Review: Croft and Tabby: The Complete Collection

Croft and Tabby: The Complete Collection by Brad Magnarella
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A decent urban fantasy, kind of Dresden Files lite. Like Harry Dresden, Everson Croft is a youngish straight white wizard living in an apartment in a major US city with his large cat, and having to be careful around technology (I'm not sure how he's able to teach at a university without using a computer). However, the cat is possessed by a succubus and talks, so that's different.

Along with his friend Kayla, who's a somewhat flaky intuitive and puts him onto most of the cases, he sets out to do good and suppress dangerous supernatural entities. He fairly often gets hold of the wrong end of quite a dangerous stick, leading to danger and tribulation, but always wins through in the end, by a combination of a narrow set of magical abilities, courage, goodwill and the help of allies, sometimes including the snarky Tabitha (the possessed talking cat).

It's solid rather than amazing, but for the most part decently edited, except that it consistently uses "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration, occasionally misses a past perfect where one should ideally be, and confuses "leach" and "leech" (easy to do).

Not my new favourite or anything, but it's competently done and entertaining, and I'd read more in the series.

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Top Books for 2025

This is my twelfth annual roundup of recommended books that I read in the previous year. My summary page links to all the previous roundups.

In the early years, I arbitrarily matched the number of top books to the number of the year (so I had 14 books on the list in 2014). I abandoned that practice after the first four years, and in 2022 I loosened the criteria even further and included almost anything that I gave four or five stars to. Next year, I'm going to change what I do again, re-aligning the star ratings to be more consistent with what they are supposed to mean according to Goodreads and Amazon.

What I mean is that for the last few years I've been running a rating system of four tiers (bronze, silver, gold and platinum), of which the first three are given four stars, indicating that I enjoyed the book to a greater or lesser extent, and the platinum tier get five stars for being amazing. Next year, I'll re-jig this as follows:

• The top tier will still be five stars, but I'll collapse Gold and Platinum together. I may still single some books out for special praise (equivalent to the old Platinum), but I haven't decided yet.
• The former Silver tier, which was for solid books that weren't outright amazing but had few and forgiveable faults, will still be four stars.
• The former Bronze tier, which was for books with significant issues that I still at least partially enjoyed and felt were good enough to recommend, will now be three stars rather than four.
• Books with faults that I think are significant enough that I don't recommend them, though they did have some positive qualities, will now be two stars, where they used to get three.
• Books that I think are pretty much a disaster right across the board, which used to get two stars, will now get one star. I haven't used the one-star rating in years, so in practice my range started at two stars.

For this year, I will be keeping the "legacy" rating system, since I decided to change it partway through 2025 and didn't want to go back and adjust everything I'd done up to that point. This year's recommendation list once again has the largest number of books so far, at 133, out of the 159 books I read in their entirety in 2025 (counting standalone novellas and boxed sets both as one, which is what I've done in previous years, but not counting anything shorter than a novella). That's what two or three days a week of commuting by train will do: increase my reading by almost 60%, apparently. If my calculations are correct, the total number of recommendations across the 12 years is now 524. I had to adjust these numbers after my initial post, because I posted this roundup on the morning of the 31st, thinking I wouldn't complete more than my current book before the end of the year, and ended up reading another novella in the afternoon and evening.

There were another 24 books I started but decided not to finish, not counting a couple where I wasn't ever going to read them from cover to cover (like cookbooks). I'll mention below where I got them from. Also, I re-read two of my own books in preparation for writing a sequel, and I don't rate my own books - I think that's tacky. This is why the total number doesn't add up to 159.

Here are my figures in a table, for the last time before the reboot of the rating system (I'll start again fresh next year):

	5 star	4 star	3 star	2 star	Total
2025	5	128	22	1	156
2024	8	92	13	0	114
2023	6	82	12	2	102
2022	6	59	13	4	82
2021	5	54	29	3	90
2020	8	53	21	0	82
2019	11	36	17	1	65
2018	5	72	15	2	94
2017	10	56	19	0	85
2016	11	53	12	1	77
2015	11	68	19	2	101
2014	9	70	23	2	104
Total	95	823	215	18	1152
Average	8	68	18	2	96

So, out of more than 1000 books I've finished in the past 12 years, I've only rated about 8% at five stars. About 71% have been rated four stars, leaving just over 20% at three stars or below. This is because I do a lot of pre-filtering based on blurbs, other people's reviews and, sometimes, previews, and weed out the ones that are obviously going to be awful. Occasionally, I get fooled. I probably filter out some good stuff now and then as well, if the authors make their books sound generic or make an obvious mistake in their blurb, or don't hook me early enough in the preview, or if they get a lot of reviews that make it sound like I won't like their book even though I actually would if I tried it.

If I re-jigged this year's figures to reflect next year's scoring system, the numbers would be: 25 5-stars (6 platinum and 19 gold), 70 4-stars (silver), 39 3-stars (bronze), 22 2-stars (former 3-stars), and one 1-star (former 2-star). This is a more informative spread, I feel, and I should have made the shift to this approach earlier.

Tier Rankings

Here's the link to all of my "Best of 2025" books, and here are my Platinum tier (6 books), Gold tier (19 books), Silver tier (70 books) and Bronze tier (39 books).

A note: I've figured out how to link to lists of books on Goodreads that have the same tag (or "shelf") and were read in the same year. I will take the risk of using these links, knowing that if GR revises their code - which is honestly long overdue - the links may well stop working. I will give brief rundowns on the Gold and Platinum books below.

Discovery/Sources

As with the previous three years, I read a lot of classics, mostly from Project Gutenberg. This is partly because my previous best sources, Netgalley and BookBub, have been disappointing over the past few of years, featuring a lot of unimaginative cookie-cutter books, many of them in genres I don't care for. I read 85 books from Project Gutenberg: five I rated Gold, 41 Silver, and 23 Bronze, 14 at three stars and one (Tom Swift and his Submarine) at two stars. There were also eight that I stopped reading before I finished them, which I haven't counted in the total of 85. So a quarter of the Gold-tier books and almost two-thirds of the Silvers and Bronzes came from Gutenberg, which represented not quite half the total books I read.

Twenty-nine of this year's books came from NetGalley, reversing a trend of declining numbers in the last four years (16 in 2024, 20 in 2023, 25 in 2022 and 41 in each of the previous two years). Only one made Platinum (Francis Spufford's Nonesuch: A Novel), five Gold, nine Silver, nine Bronze, and five which earned only three stars. Because NetGalley books are pre-publication, I generally don't use my Needs Editing tag on them, since at least in theory they could get more editing before publication (though, honestly, they most likely won't), but three of them were so significantly bad that I did tag them, a three-star and two Bronzes, and one of the Bronze books got the Seriously Needs Editing tag. It was a superhero book, which for some reason are often particularly poorly edited. Six of the Netgalley books, though, got the Well Edited tag.

In addition, as in 2024, I again got 8 books from NetGalley that were either sufficiently bad or sufficiently not to my taste that I didn't finish them. I usually filter the books I pick up carefully, but on Netgalley (where I can't read a preview) I will take a risk on something that sounds like a fresh premise. Sometimes this works out; sometimes, as with these books, it does not.

I bought only nine books through BookBub this year that I finished, which is also up from previous years, one tagged as "Needs Editing" and two as "Seriously Needs Editing," none this year as "Well Edited"; four of them made Bronze, three Silver and one (Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief) platinum, indicating that BookBub, like Netgalley, has slightly improved as a source of books for me, after several years of steady decline.

I picked up two more books via BookBub that I didn't finish, only one of which I actually bought; the other I dropped after reading the sample.

I read 18 ebooks from the library, fewer than last year, consisting of one Platinum, seven Gold, ten Silver, and no Bronze-tier books, plus a three-star. I also borrowed 4 physical books from the library, all by P.G. Wodehouse, of which three made Silver and one Bronze. In addition, I borrowed six e-audiobooks from the library, a Platinum, two Golds, a Silver, a Bronze and a three-star, plus two I didn't finish. That's a total of 30 library borrowings, with two Platinum, nine Gold, 14 Silver, two Bronze, two three-star and two not finished.

I maintain a large wishlist (80-odd titles) on Amazon entitled "Await Ebook Price Drop," and monitor it regularly. I bought only one book from my wishlist this year, a Silver, which I'd already had as an e-audiobook (in a full cast recording, and I wanted to re-read it in text because a full-cast recording drops some of the internal reflection of the characters).

I'm part of the Codex writers' forum, and occasionally pick up a book by a fellow Codexian, though I've not been on the forum much for a while. I picked up two books from Codexians this year. One I decided against after reading the sample (it was a pastiche of an author I'm a big fan of, and I didn't feel the book pulled the pastiche off), but the other made the Silver tier.

I bought no books based on an Amazon recommendations this year, at least not that I recorded. I may have missed one or two.

Best of the Best

I'll again just highlight the Platinum and Gold books this year, a total of 25 (up from 17 last year). Don't despise the Silver or even Bronze tiers, though; those are still recommendations, still books I enjoyed.

Gold Tier

Let's start with the books I liked a lot but that didn't quite make it to the highest possible level. In alphabetical order by author (links to my Goodreads reviews), this year with the source noted:

• Drake Hall and City of Serpents, both by Christina Baehr (library e-audiobooks). Books 2 and 4 in a strong series, of which the first made the list at Silver in 2024, and the third is on this year's list at Platinum. Dragons in Edwardian England, with the strongest grasp of period authenticity I've seen in a while.
• Out Law: A Dresden Files Novella, Jim Butcher (NetGalley). Harry Dresden teaches Being a Decent Human Being 101 to a scared criminal who wants to reform, but there's no lack of action and tension while he does so.
• The Seven Dials Mystery, Agatha Christie (Project Gutenberg). It's a pity Superintendent Battle never became as popular as some of Christie's other sleuths. I like him. Less like a Christie book and more like a Wodehouse book that collided with an Edgar Wallace book, to the benefit of both.
• Cicero James, Miracle Worker, Hal Emerson (NetGalley). Urban fantasy set in San Francisco, which manages to look realistically at the city's problems without falling into either of the main ideological camps, and while telling a suspenseful story of a man who's willing to sacrifice for the benefit of others.
• Slayers of Old, Jim C. Hines (NetGalley). I think Hines is underrated, and this "Buffy meets Golden Girls" tale of a retired supernatural slayer pulled back into the life as a consequence of youthful mistakes demonstrates why I think that. Particularly recommended if you're over 50.
• Lady of Magick, Sylvia Izzo Hunter (library ebook). That spelling would normally put me right off, but the first book made Silver last year, as did the third this year, and the series as a whole is solid and entertaining. An alternate Britain in which the Tudor line survived into the 19th century and magic is practiced.
• The Geomagician, Jennifer Mandula (NetGalley). Another alternate Britain with magic, but this time it's linked to fossils, and there's a pterodactyl which becomes a fossil-hunting woman's key to get into the boys' club. Based largely on real historical figures, and with strong reflection on important issues that doesn't bog down the story.
• The Mark of Zorro, Johnston McCulley (Project Gutenberg). Here's where the legend began (not only Zorro's, either, it inspired aspects of Superman and Batman), and it's as swashbuckling as you could wish, written with a delightful brio.
• The Summer War, Naomi Novik (NetGalley). A determined and capable young woman, my favourite type of protagonist, takes on a version of Faery that feels like the tales and ballads in order to save her brother.
• The Garden of Resurrection: Being the Love Story of an Ugly Man, E. Thurston Temple (Project Gutenberg). A moving, human and humane story of the attractiveness of being kind, from a now-obscure author.
• The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith and The Fire Within, Patricia Wentworth (Project Gutenberg). Another determined and capable young woman in a tensely plotted thriller, and what at first seems like it will be a standard murder mystery but isn't that at all; instead, it's an insightful novel about manipulation, guilt and redemption through love.

The rest of the Gold-tier books are all by P.G. Wodehouse and were all borrowed from the library as ebooks:

• Mulliner Nights. One of Wodehouse's great raconteurs gives us a series of unlikely but always entertaining tales about his various relatives and connections.
• Blandings Castle and Elsewhere. A collection of short pieces featuring some of the author's most beloved characters and locations.
• Full Moon. A Blandings Castle farce with the usual multiple impostures, young love thwarted and then triumphant, and all the trimmings.
• Young Men in Spats. A collection of shorts including the first Uncle Fred story (my favourite character in all of Wodehouse), and some fine stories from the Drones Club and Mr Mulliner.
• Cocktail Time. An Uncle Fred novel, in which that differently moral peer interferes effectively in the affairs of basically everyone.
• The Luck of the Bodkins. One of Wodehouse's satires on Hollywood, where he worked for a time writing for the movies. The farce is strong with this one.

Platinum Tier

And now, the very best of this year's reading, also in alphabetical order by author.

• Castle of the Winds, Christina Baehr (library e-audiobook). Another determined, capable young woman facing genuine peril bravely, with depth of reflection on any number of issues. Third in a strong series.
• Brigands and Breadknives, Travis Baldree (library ebook). I consistently rate Baldree's cozy fantasies highly, and it's because it's more than just cozy fantasy. This one even challenges the standard cozy trope that owning a small business will make the protagonist happy.
• Hogfather, Terry Pratchett (paperback, owned for years). Funny, tense, and thought-provoking, and any one of those is hard to pull off individually, let alone together.
• The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi (BookBub). The first book in what I found, unfortunately, to be otherwise a disappointing series, but read as a standalone it's brilliant and different from almost anything else out there.
• Nonesuch: A Novel, Francis Spufford (NetGalley. The last on the list alphabetically would be the top-rated book if I was still putting them in order. It says "A Novel," and it is, but it's not the usual literary self-indulgence in which passive characters sink into over-described tragedy. It reminds me of the best parts of Connie Willis and Charles Williams, without the faults of either, and the ending left me stunned. Come for the summoning of biblically accurate angels in the London Blitz to fight fascism, stay for the skillful description, excellent character arc and thundering plot.

Conclusion

Though NetGalley and BookBub seem to have improved a little, I still read a lot of classics this year, a trend that started in 2023, and made good use of the library. The books I loved came from multiple sources, as did the books I loved less. I hope, if your taste is anything at all like mine, that you can find something you'll enjoy through my recommendations.

Review: Out Law: A Dresden Files Novella

Out Law: A Dresden Files Novella by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a while since Jim Butcher's last book - he's had some personal stuff to deal with, I understand - and honestly, this one refers back to some people and events that I don't remember well or, in some cases, at all, including one of the central characters. This is a lowlife associated with Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, who, thanks to a narrow escape from death, wants to reform, and Marcone, claiming that Dresden owes him a debt for saving his life, brings the guy to Dresden to be taught Decent Human Being 101. Of course, Marcone also has an angle that benefits him.

If anyone is qualified to be Professor of Being a Decent Human Being Under Difficult Circumstances and Making the Hard Choices, it's Harry Dresden, and he does a good job, imparting the wisdom he's picked up throughout his tough life. Sample dialog:

"But what do you get out of it?"
"I get to be me. I get to be the guy who helps people who need it."

(Note: I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there may be changes made before publication. There are a few minor copy editing errors, for example, which I hope will be corrected, but very few.)

It's not just an extended preachment, of course. It's a Harry Dresden story, which means dire supernatural threats, action sequences that mean something, and difficult problems cleverly solved using Dresden's now extensive resources when his default initial approach of "kill it with fire" turns out not to be effective. It's wryly funny, with great banter, the fights feel like Harry and his allies are barely escaping death (and not without injury), and for all Harry's wisecracking he's deadly serious when the situation calls for it. He's even learned when not to run his mouth. And the issues include legal trouble and the IRS, not just the supernatural, so there's a variety of threats to deal with in different ways.

Solidly written, and with that extra layer of reflection on the human condition that raises it into the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list, this is Jim Butcher fully on form and in firm command of his craft.



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Review: The Man In The Queue

The Man In The Queue by Josephine Tey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tey enjoys a good reputation as a writer, and this is the first of a well-regarded series, so I gave it a look. It's not a great book even for its time; relies too much on coincidence to keep the plot together, and the main character makes copious use of an ethnic slur for people of Mediterranean origin and generalizes wildly about how English people behave differently from foreigners, which puts him on completely the wrong track for most of the book. He's not as brilliant a detective as he thinks he is, and in the end this is one of those "only solved because the criminal confesses" books that I find so unsatisfactory. Still, I've read worse, and it's promising enough that I'll pick up the next book, on the understanding that this is a weak start to a stronger series.

HarperCollins have the brazen effrontery to say in the back of the book that their HarperPerennials series is "upholding the highest standards of ebook production," but, like most of their books, this one needs more editing. There are a lot of missing commas, fewer but still numerous missing closing quotation marks, and some obvious misreadings by the OCR process, at least one of which was so wrong I couldn't even figure out what the word should have been. Project Gutenberg, who are staffed by volunteers and so can take more time correcting the scans, generally do a better job than major publishers (and especially HarperCollins) of tidying up these old books, but at time of review this one isn't on Project Gutenberg. The 1929 publication date means it should make it there soon, hopefully.

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Review: Hogfather

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a reread, of course, because I've read most of the Discworld books multiple times.

Death's granddaughter Susan Sto Helit, determinedly sensible and capable in the face of a universe that refuses to behave sensibly, is the main protagonist, though her grandfather (by adoption of her mother), Death himself, is the instigator of much of the plot. The Hogfather, the Discworld version of Father Christmas, has been or is in the process of being assassinated by means that only make sense on the Discworld, involving tooth fairies and belief, and Death has stepped in as a locum to keep the traditions moving along. Unfortunately, Death only partially understands people and how they work, which creates much of the comedy, along with Pratchett's usual masterful parody of this-worldly things that make no sense (Christmas traditions and their inherent contradictions, mostly) and people who behave with small-minded conventionality.

As with all of his best work, though, it's not just comedy. There are some dark parts, as you'd expect with Death as a leading character and a crazed assassin (described as "a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic") going around killing people he no longer has any use for, or who might cause some minor inconvenience to his mad plot. But more importantly, there's a good deal of thoughtful reflection on what the true meaning of Hogwatchnight/Christmas is, and a complicated answer that involves the long evolution of tradition and the human ability to find meaning and significance in the middle of chaos.

It's deeply life-affirming; the true villains are the Auditors, literally soulless cosmic bureaucrats who believe that life was a mistake and should be eliminated, especially the messy and chaotic parts like believing in things that make no sense. Susan provides a great bridging character, someone who rather wishes the supernatural wouldn't persist in breaking into what she's trying to make an orderly life, but who is also, when it comes right down to it, firmly on the side of humane values, and definitely not above making use of her own abilities in the cause of preserving everything the auditors oppose. There's a terrific climax in which the question "Who is a monster?" is posed and dramatically answered.

Meanwhile, the wizards of Unseen University are, as usual, tampering with things that ought not to be tampered with and eating big meals, but in a pinch putting their substantial weight behind the traditions that really matter. And there's the wonderful secondary character of the Oh God of Hangovers, Bilious, who's the counterpart of the God of Wine and only ever experiences the consequences of the party, not the party itself. He's one of Pratchett's classic types, the rather pathetic person who manages to rise to be someone we can respect at least a little, by making the right choices in tough situations.

Good and evil are clearly distinguished, but they aren't cartoonish or simplistic. Nothing here is simplistic; it's all thought-provoking and profound, and the thought-provocation rises naturally out of a really well told and highly entertaining story. It's one of the best Pratchetts, in my opinion, up there with Carpe Jugulum and Feet of Clay , to pick one from each of the other main series-within-the-series. I hold back from giving it my very highest tier ranking (Platinum) only because it does get a bit darker than I prefer in places, though for entirely justified reasons.

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Review: Mr Campion & Others

Mr Campion & Others by Margery Allingham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've so far only read the first Campion novel, but plan to read the series, so I picked up this collection of short stories to check what it was like. They're mostly light, fairly amusing pieces. Most of them are not murder mysteries (though there are one or two) but kidnappings, blackmail, con jobs, jewel thefts and the like.

In all of them, Campion works with his Scotland Yard contact and friend, Stanislaus Oates, who holds several different ranks in the different stories. The stories are not arranged in order of internal chronology, so Oates can be a superintendent in one story and then a chief inspector in the next. Because they appeared in several different magazines, and the readers might not have read other stories or indeed any Campion at all, they are all standalones, and apart from Oates being promoted there's no development or change in the characters, including Campion.

Where his age is mentioned, Campion is generally around late thirties to early forties, unmarried and apparently unattached, and conscious of the age gap between him and the naive young women who sometimes seek his help as if he was an honorary uncle. They're all of his own class; he's upper class, which is a big part of his expertise and his usefulness to the middle-class Oates, though of course Campion is also a skilled amateur detective. He has casual entree to circles that would be closed to the official police, at least without some concrete evidence of a crime, and even then, they would stand out as he does not.

The crimes and their unwinding are clever ones, though the short format limits how complicated they can be, and overall it's a solid collection of enjoyable mysteries. I look forward to reading more of the novels so that I can see how Allingham takes advantage of the longer format to develop more depth and complexity.

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Review: Red Aces: Being Three Cases of Mr. Reeder

Red Aces: Being Three Cases of Mr. Reeder by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

J.G. Reeder is one of Wallace's few characters that he reused across different books, at least early in his career - though in the first book he's a young man (with an older man as a decoy), and subsequently the older man is Reeder and the young man is never mentioned again, so the continuity is not that strong.

He's a private detective who's also consulted by the police and has some kind of ill-defined connection with the Public Prosecutor's Office, which allows Wallace to have his cake and eat it too. Reeder is independent in terms of what cases he takes on, but he has some semblance of official authority when he needs it.

These three mid-length stories are varied. "Red Aces" is a story of a murder that Reeder happens to come upon on a snowy night, with some theatrical elements and a backstory of organized crime and revenge. His task is to extricate a young man from the elements that make him look guilty and identify the actual culprits. I found the whole thing rather confusing, and for most of it had no idea what had actually happened.

"Kennedy the Con Man" I thought was clever; I was fooled almost to the end. A number of people who had been victims of a scam several years before have disappeared mysteriously, and Reeder is asked to find them.

"The Case of Joe Attymar" had its clever elements too, but I was suspicious of one particular character throughout, though I was never sure. Since we don't get to see all of the evidence that Reeder sees, it isn't a "fair play" mystery.

The construction and unwinding of the cases shows ingenuity and originality, but these are otherwise not top-drawer Wallace. Entertaining, though, certainly.

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Review: Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm reasonably sure I've read this one before, but long enough ago that it was a fresh experience.

It's another standalone Wodehouse, technically in the Drones Club series, though that is a very loose series linked only by the fact that the stories' main characters are members of that frivolous club. This one, Reggie, has recently inherited an earldom that he wasn't expecting (a number of relatives had died in the necessary order), and he's been sent off by the family lawyer as the new "head of the family" to lay down the law to his alcoholic Cousin Egbert, who has got engaged to someone in Hollywood, of all ghastly places.

On the way to Los Angeles by train, he meets (by what seems to him like a coincidence, but clearly is planned on her part) a popular film actress who's as fake as a rubber chicken, but takes him in completely. Drones Club members are not noted for their intelligence. He refuses to hear a word against her from anyone, including Ann, his former fiancée, who turns out to be his cousin's current fiancée.

People swapping bodies was a staple of pulp fiction at the time, no doubt inspired by F. Anstey's Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers (1882). The book Freaky Friday, now the best-known example thanks to the movie (which recently got a sequel), drew on Anstey, and here, so does Wodehouse, introducing a rare supernatural element that never gets explained - because it's a plot device, and not at all the point of the story. While under the laughing gas of the title for dental surgery, Reggie accidentally swaps bodies with Joey Cooley, the child star, who is having a similar procedure next door, and shenanigans ensue.

The weedy Joey, now in an adult body with the build and experience of an amateur boxer and a face like a gorilla, goes around punching people in the snoot who he has long felt deserved it. Reggie, on the other hand, has to cope with Joey's unenviable situation: he lives with the head of the studio and the studio head's sister, who can't stand Joey at any price and makes no secret of it, and he also inherits Joey's youthful enemies.

But what he does discover is that Ann, who looks after Joey, is genuinely fond of the child and a good person, and that April June, the film star he had fallen in love with, is the viper that everyone has warned him about. Meanwhile, Cousin Egbert believes Joey is some kind of hallucination brought on by alcohol, and is drawn as a result to the temperance preaching of the Temple of the New Dawn. (There's a bit of tongue-in-cheek Wodehouse playfulness in that the Temple's services are described as if it's an Anglican church, with matins, evensong, and prayer books, though he certainly would have known that a nondenominational church in Los Angeles would have none of those things.)

Because this is Wodehouse, everything is sorted out in the end, and people get their comeuppance or their reward according to what they deserve. But it's the journey that matters, and it's full of reversals and comedic moments ranging from slapstick to sophisticated wordplay.

I will note that I've given it my "casual-racism" tag, though I hesitated whether to do so or not. By the standards of the 1930s, it's not virulently racist, not like some other popular books such as John Buchan's or I Pose, but it's more racist than Wodehouse usually gets. The racial stereotypes are undermined in a couple of cases, and yet the attitudes and language are there, and if this is something you're extra sensitive to, it would be best to avoid this particular Wodehouse.

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Review: The Melody of Death

The Melody of Death by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An odd one, and not my favourite of the Wallaces I've read.

There's a significant amount of relationship drama, which is a bit unusual for Wallace. A controlling mother pushes her daughter to marry a man who she believes is wealthy, or at least the heir to wealth, and neither of these things is true (his eccentric uncle having disinherited him on a whim). In turn, he believes that his bride-to-be has money of her own and that money has nothing to do with her wanting to marry him, and neither of these things is true either. He doesn't pick up on the clear signs that she doesn't love him whatsoever and is probably (reading between the lines) mainly marrying him to escape from her awful mother. They do talk honestly, after rather than before the wedding, and set up a household in which they live as, basically, flatmates with a growing non-romantic friendship, but it's still awkward, because they each feel they've let the other down.

Also, on the evening of their wedding, a violinist plays a tune outside, and he turns pale and won't say why.

Meanwhile, he's going out a lot at night and, again, not explaining why. And there's a rash of safecracking burglaries going on. And he's given up his job, but now has money. Coincidence? We think not!

But also not what it looks like. There's a gang of safecrackers who are cleverly avoiding the police, but we know he's not one of them.

The explanation turns out to be far-fetched. (view spoiler)[He suspected he had cancer, and went to a doctor in another city, and, because he couldn't face hearing the diagnosis directly and didn't want the doctor to know who he was, devised an elaborate system where the doctor would send one of two cards to a violinist the young man knows, asking him to play one of two melodies outside the man's house, depending on whether he had cancer or not. But the doctor unaccountably messes up and sends the wrong card (saying that he has cancer when he doesn't), and then, not having any way of contacting him, can't correct the error.

Having, he thinks, nothing to lose, and loving his wife even if she doesn't love him, and having always had a fascination with the idea of being a thief but being too law-abiding to actually do it, he sets out to steal from the thieves, and in a highly unlikely turn of events, manages to turn the money into more than twice its value by clever stock speculation, so that he can pay back the victims and the thieves and still have some for himself and his wife. He's captured by the robbers; locked up to prevent him interfering in their next hit - on his uncle; fortunately rescued when a fire happens to break out next door, and foils the robbery, winning his uncle's approval and his wife's love. (hide spoiler)]

There's a diamond necklace McGuffin, there are armed confrontations and a shoot-out, all of the machinery is there, but because the explanation for the odd events is just so unlikely I felt let down by the reveals. Still enjoyable, but not up to the usual standard for Wallace.

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Review: The Black Company

The Black Company by W. B. M. Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A young man who has inherited unexpected wealth from his uncle and then succumbed to his family's tendency to alcoholism happens across a mysterious criminal gang calling itself the Black Company, and themed on chess. He manages to become sober, encouraged by his also-chance-met love interest, and insists on investigating, despite the danger.

There are lots of unexpected twists, in some of which a situation I was expecting to continue for a while is resolved and replaced with another situation. On the other hand, there are also a few tropes - the chance encounter, the Convenient Eavesdrop, falling into the obvious trap.

Still, it's action-packed, suspenseful, and if not quite as good as, say, Edgar Wallace or Johnston McCulley, it's very much in the same mould. I have to say, the love interest didn't interest me - she was high-handed and moody and had almost no other characteristics - but each to their own.

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Review: Nonesuch: A Novel

Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fine piece of fiction.

It reminds me of Connie Willis, in that it's set in World War II, in the Blitz, and involves time travel, though the time travel doesn't come until the end. It also reminds me of Charles Williams, in that it's set in the period when he was writing and involves the occult (a secret society along the lines of the Golden Dawn, working from the writings of a 17th-century researcher who discovered how to bind lesser angels into statues around London). But it feels very different from both authors. It has more psychological and spiritual depth than Willis, and is more down to earth and much less self-consciously lyrical than Williams, and the main character is one that neither of them would write. It's like the best parts of both writers, plus something neither of them achieves.

The author started out as a nonfiction writer, which is probably why it feels so well researched, and yet the research isn't ground into the reader's face like some authors (including Connie Willis) sometimes do. It's used to give us a moment of observation that makes us feel like we're actually there and then, a passing detail that someone in that place and time might well have observed. It's literary in feel, but not in the trying-too-hard, overly lyrical way that some writers approach being literary. It feels literary because of the aptness of the observations, the way the characters come to understand themselves and each other, and the theme that runs throughout.

I'd summarize that theme as a confrontation and a contrast between people who believe that having power gives them the right to do whatever they want because they can, and people who believe that human freedom and dignity is a higher value. The most obvious level at which this operates is World War II itself, between the Nazis and the beleaguered British. Part of the plot hinges on the moment where Churchill almost didn't become Prime Minister and lead Britain to fight, instead of taking the easier route of folding in the face of the Nazi threat. But it's also operating at the level of the occultists and British fascists (there's considerable overlap between the two groups); real-life occultists often were seekers of power for its own sake, and if they had got it would have used it to exploit others for their own benefit, so this rings true. And at a personal level, it comes down to two women: Lall, an aristocratic British fascist who has got hold of some of the occult research and is determined to use it to impose her vision of how the world should be ordered, regardless of what anyone else thinks or what it costs them, and the protagonist, Iris, who is determined to stop her, who considers the losses Britain is suffering (and that she herself and her beloved are suffering) are a worthwhile price for freedom.

Iris is a complex character. She starts out, for me, at least, unsympathetic; she sleeps with a number of well-off idiots who she has no respect and not much liking for, mostly because she enjoys the sex, though also (very secondarily) because they take her to nice places beforehand. She picks up Geoff, a nerdy young radio engineer, at a bohemian club they both happen to be at, partly to spite Lall, who Geoff is obviously smitten by, though it's equally obvious Lall doesn't want him. But then events both supernatural and otherwise start to occur, and Iris starts to discover new dimensions in the world and in herself. Eventually, we get the story that's been hinted at throughout about the fire that changed her life, and it forms a key part of a devastating conclusion that pulls off the "surprising but inevitable" trick perfectly.

In fact, the whole thing is pulled off very nearly perfectly, with the odd exception (for such a careful researcher) of a family whose individual titles make no sense when taken together. I had a pre-publication version for review from Netgalley, and will mention this issue to the publisher, and it may well be corrected before publication. I did also wonder (view spoiler)[why, given that the characters knew how to free angels from their captivity, they didn't even discuss doing that to the statues in order to deny access to them for time-travel purposes(view spoiler)[, but that was a minor point.

This is by far one of the best books I have read this year, and given that I've read, so far, 150 books in 2025, that's an achievement. Highly recommended. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

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Review: The Element of Fire

The Element of Fire by Martha Wells
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I've tried to read this twice now. The first time, I bounced off the complex setup and wordy descriptions early on, and set it aside for several years. The second time, I made it about halfway through before deciding that I just didn't care about the characters enough to trudge through the kind of tragic war story that I don't enjoy in order to find what happened to them. There are clear hints of two of the characters ending up together, but I didn't much like either of them or think they would be a good couple, so that didn't motivate me either.

My issues were mainly with the setting: a decadent court with a weak king, where the Queen Mother makes most of the effective decisions, and the king's older cousin is clearly the villain. Practically everyone, including one of the two main characters (the captain of the queen's guard), sleeps around constantly as if relationships don't matter even a little bit, and that alone made it not the book for me, even before the violence and gore and meaningless death of innocents really started to kick in. (To be fair, at least in the first half, we're only told, not shown, that the captain is promiscuous; we don't see him with anyone, even the widowed queen, his main lover.)

The two main characters, the captain and the king's older-but-illegitimate half-sister, do seem to be trying to do the right thing in a dark world, but... it wasn't enough for me.

It's well written for the kind of book it is; it just happens that I don't care for that kind of book. It's from the 1990s, meaning it's been scanned and run through OCR, meaning that there are quite a few small typos and misreadings, because publishers seldom do a thorough enough job of cleaning up the books they publish that way. (It's difficult work - I used to do it, and OCR doesn't seem to have improved much in the intervening 30 years, oddly.)

Not for me, might be for you.

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Review: Way of the Wolf

Way of the Wolf by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had this in my TBR folder for a while before starting it, because I assumed it would be very similar to every other Buroker, and I'm not always in that mood.

The characters do feel very familiar. As I've said before, it's like the author has a small number of actors who play all her characters, and while they bring something new to each role, you can recognize the similarities. The (tentative) love interest this time is played by the wacky, self-regarding guy, and the narrator and protagonist is the competent, snarky but slightly insecure woman.

Considered on its own merits, it's a solid piece of work. There's a strong setup: the middle-aged protagonist, Luna, was born a werewolf, left her pack after killing her lover while shifted, and has been taking potions to suppress her change for more than half her life, but now various events are pushing her towards returning to the pack. Her mother is ill, her cousins appear to want to kill her, and there's a mysterious box with a wolf carved on it that she wants to know more about. Her potion supplier has suddenly disappeared, and a lone werewolf (the wacky self-regarding one) has turned up and is poking around for who-knows-what. Machinating somewhere in the background is her creep of an ex-husband. Their two sons, who have left home, are mentioned but play no direct role in the plot. Luna just wants to work quietly at her job managing an apartment complex and save some money for her retirement, but the dynamic situation won't let her do that.

As usual for Lindsay Buroker, there are very few editing errors, just the odd hyphen where it shouldn't be and "palette" for "palate". The characters, while very reminiscent of all her other characters, are engaging, the banter (though, again, familiar) is good as always, the setup is original, and the pacing worked well for me. I'd probably read the whole series if I could get it as a bundle and was in the right mood.

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Review: Six Against the Yard

Six Against the Yard by The Detection Club
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something unusual: a themed anthology contributed to by some of the best-known detective writers of the early 20th century: Margery Allingham, Ronald Knox, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Russell Thorndyke. There's also an article by Agatha Christie, not part of the original volume but published around the same time, about a real-life unsolved murder.

The theme is "the perfect murder," and in between the stories, George W. Cornish, a retired Scotland Yard detective, analyzes the crimes and talks about how they aren't perfect murders at all, and how detectives would go about solving them if they happened in real life. The one that he does concede is probably not soluble is the Sayers, but he manages to pull off a move of "even when I lose, I win" by claiming that it isn't actually a murder.

While Cornish's commentary is interesting, it does go a bit against the grain of the detective genre, which we all secretly know doesn't reflect real life. It's as if a relationship counsellor commented on a book of romance stories, or a Western historian on a book of cowboy stories, or an actual undercover agent on a book of spy stories. It takes the air out of them a bit.

The stories are mostly enjoyable, though. I'd read the Sayers before, in one of her collections, but the others were new to me, and they're varied and interesting - some told in first person, some in third. As with any anthology, some are better than others, but all of them, I thought, were at least competent. The Sayers was the best written, to my mind, though in terms of the actual crime story I most enjoyed Anthony Berkeley's venture into American-style hard-boiled meeting British matter-of-fact domestic crime.

The proofreading of what I assume is a scanned and OCR-interpreted text is, as usual, rough in spots.

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Review: Brigands & Breadknives

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Travis Baldree is one of the best writers of cozy fantasy out there, and here he has produced a book that is pushing the boundaries of how much action you can put into a cozy, while absolutely writing a cozy book. It's not about the fighting. It's about the character growth.

Fern, the rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust , comes to join Viv, the orc who has, until now, been the protagonist of the series, in the town where she's founded her successful coffee shop (see Legends & Lattes ). The idea is that she will set up her bookshop opposite the coffee shop and there will be retail synergy.

But if anyone has earned the right to be a cozy fantasy heretic, it's Baldree, and, as he says in his acknowledgements, “I don't want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life's woes.” Despite a successful launch and the fact that everything's going fine, Fern discovers that her mid-life crisis has not been averted by her move to a different town and reconnecting with her old friend Viv. She gets very drunk, and, happening to spot Astryx, a famous thousand-year-old elf warrior, on the street, on a whim hides in the back of her cart, thus involving herself in adventure. Astryx is on her way to collect a bounty on a chaos-agent goblin she has in custody, and other people want the goblin too - some for the bounty, others for revenge.

Neither Fern nor the ancient elf comes out of the experience unchanged. Along the way, they encounter a sentient ancient blade reforged (as a punishment) into a breadknife. His name is Bradlee, but, given his form, he gets the nickname Breadlee, which he objects to strenuously.

Fern continuing to use a nickname he hates is kind of bullying, or at least rude, but then, Fern is rude. Not just because she swears a lot, though she does, but because she's often blunt and tactless in her interactions with others. It's a wonder she survived in retail for so long, honestly.

Her imperfection, though, is part of what makes this book so good. She isn't brave, in any way; she can't talk to her old friend Viv about the fact that the bookshop isn't working out as she'd hoped, for example. But over the course of the story, she comes to care enough about the people she's with to develop a degree of courage, though, realistically, she's still incapable of fighting effectively. Both she and Astryx find new meaning through their journey together, and new honesty with themselves, and that, to me, is the real story (and the real strength) of the book. It's also part of what makes it cozy, even though it has more fighting than a cozy normally would.

There's not a lot to criticise for me here. It's all minor stuff: Fern gets drunk on whisky at the start of the book, but by the end of the book it's become brandy. There are some commas after adjectives that shouldn't have them, including a couple that come between the adjective and its noun. There's one misplaced apostrophe ("Warden's barracks" when there's more than one warden). The distances shown on the map and the distances described in the narrative don't seem to match up well, in that places that seem the same distance apart on the map can require very different lengths of time to travel between them, not obviously connected to the difficulty of the terrain. Astryx has an elder blade named Nigel, which she makes no attempt to conceal, but which somehow is not part of her legend.

The flaws are so minor, and the strengths so well handled, that I had to give it the full five stars, which I don't hand out particularly often. Not only is it sound in its craft, it has a deeper layer of meaning that is what I look for in a five-star book, and relationships and personal growth are at the heart of that depth. It's cozy in that it doesn't have epic scope - the things that matter in it matter mostly to the people directly involved - but they matter deeply to those people, and that makes for a compelling story.

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Review: A Knack for Metal and Bone

A Knack for Metal and Bone by Kim McDougall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't see nearly as much steampunk fiction these days as I used to a decade ago; the tide seems to have ebbed on it. I enjoy it when it's done well, though - which it rarely is, though this one, I'm glad to say, is largely an exception.

We're on a future post-apocalyptic Earth, it turns out through bits and pieces of backstory doled out in relevant moments rather than in infodumps (good). The eruption of magic six centuries ago filled the world with dangerous monsters. This apparently happened in the 21st century, based on how long ago Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is said to have been written. Much technology was lost, but some of it is now being reconstructed in a new way, using magical power sources. I love a good alternative tech tree based on magic, and this was a big plus for me. I'll note that I wouldn't have picked the book up if I'd known it was post-apocalyptic, since I don't usually enjoy that genre. However, it was far enough post-apocalyptic that it was effectively a secondary world in most respects.

The characters are a bunch of military misfits on a suspicious mission to investigate why a science station out in the Meadows (where the monsters are) has suddenly stopped communicating. There's a princess, which almost put me off - I can't stand princesses as a rule - but she's not at all princessy; she's a mechanic with a magical-technology arm and a mech familiar that turns from a bird into a mouse, all of which is cool. She's not a kid, either. She's 28. And there's a werewolf, also not one of my favourite tropes, but he also has an interesting backstory: he killed his incompetent general to keep his whole unit from being killed. Shifters are discriminated against, so he's in more trouble for being one than for killing the general.

Even though there's a large group of characters in the troop and most of them are introduced at once, I quickly got to be able to distinguish them, which is well done by the author. Most of the minor characters don't have much more than a couple of quirks and a role, but that's fine. The two main characters, who have a relatively slow-burn romantic attraction, have some depth to them, some of which is given in backstory references and flashbacks.

It's relatively well edited for a steampunk book, which are usually awful and full of vocabulary issues. There are a few notable glitches, though. The most common is the good old "let's eat Grandma" error (missing commas around terms of address), but there are a couple of misplaced apostrophes for plural nouns, missing question marks, and a few instances of sloppy typing around the end of a sentence (double period, no period, missing closing quotation mark). Numbers that are not between twenty-one and ninety-nine get hyphens they shouldn't have. There are a couple of vocab errors, but they're not frequent. I marked about 70 issues, which is two or three times the average for most books, but for a steampunk book is not terrible.

The most obvious worldbuilding mistake, which doesn't actually affect anything, is that the author seems unclear on how midnight works. Even in the far north (this appears to be former Canada, based on the wildlife, but a globally warmed version), even in the middle of summer, no matter how short the day is, the sun will never set after midnight. Midnight is the midpoint of the night - you know, the dark bit. It comes after sunset and before sunrise, roughly halfway between the two.

I did also wonder, though, how the city fed itself, given that the river and the plains were both full of monsters, and so not conducive to farming or fishing. Also, how an artificial limb fitted the princess both when she was a child and when she was an adult. And why so many contemporary references (like "didn't get the memo" or "harlequin" or the way people were named) had survived six hundred years of disruption and change. And why, now they had a magical power source which would be capable of driving it, nobody had brought back flight technology.

It's hovering on the border of the Bronze (lowest) and Silver (solid) tier of my annual recommendation list, but I think on balance it falls into high Bronze. Definite issues, both with the editing and the worldbuilding, but some good bones, strong character work and a compelling story.

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Review: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I studied English literature at university, I deliberately stopped at the 17th century. The more 18th-century novels I read now, the more I realize what I was missing out on, though I might not have appreciated them as much back then. Yes, they're rambling and wordy, both in their individual sentences and overall, and I wouldn't put up with that style in a 21st-century novel, but I make allowances for the period. It still meant that I wasn't always in the mood to read this one, which is why it took me nearly two months to finish.

This is a comedy of characters. Told via letters, which have distinct voices for the different authors and often give markedly different perspectives on the same events, it chronicles the doings of a Welsh squire's family on a journey around Britain. It's also a travelogue, with reflections by the various characters (mainly Squire Bramble) on the good and bad aspects of the places they visit, to the point of satire sometimes on the more fashionable ones like Bath. If there's an overall theme, it's the difference between balanced and healthy prosperity, which increases and spreads through wise management and sensible development, and extravagance, which exhausts and finally consumes itself and leads to ruin and poverty, not only in money but also in character.

As well as being a comedy in the "intended to be funny" sense, it's also a comedy in the sense that it ends with marriages rather than deaths. There are several slowly unwinding plot threads that come together relatively quickly at the end.

The head of the family, Squire Bramble himself, is a querulous hypochondriac who comes off as a misanthrope, until you dig beneath the surface and discover that he's a kind and generous man with a short temper because of his real and imagined illnesses. His health improves towards the end of the book, on his visit to Scotland, about which he enthuses (the author was born there, by what I'm sure is no coincidence). Bramble's unmarried sister Tabitha is a type of 18th-century literature (or perhaps of English literature), the wrong-headed woman who can't be reasoned with. Their nephew is superficially a young coxcomb, but again has more depth to him once you get to know him. Their niece is a naive young woman who has fallen in love with an actor - who may actually be a gentleman going under a false name. Partway through, we get the advent of the title character, Humphrey Clinker (eventually revealed not to be his real name), an honest young man who the squire engages as a servant at a low point in his life. This kind act turns out well for everyone, particularly Clinker and the squire. A coincidence eventually comes to light which connects Clinker to the family in a different way.

Clinker becomes involved in the Methodist movement - then an evangelical awakening within the Anglican church, which appealed strongly to the poor - and his honest piety, leavened occasionally with credulous superstition, is a major feature of his character, treated sympathetically for the most part.

If the book has a fault, it's that there are too many characters to easily keep straight at first, some of whom are written to and others written about, and that you sometimes have to check the end of the chapter to see who's writing, though often you can tell from the voice or from the recipient. As I went on with the book, I became more orientated. The stage machinery is visible occasionally, when one letter-writer avoids retelling a good story that has been told by the previous one, saying "I'll tell you that story when I see you."

The Project Gutenberg version has occasional OCR/scan errors, where words have been mistaken for other legitimate words. Because a couple of the letter-writers provide amusement through their misspellings and malapropisms (to a degree that stretches disbelief sometimes, particularly when it's bawdy through no intent of the letter-writer), and because 18th-century English was often spelled (and punctuated) differently from modern English anyway, and had a lot of vocabulary that we've since lost, it's a pardonable fault. I will send them an email about the obvious substitutions I noticed, though. I know I will have missed some through not recognizing the original word.

Overall, though for modern taste it needs a bit of compression and streamlining, this is an enjoyable look at Britain of the later 18th century, its places, people, and social movements and conditions, and a mostly gently satiric comedy full of memorable characters and absurd incidents. If you enjoy, say, The Pickwick Papers or even Three Men in a Boat , you will probably enjoy this literary predecessor of both of them.

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Review: Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey

Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Crofts always writes a clever, twisty plot, and French is a solid toiler with flashes of brilliance who has just enough personality to qualify as a character, rather than the crime-solving plot device he was in the first couple of books. Mrs French is mentioned a couple of times in this book, but never appears.

At the 13% mark, I already had a theory about who had committed the crime and how. That theory proved to be correct as far as it went, though very incomplete, and I didn't know why they'd committed it. Watching French unravel the complicated plot in his dogged way was mostly enjoyable, though occasionally I felt some of the tedium that he himself was feeling. Mostly, the author skips over the tedious police-procedure parts with summary, and only gives us fully developed scenes when French's perseverance (or a credible stroke of luck favouring the prepared mind) yields progress. As always, the sense of place is well conveyed, particularly since many of the scenes are in Northern Ireland, which is where the author grew up. And, as is the tradition with the French books, there's a tense scene at the end when French and his colleagues make the arrest and are vigorously resisted.

The HarperCollins edition is a typical low-effort production that's been run through scanning and OCR and then pushed out without adequate (or, perhaps, any) proofreading for scan errors. There are multiple missing, inserted, misplaced or substituted punctuation marks, and a couple of typos that, if someone had bothered to run a spell check, would have been caught. I read the ebook from my library, but I assume the paperback is just as bad. If you have the option, don't buy this edition; it will only encourage the publisher in their lack of professionalism, plus it's annoying to read.

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Review: Short Fiction

Short Fiction by R.A. Lafferty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Every Lafferty story I've read goes more or less the same.

1. Something weird happens, either to an individual or to the world, for reasons that are largely unexplained and unexplored.

2. Not-especially-ethical people deal with it the way such people do.

3. This doesn't end well.

It's not a formula I love, and I didn't much enjoy these stories, particularly since Lafferty had the misogyny that was common in his time very much on display. It's often mentioned that Lafferty, like Gene Wolfe, was a devout Catholic, but I see very little evidence of it in most of their work; the tone is generally cynical and misanthropic, and rather than being set in a well and benevolently ordered universe, their fiction shows us random, inexplicable events. At least Lafferty's characters mostly behave like human beings, even if they're generally the less admirable type of human being. I've never felt that Wolfe's characters made any sense at all.

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Review: Hot Water

Hot Water by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wodehouse is best known for his series books, but he wrote some wonderful standalones as well, and this is one.

It's very much in the formula, but it's a formula I enjoy, so that's fine. There's a man of action at the heart of it, a decent fellow who nevertheless doesn't scruple about a few falsehoods in a good cause. He's engaged to one of Wodehouse's attractive-but-managing young women, who is determined to develop his sensibilities, whether he wants her to or not. There's also a managing older woman whose husband, having lost his own money and being dependent on hers, is a cypher in the home, and resents it deeply, but doesn't see what he can do about it. His wife wants him to become American Ambassador to France, which is the last thing he wants, and is putting the screws on Senator Opal to make that happen. One of the screws she is putting on Opal is that he accidentally swapped two letters, and sent his refusal of her invitation to his bootlegger, and an order for alcohol to her. Given that he's a prominent Dry (a proponent of prohibition legislation) in public, this is powerful blackmail material, and the letter therefore becomes a McGuffin.

Of the twelve characters with a part to play in the plot, six of them are operating under some form of false identity at some point during the book, and the hero, Packy, ends up using three false identities, if you count pretending to be the Senator's daughter's fiancé. I don't think that's even a record for a Wodehouse hero, but it leads to wonderful complications for all concerned, as Packy tries to retrieve the letter for the Senator, definitely not because he's in love with the Senator's daughter, given that he's engaged to the managing beauty and the daughter is engaged to the wet Bloomsbury novelist. No, it's definitely not for that reason.

Meanwhile, there are four different crooks and an undercover detective operating in the French Riviera chateau where most of the action happens, drawn there by the managing older lady's jewellery (given to her by her husband during his prosperous years, before the stock market crash wiped him out). Also, there's a disreputable and dissolute, but basically harmless, young French aristocrat who's a friend of Packy's and the son of the owner of the chateau.

The farce is high, the prose, while not as crammed full of quotations as Wodehouse often is, sparkles along, the plot is intricate and beautifully handled, and overall it's a good time.

As is often the case with these Cornerstone Digital editions, this one shows clear signs of having been scanned using OCR and then given little or no proofreading, something which it badly needed. There are a great many missing quotation marks, some other missing punctuation (usually at the ends of sentences), and inserted hyphens where, in the print version, a word broke across two lines. There are even a few instances of what look like page numbers dropped into the middle of the text. It's distracting and unprofessional, and I recommend not buying these editions. (I got my copy from the library.)

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Review: The Case of Jennie Brice

The Case of Jennie Brice by Mary Roberts Rinehart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short book - I read it in not much more than a couple of hours - but full of good material. The narrator is a woman from a wealthy family who was cut off by that family completely when she ran away from school to marry an Englishman named Pitman (since deceased). Shockingly, this turned out not to be a great decision, though she's mostly philosophical about the consequences - she's now running a theatrical boarding-house in a dubious part of Pittsburg that floods each winter, near her childhood home. By coincidence, her niece, who has no idea of the relationship, becomes peripherally involved in the story.

Content warning, by the way: a number of people and animals drown in the annual floods. Mrs. Pitman is regretful but philosophical about this too.

Mrs. Pitman is very much the main character, even though as far as the events of the mystery plot go, she's at least as much observer as participant. She is the first to be suspicious when one of her boarders, Jennie Brice, disappears after quarreling with her husband, and she supplies important clues and observations, but the work of solving the case is done mostly by an amateur detective who happens by in a boat, from which he has been feeding animals trapped by the floodwaters. He gets interested in the case, and moves into the boarding house, the better to pursue it. He's retired, with a little money, so he can do what interests him.

Mrs. Pitman's character is well developed, with her occasional musings about the course of her life, her surreptitious encouragement of her niece and the niece's suitor, her rivalry with Molly Maguire next door, and her observations on the mystery.

The mystery takes several twists along the way, and is cleverly resolved. In other books I've read by this author (notably The Man in Lower Ten ), the focus was so much not on the mystery plot that I came out of it disappointed, but this one has a better balance between "story of someone involved peripherally in a mystery" and "mystery story." It also (again, unlike The Man in Lower Ten) doesn't overplay the role of coincidence. There is some coincidence, notably the connection with Mrs. Pitman's niece, but it isn't central to the plot.

Written in 1913, the book shows us a world in which telephones are becoming common, but gas lighting is still used, and there are still a lot more horse-drawn than motorised vehicles. It's an atmospheric period piece with an appealing central character and a well-plotted mystery.

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Review: Dorcas Dene, Detective

Dorcas Dene, Detective by George Robert Sims
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An early "lady detective," who was formerly an actress, so she's amazing at disguises. Her Watson (whose name is Saxon) is a sometime theatrical producer who knew her in her acting days, and becomes a friend of hers and her (blind) husband's. I did suspect that he was a little in love with her, though, as a decent fellow and a friend of the couple, he didn't do or say anything about it.

The big flaw of the stories is that they tend to tell us the solution rather than showing us how it was reached sometimes, though this isn't a universal fault. The very-end-of-the-19th-century setting is interesting (the more so because, having read a few books set in the following decade, I was amazed how quickly things changed). The detective is competent and clever, the Watson admiring and not up to much in terms of figuring out mysteries, but a good man to have nearby in case any action becomes required, and doesn't seem to have any difficulty finding time to assist the detective. In other words, he's a classic Watson - let's remember, Sherlock Holmes had debuted only ten years earlier.

Mrs. Dene takes a pragmatic view of the sometimes scandalous lives of the people she investigates, and is always professional and capable. An enjoyable set of stories, not among the greats, but better than plenty of other now-obscure classic mysteries, many of which deserve their obscurity.

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Review: The Standard Book of Anything

The Standard Book of Anything by Andrea H. Rome
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This, for me, falls into a gap between two very disparate genres. One is cozy fantasy, and the other is dystopian. The scene in which the MC is rendered unconscious for sinister purposes by means of a spa treatment epitomises the clash between an element that should be cozy and an outcome that very much is not. I'm not sure how intentional the mixture is, but for me, it was always on the edge of not working.

Unfortunately, the writing is also in severe need of much more past perfect tense. The past perfect is used sometimes, but it needs to be used consistently. First of all, when referring to events that happened prior to the narrative moment, so that the reader doesn't suffer temporal whiplash trying to figure out the sequence, particularly in one case where the narration starts at one time, flashes back briefly to earlier events, and then returns. It's like a car changing lanes abruptly without signalling. As well as that, though, there are several cases where the author writes something like "she never knew X" when, in fact, she now does know X, having just learned it, and so the phrasing should be "she had never known X".

This isn't the only lack of clarity, either. At one point, a female character cups another female character's chin. This is described as "She cupped her chin," the obvious reading of which is that the character cupped her own chin, but two sentences later we discover that the "she" and the "her" were two different people, meaning I had to go back and re-parse the whole paragraph.

A dog who is a long way off, leading pursuers away, is, suddenly and with no transition, right there with his people.

Then there are the vocabulary issues. "Millennia" used as if it was singular (that would be "millennium"). "Marshall" with two Ls, which is a surname, used in place of the job title "marshal" with one L. "Betraying" for "belying" (most people get those confused in the other direction), "discrete" for "discreet" (a very common error), "bedclothes" for "nightclothes" (bedclothes are sheets and blankets), "peaked" for "peeked." There are misplaced commas now and again, and a couple of misplaced apostrophes. Nothing I haven't seen before, but it all adds up. One I hadn't seen before is "annuls" for "annals."

There's also a big clanging anachronism: "They weren't on the empress's radar." That's the kind of mistake you can only commit if you don't give a moment's thought to the literal meaning of the cliche you are using. This has got past half a dozen beta readers and an editor, according to the author's note at the end, so I can only imagine there were a lot of other issues distracting them from it.

Em, the protagonist, while she is one of those infuriating characters who gets in trouble by making the same stupid decision repeatedly, is well-intentioned, and in a difficult situation that's none of her making, but stepping up to try to solve it. That is what kept me reading, despite the mechanical problems. Her use of magic items at one point is moderately clever.

She's a person who fixes things, as in a handyperson - that's her occupation. This is the second book I've read recently where a young woman is portrayed as capable by making her someone who does home repairs (the other being Partridge Up a Pear Tree (and Dragons) ), but I felt this one did a better job of incorporating it into her character and making it part of how she approached the world, rather than just being a decal that said, against all other evidence, that she was competent and practical. I like a competent young woman protagonist, though I prefer ones who don't keep making the same stupid mistake.

The world is one where magic use is fading. The government (headed by an empress) is actively suppressing it, in fact, but it turns out there's a good reason - magic has caused a lot of problems. Still, the goon squad who come in search of one of the protagonist's friends to arrest him for magic use is needlessly brutal and bullying, and their captain, who later is portrayed as not so bad after all, does nothing to stop them, something that Em doesn't confront him about. Em's village has lost its guardian tree, which was suppressing negative emotions and producing a cozy-style village artificially - perhaps the whole book is a critique of the cozy genre? The loss of the tree causes a surge of negative emotions that tears the village apart, and Em leaves to find a solution, having a series of adventures. She's guided, or misguided, by the magical book of the title, which hints at directions for her to follow but never tells her everything she needs to know in order to get it right.

Em echoes, but never just follows, the fantasy cliche of the young orphan craftsperson who must leave the village when it's destroyed, encounters helpful and loyal companions and gains useful magic items; that side of the story is genre-savvy, and I think there may be some thought going on about artificial utopias, dystopias, negative consequences of attempting to make people happy and contented artificially, and the contentment of one group being purchased at the price of tragedy for another. (view spoiler)[Unfortunately, the resolution doesn't back up the direction of "you can't fix things with magic, but you can fix them with skin" (possibly misremembered Granny Weatherwax quotation). The magic tree isn't a good way of helping people, but another magic plant with healing properties instantly gets the villagers over their mental and emotional confusion and distress and enables them to go back to being sane and neighbourly. The text says "without enchantment," but that's simply not true. The solution was magic all along. That struck me as backing down from what could have been a more powerful and developed theme. (hide spoiler)]

If the execution had been better, and the resolution had stuck the landing, these underlying ideas could have worked, but it's not enough just to have a good idea about a theme; you have to pay attention to the details that convey it to the reader on a sentence-by-sentence level, with clarity and accuracy that let the reader absorb the story undistracted by mechanical glitches, or by having to re-parse poorly phrased sentences. For me, that quality wasn't there, and this lands in the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list, along with other books that could so easily have been so much better. There's definitely potential here, but I don't feel it's been reached.

Note: As of next year, I will be scoring books at this level three stars. I'm keeping four stars until the end of the year for consistency in my annual Best of the Year list for 2025.

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