Review: Golem for Broke: A Magical Midlife Urban Fantasy

Golem for Broke: A Magical Midlife Urban Fantasy by Deborah Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Midlife urban fantasy is often an ever-so-slightly reskinned version of what I always refer to as This Damn Thing Again, where a middle-aged woman with no ties (instead of a young woman with no ties) inherits property from an elderly relative, returns to her hometown, discovers her magical heritage, meets a hot werewolf and/or cop, gets a cute familiar and solves a bland and obvious mystery while not putting much work into a small business.

This book is not that.

Instead, it's set in a world similar to ours - maybe a little too similar, given that the difference is that a lot of people have magic, and this is publicly known, and apparently this has been the case for a long time, maybe forever. The protagonist is Jewish, and for some unexplored reason, even though people from every culture have magic, the apparently universally used terms for people with and without magic, and the name of the group that polices it, are Hebrew terms.

The original (as far as I know) twist to this particular setting is that magic comes to people through transitions or traumatic life events, including but not limited to puberty and menopause. The protagonist and her three friends, collectively the Mad Queens, have magic they got at menopause, which reflects menopausal changes - hot flashes giving fire magic, brain fog the ability to make other people forget things, and so on. They also have secret secondary magic, secret because (again, for reasons unexplored beyond "historically, people with two powers have been a problem"), that's drastically illegal and will get you imprisoned for life or killed. This provides stakes; Tovah, the protagonist, must protect her secret, and so hesitates to use her second power (of unravelling magic) in case it leads to detection for her and her friends, but sometimes that's her only option if she's going to survive.

They function as a kind of problem-solving agency, not exactly private detectives but similar, and have managed to find a legal loophole that means they aren't regulated by the authorities. This puts the protagonist at odds with her cousin, who's the head of Gevurah, the supernatural policing agency for the Canadian city where they all live. Not least because she inherited the Mad Queens agency from her aunt, the cousin's mother.

The book opens with a tone-setting scene, simultaneously hilarious, ridiculous, suspenseful and occasionally coarse, in which Tovah, in the middle of a mammogram, topless and clamped into the machine, must fight off a rogue golem who's threatening both her and her mammography technician. This leads into a mystery/thriller plot that kept me interested, and mostly puzzled (in a good way), throughout.

There are a few flaws. I've already mentioned some bits of worldbuilding that didn't completely convince me. There's an enemies-to-lovers romance arc that didn't convince me either. Firstly, not a lot of work has gone into the "enemies" bit; there's no backstory (as far as I remember) of any specific incidents or reasons why Tovah and the golem maker are enemies, it's just "this bastard is my brother's best friend and we don't get on." Then the handling of the actual arc reminded me of an early British motor car, in that it was so obviously "enemies to lovers" it might as well have had a man walking in front of it waving a big flag and letting off fireworks every time he reached an intersection. And then there are a few minor issues, like why a golem made of fired porcelain would leave clay under the fingernails of a woman she'd attacked.

But the golems and gargoyles are cool, the world is interesting if occasionally thin, the plot is sound, the multicultural middle-aged women are gloriously indifferent to what other people think, the threats feel genuinely threatening and the protagonist feels genuinely competent and intelligent, the writing craft is solid, and the editing is mostly very clean. I'd definitely read a sequel.

View all my reviews

Review: Dancers In Mourning

Dancers In Mourning by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unusually, this book includes a callback to earlier in the series: a character from Police at the Funeral reappears, and is the means of introducing Campion into the investigation into what is, at first, just a series of nasty pranks played on a prominent theatrical producer/dancer with the apparent goal of disrupting his show and/or emotional stability (inasmuch as theatre people can be said to have emotional stability).

It omits a callback to Sweet Danger, in which Campion more-or-less promised a very young woman that when she was old enough, they would try a relationship. (It's less creepy than it sounds, in context.) I would have expected some such callback, because in this book he inadvertently and rather to his dismay falls in love with his client's wife.

Campion's love interests always seem to be unavailable. A good half of them end up with (or, in this case, start out with) someone else, for a start. Having played out a similar pattern - excluding the someone-else's-wife part - in my own young adult life, I sympathise, though I got past it at a younger age than Campion; it's a form of self-sabotage, probably, or self-protection against actually having to deal with a relationship.

As always, all the characters are vivid, individual and mostly eccentric, or at least distinctive in some way. Not the least vivid of them is Lugg, Campion's ex-con manservant. Sent to fill in as butler at the country house that's the centre of the events when the existing butler resigns, Lugg declares, "I'll do anything, as long as it's not common." Which is amusing, because Lugg is always common, as his habit of addressing his employer as "cock" attests. He ends up teaching the theatrical manager's six-year-old daughter to pick locks with a hairpin and run the three-card-monte scam, much to her delight, and probably nobody else's.

To my surprise, I figured out the murderer some time before Campion did, though I didn't have his personal stake in the answer. It's not the best of the series, but mainly because of the character work I still feel it deserves five stars.

View all my reviews

Review: The Blotting Book

The Blotting Book by E.F. Benson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rather disappointing as a mystery, and not much to my taste as a novel either.

I bounced off Benson's Mrs Mapp, a thoroughly nasty, small-minded woman, after already having been less than delighted by his character Lucia's pretentious self-involvement. The characters here are not wonderful people either, and all in all Benson comes off as a misanthrope. Even the person for whom his omniscient narrator's viewpoint has little but praise acts completely out of character for what we're told about him, and since we don't see the key scenes it's never explicitly explored how he came to do so. (His motive is clear, but not how such a person comes to do such a thing.)

The mystery isn't particularly puzzling. A young man (22) reposes complete trust in a lawyer who has looked after his inheritance almost all his life, and been like a father, or at least an uncle, to him. What he doesn't know is that the lawyer had made some foolish investments and lost a lot of the young man's money, and is now attempting to get it back again. The lawyer's partner, who does know this, uses the knowledge to blackmail the first lawyer. The partner, knowing that the young man comes into his inheritance if he marries, also slanders him to his intended's father so that the marriage won't proceed, reducing the risk that he'll become aware of the shenanigans.

The young man becomes murderously furious about the slander, which doesn't succeed in its goal (since the intended believes in him), and when the partner is found murdered close to the intended's home, where the young man was around the presumed time of the murder, he is arrested and tried for the crime.

There's very little investigation shown; the investigating officer isn't even very bright. We're mostly shown the trial, at which evidence comes out that points to the (extremely obvious) actual murderer. It's a short book, and the whole thing wraps up quickly and linearly.

Not a success for me, and I think I'm done with Benson after this.

View all my reviews

Review: Sorcery, Swords and Scones

Sorcery, Swords and Scones by T.L. Stone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A pleasant cozy, and a good follow-up that builds on the first book in the series.

This time, the main focus is on Sass, the dwarf partner in the tavern of the series title, rather than on her half-elf business partner Lira, as in book one. Lira's story does continue to progress, though. (view spoiler)[Her elf uncle turns up and is very useful, her relationship with her orc love interest progresses to the point of setting a wedding date, and the remaining member of her former adventuring party turns up, along with his wife. (hide spoiler)] We learn what Sass was running from, and get to meet her best friend Thrain (Lord of the Rings readers will recognise this as the name of Thorin Oakenshield's father - we're not in Middle-Earth, but it's a nice homage).

There's a good deal of cozy food and drink and cute animal time, and the slow progression of a romance for Sass, but intermingled with this is a more serious threat from Sass's past, the reason she left home and ended up in the village of Wayside. (view spoiler)[She was fleeing an arranged marriage - with another woman, apparently normal dwarf custom, and arranged when she was a child. She's attracted to women as an adult, but it's not clear whether that's just a coincidence, or something that was already known about her in her youth, or simply considered irrelevant by her parents and dwarf society generally. The ex-fiancee is built up as a violent, irrational tyrant who will trample over anyone to get what she wants, but in the end is convinced relatively easily to go back to the dwarf lands more or less empty-handed, rather than pit her formidable dwarf force against a scratch mob of former adventurers and poorly-armed townspeople, and promises not to take vengeance on Sass's family other than to publicise the fact that she's working in a humble capacity at a tavern. Sass's parents then turn up, and are also easily convinced that Sass should stay where she is and live the life she's chosen; they only ever wanted the best for her. I found all of this capitulation too easy and not sufficiently earned, and felt more consequences ought to have ensued, but perhaps there will be some in future books. (hide spoiler)]

I noticed some typos and other issues, though fewer than in the previous book, and reported them to the author using an email address she includes in the book for that purpose (showing a commitment to quality).

Like the first book, then, this has a few flaws from my perspective, but they're not fatal ones for my enjoyment, and I will continue to follow the series.

View all my reviews

Review: The Talleyrand Maxim

The Talleyrand Maxim by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The maxim of the title is "With time and patience, mulberry leaves become velvet." Which skips a lot of important steps, notably the role of the silk moth caterpillar, but never mind.

This is a beloved saying of the main character, who is not the detective, but the villain, in a move which Fletcher also used in The Paradise Mystery . He's a law clerk in a Yorkshire town, a man fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, and always on the lookout for a chance to improve his fortunes, at the expense of others should that be necessary.

He gets this chance through a series of unlikely events. First, a wealthy mill owner is killed by a falling chimney in his mill, along with both witnesses to his will, which he has only just finished making (for no readily explicable reason). The will has been put in an old book, again for no obvious reason, so it isn't found after his death, and he's assumed to have been intestate. This means that his niece and nephew inherit, as his closest relatives.

The book falls into the hands of a local antiquarian bookseller, who brings it at the end of the workday to the solicitor's office where our villain works. Everyone else has gone home (or so the villain believes, at least), so when the old man dies immediately after telling him about the will and saying he hasn't told anyone else, he takes it to use as leverage against the heirs, or rather their mother, the late mill-owner's sister-in-law, who is doing a lot of the actual managing of the inheritance. The nephew lacks drive and focus, and the villain dismisses the niece as unimportant, which is a mistake.

This scheme starts unravelling almost immediately, and continues to do so until the end of the book. He soon finds himself in the "two can keep a secret if one of them is dead" situation. Meanwhile, the late bookseller's grandson, a barrister, comes to wrap up his estate, and ends up setting up in practice in the town, not least because of the late mill owner's niece, who has also attracted the villain's attention (more for her wealth than for the attractions of person and character which the barrister notices).

As well as being mostly (particularly at first) from the viewpoint of the villain, this book is notable in having an ensemble cast put together the various clues that the villain doesn't know about or has left inadvertently. There's his employer the solicitor, the young barrister, a police detective, and the honest niece of the mill owner, who isn't just a passive love interest but plays a vital role in the plot, not least by sensibly confiding in people she trusts. Various honest locals (speaking Yorkshire dialect) provide clues, the importance of which they are unaware of.

There's a strong message throughout that unearned wealth is a potential corrupting influence, and that a person is better off working at something meaningful. Interestingly, even the villain seems to know this; his blackmail demand isn't money, but a position as steward or agent managing some of the inheritance. It will make him more money than his law-clerk job, and it's not a post he could get without the leverage, but he is competent to do it and intends to work at it honestly. It's just that his means of getting there are villainous in the extreme.

Overall, it's something out of the ordinary for a Golden Age detective mystery, in a good way, which is my experience of Fletcher's books in general. I plan to read several more.

View all my reviews

Review: The Enterprising Burglar

The Enterprising Burglar by Hearnden Balfour
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Yes, the title is a quotation from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Returned from World War I, and both bored and also outraged at the plight of returned soldiers who starve while war profiteers revel in their wealth, the Enterprising Burglar embarks on a Robin Hood campaign, stealing from the profiteers and giving the money to support... anti-Bolshevik causes? Yes, rather than thinking "The problem here is that capital has too much power and labour too little, I will attempt to shift the balance" or "I'll help support my former comrades who now can't get jobs," he takes on a revolutionary conspiracy that he comes across, the aim of which is to install a dictator in Britain after overthrowing the government. Said dictator candidate is inspirational, plausible, charismatic. His followers, rather than being just working-class Reds, are honest Englishmen of all classes and backgrounds. The Burglar - professionally known as Vive le Sport, legal name Stephen Nicholson, Nick to his friends - wants to foil the uprising while not, if he can help it, landing anyone in trouble other than the Chief, whose identity he is trying to ascertain. Because the other conspirators are just decent fellows who've been misled.

He confides in his old friend Jack and Jack's twin sister Jill (yes, really). Jack is a Scotland Yard detective, who has to pretend he doesn't know about Vive le Sport's activities because, don't you know, they're old friends, what? Knew each other in the trenches, and all that sort of thing. But Jack is being sent by his idiot superiors, who don't believe in the conspiracy, to Russia, so he can't be of much initial help.

Nick has been to a meeting of the conspirators in Wales (he's a master of disguise and has penetrated the organisation relatively easily), and is returning by train to London, in the same compartment as the leader of the conspiracy for the Western area, a Welshman. He's just hoping for some lucky chance that will enable him to go more deeply into the conspiracy and maybe get a clue to the Chief's identity when the author generously provides a train crash, in which the Welshman is badly injured, allowing Nick to impersonate him (swathed in bandages) at the big meeting. There, he gets away with the McGuffin: a signed list of all the members, which was going to be sent to Russia as the only collateral for a loan to fund the revolution. He then tries to use it as leverage to get the Chief to cancel the revolt and stand everyone down. He gives him until a month before the scheduled day.

Of course, the Chief isn't having that, and launches a series of attempts to get the McGuffin back. In the course of these, by the usual credulity-stretching coincidences that were so common in fiction of this period, the same people keep encountering each other in different contexts, and we end up with a love interest for Nick (I thought it was going to be Jill, but no; there are actually three named female characters with lines in this book, and I think they may even pass the Bechdel test.)

Round and round and round we go, and in the end the Chief's identity is revealed (view spoiler)[(it's someone who keeps being connected to everyone else in various ways, of course) (hide spoiler)], and everything resolves itself. Meanwhile, though, we've had action, disguises, bluffs, danger, romance... all the ingredients.

It's not a bad book for its time. Yes, the coincidences are piled on far too thickly, but that could be said of many books written in this period. The love interest is appealing and shows at least some independence, though she doesn't really contribute all that much to the main plot. The schemes are sometimes clever, and if the conspiracy is thoroughly implausible, at least it's not as anti-labour as it could easily have been, and as better writers than this (looking at you, Agatha Christie) made it when employing this particular early-20th-century bogeyman. It's an earnest effort that's just a little too shonky to get four stars from me.

View all my reviews

Review: The French Powder Mystery

The French Powder Mystery by Ellery Queen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As with the first book, even though all of the clues are there, I didn't figure out who the criminal was until just before it was announced at the end. Ellery Queen is the kind of person who is very aware, and likes everyone else to be aware, that he's the smartest (and best-educated) person in the room, and he does back it up with clever deductions that make complete sense when he lays them out.

The same drawbacks are present as in the first book. It is, of course, completely absurd that a senior police inspector on the NYPD lets his dilettante author son trail around with him and investigate crime scenes, and also vouch for someone he'd known as a kid who would otherwise be a suspect, so that he, too, can be present in places he absolutely should not be and party to information he shouldn't have. Even setting that aside as a genre trope, there's an unpleasant undercurrent of casual racism, not in blatant "all these people are inferior and should have no rights" declarations, but in the language used about non-whites. There's a black minor character who is almost always referred to as "the Negress" when a more offensive term isn't being used (not the most offensive one, but a couple of slurs). She's described in the cast of characters as "a study in normal ebon," in other words, a stereotype, and the "dialect" that she and the other black character speak is fully represented, making it clear that they're part of an outgroup. Meanwhile, the Queens' Roma servant is described at one point as "simian."

There's not a lot of character work that isn't directly related to the plot. The romance subplot isn't even resolved.

These are clever mystery puzzles, and I do enjoy them at that level even though I don't solve them, but there's really not much in the way of other levels at which to enjoy them, and the racism is difficult to ignore. I don't think I'll continue with the series.

View all my reviews

Review: Saved by the Spell

Saved by the Spell by Tanya Huff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The premise was immediately appealing to me: What if Harry Potter, but Canadian, from the perspective of the teachers, and the teachers are genre-savvy?

Realistically overworked and underpaid English teacher Abby Bellman has some extra headaches to contend with: the school she works at is a magic school, where kids learn to handle their powers, which can mean things like fireballs and sudden plant growth. That's bad enough, but she's just figured out that one of her new class of 14-year-olds is a Hero. Which means that somewhere there's a Villain, and Abby is the Mentor.

This isn't a world where magic is hidden. The school is a government school, and there are plenty of others throughout the world (this is the only one in Canada). The existence of magic has changed a few things, though not enough for my full suspension of disbelief, compared with our world. The same authors exist, for example. For reasons not gone into, various forms of paganism have survived into the equivalent of the 21st century, but this is completely not reflected in people's names, many of which (including Abby's, a nominal Druid) come from the Bible, as they would in our world. There are religiously bigoted protestors - with mispunctuated signs - outside the school, and they are never specifically identified as Christians, but they clearly are meant to be. Put this alongside the fact that almost everyone who has a relationship is queer in some way, and you'll know whether you are or are not the audience Huff is aiming for.

My parents were both teachers, and the way they complained about their jobs put me off the profession, so that was a touchpoint for me. I wasn't fully convinced by some aspects of Abby being an English teacher; do real English teachers try to enforce the completely made-up and only-observed-by-total-pedants rule that a preposition is something you shouldn't end a sentence with? Also, despite mentioning misplaced modifiers as something she battles against in her students' work, she commits one. In the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley, there were also a good few sentences with missing, inserted or jumbled words, one misplaced apostrophe and a few other punctuation glitches, and some vocabulary errors. They may be fixed by publication.

I did have some difficulty keeping track of all the minor characters; there are quite a few staff and students, naturally, and because the staff are known by their first names when Abby is talking to them or thinking about them and by their surnames when she's talking about them in the presence of students, and they were mostly introduced in the same scene and not all that well differentiated from each other, it becomes a bit confusing at times.

I've read a couple of Huff's books before, one of which I liked and the other I didn't, so picking up this one was a calculated gamble. I'm glad I did; leaving aside the worldbuilding weaknesses and occasional mechanical issues, it's well told, amusing in a wry way, and shows us a world-weary (and just outright weary) person who, nevertheless, will persevere in doing the right thing regardless of what it costs her, because she does actually care about the kids entrusted to her. It reminded me of Jim C. Hines' Slayers of Old , which I highly recommend, in the way it took familiar genre tropes to the next level of seriousness and asked what would really happen, while keeping an ironic detachment from the essential silliness of them and also telling a good story.

View all my reviews

Review: The Paradise Mystery

The Paradise Mystery by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a different approach to the mystery genre, we (mostly) follow the perspective not of a detective, but of a skeevy young doctor who wants blackmail material that he can leverage. He has just been sacked by the doctor he was assisting because he refused to stop asking the doctor's ward to marry him, something she absolutely will not do - both she and her guardian have a sense that he's not a good guy, even though they have nothing specific against him, and indeed we learn that he is an amoral schemer. When a murder is committed and it looks to the younger doctor as if the older doctor may have committed it in order to keep a secret about his beautiful ward and her younger brother, the younger doctor starts poking around for evidence, and uncovers a sordid story from a couple of decades earlier involving bank embezzlement.

There's a police investigation going on at the same time, though, and the police are suspicious of the younger doctor, who was one of the first people on the murder scene, so they keep half an eye on him.

It turns out that a number of people who knew each other long ago have, by complete coincidence, converged on a small, sleepy cathedral city (modelled, I think, on Winchester, though called Wrychester) and encountered each other, with tragic results. Several of them are now living under different names, and untangling the whole thing takes hard detective work from multiple parties and involves several more deaths (and a couple of complete red herrings: (view spoiler)[it's never explained why the younger doctor drew 50 gold sovereigns out of the bank the day before a witness was bribed with 50 gold sovereigns by someone else, and we also never learn why the retired detective never let on to the local police that that had been his occupation and why the Scotland Yard man had never heard of him (hide spoiler)]). Also, (view spoiler)[there's a Chekov's well that I was sure was going to be the young doctor's grave, but wasn't, though I did accurately predict that he would be killed - having him still around would have been slightly inconvenient to the happy ending, and besides, he deserved it (hide spoiler)].

Although parts of the mystery are a bit of a cheat, the unusual point of view worked well for me, and the whole thing was entertaining.

View all my reviews

Review: The Valley of Ghosts

The Valley of Ghosts by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read as a distraction while bored by a more worthy book, and I don't regret it, even though the ending is a bit weak.

It almost got my "not-solved-by-detective" tag, though it doesn't quite qualify because the detective does solve the case, albeit by lying in wait for the criminal and watching as he re-enacts the crime while sleepwalking. It also almost qualifies for my "thin-romance" tag, because the detective falls in love with a woman and is prepared to compromise his professional integrity to help her escape when he thinks she's the murderer, even though (as she herself explicitly notes) they have only met three times and exchanged about a dozen words. I keep "thin-romance" for cases where the couple get married after about that much interaction, though, and they do get to know each other over time after that first ridiculous declaration.

The characters are, as usual with Wallace, interesting and not purely stock. There's the reforming jewel thief, the man with a mysterious occupation who turns out to be (view spoiler)[a maker of women's hats - which reminded me of "Madame Eulalie" in P.G. Wodehouse (hide spoiler)], the detective himself who is a pathologist who's somehow ended up becoming an investigator, and his love interest, the daughter of an alcoholic artist who has, in the way of children of alcoholics, learned to cope with unpredictability and the cycle of bad behaviour and seemingly-sincere penitence that just keeps on repeating. The suspect for the murder is a mysterious moneylender, a type of person Wallace probably had unpleasant experience of, since he was often in debt because of gambling. This particular one is remarkable for never being seen and doing all of his business (which seems to involve blackmail as well) via letter.

There's a brief mention of "Reeder," and if, as seems probable, this is J.G. Reeder, one of Wallace's few recurring characters, this places the book within a wider Edgar Wallace Universe.

It's suitably mysterious and complicated, only has one significant coincidence which speeds up part of the plot rather than completely enabling it, and is in general a fun time.

View all my reviews

Review: Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn]

Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn] by Rebecca McKee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this up (pre-publication, via Netgalley) largely because the title reminded me of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , for which I have a fondness despite its imperfections. It doesn't have many other similarities to Penumbra apart from the title (and, obviously, a wondrous bookstore); this bookstore is somehow holding the universe together, is located in a small coastal town in New England rather than in Northern California, and is only visible to people who need something from it.

We start out being told that something is awry in the state of the universe that the bookstore holds together, and then we get a long sequence of different points of view from the people who work there, a customer, and the roommate of one of the workers, all of whom are sensing some sort of wrongness they can't put their finger on and are usually doing their best to ignore, and most of whom have (it is hinted, and gradually revealed) secrets they are ashamed of. It has the feel of something that could turn much more horror than cozy. Spoiler in case you need to know which in order to decide whether to read it: (view spoiler)[it's OK in the end. It's not horror. But the journey does get harrowing. (hide spoiler)]

This long middle section takes up most of the book, and for me moved too slowly. Just past half-way, I got bored enough with it, and uncomfortable enough with the constant hints of something wrong that wasn't yet being revealed, that I went off and read another book. But I did come back and finish it, and I'm glad I did, because the ending is compelling and pulls together the carefully-set-up backstories of the characters, all of whom needed to learn something and some of whom also needed to teach something to one or more of the others. My five-star rating is because it has a degree of psychological depth and (like one of the characters in the story) adeptly weaves together a number of threads. It's not, as I've mentioned, without its flaws - the tell-don't-show prologue, the slow-moving middle, and also a character, Violet, who I didn't feel was sufficiently developed for the weight she bears in the plot to hit as hard as it could have. But even if Goodreads would let me drop my pre-publication five-star rating to four - which it won't - I might leave it at five anyway, though it's only just in that zone. Call it a strong four-and-a-half.

The copy editing is good; I could quibble about the instances of "may" that should be "might" and the occasional missing past perfect where I personally would include one, but hardly anyone writing these days doesn't make those mistakes, and most people don't seem to notice.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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).

View all my reviews

Review: Gunman's Bluff

Gunman's Bluff by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another rip-roaring pulp story from Wallace. It's littered with moments where the author used pure coincidence to get characters together in the right place for the plot to happen, as was common at the time, but at the same time it has a bit more complexity than the typical thud-and-blunder thriller, and I'm inclined to almost forgive the coincidences as a result.

A young couple who have known each other most of their lives are engaged, in that rather passionless way that young couples from the wealthier echelons of British society seemed to get engaged between the wars. Her brother commits suicide in despair at his debts, and the note he leaves seems to implicate her wealthy fiancé as a contributing factor for giving him bad investment advice and then not helping him when he lost everything. This breaks up the relationship immediately after the wedding, much to the delight of the late brother's friend, a confidence trickster who has designs on the woman, and the groom disappears.

Meanwhile, the groom has helped - or attempted, ineffectually, to help - a criminal dobbed in by the con man, who's afraid of him and wants him out of circulation. The criminal, the gunman of the title, is grateful for the gesture, and goes out of his way to a tremendous extent to help in return when everything turns bad for his would-be rescuer.

It turns very bad indeed, and the poor fellow has a rough time of it, while we learn more about the criminal machinations that are going on and also see the young woman go through an emotional journey, the gunman attempting to reform, and a jovial middle-aged police detective keeping an eye on everything that's going on and dispensing keenly judged advice. Along the way there's plenty of varied action and suspense, thrillingly told in the Mighty Wallace Manner.

I think I'm safe in saying that if you enjoy Edgar Wallace at all, you'll enjoy this one.

View all my reviews

Review: The Carousel of Forgotten Places

The Carousel of Forgotten Places by S. Hati
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up because of the original premise, but ended up being disappointed with the execution.

The protagonist and narrator is Ryka, a woman of Indian heritage brought up in the US, who has spent almost five centuries as the Timekeeper in a magical pocket dimension created by a time god, from which she undertakes expeditions to repair timelines that have somehow become corrupted (exactly how or why this happens routinely is not explored in any detail). The founding time god's brother Everest is generally around and plays an important role in the time repairs. Despite being demisexual, or perhaps because of it, she is in lust with him, but doesn't want to mess up their working relationship by doing anything about it.

Ryka is self-pitying, emotionally immature despite her 500 years, and one of those people who make sure that everyone around them shares in their bad mood, and she makes some poor decisions even though she should have both the intelligence and the experience to know better. Everest is flaky, unreliable and lacking in empathy. That was never a ship I was going to be on board with; I have to like both members of a couple to care about whether they end up together, and I didn't like either of them.

Among a good few small imperfections, the most prominent one for me was the implausible reason for the MC to understand languages. Because she has been visiting various places and times for a little less than 500 years, she has "developed fluency in most languages" (according to her). There are about 7000 languages currently spoken in our world, and of course many more (and many mutually unintelligible earlier versions) throughout history, and this book has divergent timelines too, so... well over 10,000. And she later claims it is "thousands," so the "most" is probably not intended as a rhetorical flourish, or to refer only to languages with a large number of speakers.

Clearly nobody, no matter how good their memory, could become fluent in "most" of those 10,000 languages, even in 500 years. Even if we're very generous and say it's 4000 (most of 7000), that's a language every six weeks, and we know (because we're told) that her memory isn't supernaturally perfect. It's absurd.

It would be absurd even if she was immersed in each language continuously for the whole six weeks, doing nothing but learning it by constantly interacting with native speakers. But she's not. She undertakes very short missions about once a week, each one to a random place and time and never to the same place and time on two consecutive occasions, and actively avoids engaging with anyone if she can help it. The languages claim is, honestly, less plausible than if you just say that her supernatural role as the Keeper of Time gives her fluency in all languages. Sure, she also has a magical library which can presumably produce books from which she could learn languages, but that's not the claim she's making.

If we set that nonsense aside, though, and assume that the excess hyphens and vocabulary glitches will be fixed between the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley and when the book comes out, and ignore the fact that the romance is between two people I don't much care for or about, the book is... OK. Fairly simple plot (Ryka messes up and has to fix it, and this helps her somehow to get over herself at last), interesting and whimsical world, secondary characters that are adequate for their roles.

I didn't love it. That's probably just me; other people seem to like it fine. Perhaps you will too.

View all my reviews

Review: A Particular Boy Among Air Particles

A Particular Boy Among Air Particles by Irvin Embalsado
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The author has set out, I think, to produce a book in somewhat the style of Brandon Sanderson. The difference is that while Sanderson's worldbuilding always has some off-the-wall aspect to it, he always manages to make that difference, and the rest of their world, feel plausible, while this one never achieved that as far as I was concerned.

It's set on a very small world. There are six landmasses, described as "continents," but the smallest of them can be seen all at once from a hot air balloon, and they're no more than a day's boat journey apart, so to my mind they would be better described as an archipelago of islands. (I live on a moderately large island. You can't remotely see all of it at once even from a high-flying aeroplane.) The boat in which Cielo, the protagonist, tours this world is a lifeboat from a larger vessel, but carries enough fuel to get to all the "continents." Why would this be, when nobody ever visits another "continent" because each society has everything it needs locally, and a lifeboat would only ever need to get back the short distance to its home "continent," and for that matter there are never incidents at sea that would even require a lifeboat? The only answer I can think of is "so the story can happen," which is never a good answer.

What's more, those societies themselves make little sense. One, for example, has a decaying punk-rock city in which people seem to spend most of their time high and either listening to music or driving round in "smoke-belchers." There's no indication of how food, or drugs, or smoke-belchers, or amplifiers, or electric guitars, or lights are produced, or by whom, but maybe it just all happens offstage (literally). Oh, there is an indication of how some food is obtained: they eat rats. On skewers.

All of the societies seem cartoonish and incomplete, despite the assertion that all of them have everything they need without each other. This assertion, by the way, is delivered in infodump by an intrusive narrator who sometimes speaks directly to the reader, but who then mostly takes a step back for the rest of the book. The bulk of the narrative is indistinguishable from close third person following Cielo, except when it suddenly hops into the head of his friend O.G. briefly. There are a number of instances of what would, in close third person, be POV violations, such as casually naming cultural features that the writer and the readers would recognise but Cielo should not, or naming characters he meets before they introduce themselves.

The worldbuilding wasn't the only part that didn't make sense to me, either. There were multiple moments when I thought there was an obvious action for Cielo to take - such as (view spoiler)[teaching his parents to heal so that the whole weight didn't fall on his shoulders (hide spoiler)] - but he doesn't, I assume because the predetermined plot and the idea of him as a lone hero took precedence.

We do eventually learn why this world is like it is, and it then kind of makes sense, but it's still pretty fanciful, and I didn't buy in. Still, the characters are just appealing enough, and the emotional beats strong enough, that the story held together and kept my interest, even if it reminded me more of Alice in Wonderland or the Phantom Tollbooth than Tress of the Emerald Sea.

The Netgalley pre-publication version I had was also reasonably well edited, apart from missing the past perfect tense occasionally when talking about something that had happened before the narrative moment.

It does have strengths, but for me they're outweighed by the inconsistent POV and the implausible worldbuilding, and it ends up at three stars.

View all my reviews

Review: Shadowed by a detective, or, The woman in wax

Shadowed by a detective, or, The woman in wax by René de Pont-Jest
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Street and Smith edition, on which the Project Gutenberg text is based, doesn't acknowledge it, but rather than being an original work of the credited author Virginia Champlin, this is a translation from the French book La Femme de Cire by René de Pont-Jest. It should be obvious to anyone who's read translated French works of the time; the New Yorkers don't talk remotely like New Yorkers, but in a way that seems to translate the French fairly literally, and the New York police department (and the private detectives, who are variously described as a firm of lawyers and "secret police") don't work like actual American police/detectives. Their titles, their duties, and whether they are elected or appointed (and are or are not lawyers, and are or are not described as "magistrates" - both the "chief of police" and the out-of-place New York sheriff are so described) are all at variance from actual practice at the time. The whole inciting incident also feels very French, with rivalry over a woman leading one of her suitors, an otherwise staid American businessman, to make extravagant statements about duels and murdering both his rival and the woman, and then fall into a decline where he's barely able to speak. Even the names are often just slightly off for being American names. For example, the main suspect rejoices in the name of Gobson. Not Gibson or Dobson, but an unhappy amalgam of the two.

The book is set in the late 19th century; references to someone being in "the Union army" suggests around the time of the Civil War, though the original publication date was 1883, so perhaps this is just another example of the French author not being aware of terminology and the translator not fixing it.

Ada Ricard, the beautiful widow of a wealthy man, is being courted by another wealthy man, a cracker magnate, who is showering her with expensive gifts. However, the army officer alluded to above is determined to win her, and arranges for her to be abducted (with her ready cooperation) from a masked ball at her mansion. A few days later, a body of a young woman turns up in the harbour, bearing the distinctive marks inflicted on Ada by her violent first husband, whom she divorced prior to her marriage to the late wealthy man. Someone has killed her and then attempted to dispose of the body in the sea, weighting it down with a barrel of tar.

The question is: is this actually Ada? Her maid says maybe not. Her ex-husband says definitely not, (view spoiler)[but then gets accused and convicted of the crime. There's another difference from actual New York criminal justice practice of the 1880s in that there's no year of appeals before his sentence is to be carried out. But on the day of the execution, a woman shows up saying, "I'm Ada Ricard. What's going on?" His conviction is, therefore, vacated, but this leaves the issue of who the corpse was and who killed her. (hide spoiler)]

There's a whole sting operation, and finally the detective, a doctor who has (for reasons left mysterious) volunteered to become a New York police detective, and (for reasons also left mysterious) adopted a sixteen-year-old girl who's said to be his distant relative, closes the case in dramatic fashion.

The whole thing must have been very confusing to American readers of the time, since not only do the police and the courts not work the way they actually worked, but everyone behaves as if they're French, making dramatic declarations and fainting in moments of high emotion and threatening each other's lives and, of course, planning to commit adultery at the drop of a hat. Mrs. Gobson's first thought when she learns that a 40-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl are living next door is that they're on their honeymoon, and she's jealous.

If you set all the nonsense aside, it's not a bad story, if a bit melodramatic, but it's very much "watch the detective do odd things and then, at the end, explain them, introducing information that the reader had no access to at any point." It's just OK, and it's also a cheaply done (and intellectual-property-rights-violating) piece of publishing. Of course, Street and Smith boast at the front of the book about the enduring quality of their publications, which always raises red flags for me (it's something HarperCollins does today in some of their incredibly poorly edited, rushed-out scans of century-old books).

View all my reviews