books!!
Happy Reading!!
What I am currently reading:
The second in the delightful Dear Miss Hermione mystery series from Anastasia Hastings—when you represent the best-loved Agony Aunt in Britain, fielding questions from both irate housekeepers and heartbroken mothers is par for the course…
“Dear Miss Hermione—what is a mother to do?”
Sensible Violet Manville and her very ladylike half-sister Sephora are absolutely bored, thank you very much. And though neither of them would ever admit it aloud, they’re missing the thrill of playing detective.
So when Violet receives a letter from “A Heartbroken Mother” sent to her alter-ego, the Agony Aunt known to the world only as Miss Hermione, her pulse can’t help but quicken. The daughter in question has gotten caught up in a cult: the Hermetic Order of the Children of Aed. Rumors of human sacrifices, mystical doings, and a ghost in the ruined Alburn Abbey where the Children pray have gripped the public conscious, helped along by a series of novels about the group, written by the mysterious Count Orlando, and clearly this girl has fallen prey.
Miss Hermione’s investigation soon collides with very real life when Violet discovers that the runaway daughter in question is Sephora’s dearest friend Margaret. Violet sets off to the Children’s compound in Nottintham to convince her to return to London. But with the dashing-but-frustrating Eli Marsh running around and a member of the Children found poisoned to death, Violet and Sephora—along with their ever-trusty housekeeper Bunty—may have more intrigue than they can manage.
What I recently finished reading:
Fresh, funny and heartfelt, The Expectant Detectives is a charming debut mystery about a group of soon-to-be moms-turned-detectives.
“A darkly witty debut. Archly funny and highly recommended!”—Deanna Raybourn
Can they solve the mother of all murders?
For Alice and her partner Joe, moving to the sleepy village of Penton is a chance to embrace country life and prepare for the birth of their first child. He can take up woodwork; maybe she’ll learn to make jam? But the rural idyll they’d hoped for doesn’t quite pan out when a dead body is discovered at their local prenatal class, and they find themselves suspects in a murder investigation.
With a cloud of suspicion hanging over the heads of the whole group, Alice and her new-found pregnant friends set out to solve the mystery and clear their names, with the help of her troublesome dog, Helen. However, there are more secrets and tensions in the heart of Penton than first meet the eye. Between the discovery of a shady commune up in the woods, the unearthing of a mysterious death years earlier, and the near-tragic poisoning of Helen, Alice is soon in way over her head.
What I think I will read next:
When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she’s not only North Carolina’s richest woman, she’s also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family’s estate high in the Blue Ridge mountains. In the aftermath of her death, that estate—along with a nine-figure fortune and the complicated legacy of being a McTavish—pass to her adopted son, Camden.
But to everyone’s surprise, Cam wants little to do with the house or the money—and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes. Instead, he rejects his inheritance, settling into a normal life as an English teacher in Colorado and marrying Jules, a woman just as eager to escape her own messy past.
Ten years later, Camden is a McTavish in name only, but a summons in the wake of his uncle’s death brings him and Jules back into the family fold at Ashby House. Its views are just as stunning as ever, its rooms just as elegant, but coming home reminds Cam why he was so quick to leave in the first place.
Jules, however, has other ideas, and the more she learns about Cam’s estranged family—and the twisted secrets they keep—the more determined she is for her husband to claim everything Ruby once intended for him to have.
But Ruby’s plans were always more complicated than they appeared. As Ashby House tightens its grip on Jules and Camden, questions about the infamous heiress come to light. Was there any truth to the persistent rumors following her disappearance as a girl? What really happened to those four husbands, who all died under mysterious circumstances? And why did she adopt Cam in the first place? Soon, Jules and Cam realize that an inheritance can entail far more than what’s written in a will––and that the bonds of family stretch far beyond the grave.
Casper Decuir’s psychic gift allows her to communicate with spirits, all fine and good until one wakes her up in the middle of the night to demand her time as intermediary with the police. As the younger half of H&C Investigations, she is tasked with finding an assassin who leaves no trace of his presence other than a corpse.
When a student at the Gifted Elite School is threatened, Casper’s first lead takes her to a shifter with a mysterious connection to the murder victim.
Whispers of Hailey Arquette’s heritage includes Vodou priestess, psychic, and all around pain in the butt. When a group of shifter assassins targets her partner, she must choose those worthy of trust and those most likely to betray them all.
What will bring down the most notorious female criminal in the world?
Meet “Y,” FBI’s third most wanted criminal best known for being cunning, intelligent and unknown to most a mother of a young boy. She is a criminal for hire on the black market of human trafficking..
But a new job brings with it a new dynamic that she’s never had to face. Working with a team but not just any team – a first of its kind even for a seasoned criminal like Y.
An all women team. Riddled with too many strong personalities, loose guns and a new target that triggers something at the core of Y she has ignored for way too long.
Trust is not something you can lean on in her world and when her son goes missing, Y will do just about anything. Suddenly everything is not gonna go according to plan.
Will Y find her son in time or is this her strange twist to live with?
When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series.
Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore—she just wrote the world’s first comprehensive of encylopaedia of faeries. She’s learned many of the secrets of the Hidden Folk on her adventures . . . and also from her fellow scholar and former rival, Wendell Bambleby.
Because Bambleby is more than infuriatingly charming. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother, and in search of a door back to his realm. So despite Emily’s feelings for Bambleby, she’s not ready to accept his proposal of marriage. Loving one of the Fair Folk comes with secrets and danger.
And she also has a new project to focus a map of the realms of faerie. While she is preparing her research, Bambleby lands her in trouble yet again, when assassins sent by Bambleby’s mother invade Cambridge. Now Bambleby and Emily are on another adventure, this time to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambley’s realm, and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans.
But with new relationships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors, and of her own heart.
Buzzword Reading Challenge 2023 (Flavour-related words: Must have flavour/herb/spice related words in the title: salter, pepper, dill, ginger, mango, vanilla, lemon…etc)—The Saltwater Marathon
2023 Sami Parker Reads Title Challenge (with a word such as rabbit, bunny, hare to honor Chinese Year of the Rabbit. Title should include at least one of those words)—Killer Rabbits
The StoryGraph’s Onboarding Reading Challenge 2023 (Read a book in your least read format or genre)—Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Scavenger Hunt TBR Book Challenge (Go to page 34, line 6 of the book you just read. How many words are there in that line? Divide that number by 3. That’s the amount of words the title of your next book should be): Modern Girl’s Guide to Vacation Flings by Gina Drayer
Beat the Backlist 2023 (meant to read it last year): Prepared by Courtney Konstantin
The StoryGraph’s Genre Challenge 2023 (A children’s book you never read as a kid): Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel
Popsugar Reading Challenge 2023 (A book with a mythical creature): Hereditary by Jane Washington
2023 TBR Toppler (The last book in a series): Ten Thousand Truths by Kelli Washington
Books I bought*:
*Normally, there won’t be a lot of books on here. But I am going through my Goodreads shelves and downloading any free books I am coming across from books already shelved (as well as adding books that are in the same series). This is an ongoing project, and I should be done by September (yes, I have that many books).