Books Coming in 2027

 I was excited to find Jacqueline Winspear - author of the Maisie Dobbs stories - has a new book being published next year, three years after writing the final Maisie Dobb story. I added it to my list to reserve at the library next year. It's titled ' Charlie Bright' and should be published in March. Hopefully the start of a new series.

Already on my list are several other books by favourite authors due.................

Sally Smith's third book in the Trials of Gabriel Ward series - A Case of Fear or Favour is due in January

Chris Nickson has a new series starting in February

Tim Sullivan has 'The Baker' due in April, another George Cross book

Anthony Horowitz has 'The Vanishing Jury' also due April this is in his Horowitz/Hawthorne series

A New-to-me author, Sarah Hilary, has the second in a series due to be published in April

Jane Thynne's new book 'The Woman with No Shadow' is out in May

Alan Parks has the third in the Joseph Gunner series due in July

Rachel Hore has a new book due in June 2027 'Song for a Suffragette'

The third book by William Shaw in the DS Eden Driscoll series is being published in July 2027

Tracy Chevalier's new book 'My Name is Agnes' is due in September

and in October next year Ann Cleeves is publishing ' The Final Vera'

St. Luke's Day

Tomorrow, October the 18th, is St Luke's Day (unless you are reading this on Sunday in which case it's today and if you are reading any later than Sunday - it's gone already!) and in the books of weather sayings they always mention St. Luke's Little Summer. This is a spell of warmer, dry days that often occur around this time. As October 2026  has, so far, been warm and mainly dry anyway this won't be much of a change this year.

 Below is the illustration from the  St Luke page of the Calendar Of Saints book. The description says mosaic in S.Vitale, Ravenna.

St Luke is the patron saint of physicians and artists and wrote his own gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. He is thought to have been a doctor and went with St Paul on one of his missionary journeys. He might have been a Greek Doctor from Antioch or an Hellenic Jew (combining Judaism with Greek Culture).

Luke's gospel has some stories from the life of Jesus that don't appear in the other gospels even though it's known that he didn't witness the work of Jesus himself. It's thought he lived until aged 80+ before dying in Greece.

Luke was often in religious pictures accompanied by an ox with horns and this led to fairs being held on his feast day called 'Horn Fairs'. A notorious one was in  Charlton in Kent, where the parish church is dedicated to St Luke. Horns were the theme, there would be horns for sale and merchandise made of horn and people would wear horns on their heads. People found the wearing of horns very amusing because of their sexual link. The crowds flocked to this fair until it was condemned for it's rudeness and indecency and eventually in 1872 it was banned.

The October Library Book Photo

Not so many books for me from the mobile library this time 'just' 12. 11 were reserved online and one plucked from the shelves.

Unusually there are four non-fiction this time.

The four non fiction are on the right although one is a thin book and hidden and I couldn't be bothered to take another photo.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a book about books and birds

Angels in the Cellar - A New life in a vineyard in France - no idea why I reserved this

Don't Forget We're Here Forever - no idea - must have seen it somewhere

Autumn by Kate Mosse is the one hidden

The fiction are as usual mostly crime except for September by Rosamund Pilcher which someone mentioned - not read any of her books for years.

Last month I came home with a huge heap of reserved books and have managed to read the majority. There was some really good reading and I even got on well with new-to-me authors.

These are the books from the the photo read and enjoyed in the last 4 weeks, copied from my Books Read 2026 page

• Tim Sullivan - The Cyclist. Crime Fiction (Published 2020) The second in this series featuring Detective George Cross. In this story there are lots of leads when a Greek restaurant owner and very keen cyclist is killed. There could be a link with drugs or with foreign criminals but maybe the murderer is closer to family.
• Susie Dent- Death Writ Large. Crime Fiction (Published 2026) The second book to feature Oxford Lexicographer Martha Thornhill and her colleagues at the Clarendon English Dictionary. In this story graffiti and mysterious symbols appear around Oxford at the same time as the body of a Lecturer is found at the bottom of the church tower. The police decide it's suicide but the messages and runes deciphered by Martha seem to predict a death and more to follow.
• Kate Ellis - Chapel of Bones. Crime Fiction (Published 2026) This is the 30th in the series set in Dartmouth in Devon (Tradmouth in the books) with DI Wesley Peterson and his colleagues. All of this series mix history with present times and archaeology comes into all of them too. This one starts with the mummified body of Dr Aleric Donnal, a historian last seen ten years ago, which is found bricked up in a wall in a large country house.
• Rachel Hore - The French Spy Mistress. Fiction (Published 2026) During the Second World  War there were two women with courage. This story is fiction but based on the true stories. In France Marie- Louise is recruited into and then leads a secret organisation called Alliance using agents all round the country to gather information to pass onto the British at MI6. In Sussex Sarah has been an ordinary wife and mother until her husband is asked to use his home as a stop- over for secret agents going to and from France. Marie-Louise and Sarah's lives collide as things get more and more dangerous.
• Louise Penny - A Fatal Grace. Crime Fiction. (Published 2006) The second in the Chief Inspector Gamache series set in Three Pines a village in Canada. Its winter and at the Boxing Day curling match everything is as usual until a huge scream and the death by electrocution of a spectator. It seems she was a person no one liked and even her husband and daughter are suspects. But why did no one in the crowd see what happened - or are they just keeping quiet for their own reasons

• Rory Clements - Invitation From A Dictator. Crime Fiction (Published 2026) Book 3 in the Detective Sebastian Wolff series set in Munich in Germany in the years leading to WWII. When King Edward the VIII (recently abdicated from the British throne) and his new bride Wallace Simpson are invited to Germany by Hitler it causes all sorts of problems for Wolff, trying to walk a line fighting against darkness and brutality without causing grief to his son and his sons mother - who has her own agenda - or to his partner Hexie.
• Joel Hames - The Viewpoint. Crime Fiction. (Published 2026) Second in the series featuring the Cumbrian detectives in the Professional Standards Division. The murder of a known criminal in a remote area shouldn't get the PSD team involved but then one of the investigating officers is attacked and camera footage goes missing Carl and his team are dragged in to the investigation.
• Phillipa Perry - Shrink Solves Murder. Crime Fiction (Published 2026). When a body is found near Beachy Head the police decide it is suicide but psychotherapist Patricia Phillips isn't so sure. The victim was her three o'clock patient, Henry Clayton, and she been helping him for a while and was sure that suicide had not been on his mind at all. As she gets drawn into investigation with her friend and neighbour Pritchard they uncover all sorts of secrets about their neighbours.
• Alexander McCall Smith -The Big Cats Dance Party. Crime Fiction. (Published 2026)Another in the long series set in Botswana with the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. In this story Mma Ramotswe etc all travel to visit the villages near an elephant sanctuary to find who is so angry with their work. Meanwhile Charlie is left in charge and solves a clients mystery all my himself.
• Ariel Lawhon - The Frozen River. Fiction (Published 2023 USA and 2025 Here). Based on the real person this story is about Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer in Maine in 1789. Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.
  Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.