Review: Library of the Unbound

Library of the Unbound by Tuuli Tolmov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I somehow missed the "YA" part in the blurb, so I got more teen angst and love triangle than I was looking for (I wasn't looking for any). My fault, not the author's.

Leaving that aside, this is an enjoyable adventure with an appealing main character. She has poor judgement, but at least she knows that, and tries not to make it worse by drinking alcohol. Though tempted to nope out from the whole mess she's got involved in, she reluctantly - but bravely and effectively - does the right thing.

She's a booktamer, who takes magical books that have gained sentience and turns them back into ordinary books again - meaning that people can use the magical rituals in them, which turns out to be a problem.

The worldbuilding is mixed. It's an alternate history, in which there was a religious revolution 600 years ago that suppressed magic and installed a theocratic government. For some reason, the names of places are mostly either their Roman names (Londinium, Lutetia, Hispania, Brittania) or medieval (the kingdom of the Franks, Saracenia). There's a continuing war - a crusade, basically - against Saracenia, in which the Church Knights, who are the elite, are fighting, but that doesn't come into the main story. There's also either a geographical difference or the author has made a mistake, because Lutetia (Paris) is apparently on the coast.

On the other side of the worldbuilding coin, technology is basically what anyone born in the past 30 years would be used to as the norm: cellphones, laptops, tablets (though those last are supposed to be reserved to the elite).

The main character has trust issues, which are fully justified throughout the book, but there are well-intentioned people too. The plot has a few twists in it, and plenty of suspense.

I gather the author is not a native English speaker. This mostly shows in sentences that start out in the past tense and finish in the present tense, or nouns and verbs occasionally not agreeing in number, or idioms that are very slightly off, though there are also a few instances of dialog punctuation not following the conventions. Honestly, I've seen much worse from authors who are native English speakers, but (despite crediting plural editors and beta readers) it does need another round of editing to be really tidy. Since I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, it may get one after the version that I saw.

It's an appealing book, and I enjoyed it even though I'm not much of a YA tropes fan.

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Review: Tea & Treachery at the Infinite Pantry

Tea & Treachery at the Infinite Pantry by Jo Miles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Extremely earnest in a very specifically mid-2020s way that will date it quickly, but if you read a lot of cozy fantasy, you're either looking for that or at least don't mind too much.

It's an original concept, though. Instead of a library or a hospitality business, we have something that combines elements of both: a kind of museum of magically preserved food (which also has three libraries and a hospitality business attached). But something has started going wrong with the preservation magic, not to mention that a major funder has just been lost, and Glen, the recently appointed head of the institution, has to pull everyone together (and hold herself together) while they all try to solve the problems.

There's never any indication where Glen fitted into the picture before she was promoted, which to me was a notable omission. She shows no particular in-depth familiarity with any of the areas of work in the institution, the heads of the departments that play major roles in the crisis all seem to have had their positions for a while, and nobody acts like they recently reported to her specifically. She has long backstory (raised by a grandmother who emotionally abused her and made use of her while undermining her self-confidence), but no recent backstory that I could see.

I spotted the source of the issue at the 10% mark. (view spoiler)[It's the one guy who isn't perfectly lovely and fully on board at all times with the way things are done. (hide spoiler)] I didn't spot the mechanism, though I probably should have; there were plenty of clues. But this book isn't primarily about solving the mystery, but about the journey of the people who are trying to solve it, and their relationships, including a romance that emerges in the course of the story.

There's a nasty rich noble guy who's the main villain. The rich and the noble are overlapping groups, and apparently hold enough power that there's no suggestion that he face any consequences for (view spoiler)[arbitrarily ordering the death of one of the characters who learned too much about his plans, something he apparently has done on multiple previous occasions (hide spoiler)], though there are also no immediate consequences to the institution from defying and thwarting him. It was another pair of what struck me as odd omissions.

The editing, happily, is above average, with few and minor glitches, which helped it hold onto its fourth star, despite the fairly basic worldbuilding (usual in cozy fantasy) and the couple of holes I mentioned above. The other thing that got it four stars, though, was that I enjoyed visiting the place and following the people, most of whom are lovely. I will be watching out for a sequel.

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Review: We Solve Murders

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked it but didn't love it.

I liked the hapless ex-cop Steve, dragged willy-nilly into a round-the-world pursuit of clues to several murders that look like someone is trying to pin them on his beloved daughter-in-law Amy. He just wants a small, quiet life back in his village with his mates in the pub and his cat. I get it, and I don't think he's wrong to want that. I liked his mate Tony, an ordinary bloke with a garage, as well, for much the same reasons.

I didn't like Amy nearly as much. She is disengaged from her emotions because of a traumatic childhood, and scored high on her boss's homemade "psychopath test". She's not actually a psychopath; she knows right from wrong and which one she's pursuing, but she doesn't indulge in feelings about it. This leaves her a bit superficial as a character, especially since she's mostly reactive rather than proactive.

I didn't like her boss much either, for similar reasons.

I disliked the bestselling novelist, Rosie, considerably. She's so rich she's not even sure whether or not she owns a helicopter. She's still (in approximately her 70s, probably, but she refuses to say) living the same lifestyle of sex and drugs and private jets that she started on in the 1980s, and feels fine about it.

The other viewpoint characters I don't think I was meant to like, apart from the hapless and clueless would-be influencer Bonnie (just a young mother trying to do what she loves in a way that will help her kids have a better life) and the head-in-the-sand talent agent who is being used by the villains. There's a self-regarding action movie actor who's awful in various ways. The villains are obsessed with money and casual about ruining or ending people's lives, more so than I was expecting from a cozy author, though I haven't read contemporary cozy previously. Most of my mystery and thriller reading has been of books from a century or more ago.

The whole thing reminded me of one of Dave Barry's novels; general comedic/bantering tone, casually nasty criminals, hapless ordinary protagonists (apart from the ones who are basically superheroes). It didn't mesh well with my taste overall, but I appreciated that it was well executed and well edited.

I do still intend to try the Thursday Murder Club, which may be closer to my idea of cozy, but my hopes are lower for it now, and I won't be continuing with this series. Again, this is about my taste, not the quality of the work.

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Review: 1066 and all that: A memorable history of England

1066 and all that: A memorable history of England by W.C. Sellar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read this, I think from my school library, many years ago. On re-read, I realize that I don't know as much English history as I thought I did, and in particular I have a big gap in the 18th century, though I'm shaky on parts of the Middle Ages too.

What I do know helped me appreciate the cleverness of this book, which is supposed to represent what the average English person actually remembers from their school history lessons (as at circa 1930, at least). It satirizes the overly patriotic, not to say jingoistic, England-centric way that history was taught at the time; whether or not England is Top Nation is a point that keeps getting reverted to. I had to smile at the description of the Pope and all his followers seceding from the Church of England in the reign of Henry VIII.

The more you know about the subject matter, the funnier it will be.

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Review: The Man Who Bought London

The Man Who Bought London by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"A man who marries for money is like a dog that climbs a steeple for a bone. He gets his meal, but there isn't any comfortable place to sleep it off."

This book features not one, but two romances between someone who's rich and someone who isn't, one of the parties being the title character. King Kerry is buying up property in London on behalf of an American "trust," and as part of that purchases a department store where our heroine works (but is about to not work; she's been late a number of times, and is inclined to snark her boss, rather wonderfully). She reminds Kerry of another girl who had a tragic end, so he takes her on as his secretary.

Twelve years later, Wallace revisited the department store as a setting and the "new woman" as a main character in Barbara On Her Own . Barbara is more central, and more capable, than this book's Elsie, driving the plot where Elsie tends to just ride along.

There's a complicated twist at the heart of the story that only comes out at the end. It's potentially controversial for modern audiences, but it's a big spoiler, so I'll put it in spoiler tags: (view spoiler)[one of the characters is a biological woman who was raised as male by a mentally ill mother, and is not a good woman, a good man, or a good person, having had relationships that end in tragedy for the other party both as a woman and as a man, and constantly plotting and instigating crimes in the course of this story. (hide spoiler)]

It's fast-moving like all of Wallace's books, twisty, sometimes comedic and sometimes suspenseful. The ending, I felt, was abrupt and didn't give the wrap-up the time it deserved, but I enjoyed the journey there.

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Review: The Unknown Seven: a detective story

The Unknown Seven: a detective story by Harry Coverdale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Right from the first scene, we're in noir territory. A detective is standing in the rain and fog of nighttime New York City, watching the house of a scientist. He wears a slouch hat and a long raincoat and smokes a cigar. (He also smokes cigarettes and a pipe in the course of the book, but somehow his lungs are "in the pink of condition" when he has to climb a lot of stairs.)

A beautiful woman pulls up in a fancy chauffeur-driven car and invites him to get in. She knows all about him and what he's doing. She blindfolds him, and takes him to a downtown skyscraper, where he meets the Unknown Seven, a group of masked men who attempt to bribe and then threaten him into giving up his case....

In the course of the book, he'll perform magnificent feats of detection and action, win and lose several fights, be knocked out, tied up, imprisoned and generally messed with, be in danger of his life multiple times, gain and lose allies, discover hidden connections and a sinister plot, and... feed his cat, Toots, who has domesticated him in the way of cats, moving into his apartment and demanding food and a comfortable place to sleep. The cat helps to humanise him, though he's a more complex character in general than a lot of pulp detectives. I haven't read enough classic noir to know whether the detectives there are usually this well developed; I don't like the cynical tone of most noir, which is happily absent here, replaced by the optimism and energy of the pulps. He's also a highly intelligent detective, really a criminologist who moonlights as a detective, but is remarkably good at it.

There was, of course, the potential for a romance angle with the Plucky Gel (who plays a minor but significant role throughout, which unfortunately includes getting kidnapped and used as leverage), but romance or even attraction is never developed, at least not for the detective. I didn't feel this was to the book's detriment.

What does let it down a little is that the author or an incompetent editor has made two consistent errors. First, not following the dialog punctuation conventions for when the same speaker continues in the next paragraph, and secondly, mispunctuating restrictive relative clauses in a way that turns them into non-restrictive clauses, distorting their meaning. Both of these occur multiple times.

If you can overlook that, this is a rip-roaring detective adventure of the 1930s, with plenty of action, a twisty plot and a well-developed (for the genre) main character.

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Review: Police at the Funeral

Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Allingham was an excellent writer, providing suspense and mystification and wonderful plot twists while describing her eccentric characters memorably. Here we have a Victorian matriarch presiding over a household in which her middle-aged children and nephew are forced to live, because they have lost what money they had and have no skills with which to earn any. It's a kind of hell on earth, and it's not astonishing that murder breaks out.

Campion, who isn't exactly a private detective but isn't exactly not one either, is called in (the only young member of the family is engaged to someone he was at university with), and handles the situation with his usual combination of keen intelligence and an appearance of near-idiocy. There's some sometimes grumpy and sometimes friendly rivalry from his old friend the Scotland Yard inspector, and Campion has a desperate physical fight to deal with before the end.

The final twist is terrific, and beautifully carried off.

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