Welcome to another edition of My Favourite Reads, a bit late this month thanks to Chrissy and the Burroughs Boy excitement.

My reads for June were the usual eclectic mix, ranging from crime to fantasy and horror to pure romance. After previous failures, I again tried to read books that had been languishing on my to-be-read list for a while, and it sort of worked. I managed to get through three until some lovely new releases caught my eye and had me hitting the ‘buy’ button.

What was my favourite? This one!

Origin by JA Konrath

Absolutely nuts but HUGE fun. I adore books like this. They’re completely over the top in terms of plot but the pacing is so fast and the characters so cool, that I can’t put them down. Entertainment by the bucketload.

Okay, I admit Origin might not be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s horror. Well, horror combined with techno-thrills but it also came with lots of laughs and even a smidgen of romance.

A linguist is sent to a secret military compound buried under the desert where a hibernating demon that may or may not be Satan has been kept secure for years. Now, the demon has woken up and Andrew Dennison is coerced into acting as its translator. As with all good horror-thrillers, things soon go very, very wrong.

I enjoyed this so much that I immediately bought and read another Konrath book – see below.

Haunted House by Jack Kilborn

Jack Kilborn is one of JA Konrath’s aliases. Some of you might recall that I read Konrath’s The List a few months ago. Well, Haunted House has some of the characters from that as well as one of the characters from Origin, so this was like playing with old friends.

Haunted House was as brilliantly bonkers as Origin and The List. Fast, funny, gory and weirdly hopeful. I’ll be reading more.

Last Breath by Robert Brydnza

I’m really enjoying this Detective Erica Foster series. I’ve read all of them so far and the characters and mystery never let me down. Last Breath proved no different and was another excellent crime novel from Bryndza, who is pretty much auto-buy for me now.

Am very curious to see how Erica fares in the next book. Is she softening a little? Can’t wait to find out!

Reckless by Amanda Quick

Impulsive but clever Phoebe Layton is convinced Gabriel Banner is a latter-day Lancelot, and seeks his help to discover the killer of a man whose death she carries on her shoulders. But Phoebe has no idea that Gabriel plans to take revenge on her family for ruining him years before.

A gorgeous historical romance. I really need to read more Amanda Quick. Her books are lovely.

The Apothecary’s Poison by CJ Archer

The Glass and Steels series continues to get better and better. Loaded with intrigue, magic and romance, these are great comfort reads.

This one ended on a terrific hook that has me itching for the next. Fortunately, there’s not a long wait with The Magician’s Diary releasing in September. Yay!

Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

This was a nice return to form for Aaronovitch after Broken Homes, which I thought was okay but nowhere near as good as the previous books in the series.

Foxglove Summer was fun though, with Peter Grant being sent to the English countryside to investigate the disappearance of some children. Great characters in this one.

The Queen and the Cure by Amy Harmon

This is the follow-on book to The Bird and the Sword which I adored (read what I thought of it here) and The Queen and the Cure didn’t disappoint. It was nice to see Kjell fall in love – I liked him so much in first book – but finding happiness was never going to be easy. Mind you, I never expected it to be this hard for him either. The poor man!

Wonderful read. I still have Harmon’s From Sand and Ash and A Different Blue on my to-be-read pile and probably should have read one of those, but I could resist re-entering the world of Jeru again. I hope there’ll be more of these. Harmon’s writing is beautiful and the romance, characters and world-building are outstanding.

What were your favourite reads of June?