Whether you’re looking for tender first love, steamy romance or spine-tingling suspense, we have your summer beach reads sorted
BAD TOURISTS
Ah, the Maldives! A crystal-clear Indian Ocean, white sand, all the cocktails you can drink…
Super-fit Camilla and writer Kate have come with Darcy to celebrate her midlife divorce.
The friends were brought together more than 20 years ago by unimaginable trauma.
Surely a break in this island paradise will be healing? But here’s the problem with paradise: there’s always a serpent. And girly jaunts can be murder.
MURDER UNDER THE SUN
There is a special charm about vintage fiction in which crimes are solved not by forensics, in the laboratory, but by intuition and deduction. The latest collection in the Vintage Murders series transports us from the English seaside to Corfu and Alsace and to that famously foreign country, the past, in the company of Simon Brett, Ellis Peters, Michael Innes and Arthur Conan Doyle – such great storytellers, it’s criminal.
ORDINARY TIME
A move to Cornwall promises a new start for Ann, whose vicar husband, Tim, is married to the Church. But the vicarage is ghastly. Tim is joyless and distant with Ann and their 11-year-old son, Sam. Ann’s to-do list is all ‘make chilli, clean bathroom, change beds’. No wonder she is led into temptation, but will she be delivered from evil? An impeccably written, nuanced novel, that is old-fashioned in the very best ways.
THE WILD SWIMMERS
Kent’s ‘desert’, the remote landscape around Dungeness, provides the evocative backdrop for another DS Alexandra Cupidi investigation. The body of wild swimmer Mimi Greene has washed up on the beach – and her death was no accident. Meanwhile, Alex’s good friend Jill Ferriter has a convicted murderer claiming to be her father. This is a gripping whodunnit peopled by the good, the bad and the ugly.
SUMMER HEAT
‘A woman must nourish her soul, keep her spirits fresh with little adventures, right?’ Art historian Melike has a devoted husband, a lovely Istanbul home – and a hole in her soul. Inveigled by seductive stranger Petro, she travels to Cyprus via Athens for a confrontation with turbulent history, a reunion with her errant father, and far more than a ‘little adventure’. A heady mix of horror and romance.
VERY BAD COMPANY
Miami, Florida. Ten-strong Team Aurora, each of them guarding a secret, are on a lavish executive jolly. They’re variously rivalrous, venal, deceiving – and that’s just the good guys. The big reveal from their oddball CEO is that they are each in line for a fortune, but
