Publisher: HarperAudio

#AudioBookReview: Days at the Torunka Cafe by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
#AudioBookReview: Days at the Torunka Cafe by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric OzawaDays at the Torunka Café (Days at the Torunka Café, #1) by Satoshi Yagisawa
Translator: Eric Ozawa
Narrator: Sadao Udea
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, relationship fiction, sad fluff, world literature
Series: Torunka Café #1
Pages: 240
Length: 8 hours
Published by Harper Perennial, HarperAudio on November 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the internationally bestselling author of the Morisaki Bookshop novels comes a charming and poignant story set at a quiet Tokyo café where customers find unexpected connection and experience everyday miracles.
Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Yumata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time.
While Café Torunka serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting. Satoshi Yagisawa brilliantly illuminates the periods in our lives where we feel lost—and how we find our way again.

My Review:

I picked this up, and started it in audio, because I adored the author’s two books featuring the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop) and was looking forward to more of the same.

But the Morisaki Bookshop turned out to have some secret sauce that the Torunka Café, at least so far, doesn’t have. That’s in spite of the tantalizingly delicious descriptions of the coffee the café serves.

Then again, and in sympathy with the café owner’s daughter Shizuko, I don’t like the taste of coffee. Shizuko’s introduction to the bitterness of coffee was at age seven – and it was clearly a bit of a shock to her system. Mine, on the other hand, was sweetened a bit too much when my parents dropped a spoonful of black coffee into my entire glass of milk. Both of us were left with misplaced expectations about the experience that we never got over.

Shizuko, however, gets reminded of that early experience on the regular. Her dad, the café’s owner, literally named her ‘drop’ or ‘droplet’, because he wanted her life to be as rich and as satisfying as the concentrated flavor in every drop of a well-prepared cup of coffee.

Like many similar books, including Monday’s Menu of Happiness, Days at the Torunka Café isn’t one story so much as it is three stories linked by the titular location. And that’s where I got disappointed – or suffered from those misplaced expectations.

Part of what I love about the Kamogawa Food Detectives series is that the framing story about the Kamogawa Diner and the relationship between chef Nagare Kamogawa and his adult daughter Koishi is as strong and important a story as the individual stories of their clients.

In those Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, while there are stories about people in the neighborhood who frequent the shop, the story as a whole centers on Takako, her eccentric uncle Satoru, and the bookstore that gives her a place to land and recover after a terrible break up. The bookstore is a central location, and it’s certainly her shelter against life’s storms when she needs one, but it’s HER story more than anyone else’s and it just worked better for this reader.

That she’s sheltering in a bookstore and recovering her equilibrium by getting lost in the world of books probably helped me get into both the book and her story, but I think I mostly enjoyed that the story had a central figure. Which is the same thing that put The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee over the top for me as well, that the gang at that café carries the story.

Escape Rating C: So this one didn’t quite work for this reader – or listener. One of the other reasons that it didn’t is that, unlike the Morisaki Bookshop stories where there is one central character and therefore the audio works with one single narrator, those Days at the Torunka Café are made up of three very distinct stories linked by a location, and it needed distinct narrators for each story the way that What You Are Looking For Is In the Library did. The narrator of Torunka Café, Sadao Udea (or Ueda, I’m seeing both spellings), was a good choice for either the first story (a young man in his early 20s) OR the second (a middle-aged man in his early 50s) but not both (mostly because the listener’s ear expects Shūichi but gets Hiro, an entirely different person, in the second story) and not the third, which is from the first person perspective of Shizuku, the café owner’s high school aged daughter.

(It’s not that men can’t voice women and vice versa, but these stories are told in the first-person which, from the perspective of this listener, begs for a closer match between the narrator and the character than a third-person viewpoint. Your listening mileage may vary.)

So I came into this book with high hopes, BUT it didn’t quite work for me on multiple levels. I expected more ‘through story’ than this book is intended to have. Personally, I had a difficult time getting into the first story, “Sunday Ballerinas” because I didn’t care for the characters. The protagonist Shūichi is too much of a doormat and in that first story Shizuku comes off as a bit of a bully. That Shizuku is the protagonist of the third story, “A Drop of Love”, while she’s more sympathetic from inside her own head, well, I had already formed an opinion that was hard to shake. The second story, “The Place Where We Meet Again”, had just the type of ‘sad fluff’ vibes I was expecting, but it wasn’t enough to carry the whole book.

There is a second book in this series, and I’m sure I’ll pick it up when the translation is published, just to see how things are going at the Torunka Café.

A+ #AudioBookReview: Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: Marble Hall Murders by Anthony HorowitzMarble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz
Narrator: Lesley Manville, Tim McMullan
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense
Series: Susan Ryeland #3
Pages: 592
Length: 17 hours and 38 minutes
Published by HarperAudio, HarperCollins on May 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Murder links past and present once again in this mind-boggling metafictional mystery from Anthony Horowitz—another tribute to the golden age of Agatha Christie featuring detective Atticus Pund and editor Susan Ryland, stars of the New York Times bestsellers Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders.
Editor Susan Ryeland has left her Greek island, her hotel, and her Greek boyfriend Andreas in search of a new life back in England.
Freelancing for Causton Books, she’s working on the manuscript of a novel, Pund’s Last Case, by a young author named Eliot Crace, a continuation of the popular Alan Conway series. Susan is surprised to learn that Eliot is the grandson of legendary children’s author Marian Crace, who died some fifteen years ago—murdered, Elliot insists, by poison.
As Susan begins to read the manuscript’s opening chapters, the skeptical editor is relieved to find that Pund’s Last Case is actually very good. Set in the South of France, it revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, who, though mortally ill, is poisoned—perhaps by a member of her own family. But who did it? And why?
The deeper Susan reads, the more it becomes clear that the clues leading to the truth of Marian Crace’s death are hidden within this Atticus Pund mystery.
While Eliot’s accusation becomes more plausible, his behavior grows increasingly erratic.. Then he is suddenly killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Susan finds herself under police scrutiny as a suspect in his killing.
Three mysterious deaths. Multiple motives and possible murderers. If Susan doesn’t solve the mystery of Pund’s Last Case, she may well be the next victim.

My Review:

Someone really needs to do something about Alan Conway. Possibly an exorcism. Or at least a cleansing ritual involving a whole lot of sage. Because in spite of his death early in the first book in this series, Magpie Murders, Alan Conway’s malevolent spirit continues to haunt his former editor, Susan Ryeland. Quite possibly to death.

Even though Conway, the creator of the best-selling fictional detective Atticus Pünd, has been dead since the early pages of Magpie Murders, the story STILL manages to be all about him. Likewise, even though Conway is no longer writing the Atticus Pünd mysteries, there’s still a new book to wrap this story around.

Life often imitates art in this series, and that’s certainly true here, as Susan’s new publisher, Causton Books, has commissioned a continuation novel for the still-popular series. Which is where Susan, as the late Conway’s editor, reluctantly comes into the picture.

Or the frame, as the case turns out to be.

Susan is back in England, back in her old neighborhood, and back at work if not at her old publishing house, Cloverleaf Books. Considering the events that wrapped up Magpie Murders, that’s not really a surprise. The surprise, to Susan as much as to anyone else, is that she managed to get a job, even a freelance gig, with any publisher in England.

After all, Susan was responsible for getting the owner of Cloverleaf Books sent to prison for murdering Alan Conway – and for attempting to shut Susan up by burning down the firm’s offices with her inside them. There are, as it turns out, a lot of people who would rather blame her for catching her former boss than blame him for killing Conway in the first place.

Which probably says as much about her former boss Charles Clover’s likeability as it does Conway’s extreme lack of the same. And isn’t all that kind about her own.

Susan hates the very idea of being involved with Conway’s legacy yet again. And after the events of Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders it’s difficult to blame her. But she needs the money. Even more, she needs the hope of getting a full-time job back in the industry that she loves and seems to live for – perhaps a bit too much.

Which is where Pünd’s Last Case and its commissioned author, Eliot Grace, come into the picture. And exit, stage left, pursued by Susan’s MG Roadster, straight into a hell at least partially of his own making – and putting Susan in the frame for his murder.

Escape Rating A+: This was the book that I just couldn’t resist reading. Or rather, listening to. So I started it in audio, couldn’t put it down and didn’t even want to try, and switched to text so I could find out whodunnit that much faster. Which is as much a pattern for my reading of this series as its “book within a book” story is a pattern for the series itself.

While I didn’t listen to a LOT of the book, I listened to enough to say that getting the actors who play Susan Ryeland and Atticus Pünd in the TV series (Lesley Manville and Tim McMullan respectively) to reprise their parts in this audiobook was absolutely brilliant.

Then, of course, there’s the story itself. Or rather, the stories themselves.

For the first two books, I was considerably more captivated by the ‘classic’ Atticus Pünd mystery on the inside than I was Susan Ryeland’s contemporary turn as an amateur detective that forms the frame for it. This time around, the balance was quite a bit more even, as it seemed like Susan was coming into her own as a character, where Pünd seemed to have sprung fully formed even from his opening scene in that first book.

Then again, Susan seemed to be flailing around personally and professionally as well as bumbling around as an amateur detective in those first two books, while this time around she’s moving forward with her own life and career in spite of some terrible roadblocks. Although she’s still a bit of a bumbler as a detective. Then again, that’s not supposed to be her job.

What makes this entry in the series work particularly well are the parallels between the series continuation novel written by Eliot Crace and Crace’s own life and all the people in it with whom he has scores to settle. Very much like Conway. Perhaps a little too much like Conway, as Eliot Crace also gets killed before he has a chance to finish his revenge stroke of a novel.

While Conway was as well known for the puzzles he inserted into his stories as he was for the sheer malevolence with which he skewered everyone he ever met by caricaturing them within his novels, Eliot Crace manages to have more nightmare fuel MUCH closer to hand than Conway ever did, while his veneer over the real-life identities of his characters is even thinner.

Once Susan has both read his manuscript and met his family it’s not a surprise that Eliot took to Conway’s wicked pen so readily – only that he was so very good at it. Nor is it much of a surprise that someone murdered him – just that it hadn’t happened sooner.

It’s also a LOT of fun to read the two books interleaved as they are with Susan’s deep dive into Eliot’s life and to play the game of ‘find the puzzle’ and ‘spot the reference’. Susan’s part of the story opens with two. First, she works for “Causton Books”. Causton is the county town where Midsomer Murders is set, so Barnaby and his Detective Sergeant of the season are from the ‘Causton C.I.D.’ which they refer to frequently and often. As if that weren’t enough of an in-joke, the author of Marble Hall Murders was one of the creators of that TV series. He has also been involved with not just one but two continuation series, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes – a practice that Susan seems to have a bit of a jaundiced opinion of. And that’s only the beginning.

Also the beginning of trying to figure out whodunnit in both stories before the big reveal at the end. I did get to the identity of Susan’s enemy well before she did – but not to the identity of either Eliot Crace’s true murderer OR the identity of the killer in his first – and last – Pünd continuation, whether or not it turns out to be Pünd’s Last Case after all.

That the frame around Susan was so very nearly successful, does seem to be par for Susan’s course. She was right that she should have steered far away from anything to do with Alan Conway. But I’m glad that she didn’t.

While this could be Susan’s happy ending, I hope it isn’t. This entry in the series was the best and most riveting of the lot, and I’d love to see more of both Susan Ryeland AND Atticus Pünd.

She’ll just have to find someone else to write more continuation novels. Or perhaps she already has!

A- #AudioBookReview: More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric OzawaMore Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #2) by Satoshi Yagisawa, Eric Ozawa
Narrator: Catherine Ho
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, literary fiction, relationship fiction, world literature
Series: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop #2
Pages: 176
Length: 5 hours and 21 minutes
Published by Harper Perennial, HarperAudio on July 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this charming and emotionally resonant follow up to the internationally bestselling Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa paints a poignant and thoughtful portrait of life, love, and how much books and bookstores mean to the people who love them.
Set again in the beloved Japanese bookshop and nearby coffee shop in the Jimbocho neighborhood of Toyko, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop deepens the relationship between Takako, her uncle Satoru , and the people in their lives. A new cast of heartwarming regulars have appeared in the shop, including an old man who wears the same ragged mouse-colored sweater and another who collects books solely for the official stamps with the author’s personal seal.
Satoshi Yagisawa illuminates the everyday relationships between people that are forged and grown through a shared love of books. Characters leave and return, fall in and out of love, and some eventually die. As time passes, Satoru, with Takako’s help, must choose whether to keep the bookshop open or shutter its doors forever. Making the decision will take uncle and niece on an emotional journey back to their family’s roots and remind them again what a bookstore can mean to an individual, a neighborhood, and a whole culture.

My Review:

At the end of the first book, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, it seems as if life is on the upswing for first-person narrator Takako, her eccentric uncle Satoru, and his used bookshop in the Jimbocho neighborhood of Tokyo, a place that is positively chock full of used book stores.

As this second book opens, life seems to be going well for Takoko. She’s moving forward with her life, has a job that she enjoys, a solid and happy and solidly happy romantic relationship, her uncle is happily complaining – which is his way – her aunt seems to have made peace with her uncle and their relationship seems stable and happy.

Even the bookshop seems to be doing well.

Howsomever, just as the first book started out as sad fluff, with Takoko in the depths of depression and eventually working her way out through working at the bookshop, rekindling her childhood closeness with her uncle, rediscovering the joys of reading and slowly becoming involved with the life of the neighborhood, these “more days” at the bookshop transit the path in the other direction.

At the beginning, all seems to be well. But as Takoko observes each time she returns to the bookshop to spend time and help out – the reality is that happiness is slipping out from under them.

Some parts of the various situations can be fixed – but not all of them. And not the saddest of all.

Escape Rating A-: I picked up More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop because, having fallen in love with the first book, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, I wanted more, well, days at the Morisaki Bookshop.

And that’s exactly what I got – and it was beautiful. I’m very glad that I read it – or rather that I gave in to temptation and listened to Catherine Ho as the voice of Takako again because she does an excellent job of embodying the character.

Like the previous book, this is not a story of great doings and big happenings. It’s a quiet story, a book of slices of life, specifically the lives of Takako, her family, her friends, and the Morisaki Bookshop which so much of those lives revolve around.

But, and this is a bit of a trigger warning, the progression of this story is the opposite of the first. It starts high and ends low – even though the epilogue does a good job of letting the reader know that life moves on – even from the depths of grief.

Howsomever, the depths of that grief are very deep indeed. Especially in the excellent audio recording, where it feels as if it’s Takako’s voice telling you just how heartbroken so many of the characters are. It’s very effective, and very affecting. Readers who are already grieving someone close to their hearts will find that part of the story gut-wrenching, cathartic, or both – as this reader certainly did.

So maybe don’t listen to that part while you’re driving because the urge to cry right along with Takako is pretty much irresistible.

That being said, the whole thing is lovely and charming and filled to the brim with the joy of books and reading and the people who love both – just as the first book was. I’m as happy I read this second book as I was the first – even if it did leave me a bit weepy.

This series, along with Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, What You are Looking For Is In the Library, The Dallergut Dream Department Store and the upcoming We’ll Prescribe You a Cat are part of a marvelously charming and extremely cozy trend of magical – sometimes with real magic – comfort reads and I’m enjoying it tremendously.

If you’re looking for some cozy, comforting reads, you might want to snuggle up with some of these books too!

#AudioBookReview: Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B+ Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: Close to Death by Anthony HorowitzClose to Death (Hawthorne & Horowitz, #5) by Anthony Horowitz
Narrator: Rory Kinnear
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Hawthorne and Horowitz #5
Pages: 419
Length: 9 hours and 12 minutes
Published by Harper, HarperAudio on April 11, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In New York Times–bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s ingenious fifth literary whodunit in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, Detective Hawthorne is once again called upon to solve an unsolvable case—a gruesome murder in an idyllic gated community in which suspects abound
Riverside Close is a picture-perfect community. The six exclusive and attractive houses are tucked far away from the noise and grime of city life, allowing the residents to enjoy beautiful gardens, pleasant birdsong and tranquility from behind the security of a locked gate.
It is the perfect idyll until the Kentworthy family arrives, with their four giant, gas-guzzling cars, a gaggle of shrieking children and plans for a garish swimming pool in the backyard. Obvious outsiders, the Kentworthys do not belong in Riverside Close, and they quickly offend every last one of their neighbours.
When Giles Kentworthy is found dead on his own doorstep, a crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest, Detective Hawthorne is the only investigator that can be called on to solve the case.
Because how do you solve a murder when everyone is a suspect?

My Review:

There’s an old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. In the case of Giles Kenworthy and the other residents of Riverview Close it seems as if the contempt came pre-installed – at least on his side and well before he actually got to know any of his neighbors. If indeed he ever bothered to try.

Kenworthy seems to be one of those smug, self-involved, ultra-privileged individuals who go through life completely unable to see other people as, well, people. Meaning that he simply doesn’t notice how much the noise and smoke from his backyard barbecues affects the neighbors he can’t be bothered to invite, he doesn’t care that the loud music he plays on his convertible wakes up the entire neighborhood when he comes home in the middle of the night and parks the damn car in the middle of a shared driveway and blocks the neighbors in.

It seems as if Kenworthy’s inconsideration knows no bounds. He’s certainly brought utter disharmony to what was formerly seemed to be a close-knit and completely harmonious little community.

But is being a boor – even to the point of being a total arsehole (it’s arse, they’re English) – enough of a reason to actually murder someone?

That’s the problem that confronted Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan five years ago when he began his investigation of the murder of Giles Kenworthy, in the foyer of his expensive home, with a crossbow bolt through his throat.

And it’s the exact same question confronting Tony Horowitz – along with the ridiculously short deadline his editor has given him for the fifth book in the series following the investigations of former Metropolitan Police Detective Daniel Hawthorne as Tony follows literally behind the man as his bumbling sidekick.

But not this time, not exactly. Because Hawthorne can’t exactly call up an interesting murder to order. So instead of following the detective as he works a case, Tony is stuck with following Hawthorne on a past case through the extensive notes left by Hawthorne’s previous assistant, the considerably less bumbling John Dudley.

Tony is even more curious about the man who preceded him than he is about whodunnit. By this point in his association with Hawthorne he knows that he’s not going to get even close to the solution until Hawthorne leads him there – most likely by the nose at that.

Which leaves Tony doing a bit of snooping on his own – not into Giles Kenworthy’s murder – but into John Dudley’s exit from Daniel Hawthorne’s life. Something that it looks like no one wants him to look into – but that might just lead him back to an entirely different whodunnit.

Escape Rating B+: Hawthorne drives Tony crazy. This series generally drives me crazy. This particular entry drove me so crazy I switched from the audio – which was, as always in this series, and with this narrator, marvelous – to the ebook at the halfway point because I was going nuts trying to figure out anything at all. My luck is no better than Tony’s usually is because the cases Hawthorne ends up investigating are so bizarre AND the man dribbles out clues like a miser drops pennies.

But by that point I was so caught up in the thing that I didn’t thumb to the end to find out whodunnit – I just read faster to get there in one hour instead of five for the audio.

At first, I have to say that I only hung in because of the audio. Because the first section is all set up and it takes more than long enough that the reader is downright grateful when the body finally drops – particularly as the body that drops seems like it couldn’t have belonged to a more deserving fellow.

At that point, the story switches from third person – which just felt WRONG for this series because it is – back to Tony’s first person perspective where he proceeds to hang a lampshade over just how trite and boring that long set up is.

After all, Giles Kenworthy was a seriously deserving murder victim and all of the issues among the residents of Riverview Close – except for the woman suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and the death of that poor dog – are very much first world problems and rich people’s first world problems at that. Which does lead back to the question of whether the man deserved to be murdered.

(Maybe for the dog, but not the rest. For the rest, maybe some slashed tires, or a thorough egging of both the house AND the open convertible. Or some maybe not-so-petty vandalism. But not murder.)

Normally this series works by following Tony as he follows Hawthorne and bumbles his way through the man’s genius and misanthropy to a solution. This time was a bit different, and I don’t think it entirely worked.

Because Hawthorne is reluctant to have Tony look into this case, parsimonious with clues and information, and doing his damndest to micromanage Tony’s writing process to the point of obstruction, the story is on two tracks.

The first is, obviously, the murder. Which is as twisty as ever and Tony is as lost as always but doggedly pursuing a solution even though he can’t see it because he knows Hawthorne can. At least until that thread of the story goes temporarily – and deliberately – pear-shaped.

But it’s the other track that gave me some pause, because part of the point of the series is that Tony knows little or nothing about Hawthorne and Hawthorne does his best to make sure it stays that way. His mystery is part of, I don’t want to say charm because let’s just say that’s not Hawthorne’s strongest suit, but rather it’s part of the way he works AND what keeps Tony following him. This entry in the series pulled that curtain back a bit in ways that I really hope pay off later because it seemed like some of them belonged more to the author’s James Bond novels than Hawthorne and Horowitz.

In the end, I have to admit that I’m every bit as hooked on this series, as Tony is hooked on following after Hawthorne, sometimes in spite of himself. The books certainly drive me every bit as crazy as Hawthorne does Tony.

Which means that, as differently crazed as this entry was from some of the previous books in the series, I’m still riveted – sometimes in spite of myself. So I’ll be back for the next – whenever either Hawthorne manages to run across a conveniently timed twisted murder – or Tony gets faced with an urgent deadline for book six!

Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi YagisawaDays at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, Eric Ozawa
Narrator: Catherine Ho
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, literary fiction, world literature
Series: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop #1
Pages: 160
Length: 5 hours
Published by Harper Perennial, HarperAudio on July 4, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books.

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Satoru, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoko left him five years earlier.

When Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

As summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.

My Review:

Takako has sunk into a slough of despond, depressed beyond imagining after learning that her boyfriend had been engaged to someone else during the entire year of their relationship. As they worked together – along with his fiancee! – Takako has quit her job to get away from the pain, and seems to be intent on leaving the waking world behind.

It’s a bit like the opening of Cassandra in Reverse – without the time travel. Or at least, without Cassandra’s peculiar method of traveling through time.

Takako, with more than a bit of a push from her mother, finds herself being herded in a direction she had no intention of going. But helping her uncle Satoru with his used bookstore – while living rent free above the shop – is at least half a step up from returning home and letting her mother remind her she’s a failure at every turn.

Which is where the story stops resembling Cassandra in Reverse, as the only time travel that Takako is capable of is the kind that happens when you step into the pages of a book and are whisked away, whether to the past, the present, or the future.

As the days slip past, at first slowly – and mostly in sleep – Takako emerges from her blanket-wrapped cocoon and becomes involved with what’s inside her uncle’s store. At first it’s the customers, and then it’s the books and then it’s the whole neighborhood.

The store and the books within it are the saving of Takako. And as her year of taking a vacation from her life saves her, so is she able to save her uncle as well.

Escape Rating A-: This is simply a lovely story. It’s a bit of a combination of Cassandra in Reverse, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro and The Cat Who Saved Books, but it’s considerably more down to earth than any of those antecedents.

This is not a highly dramatic story. After the opening, where Takako learns that her boyfriend is a narcissistic asshat, there are no big scenes until very nearly the end. Rather, the story quietly unspools as we climb into that cocoon with Takako and then watch her gently pull herself out.

The story of those Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is really a story about the way that books cushion us, comfort us and save us. It’s about the joy of discovery and the even greater joy of sharing that discovery. It’s a story that starts out quietly sad and quietly and charmingly goes on its way to becoming quietly happy.

Which made this little book an unexpected comfort read and an equally unexpected comfort listen. I fell into Takako’s life just as she fell into sleep, but the waking up was considerably less traumatic for the reader than it was for the character – who was perfectly embodied by the narrator. I didn’t feel like I was reading a book, I felt like Takako was telling me the story of her year at her uncle’s bookshop and what happened after.

And it was an utterly charming story, extremely well told, every step of her way. It was exactly what I was looking for, and I hope that when you’re looking for a lovely read or listen to let you slip into a world of books, it will be that for you, too.

Review: The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: The Sentence is Death by Anthony HorowitzThe Sentence is Death (Hawthorne, #2) by Anthony Horowitz, Rory Kinnear
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery
Series: Hawthorne #2
Pages: 384
Published by HarperAudio on May 28, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

8 hours, 36 minutes

Death, deception, and a detective with quite a lot to hide stalk the pages of Anthony Horowitz’s brilliant murder mystery, the second in the bestselling series starring Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne.

“You shouldn’t be here. It’s too late . . . “

These, heard over the phone, were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, found bludgeoned to death in his bachelor pad with a bottle of wine—a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, to be precise.

Odd, considering he didn’t drink. Why this bottle? And why those words? And why was a three-digit number painted on the wall by the killer? And, most importantly, which of the man’s many, many enemies did the deed?

Baffled, the police are forced to bring in Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, the author Anthony, who’s really getting rather good at this murder investigation business.

But as Hawthorne takes on the case with characteristic relish, it becomes clear that he, too, has secrets to hide. As our reluctant narrator becomes ever more embroiled in the case, he realizes that these secrets must be exposed—even at the risk of death . . .

My Review:

This series doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as hammer it down to the ground with a police truncheon – and extreme prejudice.

The Sentence is Death begins much the same way that The Word is Murder kicked off the series – with an unexplained death and ex-cop turned police consultant Daniel Hawthorne interrupting our author/his Watson in the midst of an important real-life event.

Anthony Horowitz was late to the set on the first day of shooting season 7 of Foyle’s War. Whether the day went exactly as outlined in The Sentence is Death, both the series and the episode are as portrayed in this book. You can still hear the echoes of the fourth wall shattering from here.

Horowitz, more explicitly Watson to Hawthorne’s not just misanthropic but often downright sociopathic Holmes, finds himself dragged into yet another one of Hawthorne’s strangely compelling cases. A case that has already cost at least one man his life, and might very well cost the author his career – if he’s not careful.

The problem for the author is that while he’s never sure that he actually likes Hawthorne – and it’s impossible to blame him for that judgment – the man only comes to “Tony” when he has a truly puzzling case to solve – over and above the fascinating case of Hawthorne himself.

“Tony” can’t resist getting dragged along in Hawthorne’s wake yet again. No matter how much he knows that he should.

Escape Rating A-: This was a rare case where I stayed with the audiobook all the way through. Not that I wasn’t impatient to see how it ended, but the audiobook was just SO GOOD. The narrator, Rory Kinnear, does an excellent job of voicing all the characters and differentiating them all. Each character in the story was very distinct in accent, in tone and in their manner of speaking.

And it’s also short enough of an audiobook that I didn’t have to play too much Solitaire to finish it in less than a week. (Which reminds me, the book is 384 pages, but there is a lot of white space and relatively big printing on those pages. It’s a breeze to read or listen to.)

The series in general, and this entry in particular, feels like a combination of whodunnit, whydunnit and Sherlock Holmes homage. The references to this being a Holmes homage, with Hawthorne as Holmes and Horowitz as Watson, are particularly explicit in this story, to the point where “Tony” (he hates it when Hawthorne calls him that and it differentiates the character IN the book from the writer OF the book – at least a little) tells Hawthorne just how much he dislikes being his Watson. Particularly since, just like the popular image of Watson, he never seems to figure out whodunnit ahead of his Sherlock.

Hawthorne is an extremely annoying character, and “Tony” is generally pretty annoyed at him. Hawthorne is always a disruption to his life – and it seems like working with Hawthorne puts “Tony” in danger of losing either his career or his life at every turn.

One of the mind-twisty parts of this story, in addition to the murder itself, is just how much of a nebbish the character of “Tony” turns out to be. There’s always a bit of a disjunct in my mind, as my mental image of the author bears a sharp resemblance to Michael Kitchen’s portrayal of Christopher Foyle in Foyle’s War. Not that I have any personal knowledge, but Foyle’s War was my first serious exposure to the author and I recognize I’ve conflated him with the character he created. It’s not about how either of them looks, it’s that Foyle is both thoughtful and decisive, and it’s jarring to see “Tony” as a bit of a milquetoast. Hawthorne pushes him around – a LOT – and so do the police detectives assigned to the case.

But that case is intricate and absorbing and convoluted. The resolution is completely unexpected, not just by “Tony” but by the reader as well. At the same time, it thoroughly follows the conventions of the mystery genre, so that once you do know whodunnit, you can see that all the clues have been there all along – just like they are supposed to be – and that the solution was obvious IF you made the correct connections. As Hawthorne certainly did.

In the end, all is made tragically clear. But “Tony” is tired of playing Hawthorne’s bumbling Watson. He wants out. He wants to go back to Foyle’s War and his next “real” Sherlock Holmes book, Moriarty.

But we just know that he’ll be swept into Hawthorne’s orbit yet again, as soon as there’s another case worth writing about. And we’ll be sucked back in right along with him!