My Book Reviews for October 2025
My Book Reviews for October 2025
My Book Reviews for October 2025 comprise two romcoms, a Glasgow-set police procedural, a literary novel, a Scottish cosy mystery, a Welsh mystery thriller, a literary thriller partly set in Serbia and an uplifting tale about sheep.
The Gingerbread Café by Anita Faulkner
This is fab festive fun with oodles of hot chocolate, mulled wine, spiced gingerbread, trimmed trees and reindeer jumpers, and there’s a heartwarming story too. Grieving, insecure Gretel learns to live – and love – again, and a dwindling village high street takes the chance to thrive.
Lonely Gretel has given up on getting close to anyone after losing her dearest loved ones. She seeks solace in her local Christmas-themed café, run by an elderly friend of her late mother. When the lady dies, she bequeaths half the café to Gretel. The other half goes to her Christmas-hating nephew, Lukas. Despite her shock at the unexpected inheritance and her complete inability to speak to strangers or bake a biscuit, Gretel is determined to make a go of the café to honour the late owner and their mutual love of Christmas. However, Lukas, a chef at a French restaurant, can’t see any future for a café in a failing high street. Gretel has until probate is cleared to play café owner before they sell to a developer and Lukas uses his share of the proceeds to fund his Michelin star catering ambitions.
With flour cascading down every work surface, legless gingerbread men, burnt cinnamon cookies, a pet ferret on the loose, a jukebox blaring its self-programmed Christmas soundtrack, sarcasm from grumpy Lukas and a January slump in customers, Gretel’s prospects are not looking good. But maybe it takes a village to save a coffee shop.
Anita Faulkner has not only created a rounded, likeable protagonist in Gretel, she also gives us a well-drawn rival/lover. Lukas might be a dab hand with a tasting spoon and oven gloves, but he’s keeping in check his share of heartache and vulnerabilities.
The cast of other shop owners is a delight: Phoebe with her healing crystals; Eve the florist; Jane and Jayne who run an art gallery; Gordon the Grocer; Bea and her lavender-and-honey-themed produce; and Zekia and Kingsley who keep everyone supplied with rum and fudge. (I want to live in Mistleton.) There are also fleeting glimpses of Lexie and Sky, lead characters in Anita Faulkner’s debut romcom, A Colourful Country Escape.
My favourite character was scarlet-haired and secretive Amber, who popped up one day to wait tables and stayed. I also had a soft spot for the baddie, town centre developer Francesca Whimple, who strutted about in trainers like a pound-shop Cruella de Vil.
The writing is excellent, the pace breezy and the humour joyful. Not only is this a lovely, funny and Christmassy romcom, it’s a celebration of village life and it gives a rousing, gingerbread-spiced cheer for gorgeous and quirky independent shops everywhere.
Here is my review of Anita Faulkner’s latest book, Your Had Me At Pumpkin Patch.
This Glasgow-based crime series, featuring DI Alex Scrimgeour and DS Mark Johnson goes from strength to strength. In this latest instalment, both detectives are in a fix.
The book opens with Alex dodging a bullet! But which gangland criminal that Alex and Mark have put behind bars has hired an assassin to exact revenge?
Forced into hiding, Alex moves in with his daughter, Kate. As well as battling a worrying personal issue, Kate, a freelance journalist, is pursuing a story about six teenage suicides. All a tragic coincidence? Copycats? Or, as the parents claim, not suicide at all?
From hired killers to family feuds, The Fallen is a well-written police procedural with depth and intrigue.
This is the fourth book in the Glasgow Southside Crime Series. The author cleverly unties a few knots at the end that will lead to private lives and previous cases unravelling in book five.
Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley
From the blurb:
The dilapidated seaside town of Saltwash isn't a place that Tom Shift would have chosen to come to at all, let alone on such a bleak November afternoon. But his new friend, Oliver Keele, has insisted on meeting for dinner at the Castle Hotel, where the owners, the Paleys, try their best to cling on to the glory days.
Both terminally ill, Tom and Oliver have been bound by the saddest of circumstances, though they have found some solace in writing to one another via a pen-pal scheme set up by their respective cancer clinics. So far, their friendship has been conducted solely through letters, with Oliver proving himself to be a treasury of literary quips and quotes. Yet, for all his flamboyance and verbosity, he is guarded, and Tom suspects that he is lonely and nomadic. And Oliver sees Tom for what he is too: a man haunted by guilt and desperate to try and atone in some way before it's too late.
Regret is what brings others to the Castle. Much to Tom's surprise, dozens more guests appear, dressed in their finest to take part in a prize draw that offers one person the chance of deliverance from their remorse. But does everyone deserve the opportunity?
The story starts in familiar Andrew Michael Hurley territory with evocative description of his Lancashire setting, in this case the sights, sounds, smells and weather of a seaside town in November. Having once spent an out-of-season weekend in Morecambe, I can attest to the writing's authenticity; the rain was biblical and lasted the full 48 hours of my visit.
The book moves into the rhythm of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day as protagonist Tom travels to the town in wistful contemplation of his life.
Once Tom gets to the hotel and he meets other guests, whom the author describes in all their flawed and eccentric detail, I was reminded of Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
Tom's time at the hotel unfolds with undercurrents of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and nods to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Kafka's The Trial.
Like Andrew Michael Hurley's previous novels, which I've read and enjoyed, this is billed as folk horror. However, despite the tilts in that direction, I felt this was more of a fluently written literary novel about regret, atonement and mortality.
This is an independent review of an advance copy. I thank the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity.
This novel will be published on 23 October 2025.
Murder at the Wild Haggis Bookshop by Jackie Baldwin
From the blurb: At The Wild Haggis Bookshop, the murder mysteries aren't just on the shelves! Beth Cunningham thought she'd closed the book on her troubled past when she opened The Wild Haggis Bookshop in the charming Scottish town of Oban. But when her inaugural book club evening ends in real murder – the body dramatically posed amongst the party decorations – her fresh start ends in a twist she definitely didn’t see coming.
As the title suggests, this is a delightful cosy crime story set in Scotland. However, this does more than it says on the tin with lots of twists and a mystery that proves dangerously close to home for chief sleuth and bookshop owner, Beth.
Her bookshop staff and the members of her bookclub are a strong supporting cast, who veer between being helpful investigators and potential culprits.
The author does a good job of evoking the setting of Oban.
A great start to a new series.
This is an independent review of an advance copy. I thank the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity.
The Death Lesson by Sarah Ward
A new teacher at an elite girls' boarding school commits suicide within a week of her arrival. Sensing something sinister afoot, the head teacher calls her police contacts via the school's old gals' network. Former police officer Mallory is brought into the school on the quiet to replace the dead teacher and sniff out trouble. Mallory soon discovers links to a punishment cult. Can she identify who in the school are cult members or their victims before more deaths occur?
This is a fluently written mystery/thriller that unfolds in a logical and engaging style. The west Wales setting is nicely depicted.
Another hit in the Mallory Dawson Crime Series.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
Under the Same Moon by A.S. Andrejevic
From the blurb:
In autumn, Serbia smells of roasted red peppers. This is how Jelena remembers her country, although she left it behind a long time ago. She has tried to forget those days when newspaper headlines wrote about Serbian Butchers and Clobba Sloba. Her home and life are as English as they can be, and she has even changed her name to Helen.
But war finds you anywhere – that’s what the clairvoyant tells her, on the day Jelena hides her children from the suspected war criminal sleeping in the basement of her Hampstead home. And now, to keep them all safe, she will have to become someone new – or perhaps, someone she once used to be.
This is a literary novel of slow-burning suspense - the sense of impending doom around Mladen's presence in the basement; the reasons for Jelena's poor decision-making gradually revealed in the flashbacks of how she has been treated; the concerning appearance of Zuko in Jelena's mother's life back home; and the clairvoyant's ominous warning. I particularly enjoyed the split screen perspectives of Jelena's domestic and school-run worries in Hampstead and her time of political unrest and danger in 1990s Serbia. It was informative and thought-provoking to see the brutal breakup of Yugoslavia from a Serbian point of view.
Ghosted at Christmas by Holly Whitmore
From the blurb:
Mia’s been ghosted. Her festive spirits are at an all-time low, but at least her Christmas can’t get any worse. Or so she thought, until she discovered that her ex, Sam, is spending Christmas with her family. Now she’s looking at a whole week with the man who broke her heart and no chance of escape.
John’s a ghost. After 30 years in limbo without a soul to talk to, he’s bored to death but still can’t seem to reach the afterlife. So when Mia screams at the sight of him, he can't help but wonder why this lovelorn girl can see him. Could helping to ease her heartbreak be his ticket to passing on?
As John and Mia become friends, he’s desperate to work out how he can cheer her up. But then John sees the way that Sam and Mia look at each other and he knows how to convince her that love isn’t dead after all. She just needs a ghostly nudge in the right direction…
This is a Christmas romance and a Christmas ghost story beautifully wrapped in a shiny red bow of RomCom.
A fun, well-written read for the festive season.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
This novel will be published on 23 October.
The Approval of Sheep by Karen Storey
Summarised from the blurb:
Gordon, a manager in a hotel group, is under threat of redundancy. He learns of a historic covenant that preserves the right for sheep to run through the company’s top London hotel. Can he convince his boss that he’s the man to save the hotel from catastrophe?
Up in Bryn Nefyn, North Wales, live the descendants of the covenant owner. The elderly sheep farmer and his aging hippy brother could use the money the hotel might offer. But along with their strong-willed American shepherdess, they laugh at Gordon’s attempts to negotiate a deal. Surely, they couldn’t use a covenant that’s been forgotten about for over a hundred years. Or could they?
Quirky characters, a funny premise, wry humour. This whimsical, uplifting tale might appeal to fans of Rachel Joyce and would work well on TV.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
I hope you enjoyed My Book Reviews for October 2025. Please pop back next month as I’ve already got some goodies lined up.