#AudioBookReview: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming + #Excerpt

#AudioBookReview: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming + #ExcerptI Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com (Cosmic Chaos, #1) by Kimberly Lemming
Narrator: Hazel Addison
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Libro.fm, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: alien abduction romance, Romance, romantasy, science fiction romance
Series: Cosmic Chaos #1
Pages: 304
Length: 9 hours and 23 minutes
Published by Berkley, Penguin Audio on February 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A hilarious and sexy romance about a woman who gets dropped on a strange planet only to fall for not one, but two, aliens, from the author of That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf.

Dorothy Valentine is close to getting her PhD in wildlife biology when she’s attacked by a lion. On the bright side, she’s saved! On the not-so-bright side, it’s because they’re abducted by aliens. In her scramble to escape, Dory and the lion commandeer an escape pod and crash-land on an alien planet that has...dinosaurs?

Dory and her new lion bestie, Toto, are saved in the nick of time by a mysterious and sexy alien, Sol. On their new adventure, they team up with the equally hot, equally dangerous Lok, who may or may not be a war criminal. Whether it be trauma, fate, or intrigue, Dory can’t resist the attraction that’s developing in their trio....

As this ragtag group of misfits explore their new planet, Dory learns more about how and why they’ve all ended up together, battles more prehistoric creatures than she imagined (she imagined...zero), and questions if she even wants to go back home to Earth in this hilarious and steamy alien romance adventure comedy romp.

My Review:

Today is Valentine’s Day, which screamed for a romance to be today’s book. I really want to claim that aliens made me do this book to celebrate the day, but that’s not my story.

However, it is, it oh so definitely is, Dory’s story. It’s right there in the title, I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com. Because Dory was abducted by aliens, and she is trapped in what the aliens believed was a rom-com.

Dory’s mileage definitely varies on that. Her story definitely turns into the ‘rom’ part of that phrase. It also, certainly does have plenty of humor in it. But part of that humor is that the aliens intended to set up a rom-com without having an actual feather of a clue as to what either ‘rom’ or ‘com’ truly mean to humans. Or, for that matter, to the Sankado, the species they’ve already abducted.

So Dory isn’t trapped in a rom-com. She does, however, totally and absolutely, get ensnared in the romance part of that equation. Times two.

And it’s a screaming ‘O’ of a blast every wild and crazy step of the way.

Escape Rating B: I picked this one up because a) that spoileriffic title and b) the author’s Mead Mishaps series was incredibly fun (start with That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon and be prepared to both blush furiously and ROFL while doing so.) Not to mention c) the book comes out on Tuesday, today is Valentine’s Day and the perfect timing of the whole thing could not be ignored. At least not by moi.

The trope this story wallows in is a familiar one. Of course it’s the ‘Aliens Made Them Do It’ ™ plot device – the one that the author is using and not the aliens making them do it. Also, the author is using it correctly while the aliens flubbed nearly all of their attempts – which is part of the fun of the thing.

The thing about this particular trope is that it screams for a ‘dubcon’ (that’s dubious consent) warning that can literally be seen from outer space. Dory, along with her partners Sol and Lok, clearly do consent to everything in the moment, but the reader can easily get hung up and thrown out of the story on the question of whether it’s true consent because the aliens have drugged all of them to create that consent at the outset.

Dory occasionally throws herself out of her own story because her desires in the moment and her resulting behavior are contrary to everything she ever knew about herself.

Some readers will be totally squicked out. Some will be all into the scene. Because I was listening to a chunk of the story, I was both blushing furiously (listening to a third party describe a sex scene is just weird) and getting a bit weirded out by just how much the way her partners talked sounded like grooming her to accept things she otherwise wouldn’t.

(BTW the audio narration was FINE, I only switched to the ebook because I was all in and reading is just plain faster.)

In the end I concluded that Dory was just discovering that she was really into the kink of it all and that was okay. But your reading mileage may go through some rough patches along the way and it may definitely vary.

The part of the story that’s just purely funny – in a very wry and totally satirical way – is the way that the particular aliens who got them ALL into this mess created said mess through bureaucratic insanity, academic pomposity, and shoddy research. They created the initial mess, dug themselves a hole and threw the first results of that mess into it, realized that they’d screwed up and then dug some more and made the hole bigger.

Anyone who has ever done research or worked in either a big bureaucratic organization or in academia is going to see the situation for the hilarious and rueful set up that it is and just laugh until tears run down their face because it’s true and awful and truly awful and so very much more common than anyone wants to admit.

But this is still Valentine’s Day so I need to get back to the romance. While the aliens may have been trying to set up a rom-com, in truth this is a sex-into-love romance times two. Dory and her partners create a really hot triad. And in an entirely different kind of warning, while this trio does set fire to the sheets, there is actual fire but no actual sheets. The sexytimes, as Dory herself would say, are “hot as balls” and the scenes never, ever fade to black.

Whether or not that’s your thing, it certainly turns out to be theirs. Even if it’s not you’ll still want to slap the alien meddler who is not just watching, he’s taking notes. Dory certainly does – and who can blame her?

In the end, there are multiple facets to this wild romp of a romance. There’s the meddling aliens who screw up and set off the whole entire mess. There’s the incredibly hot romance between Dory and her two sexy partners, who fall in love while an incompetent research intern meddles with their lives every step of the way.

Last but not least, there’s the two sets of sentient beings, alien to each other, who have been thrown together against their wills trying to make the best of it – in spite of yet more alien meddling. That’s clearly going to be the throughline for the entire Cosmic Chaos series, as this story ends with that incompetent research intern failing upwards into a promotion that Dory and her friends are sure to make certain he regrets at every turn. Or at least I certainly hope so and am looking forward to finding out.

The true level of Cosmic Chaos in this story has to be experienced to be believed, so I’m going to leave you with this excerpt from the opening of I Got Abducted by Aliens… so that you can experience a bit of Dory’s voice for yourself. One last thing, that lion, to quote Dory, “THE FUCKING LION!” turns out to be the very best wingman a displaced human could EVER have.

Excerpt from I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming

“Fuck, I’m dead?” I snarled, gazing down at the desert. A bright light was pulling me farther into the sky. Which was probably good, right? I’m not the religious type, but I think the general consensus is that up is good.

“All right, not all bad, I guess?” I turned to have a look around, taking in the sights before— “THE FUCKING LION!” I screamed, trying to kick away my murderer. The sandy-brown fur of its mouth was stained a telltale red. I put a hand to my throat, flinching when pain erupted. My hand came back covered in blood. “All right, so you definitely didn’t miss. What is going on?”

The lion ignored me; instead his eyes remained transfixed by what he saw above us. I stilled and looked up to see the clouds shimmering. A darker spot opened up in the sky. A greenish light sparkled out of it until the force pulling me sped up to a breakneck pace. The light became blinding, and I . . . I must have fainted.

The next thing I knew, I was in a tank. My body felt too heavy to move. There was a tickling sensation on my neck. Reaching out, I tried to touch the glass front of the tank but couldn’t reach it. When I cried out, bubbles floated uselessly out of my mouth. I wasn’t sure how long I was floating as I drifted in and out of consciousness.

Muffled chirping met my ears. I struggled to open my eyes, but the room was so damn bright.

Why . . . why do I smell cotton candy? Am I having a stroke? I thought that was burnt toast. Dammit. I knew I should have taken that CPR class. What smell meant you were having a stroke?

A sharp zap to my neck shocked me awake. Birds were chirping all around me. I struggled to get up. Something dug into my arms, so I thrashed. Strings lined with suction cups snapped off my arm with little pops. The birds’ chirping grew angrier as I pulled my other arm free. I blinked and looked around to see what looked like . . . owls?

“What the fuck?” I asked. Mutant-looking owls with large fluffy ears fluttered around me, chirping and fussing. Their feathers ranged in color from simple blacks and grays to the colorful blue and orange plumage you would normally find on a tropical bird. Which, frankly, is a wild range of colors for one species to have. I wonder if it’s gender-based.

Focus.

Macaw-like beaks took up a third of their face. Their flapping wings ended in tiny three-fingered hands. One of them was dressed in a white robe and it was trying to probe me with some horseshoe-looking gun thing.

I smacked it away from me and got to my feet. “One of you better start chirping in English,” I warned. Fear and rage caused the threat to come out in a stuttered shout.

The birds were unaffected.

Unfortunate.

I touched my neck, unsure if I’d truly died and gone to some bird hell. But all I felt was smooth skin. When I inspected my hand, not a drop of blood was found. I checked the other side; still nothing. “If I’m not dead, how am I healed?”

The room was lined with rows of cylindrical tanks filled with green liquid. I peered closer at their contents to see the face of a sleeping woman floating in the tank. Her round face looked serene. Long braids fanned out around her face. A few tapped their beaded ends against the glass. The hair rose on the back of my neck as I took in each tank, noting that every one of them held a person. I rubbed my eyes, trying to wake up from the nightmare. Yet when I looked around again, the pods and their occupants remained. Worse still, I noticed that all of them were women.

Reality sank to the pit of my stomach. I was on an alien spaceship. Those aliens only felt the need to capture women, and I’d just woken up on an operating table. If this wasn’t hell, it was about to be.

Screaming, I stumbled away from the nearest alien, then snatched a tray off the counter next to the table where I’d woken up. Glass vials and unsettling-looking tools crashed to the floor when I flung it at the nearest alien. Two slightly bigger Owlish came at me with what looked like cattle prods. I grabbed hold of one and kicked off its owner, then swung wildly at its partner. The bird’s squawk was cut short when my stick hit the side of its head, sending the creature flying back. Not knowing what else to do, I just swung at any of the little aliens that came within striking distance.

Farther into the room was a dome-like door leading to a hallway. I leapt over two of the Owlish, caught my foot on one, then tripped and fell on my ass. The fall knocked the stick out of my hand; it ricocheted off the ceiling and slammed into a glass case lining the wall. Blue goop spilled out all over my hair. It weighed down my wild red curls until they felt like rivers of slime. “No! No strange alien goop in my hair, dammit!” I wailed, scrambling back on my feet. “Fuck, my ass is gonna die. I’m so gonna die.”

One of the Owlish squawked like a penguin and stomped closer to me. I jumped up, shoving it aside before I sped down the hallway. My vision blurred, causing me to stumble against the wall. The slime dripping down my head grew hot, and the skin where it touched tingled. “Oh, gross. This better not be poison,” I said, wiping it away quickly.

I burst into the first room I encountered to see that it was full of bigger penguin-looking bird aliens and slammed the door shut. “Nope.”

I swore all the way down to the next room and locked myself behind the door. Then I looked around to see that I had made a poor, poor decision, as this room was full of so many more Owlish, some with the cattle prods, and, of course, the motherfucking lion.

My murderer was floating in a ray of light on a table, completely unaware of its surroundings. Flapping noises beat on the door at my back and the Owlish in the room began chattering angrily. Those with cattle prods advanced.

. . . Fuck this.

“You know what? If I have to die”—I raised a finger to all the bird fuckers in the room—“we’re all gonna die.” I grabbed the nearest Owlish and threw it at the others charging forward.

Excerpted from I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming Copyright © 2025 by Kimberly Lemming. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.

#AudioBookReview: Do Me A Favor by Cathy Yardley

#AudioBookReview: Do Me A Favor by Cathy YardleyDo Me a Favor by Cathy Yardley
Narrator: Elyse Dinh, Teddy Hamilton
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Romance, small town romance
Pages: 299
Length: 9 hours
Published by Montlake Romance on July 23, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Willa Lieu-Endicott moved from California to the Pacific Northwest to start over. Since her husband’s death, she’s been struggling to get back her old career as a cookbook ghostwriter. Unfortunately, her latest project—ghostwriting for a viral cooking sensation known more for his washboard abs than his meals—has her stuck.
Until she meets her new neighbor.
Hudson Daws, the handyman next door, lives on a farm with his parents and two adult children. He’s the opposite of everything she’s ever known. His happily chaotic life includes biker barbecues, an escape artist dog, and adorably menacing goats. He’s also got a sinfully sexy smile and a rumbling bass voice that makes her shiver. He inspires her.
From their first meeting, the two fall into an escalating cycle of favors, paybacks…and attraction, even though Willa’s trying to keep her distance.
They both have their own pasts to deal with. Now, they just have to figure out if they have a future.
A delectable rom-com about a widowed cookbook writer and a divorced handyman who find that it’s never too late for a fresh start.

My Review:

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and that seemed like an appropriate occasion for romance books, not just ON the day – although I am – but also the day before, which is today. So here we are. And honestly, as much as I adored the author’s previous book, Role Playing, I couldn’t wait to read this one the minute I discovered it existed.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

But what about this story? From a certain perspective, this is a bit of a typical small-town romance story, where a person from the ‘big city’, whatever that city might be, moves to a small town, falls in love with a local resident, and decides to stay in the new cozy paradise they’ve discovered with their new love.

And this is that story. But it’s so much more, and that’s down to the protagonists, Willa Lieu-Endicott and Hudson Daws. Because they’re not teens or twenty-somethings, and this is far, far, far from being either of their first romantic rodeos. They’re on either side of 45 rather than 25, and they have lives and metric tons of emotional baggage dragging behind them.

Which is what makes this story special.

Hudson is the local, born and raised on tiny Marre Island located somewhere in Puget Sound near Seattle. And it’s where he raised his now-barely-adult twins with the help of his own parents after his wife left Marre for Seattle so long ago that he’s gotten over it even if his kids still resent her, her departure, and the horse she left town on.

But leaving him with the then-toddlers left Hudson putting his own dreams on hold because his kids came first in HIS life if not his ex’s. And he got into the habit of NEVER putting himself first, so his life is content all the way around but not what he’d planned. Or maybe even all of what it could be if he let himself dream. Which he doesn’t.

At least not until Willa moves into the house next door to his family’s farm, and his dog decides he prefers her house to his. A fact that Hudson understands completely from the very beginning.

But Willa has come to Marre just as the knot in the end of her rope begins to unravel. Her beloved great aunt left her the little house, but that loss is the latest in a string of terrible losses. At 46, Willa is a widow. Her husband’s ‘live big’ lifestyle was guaranteed to get anyone sooner or later, but with his diabetes it was definitely sooner. They lived large when he was healthy, but when his health failed they lost their home and their savings and then Willa lost him, too. She had put her own career on hold to live his dreams, but now that’s gone and the pieces are more slippery than she ever thought they would be to pick up.

Her great aunt’s cottage is her only financial asset. The freelance project she is currently working on is her only financial hope, and she’s not at all certain where to turn next.

Which is when she finds Noodle, the dog who just won’t stay home, huddling in her garage in the midst of a thunderstorm. And lightning strikes. Not her house, but her heart. Twice over.

Escape Rating B: In the end, I very much enjoyed this book, but I middled with one hell of a lot of mixed feelings – and I’m still torn about the whole thing and trying to figure out why.

I picked this up because I utterly adored the author’s Role Playing (I also enjoyed her Fandom Hearts series) and wanted more of the same. The geekiness factor wasn’t required, but rather the romance between grown ups with lives that have left scars and the reality of finding love (again) when you’ve been beaten down a bit by life handing you lemons left, right and center with no sugar handy to make them into lemonade in sight.

I also picked this because I wanted to experiment a bit with Kindle Unlimited. I was able to get both the book and the audiobook, and was able to switch between at a whim. So I thought I’d flip back and forth and that’s where I nearly got completely stuck.

Particularly at the beginning, Willa’s head was a very difficult place for me to be in. The story is told in alternating chapters, first Willa, then Hudson, and each in the first person, so we really are inside each of their heads. Willa is just so angst-filled, and so much of her angst is about her lack of support and her programmed inability to reach out for help that I just didn’t want to be that deeply in her mind. It all made sense for where she was at and why it came about, but I felt like I was experiencing it with her to a degree that almost drove me away.

In text, I could just skim that part, but in audio – while driving – that’s a whole lot harder. And I was caught in the dilemma that the narrator felt right for Willa but she perhaps did a bit too good a job of narrating that angst.

I was, very much on the other hand, perfectly happy to listen to Hudson’s narrator to the point where I wouldn’t have minded AT ALL if he’d done the whole book in spite of how wrong that would have been on any number of other levels.

Still, once things started happening, once Willa began to climb out of the rut she’d dug herself into about accepting help when it’s offered and not feeling like she was either taking charity or pity or that she’d be left owing a debt she didn’t want to pay, the pace of the story picked up a lot and I started turning pages faster to see how it would all work out.

Because I knew it would. Willa and Hudson were made for each other, they just needed to get past their own ingrained tendencies and clamber over the pile of emotional baggage they’d each earned along the way. And I really, really needed to make sure that Noodle got HIS happy ever after because he’s such a cute little mischief maker and he did a terrific job playing Cupid for the humans he claimed as his that he earned it.

Grade A #BookReview: Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Grade A #BookReview: Picks and Shovels by Cory DoctorowPicks and Shovels (Martin Hench, #3) by Cory Doctorow
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: financial thriller, historical fiction, science fiction, thriller
Series: Martin Hench #3
Pages: 400
Published by Tor Books on February 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever the personal computer.

The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.

When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup the Three Wise Men to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Three Wise Men without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Magenta Women's Enterprise. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Three Wise Men and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Three Wise Men out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.

In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

My Review:

When I picked up Red Team Blues two years ago, it looked like a standalone. I absolutely LOVED it, but I just didn’t see how it could ever be more than a one-off. Forensic accounting just isn’t all that exciting – but the story did an excellent job of playing into that assumption. To the point where forensic accounting in general might not be all that thrilling, but the situations that Martin Hench gets himself into while doing his job certainly are.

That Marty is a terrific raconteur telling his own story made the whole thing work – and work WAY better than I expected. But I still expected it to be a one-off. Two books later, it’s pretty clear that I was wrong – and I’m glad about it.

The Martin Hench series reads like it’s been written backwards. That first book, Red Team Blues, took place in the present. The second book, The Bezzle, turned the clock back to 2006, when Marty was very much in his prime. (Meaning that this books takes place before either of the others and a new reader could start here and be just FINE.)

This latest book, Picks and Shovels, goes all the way back to the beginning. This is Marty’s ‘origin story’, the story of how Marty became the man that readers know and love from Red Team Blues.

So it begins with Marty flunking out of MIT because he’s discovered the one, true love of his life. Just as so many people did in the mid to late 1970s, Marty was introduced to personal computers at the dawn of that revolution – and it swept him away.

It also swept him out of MIT, into an Associates Degree program at UMass Boston where he was introduced to the Apple ][ Plus and the revolutionary program VisiCalc. As it turns out, spreadsheets made Marty’s world go round, and his rare combination of skills, the ability to create complex business models AND the accounting background to engineer or especially reverse-engineer a company’s financial statements, turned what most saw as a ‘hobby’ into a satisfying, sustaining and surprisingly fascinating career.

The story in Picks and Shovels also sets up the pattern of Marty’s life – at least as he tells it. Because, this origin story, like the stories of the life that follows after it, is the story of how Marty dives head-first into a job, discovers that his employers are not on the side of the angels, and then puts himself on the side of the angels by the most expedient method possible.

Unfortunately for Marty, but fortunately for the reader, Marty’s expedient methods of switching sides usually piss off the villains in a way that is exponentially worse than if he’d been professional about the whole mess. He ends up making lifelong grudges while thinking that he’s the good guy. Which he mostly is even though his self-righteous cluelessness creates even more enemies than he needed to. On the other hand, it creates good friends, too.

That, along with telling the story of how Marty got to be the Martin Hench of Red Team Blues, Picks and Shovels is also steeped in the early ‘glory days’ of the Silicon Valley ‘gold rush’ and the whole thing is told in Marty’s wry, witty and often self-deprecating story, combines two great stories into one terrific tale.

Escape Rating A: I fully admit that there’s a certain amount of nostalgia in just how much I enjoyed this book. I built my first computer out of a kit. In 1979. Meaning that I remember this period entirely too well. I even lived some of it. Scarier still, I’m realizing not just that Marty and I are about the same age, but that he’s exactly the sort of guy I dated back then. And I’m a bit freaked out about all of that. I’m also VERY weirded out that a time period that I have adult memories of has become historical fiction.

Because this is stuff I remember as it happened, I found Marty’s story about the early days of personal computing and the rise of Silicon Valley to be a bit like the fable about the frog in the pot of water that is slowly turned up to boil. Not that the situation is quite as bad as that poor frog’s, but rather in the way that Picks and Shovels is very much grounded in real events in the way that what started out at least seemingly sane got overwhelming surprisingly fast but the people in the soup were too busy to notice. Those years were every bit as chaotic as Marty describes.

Where the water really starts boiling, to stretch the metaphor, is the way that the story adds in the fictional elements in ways that are utterly plausible. Because, while this particular crap didn’t happen, crap like it very much did. To the point where I had to look to see if the setup was based semi-obvious on a real company, although if it is I couldn’t find it.

But there were plenty of situations of the kind of built-in customer lock-in and the jacking of prices because companies and organizations were held hostage, not just during the 1980s but even into the 1990s in some niche applications. It was all as wild and wooly as portrayed.

The situation does eventually fly right over-the-top, but until that point most of it parallels stuff that really happened, if not necessarily all in one single combination.

The story, and the series as a whole, works because of Marty’s voice as a character. Marty is the one telling this story. So, of course, Marty is the hero of his story, as we all are the heroes of OUR own stories – even the villains. But Marty is a likable, intelligent and a thoughtful character. His head is an interesting place to be – at least as he tells it. And this story makes it easy to see how the Marty we met in Red Team Blues got to be that person even though he’s not fully baked in Picks and Shovels.

That’s what origin stories are for, after all. This particular origin story turned out to be a doozy.

OTOH, it’s hard to imagine the series diving back any further into Marty’s past. Meaning that the one-off could be a three-off and be done. Howsomever, based on what we’ve learned about Marty over these three books, I’m confident that Marty has PLENTY more stories to tell about his escapades in the years between Picks and Shovels and Red Team Blues. And I’d be happy to read them all!

A- #BookReview: The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton

A- #BookReview: The Fourth Consort by Edward AshtonThe Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction
Pages: 288
Published by St. Martin's Press on February 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A new standalone sci-fi novel from Edward Ashton, author of Mickey7 (the inspiration for the major motion picture Mickey 17).
Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood.
That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.
Funny thing, though—turns out there actually is a benevolent confederation out there, working for the good of all life. They call themselves the Assembly, and they really don’t like Unity. More to the point, they really, really don’t like Unity’s new human minions.
When an encounter between Boreau’s scout ship and an Assembly cruiser over a newly discovered world ends badly for both parties, Dalton finds himself marooned, caught between a stickman, one of the Assembly’s nightmarish shock troops, the planet’s natives, who aren’t winning any congeniality prizes themselves, and Neera, who might actually be the most dangerous of the three. To survive, he’ll need to navigate palace intrigue, alien morality, and a proposal that he literally cannot refuse, all while making sure Neera doesn’t come to the conclusion that he’s worth more to her dead than alive.
Part first contact story, part dark comedy, and part bizarre love triangle, The Fourth Consort asks an important how far would you go to survive? And more importantly, how many drinks would you need to go there?

My Review:

I have to admit that when I started this book I had absolutely no idea where it was going – because it wasn’t like any of the author’s previous books, Mickey7, Antimatter Blues or Mal Goes to War. I started this one, tried to figure out where it was going, set it aside, came back, started over and then suddenly – I kind of got it.

Or at least I got the ways that it actually was sorta/kinda like the author’s previous work – particularly Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues. What those two and this book have in common are a similar sideways view of a scene that has been oft repeated in SF and generally follows a whole trilogy’s worth of standard tropes.

For Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues it was a VERY sideways and twisted take on so-called ‘golden worlds’, very-long-haul colony ships and establishing human colonies.

In The Fourth Consort it’s about the interplay of mercantile space empires with first contact and it manages to go some places that no one has gone before – as well as some places that usually go a whole lot better than Deacon Graves’ experience with the minarchs and the stickmen.

What sets this story apart is that it is told far, far, far from any position of human superiority. Deacon Greaves seems to be utterly clueless about his and humanity’s place in the grand scheme of the universe even after three years aboard the Unity ship the Good Tidings.

But then, the system seems to be designed to pretty much keep him as a blank slate for as long as he manages to last. Cannon fodder doesn’t need to be all that well-informed, after all. Too much information might lead to critical thinking – and the powers that be, meaning the top-of-the-mercantile-empire-food-chain ammies who run the Unity, can’t have that.

But the ammies have left Deacon and his senior human partner, Neera, stranded on the minarchs’ home planet in a face off with the stickmen who represent the ammies’ mercantile enemy, the Assembly. The two factions are in a contest to get the native civilization, the insectoid minarchs, on their side and into their alliance.

The three factions, the stickmen, the minarchs, and Deacon, understand each other’s words but not each other’s cultures and contexts. They have biases and assumptions and prejudices. They might have common ground but they might not be able to find it.

Meanwhile, the native minarchs are in the midst of what could be a civil war, a coup, or just their normal if violent method of changing governments.

But both the stickmen and the minarchs have made one really big mistake about the humans. The minarchs and the stickmen are both insectoid species. They understand each other’s chitin as armor, and see each other’s mandibles and claws as weapons.

They both see humans as clear and obvious prey. An assumption that will bite both species, perhaps not with mandibles, but still, in the ass.

Escape Rating A- : There’s a high probability that this will remind a lot of readers of the famous, classic, beautiful, marvelous Star Trek Next Gen episode Darmok. And honestly, any writer who manages to get even in the neighborhood of the feels that episode struck is doing a good thing.

The Fourth Consort may even remind readers a bit of The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler – which is a bit more apropos than I thought at first because of the ammies who are, indeed, ammonites.

But the real comparison is that all three stories, Darmok, The Mountain in the Sea and The Fourth Consort are all stories about the difficulties of communication between species that do not share frames of reference, and just how easily communication can get far off-track because of what each party believes they know about the others that turns out to be oh-so-wrong.

Ironically, the ammies are relying on those miscommunications when it comes to their human employees/clients/patsies. It’s pretty clear by the end of the story that the ammies have a very low opinion of humans but then it seems like they have a similar low opinion of all the other races they come across.

But I could be making an incorrect assumption as well.

What makes this story finally work – and what makes it so hard to get stuck into in the first place – is that the three parties, the humans, the stickmen and the minarchs, have mistaken or conflated word by word translation for interpretation. They need to understand the cultural basis of each other’s communication and simply don’t. Every interaction is fraught and goes awry even when the participants walk away not knowing that it did.

What makes the situation even more difficult is that it seems like everyone who has ever told Deacon anything about the situation in which he currently finds himself – everyone who is supposedly on his side that is – has deliberately misled him. He’s certainly capable of lying but he seems to be a fairly straight shooter. But the unreliability – to say the least – of all of his sources of information makes him appear to be a liar to both the stickmen and the minarchs when the truth is that he simply doesn’t have enough real info to work with.

Which means that a good bit of the story leaves the reader wondering when or if Deacon is going to wise up, at all or ever. That he does in the end leads to an unexpected – especially to Deacon – ending that is as surprising as it is satisfying.

A- #BookReview: The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBird

A- #BookReview: The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBirdThe Serpent Under (A Sherlock Holmes Adventure #6) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #6
Pages: 375
Published by Collins Crime Club, Harper Collins on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Holmes and Watson face treachery and danger in the latest full-length thriller by Bonnie MacBird, author of the bestselling Sherlock Holmes novel Art in the Blood . Murder, jealousy, and deceit underscore three interlocking mysteries as Holmes and Watson take on a high profile case at Windsor Castle, a boy drowned in the Serpentine, and a crusading women’s rights activist who suspects a traitor in her organisation. The cases send them into danger into locales as varied as the palace itself, a dockland cannery, an arts and crafts atelier, and a gypsy encampment. But is there peril underfoot as well – right at 221B Baker Street? The twisting, breathlessly plotted conjoined mysteries that Bonnie MacBird is known for provide a thrill ride that will delight Sherlockians worldwide.

My Review:

There are a whole lot of serpents in this latest entry in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series (after What Child is This?), of the reptilian as well as the human kind. A disconcerting number of them end up dead – again of both kinds – in this mystery that includes a surprisingly high body count for a detective who keeps his partner around, at least in part, because it’s Watson who is good with a gun.

On the other hand, there’s a BOMB, and those always cause a lot of collateral damage.

It begins with a dead body – as so many of the best mysteries do. The ‘Palace’ comes calling at 221b Baker Street, in the ‘person’ of a royal carriage and a coachman fully prepared to whisk Holmes and Watson off to Windsor Castle, whether they have other plans or not.

Which, come to think of it, describes more than a little about how this case progresses. The ‘high and mighty’ – and not just those at court – believe they can drag Sherlock Holmes around, order him to provide solutions at times of their choosing, all the while refusing to answer his questions so that he can FIND those solutions.

It’s both fun and frustrating, both for Holmes and for the reader, as we’re used to seeing him as the master of his domain – because he generally was. But this Holmes is still in his early 30s and isn’t quite there yet. He’s still at the ‘faking it until he makes it’ stage more than a bit. But he’s getting there and this reader at least is wondering if cases like this one are what gave him the push to get there as fast as possible.

I digress, but only a bit. I’ll do it again later.

The Palace has commandeered Holmes because they’ve got a nasty puzzle on their hands and need to get it solved before the circumstances get out – as they inevitably will. One of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting was found at Windsor, stone-cold dead and seemingly the victim of suicide.

And that’s the way the Palace Guard wants to play it – so they can bury it and her as fast as possible. Literally sweep the dead woman under the rug.

The problem is that Miss Jane Wandley was extensively and extremely professionally tattooed just before her death. With a snake. Two snakes, actually, both eating their own tails in the ouroboros form, including a significant amount of the tattoo on her face with the heads of the snakes inked on top of her head and hidden under her artfully dressed hair.

She didn’t do THAT to herself. She didn’t kill herself either, as Holmes easily proves in spite of the palace functionaries having cleaned and moved the corpse and the crime scene while destroying an unconscionable amount of evidence.

And it is from that shocking point that the case sends out tendrils and tentacles (yes, I know that snakes don’t have tentacles but it still fits) as well as a whole lot of deadly fangs and death rattles all over the country as Holmes looks into every nook and cranny and snake’s nest to figure out who the real snake in this case is and what part of their own past tail, or tale, they are attempting to eat in their utter destruction of Jane Wandley and her entire family.

Escape Rating A-: The ouroboros image, that snake eating its own tail, turned out to be the perfect metaphor for this book! At the center of this insane mystery is a plot – and a pain – that twists through the story and back on itself – even as it reaches into the long ago but clearly not dead enough past of its perpetrator as well as its many victims.

Even as it also twists through some fascinating bits of history, as this takes place as the Victorian Era is winding towards its inevitable close while the fruits of the Industrial Revolution shape what is to come – and a bit of what comes in this mystery as well.

The Wandley family, as the current victims of this insane mess of a case, represent the crossroads between the old and the new. Jane seems to have been a paragon of the old female virtues even if she was a bit of a tyrant – or especially because. But her younger sister is VERY active in the women’s suffrage movement, while her brother is an artist working for Christie’s auction house and gallery – then an influential force in the lucrative Arts & Crafts artistic movement and still extant today.

The design inked on Jane’s face was drawn by her brother Clarence for Christie’s, while the women’s rights group that her sister Kate belongs to has been the target of a snake of its own, setting them up for violent encounters with the police designed to discredit their movement as a gaggle of hysterical females.

While it’s clear to both Holmes and the reader that someone has it out for the Wandley family, it’s only when he dives deeply into the past that he is able to follow the twisted path of an even more twisted mind to find the dark beginning to this old, cold plan for revenge.

This case, like the previous cases in this series, is every bit as twisty and even confounding as those of the original canon. Howsomever, what makes this variation interesting in its own right is just how much it owes to more recent portrayals of this archetypical duo.

Through Watson’s eyes, we’re allowed to see a bit more of what makes Holmes tick – and occasionally, pardon the pun, tock. Because Holmes is portrayed as being neuroatypical – even if it wasn’t called that in his time – and being aware that he marches to the beat of a slightly different drummer. Just as Watson is aware that Holmes needs him as a sounding board and audience even if he never takes Watson’s advice. Occasionally, Watson doesn’t take Holmes’ advice either, as they both demonstrate in this case.

Also, one of the things that is clear if you go back and read the original stories with a fresh eye, is that Holmes in the original was very much a man of his time – with all the predilections and prejudices thereof. In the case of The Serpent Under, as has been true for the other books in this series, we observe Holmes in situations that make it clear that this Holmes has been written a bit more for our time in his respect for people that late Victorian society did look down upon with extreme prejudice. He never leaps to what would have been the easy conclusion about the perpetrator of this particular case, that either the Roma people did it, or were at least guilty of something that precipitated it, that Clarence Wandley or his male lover were responsible purely because they are homosexual, or that Kate Wandley must have caused it all because women’s rights advocates are all hysterical. Or even worse, that Jane Wandley must have provoked her own murder merely because she was female.

There’s none of that and it makes the case that much more complicated because this Holmes does not succumb to taking any of the easy ways out.

I did say I’d digress one more time before I close, and that digression regards the timeline of this series. The original Holmes stories were not published in chronological order, and this series does not seem to be either. Which led me to a deep dive about when they were set and whether or not Mrs. Mary Watson (née Morstan) was still alive at this particular point in time. Which she was but Watson never mentions why he seems to be rooming with Holmes at 221b while he’s got a wife somewhere. Previous books have at least mentioned the poor woman being off visiting relatives!

The second part of my timeline digression has to do with one of the usually fixed points in the Holmesian timeline. Specifically, Holmes’ encounter with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, which took place April 24-May 4, 1891. That’s barely a month after this story takes place, but there isn’t even a Moriarty in sight in this particular interpretation. Which means that I’m wondering really, really hard about just how that’s all going to work out in the next book. If it does at all. We’ll certainly see in the hopefully not too distant future.

Of course, this Holmes’ Moriarty might have been encountered in the one earlier books I haven’t read yet,  The Three Locks. (I absolutely cannot believe that Vidocq is Moriarty. If THAT turns out to be the case I need to go out and buy a hat so I can eat it!) Clearly I need to find out post haste. Which means I’ll be picking up that book even sooner than I thought!

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 2-9-25

This was certainly an excellent reading week, with A+ books to kick off and close out the week. I adored The Silverblood Promise, and it’s the first thing that gave me real readalike feels for In the Shadow of Lightning. Now I’m stuck waiting for book two in BOTH series. That’s ARRGGGHHHH but it’s a good ARRGGGHHHH. Symbiote just plain gave me the chills, not just for the setting but for the whole entire story. I think I’m glad the author left the door open for a second book, because I want to read what happens next while at the same time I don’t want to know what happens next because I expect it to make the Alien movies look like the proverbial ‘Sunday School picnic’ in comparison.

I needed a cuddle after Symbiote – and you might too so consider that a warning – so this week’s (not just) cats picture is of ALL my boys cuddled close, with a blissful Tuna head-washing a rather sleepy George in the shelter of Galen’s slippered feet.

Current Giveaways:

$10 Gift Card or $10 Book PLUS EVENT-WIDE AMAZON/PAYPAL PRIZE in the January Wellness, Super Bowl & Valentine’s Day Giveaway Event!
$10 Gift Card or $10 Books in the Winter 2024-2025 Seasons of Books Giveaway Hop

Blog Recap:

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James Logan
B #BookReview: The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat Anderson
Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen Spotswood
B #BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran
A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael Nayak
Stacking the Shelves (639)

Coming This Week:

The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBird (#BookReview)
The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton (#BookReview)
Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow (#BookReview)
Do Me A Favor by Cathy Yardley (#AudioBookReview)
I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming (#BlogTour #BookReview)

Stacking the Shelves (639)

This week’s stack needs a new category! The two creepiest covers are Girl in the Creek and The Knight and the Butcherbird, although I’m also giving some side-eye in that department to Hemlock & Silver.

The prettiest covers, also the two books with the completely opposite titles, are Heir of Light and Written on the Dark, with the most adorable cover award going to Bodies and Battlements. Heir of Light is also one of the books I’m most looking forward to, along with Thaumaturgic Tapas. Although I’m technically not looking FORWARD to Thaumaturgic Tapas because I was looking forward so hard that I’ve already started it!

For Review:
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Bodies and Battlements (Ravensea Castle #1) by Elizabeth Penney
Everything is Probably Fine by Julia London
The Game is Murder by Hazell Ward
Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
Heir of Light (Lessons of the Academia #2) by Michelle Sagara
Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow
Love at First Sighting by Mallory Marlowe
Thaumaturgic Tapas (Hidden Dishes #3) by Tao Wong (eARC and audio)
The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam (Hart and Mercy #3) by Megan Bannen
Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay


If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:


A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael Nayak

A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael NayakSymbiote by Michael Nayak
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: horror, science fiction, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 400
Published by Angry Robot on February 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

World War III rages, and the scientists at the South Pole are thankful for the isolation – until a group of Chinese scientists arrive at the American research base with a dead man in their truck. The potential for a geopolitical firestorm is great, and, with no clear jurisdiction, the Americans don’t know what to do. But they soon realize the Chinese scientists have brought far more with them than the body…
Within seventy-two hours, thirteen others lie dead in the snow, murdered in acts of madness and superhuman strength. An extremophile parasite from the truck, triggered by severe cold, is spreading by touch. With rescue impossible for months, it is learning from them. Evolving. It triggers violent tendencies in the winter crew, and, more insidiously… The beginnings of a strange symbiotic telepathy.
From an exciting new voice comes this propulsive SF-thriller, infused with authentic details about life in one of the world’s harshest, most mysterious landscapes, Antarctica.

My Review:

Four years from now – just think about that for a minute. Four years from right NOW. The world is on the brink of World War III.

And that’s not necessarily the most frightening part of the story!

The fears and frights and scares and outright terrors are layered in this OMG DEBUT novel, to the point where the reader’s heart is pounding alongside all the rest of the characters. I say ‘rest’ of the characters because frankly, if this is that close then we’re already in it and it’s already all of us.

A map of Antarctica showing the location of the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station (circled)

But those layers of fear may start with just thinking about how close this might be, but the part of the story that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn’t let go is the part that happens far, far away, in the remotest place on Earth.

Over an entirely too short 72 hours in the midst of the long Antarctic winter, the tiny overwinter crew at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is reduced from 41 scientists, technicians and support crew to just FIVE scarred and scared survivors after the station is invaded.

In the midst of the Third World War that is happening in the world at large, the crew at the U.S. controlled South Pole fears that the vehicle heading their way from the Chinese-controlled Dome A is the vanguard of that invasion.

And it is – but not in the way that anyone thinks. It’s not the three starving Chinese men who are the threat – it’s the dead man in the back, the one who dashed himself against the walls until he died.

He had a passenger. (Technically, the dead man had a host of passengers.) In the best SF horror thriller tradition, those passengers, a lab experiment gone much too successfully and entirely too wrong, have plans of their own.

Geographic South Pole

Escape Rating A+: There are so many ways to think/talk/write about Symbiote – and they ALL work. The whole thing was a WOW. (Admittedly, a WOW I had to stop reading at 1 am, even though I had less than an hour left. I could have finished. And I’d probably have been awake for the rest of the night as a result. It’s that kind of WOW.)

The horrors, as I said, are layered. There’s the World War III aspect, which is touched on just enough to give the reader the shivers, which then gets subsumed in all the other horrors, only to rear its ugly head again at the end.

Underneath the World War III scares and the political maneuverings that go with it is the horror so brilliantly pointed out in the first Jurassic Park movie, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The results are not actually dissimilar, although part of the horror leans a bit on another famous, and much older quote from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

One of the biggest, and most in the moment layers of the horrors in Symbiote is very definitely the human equation.

An aerial view of the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station taken in about 1983. The central dome is shown along with the arches, with various storage buildings, and other auxiliary buildings such as garages and hangars.

The small crew of overwinter “polies” is, as they are every year, alternately hard working and bored, often introverted but stuck in the enforced intimacy of a VERY TINY small town, isolated from the whole entire rest of the world and quite possibly just a bit – or a lot – cracked in one way or another.

There’s also a deep, resentful divide between the scientists – the ‘beakers’, and the techs and support crew – the ‘loggers’. On top of that there’s a huge gender imbalance, three men for every woman. It’s a pressure cooker on multiple axes and the stew gets aside to cook for a nine-month season. It’s not really a surprise that it boils over at the best of times – which this particular overwinter absolutely is not.

In other words, the story in Symbiote had more than enough stress factors to go to the ‘dark side’ from the human parts of the equation alone. And to some extent those human factors continue to drive events even after not all the humans are exactly still or just merely human.

And it’s those human factors that give the story its compulsive, breakneck pace. Because it’s the humans that we care about – and we do. We absolutely do. From the beginning, when it just seems like the scares come from humans just being human and some of them being shitty humans, we already have our hero, our sidekicks and most definitely our villains.

A photo of the station at night. The new station can be seen in the far left, the electric power plant is in the center, and the old vehicle mechanic’s garage in the lower right. The green light in the sky is part of the aurora australis.

As the snow gets deeper and the shit gets WAY more complicated, so do the motivations of ALL the players – and the reader gets even more invested as each character learns something new and shitty about themselves – and stands or folds under the weight of that knowledge.

I got so caught up in this story I barely stopped to sleep while I still could. When I finished, I found the ending cathartic enough – and yet still open. Because it reads like this chapter may be done, but there is plenty of story yet to come.

As there should be. Because the survivors have merely managed to survive the horror they faced in their isolated base. The huge, horrifying issues that brought this mess to their snowy doorstep are out in the wider world – and have yet to be addressed. Even though one of those messes already clearly has plans to address them.

#BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran

#BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi OgundiranAt the Fount of Creation (Guardians of the Gods, #2) by Tobi Ogundiran
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, historical fantasy
Series: Guardians of the Gods #2
Pages: 224
Published by Tordotcom on January 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The fate of the Orisha will be decided in the concluding volume of the Guardian of the Gods duology, inspired by Yoruba mythology.Perfect for fans of N. K. Jemisin, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Daughters of Nri, and Godkiller.For four hundred years, the world's remaining Orisha have fought to survive the rapaciousness of the soul-stealing Godkillers and the charismatic words of the singular, mysterious figure who leads them, known as the Teacher. Now they seek to kill the one person whose existence defies their very mandate.Now that Ashâke carries within herself the spirits of the surviving Orisha, she is on the hunt for allies who can help her defeat the encroaching army of Godkillers. But their influence is everywhere, and no one is immune―not even Ashâke. If she is to succeed, Ashâke will need to answer the question the Godkillers pose―are the Orisha even worth saving?

My Review:

I think I’m going to have to talk ‘around’ this story before I can get to talking ‘about’ this story because that’s the problem I had with reading the story and, as it turns out, with writing this review.

For a short book, it took me a rather long time to get into it, and it’s only now that I can see why that happened as well as what made it work in the end.

The first book in the Guardians of the Gods duology, In the Shadow of the Fall, drove me batty because it didn’t feel like a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. And even though it was clearly part one of a duology, that part still needed an ending – which it didn’t feel like it got.

I expected a cliffhanger, but instead the book read like it fell off a cliff – and took the reader right along with it.

It was a LOT of setup – necessary as background but frustrating in the character development. Then suddenly both Ashâke and the reader learn that everything she was taught was a lie and that all of her actions based on that lie were a deadly and dreadful mistake.

Now, in the duology’s conclusion, we learn the truths behind the lie that Ashâke was taught, the cost of her mistaken belief, not just to herself but to her entire world, and the revelation of the trick that lay behind it all.

In this particular story of discontented trickster gods and the manipulations they wield to get their way, it’s still a bit of a two-man grift – even if both are deceiving each other as much, or more, than they are the world at large.

Escape Rating B: For this reader, just as with the first book, it felt like the beginning of this half of the story was drifting rather than moving forward. After finishing, I realized that the story felt like it was drifting because the protagonist, Ashâke, was herself in a state of drift.

She’s not acting, she’s reacting, and she’s reacting to the drives and whims of the four active gods, for whom she is the combination of guardian, avatar, and only living channel. She was taught to see the gods, called Orisha in the West African myths in which this story is rooted, as all-powerful over the individual aspects that each individual Orisha represents.

And they ALL exploit that belief mercilessly because they have, in truth, lost control and are desperate to maintain some semblance of it.

Meanwhile, the social and political situation is out of control. The Orisha – and Ashâke – have been reduced to desperate straits because a charismatic ‘teacher’ has swayed the hearts and minds of the people who once worshiped the Orisha. Ashâke and the gods she guards are on the run and running out of room in which to keep running.

No one makes good decisions in such conditions – not even gods.

The final confrontation is huge and cathartic and is a truth that sets the people and even the Orisha free. Everyone, it seems, but Ashâke herself, who finally takes the position that was always meant to be hers. All she needed to do was rise to it in spite of all the things and people and even gods that stood in her way.

Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen Spotswood

Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen SpotswoodDead in the Frame: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Pentecost and Parker #5
Pages: 384
Published by Doubleday on February 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The most dramatic installment yet in the Nero Award-winning Pentecost and Parker series, as Will scrambles to solve a shocking murder before Lillian takes the fall for the crime.

NEW YORK CITY, 1947: Wealthy financier and ghoulish connoisseur of crime, Jessup Quincannon, is dead, and famed detective Lillian Pentecost is under arrest for his murder. Means, motive, and a mountain of evidence leave everyone believing she's guilty. Everyone, that is, except Willowjean “Will” Parker, who knows for a fact her boss is innocent. She just doesn’t know if she can prove it.

With Lillian locked away in the House of D–New York City’s infamous women’s prison–Will is left to root out the real killer. Was it a member of Quincannon’s murder-obsessed Black Museum Club? Maybe it was his jilted lover? Or his beautiful, certainly-sociopathic bodyguard? And what about the mob hit-man who just happened to disappear after the shots were fired?

With the city barreling toward the trial of the century, each day brings fresh headlines and hints of long-buried scandals from Lillian’s past. Will is desperate to get her boss out from behind bars before her reputation is destroyed. Because the House of D is no kind place, especially for a woman with multiple sclerosis. Or one with so many enemies. Her health failing and targeted by someone who wants her dead, Lillian needs to survive long enough to take the stand.

With time running out on both sides of the prison walls, Will and Lillian must wager everything to uncover who put their thumb on the scales and a bullet in Quincannon’s head. Before Lady Justice brings her sword down, ending Pentecost and Parker's adventures once and for all.

My Review:

The Women’s House of Detention at 6th Avenue near West 9th Street in 1939.

This fifth entry in the Pentecost and Parker series begins with celebrated, hated, envied, feared, private investigator Lillian Pentecost on her way to the Women’s House of Detention at 6th Avenue near West 9th Street in New York City, under arrest for a murder that she surely did not commit.

Not that either the NYPD or the criminal justice system can see their way to that conclusion – at least not yet. The frame around Pentecost fits much too well, and there are too many people in the NYPD who have been itching to see this successful, intelligent woman fall. Of course the press is having a literal field day because everyone loves a scandal, and people especially love seeing the high and mighty cut down to size.

Pentecost’s right-hand woman, Willowjean Parker, comes back from her first-ever vacation to find her boss in handcuffs, their property being ransacked, and cops and reporters besieging the place. It seems as if the entire city wants a piece of Lillian Pentecost – only because they do.

This is the job that Will Parker has been training for, to become the lead investigator of Pentecost and Parker Investigations. That has been inevitable from the very first, marvelous book in this series, Fortune Favors the Dead, when Pentecost took Parker on as her assistant. Not because she wanted an assistant, but because Lillian Pentecost had been recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and she knew that her time as the lead investigator of her own agency was inevitably running out.

Now that it has, possibly temporarily but certainly abruptly, while Pentecost is behind bars and bail has been denied, it’s up to Will to ask herself what Lillian Pentecost would do – and do it. No matter how high the deck is stacked against them both. Pentecost is depending on her, and Willowjean Parker will not be found wanting. Whatever it takes.

Escape Rating A: The entire Pentecost and Parker series has been an edge-of-the-seat thrill ride from the very beginning in Fortune Favors the Dead, through Murder Under Her Skin, Secrets Typed in Blood, Murder Crossed her Mind and now this latest page-turner, Dead in the Frame.

What initially drew me into this series was its homage to a classic mystery series that isn’t talked about much anymore, and that’s the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. A series which I fully admit probably doesn’t wear well in the 21st century for all sorts of reasons.

But the concept of the Wolfe series was a partnership between an older detective who mostly refuses to leave his New York City brownstone and his younger assistant who does all the legwork and brings the case back to his boss. In the case of Pentecost and Parker, as the series began Pentecost was aware that she SHOULD be sticking to her brownstone, but can’t make herself do it as much as her doctor would prefer.

On the one hand, Pentecost and Parker are very much in the style of the noir fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, and Parker’s first-person chronicles of the cases resembles Wolfe’s junior partner Archie Goodwin in style and often substance. Howsomever, the lens through which Parker sees the world is VERY different from Goodwin’s. Parker is both female and queer, and grew up in as far over the wrong side of the tracks as possible as she literally ran away and joined the circus.

(If you’ve enjoyed Pentecost and Parker and you’re curious about their antecedents, the first book in the Nero Wolfe series is Fer-de-Lance. If you’re looking for a readalike for Pentecost and Parker, take a look at Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen.)

This particular entry in the series does a fantastic job of straddling the line between Parker’s now and ours, speaking both to the case itself and the reasons for it while at the same time using that vehicle to highlight issues that are very much a part of our present. Including, but very much not limited to, the way that Pentecost is tried in the press LONG before her actual trial because there are just so many powers-that-be that can’t bear to see a woman be independent, successful and show them up when they deserve it.

After taking a couple of days to think about this one, I think that what’s at the heart of this entry in the story is the issue of inevitability and the human response to knowing that an ending is coming. In a way, it’s all about, to paraphrase the poet Dylan Thomas, not going gently into that good night, and the form that the rage against the dying of the light takes. It’s about the conflict between revenge being a dish best served as cold as, and from, the grave versus “I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

All of that may seem a bit on the philosophical side, but it’s in there. And so is an absolutely cracking good mystery that sends both of our detectives through walks in the valley of the shadow of death and brings the inevitable changes that Pentecost has been staving off for years much closer much faster than her early hopes would have had it.

I have to say that the parts of this story where Pentecost is in the Women’s House of Detention are harrowing and also feel much too real – as the House of D most certainly was. Her treatment while incarcerated was entirely too typical of the treatment of prisoners in that nightmare of a place, and we go through that nightmare with her and feel her get both scared and scarred by it.

I was utterly caught up in the mystery, as I have been with every single one of their cases so far. I knew Pentecost was innocent but couldn’t see how she was going to get out from under – and for the longest time neither did she or Parker and it ratcheted the tension up to 11 the entire way.

The one thing that kept niggling at me is probably a result of my 21st century perspective having a disconnect with her post WW2 circumstances. I certainly understand why she hated the victim, and vice versa. But the information he was holding over Pentecost wasn’t about her, it was about her parents. I understand why no one would want that history dug up, but not why it was such a potentially huge scandal for Pentecost herself. Whatever the truth of that old matter, she herself can’t possibly be guilty of any of it as she was a child at the time. I expect to see that mess resolved, or at least as resolved as the dead past can be, in the next book in this series. Because that’s the story that Lillian Pentecost herself promised to work on next!