Work from the desk.

Mary-Lisa Russo’s “The Many Mini Ways to Create a Positive & Inspiring Life” is a warm, personable invitation to rediscover the small choices that can make everyday life feel richer, calmer, and considerably more joyful.

Rather than approaching self-care as a grand reinvention, Russo finds possibility in the attainable: creating a peaceful home, setting boundaries, nurturing creativity, learning something new, spending time outdoors, giving to others, keeping a journal, or simply allowing oneself the pleasure of rest. The cumulative effect is less that of a conventional self-help manual and more like an encouraging conversation with someone who genuinely wants her reader to flourish.

What distinguishes the book is Russo’s willingness to place herself inside that conversation. She shares her own habits, pleasures, vulnerabilities, and lessons learned, giving the advice an intimate quality rather than delivering it from a distance. Her enthusiasm is infectious, whether she is discussing creativity and lifelong learning or the restorative pleasures of personal style, home comforts, and singing unabashedly in the shower.

There is an unapologetically feminine spirit throughout the book, but its underlying message reaches considerably further. Confidence, boundaries, kindness, resilience, creativity, and the need to protect a little space for oneself are recognisably human concerns. Russo’s philosophy is refreshingly uncomplicated: happiness need not always arrive through enormous transformations. Sometimes it can be cultivated through small, deliberate acts of attention.

The short chapter structure complements that philosophy particularly well. Readers can enjoy the book from beginning to end or return to individual sections whenever they need encouragement, making it as much a companion to revisit as a book to complete.

Ultimately, “The Many Mini Ways to Create a Positive & Inspiring Life” succeeds because it practises what it advocates. It is optimistic without pretending that disappointment and difficulty do not exist, personal without becoming prescriptive, and earnest without losing its sense of fun. Russo reminds readers that creating a more positive life may begin not with becoming somebody new, but with treating the person already there with greater kindness.

A bright, affectionate, and uplifting celebration of everyday self-worth.

“The Mourning Ring” understands one of Gothic fiction’s oldest tricks: the most frightening ghosts are rarely the ones rattling chains in the corridor. They are the secrets people have spent a lifetime trying to bury.

Iwan Ross sets his fifth McTavish mystery against the brooding Scottish landscape of Serpent’s Manor, where Coby McTavish arrives with his family expecting the impending birth of his child and instead finds himself drawn into a mystery reaching back to the final months of the Second World War. A skeleton discovered beneath the cliffs, an ornate gilded ring and a message that never reached its intended recipient provide the bones of the investigation. But Ross is less interested in simply asking who died than in uncovering what the dead were prevented from saying.

That distinction gives the novel its emotional weight.

Coby remains an appealingly unconventional centre for the story. He is curious, fallible and frequently surrounded by enough domestic chaos to prevent the supernatural elements from becoming oppressively grim. Dark humour sits comfortably beside murder, family life beside hauntings, while the arrival of a sharp-eyed detective adds another layer of tension to an already crowded manor.

The setting does considerable work. Serpent’s Manor is not merely Gothic scenery pasted behind the mystery; the cliffs, corridors, violent weather and isolation steadily constrict the story. Even seemingly eccentric details — a mysterious black cat, voices that may know too much, restless spirits and the ring itself — accumulate purpose as the past begins pressing against the present.

Ross also trusts atmosphere without allowing it to replace momentum. Beneath the apparitions and Gothic theatrics lies a surprisingly human mystery about promises, betrayal, memory and the terrible longevity of unfinished business.

The result is a Scottish Gothic mystery in which the supernatural does more than haunt the living — it gives the silenced dead one final opportunity to be heard.

Readers who enjoy their mysteries steeped in atmosphere but relieved by warmth, eccentricity and dark humour will find “The Mourning Ring” an invitingly strange place to spend the night.