Pop Culture Princess

Pop Culture Princess
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Thursday, October 26, 2023

Gearing up for a Thrill Ride TBR this November

I’m currently reading the final book in my FrightFall readathon(Lone Women was so worth the wait!) and already planning another reading challenge for next month. This one, however, is one set up just for me.

November is a pretty busy month for book folk, with Best of the Year lists and various themed readathons like No-Buy November or Noir November ,for example,and of course National Novel Writing Month to boot!

However, I thought this might be a good time to clear up of my regular TBR piles and since there are a few mystery/thriller titles that I’ve been meaning to get to for awhile now, so I’m taking a literary thrill ride with page turning instead of putting the pedal to the metal there.

My challenge TBRs tend to use the rule of three and the first of that trio is Maisie Dobbs, the first in a well renowned series by Jacqueline Winspear. Our title leading lady has gone from being a housemaid in a Downton Abbey type of situation to a college student, then a WWI nurse and now opening up her own private detective agency in London.

Her first case appears to be just a standard infidelity investigation yet as things go on, Maisie uncovers a scheme to cheat military veterans out of their finances run by a former officer whose need for control risks many lives in more ways than one.

Can she reveal the truth and protect these men from someone claiming to protect them from themselves? I won this book in a giveaway earlier this year and have consistently heard great things about this series so the opportunity to see if these books are something I need to get into is ideal indeed:


Next in the docket is Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby, a tale of revenge and unlikely fellowship. 

Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins are far being any sort of friends, despite the shared fact that their sons are married to each other. 

When their children are murdered via hate crime, Ike and Buddy find themselves compelled to dig back into their former criminal ways and work together to avenge the deaths of their sons once it’s clear that the law is than motivated to do so.

S.A. Cosby’s works are being hailed as modern crime fiction classics and this particular book seems to be a great place to start. This part of the thrill ride is going to be rough but I have no doubt that this journey is worth the taking:


For the third act, Gillian McAllister’s Just Another Missing Person  promises to be quite the conclusion to say the least.

When DCI officer Julia Day is called away from a family dinner to look into the disappearance of a young woman named Olivia Johnson,  she’s more than ready to tackle this case as per her usual.

What does surprise her is the appearance of a strange man in her car who demands that Julia plant evidence that a man named Matthew James is responsible for Olivia’s vanishing. If not, he’s willing to reveal that Julia misused her authority to cover up a crime for her daughter Genevieve.

While Julia is willing to go along with this for the sake of her child(not to mention using this demand as potential evidence towards finding Olivia), things become more and more complicated as time goes on to the point where she doesn’t know who or what to believe here. 

By untangling the truth from the fiction, is Julia able to save Olivia, Genevieve or even her own career from utter ruin? 

I read McAllister’s Wrong Place, Wrong Time a few months ago(based on a BookTube recommendation) and that time travel mystery was an amazing read. When I saw this new release as a Book of the Month add-on, my response was “Yes,please!” This sounds like what some fans of British detective shows might call a cracking good read and I have high hopes of that being true:


While I might include a couple of other mystery related books into the mix, these three are my main mission for completing in November. If you’re interested in trying this out for yourself, please feel free to do so-I am not a proficient arranger of readathons but more than willing to offer any inspiration there!

Thrill rides are rather scary outings as well as exciting ones but confining such antics to the pages of a book seems reasonably safe to me. A good release of tension and hopefully truly entertaining, like a well made action cinematic romp or an old school spy movie, only you have to supply the theme song yourself, plus a solid bookmark there:





 

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