Review: Flowers for the Judge

Flowers for the Judge by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dorothy L. Sayers was perhaps as accomplished a writer as Margery Allingham, but Allingham is both more accessible to someone who hasn't had Sayers' education and also more consistently good (there are one or two dud Wimseys, but so far I haven't been disappointed by a Campion, and in fact all but the first one have been five-star reads for me).

Campion is clever, despite his frequent pose of upper-class British idiocy, and this is the second instance in which he works out who the murderer is but is faced with the difficulty of proving it - the previous book, Death of a Ghost , confronts him with the same problem, though the solution is quite different.

The books aren't written much to a formula, in fact. Here we're in the world of London publishing, in the century-old house of Barnabas, headquartered in an old and quirky building and run by eccentric partners. (When none of the three partners are available, it seems to run quite adequately, helmed by the invaluable "secretary" who clearly is the actual manager.) We get that sense that no modern pastiche I've read so far has managed to capture, of a claustrophobic, ramshackle 1930s London where the buildings are often dilapidated, dirty, cramped, chilly and impractical, the fog is yellow with sulphur from the burning of coal, and the people are mostly too stuck in their ways of thinking to recognise the truth when it's in front of them. Actually, the old building full of random bric-a-brac reminded me of a brilliant but eccentric and outright dodgy publisher I worked for in the 1990s, but I have the impression that this was the norm in the 1930s as it would not be today.

One of the partners, Paul, who is in a loveless marriage, has gone off somewhere on a Thursday and not been heard of by Sunday. His wife Gina, who is used to him being erratic but generally does at least hear news of him if he disappears for a while, is concerned enough to call in Campion, who she knows, to quietly check into things. One of the other partners, Mike, Paul's cousin, is sent down to the "vault" at the bottom of the office building to get something and comes back with it. He is in love with Gina, but hasn't done anything about it. But a day or two later, Paul's body is discovered in the vault, having apparently been there since Thursday, in a position which suggests that Mike couldn't have possibly missed seeing him on the Sunday. Mike is, naturally, arrested and put on trial for the crime.

Campion (and everyone else who knows him) is convinced he's innocent, but things look bad for him, and locating the actual murderer is complicated by the fact that the scene was hopelessly compromised before the police were called in. Campion does figure it out, though, and it puts him in deadly danger, before a resolution that I absolutely did not see coming. One of the things I like about these books is that if I work something out from the clues the author has given, so does the detective, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they can wrap up the case as a result.

Meanwhile, we get some beautifully observed character work, including some comic scenes with Lugg, Campion's manservant, who has "bettered himself" and is trying to be posh, without notable success. He's developed an exaggerated consciousness of their social position, and opposes Campion being involved in anything relating to crime or scandal, especially since there's a chance Campion is going to inherit a ducal title from an unspecified relative. He has, in fact, ambitions to be Jeeves, which are destined to remain unfulfilled because of his essential Luggness.

Allingham is wonderful at the craft of writing, and without ever indulging in pretentious literary prose can place the reader completely in the scene and give a sense of depth to the characters that I don't often see in genre fiction. What a pity, then, that Random House's ebook edition is littered with uncorrected scan errors, such as missing or inserted punctuation or outright misread words (like "bang" for "hang"). This is a fine piece of writing that deserves more care from a publisher who is no doubt making a steady income from it. Get a different edition if you can (mine came via my library).

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Review: Gunman's Bluff

Gunman's Bluff by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another rip-roaring pulp story from Wallace. It's littered with moments where the author used pure coincidence to get characters together in the right place for the plot to happen, as was common at the time, but at the same time it has a bit more complexity than the typical thud-and-blunder thriller, and I'm inclined to almost forgive the coincidences as a result.

A young couple who have known each other most of their lives are engaged, in that rather passionless way that young couples from the wealthier echelons of British society seemed to get engaged between the wars. Her brother commits suicide in despair at his debts, and the note he leaves seems to implicate her wealthy fiancé as a contributing factor for giving him bad investment advice and then not helping him when he lost everything. This breaks up the relationship immediately after the wedding, much to the delight of the late brother's friend, a confidence trickster who has designs on the woman, and the groom disappears.

Meanwhile, the groom has helped - or attempted, ineffectually, to help - a criminal dobbed in by the con man, who's afraid of him and wants him out of circulation. The criminal, the gunman of the title, is grateful for the gesture, and goes out of his way to a tremendous extent to help in return when everything turns bad for his would-be rescuer.

It turns very bad indeed, and the poor fellow has a rough time of it, while we learn more about the criminal machinations that are going on and also see the young woman go through an emotional journey, the gunman attempting to reform, and a jovial middle-aged police detective keeping an eye on everything that's going on and dispensing keenly judged advice. Along the way there's plenty of varied action and suspense, thrillingly told in the Mighty Wallace Manner.

I think I'm safe in saying that if you enjoy Edgar Wallace at all, you'll enjoy this one.

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Review: The Carousel of Forgotten Places

The Carousel of Forgotten Places by S. Hati
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up because of the original premise, but ended up being disappointed with the execution.

The protagonist and narrator is Ryka, a woman of Indian heritage brought up in the US, who has spent almost five centuries as the Timekeeper in a magical pocket dimension created by a time god, from which she undertakes expeditions to repair timelines that have somehow become corrupted (exactly how or why this happens routinely is not explored in any detail). The founding time god's brother Everest is generally around and plays an important role in the time repairs. Despite being demisexual, or perhaps because of it, she is in lust with him, but doesn't want to mess up their working relationship by doing anything about it.

Ryka is self-pitying, emotionally immature despite her 500 years, and one of those people who make sure that everyone around them shares in their bad mood, and she makes some poor decisions even though she should have both the intelligence and the experience to know better. Everest is flaky, unreliable and lacking in empathy. That was never a ship I was going to be on board with; I have to like both members of a couple to care about whether they end up together, and I didn't like either of them.

Among a good few small imperfections, the most prominent one for me was the implausible reason for the MC to understand languages. Because she has been visiting various places and times for a little less than 500 years, she has "developed fluency in most languages" (according to her). There are about 7000 languages currently spoken in our world, and of course many more (and many mutually unintelligible earlier versions) throughout history, and this book has divergent timelines too, so... well over 10,000. And she later claims it is "thousands," so the "most" is probably not intended as a rhetorical flourish, or to refer only to languages with a large number of speakers.

Clearly nobody, no matter how good their memory, could become fluent in "most" of those 10,000 languages, even in 500 years. Even if we're very generous and say it's 4000 (most of 7000), that's a language every six weeks, and we know (because we're told) that her memory isn't supernaturally perfect. It's absurd.

It would be absurd even if she was immersed in each language continuously for the whole six weeks, doing nothing but learning it by constantly interacting with native speakers. But she's not. She undertakes very short missions about once a week, each one to a random place and time and never to the same place and time on two consecutive occasions, and actively avoids engaging with anyone if she can help it. The languages claim is, honestly, less plausible than if you just say that her supernatural role as the Keeper of Time gives her fluency in all languages. Sure, she also has a magical library which can presumably produce books from which she could learn languages, but that's not the claim she's making.

If we set that nonsense aside, though, and assume that the excess hyphens and vocabulary glitches will be fixed between the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley and when the book comes out, and ignore the fact that the romance is between two people I don't much care for or about, the book is... OK. Fairly simple plot (Ryka messes up and has to fix it, and this helps her somehow to get over herself at last), interesting and whimsical world, secondary characters that are adequate for their roles.

I didn't love it. That's probably just me; other people seem to like it fine. Perhaps you will too.

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Review: A Particular Boy Among Air Particles

A Particular Boy Among Air Particles by Irvin Embalsado
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The author has set out, I think, to produce a book in somewhat the style of Brandon Sanderson. The difference is that while Sanderson's worldbuilding always has some off-the-wall aspect to it, he always manages to make that difference, and the rest of their world, feel plausible, while this one never achieved that as far as I was concerned.

It's set on a very small world. There are six landmasses, described as "continents," but the smallest of them can be seen all at once from a hot air balloon, and they're no more than a day's boat journey apart, so to my mind they would be better described as an archipelago of islands. (I live on a moderately large island. You can't remotely see all of it at once even from a high-flying aeroplane.) The boat in which Cielo, the protagonist, tours this world is a lifeboat from a larger vessel, but carries enough fuel to get to all the "continents." Why would this be, when nobody ever visits another "continent" because each society has everything it needs locally, and a lifeboat would only ever need to get back the short distance to its home "continent," and for that matter there are never incidents at sea that would even require a lifeboat? The only answer I can think of is "so the story can happen," which is never a good answer.

What's more, those societies themselves make little sense. One, for example, has a decaying punk-rock city in which people seem to spend most of their time high and either listening to music or driving round in "smoke-belchers." There's no indication of how food, or drugs, or smoke-belchers, or amplifiers, or electric guitars, or lights are produced, or by whom, but maybe it just all happens offstage (literally). Oh, there is an indication of how some food is obtained: they eat rats. On skewers.

All of the societies seem cartoonish and incomplete, despite the assertion that all of them have everything they need without each other. This assertion, by the way, is delivered in infodump by an intrusive narrator who sometimes speaks directly to the reader, but who then mostly takes a step back for the rest of the book. The bulk of the narrative is indistinguishable from close third person following Cielo, except when it suddenly hops into the head of his friend O.G. briefly. There are a number of instances of what would, in close third person, be POV violations, such as casually naming cultural features that the writer and the readers would recognise but Cielo should not, or naming characters he meets before they introduce themselves.

The worldbuilding wasn't the only part that didn't make sense to me, either. There were multiple moments when I thought there was an obvious action for Cielo to take - such as (view spoiler)[teaching his parents to heal so that the whole weight didn't fall on his shoulders (hide spoiler)] - but he doesn't, I assume because the predetermined plot and the idea of him as a lone hero took precedence.

We do eventually learn why this world is like it is, and it then kind of makes sense, but it's still pretty fanciful, and I didn't buy in. Still, the characters are just appealing enough, and the emotional beats strong enough, that the story held together and kept my interest, even if it reminded me more of Alice in Wonderland or the Phantom Tollbooth than Tress of the Emerald Sea.

The Netgalley pre-publication version I had was also reasonably well edited, apart from missing the past perfect tense occasionally when talking about something that had happened before the narrative moment.

It does have strengths, but for me they're outweighed by the inconsistent POV and the implausible worldbuilding, and it ends up at three stars.

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Review: Shadowed by a detective, or, The woman in wax

Shadowed by a detective, or, The woman in wax by René de Pont-Jest
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Street and Smith edition, on which the Project Gutenberg text is based, doesn't acknowledge it, but rather than being an original work of the credited author Virginia Champlin, this is a translation from the French book La Femme de Cire by René de Pont-Jest. It should be obvious to anyone who's read translated French works of the time; the New Yorkers don't talk remotely like New Yorkers, but in a way that seems to translate the French fairly literally, and the New York police department (and the private detectives, who are variously described as a firm of lawyers and "secret police") don't work like actual American police/detectives. Their titles, their duties, and whether they are elected or appointed (and are or are not lawyers, and are or are not described as "magistrates" - both the "chief of police" and the out-of-place New York sheriff are so described) are all at variance from actual practice at the time. The whole inciting incident also feels very French, with rivalry over a woman leading one of her suitors, an otherwise staid American businessman, to make extravagant statements about duels and murdering both his rival and the woman, and then fall into a decline where he's barely able to speak. Even the names are often just slightly off for being American names. For example, the main suspect rejoices in the name of Gobson. Not Gibson or Dobson, but an unhappy amalgam of the two.

The book is set in the late 19th century; references to someone being in "the Union army" suggests around the time of the Civil War, though the original publication date was 1883, so perhaps this is just another example of the French author not being aware of terminology and the translator not fixing it.

Ada Ricard, the beautiful widow of a wealthy man, is being courted by another wealthy man, a cracker magnate, who is showering her with expensive gifts. However, the army officer alluded to above is determined to win her, and arranges for her to be abducted (with her ready cooperation) from a masked ball at her mansion. A few days later, a body of a young woman turns up in the harbour, bearing the distinctive marks inflicted on Ada by her violent first husband, whom she divorced prior to her marriage to the late wealthy man. Someone has killed her and then attempted to dispose of the body in the sea, weighting it down with a barrel of tar.

The question is: is this actually Ada? Her maid says maybe not. Her ex-husband says definitely not, (view spoiler)[but then gets accused and convicted of the crime. There's another difference from actual New York criminal justice practice of the 1880s in that there's no year of appeals before his sentence is to be carried out. But on the day of the execution, a woman shows up saying, "I'm Ada Ricard. What's going on?" His conviction is, therefore, vacated, but this leaves the issue of who the corpse was and who killed her. (hide spoiler)]

There's a whole sting operation, and finally the detective, a doctor who has (for reasons left mysterious) volunteered to become a New York police detective, and (for reasons also left mysterious) adopted a sixteen-year-old girl who's said to be his distant relative, closes the case in dramatic fashion.

The whole thing must have been very confusing to American readers of the time, since not only do the police and the courts not work the way they actually worked, but everyone behaves as if they're French, making dramatic declarations and fainting in moments of high emotion and threatening each other's lives and, of course, planning to commit adultery at the drop of a hat. Mrs. Gobson's first thought when she learns that a 40-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl are living next door is that they're on their honeymoon, and she's jealous.

If you set all the nonsense aside, it's not a bad story, if a bit melodramatic, but it's very much "watch the detective do odd things and then, at the end, explain them, introducing information that the reader had no access to at any point." It's just OK, and it's also a cheaply done (and intellectual-property-rights-violating) piece of publishing. Of course, Street and Smith boast at the front of the book about the enduring quality of their publications, which always raises red flags for me (it's something HarperCollins does today in some of their incredibly poorly edited, rushed-out scans of century-old books).

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Review: The Roman Hat Mystery

The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Crisp, efficient prose chronicles the crisp, efficient police procedure of Richard Queen, somewhat implausibly assisted by his amateur-detective son Ellery, who's a novelist, but appears to be able to take as much time as he likes to assist his father (what I call a "superhero job"). Ellery supplies the brilliance his dogged father lacks. As with "Nicholas Carter," the detective's name is the same as the author's pseudonym (two authors, in this case), but the narration is not first person.

The mystery is suitably intriguing. A man has been murdered in a theatre during a performance. Someone has carefully engineered, in what would normally be a packed house, that there was nobody sitting next to or in front of him, and he was in the back row. Nobody saw anyone come near him, at least that they are willing to admit. And, for no obvious reason, his custom top hat is missing - not in the possession of any other patron of the theatre, not anywhere to be found in an exhaustive search.

The victim is a dodgy lawyer suspected of being a mastermind of organized crime, but neither his home nor his office yields clear documentary evidence. He had a large income, but a small bank account. And, to add an extra layer of mystery, in the corpse's pocket is the purse of a wealthy man's socialite daughter, also in attendance at the play, but seated nowhere near him.

There are diagrams of the crime scene, reproductions of key bits of evidence, and a list of the characters to help you figure out the crime for yourself. I didn't, and while technically everything was there for one to do so, the detectives did have access to information hidden from the reader. It's clever, though, and well told, and I can see why the series was so popular. I have the second one from Project Gutenberg, and will look for more through my library.

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Review: The Wheel O' Fortune

The Wheel O' Fortune by Louis Tracy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A full-throated pulp adventure with all the hallmarks.

The hero, Richard Royson, is the heir presumptive to a baronetcy, though he is at odds with the current baronet, his uncle, and seems unlikely to inherit the wealthy estate along with the title. He is also out of work, having given a well-deserved thumping to the son of his employer for sexually harassing and/or assaulting a young woman in their employ. When he happens to be in the right place at the right time to stop a pair of bolting carriage horses and so save Irene, a beautiful young heiress, Irene's companion at the incident, a dodgy-seeming Austrian baron, gives him a job on a forthcoming expedition, funded by the heiress's grandfather.

The expedition's goal is to find some treasure cached by a Roman legion who had marched from Egypt to Saba (biblical Sheba) and looted it there, only to be ambushed by Nubians on their way back to the Nile and slaughtered to the last man - except for a Greek merchant, who managed to escape and write a papyrus giving the treasure's location. This document is now in the possession of the Austrian baron.

The expedition's funder is more interested in the archaeology than in the (to him, dubious) tale of treasure, to his credit, but he is the kind of person who will push on obsessively past obstacles - such as the fact that the location is in territory controlled by Italy, and an Italian enemy of the Austrian has convinced the Italian authorities to forbid the expedition to land anywhere other than a recognized port in their territory.

The hero is supposedly descended from Richard the Lionheart, and, like him, is larger than other men and a fierce fighter; there's a bit of semi-mystical nonsense about him feeling like he's been in Egypt before because his ancestor and namesake was. He's also a good sailor, which comes in handy on the voyage to Egypt and wins the respect of the comic sea-captain Stump. He's pretty much a standard pulp hero, in fact, able to learn Arabic quickly, fight a dozen men and win, and stay awake for 60 hours straight (involving strenuous desert travel) with no significant ill effects. Of course, he and Irene fall in love, even though he has no money (that he knows of) and she's the sole heiress to millions.

The ill-intentioned get comeuppance, the well-intentioned win rewards, and on the way we're treated to some good action scenes and, unfortunately, one of the most stilted scenes of romantic declaration I've ever read. Not that the dialog is particularly natural in general, but it grows even stiffer, to the point of being unintentionally comical, when Royson is having to talk about his feelings. The author also gives the standard speed of a camel at one point as being two and a half miles an hour, and then at a later point has an estimate of an hour and a half for camels to cover 10 miles.

There are some uncorrected scan issues in the Project Gutenberg edition, unfortunately, which I'll draw their attention to - they usually fix them quickly. Mostly the letter "i" rendered as a capital when it should be lowercase, but some misread letters too. Also, someone or something, either the author, an inept editor, or the scan process (or a combination), has inserted many commas where they should not be, such as before the main verb and after prepositions - the second one is a tic I've never encountered before, and I thought I'd seen most forms of comma abuse.

It's otherwise a solid pulp adventure, not one of the greats, but enjoyable, and the inevitable racism that comes with British people encountering Arabs and black Africans is kept to a low level for the time. Irene is appropriately intrepid, Royson is a decent, honourable man as well as a force of nature, and Captain Stump is amusing.

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Review: The hand of power

The hand of power by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pulp novel that has everything. A secret society! A beautiful actress! Her wicked guardian! Her mysterious origins! A gentlemanly burglar! Disguises! Murder in the street! Kidnapping! Piracy! True Love!

Of course, every character is linked to every other by a chain of coincidence as thick as your wrist, and a key plot point hinges on a Convenient Eavesdrop, because the gentleman burglar happens to lodge with the mother of the other actress (the fake-French awful one), who has been recruited as a patsy in one of the schemes of the wicked guardian (who, in a separate plot thread, just happened to be passing when the head of the secret society fell ill), and the mother also is possibly the only person who knows the true origins of the first actress (the heroine), and happens to be telling her daughter all about it when the burglar overhears, and since he happens to know the people who are working in the heroine's interests and against her wicked guardian, he tells them. It's a big ball of yarn, after the cat has got at it.

If you can suspend disbelief hard enough, though, it's one of Wallace's typical gripping pulp thrillers. It's not clear for a long time what the heck is up with the guardian and the secret society and the heroine and the guardian's mysterious requirement for her to sit in a shop window writing at a desk, with a single rose in a jade vase, or for that matter why the burglar is involving himself. But the author tells it in a way that makes you want to keep reading and find out.

There's plenty of action, especially in the second half, and even a bit of high technology (for the time) - a listening device inserted into the villain's chimney. The characters are more or less stock, though the Scotland Yard inspector is from the records office and has never arrested anyone, which makes him different. There's a highly principled former accountant who is now, oddly, running a PR agency, which I would have thought was the opposite of something a highly principled former accountant would be good at. Perhaps he isn't.

The mastermind turns out to be someone I didn't suspect for a moment, and the hero certainly works for his happy ending, taking plenty of daring action. It would film well, like a lot of Wallace books (he was the most filmed author of the 20th century, and may still hold the record), and the film would be a rip-roaring thriller. Supposedly the 1968 German film Im Banne des Unheimlichen is based on it, but the plot and characters are completely different.

One of the best Wallace books I've read for action and suspense, despite the heavy reliance on coincidence to pull the plot and cast together.

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Review: Cynthia's Chauffeur

Cynthia's Chauffeur by Louis Tracy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the years before World War I, while P.G. Wodehouse was barely moving beyond school stories, this romantic comedy appeared, involving members of the British and American upper classes, false identity, disapproving elders, questions of finance in the context of marriage, rapid romance, and the British countryside, all elements the master was later to adopt as part of his standard fit-out.

Cynthia is the daughter of an American railroad tycoon. When George, Viscount Medenham, only son and heir of the Earl of Fairholme, comes across an old Boer War comrade whose car has broken down, meaning he can't fulfil his contract to drive Cynthia on a tour of the South-West of England, Medenham volunteers to help his old friend out by substituting for him until the car can be fixed. He little knows that he will fall in love with Cynthia almost immediately - and be unable to speak up, since he's claimed to be merely a chauffeur.

On their journeys to see lovingly described landscapes and landmarks, accompanied by Cynthia's scheming chaperone, who wants to fix her up with an impoverished French count, their relationship blossoms, the count is vexed, the chaperone panicked, both fathers get in a taking because their precious child has fallen into the hands of (they each believe) a schemer, and the unfortunate servants (including Medenham's own chauffeur) are torn between duties.

It doesn't rise to the level of farce later perfected by Wodehouse, but on the other hand, the romance is a lot less ramshackle and better developed than he typically achieved, too; for Wodehouse, romance is usually a plot complication rather than a plot. I saw the attractive qualities in the pair, and the shared delights in history and beauty that drew them together, and believed in their love, even though it progressed so quickly.

There are dramatic and adventurous moments in the book too, but they're not pushed so far as to become implausible, though the final crisis is a bit over the top.

I was disappointed with the same author's Karl Grier , but not with this one. It's not one of the all-time greats, but it's a sound, solid rom-com with adventure and travelogue thrown in.

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Review: A Husband by Proxy

A Husband by Proxy by Jack Steele
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not written in the hard-boiled noir style, but very much employing noir tropes. It opens with an underemployed "criminologist" (he doesn't call himself a detective, but is totally a detective) in his New York office with his name on the glass of the door, and a tall, beautiful woman coming in to hire him for something dubious. He goes on to be trailed by mysterious people, beaten up and nearly killed, while running hither and yon after clues.

There's a bit of a twist, though. The woman is hiring him to pretend to be her husband, something she needs so she can inherit under the terms of her uncle's will. By the coincidence that was such an important part of most plots at this period, after she leaves he gets another job - two in one day after a long dry period - to do an investigation for an insurance company into the death of a man who, as it turns out, is the woman's uncle from whom she is set to inherit. This places him in a conflict-of-interest situation, particularly since (on almost no acquaintance and not knowing key facts about her) he has fallen in love with her, and it looks suspiciously like she could be involved in the death.

I suspect this kind of "I trust her for no reason except that a wonderful girl like her could never" plot was being parodied by Edgar Wallace in The Angel of Terror , in which almost nobody believes that the villainess is a villainess because she looks so sweet and innocent. It's a trope that I've come across a few times in the literature of the period. Of course, people would also trust men they met for similar reasons; they belonged to a class that was supposed to have a highly developed "code," and showed all the signifiers, so of course they were trusted without further inquiry.

Apart from this rather stupid trope and the general thinness of the romance, and the inevitable coincidences and bits of good luck (alongside protagonist agency, at least), it's a good detective story, with a well-judged mix of action and investigation, and a personal stake for the investigator.

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Review: The Girl and The Bill An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure

The Girl and The Bill An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure by Bannister Merwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one relies heavily on coincidence.

"There is a lady, sweet and kind,
Was never face so pleased my mind,
I did but see her passing by
And yet I love her till I die."

The protagonist of this book doesn't quote that old song, but he might as well. It's one of those scenarios where he's never seriously been interested in any woman before, but he sees one in the street by chance and is instantly smitten. Then he meets her again, also by chance, and helps her change a tyre. And then she turns up at his apartment in pursuit of the "bill" of the title, a $5 note which has directions written on it for retrieving something important to her, which has come into his possession by... complete random chance. He then engages in multiple adventures on her behalf, even though she won't tell him her name yet (or what the papers are that she's trying to get back), because he's fallen in love with her and trusts her implicitly. Besides, the other people trying to get the McGuffin are nasty foreigners, and she's of his race, nationality, and class, so obviously he sides with her, quite apart from the instalove.

The adventure bits are fine. It's just that the hero, despite being a lawyer by profession, is a lot braver than he is smart, and a good deal of the plot that isn't driven by coincidence is driven by him being an idiot, though he does have his effective moments too.

We never do learn the name of the girl. He addresses her as Girl.

I picked it up because of an original publisher's advertisement in the back of another old book I read from Project Gutenberg. That book ( Cynthia's Chauffeur ) was better than this one.

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Review: Second Chance Circus

Second Chance Circus by Ryan Tang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The worldbuilding on this one isn't so much weak (the usual issue with cozy) as it is incoherent.

In a barony which seems much larger than a barony would typically be, there are minor nobles below the rank of baron (normally the lowest rank of noble). It's populated with people who have names drawn from all over Europe, and the cities are similarly random in their naming, one sounding English, another Italian, and a third completely made up. Yes, it's clearly a secondary world, but my usual assumption is that this kind of mess originates from not thinking things through or not knowing much about the real-world originals, rather than from being creative.

There's a great deal of anachronism, which I think is supposed to be humourous; for me, it fell flat if that was the intention, as did the fact that the professors at the university have surnames which are the names of fonts (Baskerville, Roman and Arial).

The editing is also messy. There are quite a few words that are legitimate words that spellcheck will recognize, but are absolutely not the word the author obviously meant to type, or sometimes just not the right word for what he's talking about. It's particularly noticeable that he doesn't know what stirrups are; he uses the word for both reins and cart harness. He also seems to think that bunches of grapes are called "bushels". Partway through, we start to get extra commas between adjectives that shouldn't have them, and most (but not all) of the time, when a plural noun is made possessive, the apostrophe is in the wrong place, before rather than after the "s". Some creatures go from "he" to "it" or from plural to singular in the course of a paragraph. There are a lot of duplicated words and missing words, and occasionally words in the wrong order in a sentence. It's scruffy.

The story and characters are original, at least, not just made from box mix. The plot doesn't have a lot of urgency until near the end, and the characters don't have a great deal of depth, although they aren't just their role plus their archetype; they each have something unusual about them, which saves the book from being completely bland. The maid (who is more of an equal to the protagonist than a servant) is a skeptic, studying science by correspondence at university. The protagonist is a powerful necromancer with a good heart and a lack of self-confidence. The sidekick is an immortal caveman with an excess of self-confidence. Each character has something about them that you wouldn't expect, but they don't have any complexity beyond that, and there's no attempt to preserve a realistic point of view; the completely uneducated caveman apparently knows about turning things in to your professor for a grade, for example. Everyone always felt like a character in a book, and quite a simple book, rather than a real person.

I often say of would-be humorous fantasy that it needs to work as a story even if the humour fails. Since the humour in this one did fail completely and utterly for me, did the story work? It did, but I thought it was mediocre for most of its length. The characters were somewhat interesting, and the concept (which is what got me to pick it up) had potential, but the execution just wasn't at the level I'd hoped for, especially in the worldbuilding and the editing. I did put it down at one point to read something else, and ended up coming back to it, which says something, and I did finish it, and a tense climax that pulled together a few previously-set-up elements saved it from two stars. It's OK, but it lacks polish and depth.

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Review: Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1: Missions 1-4

Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1: Missions 1-4 by J.S. Morin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something a bit different, and I'm always looking out for that. A bounty hunter who is a self-described vigilante samaritan - she goes around helping people who need it, often a little bit outside the law. Yes, it's kind of like a supers story in some ways, or how a supers story should work if the vigilantism isn't tolerated by the authorities, but it doesn't feel that way. It's its own thing.

The worldbuilding is mostly off-the-shelf classic space opera: blasters (with a stun setting), FTL ships, alien races who look like anthropomorphic animals (turtles, monkeys, cats, wolves and dogs, probably a few others). Earth seems to be the center of a multispecies polity named ARGO, an acronym that is never defined (nor is it the only undefined acronym); there's the usual spectrum from civilized core worlds with sprawling megacities where, implausibly, trees are now rare to more-or-less anarchic and thinly settled frontier worlds, mimicking the 19th-century US in many ways. Because of the easy FTL, different planets feel more like states or countries. They're mostly Earthlike, more or less, either naturally or by terraforming, and their alienness is not very marked for the most part. It's set in 2562, and I found the differences and similarities to our present day moderately believable; it wasn't just the 21st century with interplanetary travel and blasters, though it also wasn't so vastly different as to feel alienating (or, to me, highly realistic, given the amount of change there's been in the past 500 years). It does make the common space opera mistake of referring to a constellation (Orion, in this case) as a "system," rather than realizing that constellations are just stars that happen to be in the same direction from Earth at widely varying distances, some of them being further from some of the others than they are from us.

Unlike the very classic style of space opera originating from the 1950s, there is a version of the Internet called the Omni. There are also wizards. These are people who have learned to convince the universe that their opinions about how things work override the normal laws of physics. The magic isn't Sandersonian - we don't know exactly what it can and can't do - so it can operate as a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card, but its use is limited by two factors. First, it disrupts nearby tech, and wizards also find tech hard to use, which in a technological civilization is inherently a problem for them. Second, in the case of Esper, the specific wizard who's the protagonist, if she goes flinging too much magic around it will attract the attention of the powerful Conclave of Wizards, who are looking for her in an unfriendly manner.

One feature of the worldbuilding that was mostly done well was the made-up future pop culture. It always annoys me when, with some kind of feeble excuse or none at all, books set in the future have no pop culture references from after the time in which they're written. It's not that hard to make up something convincing, and these books do. The author occasionally fails to resist the temptation to use a joke name that's a present-day reference, though.

The worldbuilding feature I found hard (in fact, impossible) to swallow was that Christianity has reunited into the One Church, rather than continuing to split like a cheap pair of trousers every time someone gets overexcited. Apparently, the author hasn't been given the sects talk: "When one fanatic hates another fanatic very much..."

Part of Esper's backstory is that the One Church took her in at a difficult time of her life, and she even became a priestess (the idea that a woman can become a priest conflicts with the firmly old-fashioned viewpoint of the one priest we see). She later left, for reasons that aren't gone into much, and joined a mostly good-hearted group of criminals, from which she's now largely independent; this is where she learned wizardry. She fights, very effectively, using magic to enhance herself so that she can practice the wuxia-like martial arts of the four-handed monkey people's movies.

When she left, she took her sidekick Kubu with her. He's a sentient alien who looks very doglike, if a dog weighed 9 tonnes, and she has magicked him semi-permanently into the size of a very large but believable dog. It's repeatedly emphasized by both of them that he isn't a dog, but he thinks and behaves very like one, except that he's sentient. He's young, not yet an adult, and rather naive, and Esper tries, with limited success, to keep from exposing him to bad influences (given that she hangs out with criminals and other social outcasts on a regular basis).

This pack contains Esper's first four (documented) adventures. The first involves rescuing a poor little rich girl who is the subject of a custody battle between her parents, a retired pirate and his bitter, nasty wife. The 16-year-old girl is cynical and jaded, reminding Esper of herself at the same age, and she attempts to mentor her, with some eventual success.

In the second, Esper goes to a remote planet to hide out from the numerous people she's annoyed, and can't resist getting involved in helping a man who, as an offworlder, is being persecuted by the tight-knit supposedly-utopian community he has married into. She wants justice for him, but it's hard to obtain when everyone believes the insiders over the outsider.

In the third, Esper, still trying to hide out from the Conclave of Wizards and various other people, gets a job as security for a brothel, and goes all crusadey when one of the women who works there is trafficked to another planet by a gangster. She leaves Kubu behind for this one, and he has his own adventures. I found it disturbing in a few different ways, and genuinely suspenseful.

The fourth adventure starts with Esper still trying to avoid the Convocation, in an escalating series of confrontations which test her moral boundaries. (view spoiler)[She is eventually captured, and put on trial for both her own actions and those of her mentor, who took over her body at one point and killed people. (hide spoiler)]

Finally, we have a short story which is entirely dispensable.

Apart from the final short, the complexity and tension of the challenges gradually ratchet up over the collection, which is good.

Apart from a bad habit of dangling modifiers and an occasional misplaced apostrophe when the noun is plural, and using "nonplussed" in the exact opposite sense to what it means, the author's mechanics are mostly good. That's refreshing to see, especially from a book I bought through BookBub. There's a bit more depth to the characters and their backstories than I often see, as well, and the protagonist is driven by a complex set of motivations, chiefly by wanting to do the right thing and protect the vulnerable and more-or-less innocent against the powerful and ill-intentioned. Operating on or beyond the edge of the law, she's in a morally complex position, and the author doesn't shy away from exploring that, or the darker thoughts that come to her when she's going vigilante. Her wins against socially embedded evil are, realistically, not absolute, but are big enough to be satisfying, and there are consequences for her when she defies something bigger than she is. The action scenes are good, too.

Overall, despite the mostly off-the-shelf and sometimes implausible worldbuilding and some missing polish, the character work and plotting are strong enough to almost (not quite) take it to five stars for me, and I'll watch out for more from this series and this author.

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Review: The Shape of Magic

The Shape of Magic by Marco Michelutto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A magical university story, but not "dark academia" (at least, as I understand it).

The world feels rich, and the magic system has had some thought put into it, which is not always the case with current fantasy. The ancient university feels centuries old, probably because the author is from Europe, where things often are centuries old.

The premise involves three friends: a woman who's a King's Ward, randomly selected from the population to serve the kingdom and provided with an education in order to do so; the eldest son of a duke, who's semi-defied his father in order to learn magic; and a third, who doesn't have much to distinguish him apart from being studious (I kept getting him confused with the duke's son). They have discovered coded instructions in what purport to be old novels for how to use teleportation glyphs to get into hidden rooms in the university, and have found some interesting stuff.

The dowager queen, who is largely in charge, since her son is young, has come to the university talking about a threat of invasion from a neighbouring country that has got rid of its royalty in a revolution and become a republic. She's using this as a reason to convert the university from being almost entirely dedicated to theoretical research over to producing graduates who can project practical power on her behalf, and is also searching for three legendary artefacts that will give her even more power - according to her, to defend the kingdom. But the trio have their doubts.

As I expected going in, given that English isn't the author's first language, the English is often not idiomatic. An editor is credited (possibly not a copy editor), and multiple beta readers, but none of these seem to have picked up the many fumbled idioms where words have the wrong number or the wrong preposition is used; the frequent absence of the past perfect tense when referring to an event before the narrative moment; the use of "may" instead of "might" in the past tense (if it could be "could," it should be "might"); an overall shortage of grammatical commas; occasional incorrect dialog punctuation; or even some basics like almost always omitting a comma before a term of address (the "let's eat Grandma" error), not capitalising a title when it's part of a name, or not starting a sentence with a capital. To be fair to the editor, if the manuscript had a lot of errors they would inevitably miss some, but some of those are glaring. On the other hand, I've also seen as bad or worse from native English speakers. I had a pre-publication copy via Netgalley, and there may be more editing done before publication, but there are just so many issues I don't think it could be cleaned up enough in the time. Of course, if all those people missed them, there will be plenty of others who don't notice or care, but I did, and it degraded the reading experience for me.

The other issue with the writing is that the style will cruise along in semi-formal "fantasy prose" mode for a while, and then a clanging contemporary colloquialism will get dropped into the middle of it. It needs to pick one or the other.

On the positive side, it's a good story competently told, the characters are appealing, the world feels more developed than is often the case, and the tone is cozy and noblebright.

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Review: The Adventurous Lady

The Adventurous Lady by J.C. Snaith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just after the Armistice is signed for the end of World War I, two young women, about the same age (twenty), about the same size (smallish), happen to take the same train to the same country village. One is the imperious Lady Elfreda Catkin, the daughter of an Irish marquis, being sent to a country manor to act in a play, but also, her mother hopes, to attract a (specific) wealthy husband. She is not on board with this plan. The other is the timid Miss Cass, the orphaned daughter of a suburban solicitor, going to a different house to take up a position as a governess, since she has no financial resources.

The badly written play Lady Elfreda is cast in, as it happens, follows the general premise of The Prince and the Pauper (or the much later movie Trading Places): it's about an aristocrat and a governess who, meeting on the train, decide to swap places. This gives Elfreda an obvious idea, and between force of personality and getting Miss Cass a little drunk on the fine bottle of wine Elfreda's father has sent her, she manages to sell her travel companion on making a similar switch. She overcomes her maid's inevitable objections in a broadly similar manner, and shenanigans ensue.

I was hoping that hilarity would ensue, but (for me, at least) it didn't. P.G. Wodehouse could, and several times did, take this kind of premise and turn it into a sparkling farce, but this book is neither sparkling nor a farce. It's very aware that Miss Cass has got the raw end of the deal, since when the scheme is inevitably exposed she will have no job, no home, no money and no "character" (reputation). Lady Elfreda airily assures her that she will take care of all that, but she isn't exactly the most trustworthy character, and poor Miss Cass, already timid and nervous, is practically prostrated with fear, and unable to even speak loudly enough to be heard when she attempts her (or rather, Lady Elfreda's) part in the play.

Not playing it simply for laughs, but making a commentary on the very different levels of opportunity and forgiveness available to the two women of two different classes, is a valid choice to make, and that's not what gets it a three-star rating from me. The rating was because the characters don't change. Miss Cass starts out spineless, and she remains spineless. Lady Elfreda starts out arrogant and careless, and remains arrogant and careless. (view spoiler)[Two men who have fallen in love with them while they were playing each other's parts (despite knowing them only a few days, and not knowing much about them at that), and who have been exposed to a certain amount of ridicule as a result when all is revealed, see this and decide to marry them anyway, which I think was a poor choice on their parts. Both of the women, in fact, end up as winners, despite acting badly (particularly Lady Elfreda), and the author outright says that sometimes in life people don't get what they deserve and the story has no moral. (hide spoiler)]

I picked this up from Project Gutenberg's feed knowing almost nothing beyond the title, what I call a "pig-in-a-poke book." Sometimes that works out for me, and I discover a forgotten gem. More often, as happened this time, I'm disappointed. What I hoped early on was a comedy is more in what I think of as a literary novel mode, where people don't act to change their circumstances or learn from their experiences or change for the better as a result of them. At least it wasn't a literary downer ending, but I'm almost more annoyed because of the lack of bad consequences than I would have been with something more realistic. On top of that, the writing is only average.

It isn't terrible, but it disappointed my expectations.

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Review: The Mostly Forgotten Spy

The Mostly Forgotten Spy by David Harkonson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mostly forgettable.

It's a supers story in a world where about 60% of people have powers of some sort, mainly fairly useless ones. The main character is tasked with infiltrating a supervillain group by what turns out to be a tragicomically inept superhero support organization, but rather than getting one appropriate to her beginner status, she instead gets swept up in events and ends up in a group which is well above her abilities. Or is it? She manages to muddle through, using her ability to make people forget her, along with bluff, good luck, determination and the help of friends she meets along the way.

The prose is often ponderous, as are the attempts at humour, and the humour tends to be dark - casual violence played for laughs. The characters are thin and generic. At times, there's a conceit that it's being written by someone in the setting, but that comes and goes and is eventually no longer mentioned. It does get a couple of good wordplays off.

I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, which asks me to believe that the "minor typographic errors" in it will be corrected before publication. I didn't spot many typos, apart from inconsistent name spelling, but I did see instances of several common issues - incorrect dialog punctuation, dangling modifiers, unclear pronoun references, "may" in past tense instead of "might," missing past perfect tense, a couple of homonyms - though none in large numbers. I'm skeptical that they'll all be corrected before publication, but I could be wrong. To be clear, this is a lot better than most superhero novels, which for some reason rank alongside LitRPG and steampunk as most likely to have awful copy editing.

I didn't ever come to love it, but I didn't hate it. It was just OK. Someone for whom the humour was a better fit would probably enjoy it more.

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Review: D'ORC Volume 1: The Book of Certain Doom

D'ORC Volume 1: The Book of Certain Doom by Brett Bean
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not for me.

It's a satire on a certain type of D&D, where, regardless of "alignment" with good or evil (here, light or dark), both sides just want to destroy the other side with ruthless violence. Maybe also a satire on contemporary US politics? Is it that deep?

The title character, being half (light) dwarf, half (dark) orc, doesn't automatically belong to either side, and there's no moral difference between them that would enable him to choose one over the other to support. So he's just trying to help everyone, and be a decent person. His violence-oriented magic talking shield thinks this is quixotic. The two sides both want to destroy him, because of a prophecy that a figure like him will destroy the world "as we know it" (pretty obvious what that means - end the stupid, pointless battles - but they don't see it that way). An undead chicken that he accidentally mostly killed, consisting of a headless body and the ghost of a head, doesn't have anything so coherent as an opinion, but hangs out with him anyway.

There's nothing wrong with the premise, but the working out of it involves frequent gory battles and lots of death and dismemberment, and I'm just not into it. I can see why the Dungeon Crawler Carl author was asked to blurb it; it's not my thing in exactly the way that DCC isn't.

Plenty of people will love it, though.

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Review: The Royal Academy of Magical Baking: A Cozy Slice-of-Life Fantasy

The Royal Academy of Magical Baking: A Cozy Slice-of-Life Fantasy by Anne Crews
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To get into the Academy, the protagonist bakes a relatively simple vanilla cake following a well-known recipe, enhanced with simple spells, that is, nevertheless, well executed and surprisingly enjoyable. I don't know if this is consciously intended as a metaphor for the book, but it certainly works as one.

The editing is decent, for one thing, which is rare. I did have some quibbles with elements of the book, but only four or five were editing issues, all relatively minor.

I wrote down some predictions at the 9% mark about how it would go, and almost half of my predictions were correct, mainly about how particular characters would act. I wasn't right about the order in which people would be eliminated from the course (it's set up kind of like a reality show: twelve bakers take the entrance exam, six pass, of whom one will be eliminated in each of the three terms of the first year, leaving three to progress to the second and third years of the course). But by the time each elimination came up, it was clear who was going - right up to the end, which surprised me.

So it's not just made from box mix, which was a relief. It has enough surprising or fresh elements that it's saved from being completely expected, something for which I've dinged books a star in the past. It is, however, firmly cozy, though I'm not sure it completely qualifies as "slice of life" - it has a bit too much plot for that to be the case. (Not a criticism, just an observation that the subtitle could be slightly misleading.)

Like practically all cozy fantasy, it's weak on worldbuilding. There's barely enough to enable the story to be what it is, and the gaps are filled either from Bland Generic Fantasy Setting #1 or direct ports from our world (days of the week, measuring units, even wanting to have popcorn when watching something entertaining).

I'm used to worldbuilding being a weakness of cozy, though I'm not reconciled to it. But at least it has only one truly jarring intrusion from our world, and it's minor (the popcorn). While the world is thin, it at least doesn't feel like 21st-century Americans cosplaying in front of scenery flats, like a lot of cozy books; it has just enough illusion of being a fantasy world that I could relax into it and enjoy the story.

And I did enjoy it. I liked the characters, I believed their actions (even when they were predictable), I wanted Lyra, the protagonist, to succeed, and I enjoyed the cozy feel of everything, even the (for the characters) high-stakes exam moments. It was fun, and I'd eat... I mean, read another.

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