I think I started five different books before I finally got stuck into Shadows Have Offended. I’ve been looking for comfort reads, and re-reading a LOT of fanfiction, so I finally just gave in and picked up some of the licensed variety – as that’s what media tie-in novels feel like to me. YMMV. Also, between playing Mass Effect: Andromeda and loving both Project Hail Mary and A Psalm for the Wild-Built last week, I’m still in an SFnal kind of mood.
This week’s cat picture looks like all the boy cats decided to have a convention in the front hallway – or at least a terribly serious meeting about something. And probably something that the humans in the house should worry about. A lot. (Sorry the picture is small. When I tried to get closer, the convention broke up. I guess they really didn’t want me to learn what they were plotting!)
Well, this is certainly an eclectic stack of books! I think the one I’m most curious about is Deadly Summer Nights. It’s the concept. The idea of a cozy mystery series set among the Catskills holiday resorts in the 1950s is intriguing, to say the least. Maybe the author was wondering what kind of a story Dirty Dancing would have been if it had been a mystery instead of a drama. I’m not at all sure about the whole idea, but I’m certainly willing to find out!
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission--and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.
Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian--while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
My Review:
Project Hail Mary is, quite possibly, the ultimate in competence porn stories. Or at least the best such book since The Martian, also, of course, by the same author.
I sense a theme here.
In order to enjoy Project Hail Mary, I think that the reader has to really like stories about people who are good at their jobs demonstrating exactly how good they are, which is the essence of competence porn. (If you prefer watching people flounder, fail and screw up, this is not your book.)
It also feels like it’s absolutely necessary for a reader to like science in order to really get suck in this story. I don’t think one has to be an expert – I’m certainly not and I loved the heck out of this – but the reader has to enjoy reading about science and engineering and discovery and believe that science is real and that it can provide real and verifiable solutions to real problems.
But expertise is not required because a lot of the story is about a scientist and an engineer teaching each other how their specialties work, and how both of their extremely different cultures work, so that they can work together on sciencing the shit out of the problem that is staring both of them in the face.
That teaching aspect – very much the way that Sophie’s World “taught” people about philosophy by telling stories about it – turned out to not just be a fascinating way of telling the story but also way more appropriate and resonant than I was expecting at the beginning.
This is a story with two beginnings. It begins with a man waking up from a coma, chased and coddled by giant robot arms, not knowing who he is or how he got to be in the fix he’s currently in.
And it begins several years in the past, when humanity learns that the sun, our sun, is cooling off, not just measurably but rapidly, and that we have a mere 30 years to fix the problem before Earth faces its “sixth extinction” and takes us with it.
As the two storylines catch up to each other, and the man waking up from the coma remembers how he got stuck with the job of fixing what’s wrong with the sun, leading him to waking up in a tiny spaceship cruising in the Tau Ceti system, along with two dead teammates and a ship full of scientific instruments, we get caught up and caught up in the past and the present of Dr. Ryland Grace, humanity’s last, best hope for survival.
Even if he won’t live to see it.
Escape Rating A+: I pulled this book out of the middle of the towering TBR pile because I’m in the middle of a replay of Mass Effect: Andromeda and was looking for something SFnal to read to go along with my playthrough.
And this book has been recommended to the skies (ha-ha) so it seemed like a good choice. I had no idea that the opening scenes of Project Hail Mary were going to bear such a strong resemblance to the opening scenes of the game, waking up from a coma and trying to figure out which end is up in a situation that has gone even more pear-shaped than it was when the protagonist went to sleep.
Ryland Grace is in a much bigger fix than Pathfinder Ryder and the Andromeda Initiative, but comparisons can definitely be drawn.
Howsomever, the stories that Project Hail Mary most resembles, beyond any obvious similarities to The Martian – which I’ve seen but not read and clearly need to read – are Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series (start with The Calculating Stars) and Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate.
The Lady Astronaut series also features an Earth that is facing an extinction-level event and a desperate international effort to save the species before the planet kills us. (There’s also a surprising bit of a resemblance to some of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series in the way that the leader of Project Hail Mary cuts through bureaucratic red tape with a machete!) To Be Taught features a similar story about a tiny crew doing good science and facing seemingly impossible odds for a home that can never be theirs again, so poignantly similar to Ryland Grace’s situation.
But the surprising difference, and the absolute charm of Project Hail Mary is that Grace does not, after all, face his situation alone, even though he’s the only surviving human on his tiny ship. Twelve light-years from home, Ryland Grace finds a kindred spirit in the place he absolutely least expected, against all the odds.
The heart and soul of Project Hail Mary is not about the plucky human scientist saving the day. It’s about a human scientist and an Erid engineer, who can’t even breathe each other’s air, reaching out to each other using the only language they have in common, the language of science. Because it’s going to take both of them and every ounce of ingenuity they both possess to save both of their worlds.
So this story that started out as a science and engineering story still turns out to be about the beauty of science – but at its heart it’s about finding friendship in the most unlikely place of all.
And that’s beautiful – right up to and including the ending which gave me the sniffles. It was just a bit bittersweet and so very, very right.
Based on a true story, M, King’s Bodyguard is a gripping, atmospheric thriller about anarchy and assassination in Edwardian London, and one detective’s mission to preserve the life of his king and prevent a bloody war in Europe.
From humble beginnings in Ireland, William Melville has risen through hard work, intelligence, and occasional brute force to become head of Britain’s Special Branch, personal bodyguard to Queen Victoria and her family, and the scourge of anarchists at home and abroad. But when in January 1901 the aged Queen dies and the crowned heads of Europe converge on London for her funeral, Melville learns of a conspiracy, led by a mysterious nihilist known only as Akushku, to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany at the ceremony.
Racing to prevent the atrocity, Melville and his German counterpart Gustav Steinhauer find themselves tangled in a web of adultery, betrayal, and violence. As the funeral looms ever closer, Melville realizes that Akushku is the most resourceful and vicious foe he has yet encountered—but is the real threat from Melville’s enemies, or his allies?
My Review:
It’s fascinating to learn that this is based on a true story. Possibly a bit loosely. But the bare bones of these events really happened. It’s even more fascinating to learn that another story, a much more famous one, owes its origins to this same set of events. Sorta/kinda.
Let me explain.
When this story opens, we’re in London, in 1901, experiencing that time and place through the mind of William Mellville, the Head of Special Branch. (The name of that agency may sound familiar. Thomas Pitt, one of the protagonists of Anne Perry’s historical mystery series, becomes Head of Special Branch in the 21st book in the series, The Whitechapel Conspiracy. It’s a title he still holds in 1910 when the series featuring his son Daniel opens with Twenty-One Days. Honestly, I thought Perry made the agency and the title up for her series. Now I’m wondering if Pitt was based a bit on Melville.)
Thomas Pitt is a fictional character, but William Melville is not. When we meet him and get inside his head at the beginning of this book, an era is about to end, and Melville is going to be one of the close witnesses to what happens next. Especially if it explodes.
William Melville
That’s because the events in this story are based on historical fact. The outlines of this case actually happened. William Melville, the title character of this book, was, in addition to his position as Head of Special Branch, one of the high-level bodyguards tasked with keeping the royal family safe, and it’s in that combined set of duties that he becomes the focal point of this story.
It is 1901, and Queen Victoria’s death is imminent. She has ruled for 63 years, and is the only queen that most Britons have ever known. (Only Elizabeth II has ruled longer.) Melville’s duty is to assist in the preparations for her State Funeral, and to deal with any security issues which it will engender.
There will be plenty. Queen Victoria was related to most of the crowned heads of Europe, and many are planning to attend her funeral. In an era when terrorism was on the rise and it seemed like anarchists, nihilists and revolutionaries were springing up at every turn, it is Special Branch’s remit to keep an eye on every organization that might tip over into violence and stop it before it happens.
Queen Victoria’s funeral will present would-be assassins with a veritable cornucopia of crowned heads to cut down or chop off, all marching in a stately procession along a predetermined route, with the newly crowned King Edward VII and his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Prussia in a prominent – and easily targeted – position.
When Melville learns of a plot to assassinate the Kaiser during the procession, he spends every waking moment – of which there are entirely too many – tracking down the would-be assassin. He is aided by the Kaiser’s own bodyguard, Gustav Steinhauer.
In a Europe where the old guard is dying, with revolution on every horizon, the storm clouds of war are gathering. Melville’s motives and loyalties are clear – even if his methods are sometimes questionable.
Gustav Steinhauer
Steinhauer appears to be a comrade in arms, working at Melville’s side to prevent the potential assassination of one or both of their charges. The plot is real enough, but the impulse behind it is murky, at least partially obscured by a man that Melville wants to trust, whether he should or not.
Escape Rating A: I misread the title of this book, and as a consequence got something different – and much better – than I was expecting. I read the comma in the title as a period, so I thought it was M. King’s Bodyguard, as in someone was guarding someone named M. King, or, from the blurb, that it was intended as “M. King” a nom-de-plume for the king himself.
Instead, this is a story about the person who might have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s famous “M”, the head of the Secret Service for which James Bond is an agent. William Melville, after all, rose from Head of Special Branch to become the first head of the organization that eventually became MI5, the British Security Service.
The case in this book really happened, but probably not quite the way it does in the story. The very beginning of the action is based on Gustav Steinhauer’s own autobiography. How accurate he was at telling his own story, and how much he obscured is anyone’s guess. After all, he was Melville’s counterpart, not just the Kaiser’s bodyguard but also the head of the Prussian – later German – Intelligence Service.
But the heart of this story – and this case – is Melville’s desperate race to discover the would-be assassin and prevent the assassination. It’s a race against the clock that draws the reader into Melville’s world and his desperation to stop the terrorist before he starts a war in the streets of London that will reverberate around the world.
To some extent, Melville is like the boy sticking his fingers in the dike. We know the war is going to happen no matter what he does. But it doesn’t have to begin in a bloodbath at Queen Victoria’s State Funeral, and it doesn’t have to begin on his watch on his own turf.
Queen Victoria’s Funeral Procession
His opponent is intelligent and well-trained, and his right hand is none too certain what his left-hand man, Steinhauer, knows and isn’t sharing. There were times in the story where I wondered if Steinhauer himself was the assassin and was leading Melville on even more of a wild goose chase than he actually was.
This was a terrific thrill-ride of a story, all the better for being based in the real. Melville is enough of an outsider to be a dispassionate observer of the people around him, including royalty, while still being a staunch defender of the status quo for reasons that make sense to both the character and the reader. Steinhauer is as much a puzzle to the reader as he is to Melville, serving as acolyte, foil and antagonist by turns, always hiding his real self in the shadows.
The portrait of an era as it ends, that period when the old order was fading, the world was changing, the status quo was falling to pieces and the war we know was inevitable still seemed preventable is heartbreaking, frustrating and compelling by turns. I couldn’t put this one down. If you enjoy historical mysteries, thrillers and/or espionage tales, you won’t be able to either.
In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk & Robot series gives us hope for the future.
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.
One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of what do people need? is answered.
But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.
They're going to need to ask it a lot.
Becky Chambers's new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?
My Review:
A Psalm for the Wild-Built turned out to be a surprisingly lovely read about both finding oneself and finding friendship, even if there were plenty of times when I wondered where on earth, or rather where on Panga, the entire thing was going.
But that turned out to be the appropriate reaction, as there were plenty of times when Sibling Dex and Mosscap wondered, separately and together, where their journey was going, and if they’d recognize their destination when they finally reached it.
Assuming they ever did.
At first, this reads as a story of self discovery of one particular self, the person of Sibling Dex. Dex (If the name reminds you of Stargate: Atlantis you are not the only one.) Dex’ world is not our world. It may or may not have ever been our world, but it certainly isn’t by the point of their “now”.
Because Sibling Dex’ now is in a post-industrial age. It also seems to be in a post-consumerism age and certainly a post-robotic age. Money still has value, and people still work for wages or exchanges – Dex seems to work for exchanges as much as they do for credits – but it seems very different from our now.
And that’s because there doesn’t seem to be any artificially inflated “wanting” of stuff. The Joneses don’t seem to exist to be kept up with. There’s nothing in the story about how they got past our never-ending hunger for “more”, but somehow they did.
Or at least they did in the material sense. The emotional sense, the fulfillment sense, is still alive and well and eating Sibling Dex up more and more each day. They had a good life as a monk, a servant to one of the gods, but it wasn’t enough. So they started over again as a tea monk, traveling the countryside and dispensing special blends of tea, places to rest and relax, and solace when people needed it.
After a rocky start, Dex is very good at it. And it’s a fulfilling life, but it seems to fulfill Dex less and less with each passing day. So Dex turns off the road well-traveled for a trek out into the wilderness in search of whatever undefined something is not present in their life as it is.
And that’s where the story really begins, as the monk with no idea about what they really want meets the robot who has volunteered to discover what humans really want. Neither of them has a clue, about their journey, about their destination, or about each other.
Escape Rating A-: I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I opened this book. Kind of like Sibling Dex doesn’t know what they’re letting themselves in for when they take that road much, much less traveled.
I was hoping that whatever I got would be as good as To Be Taught, If Fortunate. That hope was most definitely fulfilled. But there was a point – actually several points – where I was as much in the dark about the book’s journey as Sibling Dex was about their own.
The setup for this is fascinating – so I’m really happy that this appears to be a series and we’ll get to visit Panga again. Some of that fascination is in the way that human nature is either vastly different from the way humans behave here and now – or that they’ve evolved a long way from where we are now. Or both.
Because in Panga, in the not all that far past, in its factory/industrial era, the humans created robots to do the hard work for them. When the robots slipped over the line into self-awareness and asked to leave to pursue their own goals, the humans let them go. Without pursuit, without rancor, without warfare.
If you’ve ever played the Mass Effect Trilogy, then you may understand my astonishment. In that universe, one race created robots to do their hard work for them, but when the robots asked if they had souls, their creators attempted to wipe them off the face of the galaxy. And failed, miserably, for both sides and pretty much everyone else.
That’s the reaction we tend to expect, that humans or their equivalent will go to war to hang onto what they believe is theirs. But in Panga, we got enlightenment – and environmentalism! – instead. Or something damn close to it.
The robots have gone their own way, far into the wilderness, to find their own fulfillment. Or to spend decades watching stalactites grow. Whatever floats their individual and particular boat. They’ve learned to find purpose in just being, rather than endlessly doing.
But they do wonder what humans have done in their absence. Not out of fear, but out of curiosity. And that’s where Dex meets Mosscap, in that realm of curiosity. Dex wants to learn whether or not the life they have is all there is. Mosscap wants to explore what humans are.
At first they are more than a bit at cross purposes. Mosscap knows it needs a guide, while Dex refuses to admit that they do as well. What makes the story work is the way that they learn to come together in friendship. Their discovery that what they have both been looking for is each other – even if, like so much else of their journey towards each other – they had no clue.
The story asks a lot of questions that echo after it ends. It’s a story that asks, “is that all there is?” but slyly leads the reader to think about the meaning of that phrase. Because it’s never about anything we expect.
But at the end, what makes this story so very lovely is the friendship between two beings who have nothing in common, but who, in the end, have everything in common – along with a comforting mug of tea.
The second book in this series, which is being called solarpunk but feels more like hopepunk, is A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, and will hopefully come out sometime next year.
The critic and scholar Heather Cass White offers an exploration of the nature of reading
Heather Cass White's BooksPromiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preeminence of literature as an aesthetic form, BooksPromiscuously Read illustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading provides for those inclined to do it.
Through three sections--Play, Transgression, and Insight--which focus on three ways of thinking about reading, BooksPromiscuously Read moves among and considers many poems, novels, stories, and works of nonfiction. The prose is shot through with quotations reflecting the way readers think through the words of others. BooksPromiscuously Read is a tribute to the whole lives readers live in their books, and aims to recommit people to those lives. As White writes, "What matters is staying attuned to an ordinary, unflashy, mutely persistent miracle; that all the books to be read, and all the selves to be because we have read them, are still there, still waiting, still undiminished in their power. It is an astonishing joy."
My Review:
I picked this one up for the title, because honestly, that title feels like a combination of the story of my life and raison d’etre. I’ve always been a reader, and I’ll stop when they pry my last book, whether it’s print or electronic or audio, out of my cold, dead hands or ears.
So I was kind of hoping for the story of a reading life. I was expecting either an exhortation, a manifesto, a kind of “preaching to the choir” – or all of the above.
I think I got everything except the part I was most hoping for, that story of a reading life. Or rather, the story of a particular reading life. There was plenty about why one should have a reading life – no matter how much the author would say that using the word “should” in reference to reading is pretty much the kiss of death when it comes to reading as promiscuously as she advocates.
Or, rather, I’ve frequently found the word “should” in reference to my own reading as almost a guaranteed death knell to my own enjoyment of a book. There have been exceptions, of course. But I generally have to play mental games with myself to make sure I read the books that I’ve obligated myself to in one way or another.
I found the most interesting part of the book to be the chapters about reading as a transgressive act. So many repressive societies, historically and in the present day, our own and elsewhere, attempt to restrict either the ability to read or the availability of reading material as a method of curbing that transgression.
Attempts that always fail, at least in the long run, because the words we read have a life of their own, and are capable of reaching audiences and interpretations that their authors never intended. That’s part of what makes a classic a classic, in that it still has meaning after the era for which it was written and intended.
It’s that thing that gives a reader that shiver up the spine, that frisson of extra-awareness, that tells a reader not just that words have power, but that this particular set of words has the power to move, if not mountains, at least to move us.
I picked this up because the title represents my own life. I read constantly and certainly promiscuously, in search of escape, adventure, identity, experience and every other thing possible to find between pages in a book.
I don’t think this book will convert a non-reader to being a reader, and I don’t think that’s the intent. I think, or perhaps I feel, that the intent is to remove the guilt from reading, and to get people to think of reading as a way of life – or many lives – and not just a secret pleasure that can only be indulged in when all the necessities of life are finished. If they ever are.
Reality Rating B: People who enjoy reading books about books and reading will get something out of the hypotheses and the concluding hopes for readers. Others are unlikely to pick it up in the first place.
I’m left in the place I began, reminding myself of the following quote from George R.R. Martin:
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” Although I’d prefer a perhaps slightly less pithy but more inclusive phrasing, “A reader lives a thousand lives before they die. The person who never reads lives only one.” Because I’ve seen places and lived lives that would otherwise be impossible, and my life has certainly been the richer for it.
Today is, well, not exactly the Fourth of July. Obviously. But it is part of a long holiday weekend in celebration of U.S. Independence Day.
Making it feel like a holiday post is in order, especially since the actual holiday was on a Sunday this year, and there’s a meme or two for Sundays. Honestly, if I didn’t do the Sunday Post/Virtual Nightstand I’d be a bit lost for the entire week. Instead, today will be a bit of a lost day as there isn’t anything that particularly HAS to be done today.
Today will be an excellent day to read. But then, aren’t they all?
Today is the actual Fourth of July, so Happy Independence Day to everyone in the U.S.
It’s also a three-day weekend this year (AND NEXT YEAR!), which means an extra long weekend of reading – or whatever floats your boat. Come to think of it, one could read while floating on that boat! I’m in the middle of four big epic fantasy books, and should manage to finish at least ONE this weekend. We’ll see.
Last week, I had a request to turn What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand into a meme with a link up, so the link up is at the bottom. My books are mostly ebooks, hence the “Mostly Virtual” in the title. If yours are too, feel free to link up here as well as to Caffeinated Reviewer’s Sunday Post. The more we link, the more we books we can add to our towering TBR piles!
Last but not least – definitely not least as Freddie and George are our two biggest cats – here’s this week’s cat picture. Freddie likes to climb. George actually doesn’t, which is kind of a surprise as he certainly has the legs for it. But here we have Freddie, as usual posing as the Prince of Quite A Lot, looking down upon George, posing as his lonely, downtrodden minion.
For those in the U.S., happy Independence Day weekend! It’s even a three-day weekend this year as the actual holiday falls on Sunday so it’s “officially” celebrated on Monday. At the moment, I’m in the middle of reading four completely different epic fantasies, and I kind of need to finish one over the weekend. Murphy’s Law means that the one I most want to finish is the one I’m listening to rather than reading – and it’s a MUCH better listening experience so I’ll have to read something else to myself. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
Whatever you decide to do for the long weekend – if you have it – I hope it’s fun!
In the uneasy peace following World War I, nurse Bess Crawford runs into trouble and treachery in Ireland—in this twelfth book in the New York Times bestselling mystery series.
The Great War has finally come to an end, but tensions remain high throughout Europe. In Ireland, no one has forgotten the bloody 1916 Easter Rising that fought to end British rule in the country. Bess’s old friend, nurse Eileen Flynn, returns to her isolated Irish village where two factions continue to battle against each other. Eileen’s time with the British army makes her a target for retaliation. Her missing cousin, who was active in the rising and is still being hunted by the British, is her only protection.
Despite concerns about her safety, Bess keeps her promise to her wartime friend and travels to Ireland to be part of Eileen’s wedding party. But on her arrival, Bess discovers that the groom has gone missing. Then a body is fished from the sea. The villagers are hungry to see justice carried out—for wrongdoings new and old—and Eileen’s protection is running out. But clearing her name may mean sacrificing another beloved friend’s neck to the noose instead. Bess must unravel a dark, deceptive plot before someone she loves dies.
My Review:
“How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?) was a popular World War I song, particularly after the war ended. Just at the point where this 12th book in the Bess Crawford series takes place.
Because in June of 1919, Bess Crawford was facing her own version of that question. When we met her in A Duty to the Dead, all the way back in 1916, her war was just beginning, and Bess, a trained nurse in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, was on her way to the forward aid stations to serve her country in her chosen profession, aboard the HMHS Britannic – which nearly sank along with her and her career.
Back on that doomed ship, Bess saved the life – and the injured legs – of one of her fellow nurses, Eileen Flynn. Now that the war is over, Eileen and the soldier she waited for for more than four years are going to be married. At Eileen’s family home in Killeighbeg, on the west coast of Ireland.
Eileen just wants to be married with her family and friends around her, in the place where she grew up and in the church where she was baptized. She wants to set out on her life’s journey by starting in her home.
But Eileen’s soldier took the “King’s Shilling” back in 1914, serving in the Irish Guards. That was before the Easter Rising of 1916 and the brutal British repression of the rebellion. Sentiment has changed quite a bit in Ireland in the following years.
Eileen and her fiancé Michael are both considered traitors by many of the locals for having served in the British Army. Eileen has asked Bess to be her attendant at the wedding and Michael has asked one of his commanding officers, so not only are Eileen and Michael considered traitors but they’ve invited English “spies” to come to Killeighbeg as well.
Although what there is in tiny Killeighbeg to spy on is anyone’s guess.
Emotions and tempers are high – on both sides. When Bess arrives just a few days before the wedding she finds herself in the middle of a powder keg that feels like it’s going to explode at any moment.
The groom is missing and entirely too many of the locals believe that it’s good riddance to bad rubbish – including Eileen’s tyrannical grandmother. Who appears to be the local despot in charge of all things Rebellion – in spite of her own son being a live – and wanted – hero of the Easter Rising.
Bess feels like a hostage in hostile territory, only because she is. But she can’t leave until Eileen’s betrothed is found – one way or another. And that can’t happen until someone figures out who took him and why.
But in the moments in between worrying about her friend’s future, Bess has little to do but consider her own. Because she’s seen her own Paree, she’s had a life where she was independent and responsible for herself, respected for her skills. She can’t quite see herself going back to being a dependent daughter again.
She envies Eileen her possibility of happiness, even as she fears that it may not come to pass. And in the darkness of entirely too many nights of tension and terror, she has to face her own truth no matter how much she wants to turn away.
Escape Rating A-: The story in An Irish Hostage feels close and tight, and that’s probably the way it should be. There are huge issues on the horizon, and in the story, and most of them are too big for Bess to solve. She’s stuck, inside tiny, hostile Killeighbeg, caught in the web of the Flynn household, and trapped entirely too often inside her own head.
I want to say that the house and town read like an attempt at a microcosm of Irish history in that tense period between the Rising and Independence. Some want to continue the bloodshed at all costs, some want to find a peaceful solution, some just want to stir up trouble for its own sake. Some people, like Eileen’s cousin Terrance, want justice for Ireland, meaning independence. Some, like Eileen’s grandmother, want vengeance at any cost. Many refuse to recognize that justice and vengeance are NOT the same thing.
And others, like Eileen and her Michael, just want peace – even if they have to leave their home in order to get any.
(I just had the very wild thought that pretty much all of the above could be applied to the Middle East as well, and that one of the big root causes in both places was the British Empire meddling in places that it arguably had no business meddling. I digress.)
And that leads directly to Bess, who is a symbol of, in some ways, the worst of all possibilities, that now that the Great War is over, the British Army in all of its might is going to come down on Ireland like many, many armed tons of explosive bricks.
While the future of Ireland looms over the entire story, it is much too big a thing for Bess to even think about solving. All she can do is get herself and those she has pledged to help out of the line of fire.
But Bess’ future is a problem that only she can solve. It, too, has been looming on the horizon for the past several books, possibly as far back as A Question of Honor, set in the Summer of 1918, but certainly by A Forgotten Place, set in November 1918 as the Armistice is signed.
Her dilemma feels real – although she has a bit too much time on her hands to mull it over. She knows what she’s expected to do. As a woman, she’s expected to “forget” having been an independent and responsible adult in a war zone for the past four years and go back to being a dependent female until she marries. She also knows that isn’t enough for her but that her choices are few.
At the same time, she is wondering about who she will spend the rest of her life with. Unlike many long-running mystery series, Bess’ love life has never been a feature of the books. She hasn’t fallen in love with anyone. By the end of An Irish Hostage, we know precisely why.
We just don’t know what Bess is going to do about it. And neither does she. Hopefully, that answer is to come in the next book in the series!
This week’s cat picture looks like all the boy cats decided to have a convention in the front hallway – or at least a terribly serious meeting about something. And probably something that the humans in the house should worry about. A lot. (Sorry the picture is small. When I tried to get closer, the convention broke up. I guess they really didn’t want me to learn what they were plotting!)
Current Giveaways:
Blog Recap:
Coming This Week:
Project Hail Mary by 
Escape Rating A+: I pulled this book out of the middle of the towering TBR pile because I’m in the middle of a replay of Mass Effect: Andromeda and was looking for something SFnal to read to go along with my playthrough.
M, King's Bodyguard by 
A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1) by 
I was hoping that whatever I got would be as good as 
Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life by 
Blog Recap:
Coming This Week:
An Irish Hostage (Bess Crawford #12) by 
Because in June of 1919, Bess Crawford was facing her own version of that question. When we met her in 
Escape Rating A-: The story in An Irish Hostage feels close and tight, and that’s probably the way it should be. There are huge issues on the horizon, and in the story, and most of them are too big for Bess to solve. She’s stuck, inside tiny, hostile Killeighbeg, caught in the web of the Flynn household, and trapped entirely too often inside her own head.
But Bess’ future is a problem that only she can solve. It, too, has been looming on the horizon for the past several books, possibly as far back as