My May TBR

I can’t believe we’ve reached May already – this year is going by so quickly, I feel like it was only yesterday I was opening Christmas presents with my best friend and her family and now we’re over a third of the way through the next year! Is this a sign of getting old?

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At the beginning of April I decided I would post my TBR for the month, and then see how many I managed to make it through. You can see how I did in my April round-up post. I also wrote a discussion post about keeping my TBR in check, as a result I added some shelves to my Goodreads account to categorize things a little better, I’ve been approved for a number of books on NetGalley but I was becoming quite aware of the fact that I was reading a lot of ARCs but some of my own books were being a little neglected. So going forward my aim is to read at least 1 physical arc, 1 eBook arc, 1 kindle freebie and 1 book that’s been sitting on my bookcase for far too long each month.

This month I’ve got 11 books on my TBR.

Letters To The Lost 

This one is carrying over from my April TBR – I started it last Friday but because I was so busy over the weekend I didn’t get to finish it.

Juliet Young has always written letters to her mother, a world-traveling photojournalist. Even after her mother’s death, she leaves letters at her grave. It’s the only way Juliet can cope.

Declan Murphy isn’t the sort of guy you want to cross. In the midst of his court-ordered community service at the local cemetery, he’s trying to escape the demons of his past.

When Declan reads a haunting letter left beside a grave, he can’t resist writing back. Soon, he’s opening up to a perfect stranger, and their connection is immediate. But neither of them knows that they’re not actually strangers. When real life at school interferes with their secret life of letters, Juliet and Declan discover truths that might tear them apart. This emotional, compulsively-readable romance will sweep everyone off their feet.

The Cuckoo’s Calling

The Cuckoo’s Calling has been sitting on my Goodreads shelf for far too long – I first started it not long after it was originally released and made my way through a fair amount of it but then I went through a phase of not enjoying reading eBooks. I remember enjoying the book at the time so I’ve borrowed a hardback copy from the library and I’m keen to get it finished this time around.

A brilliant mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel’s suicide.

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this.

The Looking Glass Wars

This one was recommended to me by one of my best friends after a discussion about how much I enjoyed reading Heartless. So I’m looking forward to picking it up this month. It’s the first in a trilogy so hopefully I’ll enjoy it!

Alyss, born in Wonderland, is destined to be a warrior queen. After a bloody coup topples the Heart regime, Alyss is exiled to another world entirely, where she is adopted into a new family, renamed Alice and befriended by Lewis Carroll. At age 20 she returns to Wonderland to battle Redd and lead Wonderland into its next golden age of imagination.

Knots & Crosses

I’ve read and listened to several of Ian Rankin’s later books in the Rebus series, and I have a signed copy of The Complaints after he visited the University of Dundee when I was a fresher there but I’ve never read the series from the beginning – Knots & Crosses was published just before I was born – I bought the first 10 books in the series from The Book People and they’ve been sitting on my shelf for over a year now so this is the at the top of the list of books sitting on my shelf that I really need to get to.

Detective John Rebus: His city is being terrorized by a baffling series of murders…and he’s tied to a maniac by an invisible knot of blood. Once John Rebus served in Britain’s elite SAS. Now he’s an Edinburgh cop who hides from his memories, misses promotions and ignores a series of crank letters. But as the ghoulish killings mount and the tabloid headlines scream, Rebus cannot stop the feverish shrieks from within his own mind. Because he isn’t just one cop trying to catch a killer, he’s the man who’s got all the pieces to the puzzle…

Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops

So this one started out as a blog written by someone I know – Again I’ve had this sitting on my shelf for too long. It’s not a long book but I’m expecting this to be a nice, amusing break during the month.

This Sunday Times bestseller is a miscellany of hilarious and peculiar bookshop moments: ‘Can books conduct electricity?’

‘My children are just climbing your bookshelves: that’s ok… isn’t it?’

A John Cleese Twitter question [‘What is your pet peeve?’], first sparked the ‘Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops’ blog, which grew over three years into one bookseller’s collection of ridiculous conversations on the shop floor.

From ‘Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?’ to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year’s weather; and from ‘I’ve forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter’ to ‘Excuse me… is this book edible?: here is a book for heroic booksellers and booklovers everywhere.

This full-length collection illustrated by the Brothers McLeod also includes top ‘Weird Things’ from bookshops around the world.

The Irregular

This one is a book I received in the post from Hodder & Stoughton. It’s due for release a little later this month and I love the idea of it so really hoping I don’t end up disappointed!

London 1909: The British Empire seems invulnerable. But Captain Vernon Kell, head of counter-intelligence at the War Office, knows better. In Russia, revolution; in Germany, an arms race; in London, the streets are alive with foreign terrorists. Kell wants to set up a Secret Service, but to convince his political masters he needs proof of a threat – and to find that, he needs an agent he can trust. The playing fields of Eton may produce good officers, but not men who can work undercover in a munitions factory that appears to be leaking secrets to the Germans.

Kell needs Wiggins. Trained as a child by Kell’s old friend Sherlock Holmes – he led a gang of urchin investigators known as the Baker Street Irregulars – Wiggins is an ex-soldier with an expert line in deduction and the cunning of a born street fighter. ‘The best’, says Holmes.

Wiggins turns down the job – he ‘don’t do official’. But when his best friend is killed by Russian anarchists, Wiggins sees that the role of secret agent could take him towards his sworn revenge.

Tracking the Russian gang, Wiggins meets a mysterious beauty called Bela, who saves his life. Working for Kell, he begins to unravel a conspiracy that reaches far beyond the munitions factory.

Cold Granite

I’ve been meaning to try this series for a while now. I’m a little addicted to Scottish crime and I’ve read several set in the Central Belt; Edinburgh, Glasgow and Fife, but I’ve been meaning for a while to head north to Aberdeen so when I saw this one had been put on promotion and was free on Amazon for a bit I grabbed it.

It’s DS Logan McRae’s first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn’t get much worse. Four-year-old David Reid’s body is discovered in a ditch, strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. There’s a killer stalking the Granite City and the local media are baying for blood.If that wasn’t enough, Logan also has to contend with a new boss, DI Insch, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly and thinks everyone’s a fool, and his own ex-girlfriend, the beautiful but chilly Isobel MacAlister, who also happens to be the chief pathologist. The only good news is WPC ‘Ball Breaker’ Watson, Logan’s new guardian angel.The dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die. If Logan isn’t careful, he’s going to end up joining them.Set in Aberdeen, where the rainy season lasts all year, criminal gangs vie for supremacy on the streets and the oil industry brings an influx of wealth and vice

The Missing Ones

 This one is the first in a new series that was released in March. I picked it up via NetGalley so I’m looking forward to reading it this month.

The hole they dug was not deep. A white flour bag encased the little body. Three small faces watched from the window, eyes black with terror.

The child in the middle spoke without turning his head. ‘I wonder which one of us will be next?’

When a woman’s body is discovered in a cathedral and hours later a young man is found hanging from a tree outside his home, Detective Lottie Parker is called in to lead the investigation. Both bodies have the same distinctive tattoo clumsily inscribed on their legs. It’s clear the pair are connected, but how?

The trail leads Lottie to St Angela’s, a former children’s home, with a dark connection to her own family history. Suddenly the case just got personal.

As Lottie begins to link the current victims to unsolved murders decades old, two teenage boys go missing. She must close in on the killer before they strike again, but in doing so is she putting her own children in terrifying danger?

Lottie is about to come face to face with a twisted soul who has a very warped idea of justice.

Stargazing For Beginners

 This is the only book I didn’t start from my April TBR that I’ve carried over and decided to read in May – I’ll pick the others up again in the next few months. I posted a teaser from this book which I loved, and I’m still a bit of a science geek so I’m looking forward to picking this one up.

Science geek Meg is left to look after her little sister for ten days after her free-spirited mum leaves suddenly to follow up yet another of her Big Important Causes. But while Meg may understand how the universe was formed, baby Elsa is a complete mystery to her.

And Mum’s disappearance has come at the worst time: Meg is desperate to win a competition to get the chance to visit NASA headquarters, but to do this she has to beat close rival Ed. Can Meg pull off this double life of caring for Elsa and following her own dreams? She’ll need a miracle of cosmic proportions …

Fans fell in love with the warmth, wit, romance and fierce friendships in Flirty Dancing, Love Bomb, Sunkissed and Star Struck, and Stargazing for Beginners has all that and galaxies more. This is the best kind of real-life fiction – with big themes and irresistible characters, it goes straight to your heart.

Based On A True Story

 I saw this one in the Spring Summer Buzz Book at the beginning of the year and it caught my eye, when I spotted it on NetGalley I just had to request it. Originally written in French the translation was published in the UK last month by Bloomsbury.

What would you do if your closest friend tried to steal your life?

Today I know that L. is the sole reason for my powerlessness. And that the two years that we were friends almost made me stop writing for ever.

Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and unable to begin writing her next book, Delphine meets L. L. is the kind of impeccable, sophisticated woman who fascinates Delphine; a woman with smooth hair and perfectly filed nails, and a gift for saying the right thing. Delphine finds herself irresistibly drawn to her, their friendship growing as their meetings, notes and texts increase.

But as L. begins to dress like Delphine, and, in the face of Delphine’s crippling inability to write, L. even offers to answer her emails, and their relationship rapidly intensifies. L. becomes more and more involved in Delphine’s life until she patiently takes control and turns it upside down: slowly, surely, insidiously.

Based on a True Story is a chilling novel of suspense that will leave you questioning the truth and its significance long after you have turned the final page.

Gone Without A Trace

 This is another book I received in the post, this one came from Headline, and was published in March. Again the blurb intrigued me so I’m looking forward to it!

No one ever disappears completely…

You leave for work one morning.

Another day in your normal life.

Until you come home to discover that your boyfriend has gone.

His belongings have disappeared.

He hasn’t been at work for weeks.

It’s as if he never existed.

But that’s not possible, is it?

And there is worse still to come.

Because just as you are searching for him

someone is also watching you.

So that’s my TBR for May! 11 Books which is challenging but not completely unachievable. Hopefully! Do any of these sound good to you? Have you already read any of them? Which books are filling the must read spaces on your TBRs this month? Let me know!