Review: In Her Exquisite Clutches

In Her Exquisite Clutches by Auston Habershaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start this review with the disclaimer that I got a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review, and there's a long time to go until it's published. That means that hopefully most of the errors I spotted will be corrected, most notably spelling a dragon's treasure as "horde" rather than "hoard" and saying that she "horded" it (the latter of which spell check should have caught). That's not the only vocabulary error either, by a long way, and the author also apparently doesn't know, or at least consistently doesn't follow, the conventions for how dialog should be punctuated (with the tag as part of the same sentence as the dialog, not a separate sentence). Even if they do get fixed by publication, these are disappointingly basic errors to still be in place at the time the book is sent out for review. This is presumably why so may authors make the same few simple mistakes: their teachers (like this author, who teaches composition) don't know the rules either.

Setting all that aside, the actual story is well told, and is a clever unravelling of a heist, loosely based on an actual (still unsolved) art heist in real-world Boston. This one, however, takes place in a world where thought-to-be-mythical beings have reemerged into the world a few years before the main action, which takes place in the 2020s, and several years after the heist in the early 2000s. Among them is a dragon, who hoards (she does not horde) art.

It's explicitly inspired by Nero Wolfe, whose detective was split into two distinct people: the one who stayed inside and admired his collection and did the brain work, and the one who went out and did the leg work (and got beaten up while doing it). The latter, in this version, is a human, and our narrator, employed by the dragon as an investigator and her eyes on the street. The dragon is infuriatingly high-handed, which completely works, and the investigator is reasonably smart - but not dragon-level smart - and streetwise enough to get the upper hand over the criminals, at least sometimes.

There's a decent amount of character backstory for the investigator, too; he has history with several of the people who are suspected of having been somehow involved in the heist, and I did suspect that this was one reason the dragon employed him specifically, perhaps even the main reason. Yes, he's been working for her for a while at this point, but she's a long-term thinker, being more than a thousand years old.

The journey to the conclusion and the conclusion itself were both satisfying and both full of surprises, and despite the basic mechanical issues, I enjoyed the book and would look for another (but would hope that it had had more editorial attention before I read it).

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Review: Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder!

Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder! by Alice Duncan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An often enjoyable light read set in 1920s Los Angeles, with a 21-year-old heroine who's a stuffy Boston Brahmin trying to get life experience so she can write. She does this by taking a secretarial job with a private investigator, and quickly becomes involved in his cases, showing a quick wit, determination and bravery, though she's also too naive to live at times, which became annoying to me. Also, she doesn't so much solve the mysteries as persist in poking around until the murderer becomes fed up with her and tries to kill her, which honestly is understandable.

It's told in her voice, which is amusing; she knows she's lived a sheltered and privileged life, but doesn't always know in exactly what way she's naive, and sometimes her naivety becomes a touch overdone (as when she consistently fails to see an obvious source of danger, or can't figure out that if she's talking to an adult man on the phone, the 30-year-old woman who's just died must be his stepmother, not his mother). It's also amusing to see the clash between her upper-class East Coast upbringing and low life in California.

To someone who reads a lot of fiction from the era, it had the clear feel of a modern reproduction rather than a genuine antique. It was given away by little tricks of phrasing, the way the world felt only lightly sketched as a background rather than truly lived-in, and of course the fact that homosexuality was acknowledged to exist (even if Mercy is too naive to understand the slurs applied by her boss to her beautifully dressed male friend who's a costumier for the movies), and the main character wasn't even a little bit racist. I didn't spot any actual glaring anachronisms, though.

There's a little Easter egg for fans of the era in the mention of Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without a Key in Book 1. This is the first novel in which Charlie Chan appeared, and the main character is a Boston Brahmin like Mercy. Also, she visits Chinatown in the course of the investigation. She hasn't read the book, though - someone else is reading it. She reads Agatha Christie.

The editing issues are relatively few and widely scattered, and consist mostly of excess commas (such as after "of course" when it's only agreeing with the previous statement - something word processing programs are not sophisticated enough to get correct), and words missing or inserted in sentences. At least once, though, the dialog alternation is messed up, and there's a continuity error where Mercy presents something as her speculation from limited information given by a witness when it's almost a direct quote from that witness, giving the detail Mercy says the witness didn't go into. Also, spell check should have caught "indiscretely," since there's no such word in English, and corrected it to "indiscreetly." It could do with another quick polish.

I enjoyed each book slightly less than the one before, because Mercy keeps insisting on putting herself in danger when she doesn't have the common sense of a gerbil, and (so that the author can have her rescue herself) her boss doesn't do anything so sensible as going with her to protect her, just turns up after she has already been attacked. Her voice is consistently amusing, and the historical aspects are OK, but it's pretty light fare, and Mercy, while she is a decent investigator in the sense that she has good instincts where to look for clues and is capable at unearthing them, often can't come to a correct conclusion to save her life. The "save her life" part is sometimes literal. One of the less plausible aspects was how (view spoiler)[despite having no self-defence training of any kind, she not once, but twice manages to push a crazed, murderous attacker off a high place. (hide spoiler)]

The mix of enjoyable aspects and weaknesses is such that it falls naturally into the three-star category for me, and I'm not going to be looking for more in the series or from the author. But if you can have more patience with Mercy than I do and don't notice the occasional editing glitch, it may be just the cozy mystery you're looking for.

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Review: The Revolution of Small Things: A Tale of Dungeons & Dysfunction

The Revolution of Small Things: A Tale of Dungeons & Dysfunction by J.L. Butterworth
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book is trying to be several things at once: a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure, a "funny" fantasy, and a left-wing political fantasy. I don't think it succeeds particularly well at any of them, though I didn't read beyond 17%.

In no small part this is because the basic mechanics are extremely rough. I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and as always I must note that there may be more copy editing to come between the version I saw and the version that's published, but in this case there's so much work to do that I can't imagine it getting done by... (checks publication date)... yesterday. Yesterday (as I write) was the publication date. No, that's not happening, is it?

There's a comprehensive collection of nearly every common issue, in fact. Vocabulary errors - though not many, at least. Frequent missing or misplaced commas, especially the "let's eat Grandma" error. Misplaced apostrophes. Dialog tags punctuated as separate sentences from the dialog. Dangling modifiers. Two different spellings for one character's name, used more or less alternately. Tense that veers erratically between past and present. Awful attempts at "period" language, which might be deliberate characterisation (the character using it is an idiot), but, given all the other issues, is more likely a reflection of the fact that the author, like most modern people, doesn't know how Renaissance-era English worked.

Not only are there a lot of different types of error, there are a lot of instances of them, too, usually at least one and often two on a Kindle page, which (at the font size I use) is smaller than a printed page.

The setting is standard D&D, including tieflings and dragonborn, which I'm not sure are permitted for use in not-officially-licensed novels as opposed to games; I'm not a lawyer and haven't read all of the Wizards of the Coast license verbiage, though. However, it's a rather depressing version of a D&D setting, full of racist guards who harass an orc just because he's an orc, literally hellish bureaucracy, and corrupt wealthy rent-seekers who think they're untouchable. It's not a tone I enjoy, and along with the constant mechanical issues it was the reason I stopped reading.

The "funny fantasy" part is in the Robert Aspirin mode, which I've never personally found funny: mostly silly names, exaggerated tropes and people behaving like jerks. The locations, for example, are all named after food with some ending tacked on to make them sound like a placename.

It falls both into the "not for me" and "not well executed" buckets, hence my DNF.

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Review: The Facilite Con

The Facilite Con by Dick Wybrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an entertaining space-opera heist with a few flaws, including what seemed to me to be a huge plot hole.

A magistrate on a former convict planet has left the planet to avoid the insurrection that's currently going on, and wants someone to "steal" his prized collection of gems and get them off the planet for him, while apparently leaving them in place. The heist crew's plan is to duplicate the gems and give him the fakes, leaving with both his payment and the real gems.

And here the issues start. The gems, which only come from this planet, are essentially magic; whatever something does, they make it do it more so. Heaters heat better, lights light better, anti-gravity shields shield better. That in itself is nonsense. Even more so is the plan: they are going to quantum entangle the real gems and the fake gems so that the fake gems, when tested, will appear to be real. Which is absolutely not how quantum entanglement works; first of all, it's between fundamental particles, not macroscopic objects, and secondly it's between particles that are essentially identical in the first place, not between magic gems and fake gems made from a completely different substance.

Finally (and this is the plot hole), there are a certain number of these gems, and even though, for the purposes of her complicated plan, the heist mastermind uses two of them, there are still the original number left. Which, obviously, is not how mathematics works.

If you can ignore all of that - and I couldn't, which is why I dropped it to three stars - it is an entertaining story, with strong emotional beats, a complex heist plot that (apart from the big issues I've already mentioned) makes sense and features plenty of dramatic reveals, an appealing main character and many amusing turns of phrase.

In terms of editing, it's largely clean, except that the past perfect tense is missing a few times when the past-tense narration covers something that happened further in the past, prior to the narrative moment. This is a common issue with current books. Apparently schools have stopped teaching the past perfect at some point.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review; further changes may or may not be made before publication.

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Review: Honey & Hexes: A bee-witching cozy fantasy romance

Honey & Hexes: A bee-witching cozy fantasy romance by Steffanie Holmes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Superficially, this is a cozy fantasy featuring a bee witch who opens a meadery (in apparently present-day England, which surprised me slightly; I was expecting a secondary-world setting for some reason), and has a gradually building romance with a cat shifter who's the subject of a curse. If it was just that, and was executed to a good standard and complete in itself, it would have been a four-star read for me, but it has a number of flaws on closer examination.

The setup is that the witch, Autumn, has spent the past fifteen years married to a controlling, negging narcissist who has kept her from making any friends, made her put away anything that reminds her of her beloved mother and grandmother (her father is never mentioned, I don't think), convinced her that she's no good at anything, and stopped her from doing anything outside the house. We're told that she doesn't leave the house and garden, but she must do, because he gives her cash for household essentials which she must go into the village to buy, and from somewhere (bookshop or library) she is getting romance novels. This prize exhibit has gone missing, and Autumn, within a few days of his being gone from her life, breaks out and opens the meadery she's dreamed of. This seems oddly quick, but right at the end we get a hint of an explanation. It's not a cozy one.

A witch who had a flower shop in the village has been murdered, stabbed in the back with her own scissors, and this means the shop is available for rent as the meadery. Along with it comes a cat, who is in fact a thief cursed into cat form by the previous witch; he can assume human form when within 20 metres of Autumn, who seems to have somehow inherited him as her familiar by taking over the space. Attraction builds between them over the course of the book, but the supposedly-rogueish cat shifter holds the line of "you're still married, until we know he's dead or you're divorced this isn't happening," while the supposedly-wholesome witch just wants to bang him and damn the consequences.

I've given the book my "weak-mystery" tag because neither of the mysteries - the disappearance of Warren, the controlling husband, and the murder of the flower witch - gets much progression, or even much focus, during the book - at least not from Autumn, who's narrating. This is a minor flaw compared with the three big ones, as far as I'm concerned.

Firstly, the verb tense, something fairly basic to writing a narrative. It lurches wildly between past and present, often within a single sentence. The main narration is present tense, but it's not consistently maintained. As a more minor point about the mechanics, the setting in England isn't backed up by it being written in British English; there are garbage cans, for example, not dustbins. This isn't particularly obtrusive for me, but it might be more so for a British reader.

Secondly, there are a couple of places where there's a distinct clash of tone. Partway through, the main character has applied for a license to manufacture mead commercially. A grumpy official denies it. (He and his colleague are given the title "Councillor," suggesting they are elected members of the governing body for the council area, but they act as council employees, inspecting premises, administering exams and issuing or denying licenses. I'm reasonably sure that isn't how councils work in England any more than it is anywhere else.) (view spoiler)[The cat shifter goes offscreen to confront the grumpy official, in cat form, and bites off his finger, which I'm not sure is something a cat could even do. The sole consequence of this unpleasant but basically innocent man being maimed for life is that he, completely inexplicably, changes his mind and grants the license which has already been formally denied, and I'm absolutely sure that neither councils nor human beings work like that. It's like a scene out of one of YouTuber Ryan George's pitch meetings:

Producer Guy: But why does losing his finger to an attack by a random cat make him change his mind?
Writer Guy: Because!
Producer Guy: That works!
(hide spoiler)]

Finally, the ending, which is also part of the clash of tone, but deserves its own point, since it was what finally dropped the book all the way to two stars for me. The non-spoilery bit is that we get a new character who's only been hinted at previously, and then the book suddenly ends with a disturbing implication. The spoilery bit is that (view spoiler)[the disturbing implication is that Autumn has snapped, killed her husband and hidden him in the compost heap - which wouldn't work, because it would stink and attract vermin - and possibly had some kind of psychological break and forgotten doing so. (hide spoiler)]

I sometimes complain that cozy books are too close to the basic formula, that they've been made from box mix, with nothing really to distinguish them. Demonstrating how hard I am to satisfy, I'm making the opposite complaint about this one. It's got too much non-cozy material creeping in round the edges, particularly at the end; the end opens things out rather than tying them up; and along the way there are some things that just don't make sense, and a lot of issues with the verb tense.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review; further changes may or may not be made between this and the published version.

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Review: The Brooklyn Murders

The Brooklyn Murders by G.D.H. Cole
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Not, as you might think, set in Brooklyn, the borough of New York, but in London, where the Brooklyn family is headed by an elderly theatrical magnate, formerly an actor-manager. He isn't the victim. Instead, his two nephews are murdered in the same night, and the clues initially seem to indicate that they killed each other - which is manifestly impossible, given they are found in different places.

It's not particularly difficult for the reader to figure out who did it and how they got the opportunity, and I and several other reviewers got to the answer considerably before either the professional police detectives or the nice young amateur detective couple. This couple do a thorough job of following up clues and alibis, aided by the author's generosity in providing witnesses to things that could easily have gone unwitnessed (and that the murderer expected to be unwitnessed). Then, when they have the murderer figured out, they sensibly go to the police and give them the information.

Just kidding - what they actually do is go to the murderer and confront him (not a spoiler that it's a man, since it's established early on that it would take a strong man to commit at least one and probably both of the murders). Their idea is that he will sneak off and emigrate to Australia or somewhere, which of course will be totally fine and won't put anyone else in danger from this person who thinks killing people is a good way to solve his problems, and this will avoid a scandal, which of course is the most important thing by far, not justice or anything of that nature.

The obviousness of the solution lost it one star (from my usual starting point of four), and the stupid actions of the amateur detectives lost it another. It's an OK period piece, not the worst I've read, and if you're looking for background for writing your own interwar detective novel it would provide some material - though there's almost nothing about the theatre, despite the business at the centre of the plot being concerned with theatrical management.

Doesn't encourage me to pick up more books from this author, but I generally give people two chances unless they're truly awful, so maybe I'll read another someday.

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Review: One Wonderful Night A Romance of New York

One Wonderful Night A Romance of New York by Louis Tracy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Utter nonsense. Still somewhat entertaining.

To be fair, the plot is probably no more unlikely than a lot of romances being written today - or a lot of rom-com movies. This one was turned into a "photoplay," a silent film made in 1914, now considered lost, and the Project Gutenberg edition features stills from this movie (which show a leading lady significantly less slender than the text describes). It was filmed again in 1922, again without sound, and with a plot which, while simpler and in some points different, bears a closer resemblance to the novel than a lot of film adaptations (if the Wikipedia plot summary is accurate).

Still, the author spends quite a few words carefully hanging lampshades on several of the completely ridiculous and implausible decisions people make in the course of the plot, which also requires some coincidence to make it to the predestined end. One of these decisions results in a Fake Marriage Becomes Real trope, and another is the cause for the Misunderstanding Leading to a Rift Between the Couple.

The couple, of course, are terrific, he a manly man who doesn't hesitate to leap into danger and punch deserving plotters on the nose, she beautiful and wealthy and headstrong in mostly a good way.

The plot, it goeth thusly (as Jill Bearup would say - if you don't know who that is, look her up on YouTube, she's consistently entertaining). The hero, just back from China where he's been doing engineering, lands in New York and almost immediately witnesses a murder outside his hotel. By accident, he ends up with the murdered man's overcoat, having dropped his own to try to intervene and later being handed the wrong one by a bystander. He doesn't notice until he looks in the pocket for something and instead finds a marriage license, made out in a name quite similar to his (Jean de Cortois, while he is John D. Curtis). He leaps to the conclusion that this is the name of the victim, and, rather than go to the police with this vital information, decides to instead go to the address of the woman named on the license and gently break the news to her, since he doesn't trust the police to do so tactfully. Cue first lampshade-hanging.

This woman, Lady Hermione, it turns out, has paid the Frenchman to be her nominal husband to stop her father, an English earl, from forcing her to marry a Hungarian count who she despises, and who only wants her money. The problem still exists, so Curtis offers to step in and be the groom instead. They get married by an elderly clergyman whose eyesight isn't good enough to quite read exactly what's on the license.

Curtis has apparently never twigged that the Frenchman is described as "undersized," and he himself is a fine strapping lad, and so the overcoat should not fit him (this never comes up). But it turns out that the murdered man wasn't the Frenchman at all, but someone who was bringing him a replacement copy of the license after it was somehow lost, and the Frenchman is in fact still alive. Second lampshade hanging then ensues: Curtis doesn't tell Lady Hermione this in case it distresses her, but proceeds with the wedding supper, along with the head of detectives for the City of New York, a friend he'd met on the ocean liner, and his aunt and uncle, who have turned up to see him. The earl and the count, of course, later use this strategic silence of his to drive a wedge between the couple.

Meanwhile, the head of detectives has improbably recruited Curtis and his ocean-liner acquaintance to help in the investigation of the murder, and they have some adventures with various foreign low-lives. The frequent anti-immigrant and anti-foreign bias of the time is fully on display; for example, Curtis, who has lived among the Chinese for some years, absolutely despises them, and so apparently does the author. Along the way, a fortunate coincidence enables them to pursue one of the suspects, who turns the tables on them and then has them turned back on him.

Of course, at the end the murderers are apprehended, the earl and count are foiled, the couple are reconciled and admit they've fallen for each other (after a completely inadequate amount of acquaintance, hence my "thin-romance" tag), and everything works out just fine.

There are worse and sillier romances than this, and it's consistently entertaining in its own manner, but it's not as good as the same author's Cynthia's Chauffeur , in my opinion. That's a romance that develops gradually, for one thing, and while it has its ridiculous elements, none of them are quite so absurd as this one's.

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