Fans pick 98 books like Sea Haven

This is the first in the Nell Ward Mystery Series where, unusually, the main character and amateur sleuth is an ecologist.

What I enjoy about this book is how the author cleverly uses the skills of an ecologist to solve the mystery and thereby draws a parallel with CSI techniques. We also learn a great deal of fascinating ecological detail (particularly about bats and badgers) and environmentalism tangentially to the storyline, which certainly adds another layer to the reading experience and this is what has stayed with me.

This is the seventh book in the Dales Detectives series and, in spite of some of the serious issues covered, is by far the most humorous and action-packed.

What I love about this book is the tremendous sense of community that leaps from the pages and really makes you think about small-town/village life. The quirky characters are all well-drawn and vivid descriptions of wayward sheep, fellside walks and twisty lanes bring the Yorkshire Dales to life.

The characters all come together in a wild west style climax which is some of the best writing I’ve ever read. How I’d love to have a beer with them all in The Fleece.

This is the first of the Edge Of the World Detective Agency series and is a quirky, unusual, and curiously addictive read which breaks new ground in the mystery genre. 

What I enjoyed about this book is that while the vivid descriptions of familiar Cornish settings keep it within the realms of reality, the slightly eccentric, but believable characters, with their knowledge of herbalism and ancient Cornish customs give it a definite hint of magic and folklore that runs throughout.

This is what stayed with me and made me think that there is very likely another side to Cornwall that tourists are simply unaware of.

In this excellently researched DI Ben Kitto series the author does not shy away from the fact that bad things happen in beautiful places.

I particularly love this first book because it sympathetically captures the essence of living in a small, remote island community, where drugs, violence, and alcohol are not far beneath the surface and the economic hardships these places endure are a daily concern.

The islands in this book are a far cry from the summer Isles of Scilly that many of us know and love and it is a realistic reminder that life anywhere is not always as idyllic and simple as it appears from the outside.

I chose this book because it is a history of cat rescue. Rescuing cats was, and still is, a complex and difficult task. The book deals with the struggle to get cat rescue organised in a way that could benefit not just cat rescuers but also cats!

Individual cat lovers have always fed cats on the street, with the resulting increase in feline numbers! At one point, rescuers thought the only answer was to euthanase all street cats,  but nowadays, a concerted effort is being made to neuter and spay feral cats rather than try to turn them into unsatisfactory pets. The book deals with the growth of Trap, Neuter, and Return schemes, as well as the growing effort to get more cats adopted.

Written by an author from the English West Country city of Bristol, this story accurately captures the inequality of life in the 1970s. Fifteen-year-old Carol lives in a council estate on the edge of town. She goes to school with a farmer’s son who will inherit rolling acres. One day, she meets handsome Frankie, who is staying with his aunt in a manor house nearby.

Every reader will know louche Frankie is bad news. Carol, of course, falls for him and finds herself pregnant. So far, so predictable. What is far less predictable is the way Carol herself is sucked into crime, secrets, and lies. Forty years later, how far will she go to evade exposure? Emotional, clever, and exquisitely written, this book is hard to put down. 

What mother remembering her own labor wouldn’t be grateful to Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s essay, “What My Mother Never Told Me, or How I Was Blindsided by Childbirth and Survived,” for her shameless revelations about the most terrifying and grubby aspects of a safe, normal vaginal delivery. It’s just one of the brilliant and necessary essays in a book that kept me company through the hardest and funniest parts of being a mom.

Like Colville, Nicolson is not very important in himself (a backbench MP for most of the time) but one who matters because he knows so many greater figures and because he writes with such honesty – particularly interesting when his predictions turn out to be wrong. If you get hooked, you can read the earlier edition, which is in three volumes.

The shout line on the jacket is “This will overturn everything you thought you knew about…The First World War”, and it certainly delivers. No other conflict has been so misrepresented, and for most people, their idea of it comes straight from Blackadder Goes Forth. But men did not spend months at a time in the trenches; a whole generation did not die; the generals were not cowardly, incompetent fools.

When I first began to write about WW1 for my Morland Dynasty series, I knew as little as anyone, and what I thought I knew was all wrong! By the time I was researching for War At Home, I knew a lot more, but Corrigan opens my eyes to many more subjects. Informative, well-researched, but above all wonderfully readable, this book should be required reading for anyone who is interested in what really happened, not just the made-for-tv version.

Based in Bradford, in the north of England, Liz’s fiction is gritty and really conveys the realities of this multi-racial, post-industrial city (I grew up a few miles away).

I’m listing Last Request because it was the first book by Liz that I read. But apart from the 6 books in the DS Nikita Parakh series, she’s also written eight novels (so far!) in the DI Gus McGuire series. There’s lots of inner-city grime in the writing, but also issues such as racial tension and mental health.

More importantly, I think, is that the writing has a compelling kind of humanity, with vulnerable, imperfect characters put into impossible situations. She’s just a natural storyteller.