Review: The Middle of Things

The Middle of Things by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fletcher was a good mystery writer, and this one is engaging and well written for most of its length, but doesn't stick the landing.

Viner, a "young gentleman of means and leisure" living in a nice part of London, returns home from an evening walk via a narrow passage between houses that offers a short cut. There he finds the dead body of a man who recently moved into the area, who he knows by sight. He saw a ragged-looking man running from the passage shortly before. The ragged man is picked up trying to pawn the man's ring to buy much-needed food, and found to be, by complete coincidence, an old schoolmate of Viner's from Rugby, down on his luck. (I haven't tagged the book "plot relies on coincidence" because, although there are some coincidences, they're not vital to the plot.) Viner is convinced he's innocent, for reasonable reasons (there was plenty of cash on the victim, which is missing, and if the suspect had cash to buy food he would have done so rather than try to pawn the ring, which he says he just snatched up from the ground in passing, thinking the victim was drunk).

It turns out the murdered man was also carrying some papers relevant to the succession to a noble title, and Viner and the several lawyers he involves (mostly in an attempt to clear his old schoolmate) are convinced that this is the motive for the crime. Multiple witnesses emerge from all directions with important clues, and the group gradually piece together the mystery. There's no one detective; Viner, a couple of the lawyers, Viner's sharp elderly aunt (who's addicted to murder mysteries) and a couple of other characters all contribute to the eventual solution.

Unfortunately, while the working out of clues and red herrings is engaging and well written, the resolution is at least two kinds of cheat, and not "fair play." The murderer is barely mentioned until right at the end, and was introduced early on only as someone with a minor and conventional function. Among a huge cast of minor characters, most of the others are more noticeable and memorable. Actual spoilers for whodunnit in the spoiler tags, because I want to complain about a plot point that makes no sense whatsoever: (view spoiler)[The murderer turns out to have a house that backs onto the alley where the murder took place, and to have done it as he showed the victim out of his own back gate. Which is fine, but why, then, does he not just go back into his house? Why does he instead go out of the alley in such a way that the man who becomes the prime suspect sees him? Why is he muffled up with his face hidden, something that is distinctive to this character and that another witness sees in a completely different context, but nobody who lives near him ever notices him doing it? The answer is obviously "so that the suspect can mention a plausible alternative suspect and it can be confirmed that such a man exists and was seen with the victim," but that's a book reason, not a reason reason. (hide spoiler)]

Those issues, and the thin romance that is also a solution to an impasse that I saw coming fifteen miles off, lost the book its fourth star. It's one of those that's enjoyable right up until the end, but then kind of falls apart.

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Review: The Classic Collection of John Ferguson (Six Detective Novels). Illustrated: The Man in the Dark, Death of Mr. Dodsley, The Dark Geraldine and Others

The Classic Collection of John Ferguson (Six Detective Novels). Illustrated: The Man in the Dark, Death of Mr. Dodsley, The Dark Geraldine and Others by John Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had read The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery in the Project Gutenberg edition, and it was so good I looked for others and found this collection. I had hoped that it would have the rest of the MacNab mysteries (there are four books in total plus a short story), but about half of the "detective" novels in this collection are actually thrillers, and only a couple of them are MacNab stories. That's a labelling and packaging issue, not an issue with the original books, which are excellent.

It's produced in Ukraine, and predictably imperfect in its punctuation (mainly missing commas, though there are also some missing periods, misread letters like "corning" for "coming," "!" read as "I," quotation marks missing, added, or on the wrong side of the space, and random extra punctuation or characters). Also, while it's technically true that it's "illustrated," the illustrations consist of random vintage pinup art (most, but not all, clothed) that has nothing whatsoever to do with the text. Not a great edition, but (aside from the pinups) no worse than some I've seen from major publishers. Still, you might want to look for better editions elsewhere.

I've already reviewed The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery , so I won't repeat that review. Let's start with The Death of Mr. Dodsley.

An elderly dealer in rare books is found at his desk, shot through the forehead sometime in the early hours of the morning. His nephew, also in the business, is engaged to the daughter of a prominent politician who is rising in the direction of being Home Secretary before too long, but father and daughter are estranged. The suspicious thing is that the daughter's recently-published detective novel is remarkably similar in some aspects to the real-life crime.

MacNab, the private detective who is Ferguson's series hero, has previously been called in by the late bookseller because rare volumes have been going missing, so he gets involved in the case, alongside the Scotland Yard inspector Mallet and his long-suffering sergeant, Crabb. There's a limited pool of suspects: the nephew, his fiancee, her brother, and the three shop assistants (one male, two female). Also involved is the politician's private secretary, a good friend of both the victim's nephew and the nephew's fiancee (the secretary's employer's daughter); he introduced the couple, in fact.

Much hinges on the beat policeman's identification of the drunken young man who distracted him, probably while the crime was being committed. Was that man involved? Is he one of the young men in the case? Clues at the crime scene suggest that a man and a woman committed the murder together. Which pair could it be, or are those clues misleading? It's a clever mystery, and I was fooled right up to the reveal.

The Dark Geraldine takes place in a fictional small Scottish town that has been previously mentioned in one of the other books - the constable is MacNab's father, I believe, which is the only connection to the MacNab series. It's narrated by a young lawyer who finds himself caught up in a mysterious intrigue involving a Munchausenesque retired soldier of fortune, his beautiful daughter (who, in a departure from the expected that I appreciated, the hero sensibly does not fall for (view spoiler)[except that right at the end he totally does (hide spoiler)]), an American purporting to be a travelling salesman but who is clearly something more, some mysterious thugs, and a drawing with a strange cypher embedded in it. The rather stuffy lawyer and his more free-spirited, action-oriented colleague take the sensible step of enlisting the village constable, who proves capable and effective. It's very much not a standard tropey detective story, and I enjoyed it all the more for that reason.

Night in Glengyle is a thriller more than a mystery, and is not a MacNab story. The narrator Maitland, a currently-out-of-work actor, is recruited by an old friend in the Foreign Office to steal some documents at a country house by means that will not be inquired into, in what sounds like a very dodgy and implausible setup. He's led to believe that a Cabinet Minister (probably, by the name and description, based on Winston Churchill) is behind the request, but doesn't see any actual proof of this. He manages to manoeuvre his way into being taken on there as an extra servant, but only by swapping identities with a man who ends up murdered. Was it because of Maitland's mission, or coincidental?

Coincidence does play a role in the plot, and unlike the other books so far this one exhibits some racial prejudice: the Irishman is stereotyped, the black man dehumanised, and a slur is used for people from the Mediterranean. This book was the one that got the overall collection the "plot-relies-on-coincidence" and "casual-racism" tags. But it's a gripping thriller for all that, and if you enjoyed The Thirty-Nine Steps, this is in a similar vein. Notably not othered and stereotyped are the tinkers who help Maitland, apparently for no gain, since he has nothing to pay them.

There are significantly fewer punctuation and scanning errors in this book than in the previous two.

The Secret Road is back to a higher number of scan errors, though. This is another thriller, this time an espionage thriller set in British India after World War I, where a rebellion is planned. The hidden mastermind's plot is to use a legendary diamond (or another diamond that resembles it, at least) to trigger the uprising. The main character is a young Englishman who is already experienced as a spy in India; like his missionary father, he picks up languages easily and with high fidelity, and can pass as Indian, as can a number of his comrades. (This involves brownface makeup.)

The complication is that the British resident in the native state where the plot looks like it's going to kick off is the uncle of the young man's crush, who's a school friend of his sister's, and a slightly older man with political ambitions is also staying there - and is engaged to the crush.

There's a lot more interpersonal maneuvering than in the other stories, possibly because there are two prominent female characters and an aspiring politician among the cast, and that crosses with and complicates the espionage/foiling-the-uprising plot. It's a gripping thriller.

Stealthy Terror (the man could certainly title) is another thriller, this time starting in pre-World War I Germany, where a young Scottish doctor is studying psychology. He is, of course, taken for an Englishman by the Germans. Happening to frequent a particular cafe, he stumbles on a plot, and when he attempts to rescue a man ends up with the MacGuffin, a mysterious parcel of documents. His only friend in Berlin has gone back to England, as he discovers when he flees his adversaries at night without shoes, hat or money.

By fortunate coincidence, the young woman he approaches for help is also Scottish, and helps him get away. But that's by no means the end of his gripping adventures, as the ruthless adversaries come after him for the MacGuffin. There's an extended tease of what the MacGuffin is; every time he's about to look at it, a crisis interrupts him. Then, when he finally has leisure to look at it, it appears to be nothing special - or is it? Plenty more action ensues, and all in all it's a thrilling time.

This one, unfortunately, is full of distracting scan errors and doesn't appear to have had the most basic editorial attention. At least it doesn't have any extraneous pinups.

In summary, then: good books, well written, but mostly poorly produced in this edition.

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Review: Breadknives and Boomsticks: A Sapphic Cozy Fantasy about Terrible Baking

Breadknives and Boomsticks: A Sapphic Cozy Fantasy about Terrible Baking by Marie Cardno
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don't let the slightly shonky cover put you off. The writing is much better.

I'm used to cozy fantasy having extremely minimal worldbuilding, barely (or even not quite) enough to enable the story. This is a welcome exception; in fact, the worldbuilding is essential to the plot, which is what I feel should preferably be the case with any kind of speculative fiction. The setup is that there was a war between liches long ago, and after it was over, one of the survivors cast a spell which causes all cursed things to be drawn to a single place, a volcano crater known as the Cauldron. Our protagonist Runa is not a world-weary warrior or (conventional) adventurer, as in so many fantasy cozies, but a guide who takes people, mainly wizards, into the crater and protects them from the many deadly dangers there while they study whatever it is they're interested in, or try to take things from the crater that have got caught up and dragged along with some curse or other.

The inciting incident is that Runa is flung out of the crater and has to recuperate in a cozy village just outside the rim (which was dragged there by a passing curseland). Everyone is nice to her, and nothing is trying to kill her, which is an odd experience for her after so long as a crater guide. She keeps thinking about an attractive woman she'd rescued shortly before her ejection from the crater, and (about halfway through the book) that woman turns up through a portal, adding complication to Runa's life. She already has some complications, in that she's living in the abandoned bakery, which has a mysterious inhabitant most of the villagers are wary of, and in order to try to contribute to the village that's being so generous to her, she's trying to bake.

She's terrible at it, which is another welcome departure from the cozy formula. Realistically, unless you've been developing some skill as a hobby for years, you will be terrible at it when you start trying to do it. She does, very gradually, get better, despite not understanding most of the instructions in the recipe book she finds, which is directed at journeyman bakers who already understand the basics which she has no idea about.

The story is Runa getting to grips with who she is if she's not being a cauldron guide, and indeed who she is in general (she's half volcano nymph and half troll, and didn't fit in with either group), and where she belongs, and if she belongs there with the woman she keeps rescuing, who has her own secrets and conflicts going on. It's a gradual unfolding, where nothing is too easy, or reliant on coincidence, or on people being idiots or acting out of character, which is also refreshing.

Another thing I'm used to with cozy (and with books in general) is terrible copy editing, and again I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, the pre-publication version I had for review via Netgalley does have a very small number of minor errors - an excess apostrophe, a couple of missing periods, a typo. But that's vanishingly little compared with most books I see, and can easily be fixed before publication.

The writing isn't just tidy, it's capable, with a wry sense of humour and a knack for expression that doesn't draw too much attention to itself. Overall, it's at the standard I always hope for, and very seldom find, in books I pick up from contemporary authors. It's what I wish cozy fantasy was all the time.

One way in which this is like many other cozies is that it's full of queer people. That may be a plus or a minus for you; I just mention it, though the subtitle should have tipped you off already.

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Review: Dead Men's Money

Dead Men's Money by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

J.S. Fletcher writes great mysteries, thrilling and not at all formulaic. This is just as good as any of his others in many ways, but I've knocked a star off because of the utter idiocy of the protagonist/narrator. Turns out I find this just as irritating in a young man as in a young woman, even though I see that variation a lot less often.

Talking in more depth about how Hugh Moneylaws, the narrator, carries the Idiot Ball involves some mild spoilers. The initial setup is that his mother's lodger has fallen seriously ill, and sent Hugh (a 21-year-old lawyer's clerk) to a lonely spot to meet someone he has an appointment with and tell the person that he can't come. When he gets there, Hugh discovers a recently deceased corpse.

(view spoiler)[On the way to the meeting, he saw a man with a distinctive mark, two missing fingers on his right hand, coming from roughly the direction of the murder scene. The man doesn't see him (it's dark, and some instinct has caused Hugh to hide when he hears him coming). Unfortunately, the same instinct doesn't prompt him to tell the police about the man when they question him. Nor, once he has identified the man as a local magnate recently arrived in the area, does he tell his wise boss, who he very much looks up to and trusts, or his girlfriend, from whom he normally has no secrets. He keeps it entirely to himself.

A dodgy local tradesman, who was poaching in the area, confides in Hugh that he saw both him and the man, and implies (Hugh realises afterwards) that they could blackmail the magnate, which Hugh of course won't do. The following day, this dodgy character is found dead from violence.

Does Hugh now talk to the police, his boss, or his sweetheart? He does not. Instead, without telling anyone where he's going, he goes to speak to the magnate, thinking there must be an innocent explanation. He informs the man that he hasn't told anyone else. The man says he has insomnia and often walks around at night, and this satisfies Hugh completely; he promises he won't say anything to anyone. Nor does Hugh smell any kind of rat when the magnate offers him a job as steward, at more than four times his current salary.

Hugh then goes with the man onto his yacht, just the two of them, far out from land. Of course the man pushes him off, and he only survives by lucky chance. But now he at least knows the man is the murderer, and will be more cautious in future. Right? Right?

No. He goes off two further times alone without telling anyone and gets into trouble, the second time having faithfully promised his sweetheart he'll do no such thing (and his sensible boss has also promised her he won't let Hugh out of his sight until everything is tied up, and uncharacteristically doesn't keep his promise). (hide spoiler)]

The rest of the book is great, full of tension, plenty of good action, a complex mystery that takes a lot of clever work (mostly by Hugh's boss) to unravel. But far too much of it relies on Hugh being dumber than bread.

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Review: Breeze Felt at Moonrise

Breeze Felt at Moonrise by Lynn Buchanan
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The good: Sanderson-style deep worldbuilding that's central to the premise and plot.

The less good: dark and tragic backstory, though with the potential to turn.

The annoying: commas after adjectives of quantity and number, which are never coordinate and should not be treated as such. Also, fortunate and unfortunate coincidence as plot drivers, though there may be an in-world explanation for why things are so conveniently or inconveniently timed.

The balance: I stopped reading at 20% because it was just too dark for my taste. I even looked at the end to see if it was ultimately completely tragic, and even though it wasn't, I decided I'm not in the mood for tragic consequences of greed and revenge visited on the next generation.

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Review: The Star of Kilnaely

The Star of Kilnaely by Grace Daly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual one, which is largely why I picked it up.

Set in the American Midwest, but in a town inhabited apparently exclusively by Irish people, so (having forgotten the blurb) I was confused for a long time about where we were. I remained confused about when we were, since the frame story and the last of the stories that it frames were apparently present day, but the majority of the stories seemed to be set in about the 1920s, based on the technology level and what was said to be new - and yet the characters, while they aged, were not over 100 years old.

There was also the occasional vocabulary glitch, which I'll mention to the publisher; I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there may still be a chance to fix them. Otherwise, the copy editing was reasonably good, apart from "may" instead of "might" in past tense and at least one apostrophe in the wrong place.

The frame story shows us a small town spoiled by the advent of a rapacious software corporation, which is degrading the environment (especially the built environment), driving up land prices and displacing long-term inhabitants who can no longer afford to live there. The inner stories, told to a hapless salaryman from that corporation in a bar, are something in between Irish legendary tales and American tall tales of the Paul Bunyan variety, except instead of a blue ox the Star of Kilnaely has an enormous dog, big enough for even him to ride on. He's a larger-than-life character, charismatic, strong, handsome and blessed, in addition, with a brilliant younger sister, who (it soon becomes obvious to the reader, if not to the slightly inebriated listener in the bar) is the person telling the stories.

The hero tales are fun, and to my mind would have worked better without the frame, but they work well enough. Some have high stakes, others low stakes, but all of them show us the Star solving problems one way or another. Again, some draw on Irish mythology and show us the Good Neighbours and gods and goddesses, while others are more general small-town situations.

Pleasant and enjoyable, if a little confusing chronologically.

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Review: Alistair Fall and the Restless Dead

Alistair Fall and the Restless Dead by Marianne Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The reason I persevere in picking up books for review via Netgalley, despite many of them being mediocre or worse, is that sometimes I get one like this.

In a lot of authors' hands, this would have been predictable and bland. The setup looks like a slow-burn grumpy/sunshine romance, based on the blurb - the FMC is actually called Sunny. But it's not that. She isn't the perky, cheery sort her name suggests; she has a dark backstory, and she engages with it, doesn't bury it under a fake sugary veneer. She's sarcastic and smart and capable, but also realistically self-doubting and slow to trust. Sure, she'd like to be a cozy fantasy protagonist - she loves baked goods, and has a favourite little tea shop and a calico cat named Butterscotch - but who she is and where she is mean that she ends up fighting a conspiracy of necromancers instead.

Her opposite number, Alistair Fall, is bad with people, but he knows and regrets it. He'd like more friends, but unfortunately almost his only real friend is murdered early in the book, and he's tasked with investigating. Sunny looks like the prime suspect, but he's a good investigator and doesn't believe it, instead recruiting her to help him find the real killer, which would clear her name. They build a partnership and what might well become a friendship over the course of the book, but it's not a romance, which I appreciate; from time to time it's nice to read about two people who are just good colleagues. Both of them bring genuine strengths to the partnership, as equals.

Solving the mystery happens well before the end of the book, because just knowing who was behind it isn't enough; the pair also have to thwart the antagonists' plot, making the last part of the book more of a thriller. They are significantly at a disadvantage in doing so, and it takes all their courage and ingenuity. And they don't do it in either of the two ways I thought of.

I'm also so used to inadequate worldbuilding in current fantasy novels that it's cause for celebration to read one with worldbuilding that actually matters to the plot, and has had some effort put into it, and is different from the usual generic off-the-shelf scenarios. In this setting, through events which aren't explored in depth, almost 40 years before the story starts the prevailing pagan religion was banned in favour of atheism, imposed by the State of Order, which... is less authoritarian and despotic and dystopian than it could easily have been, though certainly some people are discontented under it, while others are good Statists and parrot the prejudices that the State encourages. One of those prejudices is against the use of magic, which is associated with paganism, and since Fall is a sorcerer (albeit sanctioned by the State), he comes in for a lot of persecution, petty and otherwise.

Yes, the trope of oppressed mages has its problems. Here, though, it's a bit more justified than usual, more of a parallel with, say, the persecution of intellectuals under some Communist regimes. These mages are oppressed because they potentially threaten the State's declaration that the gods are mythical, and the mechanism of their oppression is not so much official persecution as encouraging ordinary people to despise and distrust them.

The worldbuilding, in other words, matters to the characters' circumstances, and it also turns out to be highly relevant to the plot (for spoilerific reasons).

Names (and phrases, and concepts) from our world did make their way in, and the names are the usual mixture of made-up fantasy names and familiar ones from various cultures in our world (including a couple of biblical ones in this world without that cultural context, which is something I should probably give up complaining about, since nearly everyone does it).

There are also married same-sex couples in this setting that's otherwise similar to our world's late 18th/early 19th century. But that's a passing detail, not a central feature as it would be in so many current fantasy books.

Other things I appreciated: Fall's sorcery is limited; not something he can deploy quickly, and it can't just do anything, so it isn't used to cheat on the plot. The editing is also excellent, unlike most books I see via Netgalley (or BookBub), with just a couple of minor vocabulary issues that I'll flag to the publisher, meaning they may well be corrected before publication.

Overall, it's sound, solid, and achieves enough depth in its exploration of the characters and their society that I'm giving it five stars, not something I do often. I definitely want to read more from the author and in this world, and it looks like being a series, so I should get my wish.

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Review: A Swindler's Song

A Swindler's Song by Lindsay Bowen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a mixed bag for me.

On the one hand, I do love a heist. On the other hand, the heist crew weren't as capable or cohesive as I could have wished, and there was a lot of reliance on convenient chance to enable them to pull off the job. I'll put all the lucky breaks in spoiler tags, though some of them come out quite early: (view spoiler)[
- The crew leader physically resembles a famous singer and can sing well, giving them a way to get into the event where they plan to pull the job.
- One of the crew can play the cello, an instrument which the singer is known to have in her backing band.
- The same crew member has grown up exploring a castle which is the exact duplicate of the one they are hitting - there are three of these, on identical islands, with a handwavey story about an ancient matriarch who insisted her three sons build identical castles and cities on the three islands, but it's clearly a plot device to make the heist easier.
- The castle includes an easy back way to the vault that they figure out by being in the right place at the right time, and it's made even easier by the fact that the eldest of the lord's four eerily similar wives has a crush on the crew leader and gives her a key.
- The escape plan relies heavily on timing that there is no way to guarantee, but of course works perfectly.
- Not to even mention the elven superpowers.
(hide spoiler)]

In other words, the author stacks the deck heavily in favour of the characters. They do still have to work for their success, and one of them does so while dealing with a chronic illness, and there's genuine danger from the despotic "warlords" (I would have just called them lords; warlords implies a more improvised situation than the multi-generational rule they represent). But it reduces the characters' agency to see them helped along like this, and character agency is an important part of the heist genre for me.

The romance subplot progresses rapidly from spur-of-the-moment hookup to enemies to fake married to soulmates having outrageously blissful sex (on-page, so if you prefer not to read that, this isn't your book). I wasn't a fan of the speed-run, or really of either of the partners much. The author gave them heartstring-tugging backstories and laudable goals, but somehow I never fully warmed up to them. I also spotted the big "twist" at the end 40% of the way through.

It was far from the worst copy-edited book I've seen lately, though the author's apostrophe game is weak when it comes to plural nouns, and there's the occasional missed opportunity to use the past perfect tense. A number of idioms are not quite rendered correctly (it's subtle), and a few sentences don't say exactly what they mean. I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and there may or may not be more editing to come.

The worldbuilding is the usual not-particularly-coherent mix of standard sword-and-sorcery world with random bits of our world wherever there's a gap to be filled. The names, for example, as is so often the case, are a mix of made-up fantasy names, names out of the Bible (in a setting where such religion as there is is Basic Fantasy Paganism, but with the gods absent because of reasons), and names from specific ethnic backgrounds in our world standing in for countries in a completely different geography. There's been some effort put in - the absence of the gods and (at least theoretically) of magic, though I've seen both of those before - but it's mostly generic.

All in all, I was lukewarm on it, and it wasn't quite for me. I'd not be at all surprised if it was for plenty of other people, though.

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Review: The Secret of the Silver Car Further Adventures of Anthony Trent, Master Criminal

The Secret of the Silver Car Further Adventures of Anthony Trent, Master Criminal by Wyndham Martyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This sequel to Anthony Trent: Master Criminal is, if anything, better than the first, more of a thriller in the mould of The Thirty-Nine Steps (but without the heavy racism) than the gentleman-thief story of the first book. It starts with immediate action, a man (Anthony Trent, as it emerges) jumping off an ocean liner just as it leaves the dock and landing, unhurt, on the quay, whence he hurries off. Why did he do this? We're not left wondering for too long; there's a flashback.

The hero, who has made a fortune as a burglar, ended the first book fighting in World War I because of his sense of duty. He's been wounded and is unconscious, and another man, who has found him and bound his wounds, has dragged him to what he thought was safety. But! A shell has buried them in the ruined building, and they're running out of air. Thinking they're both about to die, Trent confesses his criminal past, giving the man his name.

But they don't die, and Trent goes in search of the man, who holds his freedom in his hands, and whose distinctive voice he had heard on the dock. There's a very substantial reward offered for the apprehension of the (to the police) unknown man who did the crimes for which Trent was responsible. What he finds quickly gets into spoiler territory, but the upshot is that Trent volunteers for a dangerous and unofficial undercover mission into Croatia to retrieve a compromising document. There, he contends with a despotic Balkan count, pulling off daring but reasonably plausible feats of espionage, theft and escape.

There's a love interest, too, who Trent considers himself unworthy of because of his criminal past. All of it is good, solid stuff, unfortunately marred by another terrible editing job by the original publishers (see my review of Book 1). I really am seriously considering editing these public-domain books myself to a decent standard, so that others can enjoy them in the state they deserve to be in. They're entertaining, they're not anything like so far-fetched or reliant on coincidence as most action thrillers of the period, and they have sound emotional beats and a strong character arc. They just need several hundred more commas and a few other relatively easy fixes.

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Review: Anthony Trent, Master Criminal

Anthony Trent, Master Criminal by Wyndham Martyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the "clever gentleman thief" subgenre that started in English with Raffles, though I think Arsene Lupin was before him in French. Trent is closer to Lupin, who, in a long and varied career, was often a helpful vigilante or even a detective, not just a master criminal. He works alone; Raffles corrupted his old schoolfellow Bunny, who had a hopeless crush on him, and treated him worse than a dog, while Lupin often had confederates, who he looked after, but Trent has studied how criminals fail, and feels that working alone is safest.

He's studied criminals as part of his original occupation as a writer of crime fiction. He wanted to do this really well, and went so far as to work for a burglar alarm manufacturer in order to research how their devices work. But this means he wrote only about a story a month, and his publisher couldn't pay him more than two cents a word for them, so when the story opens he's living in a boarding house with a rented upright piano and dreams of someday having a big house with a grand piano so he can compose. (His musical ambitions and abilities don't really come up again after this.) He concludes that his dreams are only feasible if he turns to crime, which he believes he can get away with, given his studies.

He's a man of some contradictions. Apart from being a thief (targeting the rich and unworthy), he maintains the moral code of his Ivy League background; he also steals things he knows he can't sell, because dealing with fences would make him vulnerable to detection. Several of his heists are for jewels which he substitutes for the coloured glass in his brass Benares lamp, simply because he fancies the idea.

Ultimately, he refuses to compromise his principles, and is saved from public disgrace only by a combination of good fortune and the loyalty of his housekeeper, who has divined his secret but knows him to be basically a good man. He then decides he will join the army and go to fight in World War I, having a couple of times foiled German spies. This also nearly leads to his exposure, and sets up for the start of the second book, which I read immediately after the first one.

Trent is a privileged protagonist. I use this term slightly differently from "spoiled protagonist," by which I mean a protagonist who's showered with unearned help from unlikely quarters. A privileged protagonist is someone who is firmly convinced, and perhaps convinces us, the readers, that anything they do is all right, even if it's illegal, because it's them doing it, and they are One of the Right Sort. Not only that, but they get away with it, essentially because they're the protagonist. Harry Potter and his friends are privileged protagonists; they break the rules all the time, and end up being commended rather than punished. Even though Trent does have his moral qualms about his way of life, he doesn't actually stop, at least until (in Book 2) he meets the love of his life, which is what usually reforms these characters. Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces is another example, though I found Trent's adventures more plausible than Cleek's. There are all kinds of obvious issues with privileged protagonists, and I plan to explore them in a blog post sometime, but personally I'm still able to enjoy stories that feature them, even as I note the trope and its problems.

This book was clearly cheaply produced by a slapdash publisher with a typesetter who should not have been employed in that field. The Project Gutenberg edition has an extensive list of obvious typos at the back that were corrected during the conversion process; it includes an "it's" that should be "its," but they missed a "who's" that should be "whose." Unfortunately, they haven't attempted to insert the many missing commas, mostly the ones that provide subtle grammatical pointers to help the reader parse the sentence, but also the vocative comma (the one that makes the difference between "let's eat Grandma" and "let's eat, Grandma"). Also, a good many of the apostrophes are in the wrong places. Some of this is probably down to the author, who has also mistakenly used the name of Trent's fictional criminal a couple of times where the reference is to Trent himself.

It's so dire that I'm seriously tempted to create my own edited edition so that people can enjoy it as it should be enjoyed, though I'm not sure how I'd distribute it. If this kind of thing bothers you as it bothers me, perhaps listen to the Librevox recording; my wife did, and recommended the book to me, which is why I picked it up.

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Review: The Little Shop of Gentle Magics

The Little Shop of Gentle Magics by Jessica Rosenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this one frustrating because it just didn't quite make sense or come across as plausible to me. Someone with a stronger ability to suspend disbelief may enjoy it considerably.

The editing is good (apart from one word choice by the author which I'll point out, when I give feedback to the publisher via Netgalley, is probably not the word she means). But I kept getting tripped up by little oddities in how things unfolded.

Firstly, Meg, the spoiled protagonist. This is a term I came up with for protagonists who get showered with unearned help by everyone they meet. The little Scottish town where this Scottish-descended American protagonist pitches up, a little while after a bad divorce, instantly and unanimously takes her to its heart and begins helping her set up her tea-and-decorated-cookies shop, which she has (unusually for her, we are told) impulsively spent all of her divorce-settlement money on. At least, we're told a couple of times that all her money has gone on buying the lease, but she still seems to have money to spend on fitting it up and getting inventory. It's not clear whether all the tradesmen who are relatives of her neighbours are working for free or just at a discount, but certainly the conveniently-available second-hand shop fittings and kitchen equipment and the tea and baking supplies aren't free. The unconditional help and support, by the way, comes from everyone including the owner of the coffee shop right across the street, who you would think would have at least some thoughts about direct competition for the tourist dollar, but no.

Of course, her new instasoulmate Art (who she met and had one amazing date with in the US, then cut off in a brief message with no explanation because she had to go to Scotland and find herself) moves in with her almost immediately, and is presumably paying something, since his company posted him (conveniently) to Scotland and has an accommodation budget for him, but the question of his contribution to the household finances never comes up. Money in general never comes up, despite the fact that this is probably the number one worry of a new small business owner apart from marketing.

The marketing almost takes care of itself, despite the fact that on the day the business opens, the shop still doesn't have a name. Art's daughter does some social media stuff Meg doesn't understand, despite being 40 years old in 2026, and they're packed to the doors all day, but Meg can still take time out for interpersonal drama, since the entire community is, as previously mentioned, supporting her.

Meg has grown up being dumped on by her awful mother and aunts because, unlike them, she has no (apparent) witchy powers, and this prepared her to marry an equally if not more awful man who made it all about him, so that she had to completely efface herself in order to manage his emotions for him. But when she starts to finally develop powers (because of the ancient magic of Scotland, which is apparently more magical than America; maybe white people can't access the inherent magic of the land in America?) it doesn't seem to be a big deal for her, as I would have expected. She is worried about telling Art, but of course when she finally does, he's OK with it, because no conflict lasts much more than a short chapter in this book. Even Art's surly teenage daughter is intermittently pro-Meg from quite early on, and his five-year-old son loves her just as instantly as his father does.

There's a good deal of sizzling-hot kissing on page, but no actual sex; it's strongly implied that Meg and instasoulmate just cuddle the first night, and after that it's never directly addressed.

A lot of things are way too easy, and because it's set in a version of the real world, that stands out more than if it's in a lightly-sketched sword-and-sorcery secondary world. At least there are interpersonal (and intrapersonal) dynamics; I wasn't fully convinced by all of them either, but there are some. For example, Art, who is usually a perfect foil for her awful ex-husband, does occasionally make decisions for Meg without consulting her, which she resents, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that she'd subjugated her own preferences to her ex-husband for 20 years. It seems like these two near-perfect people can only have conflict by both of them acting a bit out of character.

The whole thing is in broadly the mould of all midlife women's paranormal cosies: divorce, small business, new love, discovery of powers, helpful community. It isn't quite what I call This Damn Thing Again, which also involves an inheritance from a relative, returning to one's hometown, discovering for the first time that the supernatural exists, and having a basic mystery to solve, but it's a close cousin. Sure, that's what a genre is, a set of expectations, but this particular genre seems to adhere more closely than most to the exact same setup each time.

Within that setup, for me it didn't come across as plausible. The fiction I admire most starts with a premise - preferably one that hasn't been done a thousand times before - and some well-realized characters and grows the events organically from the setting, the premise and the characters interacting in a natural and believable way. I didn't feel this book was doing that. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm sure plenty of people will enjoy it a lot, and I do commend the excellent standard of editing. It just didn't quite work for me.

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Review: The Friendship Circle: A magical heartwarming story about second chances and friendship for fans of cozy small-town emotional reads in 2026!

The Friendship Circle: A magical heartwarming story about second chances and friendship for fans of cozy small-town emotional reads in 2026! by Amanda James
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

That subtitle is positioning the book pretty clearly, and if you like this sort of thing, this is definitely one.

I'd read an Amanda James before, The Secret Library , which set out to be inspirational and uplifting, but was let down a bit by the fact that the author's craft skill is not equal to her ambitions. It had an interesting enough premise and a worthy enough positive tone that I wanted to give her another chance, but the lack of skill was even more evident in this one, where cliches are presented as wisdom, and trite, vaguely New Agey self-help platitudes are presented as depth. The characters seemed stiff and generic to me, and overall it just didn't keep my interest, and I didn't finish it. For someone who is more centrally its target audience, it would probably work better.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy

The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy by Briana Snow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author isn't kidding about the slow. It takes the first 4% of the (relatively short) book for the main character to come into a room and make a cup of tea. That's OK, though, because every sentence of that 4% is building character or the world or both.

But I have to say, by the time some conflict finally appeared almost halfway through, I had been ready for it for a while. I'd had to stop reading because I was falling asleep (on a sunny afternoon, on the couch with my cat). It's maybe just a tiny bit too cosy unless you're really, really into that slow life vibe. That conflict, by the way, is relatively easily resolved and has no long-term negative consequences.

I mentioned worldbuilding above. I often criticize the worldbuilding of cosy books for being thin - slapdash scenery flats placed behind 2020s people in cosplay. This one has more worldbuilding than that, but it's a bit incoherent.

Firstly, there's a reference (to Blackpool in 1987, in a context that signals this was many years ago) that places it probably in contemporary England, but nothing in the story really requires it to be, and no details back that up. The English is American, and with the exception of a single toaster, nothing seems to be powered by electricity or manufactured. It's very much the pre-industrial cosy setting I was expecting from the cover and blurb, and it could easily be secondary-world without affecting the story whatsoever.

Secondly, there are random bits (and one non-random bit) of the Harry Potter Wizarding World scattered throughout, with references to silver sickles (the currency, though there is also a literal sickle made of silver), the Minister of Magic, and, above all, house elves. A house elf is central to the story, and it's clear that house elves are effectively slaves or a close equivalent, as in HP - but he's wearing ordinary clothes, which goes against HP lore. The title "warlock" is used for his master, which isn't in HP as far as I remember. There's a point mentioned about house elves having wandless magic, but the witch who's the main character does various magical things without her wand as well as with it. There's no apparent magical/non-magical person divide or secrecy about magic in the village. It's all a bit of a muddle, and could easily have been de-HPed, whether or not it was originally fanfic, just by using, say, "brownie" instead of "house elf."

On the upside, it is about as cozy as it's possible for a book to get, the editing is far better than I usually see, and its faults are all minor ones. If you're a habitual cozy reader, by now you've probably trained yourself to ignore worldbuilding oddities anyway, and you're likely to enjoy this very much.

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Review: Lateral Cooking

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

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

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

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

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Review: Radical Magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: In Her Exquisite Clutches

In Her Exquisite Clutches by Auston Habershaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start this review with the disclaimer that I got a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review, and there's a long time to go until it's published. That means that hopefully most of the errors I spotted will be corrected, most notably spelling a dragon's treasure as "horde" rather than "hoard" and saying that she "horded" it (the latter of which spell check should have caught). That's not the only vocabulary error either, by a long way, and the author also apparently doesn't know, or at least consistently doesn't follow, the conventions for how dialog should be punctuated (with the tag as part of the same sentence as the dialog, not a separate sentence). Even if they do get fixed by publication, these are disappointingly basic errors to still be in place at the time the book is sent out for review. This is presumably why so may authors make the same few simple mistakes: their teachers (like this author, who teaches composition) don't know the rules either.

Setting all that aside, the actual story is well told, and is a clever unravelling of a heist, loosely based on an actual (still unsolved) art heist in real-world Boston. This one, however, takes place in a world where thought-to-be-mythical beings have reemerged into the world a few years before the main action, which takes place in the 2020s, and several years after the heist in the early 2000s. Among them is a dragon, who hoards (she does not horde) art.

It's explicitly inspired by Nero Wolfe, whose detective was split into two distinct people: the one who stayed inside and admired his collection and did the brain work, and the one who went out and did the leg work (and got beaten up while doing it). The latter, in this version, is a human, and our narrator, employed by the dragon as an investigator and her eyes on the street. The dragon is infuriatingly high-handed, which completely works, and the investigator is reasonably smart - but not dragon-level smart - and streetwise enough to get the upper hand over the criminals, at least sometimes.

There's a decent amount of character backstory for the investigator, too; he has history with several of the people who are suspected of having been somehow involved in the heist, and I did suspect that this was one reason the dragon employed him specifically, perhaps even the main reason. Yes, he's been working for her for a while at this point, but she's a long-term thinker, being more than a thousand years old.

The journey to the conclusion and the conclusion itself were both satisfying and both full of surprises, and despite the basic mechanical issues, I enjoyed the book and would look for another (but would hope that it had had more editorial attention before I read it).

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Review: Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder!

Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder! by Alice Duncan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An often enjoyable light read set in 1920s Los Angeles, with a 21-year-old heroine who's a stuffy Boston Brahmin trying to get life experience so she can write. She does this by taking a secretarial job with a private investigator, and quickly becomes involved in his cases, showing a quick wit, determination and bravery, though she's also too naive to live at times, which became annoying to me. Also, she doesn't so much solve the mysteries as persist in poking around until the murderer becomes fed up with her and tries to kill her, which honestly is understandable.

It's told in her voice, which is amusing; she knows she's lived a sheltered and privileged life, but doesn't always know in exactly what way she's naive, and sometimes her naivety becomes a touch overdone (as when she consistently fails to see an obvious source of danger, or can't figure out that if she's talking to an adult man on the phone, the 30-year-old woman who's just died must be his stepmother, not his mother). It's also amusing to see the clash between her upper-class East Coast upbringing and low life in California.

To someone who reads a lot of fiction from the era, it had the clear feel of a modern reproduction rather than a genuine antique. It was given away by little tricks of phrasing, the way the world felt only lightly sketched as a background rather than truly lived-in, and of course the fact that homosexuality was acknowledged to exist (even if Mercy is too naive to understand the slurs applied by her boss to her beautifully dressed male friend who's a costumier for the movies), and the main character wasn't even a little bit racist. I didn't spot any actual glaring anachronisms, though.

There's a little Easter egg for fans of the era in the mention of Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without a Key in Book 1. This is the first novel in which Charlie Chan appeared, and the main character is a Boston Brahmin like Mercy. Also, she visits Chinatown in the course of the investigation. She hasn't read the book, though - someone else is reading it. She reads Agatha Christie.

The editing issues are relatively few and widely scattered, and consist mostly of excess commas (such as after "of course" when it's only agreeing with the previous statement - something word processing programs are not sophisticated enough to get correct), and words missing or inserted in sentences. At least once, though, the dialog alternation is messed up, and there's a continuity error where Mercy presents something as her speculation from limited information given by a witness when it's almost a direct quote from that witness, giving the detail Mercy says the witness didn't go into. Also, spell check should have caught "indiscretely," since there's no such word in English, and corrected it to "indiscreetly." It could do with another quick polish.

I enjoyed each book slightly less than the one before, because Mercy keeps insisting on putting herself in danger when she doesn't have the common sense of a gerbil, and (so that the author can have her rescue herself) her boss doesn't do anything so sensible as going with her to protect her, just turns up after she has already been attacked. Her voice is consistently amusing, and the historical aspects are OK, but it's pretty light fare, and Mercy, while she is a decent investigator in the sense that she has good instincts where to look for clues and is capable at unearthing them, often can't come to a correct conclusion to save her life. The "save her life" part is sometimes literal. One of the less plausible aspects was how (view spoiler)[despite having no self-defence training of any kind, she not once, but twice manages to push a crazed, murderous attacker off a high place. (hide spoiler)]

The mix of enjoyable aspects and weaknesses is such that it falls naturally into the three-star category for me, and I'm not going to be looking for more in the series or from the author. But if you can have more patience with Mercy than I do and don't notice the occasional editing glitch, it may be just the cozy mystery you're looking for.

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Review: The Revolution of Small Things: A Tale of Dungeons & Dysfunction

The Revolution of Small Things: A Tale of Dungeons & Dysfunction by J.L. Butterworth
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book is trying to be several things at once: a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure, a "funny" fantasy, and a left-wing political fantasy. I don't think it succeeds particularly well at any of them, though I didn't read beyond 17%.

In no small part this is because the basic mechanics are extremely rough. I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and as always I must note that there may be more copy editing to come between the version I saw and the version that's published, but in this case there's so much work to do that I can't imagine it getting done by... (checks publication date)... yesterday. Yesterday (as I write) was the publication date. No, that's not happening, is it?

There's a comprehensive collection of nearly every common issue, in fact. Vocabulary errors - though not many, at least. Frequent missing or misplaced commas, especially the "let's eat Grandma" error. Misplaced apostrophes. Dialog tags punctuated as separate sentences from the dialog. Dangling modifiers. Two different spellings for one character's name, used more or less alternately. Tense that veers erratically between past and present. Awful attempts at "period" language, which might be deliberate characterisation (the character using it is an idiot), but, given all the other issues, is more likely a reflection of the fact that the author, like most modern people, doesn't know how Renaissance-era English worked.

Not only are there a lot of different types of error, there are a lot of instances of them, too, usually at least one and often two on a Kindle page, which (at the font size I use) is smaller than a printed page.

The setting is standard D&D, including tieflings and dragonborn, which I'm not sure are permitted for use in not-officially-licensed novels as opposed to games; I'm not a lawyer and haven't read all of the Wizards of the Coast license verbiage, though. However, it's a rather depressing version of a D&D setting, full of racist guards who harass an orc just because he's an orc, literally hellish bureaucracy, and corrupt wealthy rent-seekers who think they're untouchable. It's not a tone I enjoy, and along with the constant mechanical issues it was the reason I stopped reading.

The "funny fantasy" part is in the Robert Aspirin mode, which I've never personally found funny: mostly silly names, exaggerated tropes and people behaving like jerks. The locations, for example, are all named after food with some ending tacked on to make them sound like a placename.

It falls both into the "not for me" and "not well executed" buckets, hence my DNF.

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Review: The Facilite Con

The Facilite Con by Dick Wybrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an entertaining space-opera heist with a few flaws, including what seemed to me to be a huge plot hole.

A magistrate on a former convict planet has left the planet to avoid the insurrection that's currently going on, and wants someone to "steal" his prized collection of gems and get them off the planet for him, while apparently leaving them in place. The heist crew's plan is to duplicate the gems and give him the fakes, leaving with both his payment and the real gems.

And here the issues start. The gems, which only come from this planet, are essentially magic; whatever something does, they make it do it more so. Heaters heat better, lights light better, anti-gravity shields shield better. That in itself is nonsense. Even more so is the plan: they are going to quantum entangle the real gems and the fake gems so that the fake gems, when tested, will appear to be real. Which is absolutely not how quantum entanglement works; first of all, it's between fundamental particles, not macroscopic objects, and secondly it's between particles that are essentially identical in the first place, not between magic gems and fake gems made from a completely different substance.

Finally (and this is the plot hole), there are a certain number of these gems, and even though, for the purposes of her complicated plan, the heist mastermind uses two of them, there are still the original number left. Which, obviously, is not how mathematics works.

If you can ignore all of that - and I couldn't, which is why I dropped it to three stars - it is an entertaining story, with strong emotional beats, a complex heist plot that (apart from the big issues I've already mentioned) makes sense and features plenty of dramatic reveals, an appealing main character and many amusing turns of phrase.

In terms of editing, it's largely clean, except that the past perfect tense is missing a few times when the past-tense narration covers something that happened further in the past, prior to the narrative moment. This is a common issue with current books. Apparently schools have stopped teaching the past perfect at some point.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review; further changes may or may not be made before publication.

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Review: Honey & Hexes: A bee-witching cozy fantasy romance

Honey & Hexes: A bee-witching cozy fantasy romance by Steffanie Holmes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Superficially, this is a cozy fantasy featuring a bee witch who opens a meadery (in apparently present-day England, which surprised me slightly; I was expecting a secondary-world setting for some reason), and has a gradually building romance with a cat shifter who's the subject of a curse. If it was just that, and was executed to a good standard and complete in itself, it would have been a four-star read for me, but it has a number of flaws on closer examination.

The setup is that the witch, Autumn, has spent the past fifteen years married to a controlling, negging narcissist who has kept her from making any friends, made her put away anything that reminds her of her beloved mother and grandmother (her father is never mentioned, I don't think), convinced her that she's no good at anything, and stopped her from doing anything outside the house. We're told that she doesn't leave the house and garden, but she must do, because he gives her cash for household essentials which she must go into the village to buy, and from somewhere (bookshop or library) she is getting romance novels. This prize exhibit has gone missing, and Autumn, within a few days of his being gone from her life, breaks out and opens the meadery she's dreamed of. This seems oddly quick, but right at the end we get a hint of an explanation. It's not a cozy one.

A witch who had a flower shop in the village has been murdered, stabbed in the back with her own scissors, and this means the shop is available for rent as the meadery. Along with it comes a cat, who is in fact a thief cursed into cat form by the previous witch; he can assume human form when within 20 metres of Autumn, who seems to have somehow inherited him as her familiar by taking over the space. Attraction builds between them over the course of the book, but the supposedly-rogueish cat shifter holds the line of "you're still married, until we know he's dead or you're divorced this isn't happening," while the supposedly-wholesome witch just wants to bang him and damn the consequences.

I've given the book my "weak-mystery" tag because neither of the mysteries - the disappearance of Warren, the controlling husband, and the murder of the flower witch - gets much progression, or even much focus, during the book - at least not from Autumn, who's narrating. This is a minor flaw compared with the three big ones, as far as I'm concerned.

Firstly, the verb tense, something fairly basic to writing a narrative. It lurches wildly between past and present, often within a single sentence. The main narration is present tense, but it's not consistently maintained. As a more minor point about the mechanics, the setting in England isn't backed up by it being written in British English; there are garbage cans, for example, not dustbins. This isn't particularly obtrusive for me, but it might be more so for a British reader.

Secondly, there are a couple of places where there's a distinct clash of tone. Partway through, the main character has applied for a license to manufacture mead commercially. A grumpy official denies it. (He and his colleague are given the title "Councillor," suggesting they are elected members of the governing body for the council area, but they act as council employees, inspecting premises, administering exams and issuing or denying licenses. I'm reasonably sure that isn't how councils work in England any more than it is anywhere else.) (view spoiler)[The cat shifter goes offscreen to confront the grumpy official, in cat form, and bites off his finger, which I'm not sure is something a cat could even do. The sole consequence of this unpleasant but basically innocent man being maimed for life is that he, completely inexplicably, changes his mind and grants the license which has already been formally denied, and I'm absolutely sure that neither councils nor human beings work like that. It's like a scene out of one of YouTuber Ryan George's pitch meetings:

Producer Guy: But why does losing his finger to an attack by a random cat make him change his mind?
Writer Guy: Because!
Producer Guy: That works!
(hide spoiler)]

Finally, the ending, which is also part of the clash of tone, but deserves its own point, since it was what finally dropped the book all the way to two stars for me. The non-spoilery bit is that we get a new character who's only been hinted at previously, and then the book suddenly ends with a disturbing implication. The spoilery bit is that (view spoiler)[the disturbing implication is that Autumn has snapped, killed her husband and hidden him in the compost heap - which wouldn't work, because it would stink and attract vermin - and possibly had some kind of psychological break and forgotten doing so. (hide spoiler)]

I sometimes complain that cozy books are too close to the basic formula, that they've been made from box mix, with nothing really to distinguish them. Demonstrating how hard I am to satisfy, I'm making the opposite complaint about this one. It's got too much non-cozy material creeping in round the edges, particularly at the end; the end opens things out rather than tying them up; and along the way there are some things that just don't make sense, and a lot of issues with the verb tense.

I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review; further changes may or may not be made between this and the published version.

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Review: The Brooklyn Murders

The Brooklyn Murders by G.D.H. Cole
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Not, as you might think, set in Brooklyn, the borough of New York, but in London, where the Brooklyn family is headed by an elderly theatrical magnate, formerly an actor-manager. He isn't the victim. Instead, his two nephews are murdered in the same night, and the clues initially seem to indicate that they killed each other - which is manifestly impossible, given they are found in different places.

It's not particularly difficult for the reader to figure out who did it and how they got the opportunity, and I and several other reviewers got to the answer considerably before either the professional police detectives or the nice young amateur detective couple. This couple do a thorough job of following up clues and alibis, aided by the author's generosity in providing witnesses to things that could easily have gone unwitnessed (and that the murderer expected to be unwitnessed). Then, when they have the murderer figured out, they sensibly go to the police and give them the information.

Just kidding - what they actually do is go to the murderer and confront him (not a spoiler that it's a man, since it's established early on that it would take a strong man to commit at least one and probably both of the murders). Their idea is that he will sneak off and emigrate to Australia or somewhere, which of course will be totally fine and won't put anyone else in danger from this person who thinks killing people is a good way to solve his problems, and this will avoid a scandal, which of course is the most important thing by far, not justice or anything of that nature.

The obviousness of the solution lost it one star (from my usual starting point of four), and the stupid actions of the amateur detectives lost it another. It's an OK period piece, not the worst I've read, and if you're looking for background for writing your own interwar detective novel it would provide some material - though there's almost nothing about the theatre, despite the business at the centre of the plot being concerned with theatrical management.

Doesn't encourage me to pick up more books from this author, but I generally give people two chances unless they're truly awful, so maybe I'll read another someday.

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Review: One Wonderful Night A Romance of New York

One Wonderful Night A Romance of New York by Louis Tracy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Utter nonsense. Still somewhat entertaining.

To be fair, the plot is probably no more unlikely than a lot of romances being written today - or a lot of rom-com movies. This one was turned into a "photoplay," a silent film made in 1914, now considered lost, and the Project Gutenberg edition features stills from this movie (which show a leading lady significantly less slender than the text describes). It was filmed again in 1922, again without sound, and with a plot which, while simpler and in some points different, bears a closer resemblance to the novel than a lot of film adaptations (if the Wikipedia plot summary is accurate).

Still, the author spends quite a few words carefully hanging lampshades on several of the completely ridiculous and implausible decisions people make in the course of the plot, which also requires some coincidence to make it to the predestined end. One of these decisions results in a Fake Marriage Becomes Real trope, and another is the cause for the Misunderstanding Leading to a Rift Between the Couple.

The couple, of course, are terrific, he a manly man who doesn't hesitate to leap into danger and punch deserving plotters on the nose, she beautiful and wealthy and headstrong in mostly a good way.

The plot, it goeth thusly (as Jill Bearup would say - if you don't know who that is, look her up on YouTube, she's consistently entertaining). The hero, just back from China where he's been doing engineering, lands in New York and almost immediately witnesses a murder outside his hotel. By accident, he ends up with the murdered man's overcoat, having dropped his own to try to intervene and later being handed the wrong one by a bystander. He doesn't notice until he looks in the pocket for something and instead finds a marriage license, made out in a name quite similar to his (Jean de Cortois, while he is John D. Curtis). He leaps to the conclusion that this is the name of the victim, and, rather than go to the police with this vital information, decides to instead go to the address of the woman named on the license and gently break the news to her, since he doesn't trust the police to do so tactfully. Cue first lampshade-hanging.

This woman, Lady Hermione, it turns out, has paid the Frenchman to be her nominal husband to stop her father, an English earl, from forcing her to marry a Hungarian count who she despises, and who only wants her money. The problem still exists, so Curtis offers to step in and be the groom instead. They get married by an elderly clergyman whose eyesight isn't good enough to quite read exactly what's on the license.

Curtis has apparently never twigged that the Frenchman is described as "undersized," and he himself is a fine strapping lad, and so the overcoat should not fit him (this never comes up). But it turns out that the murdered man wasn't the Frenchman at all, but someone who was bringing him a replacement copy of the license after it was somehow lost, and the Frenchman is in fact still alive. Second lampshade hanging then ensues: Curtis doesn't tell Lady Hermione this in case it distresses her, but proceeds with the wedding supper, along with the head of detectives for the City of New York, a friend he'd met on the ocean liner, and his aunt and uncle, who have turned up to see him. The earl and the count, of course, later use this strategic silence of his to drive a wedge between the couple.

Meanwhile, the head of detectives has improbably recruited Curtis and his ocean-liner acquaintance to help in the investigation of the murder, and they have some adventures with various foreign low-lives. The frequent anti-immigrant and anti-foreign bias of the time is fully on display; for example, Curtis, who has lived among the Chinese for some years, absolutely despises them, and so apparently does the author. Along the way, a fortunate coincidence enables them to pursue one of the suspects, who turns the tables on them and then has them turned back on him.

Of course, at the end the murderers are apprehended, the earl and count are foiled, the couple are reconciled and admit they've fallen for each other (after a completely inadequate amount of acquaintance, hence my "thin-romance" tag), and everything works out just fine.

There are worse and sillier romances than this, and it's consistently entertaining in its own manner, but it's not as good as the same author's Cynthia's Chauffeur , in my opinion. That's a romance that develops gradually, for one thing, and while it has its ridiculous elements, none of them are quite so absurd as this one's.

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Review: The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious

The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious by Scott Lynch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy Scott Lynch, so when I saw this on Bookbub I hardly hesitated before picking it up. It's in his usual slightly tongue-in-cheek high style, the kind of style that earnest fans of Jack Vance often attempt and fail at miserably, but that Lynch has the chops to pull off and make just slightly self-parodying while still working in its own terms.

It's a short work, just a few brief chapters, but complete in itself. The wizard of the title is a member of a wizards' conclave that meets every 13 years on a beach drawn up out of the remote ocean for the purpose. He keeps himself suspicious by never demonstrating any magic at these meetings, so that some of his colleagues are convinced he's not actually a wizard. The test applied by one of them on this particular occasion to try to trick him into settling this one way or the other is repurposed as an ingenious murder weapon, and the (possibly not actually a) wizard cleverly solves the crime.

There are perhaps a few too many of the wizards to easily keep straight in this short a book, but they are spectacularly powerful and eccentric in their presentations, and their magic can do basically anything they can imagine. Since their imaginations are Scott Lynch's, they do some wild and entertaining things. But even though their magic is effectively unlimited, the way in which the murder is performed is still subject to analysis.

The group dynamics, the individual personalities, the wizards' bizarre conveyances and appearances, and their different reactions to the events are well developed, and the mystery itself I found satisfying, both the problem and the solution.

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Review: Riallaro, the Archipelago of Exiles

Riallaro, the Archipelago of Exiles by John MacMillan Brown
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I put this on my e-reader a while back, and had forgotten the details, so I vaguely thought it was a utopian novel like Erewhon . That certainly seemed to be where it was going at the beginning: a group of gold prospectors in Fiordland (New Zealand's most remote region) stumble upon a man who speaks English with a northern accent, haltingly at first, as if he hasn't been using the language for some time. He appears to have got where they are using some sort of winged contraption. But this is just a frame story for a book that is much more like Gulliver's Travels.

The unnamed man, having inherited a steam yacht, and disillusioned with western civilization and its discontents, sets out in search of a theorized idyllic land populated by noble savages, which he hopes to find in a mysterious area of the Pacific surrounded by mists. However, what he finds there is a group of islands where the inhabitants maintain their biases by exiling anyone who doesn't fit in with their way of thinking to one of the other islands. It's an elaborate, though fairly obvious, satire on western, or at least British, civilization, told in verbose and mannered language that contrasts with the rough gold prospectors of the frame story, who are theoretically conveying it to us. Sample:

Nor must it be held an inconsistency in them that they thought money the root of all evil... They despised it and hated it. And lest it should do to their neighbours the harm for which they feared it and loathed it, they gathered as much of it into their hands as they could. “They swallowed the devil” again, according to their own proverbial phrase, as the best means of preventing the mischief he might do to others. It was one of the most altruistic of their principles, they considered, this accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, lest the many should suffer. They could hedge the monster round and narrow his sphere of operations. And every provision had been made by the state for centuries that he should not approach the masses with his foul influence. It was the gilded classes of the marble city that could alone withstand the evils he worked, and amongst them therefore was he imprisoned. They were, so to speak, the turnkeys of this vampire of commercial races; and in their duties they were all vigilant lest he should escape and work irremediable havoc amongst the rest of the nation.

Which says the exact same thing at least three times, in case you miss the point. It was this style that caused me to stop reading, having obtained about as much entertainment as I was likely to get out of the book.

Interesting historically, though.

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Review: The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery

The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery by John Ferguson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I get a lot of books off the Project Gutenberg RSS feed, and often I don't know much about them or their authors. The reason I keep doing that is that every so often I hit one as good as this.

Told in compelling and capable prose, this isn't your standard Golden Age mystery with the locked room, the closed pool of suspects, and the detective sorting through motives and alibis. It's completely different from that, in fact. The murderer remains an unseen and unnamed figure for most of the book; how and (roughly) why he committed the crime is clear from early on, but the main focus of the book isn't even on who he is, but the experiences and fate of the man of the title.

This man, Kinloch, has been blinded in World War I, and is down and out as a result. In desperation, he visits an old friend, a fellow Scot who was at university with him, one night in the London suburb of Ealing. They quarrel, and he storms out into the pea-souper fog that has the whole city locked down, in which he's at no more disadvantage than anyone else.

A man finds him lost, looking for the railway station, and offers him a deal: five pounds to come to his house and be a hidden witness to a meeting he is having, only revealing his presence if prompted. He's delighted to discover that Kinloch doesn't recognise him, which a sighted man would, since he's a public figure.

The meeting degenerates into murder, Kinloch is knocked out in the subsequent chaos, and the murderer has a female accomplice take him away into the country because, initially unaware of his blindness, the murderer thinks Kinloch will be able to identify him. Kinloch keeps his ears out for clues that would identify the place he's being held, but over his captivity forges a mutual bond with his captor, who appears to be the murderer's wife.

Then the point of view switches, and we get an account by a journalist who, with a private detective (Francis McNab, the series hero), is attempting to track down the murderer ahead of the police. This would sell a lot of papers, so the journalist's editor is keen, at least until they seem to stop making progress. There's some well-handled dramatic irony as both the private and official detectives draw conclusions from the crime scene that we, the readers, already know are incorrect. Later, we get the account of Kinloch's friend the doctor, who is trying to track him down simply out of concern, and then the last section of the book is back with the journalist as the detective gets on the trail of Kinloch, whose name they have finally discovered. The book ends with a tense and dramatic climax and a satisfying resolution.

The whole thing is excellently done, with a high standard of craft all the way around: in constructing the story, in pacing, in managing the emotional arc, in the puzzle and the investigation, and just in the writing mechanics.

There's a complete one-volume ebook of the six McNab mysteries available for cheap, so I picked it up (first checking the sample quickly for quality, and it looked OK). I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the novels.

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