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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Review: The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious

The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious by Scott Lynch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy Scott Lynch, so when I saw this on Bookbub I hardly hesitated before picking it up. It's in his usual slightly tongue-in-cheek high style, the kind of style that earnest fans of Jack Vance often attempt and fail at miserably, but that Lynch has the chops to pull off and make just slightly self-parodying while still working in its own terms.

It's a short work, just a few brief chapters, but complete in itself. The wizard of the title is a member of a wizards' conclave that meets every 13 years on a beach drawn up out of the remote ocean for the purpose. He keeps himself suspicious by never demonstrating any magic at these meetings, so that some of his colleagues are convinced he's not actually a wizard. The test applied by one of them on this particular occasion to try to trick him into settling this one way or the other is repurposed as an ingenious murder weapon, and the (possibly not actually a) wizard cleverly solves the crime.

There are perhaps a few too many of the wizards to easily keep straight in this short a book, but they are spectacularly powerful and eccentric in their presentations, and their magic can do basically anything they can imagine. Since their imaginations are Scott Lynch's, they do some wild and entertaining things. But even though their magic is effectively unlimited, the way in which the murder is performed is still subject to analysis.

The group dynamics, the individual personalities, the wizards' bizarre conveyances and appearances, and their different reactions to the events are well developed, and the mystery itself I found satisfying, both the problem and the solution.

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Review: Riallaro, the Archipelago of Exiles

Riallaro, the Archipelago of Exiles by John MacMillan Brown
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I put this on my e-reader a while back, and had forgotten the details, so I vaguely thought it was a utopian novel like Erewhon . That certainly seemed to be where it was going at the beginning: a group of gold prospectors in Fiordland (New Zealand's most remote region) stumble upon a man who speaks English with a northern accent, haltingly at first, as if he hasn't been using the language for some time. He appears to have got where they are using some sort of winged contraption. But this is just a frame story for a book that is much more like Gulliver's Travels.

The unnamed man, having inherited a steam yacht, and disillusioned with western civilization and its discontents, sets out in search of a theorized idyllic land populated by noble savages, which he hopes to find in a mysterious area of the Pacific surrounded by mists. However, what he finds there is a group of islands where the inhabitants maintain their biases by exiling anyone who doesn't fit in with their way of thinking to one of the other islands. It's an elaborate, though fairly obvious, satire on western, or at least British, civilization, told in verbose and mannered language that contrasts with the rough gold prospectors of the frame story, who are theoretically conveying it to us. Sample:

Nor must it be held an inconsistency in them that they thought money the root of all evil... They despised it and hated it. And lest it should do to their neighbours the harm for which they feared it and loathed it, they gathered as much of it into their hands as they could. “They swallowed the devil” again, according to their own proverbial phrase, as the best means of preventing the mischief he might do to others. It was one of the most altruistic of their principles, they considered, this accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, lest the many should suffer. They could hedge the monster round and narrow his sphere of operations. And every provision had been made by the state for centuries that he should not approach the masses with his foul influence. It was the gilded classes of the marble city that could alone withstand the evils he worked, and amongst them therefore was he imprisoned. They were, so to speak, the turnkeys of this vampire of commercial races; and in their duties they were all vigilant lest he should escape and work irremediable havoc amongst the rest of the nation.

Which says the exact same thing at least three times, in case you miss the point. It was this style that caused me to stop reading, having obtained about as much entertainment as I was likely to get out of the book.

Interesting historically, though.

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Review: The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery

The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery by John Ferguson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I get a lot of books off the Project Gutenberg RSS feed, and often I don't know much about them or their authors. The reason I keep doing that is that every so often I hit one as good as this.

Told in compelling and capable prose, this isn't your standard Golden Age mystery with the locked room, the closed pool of suspects, and the detective sorting through motives and alibis. It's completely different from that, in fact. The murderer remains an unseen and unnamed figure for most of the book; how and (roughly) why he committed the crime is clear from early on, but the main focus of the book isn't even on who he is, but the experiences and fate of the man of the title.

This man, Kinloch, has been blinded in World War I, and is down and out as a result. In desperation, he visits an old friend, a fellow Scot who was at university with him, one night in the London suburb of Ealing. They quarrel, and he storms out into the pea-souper fog that has the whole city locked down, in which he's at no more disadvantage than anyone else.

A man finds him lost, looking for the railway station, and offers him a deal: five pounds to come to his house and be a hidden witness to a meeting he is having, only revealing his presence if prompted. He's delighted to discover that Kinloch doesn't recognise him, which a sighted man would, since he's a public figure.

The meeting degenerates into murder, Kinloch is knocked out in the subsequent chaos, and the murderer has a female accomplice take him away into the country because, initially unaware of his blindness, the murderer thinks Kinloch will be able to identify him. Kinloch keeps his ears out for clues that would identify the place he's being held, but over his captivity forges a mutual bond with his captor, who appears to be the murderer's wife.

Then the point of view switches, and we get an account by a journalist who, with a private detective (Francis McNab, the series hero), is attempting to track down the murderer ahead of the police. This would sell a lot of papers, so the journalist's editor is keen, at least until they seem to stop making progress. There's some well-handled dramatic irony as both the private and official detectives draw conclusions from the crime scene that we, the readers, already know are incorrect. Later, we get the account of Kinloch's friend the doctor, who is trying to track him down simply out of concern, and then the last section of the book is back with the journalist as the detective gets on the trail of Kinloch, whose name they have finally discovered. The book ends with a tense and dramatic climax and a satisfying resolution.

The whole thing is excellently done, with a high standard of craft all the way around: in constructing the story, in pacing, in managing the emotional arc, in the puzzle and the investigation, and just in the writing mechanics.

There's a complete one-volume ebook of the six McNab mysteries available for cheap, so I picked it up (first checking the sample quickly for quality, and it looked OK). I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the novels.

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Review: Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life

Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life by Richard Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judith Lee is sometimes described as a "lady detective," but she's really not a detective. She's a superhero, a couple of decades before that consciously became a thing. (This collection of stories was published in 1911, and several more were published five years later, after the author's death.)

Her superpower is that she can read lips with slightly implausible accuracy from some distance away, since she - like her father and grandfather before her - is a teacher of the deaf and dumb, using the "oral method," which involves teaching deaf people to lipread. This doesn't seem to be her only source of income; she moves in moderately well-off circles, a policeman at one point notes that she's wearing an expensive frock, and most of the stories in the volume take place while she's on holiday at some resort or other, or at least eating at a nice restaurant. She's a bit of a snob, and is prejudiced against foreigners (of course), the lower classes, people who look unusual, and... gingers. Any character who has red hair is definitely going to be up to no good. So it's a surprise when she disguises herself at one point with a red wig.

It's also surprising that she has dark skin (a Sicilian refers to her "black face" at one point, and even allowing for exaggeration that suggests she's quite dark for an English person), very dark hair, and gets referred to by one of the less grateful people she helps as "that half-bred gipsy-looking creature." The surname Lee is sometimes held by Roma in Britain, so perhaps she's supposed to be of Roma descent.

As well as foreigners, common people and gingers, she's not a big fan of men either, saying at one point, "Why are some men so silly—so many men—nearly all of them?" Having said that, women are sometimes the perpetrators and men occasionally the victims of the crimes and crime-adjacent schemes that she keeps stumbling upon through her unacknowledged second superpower, incredible luck. And by "incredible" I mean I didn't believe in it; it's authorial interference, is what it is. In one of the longer stories, she hangs a lampshade on the coincidence of bumping into the same people over and over, sometimes years apart, at random places, just at the moments that are essential for the plot to progress. Some higher power, she says, must be involved. Indeed it is, and that power is an author who can't make his plot work without this level of coincidence. Although when she is confronting wrongdoers, she sometimes claims to be the instrument of God, and if that isn't just part of the bluff, the "higher power" bit may be intended to be taken seriously. In one story, it's "borne in upon her" that she should go to a particular place because something is happening there, so maybe she is supposed to be acting under the direct guidance of God. Outside these contexts, she doesn't express religious sentiments or ideas, so it's hard to say.

I say she's not a detective because she never really solves mysteries in any conventional sense. She just eavesdrops visually on chance conversations plotting harm to people, and then involves herself in obtaining justice, either by attempting to warn the victims or, in several cases, using her knowledge of what the people having them were convinced were private conversations, in order to frighten them into abandoning their plots. She does sometimes involve the police, but she pretends they're involved at other times when they're actually not, in order to put the frighteners on the villains. She has plenty of self-assurance, and bluffs like a poker world champion; it's almost a third superpower. She says at one point that she makes it a rule never to do anything important while angry, but this is patently untrue. When she's enraged at injustice, her typical first move is to go and confront the villain, without much thought for her own safety.

Her bluffs often work, but as the stories go on, they're less and less effective, and in the last story she has a physical fight for her life that leaves her permanently scarred. She also, in one of the later stories, uses Jiu Jitsu, which she's been practicing, but I'm not going to count that as a superpower because it only gets mentioned that once.

Her fourth superpower is that she can gain near-native fluency in languages in a short amount of time, which is useful a couple of times when she's lip-reading people who speak a particular German or Italian dialect from somewhere she happens to have been.

Overall, the various superpowers make for a setup that's pretty implausible, unless you consider these as pulp stories in the vein of, say, Doc Savage. Judith is an interesting character, though: independent, intelligent, capable, with a powerful sense of justice that sometimes overrides her better judgement. She will go to considerable trouble and even risk her own life to help people who she has, in most cases, never met before, even ones she doesn't like or who don't like her, and if that's not a superhero, I'd like to know what is.

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