Review: Calculated Whisk

Calculated Whisk by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was just coming off several books that were particularly poorly edited, one of which was also dark and depressing while pretending to be a cozy for marketing purposes, and I wanted something that I could relax into, knowing it would be entertaining, well edited, and light.

Fortunately, I had recently bought this one off Bookbub. If there is anything that Lindsay Buroker reliably is, it's entertaining, well edited, and light, and indeed that was the case here. I spotted four very minor issues: a sentence that says the opposite of what it should because of a missing negative, an excess hyphen, and two vocabulary glitches, one of which is an overcorrection for a common mistake and the other of which is debatable.

She always has good banter, and the back-and-forth between the human ex-mercenary archer who wants to settle back down in her hometown as a bookkeeper and her elven assassin comrade is as amusing as ever. There's tragedy in people's backstories - after all, they've been in a war - but the story we're reading is pleasantly cozy, with no stakes higher than winning a cooking contest and making sure a small hospitality business makes a profit.

Cozy is, I think, a new genre for Buroker, who's written in a number of popular SFF genres, but she does it well, and without the usual feel I get from cozy of a world that's made of scenery flats not very convincingly painted. It's mostly a standard sword-and-sorcery world, but with enough tweaks to give it a degree of freshness, and it feels lived-in and as if there's actually a world outside the town that we see.

One of those tweaks is that the town is peaceful because the gnome peacekeepers make sure - using golems, magical detectors, peacebonds on people's weapons, and (in some unexplored way) the power of a new god - that people don't commit violent acts within it. This is a good way of creating a cozy, safe, peaceful enclave within a violent world, and at the same time provides a good source of conflict and even character growth: people who are used to solving their problems with violence have to figure out another way.

There's plenty of conflict set up, too. The dragon who owns the diner that the protagonist wants to work at is someone she shot during the war, humans and dragons having been on opposite sides, and she has to convince him that she doesn't intend to attack him again, plus there's one of the trademark Buroker slow-burn romances cooking between them. The protagonist's father is a distant, haughty aristocrat that she doesn't particularly want to reconcile with, and the man who her father wanted to arrange for her to marry before she left to become a mercenary is up to something, which no doubt will emerge more fully in the course of the series.

Overall, it's promising as a series and enjoyable as a complete book with its own resolution.

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Review: The flying buccaneer :a novel of adventure in the skies / 1923

The flying buccaneer :a novel of adventure in the skies / 1923 by Jack Binns
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I sometimes pick up "pig in a poke" books off Project Gutenberg - obscure works of obscure authors with, at the time I pick them up, little or no blurb and little or no author information on Goodreads. Occasionally, they surprise me by being good.

This is not one of those times. By the end, it did turn into a decent adventure story, but it's very clearly a first novel (it was also the author's last, and I think that was a good call).

Whoever published it has done minimal copy editing, if any, not even correcting the many "let's eat Grandma" errors (missing commas before/after a name or term of address), which are among the clearest marks of an amateur writer. A lot of sentences phrased as questions lack their question marks. The author even spells "all right" as "alright," which is still not accepted by major style guides 100 years later, and was definitely regarded poorly in 1923. Project Gutenberg has a startlingly long list of misspellings that they corrected for their edition. It was clearly typeset by someone who didn't know what they were doing.

On top of that, his prose is caught in that unfortunate zone where it's attempting to be formal and sophisticated but doesn't have the chops to be anything but wordy and awkward. The dialog is especially stilted, and character development is not really a thing. He repeats himself. He contradicts himself (a wireless rig goes from half-meter to quarter-meter waves, for example). He repeatedly refers to "knots per hour," apparently not knowing that a knot is a measure of speed, not distance, and already incorporates the "per hour."

The plot reads like he has been reading too much Jules Verne (notably Robur the Conqueror ) and maybe George Chetwynd Griffith, both of whom wrote about how if one person had air superiority the world had better look out. In this case, it's a brilliant young inventor who, when his proposal of marriage is turned down by his beloved, despairingly accepts the overtures of sinister foreigners who encourage him to become an air pirate instead of working for the US government. (The sinister foreigners are never mentioned after their preliminary approach, and there is no explanation of how he cashes in his pirated loot or resupplies his base.)

He downs a dirigible named the Wilbur Wright - an odd name for a lighter-than-air craft - on which his crush is travelling and abducts her, causing her mother to go into a terminal decline; her military escort (she's the daughter of the air defense secretary), also in love with her and also refused by her, becomes very ill as well when it looks like he (the military man) has been responsible for her death. Everyone's emotions are extremely tempestuous and powerful, as if everyone was French; maybe more Verne influence? The novel was apparently written to highlight the advantages of heavier-than-air craft over dirigibles, in a time when zeppelins were becoming popular (the Hindenberg disaster wasn't until 1937).

The military's early encounters with the pirate are described after the fact, which takes some of the tension out and tells rather than shows. When we do get shown action directly, it's reasonably good.

The book is set in 1952, about 30 years after it was written, but wireless still uses Morse, even though by 1923 broadcast speech was coming into use, albeit Morse was probably still easier to pick up over a long distance. The author (I found when I researched him after starting the book) was a wireless operator who was the first person in history to send a wireless message resulting in a successful rescue at sea, something that occurs several times in this story. He was British, and gives American military airmen the British rank titles rather than the ones the Americans actually used, even though he'd been living in the US for years by this point, having moved there shortly after refusing the post of wireless operator on the Titanic and become a journalist.

The Wikipedia article for Jack Binns doesn't mention this book, but there's a biographical summary of him online which does, so I'm confident it's the same man, and have updated his Goodreads page accordingly.

One of those times when the author is more interesting than his book.

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Review: Unexpected Magic: A Romantic Fantasy series

Unexpected Magic: A Romantic Fantasy series by Jude Knight
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fantasy regency was suddenly a thing a couple of years back, and I read and enjoyed more than a dozen books in the subgenre, but I haven't seen any for a little while. I was happy, then, to pick this up from Netgalley for review.

Like a surprising number of the Regency fantasies I've read, it involves dragons. Unlike several of them, it isn't a close retelling of Pride and Prejudice , though the setup does have similarities if you look closely: the male lead is related to nobility, the female lead is minor country gentry, there's mutual pining obscured by the obvious impossibility (for a few extra reasons) of the match, he proposes in an insulting way and she gets angry at him. And, like some but very much unlike others, it's well edited, even in the pre-publication version I saw, except for a few hyphens where they shouldn't be.

It's an original version of the Regency world, in which people have magic and there are also various magical creatures, some born from humans and others from nonmagical animals. This has made history somewhat different as well; Arthur II, the older brother of the man our history knows as Henry VIII, lived and defeated a rebellion by his brother, and his descendants are on the throne. Nobility comes only partly through bloodlines, and mainly through magical gifts; having no gifts can get you dropped out of the nobility, while having them can raise you into it.

The heroine, Cordelia, known as Delia, is the daughter of a baronet, meaning that her father has minor magic. She herself seems to have none, but it turns out she has very powerful and rare magic that's much sought after by Britain's enemies (an independent Ireland, the independent parts of Wales, and the French under Napoleon, currently conquering Europe). She's also looking after a newborn unicorn, a rare creature which belongs by law to the queen, and must be looked after by a maiden, since they can't stand men or women who smell of men. Her parents are awful, especially her mother, and she has had to become the person who deals with everything around the estate. She's intelligent and competent, but considers herself plain, and without (she has always believed) any magical gift, she's had no suitors, and is unmarried in her mid-20s.

The hero, Jasper, is the nephew and designated heir of a duke, with powerful magic that he can't make behave consistently, despite his best efforts. He thinks Delia is wonderful, which, to be fair, she is. Delia thinks he's pretty amazing too. But because she's a designated unicorn maiden (and, in her mind, unattractive and just a country girl well below his station), of course they can't be together. Or can they?

The worldbuilding has had thought put into it, the characters are appealing and have some dimension, and my main complaint is that it's short (a novella, I think) and feels like it wraps up suddenly. Not to worry; it's a series starter, and I will definitely be watching for more in the series.

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Review: Theodora’s Tea Shop

Theodora’s Tea Shop by Christy Anne Jones
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

First off, despite having "Tea Shop" in the title and a somewhat cozyesque cover, and claiming to be cozy in the blurb, this book is not (in my opinion) remotely cozy. It's too dark for that. Yes, it also says "dark" in the blurb, and I should have picked up on those mixed signals and avoided it.

Taking place largely in a city doesn't disqualify it from being cozy, per se, though it doesn't help, especially since the city is grimy and dystopian in places and the seat of a corrupt, hypocritical government; also not helping is the fact that the small town where the main character starts out, rather than being an idealised rural cottagecore fantasy, is claustrophobic and small-minded and depressing in the style of a fishing village in the north of England. There's one fairly minor character who's warm and helpful (which is how the majority of people in a cozy usually are), and pretty much everyone else is either a damaged person making bad decisions that have tragic consequences or a cruel exploiter murdering innocents as a means to power. The "found family" is less dysfunctional than the characters' families of origin, but only because that's an incredibly low bar.

The closest thing to a cute familiar is a sinister raven, which plays a more minor role than the cover would suggest (as far as I read, at least); and far from a supportive and wholesome love interest, the protagonist falls, against her better judgement, for someone with more red flags than a May Day parade, who's still hung up on his first love and barely knows the protagonist is alive. Nobody has a functional romantic relationship, nobody has a functional family relationship, and there's barely even a functional friendship to be seen (while there are at least two very dysfunctional friendships). Add to that: body horror.

It's just not what people who read the cozy genre are typically looking for, and marketing it to them feels like a bait-and-switch, an instance of picking something currently popular and claiming your thing is that, even though it isn't. I'd expect this strategy to backfire. It certainly did with me.

At its heart (and not mentioned in the blurb) is a version of the Oppressed Mages trope, which I consider seriously overused, implausible and potentially harmful. People are only allowed to practice magic if they can afford to go to the Royal Institute, which few can, and if you practice without a license you can be maimed or killed. Now, fine, that's about elite access to/control of power, and one reason that the law's in place is that a foreign power has defeated the country in war (though they kept a previously existing law imposed for a less credible reason), but... read the article I linked to, it explains far better than I can why "oppressed mages" is still not a great trope.

The worldbuilding is certainly richer than practically any cozy fantasy I've read, and although that's also an extremely low bar, this book clears it comfortably; at the same time, the magic system isn't particularly well defined in terms of what it can and can't do or how it operates.

The witch Theodora (not her real name) runs a tea shop as a front for distributing illegal magic, even though she says in as many words that she hates tea. She somehow manages to keep up seven different false identities, including ones that you would think would require some qualifications and background, such as a professor at the Royal Institute, the king's personal sorcerer and a Member of Parliament, and nobody seems to notice that each of these well-known people is only ever around for an average of a day a week. (They don't notice that they're all the same person because of magic.)

So: very not cozy, characters and events practically bordering on grimdark, implausible elements, toxic trope. Was there anything about it I thought was good?

It is well written. People who like dark fantasy, unlike me, will probably enjoy it considerably. Sure, there are some vocabulary issues (which I'll mention to the publisher; I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so there's still the chance of fixing those), and the extremely common issue of excess commas between pairs of adjectives, but hardly anyone notices those things. The plot is adequately complex, as are the characters, as is the world. It falls firmly into my "good, but not for me" category.

By 66%, no coziness had eventuated, and I had to ask myself: Do I want to spend another two hours with these characters just to say that I've finished it, and find out what Theodora's plan to fix everything is and how it works, when nobody's plan has ever done anything but make things worse up to this point? I decided I did not want to spend more time with the characters, and in fact I disliked it enough that I'm giving it two stars.

It will have an audience, but that isn't me.

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Review: The Case of the Late Pig

The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A novella, narrated in first person by Campion himself. It's full of "had I but known" foreshadowing, and the odd events eventually explained which are often a trademark of the series.

The first odd event is that Campion receives an anonymous letter, well typed and literate, which helps to draw his attention to a funeral announcement for an old schoolmate, "Pig" Peters. When bullied to the point of significant injury by "Pig" at school, Campion had tearfully and angrily promised to attend his funeral, and he now fulfils that promise. Only, six months later, he's called in on a mysterious death, and when he sees the body, immediately recognises "Pig" - freshly dead.

The rest of the book deals with Campion's efforts to unravel the whole thing, helped and hindered and distracted by various characters: the bluff Chief Constable; the rural but efficient Inspector Pussey; the Chief Constable's attractive daughter, who Campion knows and is somewhat in love with, but who is angry at him because a very common person is representing herself as Campion's intimate friend; the very common person; another old schoolmate; the local doctor, who's just happy that something is happening in this dull rural backwater; the humourless vicar, who takes immediate exception to Campion; the hostess at the local country club, a former actress who calls Campion "duck"; the mysterious Mr Hayhoe, who claims to be the dead man's uncle; and, of course, Campion's manservant Lugg, with whom he has a contentious relationship founded on unspoken mutual devotion.

It's a lot of characters for a novella, and in fact it's so full of character there isn't room for a whole lot of plot, but the plot that there is is a twisty and surprising thing that I had to just sit back and observe rather than try to understand for most of its length. It's set in rural Southern England, like most of Campion's adventures up to this point, and as always the setting is beautifully rendered, though with a light touch.

Not, perhaps, as good as the full-length novels, where everything has more space in which to breathe, but certainly an enjoyable read.

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Review: Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One

Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One by Jonathan Moeller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An entertaining sword-and-sorcery series with likeable characters, let down a bit by typos.

Rivah is the daughter of a cruel, arrogant elven lord and one of his human concubines, who escaped at the age of 13 when her mother died and her father was about to sell her to one of his friends. She's ended up, some years later, as a master thief in the Court of the Masked King, the thieves' guild of the city where she lives. She pulls what are basically heists, but the heists are more incidents within the story than they are the story itself, so I haven't given the book my "heist" tag. In doing so, she discovers that multiple powerful people in the city are getting into the dark magic of the Shadow Elves and summoning things that definitely ought not to be summoned. Fortunately, she has a conscience (even though she denies it), and is friends with a powerful cleric who is living as a humble monk and a powerful wizard who is pretending to be an old street person, both of whom help her to defend the city from outbreaks of necromancy. In the third book, a half-orc paladin eventuates and also gets involved.

There are some good action sequences, some believable character interactions, and Rivah herself is a character with some depth and dimension to her which rises naturally out of her backstory.

Setting-wise, this is a world based largely on the Roman Empire; slavery is common, most people (other than Rivah, who understandably hates it since it was almost her fate) accept it as just how things are done, and the military and governmental titles and the money are also based on Roman models. The religion is monotheistic, but not Christianity. At the same time, it's also a D&D-adjacent sword-and-sorcery world, with mages, clerics, rogues, bards and paladins. The magic system is not exactly D&D (or, if it is, comes from one of the versions I'm not familiar with, or maybe it's based on a similar system like Pathfinder), but it has a strong kinship. The spells sometimes have different names - Feather Fall, for example, is called Drift - but the inspiration is usually obvious. Rivah starts out knowing three spells, which her mother taught her before she died, but her first heist yields, among other loot, a basic spell book, unexplainedly present in the room where the powerful wizard was attempting a summons he ought not have, and she gets a few more from sympathetic wizards she encounters. There are enough spells in the spell book which haven't been mentioned yet that the author can pull out any one that happens to be convenient in the future.

Despite being based on some well-worn tropes, the world feels lived-in, partly because the author has taken the trouble to map out a city with its districts and neighbourhoods and put some thought into how it would operate. Cozy fantasy authors, whose settings often feel like they've been unconvincingly painted on old dropcloths and hung in the background of the scenes on obvious ropes, could take a lesson. It's a dark world, but with some good people in it.

There were some moments that stretched my suspension of disbelief by being plot-convenient rather than inherently plausible. One I've mentioned already - the presence of a magical "primer" in the room where an advanced wizard was operating. The other occurs in the third book, where Rivah takes the McGuffin with her in a way that we just know will end up with it falling into the hands of the antagonist, even though there's no convincing reason why she shouldn't just leave it in a safe place.

The copy editing side is unusual. Nearly every contemporary author I read makes the same few basic errors, but this one mostly doesn't make them. The commas and apostrophes are nearly all in the right place; there are no hyphens where they shouldn't be; tense is used correctly, which is sadly rare; there are very few vocabulary errors, and some words that are often bungled are used correctly. But the author is apparently a sloppy typist, who leaves words out of sentences, types the wrong word occasionally, and sometimes, when editing, leaves in a word or phrase instead of deleting it when replacing it with another, and ends up with both versions sitting in the sentence together. Either this is an author who knows the rules but occasionally stumbles over the keyboard, or it's been past a good copy editor who hasn't quite learned the trick of seeing what is actually there rather than what should be there. (It's a double-edged sword, that trick. I learned it when I worked as an editor more than 30 years ago, and now I can't turn it off.)

Overall, it's solid, enjoyable stuff, marred only by the occasional plot-convenient thing that doesn't make sense and by the slightly scruffy typesetting. Those factors mean that I'm not about to pay $5 a book for the rest of the series, but I will look out for them on sale and through my library.

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Review: Flowers for the Judge

Flowers for the Judge by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dorothy L. Sayers was perhaps as accomplished a writer as Margery Allingham, but Allingham is both more accessible to someone who hasn't had Sayers' education and also more consistently good (there are one or two dud Wimseys, but so far I haven't been disappointed by a Campion, and in fact all but the first one have been five-star reads for me).

Campion is clever, despite his frequent pose of upper-class British idiocy, and this is the second instance in which he works out who the murderer is but is faced with the difficulty of proving it - the previous book, Death of a Ghost , confronts him with the same problem, though the solution is quite different.

The books aren't written much to a formula, in fact. Here we're in the world of London publishing, in the century-old house of Barnabas, headquartered in an old and quirky building and run by eccentric partners. (When none of the three partners are available, it seems to run quite adequately, helmed by the invaluable "secretary" who clearly is the actual manager.) We get that sense that no modern pastiche I've read so far has managed to capture, of a claustrophobic, ramshackle 1930s London where the buildings are often dilapidated, dirty, cramped, chilly and impractical, the fog is yellow with sulphur from the burning of coal, and the people are mostly too stuck in their ways of thinking to recognise the truth when it's in front of them. Actually, the old building full of random bric-a-brac reminded me of a brilliant but eccentric and outright dodgy publisher I worked for in the 1990s, but I have the impression that this was the norm in the 1930s as it would not be today.

One of the partners, Paul, who is in a loveless marriage, has gone off somewhere on a Thursday and not been heard of by Sunday. His wife Gina, who is used to him being erratic but generally does at least hear news of him if he disappears for a while, is concerned enough to call in Campion, who she knows, to quietly check into things. One of the other partners, Mike, Paul's cousin, is sent down to the "vault" at the bottom of the office building to get something and comes back with it. He is in love with Gina, but hasn't done anything about it. But a day or two later, Paul's body is discovered in the vault, having apparently been there since Thursday, in a position which suggests that Mike couldn't have possibly missed seeing him on the Sunday. Mike is, naturally, arrested and put on trial for the crime.

Campion (and everyone else who knows him) is convinced he's innocent, but things look bad for him, and locating the actual murderer is complicated by the fact that the scene was hopelessly compromised before the police were called in. Campion does figure it out, though, and it puts him in deadly danger, before a resolution that I absolutely did not see coming. One of the things I like about these books is that if I work something out from the clues the author has given, so does the detective, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they can wrap up the case as a result.

Meanwhile, we get some beautifully observed character work, including some comic scenes with Lugg, Campion's manservant, who has "bettered himself" and is trying to be posh, without notable success. He's developed an exaggerated consciousness of their social position, and opposes Campion being involved in anything relating to crime or scandal, especially since there's a chance Campion is going to inherit a ducal title from an unspecified relative. He has, in fact, ambitions to be Jeeves, which are destined to remain unfulfilled because of his essential Luggness.

Allingham is wonderful at the craft of writing, and without ever indulging in pretentious literary prose can place the reader completely in the scene and give a sense of depth to the characters that I don't often see in genre fiction. What a pity, then, that Random House's ebook edition is littered with uncorrected scan errors, such as missing or inserted punctuation or outright misread words (like "bang" for "hang"). This is a fine piece of writing that deserves more care from a publisher who is no doubt making a steady income from it. Get a different edition if you can (mine came via my library).

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