BOOKMARK June 2025 Book recommendations
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June Titles
All books are available from Adventure Into Books in Blairgowrie.
Summer at its height. A time for a shady garden chair, a beverage of choice and an entertaining book.A little lightness and laughter to get us started as we meet up once more with Shona McMonagle (or should that be ‘Mangle-Moggle’?), and travel with her across time to enjoy her latest haphazard and whacky sleuthing romp in Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Uncharted Island by Olga Wojtas; chuckles are also likely to accompany Bob Mortimer’s The Hotel Avocado. Guaranteed warmth and humour also abound in Alexander McCall Smith’s latest Perfect Passion Company novel, Looking for You.
My next few recommendations have a darker tone, starting with Stuart MacBride’s This House of Burning Bones; and a mystery of a very different ilk is Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent. Stepping further back in time, to 1598, SJ Parris’s Traitor’s Legacy offers intrigue, murder and the threat of rebellion.
Before we leave June, The Dead of Summer: Strange Tales of May Eve & Midsummer offers a feast of stories to accompany the season.
Kate
BOOKMARK member
PS: The Adventure into Books Book Blether group meets at 7pm on the first Wednesday of each month. On 4th June, we’ll be meeting to chat about books that evoke a particular era. On 2nd July, we’ll be chatting about For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain (ISBN: 9781526647931, paperback, Bloomsbury, 2024) – a fascinating book and author. All are welcome.
PPS: On 19th June, Adventure into Books will be celebrating the season of simmer dim with an evening of poetry, music and stories. Get in touch if you would like to come along.
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Uncharted Island by Olga Wojtas
(Saraband, 2025)
Fiction
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Uncharted Island by Olga Wojtas (ISBN: 9781916812390, paperback). Could bladderwrack be a murder weapon? Shona has her doubts, but you’ll have to read the book to find out.
The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer
(Simon & Schuster, 2025)
Fiction
Bob Mortimer’s The Hotel Avocado (ISBN: 9781398529656, paperback). Billed as an offbeat, romantic thriller, it is a zany, entertaining, engaging book – precisely what you might expect from the zany, entertaining, engaging author.
Looking for You by Alexander McCall Smith
(Birlinn, 2027)
Fiction
Alexander McCall Smith’s latest Perfect Passion Company novel, Looking for You (ISBN: 9781846976933, hardback, ). The mix of McCall Smith’s deftly drawn characters and their various trials, tribulations and exhilarations of the heart – all part of the daily fare of Edinburgh’s very own marriage bureau - offer a perfect serving of summer escapism.
This House of Burning Bones by Stuart McBride
(Pan Macmillan, 2026)
Crime Fiction
Stuart MacBride’s This House of Burning Bones (ISBN: 9781035064854, hardback). In the heat of an Aberdeen summer, Detective Inspector Logan McRae is juggling cases, running a murder investigation with a skeleton staff of misfits and being harangued by the local paper. And that’s just for starters: the banter is sharp, the characters are raw and the plot is pacy.
Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent
(Bonnier Books, 2025)
Crime Fiction
Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent (ISBN: 9781804183977, paperback). Set in Oxford, at the Clarendon English Dictionary office, a team of word-researchers have been sent a series of increasingly baffling clues and disturbing postcards, each revealing more of the troubling truth surrounding the disappearance of a Charlie Thornhill a decade earlier. An intriguing read, this is definitely one for the logophiles.
Traitor's Legacy by S J Parris
(Harper Collins, 2025)
Historical Fiction
SJ Parris’s Traitor’s Legacy offers intrigue, murder and the threat of rebellion (ISBN: 9780008595791, hardback). When a young heiress is murdered at the theatre, the Queen’s spymaster Robert Cecil asks former agent Sophia de Wolfe to investigate. The task is treacherous, and she quickly finds herself up against powerful enemies – not least the ambitious Earl of Essex, favourite of the Queen. A cracking historical thriller.
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The Dead of Summer: Strange Tales of May Eve & Midsummer by Johnny Mains
(The British Library, 2025)
Short Stories
The Dead of Summer: Strange Tales of May Eve & Midsummer offers a feast of stories to accompany the season (ISBN: 9780712355285, hardback,edited by Johnny Mains). New and old, from here and abroad, these fey tales swirl with ghosts and strange, otherworldly encounters.