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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Review: The Charm Collector Box Set: Books 0-2

The Charm Collector Box Set: Books 0-2 by Melissa Erin Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, the prequel novella had me looking forward to an urban fantasy with an established married couple, sensible, capable, underpowered but making up for it with intelligence, private investigators who know about the hidden supernatural world. Sure, the husband didn't have a lot of personality - the wife was the narrator - but I assumed that would change as we went along.

Book 1 starts - and we're in the viewpoint of their daughter (in utero in the prequel). The dad is dead, the mother has disappeared, and the daughter, far from being a PI, makes her living by stealing artefacts, and is also implied to be making a number of other poor life choices. Not what I was hoping for at all, and not nearly as appealing to me. I'd much rather read about a smart, capable person solving problems that aren't of their own making in the cause of the greater good. Also, it felt (at least at first) like it rendered the prequel more or less irrelevant.

However, as the book goes on, she does start solving problems not of her own making in the cause of the greater good, along with several other initially unpromising characters, so I started enjoying it again.

In the second book, the allies assembled in the first book are dodging the authorities and trying to solve the threat, split into two groups, with separate interwoven narratives. The main character's thread continues in first person, and her friend's story is in third person. The alternation isn't chapter-by-chapter, which I think was a good choice, and usually switches at moments of high tension, which is the best way to do a split narrative. There's a slow-burn romance subplot for the MC's friend, but the parties to it are mostly focused on the main plot. And eventually, the events of the prequel do become relevant again. It gets gripping and impactful - a lot of the best writing is in the second book, but it needs the first book to set it up.

The world is interesting, with hidden supernatural cities dotted across the USA (and presumably the world), where magical technology functions, sometimes just replacing mundane technology (magical lights instead of electric ones), sometimes doing things mundane tech can't do (teleportation stations). The thing is, magic is said to be limited on earth, so why use it to do what mundane technology is capable of? It's not because mundane tech doesn't work; it does. Yet blue "fae lights" instead of more natural-spectrum LEDs are the choice for lighting, including flashlights, in the hidden cities. Perhaps it's a vibe/nostalgia/hanging-on-to-culture thing.

The copy editing is mostly fine, with the occasional small issue. There are a few places that need an apostrophe, but when an apostrophe does occur, it's in the right place. There's the odd homonym error, too, of the kind that a lot of people make, like leach/leech (always a tricky pair), tick/tic, base/bass, borne/born - it's surprising how often people write "borne" (carried) when they mean "born" (birthed) - plus a few other vocabulary choices that are either highly unusual or just wrong for what is evidently the intended meaning. Those mistakes are widely scattered, though.

There are other minor glitches. For example, a continuity issue: the MC, on her way to a teleportation station, worries about whether her stored-value card has enough credit on it, because she's not carrying her bank card or any cash. And then at the other end of her teleport, she gets a cab. Paying for it how? There's also a piece of dialog where the speaker is trying to say "I'm not out of your league, you're out of my league," but actually says "You're not out of my league, I'm out of your league." Since it isn't called out as a fumble by the character, I assume it's a fumble by the author. And a zoo established in the early 20th century and abandoned not long afterwards is very much set up like a modern zoo, including features like an "insect exploratorium" (the word "exploratorium" was first used in the 1960s).

So there are opportunities to tighten up and improve it further, but the heart of it is sound - a strong, distinct cast with interesting synergy and some push and pull between them, a compelling problem for them to solve that they have to push hard and risk everything for, plenty of action that means something, an original world (as far as I know) that mostly makes sense, and skilled tension-building cuts back and forth once it splits into two storylines. The ending is suitably dramatic. Overall, I enjoyed it, and will look out for other books in the series and from the author.

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Review: The Ministry of Witches: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

The Ministry of Witches: A Cozy Fantasy Novel by Dael Astra
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

A frustrating mixture of original and needlessly derivative, well-edited but with one huge persistent fault, emotionally sound and then emotionally unconvincing, predictable and unexpected, and also overly wordy for my taste. It's hard to rate as a result.

I say "original but needlessly derivative" because, although I don't think this is actually set in the Harry Potter universe - HP is not the most consistent universe, so it's hard to tell for sure - it uses multiple terms from that universe: galleons and sickles (the monetary units), house elves, Whomping Willows, gillyweed, the floo network. None of these terms are even slightly necessary to the story that's being told - they could very easily be something else, and nothing would be lost - so it's risking a lawyer's letter for no good reason. The rest of the worldbuilding, though done with a light hand, is sound and original and fit for purpose, so I haven't given it my "weak-worldbuilding" tag.

There are very few editing errors, and the big one that it does have is something many people won't notice, because almost nobody understands how the coordinate comma rule works. The simple explanation is that English has a preferred adjective order, which goes "number-opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose," and if you have two adjectives that are in different categories, they don't need a comma between them, because they can only go in that order and feel correct; it's only if they're both in the same category that you need a comma, to signal that they're both, as it were, modifying the noun as equals.

This means, for instance, that number words like "single," "one," "two," "few" or "dozen" will basically never be coordinate and should not have commas after them. Nor should "each" or "own" or a great many other adjectives that this author sticks a comma after. I'm used to authors getting this wrong occasionally, especially in edge cases. These are not edge cases, and they're constant. I counted 40 instances in the first 10% of the book, which suggests that there are several hundred in total. It made it, for me at least, a chore to read. The most important part of the coordinate comma rule, and the one too few authors observe, is the part that tells you when not to use a comma, and this author has clearly never heard of it, and has faulty intuition on the subject to boot.

The author's style is lush, which means most of the nouns get at least two adjectives, sometimes three, and they almost always get commas between them, and about 70% of the time they shouldn't. It's wordy in general; repetitive (it's hammered home at least once too often that Aleda isn't doing command-and-control but empathy and empowerment), and, for me, outstayed its welcome by having too many wrap-up chapters after the main resolution. I personally prefer a compact style, and this is the opposite of that.

Multiple chapters should begin with the word "the," but oddly do not. Something to do with the drop caps, perhaps?

Anyway, the story. The protagonist, Aleda, is a humble gardening witch who is suddenly elevated to Minister of Witches (why that title, when it's neither a national office, nor British, but part of the government of New York City, and when male magic users are called wizards?) by the invocation of a peculiar old administrative rule on the departure in disgrace of the previous minister. The previous minister was a corrupt politician whose "modernizing" over a 20-year period has thrown the whole magical system out of whack, though the consequences of this mostly seem to be low-key disturbing and disruptive rather than, at least so far, catastrophic, even though the Ministry is supposed to head off catastrophes, and we later see it doing so. With her gardener's intuition, Aleda is able to restore the magical ecosystem to balance, in a series of emotionally sound and believable events. (view spoiler)[And then she has a crisis of confidence, which I didn't believe, either in its origin or in her recovery from it. And then she convinces an implacable foe of the Ministry, who is trying to pull its budget, to change his mind - and I didn't believe that either. I thought a real person who held the attitude he held would have accused the witches of fakery, since the crisis they averted wasn't verifiable, and also just because people who hold ideology-based opinions are rarely convinced by any amount of evidence. The author, in other words, doesn't sell these emotional events to me. Other readers, no doubt, will differ.

The archivist has a big flashing neon sign above his head that says "Enemies to Lovers." I suspected that trope was coming when he was first described, at his introduction, as "handsome" (his appearance, apart from his clothing, is never otherwise described, as is the case with most of the characters; only the twins get a hair colour, red, which I suspect is an echo of HP's Fred and George). I was sure of it by the time he was called "handsome" for the third time. And I was right. It was totally predictable. Yet most of what goes on in the book is not predictable or tropey at all. (hide spoiler)]

Continuity is not a strength. After the Board does the thing that gives Aleda the "Minister" title, they are never mentioned again except in reference back to that event, and their members (apart from one) never play any further role. The number of people on the Board also seems inadequate for the number of factions that are later described. There are several continuity issues within a chapter, too, such as when someone says "We did it!" and, after another couple of lines of dialog separated by a lot of descriptive waffle, several pages later, '"We did it," Aleda corrected.' Except she isn't correcting, because that's exactly what the other character said. It feels like things have been changed in editing and the rest of the chapter still left with the earlier version, creating a contradiction if you're reading closely.

It is absolutely cozy. There's an enchanted tea trolley that dispenses the exact beverage you need for the mood you're in. There's a wise cat. It is as cozy as you could possibly wish, and the crises are solved not by power and control but by listening and empathizing and finding ways for systems and people to work together. That part is great. It just falls into the all-too-common basket of "could so easily be so much better" because of completely avoidable faults: the unnecessary use of terms from another author's universe, the constant muffing of the coordinate comma rule, a predictable trope signalled far too clearly far too early, some emotional shifts that I didn't feel were justified well enough, minor continuity glitches, wordy prose that could stand tightening. The right developmental editor and (please) copy editor could make this amazing with relatively little work. As it stands, it's an awkward mixture of rare strengths and unfortunate weaknesses, and the weaknesses land it in the lowest (Bronze) tier of my annual recommendation list.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and further changes may take place before publication.

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Review: Partridge Up a Pear Tree (and Dragons)

Partridge Up a Pear Tree (and Dragons) by Rachel Taylor Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I grew up in a family where the women were capable and pragmatic, which isn't unusual in New Zealand. Accordingly, I prefer to read about women like that, and fortunately there are plenty of fictional heroines who are. Sasha, the protagonist of the first book of this series, for example.

Unfortunately, at least from my point of view, Joey Partridge, the protagonist of this book, is not that, even though she fixes things around the house (something that felt to me as if it had been tacked on to make her seem more competent). She's a big ball of crippling anxiety wrapped in a thick layer of codependency, and I personally found her trying to spend time with. She's surrounded by people who are incapable of listening to her, and treats this as normal and not a reason to, for example, refuse to go out with them. She has crying jags so severe as to be completely debilitating, and under stress she spills a desperate stream of consciousness that causes all kinds of trouble, not only for her but for the people around her. It got her previous boyfriend arrested by the Chinese state security forces, for example, which not only resulted in her family and his being thrown out of China but also broke their relationship completely.

He, of course, refuses to listen to her apologies. He's a brooding musician. At one point he describes her as the complete opposite of what we know her to be through her POV - fearless, happy, carefree - and then says she doesn't get him. Project much? (To be fair, when they were together she was able to be more like he describes, at least outwardly - but that in itself is a problem, in fact several problems.)

Her parents, and his, are part of a Canadian government department that researches dragons, called in to Newfoundland because of the events of the previous book. They move around a lot, researching dragons in various parts of the world; her parents are emotionally distant and impractical, and (you'll be surprised to learn) don't listen to her when she tries to tell them that she wants to pick her own college rather than the various ones they and several other family members have arranged for her.

For some reason - I suspect because otherwise she couldn't conceivably be the protagonist - the dragons have decided they like Joey, based on no acquaintance at all, and only she will do to help in finding out who is trying to do something initially vague to the incubating dragons that all of the fuss is about. She spends the first quarter of the book refusing the call, arguing (quite plausibly) that she's a poor choice for the role, engaging in extreme teenage angst, not being listened to by basically anyone, and starting up a new relationship that is obviously doomed (thus providing the classic YA love triangle), interspersed with flashbacks to the backstory in China.

She turns out to be surprisingly good at investigating, despite continuing high teen drama and a series of terrible choices and major wimp-outs on her part. Her handler/dragon liaison, Bob, says at one point that she's less incompetent than he'd expected, and honestly I felt the same. For me, it was the mystery and the investigation that kept me reading despite the teen angst - so I was somewhat frustrated when the resolution to the teen angst came before, and delayed, the resolution of the mystery plot, with no sense of urgency even though one was called for.

Other readers will no doubt enjoy the parts I didn't. The relationship and emotional dynamics are well developed and realistic, to be clear, so this isn't about the author's skill but the reviewer's taste.

Something else I enjoyed besides the investigation plot was the antics of the dragons, who are intelligent but in a way that doesn't completely map to human ways of thinking. They name themselves after dragons from fantasy literature, like Ramoth and Temeraire, which I also liked.

I had a pre-publication version for review via Netgalley, and one thing I did notice about it was that the editing was in a much better state than the previous book. I suspect a good copy editor has gone through and largely corrected the author's terrible overhyphenation habit, though they've missed a couple of cases where there's a hyphen between a verb and the pronoun which is its object (why would anyone do that?), and there are still one or two places where there's a hyphen between an adjective and the noun it's modifying. This includes "magical-creatures," which was everywhere in the first book, and the editor may have decided to keep it consistent (even though that means consistently wrong). There's also frequently a comma used after "of course" when it's just being used to agree with a previous statement, which is a common error encouraged by MS Word's inaccurate grammar checker. As always with books I get via Netgalley, there may be further editing to come after I see it and before it's published.

For me, it was a difficult-to-rate mix of strong storytelling, a character I didn't care for (though she does develop), and a cheeky shortcut by the author to justify why that character is even involved. Joey's character arc, from total emotional bomb site to able to stand up for herself and cope, came late and rapidly, which stretched my suspension of disbelief a little, though it is true that having to focus on the needs of others - in this case, the dragons - is the most likely thing to get someone in internal crisis to pull themselves together and break out of their downward spiral.

Overall, I'm putting it in the Bronze (lowest) tier of my annual recommendation list, because it wasn't quite the book I'd hoped for and didn't fit my taste well. If that hadn't been true, it would have won a place in Silver, since it's soundly written and has some insight into human relationships - just between humans I don't particularly care to read about. Your mileage is highly likely to vary.

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Review: Arrow of Fortune

Arrow of Fortune by Jacquelyn Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The world tour continues, with our characters off to India this time, the origin of a quarter of Constance's heritage.

The improvement in mechanics continues from book to book, which is great to see. Here, the main issue I noticed was that the author puts a comma after "of course" when the sentence is simply agreeing with a previous statement, which is not usual usage (MS Word will recommend it, but, as is so often the case, MS Word is wrong). Otherwise, it's pretty clean, though I did spot a few Americanisms, anachronisms and vocabulary errors. I had a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, so these minor issues may well be fixed for publication.

Even though I'd read the other books comparatively recently, I didn't remember their plots as well as I probably needed to in order to pick up on everything that was mentioned from the previous books. The characters themselves are strongly enough drawn that I remembered them, though.

The book wears its politics openly; the late-19th-century protagonists share common early-21st-century attitudes to race, imperialism, colonialism, homosexuality, and sexuality in general, while acknowledging that this sets them against the norm of their society.

There are two strong romance subplots, different from each other, one involving a woman who is dead set against the institution of marriage but wants to be with her beloved openly, and the other involving a couple who are in the process of discovering that they want to be a couple, despite their very disparate personalities. Throughout, there's a strong theme of how important it is to accept people as they truly are without asking them to change, which I'm not sure is a great idea in its very strongest form. Part of the point of opposites attracting, for me, is that they moderate each other towards more balance by learning from each other's strengths, and I didn't see that brought out explicitly, though it might be happening implicitly.

Anyway, this manages to be inspired by thrilling pulp novels while having a 21st-century consciousness, and mostly succeeds in walking the tightrope between those two. It's a well-done series, and I look forward to the next episode, which looks like it will occur in Korea.

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Review: The Miss Silver Mysteries Volume One: Grey Mask, The Case Is Closed, and Lonesome Road

The Miss Silver Mysteries Volume One: Grey Mask, The Case Is Closed, and Lonesome Road by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up this book because I'd read another Wentworth, The Fire Within , which isn't a mystery novel, although initially it looks like it's going to be one. I was impressed with the author's handling of the character relationships, and thought I might get something with a bit more depth than the average pulpy mystery of the early 20th century.

Well, the first book, Grey Mask, was a disappointment to me. It's one of those books which convey the impression that London is a small village with a population of about two dozen people, based on how frequently the characters cross paths by pure random chance, and there were no fewer than three Convenient Eavesdrops, my least favourite plot device. (view spoiler)[Also, two separate characters who are believed to be dead turn out not to be. (hide spoiler)]

There is a fraught relationship between a man and a woman, who used to be engaged but now are not; this seems to be the author's speciality. But the mystery/thriller aspects appear cribbed from books in which they're done better, such as The Black Star by Johnston McCulley (criminal conspiracy, led by a masked figure, ordinary people manipulated into being part of it, known by numbers) or Edgar Wallace's The Man Who Knew (unassuming detective who can find out anything about anyone - though "sleuthess" Miss Silver doesn't have any associates that we see evidence of, so she appears, implausibly, to be doing all her own legwork).

Like the "Man who Knew," unfortunately Miss Silver doesn't actually solve the mystery, either. The villain is self-identified (when the characters get too close to the secret, so that part is not without character agency), and foiled by complete chance. It's not in any way a "fair play" mystery; two separate characters have been moving behind the scenes, and end up just giving us exposition of what we couldn't have guessed and the detective didn't work out.

It also contains one of the most maddeningly silly young women I've ever seen depicted in print, though given that I try to avoid characters like that, I've probably missed a good many. She is supposed to be maddeningly silly, though, so no demerits to the author for that. There's also a highly intelligent woman who takes important action which saves her and her love interest, so that's something. But overall, I felt it was an author writing outside her genre, not doing a great job with the genre elements, and patching the plot together with coincidences and eavesdrops.

The second book in this collection, The Case is Closed, also relies on coincidence to a degree. I give an exemption for inciting incidents being coincidental, but the inciting incident is not the last time the heroine, Hilary (who has busted up with her fiancé, just like the heroine in the first book), has a chance meeting with the servant couple whose testimony clinched the conviction of her cousin's husband for murdering his uncle. It's like there's a gravitational well pulling them together in random places. Hilary is in those places investigating, but coincidence still plays a big role.

Hilary's definitely-no-longer-fiancé, Henry, is the one who engages Miss Silver, and keeps asking her to investigate further even though all his internal arguments are against doing so. The suspicion is that the servant couple was lying in their testimony, and that the imprisoned man's cousin, who inherited under a new will executed on the day of the uncle's death, somehow is involved, although he has an apparently rock-solid alibi four hundred miles from the murder.

It's a promising setup, and soon we have real danger for Hilary, and stronger grounds for suspicion, and Hilary and Henry are clearly back together even if she won't admit it. They have a kind of war-of-the-sexes thing going on, where each one thinks that if they don't stand strong, the other one will walk all over them, because he/she doesn't listen, and if they don't win, they'll lose. Pro tip from someone who's been married going on 27 years: this is a terrible way to run a relationship. Very much how a lot of relationships were conducted at the time, though, with New Women starting to challenge masculine dominance. Unfortunately, it's never truly resolved, though there are hints by the end that they may have both learned something.

The denouement is thrilling and suspenseful, and even though Henry does (as I predicted) burst in and save Hilary at the psychological moment, she does something brave and effective first, so I didn't mind so much. I'd worked out how the crime was done some considerable time before it was laid out by Miss Silver, but the process of getting to the resolution was still enjoyable.

With the third book, Lonesome Road, the author finally seems to have got a sense of Miss Silver. In the first two books, she's a dowdy-looking middle-aged spinster who knits (typically for her stereotype), writes things down carefully in exercise books, and implausibly knows things about people by no clearly articulated mechanism. She's an archetype combined with a plot device. In this book, she suddenly develops a personality, rather a tart-but-kindly one, and we get to see inside her head, not least by seeing what it is she's writing in those books.

A wealthy woman with a large collection of family hangers-on (cousins and the like, mostly), who stand to inherit money from her, is receiving death threats and murder attempts, and asks Miss Silver to come and investigate, so we get to see her on site and active rather than largely in her consulting room. Things quickly become suspenseful, and everyone's a potential suspect, and there's a young woman also (one of the cousins) who seems to be in trouble and foolishly won't confide in Miss Silver.

It's an unusual detective story in that it's not solving a murder, but an attempted murder, and trying to prevent an actual murder (or, as it turns out, two murders), and the police never become involved, because Miss Silver's client won't set them on her relatives, no matter how awful those relatives may be. Also, (view spoiler)[there's a Disney Villain Fall of sorts that makes it unnecessary to bring the murder attempts to the attention of the authorities. (hide spoiler)] I didn't spot the would-be murderer at all, though Miss Silver's explanation makes total sense of why she did.

There's a small thread of continuity running through the three books, in that in both books 2 and 3, the person seeking Miss Silver's help has heard about her through the main character in the previous book. I wonder how far into the 32-book series this was sustained? I will probably find out, because after an unpromising start, this turned into a series I definitely want to continue with. It's a fortunate chance that I picked up the three-in-one from my library, because if I'd only read the first one, I might not have continued. The second was much better, and the third really good. Averaging them out, I'm putting this whole collection in the Silver tier of my annual best-of list, though the first would have been Bronze at best, and the third is knocking on the door of Gold.

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Review: The Porcelain Mask: a detective story

The Porcelain Mask: a detective story by John Jay Chichester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one's built from the ground up for melodrama, and there is plenty of that. Everyone runs around very dramatically regretting their life choices, and then a woman is shot.

Extensive plot summary coming; some of it could be considered spoilers, because it's not known right at the start, but I'll stop at the point of the murder, so that you have the setup for it.

A blended family. The father died some years previously, leaving his widow, Mrs. Gilmore; her daughter from a previous marriage, Joan Sheridan; and Kirklan Gilmore, his son from a previous marriage. They have a nice place in the country outside New York, but are not wealthy, just comfortably off.

Kirklan is a novelist, who has had some success with his first novel, in part thanks to Joan, who has given him some of his best material. In gratitude, he sends her on a trip for a month, and while she is away, meets and, an ill-considered week later, marries a woman named Helen, about whom he knows very little. Joan comes back to find that her stepbrother (who she's in love with) is married to someone she's never met, and that this interloper has insisted on moving into Joan's bedroom, the best room in the house. Joan is, understandably, furious.

Kirklan goes into New York to see his publisher, and the publisher, who used to employ Helen (which is how the couple met), swears he sees her going into a disreputable lodging-house. Kirklan dismisses this, but when he talks to her at home, she asks him for a lot of money and is evasive about why. What we know and he doesn't is that she had gone to see her no-good husband - to whom she is still legally married - because he's blackmailing her by threatening to reveal her bigamy. He's a criminal and a drunkard, and she wishes she'd never married him, but she did. She's not in love with Kirklan, but sees him as a safe haven - a haven that's now threatened.

By one of those coincidences that authors of this period used so freely, the illustrator for Kirklan's next book, a man he knows and considers a friend, comes to stay at the house so they can work together, and recognizes Helen as the woman responsible for his brother's death (we don't know how yet). Kirklan, already suspicious because of the earlier lies, notices their reaction to each other when they meet. When his friend won't tell him the story, Kirklan flies off the handle and attacks him.

The artist fights him off, and Kirklan goes off for a walk to calm down. He stumbles in after midnight, wakes the butler to let him in, and is with him having a drink when they hear a scream and then a shot upstairs. They run up to find Helen shot dead. Various clues point to murder, and it looks as if it could only be one of three people: harmless Mrs. Gilmore senior, Joan (who we know hates Helen, and who is found sobbing in her room, and whose scream the butler initially thought it was that he and Kirkland heard), and the artist (who we know, and the investigators soon find out, has reason to take revenge on Helen). What they don't know but we do is that Helen's no-good husband has located her, on the run from the police, and forced her to hide him upstairs. The gun is one he took from a police detective he assaulted in order to escape arrest, but it was in Helen's possession, not his, prior to the shooting.

So, at this point we have three equally plausible suspects. Let the investigation commence!

There are two investigators. One, the official police, is the sergeant whose gun was taken after he was hit over the head by Helen's not-legally-ex. His turning up is not a coincidence; he's pursuing a lead, and the fugitive, who has been traced to the area. He quickly becomes involved in the investigation, because the local constable is out of his depth, being more used to catching speeders than murderers.

The unofficial investigator is a reporter known as "Wiggly" Price, because his ears wiggle when he's in the grip of strong emotion. This is almost his only distinguishing feature, but it gets a lot of mentions. He isn't convinced by the most obvious initial explanation, nor by the next most obvious explanation, and keeps prying and pressing until he finally solves the case.

What he doesn't appear in any hurry to do, and what we in fact never see him do, is file a story, which is what he's supposedly there for. His status as a newspaper reporter is what gets him involved, but after that, he barely acts like one, instead acting like a detective. That (along with the overly heightened emotional drama) was almost enough to bring the rating down for me, but it's a twisty, clever plot with more red herrings than a Soviet trawler, so I'll leave it in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list.

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