Review: The Crime Code

The Crime Code by William Le Queux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this author's first novel, Guilty Bonds , and found it absurd and inept. I said in part in my review: "It's melodramatic. It's implausible. It's rife with coincidence. It's heavily dependent on bad decisions by the main character. And the final explanation doesn't stack up."

Still, a lot of people who write bad first novels improve as they get more practice. How was he doing more than 35 years and roughly 150 books later (he wrote a lot of books, very quickly)?

Well, this novel is melodramatic. It's implausible. It's rife with coincidence. It's heavily dependent on bad decisions by the main character. And the final resolution is remarkably similar to the one in Guilty Bonds that didn't stack up.

I think this is my last Le Queux.

Some spoilers follow in this plot summary; without them, you wouldn't be able to tell how ridiculous it is.

Hipwell, the protagonist (if you can call him that; he's more reactive than proactive, and often more passive than active) goes to the defence of a woman who's being mistreated by a man late at night in London, on his way back from a gambling house. In the subsequent scuffle, the man draws a pistol, which goes off, killing him. The woman then shows her ingratitude by accusing Hipwell of murdering him and saying she'll set the police on him, so, to avoid scandal (his father is a prominent MP, and he also has political ambitions), he flees the scene and goes into hiding, disguised as a working-class journalist. As you do.

He happens to take lodgings in the same house as someone who later turns out, by complete coincidence, to be in the same gang of jewel thieves as the two people he encountered earlier, and what's more, making his way home through one of London's legendary fogs, he accidentally goes into the wrong house and finds the gang, including his fellow lodger, dividing up the spoils. They think he's a police spy, and, desperate, he tells them the truth, that he's hiding from the police, and why. But the woman he quixotically rescued turns up later too, and explicitly states that he was not the man who killed her lover. His fellow lodger, a young woman, says, "Let's blind him so he can't testify to our identity" (how would that even work, given that he can describe them and knows where she lives, and they've mentioned someone's first name and that he's a medical student at Guy's Hospital?) But what she actually does is inject him with a drug that makes him compliant to them and "not himself," until two years later he accidentally hits his head and snaps out of it, but can't remember those two years. Meanwhile, it later emerges, he has learned to be a jewel thief and is good at it; he has also been appointed to the responsible post of King's Messenger, or diplomatic courier, which conveniently means that his bags won't be searched during his many travels around Europe with dispatches. The gang makes no use of this as far as is ever mentioned.

Sometime during his time of "unconsciousness" he has married one of the gang, for reasons never explained, despite being in love with and engaged to a lovely girl who's the daughter of a prominent lawyer. When his wife eventually turns up, she explains a lot of stuff to him that he should already know and shows him the code of the title, which is based on musical notation.

Around this time his fiancee is abducted and disappears.

He goes to the head of the gang (taking with him a stolen necklace in his diplomatic baggage) to plead to be released from his service to the gang on his word of honour that he won't tell, honest he won't. The chief refuses, and gives him a message in the musical code for his wife, who's setting out to harm him; Hipwell has the key and could decode it, but doesn't, even though for all he knows it says "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern this idiot." He also doesn't use the code to warn his wife about a police raid, even though he's afraid she'll shop him if she's arrested. This is what I mean about him being passive and making obviously bad decisions.

The raid indirectly leads to his fiancee being recovered, and then (as was obviously going to happen) his wife conveniently dies, freeing him to marry again; he tells his prospective father-in-law the whole story, and of course is advised that it's fine, he wasn't responsible for his actions (obviously apart from smuggling the necklace that he knew to be stolen, though that isn't mentioned), no consequences need ensue. He begs the chief of the gang to be released again, and this time it's granted, following which the chief also conveniently dies - but not before restoring the necklace to its owner. The help given to Hipwell earlier, the release, and the return of the necklace are all thoroughly out of character for this ruthless individual, who's never called an anarchist but probably is one, as was the case with the plotters in the author's first novel. He's Russian, but steals from the Soviet authorities, committing several murders without hesitation in the process.

It's basically a very similar story to the first book, with all the same flaws, except the author has apparently learned not to dangle his modifiers or miss out the past perfect tense somewhere in there. He does still hyphenate things he shouldn't and put a good many commas in the wrong places, though.

I should probably give it two stars, but I did enjoy some of the action bits towards the end enough that it just barely squeaks three. Still, Hipwell is too stupid to live.

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Review: Tea With an Outlaw

Tea With an Outlaw by R.R. Orange
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third book I've read recently from Netgalley with "tea" in the title, none of which were all that cozy, and none of which I thought were particularly good, though this is the best of the three for my taste. It's more YA than I was expecting, in the sense of being quite simplistic and also focusing on the concerns of young adults, and the narrative arc seemed off even for that.

The protagonist is a young woman who's about to turn 18. She lives in a society where parents typically make decisions like who their offspring will marry, but rebels against this and wants to make her own decisions, like not marrying at all and becoming a flower mage instead. The problem is, she isn't as good at making decisions as she thinks she is, though the ones she makes are, it turns out, often better than if she had obediently gone along with her parents. She flip-flops around on some of her decisions, too, right up to the end of the book.

The outlaw of the title is a young nobleman, loyal to the young queen, who is being pursued by the Queen's Guard on the orders of a royal advisor who is trying to kill the queen with surprisingly slow-acting flower magic.

I say "surprisingly slow-acting" partly because the flower magic is quite powerful - in fact, all the magic is quite powerful, but it isn't Sandersonian (the reader doesn't know in advance what it can and can't do, so there's always the possibility that it can be used to resolve a situation in a way that's unexpected and unforeshadowed, and therefore less satisfying to the reader). The setting is partially fantasy Italian, though among all the Italianate names there are a couple of minor characters called Edith and Brian for some reason, and several of the more major characters have what seem to be made-up fantasy names.

The protagonist helps the outlaw to escape and joins his quest, along with her best friend the 17-year-old highly-skilled alchemist, who at one point casually whips up a teleportation spell because, after all, how hard can it be? They (and a couple of other villagers, aided sometimes by a local witch and the protagonist's flower-mage mentor) run around on the advice of various creatures, picking up magic and using it. I'll put the disappointing part in spoiler tags, but it has to do with narrative expectation. (view spoiler)[The main part of the quest is to get a berry that appears once every thousand years in order to save the queen, and when they manage to do this, relatively easily in the end, the protagonist uses it to save her mentor instead. This totally doesn't matter; they go to the palace and the antagonist immediately backs down and disappears, and getting rid of her inimical plants and saving the queen is super easy, barely an inconvenience. The protagonist then flip-flops a bit on whether she is, after all, going to marry her fellow villager who she had been dead set against marrying, but ends up going off on another quest with the former outlaw, with whom she has a mutual attraction - but they have decided not to pursue it because he's a noble and she's a peasant and it just wouldn't work out. (hide spoiler)] I got strong "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way" vibes, and it just wasn't satisfying to me. What should have been difficult was easy, and what initially seemed important turned out to not be that important, and the protagonist didn't seem able to stick to a decision.

I gather that the author is not a native English speaker, but it doesn't show too much. There's the odd idiom that is slightly off, and some of the dialog punctuation doesn't quite follow convention, but I often see far worse from native speakers.

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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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