Better With Books: Week 3 – Which Book got 5 Stars?!

I swear, this isn’t going to turn into a book blog! It definitely looks that way right now, granted… Let’s jump straight into it!

Three Days Earlier – Lynn Walker

I am generally quite a seasonal reader; I love taking advantage of all of the positive aspects of the season and really feeling them through a book. So it was unusual of me to go for a thriller this early in the year. I’m going to be honest: I picked this book specifically so I could fill out a ‘thriller’ block in my book tetris for the year. I’m actually struggling with book tetris a bit more than I thought because I’ve realised I do tend to stick with the same genres at a time (and also struggle to define what genre something belongs to!) so maybe having the tracker in my bujo will help me be a bit more varied in my reading.

Anyway, about this book! Three Days Earlier follows Rachel, a lawyer who has sudden and vivid premonitions about how a person is going to die. She has kept herself as reclusive as she can, being afraid to get close to people following the pain of witnessing how her mother was going to die and being unable to stop it, but when a premonition about her boyfriend leads to his death she begins to wonder if she isn’t actually predicting what is going to happen – she is causing it. The meat of the story takes place around the disappearance of a local girl, after Rachel encounters a very different premonition to her usual one, and works with the local police to try and find her. The premise of the book was a little rushed and shaky to me at times; the people around her are far too happy to just accept that she has these harrowing premonitions, including people who she tells for the first time. But we all know I love a multiple perspective book! And the suspense was fairly gripping – without giving anything away, there is a scene where one character is running away from another and I genuinely felt my heart racing.

The Hotel Avocado – Bob Mortimer

I love a bit of Bob Mortimer. He is one of those comedians who can almost unfailingly make me laugh, so I was excited to try a book of his. There are two things that I believe may have impacted my enjoyment of this book: one is that it was an audiobook, which I famously struggle to get along with, and the second is that this is the second book in a series. However, I felt like I got to grips with the characters enough that it doesn’t feel entirely essential to have read the first book of the series. Bob Mortimer and a host of famous pals read this audiobook, so it was fab hearing voices that you recognised, and I do like it when authors read their own books because you hear things the way they heard them in their own heads.

I suppose my gripe (other than disliking one of the voices that Sally Phillips did! Sorry Sally, as if you’d read this!) was that it just felt like it was bumbling along without there being much point to it all. Maybe that’s because I was picking it up after part of a story had resolved and then just did a bit of a resurgence, or maybe there doesn’t need to be a point to every book – it can just be what it is.

Good Spirits – B K Borison

Oh, this book. For a start, every time I made it I had an immediate craving for a peppermint mocha, and it has now become part of my daily afternoon routine! I want to preface this by saying that if we accept that this is a story with a ghost as a main character, then we kind of have to suspend belief and just accept everything else that happens…!

Good Spirits is a not-quite retelling of A Christmas Carol – in that Nolan, our MMC and an Irish fisherman who has been dead for over 100 years, is the Ghost of Christmas Past. Being dead isn’t quite what you’d expect; there are various departments, a fairly solid infrastructure, and rules that ghosts have to follow. Side note, if you enjoy that aspect of this book, you might like to watch the TV series ‘Dead Like Me’!

Nolan is assigned to Harriet York this Christmas. It is his job to have her look at her memories, realise the error of her ways, and meet his quota by passing her along to the next ghost by Christmas Eve. Except… Harriet is practically perfect, and her memories aren’t revealing any dark deeds for which she needs to atone. As they work through memories together, Nolan and Harriet realise there is quite a bit they can learn from eachother’s company – with a bit of romance along the way! This was a cute and fun read, would be perfect for right before Christmas, and Harriet is very easy to fall in love with.

Share your most recent book in the comments – I’d love recommendations!