Review: The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance

The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance by Chiara Bullen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well-written cozy which shows us people changing for the better through each other's influence, which in my view is the best kind of cozy.

Ainsworth has risen, by hard work and ability, from being the son of a small tradesman to a well-regarded young research scholar at a prestigious institution. He's at about the equivalent of a postdoc or fellow, and has received generous research funding to go to a remote area where there's an inn at the foot of a reputedly dragon-haunted peak. His great-grandfather, according to letters preserved in the family, went there, but never apparently returned.

He'd originally planned on a different research project, but his mentor packed him off on this one - reading between the lines only very slightly - because his toxic boyfriend had been even more toxic than usual and this time had actually injured him physically as well as emotionally. The boyfriend goes off on what was going to be their joint project, and Ainsworth goes to the inn.

There, he meets a crew of characters who are recovering from their own difficult backstories in the low-pressure environment, under the leadership of the innkeeper, Honey. From an unpromising start, where he displays all the snobbishness he's learned in order to fit in at the snooty institution, he gradually reverts to the decent person he grew up as, and he and Honey become friends, with a side of attraction. But he still considers himself bound to the toxic boyfriend. (Both he and Honey are bisexual, in the usual way of 2020s fantasy romance.)

Ainsworth wants to interview adventurers about their experiences on the mountain, but the weird thing is that after a night at the inn, every single one of them decides that it's not worth risking their lives there, that there are more important things they could be doing, and they have nothing to prove. It's like overnight therapy.

Eventually, after Ainsworth has got his head together, we learn why this is (I guessed part of the big twist well in advance, but it was a good one). It's an emotionally satisfying journey and conclusion.

I always comment on the copy editing of books I read. This one isn't bad as such books go, only occasionally missing out the past perfect tense or inserting an unnecessary comma between non-coordinate adjectives. There are a couple of misplaced apostrophes, a few mangled idioms (and perhaps one or two of those are just different in Scotland, where the author's from?) and a dangling modifier, plus a few words used incorrectly. It's better than average.

Overall, capably written and enjoyable, and I'd read another from the author.

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Review: The Maze of Ortygia: A Disappearance at Hecate Station

The Maze of Ortygia: A Disappearance at Hecate Station by Robert Hildenbrand
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The most obvious problem with this one is that the dialog is so stilted, with very few contractions, and all the characters sound the same.

The lesser but still important problems include the fact that the author frequently tells us how a character is instead of showing us, and that a lot of important information seems to stay in the author's head and never make it to the page, or only make it there suddenly and with no preparation. For example, a character who has seemed up to that point to be human is abruptly announced to be a human-shaped cyborg (most cyborgs in this setting aren't human-shaped). This isn't something the other characters discover; it's just narrated.

There's a might-as-well-be-magical stuff called "ether," with abilities that are not at all defined to begin with (so it's not Sandersonian). We're just told it's useful, not how or why. Later on, it can apparently form complex illusory scenes, and convert other matter into itself (so it seems to be programmable matter, maybe). Conveniently, when a lot of it rushes out of a confined space, it only pushes named characters around a bit (and the one it bounces off the wall is enhanced to take it), but it kills an unspecified number of unnamed characters by tearing their ship apart and converting parts of the ship into more of itself, at just the point where its pressure ought to drop. It even luckily prevents a named character from being hit by laser fire at the same time. It might as well be called "makesnodamnsensium" or "plotconveniencium."

FTL isn't a thing, and we're told that backup will take an infeasibly long time to reach the system, but then we're also told in a different context that backup can be called and will arrive "soon". Ships can't operate without their transponders, but a number of duplicate ships are swapping around the same transponder, and radar doesn't seem to be picking up the discrepancy.

Add to this that the author doesn't always type the word he means ("forward" instead of "future," "would" instead of "wouldn't"), and often doesn't use the past perfect tense to position events comprehensibly in time relative to the narrative moment. In fact, it starts out in present tense for a short time, and then drops suddenly into past. There are missing commas around terms of address, fumbled idioms, and a plural conveyed by using an apostrophe after the "s". These problems aren't particularly frequent, and I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so some of the more egregious errors might be corrected by publication - or they might not.

I got about halfway through and wasn't much gripped by the several mysteries, particularly since I suspected they would be solved by the use of plotconveniencium, so I started reading something else to see if I cared enough to come back to this. I concluded that I didn't.

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Review: The Curry Bible: The Ultimate Indian Cookbook Featuring 100 Classic Recipes

The Curry Bible: The Ultimate Indian Cookbook Featuring 100 Classic Recipes by Nisha Katona
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The strength of this book is that the recipes are quite simple.

This is also its weakness, in that the detail they leave out is probably the difference between an OK recipe and a good recipe. Also, some of them just don't seem quite right to me.

I made the aubergine and potato curry. Most of the vegetarian recipes feature potatoes, not my favourite vegetable, but I suppose I can substitute. I didn't substitute, though, and made it basically as written, except that my "large" 500g aubergine/eggplant was almost twice as large as the "large" 300g one the recipe specifies, and the recipe says to cut it into 8 pieces, which I thought would be too big (even if I went for 16 pieces to allow for the difference), so I cut it about the size specified for the potatoes, 3cm. This gives a very rustic result, and it's difficult to get the potatoes cooked through. I happened to have more potatoes than called for, too, in about the same proportion as the eggplant, so I increased the spices slightly to compensate. I didn't double them, and was glad I hadn't; I think that would have been too strong for me. As it was, it made a pleasant curry, with slightly undercooked potatoes even though I gave them extra cooking time. I will probably make it again, but substitute carrots for the potatoes and cut everything smaller.

To accompany the curry, I made the roti recipe. The texture came out a bit cardboardy, which didn't surprise me much, since, comparing with other recipes, 10 minutes is a very short time to rest the dough after kneading, and a lot of the recipes call for resting it again after rolling into balls. Coating the dough ball in plenty of oil worked well for cooking them on the griddle without creating burned-on carbon, though, so I will take that approach with other flatbreads in future. They tasted OK, but with so few ingredients that also wasn't surprising.

The spice mix section at the front is probably the best thing in the book from my perspective, and I will be using it. I made one of the mixes as part of the curry recipe, and it was good, though, again, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if I'd used more of it.

Not a complete fail, but not one of the great cookbooks either.

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Review: Legendary: Help Unwanted

Legendary: Help Unwanted by A.M. Mirabella
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story of a diligent Hero (paladin-adjacent, but not religious) and a fairy who offers to help in the Hero's latest quest: retrieving the ingredients for a potion to save her prince yet again. The prince has magical blood, and everyone literally wants a piece of him, so her task of protecting him is challenging and never-ending. There are multiple references to her previous adventures protecting him, starting six years earlier, when (aged 12) she cut off the head of a sorcerer who was after his blood.

From a storytelling angle, it's strong, with plenty of good emotional beats as the hero and the fairy work together and attempt to deal with their respective trauma. Plenty of plot twists and reverses, a villain you love to boo, and encounters with interesting minor characters, who don't feel as flat as such characters often do in books like this. It's a world that's had a degree of thought put into it, with an entire kingdom that flies, plenty of legendary creatures, and magic in all directions. The sensawunda is strong with this one. At the same time, the inner and outer conflicts are believable and engaging. Some of the concerns, and proposed solutions (like taking a vacation as a way of relieving the pressure from constant stressful work), are modern rather than of the equivalent historical period, but that helps them work for a contemporary audience.

Like practically every new book I read, whether from Netgalley pre-publication like this one or from Bookbub after publication, it could do with a bit more editing, and quite a bit more past perfect tense. There are a couple of apostrophe glitches, a dangling modifier, some ambiguous pronoun usage, a few excess hyphens and an outright misspelling, as well as a continuity error. I'll point all of these out to the publisher in the hope that they get corrected.

The hero works in what's described as a kingdom, but it appears to be ruled by a prince and princess with the support of a council of sages, which would normally make it a principality (a word that does get used in another context). Also, the prince and princess are addressed as "Your Majesty" rather than the more usual form for princes and princesses, "Your Highness," though if they're the rulers this is more justifiable.

These are relatively minor issues, and there aren't a great many of most of them (apart from the missing past perfect). Overall, it's a capably told, enjoyable fantasy, and I'll be watching out for more in the series.

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Review: The Borough Treasurer

The Borough Treasurer by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two prosperous businessmen run a building company in partnership in a small town in the north of England.

One is serving his second term as mayor; the other has been borough treasurer for six years, and his daughter is about to marry a wealthy local man with a bright political future.

But, completely by coincidence, a man comes to the town who remembers the pair from 400 miles away and 30 years ago, when (under different names) they were convicted of embezzling from the building society of which they were secretary and treasurer. With so much to lose, they have two options: give in to blackmail which might never stop, or... ensure he never tells anyone.

The blackmailer dies - but who killed him, and why? Being a J.S. Fletcher book, it doesn't always go in the direction I was expecting, except of course for the two very lightly sketched romances with women who barely appear in the story and certainly don't get much characterisation. There's no single detective; the one we follow most is a young barrister, the friend of the borough treasurer's prospective son-in-law (which adds its own layer of complication), but he doesn't solve the whole mystery by himself. It's a largish ensemble cast, many of them minimally developed.

The biggest weakness for me was the abundance of evidence, most of it produced by coincidence and then suppressed for reasons. An encounter on a supposedly deserted moor is witnessed by at least three people. The one document a murderer would want most to suppress is the one that falls out of the victim's pocketbook, to be found by someone with a motive to conceal it. People keep happening to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time. (view spoiler)[And then the borough treasurer's biggest motive - to spare his daughter the shame and distress of learning about his criminal past, and ensure that her fiance doesn't reject her because of his political ambitions - becomes a complete non-issue; neither of them cares. (hide spoiler)]

For me, the plot loses its way (despite, or maybe because of, the abundant coincidence), and the characters are underdeveloped. It's one of Fletcher's less successful books from my point of view. He didn't write conventional detective stories, which is great, but sometimes the way in which his books are original is more a weakness than it is a strength, and this is one of those times.

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Review: Beware of Chicken 5

Beware of Chicken 5 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A significant improvement over Book 4, in my opinion. There's a sense of progress, albeit slow, throughout, rather than just a lot of slice-of-life eventually giving way to some action most of the way through the book. True, there isn't much actual action, but there is at least the potential for conflict when Jin Ren's adoptive "grandfather," the mighty and terrible cultivator Shin, arrives at the farm with an agenda already in mind that will clash with Jin's settled purpose.

It's also partly a setup book, since near the end two groups of the (many) characters go off on different missions, leaving a third group to keep things going on the farm.

There really are too many characters, and too much backstory (which I find harder to remember than the characters, as I've mentioned in a previous review), but from what little I know about Asian classic literature, sprawling epics with many characters and not a lot of what Westerners would think of as plot are quite normal, so this is, presumably, in tribute to that tradition.

Most of the characters have points of view, and experience some form of personal growth, often because of each other, which is good. There are some touching and amusing side stories at the end of the book. All in all, I enjoyed it.

This series started out poorly edited, but has significantly improved. I did mark a couple of dozen issues, but that's about average even for a book much shorter than this one, in my experience. There are occasional odd phrasings or misused words or fumbled idioms, and a few punctuation stumbles that usually seem more like typos than someone not knowing a convention, but by current standards this is very clean.

I suspect (by the fact that the first five books all seem to be on sale at once) that Book 6 may be about to come out. I look forward to it (though I don't look forwards to it, as the author phrases it a couple of times).

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Review: The Case of the Canterfell Codicil

The Case of the Canterfell Codicil by P.J. Fitzsimmons
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not a bad period-setting modern murder mystery, let down by some easily fixable issues with the editing. Most prominently, the author frequently leaves out the vocative comma (the "let's eat Grandma" error), which to me is one of the most basic things that makes an author come across as amateurish. There are also a few Americanisms, like referring to Oxford University as "school" and to someone's "junior year" and giving a "commencement address," but I spotted fewer anachronisms than I expected. There is the use of "alright" as a spelling for "all right" (originated in the 1980s, and still not the most common usage or accepted by major style guides), and giving an English earl of the period of the Wars of the Roses the first name "Elmer," which is distinctively American and only started being used after the American Revolution (so it's an Americanism and an anachronism in one). There are a few vocabulary errors, too: desert/dessert, infer/imply (though even good writers at the actual period this is set in did make that mistake), passed/past, dichotomy/paradox, vindictive/invective. Occasional missing words in sentences, some garbled idioms, and a couple of other punctuation or usage issues round out the collection. It lacks, in other words, the polish I was hoping for, without which it's not a convincing attempt at a 1920s mystery, and I can't bring myself to give it more than three stars, even though it's otherwise sound.

I read a lot of actual 1920s mysteries, and if this was properly edited it wouldn't be a bad one. The main character, Anty Boisjoly (pronounced like Beaujolais), has a role similar to Albert Campion: not strictly speaking a detective, more of a fixer and finder-out for his wide circle of acquaintances. In this case, he's called in by his old rowing coxswain to clear him of a charge of murdering his uncle. He's of the Bertie Wooster class and background, a young man of the upper classes, educated at Eton and Oxford, without a specific occupation, and his observations are amusingly phrased, though they don't have the true Wodehousian sparkle any more than they have the Campion eccentricity. The other obvious comparison is to Lord Peter Wimsey, but he's sadder and more profound and, of course, his writer was an excellent prose stylist. Not that the prose here is terrible, but it's about average for the period it's set in, making it better than average for today. The other difference from all three of these characters is that he's neither an actual idiot like Wooster, nor masquerading as one to put people off their guard, like Campion and Lord Peter.

The other characters are mostly stock, as was the style in most 1920s mysteries, though there are hints of greater depth in some of them; the retired major, for example, isn't just a stereotype. The mystery is tricky and well plotted out (view spoiler)[(though it relies on people not hearing some shots that they really should have heard - the ones from the tower towards the pub) (hide spoiler)], and Anty solves it cleverly. The police inspector, unlike Campion's and Wimsey's police colleagues, is a classic Scotland Yard bungler in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, while the local policeman is a good-natured yokel, leaving the field clear for Anty to shine.

Compared with other modern attempts at classic mystery I've tried, it has some potential - but personally, I can't get past the lack of attention to detail in the editing, and I wouldn't buy another for that reason. But if I ever go back to listening to audiobooks, my library has the series in that format, and I won't be distracted by anything except misused words there.

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