Category: A+ Reviews

A+ #BookReview: Edge by Tracy Clark

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Edge by Tracy ClarkEdge (Detective Harriet Foster, # 4) by Tracy Clark
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Detective Harriet Foster #4
Pages: 332
Published by Thomas & Mercer on December 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When a tainted drug starts claiming lives across the city, Detective Harriet Foster and her team race to track down the source…before it takes one of their own.
Chicago’s finest are scouring the city for a tainted new opioid making the rounds, but they’re coming up empty. With five people already dead—a college kid, a new mother, and three poker players—all they really know is the drug’s Edge. Where it’s coming from is still anyone’s guess.
Detective Harriet Foster doesn’t have time for guessing games. She needs answers. And when the next overdose hits Homicide where it hurts most, Harri is determined to get what she wants. But keeping her eyes squarely on the prize proves harder than expected.
Still reeling from her last case (and the stain of suspicion it left on her career), Harri finds herself at a tipping point. The drug isn’t the only edge she needs to worry about. If she can’t come back from her own, there’s no telling whether this investigation will lead to a satisfying conclusion…or her own demise.

My Review:

“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago Way!”

While the quote is from the 1987 movie, The Untouchables, based on a 1957 book of the same title ABOUT the FBI’s pursuit of the notorious gangster Al Capone in 1930, it also reads as if its ripped from the headlines – the fictional headlines about the case that has Detective Harriet Foster of the Chicago Police Department tied up in knots – and not just because one of the victims belongs to one of the CPD’s own.

This doesn’t start out as a homicide case at all. Harriet was taking a walk early in the morning on what should have been her day off. She never expected to find two bodies on the grass behind the closed gates of a park. From a distance, it looks like two dead teenagers. Close up, it looks like a couple of kids dead of either an overdose.

At least until Harriet’s cursory check for signs of life finds actual signs of life in one of them – and the race to save Ella Bryce is on. For the first but not the last time in this story. Because Bryce’s uncle is one of Harriet’s fellow detectives, and the man is not going to let this go even when he should back away.

As one of his colleagues quips later, “there’s a good reason surgeons don’t operate on their own family,” and that cops shouldn’t either.

If this were the simple case it originally appeared – two middle class college students experimenting with drugs that a friend of a friend said were ‘safe’ – and discovering the hard way that they’re not – this would not have been a homicide case and probably wouldn’t have been investigated much if at all. Whether or not it should have been is a different question well above Harriet’s paygrade.

But it’s not simple because those first two victims are not the only ones. There’s clearly a bad batch of something out on the streets, because people keep turning up dead from it – and drug suppliers don’t set out to kill their customers. After all, it’s bad for business.

The question is, whose business? The second question, the one that dogs the investigators’ minds and footsteps, is the question that no one wants to be asked but has to be asked anyway. Because Detective Matt Kelley’s niece, the girl whose life Harriet saved in that park, is clearly lying about pretty much everything pretty much all of the time.

And the results of that are not going to be pretty at all.

Escape Rating A+: I held off on putting together my Best Books list for this year because I expected Edge to be a contender for that list. I was NOT disappointed. This whole series, beginning with Hide, has been awesome and Detective Harriet Foster has been a fascinating character to follow. Not just because of her dogged investigative skills, but because we’ve been watching her tiptoe oh-so-slowly out of the shadows of her own life towards healing as the series has continued. With each entry in the series, she pushes both the case and herself forward and it’s utterly absorbing with every single one of her steps – including the ones that go backward.

The series is also fun – at least for this reader – because it is so very much Chicago in all of its messy glory AND its terrible weather. Hide took place in the early fall, Fall in the late fall, Echo in the bone-chilling cold of a typical (and typically awful) Chicago winter, while Edge takes place on the leading edge of what will eventually be spring. March in Chicago is still freezing, still snowy, still icy. Basically, March in Chicago is still mostly winter but with longer days in which to notice how dirty the snow piles that have been sitting around since January look.

The case that Harriet and the team uncover is one of those cases that peels back like an onion – including the tears. At first it makes no sense – and it’s not theirs. There’s not a pattern – more like a bunch of mismatched speckles. Two kids in that park. A young mother with postpartum depression. Three middle-aged meat-packers having a poker night. That’s the side the cops see.

It’s only when the body of a local mob boss is discovered in a back alley, shot to death in her own limo in what is obviously both a hit AND an inside job, that the cops realize this case is both bigger and stranger than it appeared – and that Detective Kelley’s niece is somehow still in the thick of it.

The Gamon crime family has always been untouchable (in a considerably less savory way than Eliot Ness and his famous FBI team) – but once they’ve put the touch on themselves their empire starts unraveling – and fast. And in that chaos and power vacuum, Harriet and her team find a way to save a girl who might not deserve it but they’re going to try to save anyway. If they can.

That the whole thing ties itself back to old rumrunners’ tunnels under Bronzeville that date back to Capone ties in that quote from the movie both nicely and messily at the same time. And made for one hell of an almost shootout to end this one with a really big – if slightly muffled – bang.

But still and all, what makes this book and this series work for this reader is the character of Harriet Foster herself, not just as a cop but as a woman trying to put herself back together after more tragedy than any one person should have to live with. But she does and its utterly absorbing to watch her work.

Harriet, her crew and her cases remind this reader of Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley in her series that began with The Jigsaw Man. Harriet herself also has a lot in common with PI Cass Raines, the leading character of the author’s earlier Chicago-set mystery series that begins with Broken Places. Raines herself makes an extended cameo appearance in Edge, managing to set Harriet’s police partner Vera on her own edge AND making the reader want to dive into her series to learn more about Raines because she’s every bit as dynamic and fascinating a character as Harriet is – but in her own, unique, way.

Harriet will probably, hopefully, be back next December with whatever one word title fits the case she gets caught up in next. I’m looking forward to getting caught up in it with her.

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum by Valerie Wilson Wesley

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum by Valerie Wilson WesleyThe Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum (A Harriet Stone Mystery) by Valerie Wilson Wesley
Narrator: Diana Blue
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Harlem Renaissance, historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Harriet Stone Mystery #1
Pages: 224
Length: 6 hours and 42 minutes
Published by Dreamscape Media, Kensington Books on December 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

At the darkly glamorous height of the Roaring 20s, an independent Black intellectual and her bi-racial foster child are immersed in the vibrant world of the Harlem Renaissance – and a shocking murder on Striver’s Row – in this thrilling Jazz Age mystery for reader of Nekesia Afia, Jacqueline Winspear, Avery Cunningham’s The Mayor of Maxwell Street.
1926: Harriet Stone, a liberated, educated Black woman, and Lovey, the orphaned, biracial 12-year-old she is bound to protect, are Harlem-bound, embarking on a new, hopefully less traumatic chapter in their lives. They have been invited to move from Connecticut by Harriet’s cousin, Junetta Plum, who runs a boardinghouse for independent-minded single women.
It’s a bold move, since Harriet has never met Junetta, but the fatalities of the Spanish flu and other tragedies have already forced her and Lovey to face their worst fears. Alone but for each other, they have little left to lose—or so it seems as they arrive at sophisticated Junetta’s impressive brownstone.
Her cousin has a sharp edge, which makes Harriett slightly uncomfortable. Still, after retiring to her room for the night, she finally falls asleep—only to awaken to Junetta arguing with someone downstairs. In the morning, she makes a shocking discovery at the foot of the stairs.
What ensues will lead Harriet to question Junetta’s very identity—and to wonder if she and Lovey are in danger, as well. It will also tie Harriet to five strangers. Among them, Harriet is sure someone knows something. What she doesn’t yet know is that one will play a crucial role in helping her investigate her cousin’s murder . . . that she will be tied to the others in ways she could never imagine . . . and that her life will take off in a startling new direction. . . .

My Review:

It’s the mystery of Junetta Plum’s whole, entire life that confuses, empowers, inspires and enables the life that her cousin Harriet Stone drops into in the opening pages of this book. Not that Harriet doesn’t find herself poking into Junetta’s death – because it is mysterious – but it’s Harriet’s amateur, informal, two-steps-forward-one-step-back investigation into her cousin’s whole entire life that pushes this story forward – and very nearly drops it, and Harriet, in their tracks.

Harriet Stone arrives in Jazz Age Harlem at the end of her emotional tether. Literally, as her once close family in Hartford Connecticut is gone, dead of illness or accident or misadventure or the ravages of the Spanish Flu epidemic. In her mid-20s, unmarried and still grieving her dead fiancé, responsible for her young, mixed-race, adopted sister Lovey, Harriet sees the invitation from her cousin Junetta to come to Harlem and live with her as a lifeline. It’s a chance to make a clean break and a fresh start. An opportunity to live the life that she’s read about in publications like The Crisis and The New Negro.

So she takes a gamble and travels with Lovey to New York City, reaching out to take the hand of a family member she never knew she had but hopes to get to know.

She’ll never get that chance. The morning after Harriet and Lovey’s late arrival, Junetta is dead on the floor of her Harlem mansion, a knife through her heart. The police, unwilling to bother investigating the death of a black woman – even a wealthy one – declare Junetta’s death a suicide in spite of just how unlikely that is.

Harriet is left with Junetta’s entire estate along with a whole lot of questions and not many answers. Everyone around her is keeping secrets – and some of those secrets are Junetta’s. Some are illegal, some are immoral, and some are just the cost of getting by as a black woman in a white man’s world.

The question that Harriet has to resolve before she can move on with her life in a dead woman’s house is the riddle of which of those secrets – and whose – got Junetta Plum killed. And whether that secret has the tenacity to reach out from the grave to harm Harriet, Lovey, or any of the people that Harriet has just begun to call dear.

Escape Rating A+: This is probably the most ‘mixed feelings’ A+ I’ve ever given a book. The A+ is because I absolutely loved this story. I got caught up in the audio from the very beginning and was just riveted. At the same time, I was enjoying the narrator so much that I didn’t want to rush through her reading. Diana Blue came to represent Harriet for me to the point that I heard her voice even when I read for myself.

But the story didn’t feel like a mystery. There’s a mystery in it, but that mystery felt like it was considerably more about Junetta’s life than her death and most of the time it didn’t seem as if Harriet’s investigation was driving the plot. What drove the plot for me was the slice of Harriet’s life, her introduction to the city, the way she slowly made her own way, the friends she made and the people who made her common sense and ‘mother wit’ raise the hair on the back of her neck.

I felt like I was reading about Harriet’s life, and that her investigation into Junetta’s life and death was just a part of Harriet’s story. As I was listening/reading, the story felt considerably more like historical fiction than it did mystery.

And what it felt was REAL. An in-depth portrait of a time and place as seen through the eyes of someone living it. The different women’s perspectives from different generations, made the narrative and the time period shine.

From a personal perspective, I think I got so immersed in this story because it’s told from Harriet’s first person perspective and everything about the story focuses on the women who are “trying to make a way in this hard old world,” as Junetta herself put it. The story is focused on women’s lives, women’s friendships – and enemy-ships – women’s problems and women picking up the pieces. The way that the story dove deeply into Harriet’s life, the difficulties that she and the women around her live with because they are black and because they are female, made it easy for this reader to walk a mile or two of Harlem in the 1920s with them in spite of our differences in time, place, race and circumstances.

If this had been written from the perspective of one of the male characters, I think it would have been entirely different, and likely more focused on the mystery. It would still have been a good story, but not this absorbing. OTOH, it would likely have been a more straightforward mystery from Detective Elliott Hoyt’s point of view.

I DO think later books in the series will clearly be mysteries, but this one reads more like series setup, character intro, and slice of historical life. I LOVED it, and the audio is terrific, but Harriet’s investigation of her cousin’s death just didn’t feel like it was driving the story in the way it would if this followed the strict rules that make a mystery a mystery. In its own way, learning about who her cousin was and what really happened to her drives Harriet, but it doesn’t drive the story.

So while this did remind me of Nekesa Afia’s Dead, Dead Girls, it also reminded me of Leslye Penelope’s The Monsters We Defy. Those stories are also set in the Harlem Renaissance, both are centered around the black community in Harlem in the 1920s, and both have a mystery element but they also both have a paranormal, fantasy, magical realism element. Harriet’s story does not slip into any magical or fantasy realms, but like both of those readalikes it does seem to be focused more on the history than the mystery.

Your reading mileage may vary on the question of historical fiction vs. historical mystery, but I hope you’ll give this book a try because it was excellent either way. Which means that I’m definitely looking forward to Harriet’s next investigation. I hope it comes soon!

A+ #BookReview: The Witch’s Orchard by Archer Sullivan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: The Witch’s Orchard by Archer SullivanThe Witch's Orchard by Archer Sullivan
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 320
Published by Minotaur Books on August 12, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A ninth generation Appalachian herself, Archer Sullivan brings the mountains of North Carolina to life in The Witch’s Orchard, a wonderfully atmospheric novel that introduces private investigator Annie Gore.
Former Air Force Special Investigator Annie Gore joined the military right after high school to escape the fraught homelife of her childhood. Now, she’s getting by as a private investigator and her latest case takes her to an Appalachian holler not unlike the one where she grew up.
Ten years ago, three little girls went missing from their tiny mountain town. While one was returned, the others were never seen again. After all this time without answers, the brother of one of the girls wants to hire an outsider, and he wants Annie. While she may not be from his town, she gets mountain towns. Mountain people. Driving back into the hills for a case this old—it might be a fool’s errand. But Annie needs to put money in the bank and she can’t turn down a case. Not even one that dredges up her own painful past.
In the shadow of the Blue Ridge, Annie begins to track the truth, navigating a decade’s worth of secrets, folklore of witches and crows, and a whole town that prefers to forget. But while the case may have been buried, echoes of the past linger. And Annie’s arrival stirs someone into action.

My Review:

Annie Gore has been a lot of things in her life, a private investigator, an Air Force special operations investigator, a muscle car mechanic, a poverty draftee into the military – and a child of the Appalachian hollers who is still running from a past she can’t forget.

Max Andrews needs all of those things, but it’s the last who pushes Annie to return to a place much too much like the one she fled, investigating people who could all too easily have been her own neighbors, just like the ones who looked on and kept to themselves as her dad regularly beat on her mother. Leaving young Annie to pick up the literal pieces of a woman who saw no way out – or didn’t look hard enough for one.

Max is just barely an adult, but he’s a young man with a mission that Annie is all too able to help him with – but all too unwilling into the bargain.

Ten years ago, the tiny town of Quartz Creek became briefly famous when three little girls disappeared – never to be found. The final girl was Max’ then six-year-old sister, Molly. His family fractured in the aftermath, his mother committed suicide, his father became a long-haul trucker to get away from his memories, and Max was left feeling responsible for a tragedy his then eight-year-old self could never have prevented.

He’s been saving money for ten years to hire Annie – or someone like her – so he can FINALLY get answers to his questions. Even if those answers are terrible. He needs closure more than he needs a happy ending he no longer has a hope of getting.

Annie just needs a job. She has too many bills to pay and nothing else on the horizon. Quartz Creek is the last place she wants to go because she knows how this case is going to go. Not just that she doesn’t expect to find Molly, alive OR dead, but that she does expect the town to bring back all of her bad memories and for her to bring back all of theirs in responses that will be hostile at best and violent at worst.

But she sees too much of Max in herself to resist his plea. She sees too much of herself in entirely too many of the women in Quartz Creek to remain uninvolved. And with her fresh eyes and lack of preconceived notions about the town and the people in it, she sees a truth that no one EVER wanted to see.

Escape Rating A+: The Witch’s Orchard is perched right on the edge of that seat between mystery and thriller, with the reader sitting on their hands through every twist and turn in a vain attempt not to bite their nails at the ever rising tension and outright compulsion of the story.

I couldn’t put this one down, I couldn’t turn my eyes away, and I can’t stop thinking about it. My reading group said this one was good – but I wasn’t expecting it to be THIS good.

It also reminded me a lot of Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad series and Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott series, which have similar settings and similar protagonists and/or secondary characters. I wasn’t expecting both The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and the Bootlegger’s Daughter to be looking over my shoulder as I read, but they were and it’s honestly kind of awesome. There’s also a bit of the much more recent Spider to the Fly in the setting, the protagonist AND the identity of the victims, even though that is considerably bloodier and more clearly into thriller territory.

I digress a bit because otherwise I’d just be squeeing all over the place. This was just SO GOOD.

The mystery itself is absolutely fascinating – and it’s made even better by the flawed, broken character of its protagonist, Annie Gore. She’s doing a terrible job to the best of her ability, and she knows it. She knows no one is going to be happy with her, but there’s at least a possibility that this will finally be done. Which means she’s caught up in guilt and remorse when her efforts make the situation worse all around – even though that’s exactly what she expected when she began.

A part of this one that was kind of icing on the cake was the way that folklore and storytelling influenced the case, the original investigation, the intervening decade, AND Annie’s path to the truth. There’s an old story about “The Witch of Quartz Creek” that Annie hears over and over. But each telling is just a bit different, depending on the perspectives and situation of the person telling it. Inside each version is a kernel of the truth, so it’s in the repeated similar but not the same variations that finally leads Annie to the long-hidden truth. (That part reminded me a bit of The River Has Roots even as the contemporary avatar for the witch – or at least the person everyone believed was the witch – recalled Nora Bonesteel from Ballad. I’m digressing again.)

Obviously, I adored The Witch’s Orchard. I’m not alone in that adoration, as this book is among the contenders for this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards for Best DEBUT Novel. I’m only surprised it’s not a contender for Best Mystery/Thriller because it should be. Whether it wins this award or any other, it will certainly be on my list of the Best Books of 2025 AND Annie Gore’s next adventure, Brimstone Hollow, is already on the list of my most Anticipated Reads for 2026!

A+ #BookReview: Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily KrempholtzViolet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, romantasy, witches
Pages: 368
Published by Ace on November 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A powerful plant witch and a grumpy alchemist must work together to save their quiet town from a magical plague in this debut cozy fantasy romance about starting over, redemption, and what it really means to be a good person.
Guy Shadowfade is dead, and after a lifetime as the dark sorcerer’s right-hand, Violet Thistlewaite is determined to start over—not as the fearsome Thornwitch, but as someone kind. Someone better. Someone good.
The quaint town of Dragon’s Rest, Violet decides, will be her second chance—she’ll set down roots, open a flower shop, keep her sentient (mildly homicidal) houseplant in check, and prune dark magic from the twisted boughs of her life.
Violet’s vibrant bouquets and cheerful enchantments soon charm the welcoming townsfolk, though nothing seems to impress the prickly yet dashingly handsome Nathaniel Marsh, an alchemist sharing her greenhouse. With a struggling business and his own second chance seemingly out of reach, Nathaniel has no time for flowers or frippery—and certainly none for the intriguing witch next door.
When a mysterious blight threatens every living plant in Dragon’s Rest, Violet and Nathaniel must work together through their fears, pasts, and growing feelings for one another to save their community. But with a figure from her past knocking at her door and her secrets threatening to uproot everything she’s worked so hard to grow, Violet can’t help but wonder…does a former villain truly deserve a happily-ever-after?

My Review:

Violet Thistlewaite is not a villain anymore, but there’s something inside her that still wants to be one. Or that just finds villainy easier. Or at least finds doing evil things with her prodigious magical power easier. Whichever it is, Violet is all in on being ‘good’.

The village of Dragon’s Rest has earned every drop of good that Violet can muster. Once upon a time, just a few short weeks ago, Violet was the dreaded Thornwitch, right hand minion and adopted daughter of Guy Shadowfade, the evil tyrannical wizard who rules over Dragon’s Rest, the lands that surrounded it – and pretty much anywhere else he wanted.

The Thornwitch was his favorite – and his favorite weapon – in getting those places he wanted that didn’t want him back under his dominion. The Thornwitch’s power may not have all been in her name and her signature thorns, but a lot of it was. She had power over plant growth and the soil that grew those plants. She had the power to make things grow – and she had the power to blight the land so nothing ever grew there again.

She could choke resistance with her thorns – or she could starve it into submission by turning every farmers’ field into a poisonous desert. With her at his side, resistance to Guy Shadowfade tended to be brief.

At least until she discovered that Guy had lied to her all of her life. That she hadn’t been abandoned because she was evil. That Guy had stolen her because she was powerful. So she used all that power he had coveted and nurtured – against him.

Now she’s come back to Dragon’s Rest, a village long in the shadow of Guy’s dubious protection – and power. But she’s come, not as the Thornwitch, but as Violet Thistlewaite, a woman with some magical power – but not more than many people in this world – over plants. Violet has come to open a florist’s shop in a place where people don’t have much to smile about. Because of what she once supported.

But the one person Violet can’t make smile is her landlord, alchemist-turned-apothecary Nicholas Marsh. Nicholas is certain Violet is hiding something – but then again, so is he. Mostly, he’s hiding that he’s desperately in debt after inheriting his parents’ apothecary. And he’s guilty about it because they went into that debt to let him fulfill his dream of becoming an alchemist.

His dream caused their debt – and their deaths. Leaving Nicholas determined to find a solution to the issues blighting his town – including the literal plant blight that has arisen out of nowhere just as not one, but two strangers come to town.

One he can’t stand – and one he can’t stand NOT to look at. The woman who haunts his dreams that he believes he doesn’t deserve to touch. The one person with the power to help him in his quest – and the person he knows he shouldn’t trust. But does anyway.

Because Violet Thistlewaite has power over Nicholas Marsh that she’s afraid to acknowledge. And power over plants that she’s afraid to use to its fullest measure. She’s afraid that her power might turn evil, never realizing that it already has.

Escape Rating A+: I went into this not knowing what to expect – because this is an OMG DEBUT novel – and I absolutely loved it.

It’s not quite cozy, but it is very cozy-esq or cozy-like or cozy-lite, depending on how those terms strike you. Violet’s origin story isn’t cozy at all. Although it is a bit Wicked – or at least a bit Wicked-adjacent. (The book, not the attribute. Or not just the attribute)

There’s still a cozy aspect, as Violet didn’t get involved in villainy because she’s inherently evil. She became the Thornwitch because it made her adopted daddy happy. He started beguiling her down this path when she was too young to know better – and gaslit her about how dependent she was on him every step of that thorny way.

And Violet’s actions in Dragon’s Rest, as well as Dragon’s Rest itself, are definitely cozy. The way she adopts the town and vice versa reminded me a lot of The Keeper of Magical Things, both in the setting, and in the push/pull of using magic to help the town without going overboard or over the top or over the line into the forbidden.

The relationship that develops between Nicholas and Violet struck me as similar to the romance in Wooing the Witch Queen with its big secrets and mistaken identities and definitely in the way that the secret doesn’t come out until it’s much later than it should be. Also that the inhabitants of the Witch Queen’s castle had as many secrets themselves as the residents of Dragon’s Rest and even the village itself.

A huge part of THIS story, however, is all about redemption. Violet is looking for redemption for the things she did when she followed Shadowfade. Nicholas hopes for redemption for what happened with his parents as well as the guilt he feels not just for their deaths but for his resentment over being stuck in Dragon’s Rest as a result.

That someone wants to pick up the pieces of Guy Shadowfade’s power – nature abhors a vacuum after all – isn’t the heart of this story or even Violet’s quest. It’s the way that everyone bands together to get out from under even the touch of the shadow of Guy Shadowfade, and the way it happens, which gave the story the delightful, rousing cheer of a finish that everything that came before was simply begging for.

I had a fantastic time visiting Dragon’s Rest and following Violet Thistlewaite’s determination not to be a villain anymore. If you loved any of the books mentioned above, I think you will too.

A+ #AudioBookReview: Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: Brigands & Breadknives by Travis BaldreeBrigands & Breadknives (Legends & Lattes #2) by Travis Baldree
Narrator: Travis Baldree
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fantasy, gaslamp
Series: Legends & Lattes, #2, #2
Pages: 336
Length: 8 hours and 24 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on November 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Return to the cozy fantasy world of the #1 New York Times bestselling Legends & Lattes series with a new adventure featuring fan-favorite, foul-mouthed bookseller, Fern.
Fern has weathered the stillness and storms of a bookseller’s life for decades, but now, in the face of crippling ennui, transplants herself to the city of Thune to hang out her shingle beside a long-absent friend’s coffee shop. What could be a better pairing? Surely a charming renovation montage will cure what ails her!
If only things were so simple…
It turns out that fixing your life isn’t a one-time prospect, nor as easy as a change of scenery and a lick of paint.
A drunken and desperate night sees the rattkin waking far from home in the company of a legendary warrior surviving on inertia, an imprisoned chaos-goblin with a fondness for silverware, and an absolutely thumping hangover.
As together they fend off a rogue’s gallery of ne’er-do-wells trying to claim the bounty the goblin represents, Fern may finally reconnect with the person she actually is when there isn’t a job to get in the way.

My Review:

Brigands & Breadknives brings the story that began in Legends & Lattes into a delightfully full circle that ties the events of Bookshops & Bonedust up into the story with a great big beautiful bow.

Legends & Lattes kicked off the whole cozy fantasy trend with its story of Viv, the orc who opened a coffee shop in off-the-beaten-path Thune, fell in love with Tandri the succubus, and they, with the magically delicious help of Thimble the rattkin baker and the whole, entire town of Thune, settled into their happy ever after with a whole lot of help from the friends they made along the way.

But orcs are more commonly soldiers than shopkeepers, so the story in Bookshops & Bonedust gave readers Viv’s origin story – or at least her change-of-heart story. That second book in the series – not a middle book at ALL – was a portrait of the middle-aged shopkeeper orc as a young mercenary, forced to stay behind her mercenary company to heal up from some serious wounds, making good friends, saving the day and more importantly, figuring out what she might want to be when it was time to retire.

In other words, it showed readers the decision-making process that eventually brought Viv to Thune to open Legends & Lattes.

This third book ties it all together. Viv has been in contact – if sporadically over the years – with Fern, the rattkin bookseller who befriended her in Bookshops & Bonedust. In fact, Fern is both the bookshop in Bookshops AND the origin of the Bonedust too.

Just as Viv has found her way by this point in HER story, Fern has seemingly lost hers. Fern, now a middle-aged rattkin, may be a reasonably successful bookseller, but personally she’s lost her way. Or at least her contentment. In spite of everything, Fern feels empty at a point when most of her life should feel full. Or at least full-ish.

Do rattkin have midlife crises? Because it sure sounds like Fern is having a doozy.

Which is where Viv’s letters and Viv’s encouragement to her old friend to come to Thune and open a bookshop next to the coffee shop find fertile ground. Leading Fern to trek to Thune in the hopes of finding whatever it is that seems to be missing from her life.

Only to discover that what’s missing isn’t in her life, it’s in her. So she runs away from, well, everything. Including all the friends who want to help her fill that hole that she can’t even admit is lodged in her middle.

Which leads her right, straight into the middle of someone else’s adventure – into the life and legends of one of the most storied beings in the world, riding side by side with Astryx One-Ear the Oathmaiden, guarding a prisoner, fending off bounty hunters, and pretending that she’s a lot more of an adventurer than she ever imagined she’d be.

Only to discover that running away has put her, by however roundabout a route, into the path that was always meant to be hers. All Fern has to do is stop living by what she imagines everyone else thinks she should be – and follow the path of her own star wherever it might lead.

Escape Rating A+: First things first. I listened to Brigands & Breadknives, read by the author Travis Baldree. There are not many authors who are as good at narrating their books as they were at writing them in the first place. But Baldree began as a voice actor, and became an author afterwards. He’s one of the few – along with Mary Robinette Kowal – who should ALWAYS read their books. ALWAYS. The narration of this was marvelous and made a great story just that much better.

Second things second, this is very much the story of Fern having the best and most adventurous midlife crisis that has ever been told. That it is told by the best and most profane storyteller to ever string a story together makes it just that much more fun – even as Fern is cursing herself and everyone around her pretty much every step of the way.

But especially herself.

The story isn’t quite as cozy as the earlier books – and it’s not meant to be. And not just because Fern never met a cussword she didn’t like the sound of. It’s not cozy because Fern herself isn’t a naturally cozy person – more spiky and prickly – and isn’t in anything like a cozy place in either her head or her heart.

She’s dealing with the cliche that goes “no matter where you go, there you are” and it’s not comfortable at all. That her urge is to keep running and hope it doesn’t catch up with her – even though it always does – is not surprising but it IS easy to empathize with.

This is, clearly, a story about the journey and not the destination. The destination is the LAST thing Fern wants to reach and she finds plenty of excuses to keep putting THAT evil day off as long as she can.

What makes the story so much fun is that Fern’s journey is to go on the adventure of a lifetime. It’s a madcap, out of the frying pan into the fire kind of story. An elf, a rattkin and a goblin go on a mad quest. It’s even more fun because it’s not the same mad quest, even though its the same prize at the end. Even better, the reward at the end turns out not to be the prize that each of them thought it would be.

Except maybe the goblin – but then she’s the only one who knew the truth all along. And the reveal is EPIC.

In the end – and along the way – Brigands & Breadknives does a terrific job of tying the first story, of middle-aged or at least middle-aged ish Viv forging a new path, opening the coffee shop and falling in love with Tandri, up with the second book of young Viv and young Fern bonding over books and stories and figuring out who they were and having an adventure, into this third story of middle-aged Fern and her midlife crisis joining Viv in Thune, realizing she hadn’t yet figured out who SHE wanted to be without worrying about what other people need and think and going on an adventure of her own and learning how to live both for and more importantly WITH herself.

As always and in the best cozy fantasy tradition, with a little help from her friends.

This book did turn the original Legends & Lattes into a delightful and satisfying full circle. It could end here. But I really, truly hope it doesn’t.

A+ #BookReview: Haze by Katharine Kerr

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Haze by Katharine KerrHaze by Katharine Kerr
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cyberpunk, science fiction, space opera
Pages: 428
Published by Caezik SF & Fantasy on November 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Three thousand years in the future, a starship pilot battling addiction becomes the unexpected key to unraveling a mystery that threatens the very foundation of space travel.
In the tradition of Kim Stanley Robinson's deeply researched science fiction and Lois McMaster Bujold's thrilling space opera adventures, HAZE transports readers to a multi-alien society governed by the Rim Council, a loose republic of planets protected by the formidable military force known simply as The Fleet. Interstellar civilization hinges on the use of hyperspace "shunts" for travel, but alarming rumors suggest that this crucial system is under threat.
In response, The Fleet deploys a reconnaissance team from its Special Ops branch to investigate. This team includes a washed-up, drug-dependent star pilot with a talent for finding hidden paths in hyperspace, an AI wrangler with an extensive network of artificial intelligences, a soldier gifted in detecting patterns in time and space, an alien gunner with impeccable aim, and a steadfast female captain who keeps them all in line. Together, this motley crew of space misfits discovers far more than they bargained for, uncovering secrets that could shake their society to its core.
Haze is a character-driven novel featuring a diverse cast of POC and alien characters, set in a future where humanity embraces bisexuality and polyamory, adding layers of complexity to an already captivating narrative.

My Review:

As much as I’ve loved this author’s fantasy series, the sprawling and awesome Deverry Cycle, I couldn’t have stopped myself from diving into Haze if I tried. Her fantasies are so good that I couldn’t resist the impulse to see if her science fiction would be just as addictive.

Which is an appropriate turn of phrase with which to open a review of Haze, because its strung-out, washed up protagonist is irrevocably addicted to the drug Haze, and has not even a flickering impulse to go to rehab, no matter how low he has to sink in pursuit of his next fix.

Which turns out to be as low as it gets. In a place called Nowhere Street on a dead end planet, crawling in search of someone who will buy his ass so he take the money to the nearest dealer afterwards. It’s definitely NOT a living after the Fleet dishonorably discharged him for being addicted to the drug they encouraged him to use to improve his piloting skills.

Dan thinks there’s nowhere left to go but death until a dubious rescue arrives in the form of Fleet reinstatement AND a guaranteed supply of Haze AND permission to use it as needed arrives in the form of new orders and a clandestine mission. He’s more than willing to sign because even if the job kills him, because, well, that’s where he was heading anyway.

At least this way he has a chance of going out in a haze of altered consciousness among the stars, riding the light.

Because that’s what Haze does, at least for starship pilots. It helps them literally ride the light through ‘shunt space’ that makes interstellar travel possible, and forms the backbone of the Rim Coalition of sapient species. Without the mysterious but providential stargates, and pilots with the genetic legacy to guide ships through them, the far flung coalition, its government and its commerce, could not exist.

Which is what makes it such an emergency that rumors have sprung up around the Coalition that the stargates are disappearing. One did. ONCE. Nearly 400 years ago. It happened, it was big news and a huge tragedy as there were colony ships lost in that event, but it dropped out of the news when nothing happened again. Now those old rumors are being riled up. Even worse, anyone who even hints at investigating either the original event or the new focus on it, gets disappeared. Or kidnapped. Or killed along with the ship they happen to be on.

Fleet is worried, because these are just the kind of rumors that lead to panic, which leads to violence, which destabilizes the Coalition. They want to nip this in the bud before the teacup this tempest is boiling in gets any bigger.

And that’s where Dan Brennan comes in. He’s the most talented pilot the Fleet has ever produced. He’s also the most deeply addicted to Haze, and those two things may be more connected than anyone even thought to imagine.

Keeping Dan functional becomes most of the focus of the crew of the Merchant ship Dancing Mary, part of a clandestine Fleet operation to find the source of the rumor and shut it down. As a part of a ‘Black Op’, the captain of the Mary can get Dan’s drugs and ignore the amount of time he spends sleeping off those drugs as long as he’s functional when it counts. Which he is.

So Dan pilots the ship and pursues the high he gets from Haze while the ship pursues the rumors and follows the money that seems to be behind them while the ship’s AI – and the whole entire network of AIs – seems to be pursuing an agenda of their own.

And it all comes together at the speed of light, when Dan’s addiction turns out to be the key to unlocking more different mysteries than the crew of the Dancing Mary – and in fact the whole entire Fleet – ever had an inkling might be being covered up by one panic-inducing rumor.

Escape Rating A+: I expected good things, but this turned out to be simply fantastic space opera, and an absolutely compelling read from beginning to surprising, utterly satisfying end. Which turned out to be an EXCELLENT thing all the way around, as the original estimated page count of 290 turned out to be a severe underestimate. Fortunately, it flies by at the speed of light.

On the surface, Dan Brennan seems like a poor choice for the hero of a space opera, and technically, he probably isn’t actually. The hero, that is. But he is our entry point to this far future world, showing just what it looks like from the very bottom of the ladder.

Also, and this may take a bit of a trigger warning, this is not his redemption story, well, not exactly. He does not get clean and sober. Instead, he discovers that his addiction to Haze is what he’s meant to do, and it gives him the talents that save them all. It’s a weird sideways evolutionary step forward and that’s not a narrative that gets looked for ever – even in SF.

What the story does do is combine the military operations/investigations backbone of K.G. Wagers’ NeoG series with its mercantile empire universe building of corporate greed and corruption. So there’s a mystery within a mystery within a plot to drive profits higher than a pilot on Haze. Hidden behind that, there’s a second mystery about human immortality by transferring consciousness, while underneath that there’s a big of good old-fashioned space piracy just to keep the plots from ever becoming clear.

I keep saying Dan isn’t the hero. The hero isn’t one person, it’s the crew of the Dancing Mary as a whole – including its ever so helpful but just a touch insubordinate AIs. One of the things that makes this story so much fun is that the four species that make up the Rim Coalition have recognized AIs as persons, and that the different species traditions and imperatives among them have meant that tolerance for others’ personal preferences and predilections is the norm for behavior and personal choice. There’s no soapbox about any of this, it simply is what it is in this universe and it’s lovely.

And I’m not saying that because this is a utopian future. People, even for an expanded definition of people, are always going to find something to hate and fear based on bigotry and prejudice. Howsomever, in this universe those things are not skin color, gender representation, sexual preferences or even gender itself. Instead, the triggers for that hate and fear are new, and they engender new and interesting responses even though the beings ginning up those prejudices are using the same old playbook.

The story in Haze, not so much Dan’s story as the story of the Dancing Mary’s mission, reminded me a LOT of K.B. Wagers’ NeoG series, but also Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, as well as a bit of Tanya Huff’s Valor/Confederation/Peacekeeper series, Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War and Vatta’s Peace, and even John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. All of which are/were long-running series and I wouldn’t mind AT ALL if Haze turned out to be the first entry in something similar.

Which it absolutely looks like it is! Dan Brennan’s second adventure, Zyon, is coming out in March. YAY!

A+ #AudioBookReview: To Clutch a Razor by Veronica Roth

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: To Clutch a Razor by Veronica RothTo Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer, #2) by Veronica Roth
Narrator: Helen Laser, James Fouhey, Nina Yndis, Tim Campbell
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Curse Bearer #2
Pages: 229
Length: 5 hours and 46 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

#1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth pulls from Slavic folklore to explore family, duty, and what it means to be a monster in this sequel to the USA Today bestselling novella When Among Crows
A funeral. A heist. A desperate mission.
When Dymitr is called back to the old country for the empty night, a funeral rite intended to keep evil at bay, it's the perfect opportunity for him to get his hands on his family's most guarded relic—a book of curses that could satisfy the debt he owes legendary witch Baba Jaga. But first he'll have to survive a night with his dangerous, monster-hunting kin.
As the sun sets, the line between enemies and allies becomes razor-thin, and Dymitr’s new loyalties are pushed to their breaking point.
Family gatherings can be brutal. Dymitr’s might just be fatal.

My Review:

Everyone believes that they are the heroes of their own stories. Even the monsters. Perhaps, especially the monsters, so that they have justification for the villainies they permit. And commit. If the end truly justifies the means, then ANY means, no matter how terrible, are permissible in order to serve a righteous cause. It’s all about ‘the greater good’ and is precisely what makes that phrase so monstrous.

The story that began in When Among Crows presents the reader with both sides of that eternal conflict in this particular world. Our world, but a variation of it where magic walks among us and hides in not-so-plain sight.

The Knights of the Holy Order believe that their ‘war’ against magical creatures is righteous, because whenever they meet one of those creatures that hides behind a human face, the creature does its damndest to kill the knight however it can. So the knight feels justified in killing any such creature whenever and wherever they are found – and even hunting them down for that very purpose.

But those creatures tell a different story. Every single one of them is hunted. Every single one has lost friends and loved ones to the knights. And every single one of them is no match for the knights and their magic. From the creatures’ perspective, the creatures generally don’t hunt the knights, but are all too aware that if a knight finds them, they are already dead. So they fight as best as they can with whatever they have, whether knives, teeth, claws or shapeshifting. The creatures feel like they have no choice, just as they had no choice to be born what they are.

Knights, however, are MADE to be what they are.

Dymitr, Knight of the Holy Order from a long line of such knights, came to Chicago to beg Baba Jaga to destroy him, because he can no longer bear to commit the atrocities expected of him. He knows the creatures he’s been taught since childhood to kill are merely people with magic – just like himself.

Instead of killing him, Baba Jaga makes him into something that has never been, a knight who is also a creature. His family will kill him when they know. But he has a task to complete for Baba Jaga in order to claim his new life. A task that will take him back to the last place that he and his new friends should EVER go.

Dymitr really can’t go home again. But the only way to learn that – all the way down to his bones – is to go there anyway. And take his two dearest friends along with him for the terrible journey.

Escape Rating A+: This second book in the Curse Bearer is every single bit as excellent as the first book, When Among Crows. It also really, truly does not stand alone, so start with Crows.

Howsomever, a part of that ‘not standing alone’ is that the reader – or listener in my case and the narrators were all marvelous AGAIN – comes into this book already knowing these people and caring about them, so this one also gave me a bit of an approach/avoidance conflict. I needed to see how this story ended, BUT I didn’t want to actually experience each of the terrible things that happen to these characters, because I like them and wanted them to be okay. Which they are in the end but absolutely not unbloodied, unchanged, unscarred or untraumatized.

This story, and this series, takes these people we’ve come to know and love and takes them on a walk through some very dark places because those are the places they need to go to get redemption. So the story is not exactly fun but it is ALWAYS compelling – and sometimes even more so because of the darkness it has to travel through.

Putting it another way, this was a bit of a train wreck book, not in the sense that the book is terrible – instead it’s terribly good – but in the sense that I knew something terrible or terrifying or both was about to happen to the characters, whom I liked very much, and I didn’t want to watch but still NEEDED to see.

The series, so far at least because damn I hope there are more, is Dymitr’s, even though his is not the only perspective we get to experience. Dymitr is the curse bearer of the series’ title. In When Among Crows, his eyes were fully opened to the truth, or at least A truth, about his own people by seeing them through the eyes of their enemies.

The Knights have always told their story as a ‘secondly’ story, in that they justify their actions towards the creatures they hunt because, in the present at least, any creature they find attacks on sight. That the zmora and the strzyga (both avian shapeshifters) and all the others attack when cornered because that’s the only option they have doesn’t matter to the knights because they believe their mission is a ‘holy’ one.

But those creatures, those people, are only defending themselves. They’d be happy to live and let live if they only could. Or perhaps there was a point where they would have. Now, there’s so much history and blood on both sides that peace between them might not be possible. And doesn’t THAT sound familiar?

So that first story took Dymitr into the belly of the first beast, to the supernatural community of Chicago, so that he could see that the creatures he had been taught to hunt were merely people. This second book takes him home, to learn first-hand and as painfully as possible that the people he loves, the people who taught him to fight and hunt monsters – are the true monsters.

What he’ll need to reckon with in later books in the series – if they ever exist and I sincerely hope they will – is that he is part of both sides and that they are part of him. That he still loves people who are creatures AND people who are monsters. Even if only one side is still willing to love him back.

A+ #BookReview: The Dentist by Tim Sullivan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: The Dentist by Tim SullivanThe Dentist (DS George Cross Mysteries, #1) by Tim Sullivan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: DS George Cross #1
Pages: 384
Published by Atlantic Crime on October 21, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A cold case that has been ignored. . . A detective who fights for the voiceless.
THE DETECTIVE
Bristol detective DS George Cross might be difficult to work with – but his unfailing logic and determined pursuit of the truth means he is second to none at convicting killers.
THE CRIME
When the police dismiss a man's death as a squabble among the homeless community, Cross is not convinced; there are too many unanswered questions.
Who was the unknown man whose weather-beaten body was discovered on Clifton Downs? And was the same tragedy that resulted in his life on the streets also responsible for his death?
THE COLD CASE
As Cross delves into the dead man's past, he discovers that the answers lie in a case that has been cold for fifteen years.
Cross is the only person who can unpick the decades-old murder – after all, who better to decipher the life of a person who society has forgotten than a man who has always felt like an outsider himself?

My Review:

Murder mysteries usually begin with a dead body – even if the body hasn’t been found in the first chapter. That’s the usual. The victim of this particular murder is a homeless man, and it’s unfortunately also usual that the undermanned and underfunded police generally do not put much investigative effort into such cases – even though it’s obvious that this man has been murdered.

While it is entirely possible to strangle oneself – that’s what nooses are for – it’s not possible to strangle oneself with one’s OWN hands, because the one in question passes out before the job is done.

DS (Detective Sergeant) George Cross of the Avon & Somerset CID in Bristol (England), is incapable of letting a case go until he’s wrung every drop of evidence out of it – until order is restored and justice is served. His meticulousness, along with his inability to let something go until it’s completed, is how his mind works. It makes him good at his job, but equally good at pissing off his colleagues and his superiors.

But there’s just not that much to go on in this case. It looks like a case of ‘homeless against homeless’ violence, and his boss wants him to move on. Instead, he teases out the first clue, the first break in the pattern.

This unidentified homeless man had expensive, custom made contact lenses, prescribed for a not terribly common eye condition. Somewhere, there’s a record of that prescription – and an identity attached to that record.

It’s the first thread to pull in a case that’s going to unravel four deaths stretching back nearly two decades, and along with the career of one distinguished retired cop. Because the cover-up is always more damaging than the original crime.

From one perspective, The Dentist is all about the painstaking – and occasionally pain-inflicting – process of pulling together a case with very little to go on except for one detective’s absolute certainty that there is a case to be made.

From another, it’s the portrait of a neurodiverse detective who is extremely good at one thing – solving murders, while being very, very bad at even acknowledging the other humans that he needs in order to make those solutions happen.

The combination of those elements, along with the careful peeling away of the layers of the case, the layers of the past, and the layers of how a team coalesces around Cross even though he can’t quite recognize what that even means, was absolutely compelling every single page of the way.

Escape Rating A+: I yanked this out of the virtually towering TBR pile because I was having a ‘bail and flail’ moment. I wanted to read the books I’d planned to read, but I suddenly wasn’t in the mood to read them right that minute. This one has been calling my name for a while, it came out this week, and suddenly there it was on my screen and I was GONE. I emerged from the pages at THREE AM, having devoured the story in a few really absorbed hours.

Obviously, I’m recommending this loudly, highly and with bells on. The investigator, DS George Cross, is a complicated and fascinating character to follow. (He also reminds me a LOT of FBI Agent Gardner Camden in Head Cases, so if you liked that you’ll definitely like that and very much vice-versa. Also Sir Gabriel Ward in A Case of Mice and Murder, come to think of it.)

What makes George fascinating is the way that he copes with the world – and the way that the world mostly doesn’t cope with him. He is on the autism spectrum, in the part of that spectrum that was formerly referred to as Asperger Syndrome. (This book was originally published in 2020 in Britain, while the term seems to have changed in 2022 in the US)

George frustrates everyone around him, and they frustrate him. He needs the world to be orderly, and it’s not and people particularly are not. One of the more interesting aspects of the case, is that one of the persons of interest is George’s former boss, a retired DCI who made George’s life miserable at every turn and got even more vindictive and frustrated when George didn’t react as expected – because he doesn’t. But it adds a layer of complexity to every aspect of the case, not just the man’s reactions to George, but George’s lack of reactions to him, and everyone else’s expectations of a set of reactions that just aren’t part of George’s personality at all.

What makes George a successful investigator is that he has made his differences work for him BECAUSE they frustrate everyone else. Especially the people that he has built meticulous cases around that result in convictions 97 percent of the time. And that success gives him a LOT of leeway in his actions. Which he’s ALSO learned to take advantage of.

This case NEEDS someone like George. Not just because he’s painstaking in nailing down all the details, but because he doesn’t react to expectations. He doesn’t read social cues so he doesn’t do the things that people in any organization do to get along and manage their colleagues and especially their bosses. He also doesn’t get social cues at all, which means that people have to say the things that generally aren’t said in order to even try to give him orders.

Since those things aren’t said because they’re uncomfortable – at best – to say, they generally aren’t said and he just goes on doing what he intended in the first place.

The case that he’s investigating, the murder of a homeless man, is exactly the type of case that generally gets little investigation or attention, because homelessness, like all those unspoken social cues and rules that George doesn’t even see, is something that no one wants to talk about or dive into deeply.

But George is incapable of letting the disorder stand. So he digs. He digs deep and he digs far, back 15 years to an earlier murder. And then even further back than that, to a degree that no one else would even think to go.

And in that deep dive into a past that a whole lot of people have tried rather desperately to bury, he finds all the answers. So justice is ultimately served – even if it leaves several of his own superiors with a whole lot of explaining to do.

Clearly, I found this entire story riveting from the opening page. I felt a strong sense of closure at the ending – even if George himself doesn’t participate in any of the social rituals that celebrate that closure. But I’m not willing to let this character go, so I’m EXTREMELY glad that the second book in the series, The Cyclist, will be riding to my (reading) rescue in January.

A+ #BookReview: The Witching Moon Manor by Stacy Sivinski

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: The Witching Moon Manor by Stacy SivinskiThe Witching Moon Manor (The Spellbound Sisters, #2) by Stacy Sivinski
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy mystery, historical fantasy, historical romance
Series: Spellbound Sisters #2
Pages: 336
Published by Atria Books on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The magical Quigley sisters return to bargain with fate once more in this follow-up to the “charming, uplifting, and utterly enchanting” (Lana Harper, New York Times bestselling author) national bestseller The Crescent Moon Tearoom.

The Crescent Moon is thriving after a much-needed expansion, with the ladies who step through its doors continuing to seek comfort in the glimpses of their futures found in the swirls at the bottom of their teacups. Anne is leading the city’s witches as Chicago’s Diviner, Beatrix is swept away on a book tour across the country, and Violet has found her place with her feet swinging through the air above the circus crowds. That is, until the Quigley sisters find themselves stumbling on their chosen paths, and they are drawn back home in search of refuge in each other’s company.

As Anne struggles to balance her growing responsibilities, Beatrix fears she has lost her gift for storytelling, and Violet is shaken after an accident at the circus, the future the sisters had drawn for themselves feels murkier than ever. And, when the threads of fate begin to unravel, Anne must lean on her sisters and team up with a mysterious—and oddly infuriating—necromancer to save the city from an uncertain destiny and help old friends find a happy end.

With all three Quigleys back in the warm comfort of the Crescent Moon, they set out to bargain with Fate once more. But will the sisters find the courage to embrace who they have become while returning to what they left behind, or will the future unfold in a way that even a Quigley couldn’t have predicted?

My Review:

When last we met our heroines, at the end of the author’s positively delightful and utterly charming debut novel, The Crescent Moon Tearoom, the Quigley sisters were saying goodbye to each other at the door of their tearoom, each on the way to their very own fates and happy ever afters.

As this story begins, Violet and Beatrix are on their way back home, because something is going terribly wrong. Not just for the Quigley sisters, but for all of magical Chicago – a place that Anne Quigley is duty bound to protect as just one part of her duties as the city’s magical Diviner.

Whatever creeping wrongness has been invading the city, it has reached the point where it’s affecting not just the magical side, but the purely mundane as well. And it’s all the Quigley sisters’ fault.

It’ll be up to the three of them to fix what they broke. Along the way, they’ll have a chance to rest, regroup, bask in each other’s company, and maybe, just possibly, figure out where each of them has gone astray in the individual lives they were each so willing to set out for.

Three paths to the future lay before them. One way lies disaster. One way lies safety but regret. And the third to the happy ever afters of their wildest dreams. All they have to do is find the way forward – before disaster becomes inevitable. If it’s not already too late.

Escape Rating A+: I loved this book even more than the first book, The Crescent Moon Tearoom, and that’s saying quite a bit! I think that’s because this one hit all the cozy, charming high-notes of the first book while not diving so deep into the low notes of putting the sisters down. In the first book, the threat felt both contrived and designed to cause a costly failure that would be personal, where this time the threat is earned and built into their circumstances and their personalities.

What’s fascinating about this particular magical world is the concept of Fate with a capital F. Fate in this case is a duty rather than a predestination. Each witch (and they are all witches regardless of gender) is born with one task that they must fulfill. If they don’t, the magical fabric of the world has to absorb the damage their unfulfilled fate might cause, and the witch themselves becomes a ghost instead of passing into the afterlife.

The first book was all about finding and fulfilling the task of a witch with relatively little power, Capricious Crowley, before he died of old age. The Quigleys chose not to force the fulfillment of his task because Mr. Crowley intended to become a ghost so that he could join the man he loved who was already lingering in that state.

It sounds romantic, and it is. However, the Quigley sisters’ allowance was based on Mr. Crowley’s presentation as a witch of very little power whose unfulfilled fate would do equally little damage. But he wasn’t and it didn’t, and that’s where this story begins. The worlds are slipping out of alignment, Mr. Crowley’s task MUST be fulfilled to set things right. But the sisters are all romantics, they want their dear friend to remain united with his love, which means they have to unravel the secrets that are keeping that person from HIS afterlife.

So it’s more than a bit of a mystery, a mystery that gets both bigger and more intimate as Mr. Crowley’s unfulfilled task is leeching magical power away from his entire extended family AND making Chicago’s winter even worse than normal (UGH!) while creating so much chaos that the mundanes are certainly going to notice – if they haven’t already.

At the same time, all three Quigley sisters are experiencing their own bits of chaos, as each is wrapped up in doubts and fears regarding their own gifts and their own futures. So there are little mysteries as well, as Anne, Beatrix and Violet are lying to themselves and concealing their truths from each other.

So this story is wrapped in a big mystery, one rooted in the past, even as the future that Anne wants to see for each of them moves further out of reach. Their fears and failures beset them on all sides, and it’s only once all their hearts are laid bare that ALL their happy ever afters become attainable. Even Mr. Crowley’s.

If you like cozy, witchy fantasy, the Spellbound Sisters duology, The Crescent Moon Tearoom and The Witching Moon Manor, is a delightfully cozy blend of historical fantasy, magical realism, mystery and romance. If you’re already a fan and are looking for similar books, take a look at The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches and A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna.

I’ll be over here with my fingers crossed, hoping for more of the Quigley sisters and their fantastically magical historical Chicago, and anyplace else this author intends to go.

A+ #BookReview: Legalist by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Legalist by L.E. Modesitt Jr.Legalist (The Grand Illusion #4) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, gaslamp, steampunk
Series: Grand Illusion #4
Pages: 576
Published by Tor Books on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., bestselling author of Saga of Recluce and the Imager Portfolio, continues the Grand Illusion, a gaslamp political fantasy series (Isolate, Councilor, Contrarian) with a prequel, Legalist.
Fifty years after the establishment of the Imperium, and 450 years before the events of Isolate, Dominic Mikail Ysella―ancestor of Avraal Ysella―is the grandson of the last king of Aloor. Stripped of most of their land, Dominic, as the third son, must support himself.
Dominic becomes a legalist and is elected to the Imperial Council quietly working as an isolate, someone unreadable by government telepaths.
Amid a time of a crumbling imperial line, Dominic must build a coalition within the Council and quietly draft a new constitution to save the Imperium from itself. Uncovering rampant corruption, graft, and potential to be arrested for treason, Ysella discovers any number of ways that simple legal specialist in water rights could get himself killed.

My Review:

Looking back at the Grand Illusion series, the very first book in the series, Isolate, was, among its many other marvelous themes and threads, a story about staging a mostly non-violent political coup from the inside. Following with Councilor and Contrarian, the series continues to explore what happens AFTER the balance of power has shifted as certain people attempt to shift it back to where THEY believe it belongs. With them, of course.

Whether that’s good for the rest of the country – or not.

This fourth book in the series takes a step back from those first three books and literally kicks the story back more than 400 years, but to a similar conflict. One that creates the possibility that occurs in the series’ ‘present’ in Isolate. A situation that is, come to think of it, is predicted late in THIS book, Legalist.

The ‘grand illusion’ of the series’ title is the illusion that government can make EVERYTHING better for EVERYONE at the same time. An idea that is so illusory it might as well be a mirror image of the famous line that goes, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time.” (The quote is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but may have originated with P.T. Barnum substituting “fool” for “please” – and doesn’t that fit all too well!)

However, just because many people either see government as utterly useless OR expect it to solve all their problems – and sometimes both contradictory thoughts at the same time – that doesn’t mean that government – or at least people in government – are completely ineffective at helping the people they claim to serve.

And it certainly – and unfortunately – doesn’t mean that they are not  absolutely capable of harming the people they serve.

It sounds as if I’m talking about now, doesn’t it? And I am, but only in the sense that the grand illusion of what government can and cannot do is fairly universal.

The story in Legalist is about a crisis in government and about a change in the form of that government in the hopes of making that crisis a bit less, well, terrible. Because humans are gonna human, and that’s true on all sides of the equation.

So the story focuses on one single member of the Council of Guldor, water legalist Dominic Mikhail Ysella – not coincidentally the ancestor of one of the primary characters in Isolate. Ysella sees the current crisis coming from miles away – and so do many of his fellow councilors.

The Imperador, the man who brought the country together and held it together, is dying. His virtually unlimited power is about to pass to his remaining son, a man who enjoys wielding unlimited power and is not at all tempered in that wielding by experience, intelligence or anything even vaguely resembling a moral compass.

Under the Heir, Guldor will become the kind of tyranny that incites rebellions – until the country breaks apart in civil war. The current Imperador may have unlimited power, but he still has the sense not to rule in such a manner as to drive the entire country into revolt. His son will have all of that power but nothing to temper it and no desire to even try.

However, the country that the Imperador created does have a founding document that outlines who has what powers AND provides a method for altering that power. The trick – and it’s going to be a trick and a half – is to get the Imperador to agree to curtailing his own power.

Or to retain his own power while limiting the powers of all who will come after him, knowing that it will happen much sooner than anyone would prefer. Change is coming, whether anyone likes it or not. The question before the Imperador, the Council, and especially Councilor Ysella, is whether this is a chance to turn that change from the unquestionable terrors of tyranny to the questionable future of a constitutional monarchy.

And who will survive the turmoil that will inevitably go into making it happen.

Escape Rating A+: This series is reading catnip for me, but I also think it’s a bit of an acquired taste – just that I’ve fully acquired it.

For one thing, all of Modesitt’s series are the ultimate in competence porn. Just like the protagonist of the Imager Portfolio, Dominic Ysella is simply damn good at his job – and he’s a decent human being as well. He doesn’t rely on luck or connections, just training and education and hard work and doing the right thing instead of the easy. He sees opportunities and he seizes them, but he also knows when to temper his own impulses.

And we see this world through his eyes as he does his best and damndest to make his country a better place than he found it.

From one perspective, it’s all about meetings and documents and political machinations – and on the other hand, it’s about not just being in the room where it happens, but making the moves needed to become the person who creates the situation that opens the room FOR it to happen.

This story could have been a bit dull – but it never is. Instead, as we follow along, we get deeper into the situation that Ysella finds himself in, we see the rock hemming him into the hard place – and watch as he opens up an unexpected space between the two so he has room to maneuver – and to make a difference.

And the story IS exciting. He’s constantly under threat of assassination, whether merely a character assassination or a bloody one. He knows he has enemies on all sides, as well as friends. He’s caught in the midst of secret work that will save his country and himself – but only if he can prevent it from a too early reveal that will inevitably lead to a charge of treason.

Ysella often feels as though he’s dancing one step forward and two steps back, on a tightrope, with no net, in the dark. We watch to see if he’ll fall even as we hope he’ll succeed.

Obviously, I loved this one, as I have the entire rest of the series. Due to this entry being a prequel to the rest, it would be possible for someone to start with Legalist, decide if this is a taste they’d like to acquire, and if it turns out to be so then going back to Isolate and reading the rest.

But speaking of the rest of the series, the author has announced that he has turned in the manuscript for what he says will likely be the last book of the Grand Illusion series, which will return to the main line of the series and take place after Contrarian. The publication date has not yet been set, however, the title of that final book will be Premier, as I predicted when I finished Contrarian. So I’m a bit chuffed about that even though I’m going to have to impatiently wait at least a year to read it.