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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Review: A Swindler's Song

A Swindler's Song by Lindsay Bowen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a mixed bag for me.

On the one hand, I do love a heist. On the other hand, the heist crew weren't as capable or cohesive as I could have wished, and there was a lot of reliance on convenient chance to enable them to pull off the job. I'll put all the lucky breaks in spoiler tags, though some of them come out quite early: (view spoiler)[
- The crew leader physically resembles a famous singer and can sing well, giving them a way to get into the event where they plan to pull the job.
- One of the crew can play the cello, an instrument which the singer is known to have in her backing band.
- The same crew member has grown up exploring a castle which is the exact duplicate of the one they are hitting - there are three of these, on identical islands, with a handwavey story about an ancient matriarch who insisted her three sons build identical castles and cities on the three islands, but it's clearly a plot device to make the heist easier.
- The castle includes an easy back way to the vault that they figure out by being in the right place at the right time, and it's made even easier by the fact that the eldest of the lord's four eerily similar wives has a crush on the crew leader and gives her a key.
- The escape plan relies heavily on timing that there is no way to guarantee, but of course works perfectly.
- Not to even mention the elven superpowers.
(hide spoiler)]

In other words, the author stacks the deck heavily in favour of the characters. They do still have to work for their success, and one of them does so while dealing with a chronic illness, and there's genuine danger from the despotic "warlords" (I would have just called them lords; warlords implies a more improvised situation than the multi-generational rule they represent). But it reduces the characters' agency to see them helped along like this, and character agency is an important part of the heist genre for me.

The romance subplot progresses rapidly from spur-of-the-moment hookup to enemies to fake married to soulmates having outrageously blissful sex (on-page, so if you prefer not to read that, this isn't your book). I wasn't a fan of the speed-run, or really of either of the partners much. The author gave them heartstring-tugging backstories and laudable goals, but somehow I never fully warmed up to them. I also spotted the big "twist" at the end 40% of the way through.

It was far from the worst copy-edited book I've seen lately, though the author's apostrophe game is weak when it comes to plural nouns, and there's the occasional missed opportunity to use the past perfect tense. A number of idioms are not quite rendered correctly (it's subtle), and a few sentences don't say exactly what they mean. I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and there may or may not be more editing to come.

The worldbuilding is the usual not-particularly-coherent mix of standard sword-and-sorcery world with random bits of our world wherever there's a gap to be filled. The names, for example, as is so often the case, are a mix of made-up fantasy names, names out of the Bible (in a setting where such religion as there is is Basic Fantasy Paganism, but with the gods absent because of reasons), and names from specific ethnic backgrounds in our world standing in for countries in a completely different geography. There's been some effort put in - the absence of the gods and (at least theoretically) of magic, though I've seen both of those before - but it's mostly generic.

All in all, I was lukewarm on it, and it wasn't quite for me. I'd not be at all surprised if it was for plenty of other people, though.

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Review: The Secret of the Silver Car Further Adventures of Anthony Trent, Master Criminal

The Secret of the Silver Car Further Adventures of Anthony Trent, Master Criminal by Wyndham Martyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This sequel to Anthony Trent: Master Criminal is, if anything, better than the first, more of a thriller in the mould of The Thirty-Nine Steps (but without the heavy racism) than the gentleman-thief story of the first book. It starts with immediate action, a man (Anthony Trent, as it emerges) jumping off an ocean liner just as it leaves the dock and landing, unhurt, on the quay, whence he hurries off. Why did he do this? We're not left wondering for too long; there's a flashback.

The hero, who has made a fortune as a burglar, ended the first book fighting in World War I because of his sense of duty. He's been wounded and is unconscious, and another man, who has found him and bound his wounds, has dragged him to what he thought was safety. But! A shell has buried them in the ruined building, and they're running out of air. Thinking they're both about to die, Trent confesses his criminal past, giving the man his name.

But they don't die, and Trent goes in search of the man, who holds his freedom in his hands, and whose distinctive voice he had heard on the dock. There's a very substantial reward offered for the apprehension of the (to the police) unknown man who did the crimes for which Trent was responsible. What he finds quickly gets into spoiler territory, but the upshot is that Trent volunteers for a dangerous and unofficial undercover mission into Croatia to retrieve a compromising document. There, he contends with a despotic Balkan count, pulling off daring but reasonably plausible feats of espionage, theft and escape.

There's a love interest, too, who Trent considers himself unworthy of because of his criminal past. All of it is good, solid stuff, unfortunately marred by another terrible editing job by the original publishers (see my review of Book 1). I really am seriously considering editing these public-domain books myself to a decent standard, so that others can enjoy them in the state they deserve to be in. They're entertaining, they're not anything like so far-fetched or reliant on coincidence as most action thrillers of the period, and they have sound emotional beats and a strong character arc. They just need several hundred more commas and a few other relatively easy fixes.

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Review: Anthony Trent, Master Criminal

Anthony Trent, Master Criminal by Wyndham Martyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the "clever gentleman thief" subgenre that started in English with Raffles, though I think Arsene Lupin was before him in French. Trent is closer to Lupin, who, in a long and varied career, was often a helpful vigilante or even a detective, not just a master criminal. He works alone; Raffles corrupted his old schoolfellow Bunny, who had a hopeless crush on him, and treated him worse than a dog, while Lupin often had confederates, who he looked after, but Trent has studied how criminals fail, and feels that working alone is safest.

He's studied criminals as part of his original occupation as a writer of crime fiction. He wanted to do this really well, and went so far as to work for a burglar alarm manufacturer in order to research how their devices work. But this means he wrote only about a story a month, and his publisher couldn't pay him more than two cents a word for them, so when the story opens he's living in a boarding house with a rented upright piano and dreams of someday having a big house with a grand piano so he can compose. (His musical ambitions and abilities don't really come up again after this.) He concludes that his dreams are only feasible if he turns to crime, which he believes he can get away with, given his studies.

He's a man of some contradictions. Apart from being a thief (targeting the rich and unworthy), he maintains the moral code of his Ivy League background; he also steals things he knows he can't sell, because dealing with fences would make him vulnerable to detection. Several of his heists are for jewels which he substitutes for the coloured glass in his brass Benares lamp, simply because he fancies the idea.

Ultimately, he refuses to compromise his principles, and is saved from public disgrace only by a combination of good fortune and the loyalty of his housekeeper, who has divined his secret but knows him to be basically a good man. He then decides he will join the army and go to fight in World War I, having a couple of times foiled German spies. This also nearly leads to his exposure, and sets up for the start of the second book, which I read immediately after the first one.

Trent is a privileged protagonist. I use this term slightly differently from "spoiled protagonist," by which I mean a protagonist who's showered with unearned help from unlikely quarters. A privileged protagonist is someone who is firmly convinced, and perhaps convinces us, the readers, that anything they do is all right, even if it's illegal, because it's them doing it, and they are One of the Right Sort. Not only that, but they get away with it, essentially because they're the protagonist. Harry Potter and his friends are privileged protagonists; they break the rules all the time, and end up being commended rather than punished. Even though Trent does have his moral qualms about his way of life, he doesn't actually stop, at least until (in Book 2) he meets the love of his life, which is what usually reforms these characters. Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces is another example, though I found Trent's adventures more plausible than Cleek's. There are all kinds of obvious issues with privileged protagonists, and I plan to explore them in a blog post sometime, but personally I'm still able to enjoy stories that feature them, even as I note the trope and its problems.

This book was clearly cheaply produced by a slapdash publisher with a typesetter who should not have been employed in that field. The Project Gutenberg edition has an extensive list of obvious typos at the back that were corrected during the conversion process; it includes an "it's" that should be "its," but they missed a "who's" that should be "whose." Unfortunately, they haven't attempted to insert the many missing commas, mostly the ones that provide subtle grammatical pointers to help the reader parse the sentence, but also the vocative comma (the one that makes the difference between "let's eat Grandma" and "let's eat, Grandma"). Also, a good many of the apostrophes are in the wrong places. Some of this is probably down to the author, who has also mistakenly used the name of Trent's fictional criminal a couple of times where the reference is to Trent himself.

It's so dire that I'm seriously tempted to create my own edited edition so that people can enjoy it as it should be enjoyed, though I'm not sure how I'd distribute it. If this kind of thing bothers you as it bothers me, perhaps listen to the Librevox recording; my wife did, and recommended the book to me, which is why I picked it up.

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Review: The Little Shop of Gentle Magics

The Little Shop of Gentle Magics by Jessica Rosenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this one frustrating because it just didn't quite make sense or come across as plausible to me. Someone with a stronger ability to suspend disbelief may enjoy it considerably.

The editing is good (apart from one word choice by the author which I'll point out, when I give feedback to the publisher via Netgalley, is probably not the word she means). But I kept getting tripped up by little oddities in how things unfolded.

Firstly, Meg, the spoiled protagonist. This is a term I came up with for protagonists who get showered with unearned help by everyone they meet. The little Scottish town where this Scottish-descended American protagonist pitches up, a little while after a bad divorce, instantly and unanimously takes her to its heart and begins helping her set up her tea-and-decorated-cookies shop, which she has (unusually for her, we are told) impulsively spent all of her divorce-settlement money on. At least, we're told a couple of times that all her money has gone on buying the lease, but she still seems to have money to spend on fitting it up and getting inventory. It's not clear whether all the tradesmen who are relatives of her neighbours are working for free or just at a discount, but certainly the conveniently-available second-hand shop fittings and kitchen equipment and the tea and baking supplies aren't free. The unconditional help and support, by the way, comes from everyone including the owner of the coffee shop right across the street, who you would think would have at least some thoughts about direct competition for the tourist dollar, but no.

Of course, her new instasoulmate Art (who she met and had one amazing date with in the US, then cut off in a brief message with no explanation because she had to go to Scotland and find herself) moves in with her almost immediately, and is presumably paying something, since his company posted him (conveniently) to Scotland and has an accommodation budget for him, but the question of his contribution to the household finances never comes up. Money in general never comes up, despite the fact that this is probably the number one worry of a new small business owner apart from marketing.

The marketing almost takes care of itself, despite the fact that on the day the business opens, the shop still doesn't have a name. Art's daughter does some social media stuff Meg doesn't understand, despite being 40 years old in 2026, and they're packed to the doors all day, but Meg can still take time out for interpersonal drama, since the entire community is, as previously mentioned, supporting her.

Meg has grown up being dumped on by her awful mother and aunts because, unlike them, she has no (apparent) witchy powers, and this prepared her to marry an equally if not more awful man who made it all about him, so that she had to completely efface herself in order to manage his emotions for him. But when she starts to finally develop powers (because of the ancient magic of Scotland, which is apparently more magical than America; maybe white people can't access the inherent magic of the land in America?) it doesn't seem to be a big deal for her, as I would have expected. She is worried about telling Art, but of course when she finally does, he's OK with it, because no conflict lasts much more than a short chapter in this book. Even Art's surly teenage daughter is intermittently pro-Meg from quite early on, and his five-year-old son loves her just as instantly as his father does.

There's a good deal of sizzling-hot kissing on page, but no actual sex; it's strongly implied that Meg and instasoulmate just cuddle the first night, and after that it's never directly addressed.

A lot of things are way too easy, and because it's set in a version of the real world, that stands out more than if it's in a lightly-sketched sword-and-sorcery secondary world. At least there are interpersonal (and intrapersonal) dynamics; I wasn't fully convinced by all of them either, but there are some. For example, Art, who is usually a perfect foil for her awful ex-husband, does occasionally make decisions for Meg without consulting her, which she resents, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that she'd subjugated her own preferences to her ex-husband for 20 years. It seems like these two near-perfect people can only have conflict by both of them acting a bit out of character.

The whole thing is in broadly the mould of all midlife women's paranormal cosies: divorce, small business, new love, discovery of powers, helpful community. It isn't quite what I call This Damn Thing Again, which also involves an inheritance from a relative, returning to one's hometown, discovering for the first time that the supernatural exists, and having a basic mystery to solve, but it's a close cousin. Sure, that's what a genre is, a set of expectations, but this particular genre seems to adhere more closely than most to the exact same setup each time.

Within that setup, for me it didn't come across as plausible. The fiction I admire most starts with a premise - preferably one that hasn't been done a thousand times before - and some well-realized characters and grows the events organically from the setting, the premise and the characters interacting in a natural and believable way. I didn't feel this book was doing that. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm sure plenty of people will enjoy it a lot, and I do commend the excellent standard of editing. It just didn't quite work for me.

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Review: The Friendship Circle: A magical heartwarming story about second chances and friendship for fans of cozy small-town emotional reads in 2026!

The Friendship Circle: A magical heartwarming story about second chances and friendship for fans of cozy small-town emotional reads in 2026! by Amanda James
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

That subtitle is positioning the book pretty clearly, and if you like this sort of thing, this is definitely one.

I'd read an Amanda James before, The Secret Library , which set out to be inspirational and uplifting, but was let down a bit by the fact that the author's craft skill is not equal to her ambitions. It had an interesting enough premise and a worthy enough positive tone that I wanted to give her another chance, but the lack of skill was even more evident in this one, where cliches are presented as wisdom, and trite, vaguely New Agey self-help platitudes are presented as depth. The characters seemed stiff and generic to me, and overall it just didn't keep my interest, and I didn't finish it. For someone who is more centrally its target audience, it would probably work better.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy

The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy by Briana Snow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author isn't kidding about the slow. It takes the first 4% of the (relatively short) book for the main character to come into a room and make a cup of tea. That's OK, though, because every sentence of that 4% is building character or the world or both.

But I have to say, by the time some conflict finally appeared almost halfway through, I had been ready for it for a while. I'd had to stop reading because I was falling asleep (on a sunny afternoon, on the couch with my cat). It's maybe just a tiny bit too cosy unless you're really, really into that slow life vibe. That conflict, by the way, is relatively easily resolved and has no long-term negative consequences.

I mentioned worldbuilding above. I often criticize the worldbuilding of cosy books for being thin - slapdash scenery flats placed behind 2020s people in cosplay. This one has more worldbuilding than that, but it's a bit incoherent.

Firstly, there's a reference (to Blackpool in 1987, in a context that signals this was many years ago) that places it probably in contemporary England, but nothing in the story really requires it to be, and no details back that up. The English is American, and with the exception of a single toaster, nothing seems to be powered by electricity or manufactured. It's very much the pre-industrial cosy setting I was expecting from the cover and blurb, and it could easily be secondary-world without affecting the story whatsoever.

Secondly, there are random bits (and one non-random bit) of the Harry Potter Wizarding World scattered throughout, with references to silver sickles (the currency, though there is also a literal sickle made of silver), the Minister of Magic, and, above all, house elves. A house elf is central to the story, and it's clear that house elves are effectively slaves or a close equivalent, as in HP - but he's wearing ordinary clothes, which goes against HP lore. The title "warlock" is used for his master, which isn't in HP as far as I remember. There's a point mentioned about house elves having wandless magic, but the witch who's the main character does various magical things without her wand as well as with it. There's no apparent magical/non-magical person divide or secrecy about magic in the village. It's all a bit of a muddle, and could easily have been de-HPed, whether or not it was originally fanfic, just by using, say, "brownie" instead of "house elf."

On the upside, it is about as cozy as it's possible for a book to get, the editing is far better than I usually see, and its faults are all minor ones. If you're a habitual cozy reader, by now you've probably trained yourself to ignore worldbuilding oddities anyway, and you're likely to enjoy this very much.

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