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What are our Book Picks for July 2025?!
So many books on our radar at the moment, and we’ll just ignore the books we said we’d read last month and didn’t get around to.
These are FRESH books, which makes them EXCITING! I mean, some of them have been on my TBR for years, but we’ve REMEMBERED them today, so counting it as a win!
The Fishbird Central Book Club Pick for July 2025 is …
‘The Tainted Cup’ by Robert Jackson Bennett!
You don’t need to ‘sign up’ or have ‘special elite access’ to join the Fishbird Central Book Club. Just read along with our chosen book for the month, and let us know how you like it!
We’ll forget to talk more in depth about the Book Club and our thoughts on the monthly book pick in our Fishbird Central Newsletter and companion podcast!
Join us as we read some great new titles and tick off some reading prompts! Book reviews will be forthcoming!
Happy Reading, Friends!
Series or Standalone?:
This is Book One in the ‘Shadow of the Leviathan’ series.
'The Tainted Cup' Back Blurb:
In an opulent mansion at the borders of the Empire, an Imperial officer lies dead – killed when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even here, where contagions abound and the blood of the Leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death at once terrifying and impossible. Called in to solve the crime is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricity. At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. Soon, the mystery leads to a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself. For Ana, all this makes for a deliciously thorny puzzle – at last, something to truly hold her attention. And Din? He’ll just have to hold on for the ride.
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone?:
This is Book 4 in the ‘Paul Hirsch’ Mystery series.
'Day's End' Back Blurb:
Hirsch’s rural beat is wide. Daybreak to day’s end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. In the time of the virus, Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge. Today he’s driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They’re checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don’t quite add up. Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much—a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight. But two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son’s.
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone?:
This is Book One in the ‘Noodle Shop’ mysteries.
'Death by Dumpling' Back Blurb:
The last place Lana Lee thought she would ever end up is back at her family’s restaurant. But after a brutal break-up and a dramatic workplace walk-out, she figures that helping wait tables is her best option for putting her life back together. Even if that means having to put up with her mother, who is dead-set on finding her a husband. Lana’s love life soon becomes yesterday’s news once the restaurant’s property manager, Mr. Feng, turns up dead—after a delivery of shrimp dumplings from Ho-Lee. But how could this have happened when everyone on staff knew about Mr. Feng’s severe, life-threatening shellfish allergy? Now, with the whole restaurant under suspicion for murder and the local media in a feeding frenzy—to say nothing of the gorgeous police detective who keeps turning up for take-out—it’s up to Lana to find out who is behind Feng’s killer order. . . before her own number is up.
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Series or Standalone?:
This book is a standalone novel.
'Headland' Back Blurb:
The small beachside town of Gloster is on the edge of disaster. After constant rain, floodwaters are rising fast. Detective Constable Craig Watson, exiled to Gloster from Sydney, is a young man with a damaged past and an uncertain future. Constables Ellie Cameron and Larissa Brookes are young women struggling to show their worth as police officers under a misogynistic sergeant. The drowning town holds a secret that someone is prepared to murder for, and as the floodwaters cut Gloster off from the world the three young police officers begin to understand that it’s not just them left stranded. Somewhere out there in the floodwaters is a killer. And he needs them dead.
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone?:
This is a standalone novel.
'The Empress Murders' Back Blurb:
It’s 1925 and the Empress of Australia is making her regular Atlantic crossing, New York–bound, with a full manifest of passengers. When a dead body is uncovered onboard, it is up to Inspector Archie Daniels to find the killer. But solving one murder quickly turns into solving two, then three, and it becomes clear that Daniels must act fast to avoid an all-souls-lost–level calamity. No one, from the horrendously wealthy and entitled first-class passengers to those they consider the dregs of empire below deck, is safe. And no one can get off …
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Series or Standalone?:
This is Book 4 in the ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ series.
'The Moor' Back Blurb:
In the eerie wasteland of Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes summons his devoted wife and partner, Mary Russell, from her studies at Oxford to aid the investigation of a death and some disturbing phenomena of a decidedly supernatural origin. Through the mists of the moor there have been sightings of a spectral coach made of bones carrying a woman long-ago accused of murdering her husband–and of a hound with a single glowing eye. Returning to the scene of one of his most celebrated cases, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes and Russell investigate a mystery darker and more unforgiving than the moors themselves.
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Series or Standalone?:
This is a standalone novel.
'The Triumph of the Spider Monkey' Back Blurb:
Abandoned as a baby in a bus station locker, shuttled from one abusive foster home and detention centre to another, Bobbie Gotteson grew up angry, hurting, damaged. His hunger to succeed as a musician brought him across the country to Hollywood, but along with it came his seething rage, his paranoid delusions, and his capacity for acts of shocking violence.
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone?:
This is Book 3 in the ‘Lane Holland‘ series.
'Vanish' Back Blurb:
Lane Holland’s crime-solving career ended the day he went to prison. Yet one unsolved case continues to haunt him: the disappearance of Matilda Carver two decades ago. Against the odds, Lane finds a lead – a mysterious farm community where Matilda lived briefly, led by the enigmatic Samuel Karpathy. The farm attracts lost souls. People looking for answers. People hiding from their pasts. People who have nowhere else to go. But some of those who go to the farm seem to vanish without a trace.
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Series or Standalone?:
This is Book One in the ‘Dr Greta Helsing‘ series.
'Strange Practice' Back Blurb:
Meet Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead. After inheriting a highly specialised, and highly peculiar, medical practice, Dr Helsing spends her days treating London’s undead for a host of ills: vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights and entropy in mummies. Although barely making ends meet, this is just the quiet, supernatural-adjacent life Greta’s dreamed of since childhood. But when a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human undead and alike, Greta must use all her unusual skills to keep her supernatural clients – and the rest of London – safe.
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