Hi everyone and welcome to halfway through September!

Thanks to everyone for voting in the poll from the September newsletter. it ended up as a tie with both option 1 and option 2 at 37% each!

As a reminder, option 1 was a separate listing of short stories/novellas and option 2 was both combined with short stories marked with a note or icon.

It was actually very helpful and we are likely going to go with a combination of the two. A book series like Jack Reacher would likely be better having its own separate listing of short stories. While there are book trilogies that have a prequel novella and that should be combined with the series.

We’ll get it all figured out 🙂

Great news for Gamache fans as Three Pines is becoming a TV series! It’s started filming in Quebec and is an Amazon production. No news yet as to when it will air but I’m looking forward to it. This is a show where the casting will no doubt make or break the series.

One book I will be listening to soon is Based On A True Story: A Memoir by Norm MacDonald.  Norm sadly passed away yesterday after an almost decade long battle with cancer.

He was without a doubt my favourite comedian, and a week didn’t go by that I wasn’t bringing up clips of him on Youtube, rewatching Sports Show episodes or The Norm Show etc.  I’ve seen him in standup countless times.  I even went to Edmonton and watched three of his shows back to back on the same night.  The first performance and the third performance were word by word the same, but still just as great.

I read that book as soon as it came out and always meant to listen to the audiobook, which he narrates.  It’ll be a bit harder to listen to now but I am looking forward to it.  He will be missed.

I finished listening to Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay. Solid psychological thriller. The ending and the culprit didn’t end up being a surprise at all but that’s okay – it made sense, and the journey to get there was good. Not every book has to be some crazy twist.

I read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. It’s the story of Harry August – someone who when he dies, is born again back when he was a child but with all memories intact.

A lot of the book involves his experiences through these lives, with the overlapping story of the world ending and him having to stop it. This was a slow book to get into I felt. I had to persevere through the first few chapters where it all seemed a whole lot of nothing.

Glad I stuck with it though as I ended up hooked and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was really immersed in it and while I found it a tad overhyped, it was still a very good read. I’d recommend it.

I tried out a new standalone thriller author in Shalini Boland. I read The Wife. Not really sure how I stumbled upon Shalini or this book but glad I did. It’s the story of a woman who faints on her wedding day and can’t remember anything that happened prior to the fainting.

The timeline jumps from then, to the present day which is ten years later, the days prior to a big tenth wedding anniversary celebration. I found myself hooked very on and the book was able to affect me emotionally which is always nice.

I had a few minor complaints about it but as soon as I finished it, I hopped onto Amazon and bought another book by her as the positives much outweighed the negatives. Solid psychological thriller.

It’s rare that you will see me mention a book that is getting a lot of hype here at the time. There’s something about that hype that just turns me off. I end up going in with very high expectations and end up reading it from an overly critical perspective.

So I like to wait until the hype dies down before reading. This is why I waited until now to read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. Funny timing as he has a sequel coming out in just a couple of weeks!

I’m only about 15% in so far and not really hooked yet. It just seems to be jumping around at the moment from character to character, story to story, and I’m not exactly sure where it is going. I’ll stick with it though and hopefully finish it this week.

I’m listening to Running the Dream by Matt Fitzgerald at the moment. It’s the story of an amateur runner who joins up with a professional running group to train for and run the Chicago Marathon. Really enjoying it although it would probably only appeal to you if you were a runner.

Good gift if you have any runners in your family though.

Each month we give away 5 prizes to 5 random subscribers of $25 each in the form of Amazon gift certificates. To win all you have to do is be a subscriber. Nothing more! When we go to hit “Publish” we take a list of all of our subscribers, throw them into a random draw and those are the winners.

Our winners this month are:

Katie from Davis, WV
Barbara B. from Miami Beach, FL
Ruth V. from New York, NY
Roger from Anderson, CA
Dana from Valdosta, GA

All of you have been e-mailed. If you don’t see anything, check your junk folder or contact me.

Graeme
OrderOfBooks.com

Quote of the Mid-Month:

“Never judge a book by its movie.”
— J.W. Eagan

Submitted by Deb. Feel free to submit your own quotes to site@orderofbooks.com or just hit reply. It can be just general quotes about books, author quotes within a novel or even character quotes.

Book / Series Recommendations

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

We received multiple e-mails recommending this historical fiction novel this month. It was an NYT Bestseller and was on many “Best Book” lists in 2017.

Ruth wrote: “I just finished reading The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. This is a historical fiction taking place in two time periods, WWI and 1947. This story is based on a real spy ring called The Alice Network that was in Europe during the first War. The characters are based on the real people that did extraordinary spying. This group were female spies that the Germans could never believe that woman can do such amazing spying. The characters are portrayed so realistically. You feel you are there with them. I highly recommend this book to you and your readers.”

Patti also wrote in to say she loved that book, as well as the two other standalone novels by Kate – The Huntress and The Rose Code.

Visit our Kate Quinn page for more details.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The story of two light-skinned black twin sisters who grow up in a small, southern black community. When they turn 16 years old they both run away.

Ten years later, one of them returns home with her daughter while the other is secretly passing for white, and is married with a child.

Both daughters of the twins’ lives intersect and this is the story of that.

This was named a Best Book of 2020 by the New York Times, Washington Post and Time Magazine. It was a 2021 Women’s Prize Finalist.

See our Brit Bennett page for more details. Thanks to im2nicholson for the recommendation.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt was an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Diana wrote in recommending it, saying:

“I highly recommend American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. Set in Mexico, it’s a powerful tale of a woman and her son who must flee the country after a cartel don has 16 members of their family killed. Themes of resilience, human depravity, and ultimately the triumph of the human spirit. Couldn’t put it down!”

American Dirt is the story of Lydia Quixano Pérez who runs a book store in Acapulco, Mexico. She is married to a journalist and the two have a son named Luca. While the drug cartels are out there and entering Acapulco, they mostly leave her life untouched. One day a charming man comes into her shop and buys a few of her favorite books. The man is Javier, the boss of the drug cartel that is taking over the town and the same man that her husband is writing a tell-all profile on. When this is published, their lives will never be the same and the family is forced to flee the city. They make their way towards the United States where they make the transformation from happy middle class family to poor migrants. Is it worth it?

See our Jeanine Cummins page for more details.

September Charities

While I appreciate all offers of donations to show your appreciation for the site and newsletter, I’d much rather you do that by supporting some great causes. Each month I pick a few select charities broken down by our most popular countries that you can support instead. Thanks! And please note you’re not restricted to the country you reside in of course – pick any you wish to support!

USA: Ferst Readers (Childhood Literacy)
UK: The Fostering Network
Canada: Autism Speaks Canada
Australia: Dementia Australia

I rotate this list each month. Feel free to suggest a favourite charity – hit reply.

Your Favourite Series:

I asked readers on our Facebook page a nice and simple question – what their favourite book series were.  Yikes!  Over 300 responses.  Amazing, but a lot of work for me haha.   I posted the first half in the August mid-month newsletter.  Here is the second half.

September 2021 Book Of The Month (16th-30th)

Craig Johnson – Daughter of the Morning Star

I know many people will be looking forward to this one!

Daughter of the Morning Star, the 17th novel in the Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson, is released on September 21st of this year.

The niece of Lolo Long is receiving death threats. Lolo calls in Walt Longmire as backup.

Unfortunately for Longmire, this puts him one on one with the deadliest adversary he has ever faced.

10 More Notable Books Releasing Sep 16-30

  1. Jailhouse Lawler by Nancy Allen and James Patterson
  2. The Burning by Jesse & Jonathan Kellerman
  3. The Wish by Nicholas Sparks
  4. Mile High with a Vampire by Lynsay Sands
  5. The Christmas Wedding Guest by Susan Mallery
  6. The Unknown by Heather Graham
  7. Mistletoe Cowboy by Diana Palmer
  8. Santa Cruise by Fern Michaels
  9. Don’t Look Now by Mary Burton
  10. The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Random Top 10 of the Month

10 Award Winning Thriller Books

How about picking up an award winning thriller novel to read? Here are just some of the great winners of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger over the years.

  1. When She Was Good by Michael Robotham
  2. November Road by Lou Berney
  3. To The Lions by Holly Watt
  4. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke
  5. Spook Street by Mick Herron
  6. The Cartel by Don Winslow
  7. Cop Town by Karin Slaughter
  8. An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
  9. Ghostman by Roger Hobbs
  10. A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming

Your Thoughts:

This month’s question:

What two book universes would you like to see cross over?

That’s something that rarely happens. We did see it a few years ago in FaceOff, a short story anthology.

That was a fun one. We had Jack Reacher and Nick Heller meeting in a bar. John Rebus and Roy Grace together. Then RL Stine’s Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy and Aloysius Pendergast!

While not a true crossover I’d love to see a horror fiction author like Bentley Little take over the Three Pines community for just one book. That would be one seriously messed up Gamache novel!

I’d love to see the Jack Reacher universe crossover with Jurassic Park. I’d love to see how Reacher handles the marauding dinosaurs!

I’d also like to just see detectives have to get used to a whole other country and how it works there. Throw Harry Bosch into the Scottish Highlands and have to take over a case for Hamish Macbeth!

What about you? What book universes would you like to see cross over?

E-mail us your feedback to site@OrderOfBooks.com or just reply to this e-mail, and we’ll pick the best comments and feature it in next months newsletter. Five people will also randomly win a $25 gift certificate to Amazon.

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Order of Books » Newsletter » September 2021 Mid-Month Newsletter

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