Blog Tour: Guest Post: Bob and Shirley’s Guide to Murder by Suzy K Quinn
Today I am sharing a guest post as a part of the blog tour for Bob and Shirley’s Guide to Murder by Suzy K Quinn. She is sharing with us about Bob and Shirley and her thoughts on ‘strong couples’ making the relationship work. Bob and Shirley’s Guide to Murder was released on July 8th. What’s even better is that Suzy is having an international giveaway!
Book Description:
Bob and Shirley run a lovely country pub. They also solve murders …
A warmly funny, gloriously British cozy crime and murder mystery series that can be read as standalones or part of a series. Set in a village where the pub is the heart of country life and served with warmth, wit and a very good Sunday roast.
“Murder? In our quiet, little English village?
Great Oakley is a place of hanging baskets, tearooms and riverside walks. We’ve won ‘Britain’s safest village’ 10 years running. I keep three pound coins, a box of toffees and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on my dashboard at all times, and I’ve never needed to lock my car.
Certainly, Bevvy Hogg was disliked. She ran the local Waist Watchers group, yet came to our pub for fish and chips, treacle tart and a bottle of Chardonnay every Friday. But I don’t think she was murdered …”
When Bevvy Hogg is found dead in the Goose and Gander pub garden, with an empty treacle tart plate beside her and several dress sizes slimmer than anyone remembers, Great Oakley’s winning streak as Britain’s safest village comes to an abrupt end.
Buy Your Copy Here:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Meet Bob and Shirley – a couple who argue every day, run a pub and solve murders
I have a theory about relationships. A strong couple are opposites. They complete each other because they are different. Which also means that a healthy couple argue. And yes, I am speaking from personal experience.
When I wrote the Bob and Shirley’s Guide to Murder is my new murder mystery / cozy mystery series. I leaned heavily into personal experiences of my daily marital bickering to write about a totally new type of detective – the arguing married couple.
My husband and I love each other to the moon and back. Honestly, we do! But if you were to record a conversation in our household, you might think otherwise.
Our usual daily chat goes something like this:
Me: ‘Why are you keeping this? It’s a used train ticket. It has no purpose. We need to throw it away.
Demi: ‘It’s the train ticket I used to see the Arsenal play … [insert some meaningless football chat I’m not interested in] and they won the match and it has sentimental value and it’s also lucky.
Me: ‘No, it isn’t. It’s litter.’
Demi: ‘You have no heart.’
Me: ‘Possibly, true. Throw it away or I will.’
We also argue about the dishwasher. He believes a plate should go in the moment it leaves the table. I believe a plate should sit on the side, gathering its thoughts, until there are enough plates to make loading the dishwasher a proper job worth doing. He calls this letting it build up. I call it efficiency.
Bob and Shirley are similarly argumentative. They run a historic, country pub together in the chocolate box village of Great Oakley, argue constantly … and solve murders and other mysteries.
Bob is an ex-fireman who grows his own vegetables, bakes his own wholemeal bread and makes elderflower cordial with no sugar in it. He cuts his own hair with nail scissors. And when God was handing out charm, Bob was at the back of the line correcting someone’s grammar.
Shirley is a landlady who thinks a little of what you fancy does you good, and then has rather a lot of it. She has never met a prosecco she didn’t like. She thinks Bob’s homemade cordial tastes of hedge.
They bicker constantly. About tea (she puts the milk in last, he puts it in first and has never told her). About whether the pub quiz brings the community together or drives it apart. About whether you can run a non-alcoholic bar at a village fitness event without causing a riot.
And they have a very happy marriage.
Because Bob notices things. He is the one with the gardening clipboard, making notes for the paramedics, spotting the odd yellow mark on the flagstones that nobody else saw. He is thorough and clever and completely hopeless with people.
Shirley is the one people actually talk to. She can walk into a room full of suspects and come out twenty minutes later knowing everything, because she has a landlady’s ear and no shame whatsoever about using it.
Separately, they would never solve a thing. Bob would be thrown out of every interview he attempted (and in book one, he is). Shirley would collect all the gossip in Suffolk and never work out what any of it meant.
Together, they are rather good at solving mysteries.
I don’t think opposites attract by accident. I think we choose people who are strong where we are weak, and then we spend the rest of our lives being mildly irritated by the exact thing that makes them useful.
My husband’s sentimentality drives me up the wall. It is also the reason our house is full of things that mean something.
My ruthlessness with the bin bags drives him mad. It is also the reason we can find anything.
So if you and your other half argue every day about something completely ridiculous, I would say you are doing rather well.
Just don’t ask me to load the dishwasher after every finished cup of tea.
Bob and Shirley’s Guide to Murder is a new murder mystery / cozy mystery series. All these books are available on Kindle Unlimited.
About the Author:
Suzy K Quinn (hello – it’s me!) is writing this bio in the third person. Which feels duplicitous and also a little egotistical. But here goes …
Suzy K Quinn writes book club books and murder mystery series, and has sold over 1 million copies worldwide. She’s a bestselling author in the US, UK and Germany and will soon, very possibly, have written more books than she’s read.
Suzy lives in Wivenhoe, Essex, with her husband and two daughters. She is a twin, an incompetent parent of two and now fully decaffeinated. Her twin sister, Cate Quinn, is also a bestseller author. When Suzy isn’t writing in cafes, she is walking around woods dictating like a lunatic.
Contact Suzy:
Website
Facebook Group
Tiktok @suzykquinn
Instagram @suzykquinn
Twitter @suzykquinn
Threads @suzykquinn
Giveaway:
Win an e-copy of Bob and Shirley’s Killer Cuppa Puzzle: Open Internationally!
One of Great Oakley’s five open gardens served poisoned tea. Can you work out which one before Bob does?
‘Like Murdle and a cozy mystery rolled into one.’
Murder mystery logic puzzle stories for fans of The Killer Isn’t Alice, Murdle and Can You Solve the Murder?
These are ‘Puzzlories’. Read them like stories, solve them like puzzles. Each one takes about an hour to read and solve.
It’s Open Gardens weekend in Great Oakley. Five gardeners have opened their gardens to the public, and each is offering a unique drink, cake, flower and interesting garden feature to their fellow villagers.
Unfortunately, one garden owner poured poisoned tea. Probably not on purpose. But you never know. There are more murders in Britain’s safest village than you might imagine.
Village pub landlady Shirley Duffy visited all five open gardens before returning to the Goose and Gander for a much-needed beer and a sit down. One of those five gardens was the scene of the crime.
The trouble is, Shirley’s memory is known to be … selective. She can remember every cake she’s eaten since 1987, but not necessarily when and where she ate it. And she can’t remember which garden served tea on Saturday afternoon.
Shirley’s husband, Bob, is frustrated that Shirley can’t remember one garden from another. But he finds many things about his wife frustrating, and loves her anyway.
As Bob presses Shirley for details, the clues pile up. Your job is to note them down and work out who served the tea before Bob does.
Twenty clues, one in every short chapter. Fill in your detective’s grid, cross off your suspects and name the poisoner.
Grab your notebook, put the kettle on (carefully) and see if you can beat Bob to the answer.
ENTER TO WIN HERE.
*Terms and Conditions –Worldwide entries welcome. Please enter using the Gleam box above. The winner will be selected at random via Gleam from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then Rachel’s Random Resources reserves the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over. Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfilment of the prize, after which time Rachel’s Random Resources will delete the data. I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.
See the entire blog tour:
Blog Tour: Guest Post: The Way We Are Now by Julie Houston
Today I am sharing a guest post as a part of the blog tour for The Way We Are Now by Julie Houston. She shares about writing and her ‘writing mates’, a group of women who support each other in their writings. They even go on trips together! It’s not just for fun, they work too! The Way We Are Now was just released on September 11th.
Book Description:
BRAND NEW from bestselling author Julie Houston comes a powerful story of first love, long-hidden secrets and second chances. Perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes, Marian Keyes, David Nichols and Ruth Jones.
First love, long-hidden secrets and second chances.
Anna Piasecki thought she had left her university heartbreak behind. After spending decades building a successful life, she arrives at sixty with everything as she wants it – a glittering career, a devoted partner and brightest star of all, her brilliant son Noah, the apple of her eye.
Theo Mandeville is trapped. Bound by aristocratic duty to his sprawling Yorkshire estate, he has spent decades living the life that was expected of him while regretting the star-crossed romance he walked away from.
When their children meet at college, Anna and Theo suddenly find their carefully constructed lives colliding. With a devastating forty-year-old secret hanging over them, can their families survive the truth and do they dare to trust that fate has other plans for them?
Spanning decades, The Way We Are Now is a sweeping, heartwarming and life-affirming tale of first love, friendship and second chances perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes, Marian Keyes, David Nichols and Ruth Jones.
Buy Your Copy Here.
Ask any writer and they will more than likely tell you writing can be a lonely business. No stopping to chat at a colleague’s desk or at the water cooler, no sharing gossip and your packet of crisps at lunchtime. You’re on your own, tied to a lap-top or desk top for – if you’re on a deadline – anything up to twelve hours a day, sobbing and on the point of breakdown if things are not progressing, desperate to preen, show off and share if it’s been a good one .
So, that’s where writing mates come in. I am incredibly lucky to be part of a group of six wonderful and supportive women writers. Two of us first met at a Romantic Novelist Association conference sixteen years ago. Oh, how time flies! We were conference virgins, unagented, unpublished but with stories we desperately wanted to tell. A year later we were joined by another. For a while we were just a threesome, meeting up for walks and writerly rants, sympathising when times were bad, but rejoicing in each other’s successes.
To misquote The Spice Girls, three became six. We mooted the idea of a writing weekend away and, over the years, this has morphed into a Wordy Away Week now twice a year. One of us is wonderfully organised – one of us has to be – and plans each retreat in different parts of the UK with the acumen of a seasoned travel agent.
We’re not just on holiday! We’re there to work. Once we’ve allocated rooms, (previous best room recipient is now down at the bottom of the list) unloaded the supermarket delivery ( there does often appear to be a surfeit of wine and cake) we’re immediately in our rooms and back into our WIP. There’s something very comforting about knowing five other writers are beavering away (or not!) just a few metres away.
Six pm is usually writing cut-off time: words are saved and laptops closed, with the unwritten rule that work is over for the day. There’s a welcome drink – or two – and nibbles to accompany the catch up of what’s been going on in our lives since last meeting. We all have grown up families (a couple of us lucky enough to even have grandchildren now) and we celebrate, as well as sometimes commiserate, our writing and personal journeys since our last meeting. Books have been published, awards have been won, foreign rites sold and – for one of us – queues have gone round the block in various European countries for books to be signed.
Sixteen years on and we all have agents and have published thousands of books. We have had our successes: Comedy Women in Print Runner up, Winner of The Popular Romantic Fiction Award, Winner of The Festive Holiday Romantic Novel Award, A Christmas novel turned into a film, and it’s been a joy as well as encouraging to share these successes with each other.
Earlier this year, five of us met up to speak as a group at a literary festival, four of us speaking, one of us as master of ceremonies holding the whole thing together: “Four bestselling women writers talk all things novel writing. From mid-life wives to midwives, Christmas crackers to beach reads, a Yorkshire village to Berlin zoo – they cover it all!”
We talked about the publishing industry and how it’s changed over the sixteen years we’ve been together as novelists, and as members of this great support group. We now have the challenge of AI as well as a seemingly saturated market. At times, much as we are committed to this often-bizarre career of novelist, and feel utterly privileged to do something we love so much for an actual living, it’s wonderful to know there’s support at the end of a phone and through our WhatsApp group.
About the Author:
Julie Houston is the author of 17 best-selling Women’s contemporary/Romantic Comedy novels. Represented by Anne Williams at KHLA Literary Agency, she was previously published by Aria/Head of Zeus but now writes for Boldwood. She has had UK top 100 selling books and Looking for Lucy hit the number 1 spot in Australia. Sing me a Secret was shortlisted for, and won, the Popular Romantic Fiction Award in 2021.
Julie is Yorkshire born and bred and lives in Huddersfield where her novels are set. After University, where she studied Education and English Literature, she taught for many years as a junior schoolteacher. After teaching for a few years, she decided to go to New Zealand to work and taught in Auckland for a year before coming back to this country. She now teaches when the phone rings to cover absent colleagues and still loves the buzz of teaching junior-aged children.
Julie is married with a son and daughter, both in their twenties and now living in London. She has been a magistrate on the West Yorkshire bench for the last twenty-four years.
Contact Julie:
Instagram @juliehoustonauthor
X @juliehouston2
See the entire blog tour here:
Book Spotlight: Ramen, Existential Crises by Roie Oknin
Today I am bringing you a book spotlight for Ramen, Existential Crises by Roie Oknin. This one was just released on August 5th and is his debut novel. It is a shorter Contemporary Fiction novel at just 164 pages and well worth looking into. There is even a Goodreads giveaway currently going on!
About: Ramen, Existential Crises
Author: Roie Oknin
Genre: Literary fiction / contemporary fiction
Published:
164 pages
Book Description:
Koji is twenty-seven and one module short of a degree in Politics and Government. The missing module is Crisis Management. It feels appropriate.
For six years, he has worked in a tiny ramen shop with eleven seats, one dish and a broth whose flame has not gone out in thirty-two years. The noodles cook for exactly eighty-five seconds.
Then the timer fails. A stranger gives Koji his business card. Someone from his past walks into the restaurant. Around him, other people make decisions and continue with their lives.
Koji has always known what should be done.
Doing it is another matter.
Purchase Your Copy here:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Hugendubel, Germany
eBook.de, Germany
Booktopia, Australia
YES24, South Korea
The paperback is also distributed internationally through Ingram.
Goodreads Giveaway:
If you are on Goodreads and also live in the US, you can enter to win a copy of Ramen, Existential Crises here. This giveaway is ending very soon. There are 10 copies up for grabs! **Remember: You can’t win if you don’t enter!**
About the Author:
Roie Oknin is a writer, artist and medical student. He holds a BSc in Neuroscience and a BA in Psychology. Ramen, Existential Crises is his first novel.
Contact Roie:
Website
Goodreads
Reviews of Ramen, Existential Crises:
Lupe Farkas Reviews: Ramen, Existential Crisis not only received a 5 star review from this reviewer, but it has also claimed a spot in Lupe’s Top 10 books of ALL Time.
The Book’s Delight: Ramen, Existential Crisis was loved by this author!
[Top]