Review: The Middle of Things

The Middle of Things by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fletcher was a good mystery writer, and this one is engaging and well written for most of its length, but doesn't stick the landing.

Viner, a "young gentleman of means and leisure" living in a nice part of London, returns home from an evening walk via a narrow passage between houses that offers a short cut. There he finds the dead body of a man who recently moved into the area, who he knows by sight. He saw a ragged-looking man running from the passage shortly before. The ragged man is picked up trying to pawn the man's ring to buy much-needed food, and found to be, by complete coincidence, an old schoolmate of Viner's from Rugby, down on his luck. (I haven't tagged the book "plot relies on coincidence" because, although there are some coincidences, they're not vital to the plot.) Viner is convinced he's innocent, for reasonable reasons (there was plenty of cash on the victim, which is missing, and if the suspect had cash to buy food he would have done so rather than try to pawn the ring, which he says he just snatched up from the ground in passing, thinking the victim was drunk).

It turns out the murdered man was also carrying some papers relevant to the succession to a noble title, and Viner and the several lawyers he involves (mostly in an attempt to clear his old schoolmate) are convinced that this is the motive for the crime. Multiple witnesses emerge from all directions with important clues, and the group gradually piece together the mystery. There's no one detective; Viner, a couple of the lawyers, Viner's sharp elderly aunt (who's addicted to murder mysteries) and a couple of other characters all contribute to the eventual solution.

Unfortunately, while the working out of clues and red herrings is engaging and well written, the resolution is at least two kinds of cheat, and not "fair play." The murderer is barely mentioned until right at the end, and was introduced early on only as someone with a minor and conventional function. Among a huge cast of minor characters, most of the others are more noticeable and memorable. Actual spoilers for whodunnit in the spoiler tags, because I want to complain about a plot point that makes no sense whatsoever: (view spoiler)[The murderer turns out to have a house that backs onto the alley where the murder took place, and to have done it as he showed the victim out of his own back gate. Which is fine, but why, then, does he not just go back into his house? Why does he instead go out of the alley in such a way that the man who becomes the prime suspect sees him? Why is he muffled up with his face hidden, something that is distinctive to this character and that another witness sees in a completely different context, but nobody who lives near him ever notices him doing it? The answer is obviously "so that the suspect can mention a plausible alternative suspect and it can be confirmed that such a man exists and was seen with the victim," but that's a book reason, not a reason reason. (hide spoiler)]

Those issues, and the thin romance that is also a solution to an impasse that I saw coming fifteen miles off, lost the book its fourth star. It's one of those that's enjoyable right up until the end, but then kind of falls apart.

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Review: The Classic Collection of John Ferguson (Six Detective Novels). Illustrated: The Man in the Dark, Death of Mr. Dodsley, The Dark Geraldine and Others

The Classic Collection of John Ferguson (Six Detective Novels). Illustrated: The Man in the Dark, Death of Mr. Dodsley, The Dark Geraldine and Others by John Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had read The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery in the Project Gutenberg edition, and it was so good I looked for others and found this collection. I had hoped that it would have the rest of the MacNab mysteries (there are four books in total plus a short story), but about half of the "detective" novels in this collection are actually thrillers, and only a couple of them are MacNab stories. That's a labelling and packaging issue, not an issue with the original books, which are excellent.

It's produced in Ukraine, and predictably imperfect in its punctuation (mainly missing commas, though there are also some missing periods, misread letters like "corning" for "coming," "!" read as "I," quotation marks missing, added, or on the wrong side of the space, and random extra punctuation or characters). Also, while it's technically true that it's "illustrated," the illustrations consist of random vintage pinup art (most, but not all, clothed) that has nothing whatsoever to do with the text. Not a great edition, but (aside from the pinups) no worse than some I've seen from major publishers. Still, you might want to look for better editions elsewhere.

I've already reviewed The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery , so I won't repeat that review. Let's start with The Death of Mr. Dodsley.

An elderly dealer in rare books is found at his desk, shot through the forehead sometime in the early hours of the morning. His nephew, also in the business, is engaged to the daughter of a prominent politician who is rising in the direction of being Home Secretary before too long, but father and daughter are estranged. The suspicious thing is that the daughter's recently-published detective novel is remarkably similar in some aspects to the real-life crime.

MacNab, the private detective who is Ferguson's series hero, has previously been called in by the late bookseller because rare volumes have been going missing, so he gets involved in the case, alongside the Scotland Yard inspector Mallet and his long-suffering sergeant, Crabb. There's a limited pool of suspects: the nephew, his fiancee, her brother, and the three shop assistants (one male, two female). Also involved is the politician's private secretary, a good friend of both the victim's nephew and the nephew's fiancee (the secretary's employer's daughter); he introduced the couple, in fact.

Much hinges on the beat policeman's identification of the drunken young man who distracted him, probably while the crime was being committed. Was that man involved? Is he one of the young men in the case? Clues at the crime scene suggest that a man and a woman committed the murder together. Which pair could it be, or are those clues misleading? It's a clever mystery, and I was fooled right up to the reveal.

The Dark Geraldine takes place in a fictional small Scottish town that has been previously mentioned in one of the other books - the constable is MacNab's father, I believe, which is the only connection to the MacNab series. It's narrated by a young lawyer who finds himself caught up in a mysterious intrigue involving a Munchausenesque retired soldier of fortune, his beautiful daughter (who, in a departure from the expected that I appreciated, the hero sensibly does not fall for (view spoiler)[except that right at the end he totally does (hide spoiler)]), an American purporting to be a travelling salesman but who is clearly something more, some mysterious thugs, and a drawing with a strange cypher embedded in it. The rather stuffy lawyer and his more free-spirited, action-oriented colleague take the sensible step of enlisting the village constable, who proves capable and effective. It's very much not a standard tropey detective story, and I enjoyed it all the more for that reason.

Night in Glengyle is a thriller more than a mystery, and is not a MacNab story. The narrator Maitland, a currently-out-of-work actor, is recruited by an old friend in the Foreign Office to steal some documents at a country house by means that will not be inquired into, in what sounds like a very dodgy and implausible setup. He's led to believe that a Cabinet Minister (probably, by the name and description, based on Winston Churchill) is behind the request, but doesn't see any actual proof of this. He manages to manoeuvre his way into being taken on there as an extra servant, but only by swapping identities with a man who ends up murdered. Was it because of Maitland's mission, or coincidental?

Coincidence does play a role in the plot, and unlike the other books so far this one exhibits some racial prejudice: the Irishman is stereotyped, the black man dehumanised, and a slur is used for people from the Mediterranean. This book was the one that got the overall collection the "plot-relies-on-coincidence" and "casual-racism" tags. But it's a gripping thriller for all that, and if you enjoyed The Thirty-Nine Steps, this is in a similar vein. Notably not othered and stereotyped are the tinkers who help Maitland, apparently for no gain, since he has nothing to pay them.

There are significantly fewer punctuation and scanning errors in this book than in the previous two.

The Secret Road is back to a higher number of scan errors, though. This is another thriller, this time an espionage thriller set in British India after World War I, where a rebellion is planned. The hidden mastermind's plot is to use a legendary diamond (or another diamond that resembles it, at least) to trigger the uprising. The main character is a young Englishman who is already experienced as a spy in India; like his missionary father, he picks up languages easily and with high fidelity, and can pass as Indian, as can a number of his comrades. (This involves brownface makeup.)

The complication is that the British resident in the native state where the plot looks like it's going to kick off is the uncle of the young man's crush, who's a school friend of his sister's, and a slightly older man with political ambitions is also staying there - and is engaged to the crush.

There's a lot more interpersonal maneuvering than in the other stories, possibly because there are two prominent female characters and an aspiring politician among the cast, and that crosses with and complicates the espionage/foiling-the-uprising plot. It's a gripping thriller.

Stealthy Terror (the man could certainly title) is another thriller, this time starting in pre-World War I Germany, where a young Scottish doctor is studying psychology. He is, of course, taken for an Englishman by the Germans. Happening to frequent a particular cafe, he stumbles on a plot, and when he attempts to rescue a man ends up with the MacGuffin, a mysterious parcel of documents. His only friend in Berlin has gone back to England, as he discovers when he flees his adversaries at night without shoes, hat or money.

By fortunate coincidence, the young woman he approaches for help is also Scottish, and helps him get away. But that's by no means the end of his gripping adventures, as the ruthless adversaries come after him for the MacGuffin. There's an extended tease of what the MacGuffin is; every time he's about to look at it, a crisis interrupts him. Then, when he finally has leisure to look at it, it appears to be nothing special - or is it? Plenty more action ensues, and all in all it's a thrilling time.

This one, unfortunately, is full of distracting scan errors and doesn't appear to have had the most basic editorial attention. At least it doesn't have any extraneous pinups.

In summary, then: good books, well written, but mostly poorly produced in this edition.

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Review: Breadknives and Boomsticks: A Sapphic Cozy Fantasy about Terrible Baking

Breadknives and Boomsticks: A Sapphic Cozy Fantasy about Terrible Baking by Marie Cardno
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don't let the slightly shonky cover put you off. The writing is much better.

I'm used to cozy fantasy having extremely minimal worldbuilding, barely (or even not quite) enough to enable the story. This is a welcome exception; in fact, the worldbuilding is essential to the plot, which is what I feel should preferably be the case with any kind of speculative fiction. The setup is that there was a war between liches long ago, and after it was over, one of the survivors cast a spell which causes all cursed things to be drawn to a single place, a volcano crater known as the Cauldron. Our protagonist Runa is not a world-weary warrior or (conventional) adventurer, as in so many fantasy cozies, but a guide who takes people, mainly wizards, into the crater and protects them from the many deadly dangers there while they study whatever it is they're interested in, or try to take things from the crater that have got caught up and dragged along with some curse or other.

The inciting incident is that Runa is flung out of the crater and has to recuperate in a cozy village just outside the rim (which was dragged there by a passing curseland). Everyone is nice to her, and nothing is trying to kill her, which is an odd experience for her after so long as a crater guide. She keeps thinking about an attractive woman she'd rescued shortly before her ejection from the crater, and (about halfway through the book) that woman turns up through a portal, adding complication to Runa's life. She already has some complications, in that she's living in the abandoned bakery, which has a mysterious inhabitant most of the villagers are wary of, and in order to try to contribute to the village that's being so generous to her, she's trying to bake.

She's terrible at it, which is another welcome departure from the cozy formula. Realistically, unless you've been developing some skill as a hobby for years, you will be terrible at it when you start trying to do it. She does, very gradually, get better, despite not understanding most of the instructions in the recipe book she finds, which is directed at journeyman bakers who already understand the basics which she has no idea about.

The story is Runa getting to grips with who she is if she's not being a cauldron guide, and indeed who she is in general (she's half volcano nymph and half troll, and didn't fit in with either group), and where she belongs, and if she belongs there with the woman she keeps rescuing, who has her own secrets and conflicts going on. It's a gradual unfolding, where nothing is too easy, or reliant on coincidence, or on people being idiots or acting out of character, which is also refreshing.

Another thing I'm used to with cozy (and with books in general) is terrible copy editing, and again I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, the pre-publication version I had for review via Netgalley does have a very small number of minor errors - an excess apostrophe, a couple of missing periods, a typo. But that's vanishingly little compared with most books I see, and can easily be fixed before publication.

The writing isn't just tidy, it's capable, with a wry sense of humour and a knack for expression that doesn't draw too much attention to itself. Overall, it's at the standard I always hope for, and very seldom find, in books I pick up from contemporary authors. It's what I wish cozy fantasy was all the time.

One way in which this is like many other cozies is that it's full of queer people. That may be a plus or a minus for you; I just mention it, though the subtitle should have tipped you off already.

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Review: Dead Men's Money

Dead Men's Money by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

J.S. Fletcher writes great mysteries, thrilling and not at all formulaic. This is just as good as any of his others in many ways, but I've knocked a star off because of the utter idiocy of the protagonist/narrator. Turns out I find this just as irritating in a young man as in a young woman, even though I see that variation a lot less often.

Talking in more depth about how Hugh Moneylaws, the narrator, carries the Idiot Ball involves some mild spoilers. The initial setup is that his mother's lodger has fallen seriously ill, and sent Hugh (a 21-year-old lawyer's clerk) to a lonely spot to meet someone he has an appointment with and tell the person that he can't come. When he gets there, Hugh discovers a recently deceased corpse.

(view spoiler)[On the way to the meeting, he saw a man with a distinctive mark, two missing fingers on his right hand, coming from roughly the direction of the murder scene. The man doesn't see him (it's dark, and some instinct has caused Hugh to hide when he hears him coming). Unfortunately, the same instinct doesn't prompt him to tell the police about the man when they question him. Nor, once he has identified the man as a local magnate recently arrived in the area, does he tell his wise boss, who he very much looks up to and trusts, or his girlfriend, from whom he normally has no secrets. He keeps it entirely to himself.

A dodgy local tradesman, who was poaching in the area, confides in Hugh that he saw both him and the man, and implies (Hugh realises afterwards) that they could blackmail the magnate, which Hugh of course won't do. The following day, this dodgy character is found dead from violence.

Does Hugh now talk to the police, his boss, or his sweetheart? He does not. Instead, without telling anyone where he's going, he goes to speak to the magnate, thinking there must be an innocent explanation. He informs the man that he hasn't told anyone else. The man says he has insomnia and often walks around at night, and this satisfies Hugh completely; he promises he won't say anything to anyone. Nor does Hugh smell any kind of rat when the magnate offers him a job as steward, at more than four times his current salary.

Hugh then goes with the man onto his yacht, just the two of them, far out from land. Of course the man pushes him off, and he only survives by lucky chance. But now he at least knows the man is the murderer, and will be more cautious in future. Right? Right?

No. He goes off two further times alone without telling anyone and gets into trouble, the second time having faithfully promised his sweetheart he'll do no such thing (and his sensible boss has also promised her he won't let Hugh out of his sight until everything is tied up, and uncharacteristically doesn't keep his promise). (hide spoiler)]

The rest of the book is great, full of tension, plenty of good action, a complex mystery that takes a lot of clever work (mostly by Hugh's boss) to unravel. But far too much of it relies on Hugh being dumber than bread.

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Review: Breeze Felt at Moonrise

Breeze Felt at Moonrise by Lynn Buchanan
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The good: Sanderson-style deep worldbuilding that's central to the premise and plot.

The less good: dark and tragic backstory, though with the potential to turn.

The annoying: commas after adjectives of quantity and number, which are never coordinate and should not be treated as such. Also, fortunate and unfortunate coincidence as plot drivers, though there may be an in-world explanation for why things are so conveniently or inconveniently timed.

The balance: I stopped reading at 20% because it was just too dark for my taste. I even looked at the end to see if it was ultimately completely tragic, and even though it wasn't, I decided I'm not in the mood for tragic consequences of greed and revenge visited on the next generation.

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Review: The Star of Kilnaely

The Star of Kilnaely by Grace Daly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual one, which is largely why I picked it up.

Set in the American Midwest, but in a town inhabited apparently exclusively by Irish people, so (having forgotten the blurb) I was confused for a long time about where we were. I remained confused about when we were, since the frame story and the last of the stories that it frames were apparently present day, but the majority of the stories seemed to be set in about the 1920s, based on the technology level and what was said to be new - and yet the characters, while they aged, were not over 100 years old.

There was also the occasional vocabulary glitch, which I'll mention to the publisher; I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there may still be a chance to fix them. Otherwise, the copy editing was reasonably good, apart from "may" instead of "might" in past tense and at least one apostrophe in the wrong place.

The frame story shows us a small town spoiled by the advent of a rapacious software corporation, which is degrading the environment (especially the built environment), driving up land prices and displacing long-term inhabitants who can no longer afford to live there. The inner stories, told to a hapless salaryman from that corporation in a bar, are something in between Irish legendary tales and American tall tales of the Paul Bunyan variety, except instead of a blue ox the Star of Kilnaely has an enormous dog, big enough for even him to ride on. He's a larger-than-life character, charismatic, strong, handsome and blessed, in addition, with a brilliant younger sister, who (it soon becomes obvious to the reader, if not to the slightly inebriated listener in the bar) is the person telling the stories.

The hero tales are fun, and to my mind would have worked better without the frame, but they work well enough. Some have high stakes, others low stakes, but all of them show us the Star solving problems one way or another. Again, some draw on Irish mythology and show us the Good Neighbours and gods and goddesses, while others are more general small-town situations.

Pleasant and enjoyable, if a little confusing chronologically.

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Review: Alistair Fall and the Restless Dead

Alistair Fall and the Restless Dead by Marianne Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The reason I persevere in picking up books for review via Netgalley, despite many of them being mediocre or worse, is that sometimes I get one like this.

In a lot of authors' hands, this would have been predictable and bland. The setup looks like a slow-burn grumpy/sunshine romance, based on the blurb - the FMC is actually called Sunny. But it's not that. She isn't the perky, cheery sort her name suggests; she has a dark backstory, and she engages with it, doesn't bury it under a fake sugary veneer. She's sarcastic and smart and capable, but also realistically self-doubting and slow to trust. Sure, she'd like to be a cozy fantasy protagonist - she loves baked goods, and has a favourite little tea shop and a calico cat named Butterscotch - but who she is and where she is mean that she ends up fighting a conspiracy of necromancers instead.

Her opposite number, Alistair Fall, is bad with people, but he knows and regrets it. He'd like more friends, but unfortunately almost his only real friend is murdered early in the book, and he's tasked with investigating. Sunny looks like the prime suspect, but he's a good investigator and doesn't believe it, instead recruiting her to help him find the real killer, which would clear her name. They build a partnership and what might well become a friendship over the course of the book, but it's not a romance, which I appreciate; from time to time it's nice to read about two people who are just good colleagues. Both of them bring genuine strengths to the partnership, as equals.

Solving the mystery happens well before the end of the book, because just knowing who was behind it isn't enough; the pair also have to thwart the antagonists' plot, making the last part of the book more of a thriller. They are significantly at a disadvantage in doing so, and it takes all their courage and ingenuity. And they don't do it in either of the two ways I thought of.

I'm also so used to inadequate worldbuilding in current fantasy novels that it's cause for celebration to read one with worldbuilding that actually matters to the plot, and has had some effort put into it, and is different from the usual generic off-the-shelf scenarios. In this setting, through events which aren't explored in depth, almost 40 years before the story starts the prevailing pagan religion was banned in favour of atheism, imposed by the State of Order, which... is less authoritarian and despotic and dystopian than it could easily have been, though certainly some people are discontented under it, while others are good Statists and parrot the prejudices that the State encourages. One of those prejudices is against the use of magic, which is associated with paganism, and since Fall is a sorcerer (albeit sanctioned by the State), he comes in for a lot of persecution, petty and otherwise.

Yes, the trope of oppressed mages has its problems. Here, though, it's a bit more justified than usual, more of a parallel with, say, the persecution of intellectuals under some Communist regimes. These mages are oppressed because they potentially threaten the State's declaration that the gods are mythical, and the mechanism of their oppression is not so much official persecution as encouraging ordinary people to despise and distrust them.

The worldbuilding, in other words, matters to the characters' circumstances, and it also turns out to be highly relevant to the plot (for spoilerific reasons).

Names (and phrases, and concepts) from our world did make their way in, and the names are the usual mixture of made-up fantasy names and familiar ones from various cultures in our world (including a couple of biblical ones in this world without that cultural context, which is something I should probably give up complaining about, since nearly everyone does it).

There are also married same-sex couples in this setting that's otherwise similar to our world's late 18th/early 19th century. But that's a passing detail, not a central feature as it would be in so many current fantasy books.

Other things I appreciated: Fall's sorcery is limited; not something he can deploy quickly, and it can't just do anything, so it isn't used to cheat on the plot. The editing is also excellent, unlike most books I see via Netgalley (or BookBub), with just a couple of minor vocabulary issues that I'll flag to the publisher, meaning they may well be corrected before publication.

Overall, it's sound, solid, and achieves enough depth in its exploration of the characters and their society that I'm giving it five stars, not something I do often. I definitely want to read more from the author and in this world, and it looks like being a series, so I should get my wish.

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