Review: Barbara on Her Own

Barbara on Her Own by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Save the business" is a genre, or at least a plot type, and in the right hands it can be compelling. Wallace's are the right hands, even though he was notoriously bad at business himself and constantly in debt, and this genial comedy proves it.

Barbara works as a secretary for her godfather, Mr Maber of Maber & Maber's Department Store, an old and fossilized institution that is about to be bought by their competitor across the road. Before the sale can go through, Mr Maber gets drunk on Boat Race Night (having, in his university days, rowed stroke for Cambridge) and is arrested and imprisoned for biting a policeman. Naturally, nobody can know about this, and he gives Barbara his power of attorney, assuming she will complete the sale negotiations.

Instead, she decides to shock the business into life, to advertise and hold a sale (two things the store has never done before). She knows a young man, who is in love with her despite her discouragement, who sells advertising space; she buys some. One of the executives becomes an ally, the other an antagonist. Various past indiscretions come into play, people leap to conclusions (Barbara has married Mr Maber! Barbara has done away with Mr Maber!), the competitor incites his subordinates to commit minor crimes, farcical consequences ensue... it's all good fun.

The ending, I felt, was weaker than the rest of the book, wrapping up too much too abruptly. But the journey there I thoroughly enjoyed. It's like a P.G. Wodehouse book written by Edgar Wallace, which means middle-class people with jobs instead of upper-class people with private incomes are the participants in the farcical shenanigans.

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Review: The Franchise Affair

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is technically an Inspector Grant novel, in that he appears in it, but he isn't the one really investigating, and for all the development he gets it could be any other Scotland Yard detective.

This is because the story is not proving that someone committed a crime, but that they didn't, which isn't what the police generally set out to do. A teenage girl, missing for several weeks, turns up disheveled and bruised at her home, and tells a story about being held captive in a distinctive house by two women, who she describes. Such a house, owned by such women, exists, and when a tabloid newspaper breaks the story they become the target of abuse and harassment.

Fortunately, when first interviewed by the police they called on the services of a middle-aged country solicitor from the nearby small town, where he works in an old family law firm, doing mostly conveyancing, wills and the like. This is fortunate for them in that, given the chance to break out of his mundane lifestyle, he becomes a surprisingly good amateur detective. He does eventually call in the services of a professional private detective, but most of the work is done by the lawyer, Robert. In the course of doing it, he falls in love with Marion, the daughter of the mother-daughter pair, who's around his age and, like him, has never married.

Marion's late father was one of those improvident men who crop up in English literature, always sinking money into some stupid scheme and never getting it back again, and although she and her mother have inherited a large, old, ugly house named The Franchise from a relative, they have little money. The house is also remote, and it's hard to get servants to come out to it, so Marion does much of the household work (shocking at the time for a woman whose origins are middle class, at least to other middle-class people like Robert's young law partner). This lends some credence to the teenage accuser's story that she was kidnapped in order to be forced to work for the two women.

The whole story turns on who people find credible and why. The teenager looks outwardly innocent, and easily cast in the role of a victim; Marion is dark-complexioned and looks "Gypsy." On the other hand, the teenager keeps reminding people with a wide experience of the world of some liar or wanton that they've known, and Robert and his law partner believe Marion and her mother immediately and unwaveringly. There's a strong vein of disdain for ordinary people who don't understand the difference between claims and evidence, and whose thinking is wooly generally; the law partner is engaged to the daughter of a bishop who always stands up for criminals and never seems to give any sympathy to their victims, except that in this case he does the opposite for some reason (probably that the girl is of a lower social class than her accused abusers), prolonging the public profile of the case. But everyone, Robert definitely included, is basing their assessment of where the truth lies on their estimation of people and their unconscious biases, at least until the facts can be unearthed; several people base their assessment on the colour of someone's eyes, generalizing about the type of personality that goes with a given eye colour.

It's a story that's, if anything, more relevant in these days of social media outrage than it was at the time of original publication, and it's this additional thought about people and issues, on top of solid storytelling, that takes it up to five-star level for me.

That's not to say that I necessarily agree with all of the ideas. Tey is coming from a conservative position, that criminals are criminal because they're ultimately self-centred, possibly having inherited that tendency from their parents. She pillories the bishop's belief that all criminality is produced by environment - the old nature-versus-nurture debate, in which the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, though I would put it slightly closer to the bishop's end of things given that criminality is more likely to occur where people have limited resources and few options. As a middle-class descendent of generations of (as far as I know) honest working-class people, I obviously don't believe that the working class are inherently and genetically disadvantaged - less intelligent, less capable, more likely to be criminals.

I also found that I predicted a couple of the story beats in advance. (view spoiler)[As soon as the house was going to be left unattended during the trial, I knew it would be burned down, freeing Marion and her mother to go and live elsewhere. And I correctly predicted that Marion would turn down Robert's proposal of marriage. The reasons she gives may have been some of the reasons that the author never married, given how much thought seems to have gone into them. (hide spoiler)]

It's in the lower portion of the five-star space, then, but it is thought-provoking and well done.

The Cornerstone Digital/Penguin edition has only a few errors in it, though it looks like the author had a persistent fault of writing "infer" (to reach a conclusion through indirect evidence) when she meant "imply" (to hint at a conclusion indirectly), and her original editor did not correct it. I noticed it in previous books as well. This edition also has an introduction, which I recommend skipping at least until you've read the book or even entirely; it's crammed with spoilers and tells you what to think about it, coming from a very modern viewpoint.

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Review: A Shilling for Candles

A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The second Grant novel improves on the first substantially, in my view, making less use of coincidence and having the detective actually solve the mystery this time instead of getting a spontaneous confession from someone who wasn't previously a suspect.

The victim is a film star who's risen from a poor background in Nottingham by determination and perseverance, and perhaps ruffled some feathers along the way. The title refers to her bequest to her brother, a religious charlatan and one of the numerous suspects.

It's a solid investigation plot, but the characters and their interactions are what really makes it, like most of the best detective fiction.

The HarperCollins edition has fewer errors than theirs often do (and significantly fewer than their edition of the first book in the series), though I suspect that's more likely because the original book was printed more clearly and produced fewer scan errors than because they put extra effort into editing it.

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Review: Jack O' Judgment

Jack O' Judgment by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A thundering good pulp novel from a master of the craft.

A ruthless gang of criminals have a clever approach to making illicit money. They buy stolen letters from burglars, and if they find anything compromising against someone who has some valuable property or a business, they blackmail them into selling it to the gang at far below its value. They've made a legitimate payment, they don't have to account for money given to them for apparently no reason, there's nothing illegal in paying less than an asset's worth for it if the seller agrees to the price, and all in all it's netting them a nice income.

The police know what's going on, but can't prove it in court. Likewise, they pretty strongly suspect that the death of a drug addict and dealer, "Snow" Gregory, was connected to the gang, but again, they can't prove anything. Enter the mysterious masked vigilante calling himself Jack O' Judgement, whose mark is the Jack of Clubs left at the scene of his vengeance. He isn't constrained by the laws of evidence, and his crusade against the gang wears away at their nerves until they're all ready to flee with what assets they can lay hands on quickly.

Wallace does an excellent job of misdirection, making us believe that Jack is any of several different people (one of whom does take on the persona at one point), only to reveal a completely unexpected identity at the end. There are armed confrontations, there's a kidnapping (of the main investigator's fiancée, who's also the daughter of a member of the gang who's trying to leave it and go straight), it's all strong stuff, and in Wallace's trademark pacy style. If he has a fault, it's that it's not always easy to tell who is talking in some of the extended dialog sequences; he could have done with adding a few more tags (in his books in general, not just this one).

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Review: Patissier et Etranger

Patissier et Etranger by Laurence Raphael Brothers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My last read of 2025 was this novella, set in Paris in 1967 at a patisserie school. George Drake, the English narrator, is the only ordinary person (it turns out) among the people he knows there, but ends up playing a key role. In exactly what would be a spoiler, but let me just say that I suspect one reason the title is in French even though the book is in English is that "Étranger" has at least three different translations in English, and the one to choose might not be the one you would initially think of.

There's plenty (but not, for me, too much) of patisserie research, and 1967 Paris research, on show, enough that it feels authentic but not so much that it becomes unduly foregrounded in the "I suffered for my art, now it's your turn" way that it's so easy to fall into (looking at you, Connie Willis and Tim Powers). I thought, going in, that it might be a "cozy," because baking, and nearly everyone is nice and well-intentioned, but the baking is a background to the interactions between the characters, and to the plot.

Because it's short, it's not a complicated plot, but it has its moments of tension, mystery and suspense. The spec-fic element also isn't the point of the book, any more than the baking is, but it provides an essential element to make the plot possible.

I will mention something that, for me, didn't completely work, though I'll have to use spoiler tags for part of it. I'm one of those peculiar people who actively dislikes sweet things. Sugar makes me feel really unwell, and so I avoid it. That probably contributed to the fact that I didn't fully believe (view spoiler)[the conversion of the fanatic by means of sugary treats. As soon as he came into the scene and it was clear who he was and what his beliefs were, I thought, "I know how this is going to go," and I was right. Sugar and chocolate convinced him that his beliefs about the people of Earth being demonic and evil were, or at least might be, mistaken. Now, I always find the idea of fanatics being converted too easily hard to swallow; by definition, they have powerful defenses against shifting their opinions. But it seemed to me that even if the food itself was seductive (which I have to make an effort to imagine, because to me it wouldn't be), that would only confirm his beliefs, not challenge them. Of course, he was also seeing what normal, nice people the pâtissiers were, which probably helped. And there are reasons I haven't gone into that do make it more plausible; sugar would provide specific important benefits to his people. Still, it was a speed bump for me. (hide spoiler)]

While it does suffer from the usual novella problem of being a bit simplistic, this feels like a story that's being told at the right length for what it is. It's complete and satisfying, makes good use of its setting and its premise without going too deeply into either for their own sake, and keeps the focus on the characters and their relationships. I enjoyed it.

Disclaimers: I am on a writers' forum with the author (I don't know him well), and received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: Croft and Tabby: The Complete Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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Top Books for 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tier Rankings

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

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

Discovery/Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of the Best

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

Gold Tier

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

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

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

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

Platinum Tier

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

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

Conclusion

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