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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Review: Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life

Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life by Richard Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judith Lee is sometimes described as a "lady detective," but she's really not a detective. She's a superhero, a couple of decades before that consciously became a thing. (This collection of stories was published in 1911, and several more were published five years later, after the author's death.)

Her superpower is that she can read lips with slightly implausible accuracy from some distance away, since she - like her father and grandfather before her - is a teacher of the deaf and dumb, using the "oral method," which involves teaching deaf people to lipread. This doesn't seem to be her only source of income; she moves in moderately well-off circles, a policeman at one point notes that she's wearing an expensive frock, and most of the stories in the volume take place while she's on holiday at some resort or other, or at least eating at a nice restaurant. She's a bit of a snob, and is prejudiced against foreigners (of course), the lower classes, people who look unusual, and... gingers. Any character who has red hair is definitely going to be up to no good. So it's a surprise when she disguises herself at one point with a red wig.

It's also surprising that she has dark skin (a Sicilian refers to her "black face" at one point, and even allowing for exaggeration that suggests she's quite dark for an English person), very dark hair, and gets referred to by one of the less grateful people she helps as "that half-bred gipsy-looking creature." The surname Lee is sometimes held by Roma in Britain, so perhaps she's supposed to be of Roma descent.

As well as foreigners, common people and gingers, she's not a big fan of men either, saying at one point, "Why are some men so silly—so many men—nearly all of them?" Having said that, women are sometimes the perpetrators and men occasionally the victims of the crimes and crime-adjacent schemes that she keeps stumbling upon through her unacknowledged second superpower, incredible luck. And by "incredible" I mean I didn't believe in it; it's authorial interference, is what it is. In one of the longer stories, she hangs a lampshade on the coincidence of bumping into the same people over and over, sometimes years apart, at random places, just at the moments that are essential for the plot to progress. Some higher power, she says, must be involved. Indeed it is, and that power is an author who can't make his plot work without this level of coincidence. Although when she is confronting wrongdoers, she sometimes claims to be the instrument of God, and if that isn't just part of the bluff, the "higher power" bit may be intended to be taken seriously. In one story, it's "borne in upon her" that she should go to a particular place because something is happening there, so maybe she is supposed to be acting under the direct guidance of God. Outside these contexts, she doesn't express religious sentiments or ideas, so it's hard to say.

I say she's not a detective because she never really solves mysteries in any conventional sense. She just eavesdrops visually on chance conversations plotting harm to people, and then involves herself in obtaining justice, either by attempting to warn the victims or, in several cases, using her knowledge of what the people having them were convinced were private conversations, in order to frighten them into abandoning their plots. She does sometimes involve the police, but she pretends they're involved at other times when they're actually not, in order to put the frighteners on the villains. She has plenty of self-assurance, and bluffs like a poker world champion; it's almost a third superpower. She says at one point that she makes it a rule never to do anything important while angry, but this is patently untrue. When she's enraged at injustice, her typical first move is to go and confront the villain, without much thought for her own safety.

Her bluffs often work, but as the stories go on, they're less and less effective, and in the last story she has a physical fight for her life that leaves her permanently scarred. She also, in one of the later stories, uses Jiu Jitsu, which she's been practicing, but I'm not going to count that as a superpower because it only gets mentioned that once.

Her fourth superpower is that she can gain near-native fluency in languages in a short amount of time, which is useful a couple of times when she's lip-reading people who speak a particular German or Italian dialect from somewhere she happens to have been.

Overall, the various superpowers make for a setup that's pretty implausible, unless you consider these as pulp stories in the vein of, say, Doc Savage. Judith is an interesting character, though: independent, intelligent, capable, with a powerful sense of justice that sometimes overrides her better judgement. She will go to considerable trouble and even risk her own life to help people who she has, in most cases, never met before, even ones she doesn't like or who don't like her, and if that's not a superhero, I'd like to know what is.

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Review: Tavern Rats

Tavern Rats by Matt Youngmark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Funny" fantasy often fails for me, because it tries much too hard to be funny, and sets out to achieve that using little more than silly names, tired genre tropes with minimal effort put into parodying them, often tedious prose, and occasionally awful verse. I found this book funny because it avoided all of those traps, and gave us the humour of an ill-equipped party of would-be adventurers consistently (but never quite fatally) failing to use their minimal and unreliable spellcasting abilities to quest for treasure. They keep getting into well-described scrapes out of sheer incompetence combined with terrible luck, and barely getting out of them by exerting maximum courage and ingenuity, and as a result the book worked as a story, apart from the humour, as well.

The main narrative is first-person, from a sorcerer who has learned 29 of the 30 known cantrips (deeming the 30th one completely useless), but no spells more powerful than that. She also loses most of her spellcasting supplies and notes early on, so she's even more limited, which serves as a further impetus to creativity. There's a secondary narrative from a bard, whose involvement in the story is unexplained (he's yet to appear in the main narrative), giving a more omniscient view of things, explaining lore and issues of which the main narrator was unaware. This is done in brief notes between the chapters, and I didn't find it intrusive.

The world is a fairly standard sword-and-sorcery world, heavily inspired by but not just copied from D&D. The setting is the Conquered Lands, so called because over a number of centuries they have been conquered by 22 consecutive factions: dragons, turtle mages, lich kings, elves (several times), humans (several times, from different places), a goblin/hobgoblin alliance, harpies... The most recent conquest, a couple of decades back, was by humans, and the main narrator is human, but was raised by orcs, so she can converse with the orc summoner in the party in his own language. This is convenient for them, since his Common isn't great, but inconvenient for the rest of the party, a scary dark elf witch with minimal spells and a probable druid, who's concerningly vague about what he can actually do. The sorcerer narrator has come across what she believes is the location of an ancient, valuable scroll, which she needs to get in order to pay her back tuition at the sorcery school. She attempts to hire a competent party, but they just take the quest and exclude her, so she has to race them to the location with the above party of incompetent misfits.

This doesn't go well.

It's fairly well edited, with few of the common errors I see almost every contemporary author making, though it has a few words missed out of sentences and the like.

Unlike the party it follows, it's much more competent than average, and I look forward to getting hold of the sequel.

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Review: The Lavender Dragon

The Lavender Dragon by Eden Phillpotts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Starts out as a pseudo-medieval tale of a knightly quest, told in formal English occasionally spiced with archaic and sometimes anachronistic terms (rather than William Morris's style of quasi-medieval language). It's supposedly set in the "Dark Ages," but refers to a lot of people and ideas that are post-medieval. It then quickly becomes a socialist utopian tract, more News from Nowhere than The Well at the World's End . The dragon is both a socialist (teaching that the greatest happiness is found by working for the good of others) and a rationalist, though he generously allows a good priest to minister to the people he has gathered in his utopian community. Assorting ill with the socialism is the inherent nobility of a young woman swapped at birth with a peasant (and the inherent commonness of her replacement), nature winning out over nurture.

Utopias usually involve big expository lumps; the author is self-aware enough that he has one of the characters, the dragon's strongest supporter, fall asleep while the dragon is expounding his philosophy at length, while all his other listeners have wandered off. I'm not sure why he didn't just cut it, if he knew this would be the effect on an audience.

It more or less peters out at the end, but since there's very little plot, I suppose this is to be expected.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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