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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Review: Lateral Cooking

Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book has an interesting premise which attracted me immediately. Rather than thinking of world food as discrete points, it looks at it as a giant possibility space in which multiple recipes are connected by what they have in common, but distinguished by slight differences in ingredients or techniques. So, for example, there's a basic bread recipe that more or less applies everywhere, but you can vary the flour, vary the hydrating ingredient, add different kinds of rising agents, take different approaches to how it's proofed, and cook it different ways, and this gives you everything from flatbreads and crackers through soda bread to yeasted bread all the way to babas.

It's an ambitious approach, and unfortunately the execution, for me, didn't quite support its usefulness as well as I would have liked. It really needs to be an app, rather than a book. If it's going to be a book, it needs to not require quite so much flipping back and forth between the base recipe and the variations; for example, if you're telling me that you can "use a 50/50 mix of warmed plain yogurt and milk for the liquid," it would be nice not to have to find my way back to the base recipe (especially in a Kindle edition that isn't as easy as it might be to navigate) to remind myself how much liquid that is. I resorted in the end to writing everything out by hand in a notebook. (I then decided to stick with my simpler, tried-and-true no-knead bread recipe, but that's another matter.)

Definitely an interesting idea, and I will dip into it again, I think, but not the perfect execution.

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Review: Radical Magic

Radical Magic by Kate Macdonald
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

For an otherwise mostly well-edited book, this has a surprising number of places where the "let's eat Grandma" issue occurs (lack of a comma before a term of address). Note that I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and this (and the places where the present tense drops into past or otherwise glitches, and the occasional missing punctuation, and the less occasional missing words in sentences) may be fixed by time of publication.

The story has several different viewpoints that slowly draw together, although none of the viewpoint characters have the full story of anything, and they don't know until nearly the end that they are connected. Viewpoint one is Conny, whose husband foolishly tried to excavate a fairy mound and was taken as a result. Viewpoint two is her husband Edward, enslaved and abused by the fae (known as elfin to themselves and fairies to humans, but I'll just say fae to make it less complicated). Viewpoint three is Auberon, the fae gentleman who owns the mound in question, who is moving around undetected in human society, learning ideas about liberty while seducing various humans, and decides that he will free his slaves. Unfortunately, his malevolent steward takes advantage of the unspecific nature of the command he's given, and releases Edward not back into 1807, where he came from, but into an unspecified year in the 20th century. Fortunately, one of Auberon's former (male) human lovers has been gifted with the ability to travel through time on being sent away, and has set up a cross-time guest house to help unfortunates like Edward.

The other key characters are Pertinacity, a researcher into the fae, who meets Conny by chance at the Royal Society and forms a friendship and alliance with her, and Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of George III (an actual historical character, though somewhat changed for purposes of the story), who is dying of TB. The author takes as established historical fact the rumours that her elder sister Sophia had a child out of wedlock, and Amelia in her turn starts an affair with Auberon.

All of this is very promising. I enjoy Regency fantasy (not that this is quite Regency, technically speaking; the Regency began in 1811), and the author does a decent job of using a few turns of phrase and some historical and cultural references to evoke a feel of the period. Most of the book, too, is satisfyingly stitched together, with these people who have multiple points of connection (unknown to them) striving for their various goals in ways that will bring them into conflict or alliance.

Unfortunately, I felt that some of the plot problems were solved rather too easily by helpful characters or coincidence, rather than the decisions and actions of the protagonists, and the ending, rather than tying up all the threads, left several dangling unresolved. This is the main reason I've dropped it to three stars (from my normal starting point of four).

A bit of softness in the plot and some mechanical issues that may be fixed by publication don't add up to a bad book, and I can see a lot of potential here and would consider reading another book by this author.

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