 me why me why me just go read this right now i'm not i'm not joking i'm not joking bitch guys guys guys okay hello so it's very late i'm very tired but welcome to the video thank god you're here where have you been bitch where have you bloody been recently i read Myrtle and Auryn Express by Agatha Christie and i was obsessed with it and i realized i just want to read murder mysteries for a week and so that's what i've decided to do i'm just making into a video to justify you know reading it all in a week i just loved the whole suspense of it i loved the clues i love kind of the mystery putting the puzzle pieces together i used to love playing Nancy Drew as a kid and i just love kind of the puzzle element of that and obviously Nancy Drew's kind of based the game the basis of the books and so i i'm just so excited to read mystery novels so today i went to an event at waterstones lead with a bunch of mystery writers and one of the authors there was an author i've been wanting to read for the longest time so her book that's just come out is the guest list this is by Lucy Foley she's author who was there i'll put a few clips now of the event yo i just hit 2k hang on i'm running over here so no one can hear me i just hit 2k and i'm in waterstones couldn't get any more fitting oh wait hang on my hand was over the microphone i just hit 2k in case she didn't hear and we're in waterstones oh my god i was like i saw that i'd hit my boyfriend texted me that we hit 2k um when the authors were speaking and i saw it and i like it took all my power to scream i'm so happy so i'm gonna go get some pizza to celebrate i was getting the pizza anyway but like it's now celebratory pizza and this book is set on a remote island in island the country and someone is murdered at the wedding party and it's kind of all the group coming together and you go try and figure out who did it she read the first page of this i'm obsessed i'm obsessed already i cannot wait to read all this i don't know if it was a mistake to have filmed this intro to this video i'm slightly tired but we're just rolling with it also a possibility to read this week is The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley this was like her big seller book it's a similar premise in the sense that it takes part in a remote lodge and the Scottish wilderness very remote locations i think most mysteries have very remote locations these are two i definitely want to get to i think i'm gonna start with the guess this because it's just come out and i want to be on that hype you know then in terms of other books that i have learned about i recently bought The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson which is a YA mystery novel and part of a series of second in the series i really enjoyed the first in the series this is set at a boarding school where it's kind of notorious for murders happening and our main character wants to solve those murders and so i think like a bit of YA this week might be a good break in terms of like breaking up the adult novels that i've got going on so that's what i want to read and then i'm going to be reading a ebook as we go along and the ebook is if you give me a second it's The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie so i have decided to read all of Agatha Christie's books um i just know i'm obsessed with it and it's basically all the audiobooks i'm going to be listening to the full civil future but um on script this is the first book in the um in her kind of series of books and uh it doesn't have an audiobook on script i think literally almost every other book does oh my god i was my most recent vlog before this one which was me using your tips to read faster and read more a big tip of that was have an ebook which you were always going to read when you're out and about and i never done that i barely ever read ebooks but it increased my reading so much and i was getting through books way quicker than i would have done otherwise so i think it's definitely going to be something that i carry on doing you're having an ebook that i read and so i definitely wanted to implement it in this video so i'm going to be reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles i've actually started it i'm only like seven percent in i've barely read it i've read like i read it whilst drawing my hair yesterday that's all i've read so not really anything so i'm going to be reading that while i'm out and about and then i haven't gone audiobook yet i believe the audiobook for that actually is on youtube so i might just use that these are the books that i definitely oh my god please these are the books that i definitely want to try and get to this week i think i'll be able to read them quite quickly just because of the nature of the book so um yeah i'm gonna go read i'm gonna go get in bed it's really late it's like midnight but i'm gonna go read like i think just the first few pages just to get a taste of the story and then i'll actually read it start reading it properly tomorrow and i'll check in once i've got some once i've got some thoughts once i've got some thoughts okay i'll see you later bye so okay well guess what people i get excited about small things i don't know if i gave you a good description of this book because i think this intro to the video was bad it was bad i was very tired so in this we are at a wedding on a really isolated island off the coast of the country island and we find out on the first page that um someone has found a body that's it so we we start off finding out that someone has died and we have flashbacks to after that throughout the book but then the rest of the book starts from the day before the wedding and so the point i'm at now i'm about halfway through the book and um at the point i'm at now we have gotten to the morning of the wedding so we've gone through all of the day previous and some kind of shenanigans went down at the wedding dinner and now on the morning of the wedding i okay whoo i feel so good about reading this because sometimes with these videos recently i've been like hitting many slumps but i'm so excited to read at the moment i think that's what kind of murder mysteries do to you like you just want to find out what's going on i still don't know who's been murdered that still hasn't been revealed and so i could be suspecting someone that's died although i have my suspicions on who's died but i might be wrong i feel like she's really good at setting showing how isolated we are how extreme the weather is because i think that's going to play a part without going there was lightning another bolt of lightning the rain poured down whatever like really really over the top descriptions of the weather or whatever it's more how maybe the air feels when the weather's really bad or the atmosphere or something like that she's really good at setting you in that weather without being like spending a whole page going on what the weather's like do you know what i mean secondly a lot of the characters in this not really many of them are likeable but she does it really well where they're not cardboard cut out villains and i think she spoke about this um at the talk you know they they all have their motivations and you can see how they all think they're doing the right thing you can see how they all think they're in the right but you can see that they're not so uh they're all very posh characters in this and a lot of the boys a lot of the men sorry from the groom side all went to like a private school together that was pretty messed up and had a lot of really weird initiations and um there was like something called survival where you'd be blindfolded like as a 10 year old and gone and put out miles from the school you have to find your own way back in the middle of the night kind of thing and they were kind of like yeah it was great it built character and they were all doing really weird stuff to each other i think that's going to be it's going to be really interesting to see where the story goes in relation to them we have one character hannah who is the wife of the male best friend of the bride and they have kind of a thing going on and hannah is kind of like our eyes into what's going on she's she's seemingly the only normal one um and she's like the only character we can really truly like but i think it helps that you have at least that one character who's kind of normal when everything everyone else is these massive personalities and i have no idea who's committed the murder i have no clue because yo like everyone has some weird shit going on in case you haven't noticed i'm weird i'm a weirdo i don't fit in everyone has some messed up backstory we don't know what they are yet we're starting to get hints of what each person's like weird thing is i just like it's going to get weirder and darker as it goes along and it's so good i think this is going to be like a four or five five oh my god that's so i haven't been giving out many stars so i'm a bit like but i feel really good about it and um i'm just really enjoying the reading experience i'm getting more and more into it and i just want to find out what's going on i just want to find out what's going on so um yeah that's that and then in terms of the mysterious affair of stars but agatha christie i've been listening to that on audiobook and then reading some of the ebook as well and i'm about 80 pages into that it's only like 230 pages so i'm happy the progress i've made on that as well i just i haven't read a book like this where i haven't liked so many of the characters and been fine with it in a long time and the suspense is just like building every chapter every chapter is getting more tense than i just want to find out what's happening i was like do i really have to film this or can i just read more so i just finished it and i'm giving it five stars yo i'm back guys guys guys guys guys guys guys guys guys it was so good so i didn't predict well here's the thing there's only a certain number of suspects and so every time with a murder mystery like in your head you're going back and forth going it could be this person or but it could be that person or but it could be that person and like so in your head you've kind of exhaust all the possibilities but i didn't realize exactly what was gonna happen i didn't predict who was actually gonna do it so um yeah the hunch i had for a long time was completely wrong the person who i thought was gonna commit the murder was actually the person who turned out to be killed wait a minute i'm figuring this out i'm like scooby and shaggy solving a mystery that's not spoiling anything but like that's what i thought was gonna happen so i got it completely the wrong way around she crafts the pace of the book so well the reveals there there are so many basically we follow a lot of different povs we follow the plus one the wedding planner the bride the best man the maid of honor the bridesmaid i think that's it um we follow each of their perspectives their povs and each of them kind of has a secret that is revealed and the secrets that are revealed i was gagged i was gagged some had me so angry some had me like so sad and like heartbroken it was crazy it was a crazy ass time and some of them you think you find out what their secret is and then you find out that's not their secret they've got a darker secret it's this was so good it was so good and i am doing my job wrong if i don't get some of you to pick this up i need you to be down in the comments below tell me megan i'm gonna pick it up because i just need to talk to you all about it oh my god i want you all to read if you're sitting there thinking i might fancy a bit of murder mystery just go read this right now i'm not i'm not joking i'm not joking bitch i'm not joking like i need to hear more people's opinions my friend alisa who came to the um event with me she went and then bought it afterwards and has read it as well and we are both just shook and everyone's so shady in it and you really don't know who it's gonna be so yeah five star i'm so happy that i've read another five star like i'm i'm so happy i'm so struggling um so far this year this was incredible it was incredible and i need you all to go pick up right now update i finished today the mysterious affair styles and here's the thing i enjoyed it i'm gonna give it three stars it was fine it was not it was nothing nothing compared to murder on new york's press like nothing i feel like it was kind of agatha christie testing the waters out of what she could get away with how adventurously she could write because it's kind of a basic story it's an old woman being killed in her home by member of her family with some poison you know in a big rich home like it ain't it ain't that exciting we haven't got a really you know crazy plot here but it was just fine i liked the twist at the end i don't know how long this kind of carries on for but it was narrated from this other character's perspective and i didn't really like that element of it i prefer when they are written in the third person perspective that's how i think murder on new york express was narrated and i think it just suits the story better rather than this guy like supposedly narrating the accounts or what happened because i feel like it um casts i still can't pronounce his name pro so embarrassing um it casts him as a more reminder character when when it's third person he's he's a bigger character but i think it's still an enjoyable story and if you like me want to listen i want to read agatha christie's books in order then i mean the audiobook is free on youtube we finished the first two books for the video it's going great i feel like i've read loads so i'm gonna start two more books the first of which i decided to go with next physically is the vanishing stare by morian johnson so this is the second in the truly devious series in this we follow stevie who is attending the boarding school where there were murders on the 1930s unsolved murders and she is going there essentially to try and solve the murders or that's what she's interested in she's really interested in true crime and she believes she could solve the murders and then she turns up in the first book and stuff starts occurring so i don't know if there's a murder in this book but i believe we are still going to be trying to figure out what happened in the 1930s murders so it has like the murder mystery element in that in that sense i don't know how much of this i'm going to read tonight i kind of feel brain dead and sometimes after i've written up like i've spent the whole day reading a book i just need a break i need to sleep and then i can wake up and start another one so i don't know if i'm going to end up starting this tonight the other book i'm going to start is i search i search for so long for a murder mystery book on script because i've listened to a lot of audiobooks this month if you don't know script it kind of limits your um like what you can listen to during a certain month so titles start disappearing after a certain point in the in the month if you've listened to a lot so loads of stuff wasn't available to me until in a week that's when i my subscription renews after searching high and low i found the strange case of the alchemist daughter by theodora goss this story follows basically the daughters of famous male classic protagonist so we follow jackal and hyde's daughters in this series we are frankenstein in it like the i don't know if she's the daughter of frankenstein or she's like a female frankenstein i don't know and i think it's like a ya book and it's set i don't know i assume in kind of that era victorian era it says that the group of women must come together solves a mystery of a series of gruesome murders script is both the ebook and the audiobook so i'm gonna switch between them like i did for uh a mysterious affair of styles which i've been doing all day today so yeah i'm gonna switch between the two and i just thought it was kind of like an interesting premise so my hair looks so wack i've just washed it and it's like settling in a really weird way i think that i'm going on a bit like a ya interlude in the middle and then i'm gonna go back to adult afterwards so yeah i'm gonna start both of those now wish me luck thank you thank you thank you and i will check in when i've got an opinion on either of them so i'm about a third of the way through the vanishing stare and i'm enjoying it so far the thing with this series is if you want to pick up the first one in the series is that it's a very easy to read book i feel like i've barely sorry you can see on my um washing that i've about to dry i feel like i've barely read anything and yeah i'm quite far in and so you just find yourself flying through it it's such a quick read and it's very cozy as well you're at a boarding school i mean i know murders are happening but you're at a boarding school and it's a really cool environment that moine johnson has crafted something that was really weird was that no spoilers but basically off page between book one and book two she had to leave the school so that was never like it was it didn't happen at the end of the last book and didn't happen at the beginning of this book but then she's back at the school within 30 pages and everything's resolved and she's only gone from the school for like a week it's not like it's a couple months or whatever she's only gone for a week and so i don't see why we had her i don't think it's going to have that bigger deal in the plot it might do but i don't see why we had her go home just to come back again and for it to happen off page i think i could have understand understood it and like lived not lived with it but like i wouldn't have been questioning it if it had happened at the end of the last book but it didn't it kind of just happened in between them and i just think it's a bit of a weird choice for it the book to start off like that and then for her to be back at the school 30 pages in but i'm really enjoying where the 1930s storyline is going because we flick back between present day and 1930s um i'm really enjoying where the 1930s storyline is going i think it's taking on a really interesting development and so i'm really enjoying that part of it the strange case of the alchemist daughter i'm about 20 um through that so i listened to quite a lot because obviously it's like a 13 hour audiobook i'm enjoying it so much more than i thought i would i was kind of just listening to it just as something to listen to but it's actually got a really cool format by the end of the book we're gonna end up having like a girl gang um and they're writing the book and like one of the girls in particular we haven't met the one who's writing the book yet but she's writing the book so as she's writing the story the other girls who she's talking about keep cutting in and kind of arguing to each other like you come out of the story it kind of breaks the fourth wall i actually think it's such a cool and refreshing format i haven't read anything like that in a while and i think it just adds another element to the story and kind of like i know it makes it cooler we've just been like with sherlock Holmes and watson and it's just she's adapting these classic characters really well it's basically reminding me of stalking jack the ripper but better so if you read stalking jack the ripper and liked the kind of victorian era it was set in but wanting something that was a bit more feminist in like not the i'm not like other girls way and it's got a group of girls i think it's a really really cool book i mean i still want to continue to stalking jack the ripper series but um yeah i'm really enjoying this one so far i feel like the pace is really good the characters are really good so yeah i'm really shocked at how much i'm enjoying it hello everyone we have a lot to discuss we have a lot to talk about we have a lot to discuss okay i finished i finished uh the vanishing stare by maureen johnson i enjoyed it i gave it four stars i think this series like it's just a bit of like mystery it's why a mystery it's a very easy way into the genre if you've never had like any mystery um this is a super easy way to get into it and to kind of like dip your toe in the water because there's a lot of other things going on here like friendship a bit of romance not a good thing okay there's a lot of elements here which if you're enjoying your other fiction i think you will enjoy in this fiction is a thing we not to spoil anything this isn't a spoiler but we know who the who done it basically for the mystery in the 1930s we find that out and a when i find that out because we're kind of in these two timelines like i was like okay fine you know what i mean it wasn't like when in a mystery maybe in like the guest list when i found out who did it i was like because the whole story has been leading up to it our whole story hasn't been leading up to that so i was like fine i didn't really see all the clues there that's kind of like two clues that pointed to that person and you're like uh okay whatever i don't know where this story is going to go in the third one there's there's a last book in this series and i don't know where it's going surely we've resolved so much there is not much left to resolve i would have thought it all would have been resolved in the last book there was like kind of like a subplot in this book of um stevie starting to work for a local professor who's an expert on the 1930s murder and kidnapping case and i think if that storyline hadn't been added and it hadn't ended in the way it ended in this book i would honestly be like where are we going in the last book and i've heard some bad reviews i haven't looked at any like bad reviews other than what people have on twitter have tweeted their good reads rating um i've seen some bad ratings for the last book in the series so i'm a bit nervous that there's not much for us to go into in the last book oh that really hurt my head the strange case of the alchemist's daughter guys guys guys okay oh my god jesus christ check out the label i only read this book because there was no other mystery books on script audiobooks i could listen to like i was i tried so hard this was the only one i found i love it i love it i i'm i love it you know you love an audiobook i when you really want the physical the physical the physical book i want the physical books and i want the hard covers that's when you know you're in deep when you're not gonna you're not gonna settle for the paperbacks you want to spend your dollar on the hard covers for a book i have already read i want it i want it so bad this series is so good let me tell you why i'm gonna tell you why once i think takes my breath the reason this is so good you will have heard a lot on booktube about stalking jack the ripper series i have read the first book i gave it like i think i gave it three stars it was it was fine this book is everything i wanted from stalking jack the ripper you've got a really strong female protagonist but not only have you got a whole girl gang so you've got all these girls who are linked to the kind of like famous um scientists from kind of victorian literature and at the point at the story i'm in they've mostly all come together now and it's just so great to read the dynamics they've got each of the girls are very distinct personalities they don't um they don't kind of mesh into each other they're all so unique and i'm just in love what a lot of people like in the stalking jack the ripper series is the references to either um real life figures or the literature you know you've got stalking jack the ripper you've got houdini you've got Dracula again this has that with the references to literature sherlock and uh whatson play a massive part in this story they are often helping the girls traveling with the girls and it's just so cool and i love sherlock i love sherlock Holmes and whatson like it's it's so good i the one thing i would say is i think she relies a lot on uh the rest of our cultural understanding of sherlock to make up his character but like i ain't bothered because i'm more interested in the girls and it's their story sherlock's there just kind of to help the story along um to use his connections to get them into places etc um but i'm i'm loving it ah it's so good i picked this up completely on a whim and it's one of the biggest surprise it's one of the biggest surprises i've had so much to update you but i just started the hunting party today and i'm going to read some more i'm like 60 pages in there's something about this where i'm not enjoying the way she's writing as much as i did on the guest list i don't know if i'm reading them too close to one another but there's something about the characters in in there so far and i might learn more about them but they seem a bit caricaturey or in both of her books she's writing in both of my thriller books uh mystery books she's writing very rich privileged characters but i just felt like they had a bit more depth in the guest list i feel like she might money 60 pages in but from what i feel like so far i feel like she picked and choose a very good hierarchy of how much attention she fleshed out characters so there were maybe like three guys who are very baseline you didn't need to flesh them out but you still have the group setting then by having them there and then you had other characters who had a much more development into their personality whereas here we've got quite a big group i don't even know how many of them there are eight or nine and i feel like she's trying to give a lot of them equal yeah equal standing and i'm just getting confused between who is who because there's not much to distinguish them in the guest list they had very strong roles you had the bride you know the plus one you know it's very strong um roles whereas in this you don't so i'm getting a bit confused between who is who but again i'm only 60 pages in so who am i talking about i should just go read it okay time for my final thoughts so i don't want to talk about too long but uh the strange case the alchemist daughter i ended up giving it five stars i think it's a great YA novel full of these amazing characters the characters are really what make the story for me it's just a great piece of YA and i loved it i you know i think i've said everything i loved about it already but the ending was really good and i can't wait to see where this kind of family goes in the future it's really a found family story of all these girls who have kind of been put through rubbish by the respective men in their lives so if that's something you'd be interested in definitely go pick that one up as well as well as the guest list of course because they are just both brilliant i gave them both five stars the audiobook was great i'd really recommend picking up the audiobook if you can because the narrator is really good at any accents for the other girls i definitely noticed a difference in my enjoyment between when i was just reading the ebook and when i was listening to the audiobook so i think the audiobook is maybe the way to go with this now let's talk about the hunting party when i read the guest list i thought i found a new favorite author i'm gonna have to read all of their stuff i'm gonna be obsessed with this author i gave this two stars why me why me why me this book was just not great and the main problem i had with it was i didn't actually feel like any of our characters ended up being developed at all they all felt very surface level to me i enjoy her writing i think she's a great author and so i'm still excited to read anything she puts out in the future and all the problems i have with this i can notice i think there's been a real effort to fix in this you know the writing is very similar the way the the plot develops you know you don't know who's been killed then maybe you find out a key characteristic gives you a hint narrows down the party of who could have been killed and then you find out who's been killed and then you find out the killer happens in both of these and i like that structure i liked the structure of this it was just the story itself the characters themselves that did not work for me whatsoever and the thing i liked so much about the guest list was that everyone kind of had these secrets everyone had these secrets and this as well but they were just it was just rich person secrets whereas in the other one there were very complex things and themes going on is this one it was just like a group of friends who all hate each other and you find out why they all hate each other really and it's just like not that good and there were so many characters who faded into the background the plot i just thought a lot of unnecessary stuff happened and then the ending kind of pissed me off because i just i just felt like the ending was a bit ridiculous we just went down a bit of a ridiculous route for who the killer was why they did it i don't think there's been enough setting up of it whereas you know with the guest list sorry to keep comparing it but i i do feel like everything that is wrong in this has been improved in this and that's why i feel i feel very confident about reading her books in the future still and this when the killer was revealed you could see how you had led up to that point whereas i could see the clues that had been supposed to you know indicate the ending but i just didn't feel like they were strong enough i didn't feel like they had enough of an impact just for you to be like okay yeah a death would happen over that i was just left feeling very underwhelmed by this so i'm really sad about it i'm really sad about it but like i said this is a new favorite book and i everything that is wrong i feel like she's looked at it had probably criticisms on what i think is wrong in this and then developed it and made it better in this but there was just pages and pages and pages of character monologue whereas in the guest list i know i shouldn't keep comparing them but like i have to and the guest list there was a lot of conversations a lot of stuff revealed through conversations with each other which i thought was kind of clever whereas this was just everyone having internal monologues and flashbacks and not enough actually happening in the place that we're at i just would get so bored when i turn on the page i'll just be like oh my god oh my god oh my god you know it just got so repetitive and i think the guest list really was helped by having that one character who wasn't a nut job who you know he maybe had secrets or was linked to secrets but was kind of the normal person looking in where there was no there was not really a normal person looking in on this so on the whole in this it was just over a week i filmed this video during and i read three physical books and two audiobooks which i'm pretty happy with i had a great time you know two five stars and i'd really been shuggling this year to to read many five stars makes me so happy and i really just got into my murder mystery hype i just enjoyed myself so much so i think murder mysteries are a great way to break a slump up a bit and to change up your reading and they're always really quick to read so yeah i'm pretty happy with what i read and i would love i just want you guys to read the guest list quite frankly i think that's our takeaway and the strange case the alchemist daughter because i i think it is literally the new and improved version of stalking jack the ripper i know i keep comparing them and you shouldn't compare books like it's like whenever whenever there's a heist novel and everyone's out here going oh it's the new six of crows like no we shouldn't be doing that but at the same time it irritates me that there was this sub par version of a very similar story not not exactly similar but very similar in the sense that it deals with science as well science is a very strong theme in the strange case the alchemist daughter and like it's just not being spoken about it irritates me so i definitely recommend you pick both of those two up i just want to see you in the comments saying megan i've pre-ordered it at my library or megan i'm listening to audiobook on script right now and i'm like thank you thank you so i hope you enjoyed the studio thank you very much for watching to the end because i know it's a bit of a long one because i've edited most of it already and i'm really putting out some long vlogs at the moment aren't they aren't they but um yeah thank you very much for watching and i will see you very very soon with another video bye