Category: book reviews

A- #BookReview: A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher HuangA Gentleman's Murder (Eric Peterkin #1) by Christopher Huang
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Eric Peterkin #1
Pages: 352
Published by Inkshares on July 31, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The year is 1924. The cobblestoned streets of St. James ring with jazz as Britain races forward into an age of peace and prosperity. London's back alleys, however, are filled with broken soldiers and still enshadowed by the lingering horrors of the Great War.
Only a few years removed from the trenches of Flanders himself, Lieutenant Eric Peterkin has just been granted membership in the most prestigious soldiers-only club in London: The Britannia. But when a gentleman's wager ends with a member stabbed to death, the victim's last words echo in the Lieutenant’s head: that he would "soon right a great wrong from the past."
Eric is certain that one of his fellow members is the murderer: but who? Captain Mortimer Wolfe, the soldier’s soldier thrice escaped from German custody? Second Lieutenant Oliver Saxon, the brilliant codebreaker? Or Captain Edward Aldershott, the steely club president whose Savile Row suits hide a frightening collision of mustard gas scars?
Eric's investigation will draw him far from the marbled halls of the Britannia, to the shadowy remains of a dilapidated war hospital and the heroin dens of Limehouse. And as the facade of gentlemenhood cracks, Eric faces a Matryoshka doll of murder, vice, and secrets pointing not only to the officers of his own club but the very investigator assigned by Scotland Yard.

My Review:

I picked this up because I got teased into it by a promo for the second book in the series (A Pretender’s Murder) that described it as “Agatha Christie and Anthony Horowitz Meet in 1925 London”. Something about that description started calling my name, because wouldn’t that be a marvelous thing? So I picked up this first book and got instantly hooked.

Detectives are always outsiders in one way or another, and Eric Peterkin is definitely a part of that tradition, amateur though he is. Peterkin is, on his father’s side, the latest in a long line of Peterkins who have served England in her military for generations. He’s a member of the Britannia Club, a club reserved for men who not only served their country but saw action in whichever of the Empire’s wars happened to occur during their lifetimes.

As this story takes place in 1924, it’s not a surprise that Peterkin, along with most of his contemporaries, served in “the war to end all wars” – and that they are scarred by that service in one way or another – or many.

But England isn’t Peterkin’s only country – even if he owes no allegiance to any other. His mother was Chinese, and Eric Peterkin and his sister Penny were raised in India, where his father served the Raj.

His membership in the Britannia Club was contentious from the beginning. While a Peterkin has been a member of the Britannia Club since its founding, and the Peterkins are the last founding family left on the membership rolls, all that most other members see is that Eric is not “one of them” no matter his name. All they see is the mixed heritage on his face – and most of them never let him forget it.

When a murder is committed, not just on the very grounds of the Britannia but inside its normally locked vault, Peterkin feels honor-bound to see justice done. Not just because of his ties to the club and to the Peterkins that came before him, but also to the dead man, a new member who had confided in him that he had come to the Britannia to right a wrong and see justice finally granted to an innocent man – and that the proof of that innocence was locked away in the club’s vault for safekeeping.

That Peterkin’s job is to vet mystery and thriller manuscripts for a small publisher, that he adores crime solving by proxy and sees fictional mysteries as a great game to be played and won by the reader, gives him, perhaps, a sense of competence in solving this very real murder that is not justified by his actual experience.

What he does have, however and very much, is both a keen mind and a fresh eye, a willingness to look at the evidence that is actually before him instead of the machinations and favoritism of the old boys’ network of which he is unlikely to ever be a part. Peterkin is willing to follow the clues to the truth – no matter which favors or whose protections he tears down along the way.

This case is going to be the making of him. If it doesn’t break him or kill him first.

Escape Rating A-: This was absolutely grand, and I had a grand time with it. This was exactly the kind of absorbing, convoluted mystery that I’ve been in the mood for and I’m ever so glad I picked it up and pretty much raced through it in just two big bites.

Eric Peterkin is a fascinating protagonist, as he’s very much of the “fools rush in” sort of character. He does have a tendency to leap before he looks – and that’s both exactly what this case needs and fits with where he’s coming from. This is definitely the “Roaring 20’s” and part of that roar is everyone doing their damndest to forget the horrors of the war just past and hope like hell that they won’t have to go through that again in their lifetimes.

So, to a certain extent, Eric gets into this investigation to solve the puzzle, because he’s good at solving puzzles and he sees literary mysteries as a bit of a game. Which they were. That this one is real just pulls him deeper in, as he sees that injustice is being done and he can’t resist tilting at that particular windmill no matter how many people attempt to steer him away.

But as much as Peterkin is playing a game, he’s also trying to shove down a reality that comes around to bite him and his contemporaries more often than any of them are willing to admit. Peterkin, and all of the members of the Britannia, have PTSD – even if it wasn’t called that then and even if there wasn’t much sympathy or empathy for it and even though just needing treatment for it made them all feel like failures.

The war is still very much with them, often at the times when they least expect it. (If this part of the story either feels familiar or you are interested in other characters dealing with this issue at this time because it is a truth that got buried for a long time, check out the Inspector Ian Rutledge series by Charles Todd and also the classic Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L. Sayers as both acknowledged their PTSD and dealt with it both well and very, very badly indeed.)

The mystery in this story turned out to be twofold. Or on two tracks. Or a bit of both. On the one hand, there’s the whodunnit and who benefited from it – the usual central questions in a mystery. On the other, and the roadblock that Peterkin rams his head into repeatedly, is that this is also a mystery that is twisted and turned by a succession of people with the very best of intentions laying the paving stones on the road to hell, and then being surprised and even overcome when a villain takes advantage of that work to ease his own trip in that direction.

A Gentleman’s Murder turned out to be a fantastic way to spend a few glorious reading hours. I’m left with one question which I sincerely hope will be answered in the second book in the series – the one that got me into this in the first place – A Pretender’s Murder, coming to the US in July. I’m expecting GREAT things!

A- #AudioBookReview: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan WongDown in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong
Narrator: Eunice Wong
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, post apocalyptic, time travel, hopepunk
Pages: 336
Length: 11 hours and 11 minutes
Published by Angry Robot, Dreamscape Lore on April 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An intense and thoughtful time-travelling dystopian fantasy where three individuals, psychically linked through time, fight enslavement, exploitation, and environmental collapse. A great read for fans of Emily St. John Mandel.

In 2106, Maida Sun possesses the ability to see the entire history of any object she touches. When she starts a job with a cultural recovery project in San Francisco with other psions like her, she discovers a teacup that connects her with Li Nuan, a sex-traffificked girl in a 1906 Chinatown brothel, and with Nathan, a tech-designer and hedonist of 2006.

A chance encounter with a prominent political leader reveals to Maida his plan to contain everyone with psionic abilities, eliminate their personal autonomy, and use their skills for his own gain. Maida is left with no choice but to join a fight she doesn’t feel prepared for, with flashes of the past, glimpses of the future and a band of fellow psions as her only tools. She must find a way to stop this agenda before it takes hold and destroys life as she knows it. Can the past give Maida the key to saving her future?

My Review:

This is a hard book to characterize, and even more difficult to sum up in just a few – or even a few dozen – pithy phrases. But I’m certainly going to try.

A big part of that difficulty is that it isn’t just one story. It’s three stories that are loosely linked – even though that’s not obvious at the beginning – centered around three individuals who do not know what they have to do with each other any more than the reader does.

They’re also not experiencing the same thing – or even the same sort of thing, although the first and third are closer in that particular than either of them would ever imagine.

But there is one thing that they share from the beginning. All of their stories, all of their histories and hopes and dreams, take place in San Francisco, a place that has carried the hopes and dreams of so very many since long before the city boomed during the California Gold Rush.

In 1906, Li Nuan, 16 years old, sold by her parents into slavery, forced into sex work, whose very existence is proof that slavery was not eradicated by the Civil War, is ‘in service’ to one of the Tong bosses who ‘owned’ pre-Earthquake Chinatown. And the earthquake is coming, the end of the world as Li Nuan knows it. But she’s seeing visions of the quake, the fire that follows, and the death and destruction that results. And those visions have told her that she can seize the freedom she yearns for in the chaos – if she’s willing to do whatever it takes to claim it.

Nathan Zhao in 2006, an up-and-coming tech designer, is busy living his very good life without taking too much care for the consequences to the world he lives on. He’s a good man, a good person, he’s got a great job, is in a happy long-term relationship with his boyfriend, they’re free to be openly gay – which he knows is a privilege – and life is, well, good. The vision that he gets, both of Li Nuan’s past and of the environmental destruction to come in his near future, opens his eyes and sets his life on a different course than he’d originally planned.

The reason that both Li Nuan and Nathan are having these life-changing visions is Maida Sun. Maida is a historian and more importantly, is gifted with psychometry in a future where a significant minority of the population has been gifted with psionic powers of one stripe or another. Maida can see the past of any object she touches, and she’s working on a cultural reclamation project in the ruins of what her post-apocalyptic society calls ‘The Precursor Era’. In other words, us.

And that’s where all the links get filled in – and pushed out into the future. Nathan and his friends buried a time capsule in 2006, a capsule that is uncovered as part of the project Maida is working on. In that capsule, along with photos, memorabilia, a few personal items and a bit of outright junk, is a jade tea cup from the mid-19th century. A cup that passed through Li Nuan’s hands, down the generations to her great-grandson Nathan, and into that box only to emerge a century later under the hands – and into the powers – of Nathan’s great-great-niece, Maida.

At a point where Maida’s post-apocalyptic world is on the cusp of descending into the dystopia they initially avoided. But only will continue to do so at this terrible, hopeful juncture if Maida can seize her day and her freedom as decisively as her ancestor Li Nuan did hers.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those stories that made me think pretty much all the thoughts and feel like it brought up all the readalikes. Which is only fair as it’s not one story but three stories and they aren’t as similar as one might expect in a single book.

At the same time, it did feel as if all the stories revolved around the idea of ‘carpe diem’, even though the days that each person in the change needed to seize were very different. Still, when they each grabbed hold of that day out of hope for the future, they each moved the story forward into the hope that they reached out for.

A virtuous circle rather than the vicious cycle that begins each of their stories.

Li Nuan’s story is the most harrowing – not surprising considering the conditions under which she was brought to California. Nathan is honestly having a lot of fun in his part of the story – at least until he sees that his world is not only due for a great big fall – but a fall that he’s likely to live to see and and can’t continue his own personal revel toward the cliff even if he can’t do much to fix the wider world.

But the story is centered in Maida Sun’s early 21st century post-apocalypse. Initially her world seems filled with hope of a brighter day for everyone – even if most people are still cursing the ‘Precursors’ (meaning US) for leaving such a big damn mess to clean up.

Still, the human side of Maida’s world is filled with hope. The ‘Collapse’ of the Precursor civilization in the 2050s, the climatic changes, the wars and death and destruction that followed, set humanity up for a more cooperative future – with the help of the great ‘Bloom’ of auroras that surrounded the planet and gave rise to psionic powers among a percentage of the population.

But by Maida’s 2106, the new normal has been normal long enough, and the devastation of the collapse is just far enough back in time and memory, that some people are starting to think that the ‘good old days’ were better than they were – at least for THEIR sort of people. Whatever that might mean. And, because humans are STILL gonna be human, there’s always someone just watching and waiting to take advantage of that impulse. By creating a new scapegoat, giving a new generation someone to hate and fear, and telling as many big lies as they can to weaponize society so that a new authoritarian regime can rise and start the whole terrible cycle all over again.

It’s hard to miss the historical parallels, because the playbook being used is old and familiar and all the more frightening for being followed right this very minute. What gives Down in the Sea of Angels its hopeful ending is that Maida Sun and the psions are finally living in a time when more people seem to want the world to get better for everyone – or alternatively that she and the psion community have the truth on their side and the opportunity to nip the forces of regression, repression and evil in the bud before the tide has turned completely in their favor.

More than a few of all of those thoughts I mentioned at the top before I close. One of the reasons this story worked as well as it did is that San Francisco is a bit of a liminal place and its history as well as its reputation for being a bit ‘out there’ for multiple definitions of that phrase fit the story. (For an entirely different fantasy featuring San Francisco’s liminality take a look at Passing Strange by Ellen Klages.)

Maida’s particular early 22nd century was fascinating because it didn’t follow the usual patterns for post-apocalyptic stories – or at least there was clearly a delay between the apocalypse and the dystopia – or we missed the first wave of dystopia and this is the attempt of a second dystopia to take hold. It’s a very different post-apocalyptic vision from either The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed or The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow and the contrasts are quite interesting.

As much as the rising tide of authoritarianism in Maida’s time resembles both the rise of Nazi Germany AND the present political situation in the United States, the way that the anti-psion sentiment is created and promoted by the powers-that-be owes more than a bit, in the fictional sense at least, to the anti-mutant sentiment in the X-Men movie series.

I’ll confess that I picked this up because I absolutely adored the author’s debut novel, The Circus Infinite – and I was hoping to get a similar feeling from this book. In the end I did enjoy Down in the Sea of Angels very much, but not quite as much as Circus, and I think that’s because of the split story lines and how long it took them to figure out that they were part of each other. Howsomever, I did absolutely love the audio narration by Eunice Wong, and it was lovely to hear her voice again, telling me a marvelous story.

Grade A #BookReview: Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess KiddMurder at Gulls Nest (Nora Breen Investigates #1) by Jess Kidd
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Nora Breen Investigates #1
Pages: 325
Published by Atria Books on April 8, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A cozy mystery series about a former nun who searches for answers in a small seaside town after her pen pal mysteriously disappears
1954: When her former novice’s dependable letters stop, Nora Breen asks to be released from her vows. Haunted by a line in Frieda’s letter, Nora arrives at Gulls Nest, a charming hotel in Gore-on-Sea in Kent. A seaside town, a place of fresh air and relaxed constraints, is the perfect place for a new start. Nora hides her identity and pries into the lives of her fellow guests—but when a series of bizarre murders rattles the occupants of Gulls Nest it’s time to ask if a dark past can ever really be left behind.

My Review:

For a cozy mystery, Murder at Gulls Nest is a bit twisty and occasionally downright creepy, but in the case of this particular case – that’s a marvelous thing!

Nora Breen has come a long way to arrive at little Gore-on-Sea on the Kentish coast. All the way from more than 30 years as a nun, out of the convent and straight into the room that her former novice occupied in a somewhat rundown boarding house just before she disappeared.

A disappearance which has led to Nora being out in the world for the first time in decades, having entered her monastery in the post-World War I years after a personal tragedy, and emerged in 1954, not long after an entirely different war whose scars are still healing, both on the country and especially on its people.

She’s just a bit overwhelmed – but she’s also very determined. As well as downright nosy – a predilection that was considered a flaw in her former vocation. But out in the world that gets a considerably more mixed reception. The local police inspector in Gore-on-Sea – and in fact the entire police station – also believe it’s a flaw, and an annoying flaw at that. Nora, on the other hand, is having a bit too good of a time figuring out how to interrogate her fellow boarders without making them feel like they are being interrogated. Even though they are.

Which doesn’t stop Detective Inspector Rideout from relying on Nora’s nosiness, her stubbornness, and her imagination fired up by years of reading detective mysteries, to help him solve a puzzling series of murders at that boarding house, Gulls Nest. Murders that the coroner would much rather sweep under the rug as either suicides or accidents even though Nora is convinced that there is a murderer hiding among the eccentric guests.

And that her missing friend was the murderer’s first victim.

Escape Rating A: Murder at Gulls Nest turned out to be one of the creepiest cozies I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading – but a pleasure and a delight it certainly was. This is the first book in a series, so Gore-on-Sea could certainly get cozier, but as the place stands right now it seems like a good place to get murdered in.

This story, and the series, begins in one of the usual ways that classic mystery series begin when the sleuth is an amateur – meaning that Nora’s first case is entirely personal at the outset. In Nora’s particular case, that she has come to discover the fate of one of her novices allows Nora to both reminisce about her time in the monastery and ruminate on the life that brought her there and the compulsion that pulled her out.

And we do get more than enough to get what she came from and where she’s coming from, even though it’s an experience that seems just as much a part of the past as the mid-century, post-war setting in the kind of seaside holiday town that was on its way out then and of which there are only remnants now.

What draws Nora into the mystery as a whole, and the reader right along with her, are the downright eccentric denizens of Gulls Nest, from the opiate-addled landlady and her ‘wild child’ young daughter to the retired traveling puppeteer, the smooth black marketeer and the dour housekeeper who is so clearly a candidate to be either the murderer or the scapegoat.

As the residents drop one-by-one, the motive for the murders gets murkier and murkier. Not that there weren’t plenty of possible motives and suspects for each individual murder, but the question of who benefits from ALL of the murders drives Rideout and Nora into a reluctant investigative partnership that pushes the story forward even as Nora pokes her nose into people and places that seem as if they couldn’t possibly be relevant until they finally are.

It’s a relationship that works in spite of the initial inclinations of the people in it, and it develops from suspicion to annoyance to grudging respect to friendship in a way that feels organic to the characters and sets an excellent foundation for the series.

I had a grand time with Nora Breen as she stuck her ‘coulter’ – meaning nose – into places she probably shouldn’t but that someone absolutely did need to stick some kind of oar into. I loved her investigative technique of nosiness with a bit more heart and understanding than her own reading of detective novels had led her to expect. I found the murders appropriately twisty, the motive at the heart of it all just a bit heartbreaking, and was happy to see order restored and chaos put properly in its place.

That this is the opening of a series was definitely the icing on a very tasty murder cake that only occasionally held a hint of bitter almond. Exactly how Nora is going to manage to keep herself on in Gore-on-Sea (and OMG that name is both a hint and a hoot under the circumstances) I can’t wait to see who and/or what she digs into next!

#BookReview: Single Player by Tara Tai

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Single Player by Tara TaiSingle Player by Tara Tai
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, queer romance
Pages: 315
Published by Alcove Press on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Two video game creators go head-to-head in this delightful, queer enemies-to-lovers workplace romance debut.
Cat Li cares about two things: video games and swoony romances. The former means there hasn't been much of the latter in her (real) life, but when she lands her dream job writing the love storylines for Compass Hollow—the next big thing in games—she knows it’s all been worth it. Then she meets her boss: the infamous Andi Zhang, who’s not only an arrogant hater of happily-ever-afters determined to keep Cat from doing her job but also impossibly, annoyingly hot.
As Compass Hollow’s narrative director, Andi couldn’t care less about love—in-game or out. After getting doxxed by internet trolls three years ago, Andi’s been trying to prove to the gaming world that they’re a serious gamedev. Their plan includes writing the best game possible, with zero lovey-dovey stuff. That is, until the man funding the game’s development insists Andi add romance in order to make the story “more appealing to female gamers.”
Forced to give Cat a chance, Andi begrudgingly realizes there’s more to Cat than romantic idealism and, okay, a cute smile. But admitting that would mean giving up the single-player life that has kept their heart safe for years. And when Cat uncovers a behind-the-scenes plan to destroy Andi’s career, the two will have to put their differences aside and find a way to work together before it’s game over.

My Review:

Single Player, a bit ironically, has two players and two plots going for it that merge into one. After, of course, a truly epic boss battle that will have readers on the edge of their seats rooting for the player characters to win the game AND get the happy ever after they have so completely earned.

In other words, the story of Single Player is patterned after the types of games that the player characters – the protagonists Andi and Cat – both love to play. Games where the player gathers a group of like-minded but differently skilled fighters and friends in order to take on the forces of evil – and along the way romances one of the companions on their quest.

Although, at the beginning, Andi Zhang isn’t sure that she can bear the idea of adding romance options to her upcoming Triple A (big story, big budget, big expectations) game, Compass Hollow. Even though adding in those romance options is literally what Cat was hired for.

But the game that Andi needs to win isn’t the game that she’s designing – it’s the real world game of preserving the gaming industry as a bastion of cis-white-male-dudebro entitlement. It’s a game that Andi – Asian American and lesbian – has already lost once and is rightfully concerned that her literally life-threatening experience will repeat itself even though she’s moved both cities and companies.

That her nemesis has not only followed her but is waiting in the wings to take her down, again, in revenge for having turned him down – proves that the threat is real. (It’s really, real too, this shit happens in the gaming industry on the regular).

While Andi is battling the demons of bureaucracy and clueless oversight along with her own personal demons, she and Cat have started down the road of an enemies-to-lovers romance. Or at least that’s what each of them perceives it as. Howsomever, whatever they’re feeling for each other – enmity is only the mask covering up something a lot deeper and more than a bit schmoopier. Even if neither of them is willing to admit it until just before the final boss battle.

Because that’s the way that the best games lock in their romance options. And it’s a gaming convention that works every bit as well in Single Player as it does in Mass Effect and Dragon Age – or just maybe, even a bit better.

Escape Rating B: I picked this up because a friend informed me that the opening line from the story is a quote from Varric Tethras, and I’m all in for that as I adore Dragon Age. But it’s also a hint that this book is chock-full of gaming references and insider-jokes about games and the gaming industry. There’s also a lot of up-to-the-minute pop culture references that’s meant to either show just how cool or just how geeky and nerdy Andi and Cat are. Or both. Most likely both.

I had no problem with the gaming references, but got a bit lost in some of the pop culture. Other readers will find the reverse to be true. I looked up a LOT and it sometimes broke me out of the story.

There’s also more than a bit of the really, really real shit of the gaming industry in this story, and it was necessary to create the boss battle at the end that the story needed, but damn it was hard to read AND I’m wondering how many readers will think that part of the story was over-the-top when it’s actually NOT. Personally, I’m not sure I wanted that much REAL in my romance, but your reading mileage may vary.

(That the initials for the big gaming company that is funding Andi’s game are the same as a well-known gaming megacorp that has had some issues with exactly the buzzsaw that Andi faces is undoubtedly not a coincidence.)

All of that being said, the relationship between Cat and Andi that begins at Andi practically knocking Cat into a wall in her self-centered haste and Cat passively-aggressively setting up meetings between herself and Andi so that she can do the job she’s been hired to do, is filled with the stops and starts and human misunderstandings and epic interferences that romances in real life often have to contend with.

So the progression of the romance felt every bit as real as Cat likes to say that game romances do – that the feelings are real and the tropes mostly get avoided because they don’t really make sense – which is pretty much what happens here. Not that a couple of tropes aren’t tried on for size, but they don’t quite fit and that becomes really obvious to both Andi and Cat reasonably quickly on their road to romance.

I finished this book with a smile. I ended up loving the romance between Andi and Cat and felt really satisfied that the villain got as much of his just desserts as he’s ever likely to. That he’s left, as the big bosses in games often are, with the possibility of coming back for another round just gave Single Player a fantastic and absolutely gaming-appropriate ending.

Speaking of games, we got more than enough hints about the game that Andi and Cat are working on that I really wish we could play it!

A- #BookReview: Shadow of the Solstice by Anne Hillerman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Shadow of the Solstice by Anne HillermanShadow of the Solstice: A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel (A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel, 10) by Anne Hillerman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Leaphorn & Chee #28, Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito #10
Pages: 336
Published by Harper on April 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this gripping chapter in New York Times bestselling author Anne Hillerman’s Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series, the detectives must sort out a save-the-planet meditation group connected to a mysterious death and a nefarious scheme targeting vulnerable indigenous people living with addiction.

The Navajo Nation police are on high alert when a U.S. Cabinet Secretary schedules an unprecedented trip to the little Navajo town of Shiprock, New Mexico. The visit coincides with a plan to resume uranium mining along the Navajo Nation border. Tensions around the official’s arrival escalate when the body of a stranger is found in an area restricted for the disposal of radioactive uranium waste. Is it coincidence that a cult with a propensity for violence arrives at a private camp group outside Shiprock the same week to celebrate the summer solstice? When the outsiders’ erratic behavior makes their Navajo hosts uneasy, Officer Bernadette Manuelito is assigned to monitor the situation. She finds a young boy at grave risk, abused women, and other shocking discoveries that plunge her and Lt. Jim Chee into a volatile and deadly situation.

Meanwhile, Darleen Manuelito, Bernie’s high spirited younger sister, learns one of her home health clients is gone–and the woman’s daughter doesn’t seem to care. Darleen’s curiosity and sense of duty combine to lead her to discover that the client’s grandson is also missing and that the two have become ensnared in a wickedly complex scheme exploiting indigenous people. Darleen’s information meshes with a case Chee has begun to solve that deals with the evil underside of human nature.

My Review:

The advantage of a mystery series in which there are not just one but two highly qualified investigators is that it is possible to focus on two separate crimes and NOT have them merge into a single perpetrator or gang of perpetrators at the end.

Navajo Nation Police Lieutenant Jim Chee has been investigating a rise in disappearances across their jurisdiction. Not that adults don’t occasionally walk away from their lives no matter where they live, but this rise is considerably more than the usual, with more families than are usually left behind in such cases left bereft by the limbo of their probable loss.

At the same time, Navajo Nation Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito is investigating complaints about an unapproved and downright dangerous structure being built by a visiting “meditation” group on land that they have rented from a well-known local family.

This may not sound like all that big a deal, but a) they don’t own the land, b) the owner refused permission for them to build, c) they didn’t get their plans approved and d) the structure is a sweat lodge meant to be used for meditation and healing ceremonies and its construction is so dangerous as to be downright deadly in the wrong circumstances. Which is exactly what they’re planning to hold. That the whole setup not just looks and sounds and more importantly ACTS like a cult setting up for something either dangerous or suicidal or both makes the owners’ feel unsafe and makes Bernie’s hackles rise accordingly.

Into this already potentially explosive mix throw the possible arrival of the Secretary of Energy, probably to give a speech that will run directly contrary to Navajo Nation policy, with all the chaos that a visiting dignitary could bring – as well as the tensions arising from the lack of certainty about whether she will or she won’t.

Chee has been left in charge of whatever is going to happen, if it’s going to happen, because the station captain had a heart attack right after the potential visit was announced. He’s torn between duties, cases and family while his wife, Officer Bernie Manuelito, has turned over a really big rock and a much more dangerous snake than she expected has crawled out to strike at a bigger prize than anyone imagined.

Escape Rating A-: As much and as long as I have loved this series, it took me a bit to get into this particular entry in it for reasons that I think were a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing. I was looking for more of an escape than I got this time around, as this story took me away in geography but not so much in other ways.

In other words, everything that happens in this story felt very close to ‘real’ life, and I wanted to be further away than that. Also, I was really, seriously worried for one of the characters and I needed to find out that she’d be okay before I could relax into the story. Once she managed to rescue herself, the rest of the story grabbed me and didn’t let go until the end – which was more than a bit of a nail-biter.

What made this one both so real and so fascinating was the way that even though the two cases don’t merge into one in any of the usual ways, they were both motivated by a lot of the same things – none of which were the ostensible causes of the crimes themselves.

Both crimes are about greed and manipulation, about taking advantage of people’s desire for a better life to line the pockets of the perpetrators at the expense of as many people as possible. That one is a Medicaid scam in Phoenix and the other is a cult subjugating its members even as it bilks them of their money is merely window dressing on the true motives of their perpetrators, which are to take advantage of people – and the government in the case of the Medicaid scam – and line their own pockets.

That one perpetrator is coldly, cruelly sane while the other believes he’s getting messages from a higher power – or at least pretends to – doesn’t mean that they’re not operating from surprisingly similar playbooks in the end.

And ending which administers just desserts to both, even though it’s not remotely possible to truly balance the scales in either case. Which comes back, again, to just how closely reality bites this fictional setting.

Over the more than OMG 30 years that I’ve been following this series (the series began in 1970 with The Blessing Way but I didn’t get hooked on it until the early 1990s) the more I’ve enjoyed getting to know these characters and have loved watching them grow and change over the years. When the series began, the ‘Legendary’ Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn was the protagonist and young Officer Jim Chee was his sometimes reluctant sidekick. Now Chee is the lead investigator, his wife and fellow officer Bernie is NOT his sidekick but an investigator in her own right. They face a whole new set of challenges, often separately on the job but together in their relationship, while behind them a new crop of officers is learning the ropes and their world is changing – as the world does. (And if any of this sounds familiar that might be because the original stories are the basis for the TV series Dark Winds.)

But humans are always gonna human, there will always be more problems for them to face and crimes for them to solve, and I’ll always be looking forward to the next book in the series whenever it appears. Hopefully, that will be this time next year.

A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. HarrisWho Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr, #20) by C.S. Harris
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, regency mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #20
Pages: 384
Published by Berkley on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The gruesome murder of a prominent nobleman throws an already unsettled London into chaos in this electrifying new historical mystery by the USA Today bestselling author of What Cannot Be Said.
August 1816. England is in the grip of what will become known as the Year Without a Summer. Facing the twin crises of a harvest-destroying volcanic winter and the economic disruption caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British monarchy finds itself haunted by the looming threat of bloody riots not seen since the earliest days of the French Revolution. Amidst the turmoil, a dead man is found hanging upside down by one leg in an abandoned chapel, his hands tied behind his back. The pose eerily echoes the image depicted on a tarot card known as Le Pendu, the Hanged Man. The victim—Lord Preston Farnsworth, the younger brother of one of the Regent’s boon companions—was a passionate crusader against what he called the forces of darkness, namely criminality, immorality, and sloth. His brutal murder shocks the Palace and panics the already troubled populace.
Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, learns of the murder from a ragged orphan who leads him to the corpse and then disappears. At first, everyone in the dead man’s orbit paints Lord Preston as a selfless saint. But as Sebastian delves deeper into his life, he quickly realizes that the man had accumulated more than his fair share of enemies, including Major Hugh Chandler, a close friend who once saved Sebastian’s life. Sebastian also discovers that the pious Lord Preston may have been much more dangerous than those he sought to redeem.
As dark clouds press down on the city and the rains fall unceasingly, two more victims are found, one strangled and one shot, with ominous tarot cards placed on their bodies. The killer is sending a gruesome message and Sebastian is running out of time to decipher it before more lives are lost and a fraught post-war London explodes.

My Review:

One of the things I utterly adore about this series is the way that each book is firmly fixed in its time and place, and that that foundation in its there and then shows the exact opposite of ANY vision we might have in our heads about what the Regency period was like. Especially if that vision owes its glitter and sparkle to Bridgerton, Georgette Heyer or even Jane Austen.

Weymouth Bay with Approaching Storm. Painting by John Constable (1816)

This particular entry in the series shines a light in darker places than usual, as it takes place in the summer of 1816, which, basically, wasn’t. Not that the summers of 1817, 1818 and 1819 were all that summer-y either. Although the sunsets were spectacular for years afterwards.

What made the situation so much darker and chillier, as this book explores rather, well, darkly, is that they didn’t know WHY clouds and storms blotted out the sun for days and weeks on end. It’s not totally unreasonable for people to have thought the world was coming to an end.

Because they were freezing and starving and it seemed like it would never end.

Not that already weren’t entirely too many people starving and shivering because Britain’s post-Napoleonic War economy was a wreck. The war was over – YAY! BUT, the soldiers were demobilized and thrown back into the population without pensions. The government was going through a period of austerity – for everyone but themselves, of course – and jobs were scarce.

And the government – and so many of the upper classes – were just so certain that it was the fault of the poor themselves that they were poor, and if they were just forced to be good, upright citizens who knew their place and didn’t question their betters that conditions would miraculously improve.

(And doesn’t that sound so very familiar?)

So when Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, gets called to the sight of the gruesome murder of one of those upper class so-called reformers, it’s clear exactly which rocks he’s going to be turning over to find out whodunnit. Because he’s certain that whoever the killer might have been, it’s not going to be the easy solution that the Crown demands in order to, well, keep order among the lower classes while hoping to satisfy the upper classes that justice is being done.

Even if it isn’t. And won’t. Unless Devlin gets his hands dirty with yet another investigation that some members of his own family would prefer he left well enough alone. Even if that well enough isn’t well at all – and they know it.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve not been remotely coy about the fact that I love this series, and this entry absolutely did not change my mind one iota. Over the course of 20 books in 20 years – and counting – it just gets better and better.

Over the course of the series I’ve realized that I’m mostly here for the historical fiction aspects of the series. Not just the way that the author illuminates this time and place that we think we know, but also the way that we walk London’s streets with Devlin and feel the cobblestones under our own feet.

At the same time, the mystery is always important and not merely in the sense of figuring out both whodunnit and why it was done. Murder is a disruption to order – to the way things ought to be. The Regency period, with its incapacitated king and its overly self-indulgent regent who will be king, was a period where order was already disrupted. And that’s before one factors in the disruptions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Meanwhile, the seeds for the Industrial Revolution have already been sown, and revolt and rebellion are bubbling up from the so-called lower orders who have seen their disruptions and results in nearby France and in the far away but less bloody and more successful United States. Change is in the wind – even if that wind is not blowing the skies clear enough to grow crops.

The disruptions caused by murder in this series, particularly this murder, are intended to show what’s lurking in the depths that is usually covered over by government propaganda and social expectations.

Because the victim in this particular case was believed to be a ‘good’ if somewhat priggish man who was working for the ‘betterment’ of the country even if he was a bit overbearing about it all. But someone knows that facade was just that, a false front that they are determined to strip away. This is a fascinating case because the point of it is NOT to capture a villain, but to expose exactly how much of a villain the murder victim really was – and to uncover his confederates in that villainy.

Justice, such as it turns out to be in this case, has already been had. And this entry in the series is all the more interesting for its purposes to have been so turned around and yet resolved as satisfactorily as possible.

I was all in on this one from the very first page, and finished the story in a bit of a sad catharsis because I was glad to see it resolved but that resolve is equivocal in exactly the way that it should be and that was marvelous in its way.

One final note about this story. I’m surprised to have a readalike for this that is not historical fiction or mystery, but if you’re interested in the effects of the year without a summer, there’s an award winning science fiction short story, “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer, that deals with the effects of a similar situation on one small community and its lovely and hopeful in ways that make it a good follow up to Who Will Remember.

#BookReview: A Fellowship of Bakers and Magic by J. Penner

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: A Fellowship of Bakers and Magic by J. PennerA Fellowship of Bakers & Magic (Adenashire, #1) by J. Penner
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, foodie fiction, romantasy
Series: Adenashire #1
Pages: 288
Published by Poisoned Pen Press on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A human, a dwarf and an elf walk into a bake-off…
In the heart of Adenashire, where elfish enchantments and dwarven delights rule, Arleta Starstone, a human confectionist works twice as hard perfecting her unique blend of baking and apothecary herbs.
So when an orc neighbor secretly enters her creations into the prestigious Elven Baking Battle, Arleta faces a dilemma.
Being magicless, her participation in the competition could draw more scowls than smiles. And if Arleta wants to prove her talent and establish her culinary reputation, this human will need more than just her pastry craft to sweeten the odds.
While competing, she'll set off on a journey of mouthwatering pastries, self-discovery, heartwarming friendships and romance, while questioning whether winning the Baking Battle is the true prize.
Escape to for a delightful cozy fantasy where every twist is a treat and every turn a step closer to home.

My Review:

It sounds like the start of a joke, that opening line in the blurb, “A human, a dwarf and an elf walk into a bake-off…” It’s not a joke at all, it’s the start of a heartwarming cozy fantasy – even if it’s not quite correct in the particulars.

The elf strides in, the dwarf bounces, a fennex skulks in and the human rushes in at the very last second, still not convinced that she belongs in the contest or has even half a chance of making it past the first round.

The elf, the dwarf, and the fennex ‘belong’ in the competition because they all have magic. Although the Langheim Baking Battle began as a competition for elves and there are still plenty of people around who believe that the tone has gone WAY DOWN since they started letting in members of other magical races.

It’s not that entry is technically restricted to those with magic, but everybody ‘knows’ that non-magical bakers like Arleta Starstone somehow never make it into the contest. They must not be considered good enough. Or the game is rigged.

Of course the game is rigged, and Arleta knows it. Because it’s part of the story of her whole entire life that no matter how good her confections are, she’s always going to get the worst spot in the local market and she’s always going to pay the most for it and her potential customers are always going to expect her to discount her prices because ‘everyone’ knows that magical baking is ‘better’.

Whether it is or not. In Arleta’s case, it’s definitely not. Winning the Langheim Baking Battle would prove that to everyone who has ever looked down their magical nose at her – even if they’ve had to look up to do it.

But Arleta has been beaten down too much for too long to even think she has a chance. However, her ogre neighbors, her unofficial adopted fathers Verdreth and Ervash, are certain she has an excellent chance if she just puts herself in the running. So they do it for her.

And with the help of a little bit of unintended misdirection, she gets in. And then proceeds to try and get herself out. But between her dads pushing her from behind, and a very handsome elf encouraging her – and facilitating her participation with travel and transport – she can’t quite make herself refuse.

Although she keeps trying all the way to Langheim. And once she’s standing on that stage, adding her little bit of special savory goodness to the sweetest of recipes, she has all the chances she needs to make it to the top.

With more than a little help and encouragement from the friends she makes along the way.

Escape Rating B: This first book in the Adenashire cozy fantasy series (there are at least three more!) is definitely one of those “book baby” situations. As in, if either Legends & Lattes (or Can’t Spell Treason without Tea) and The Great British Bake Off had a book baby, it would be A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic.

And it would be delicious. There would also be delicious recipes in the back – because there are.

This first entry in the series has a bit of heavy – but delicious – lifting to perform in order to get to the sweet, gooey, tasty center of things. As the series opener, there’s the intro to this fantasy world and especially to Arleta’s home village of Adenashire. Then there’s the plot centered around the Baking Competition, which is where Arleta’s new friends – and the main characters of the other three books – get introduced. And last but absolutely not least there’s the romance between Arleta and the literal elf of her dreams, Theo.

The world Adenashire inhabits is a place where magic is what makes the world go around, and anyone who doesn’t have magic is definitely considered lesser. Humans CAN have magic, some do, but Arleta doesn’t happen to be one of them. So Arleta faces prejudice at pretty much every turn and she’s internalized all those feelings of being ‘less than’ to the point that she expects to be trodden upon at every turn.

The Baking Competition is a chance for her to get out of that mindset – if she can. And it’s a hard slog every step of the way that is not helped by the voice in her head telling her that she it’s wrong to accept help from anyone. That we don’t know where THAT voice originated gave me fits and explains the B rating. It’s not that feelings like that don’t happen to plenty of people and don’t cause internal strife and dramatic tension, it’s rather that they don’t come completely out of nowhere and Arleta already had more than enough pushing her down without piling that on. (YRMMV – your reading mileage may vary)

The competition – and all of the baked in tension of those shenanigans – is lots of fun with lots of stress for everyone. Anyone who loves cooking and baking contest shows is going to find that part a hoot!

Then there’s the romance, which is as sweet as Arleta’s baking while also playing back into the baked in prejudices of this world AND manages to check off a whole bunch of the more fun romantic trope boxes along the way and fill them with flowers. And a cat. Mustn’t forget Faylin because that cat won’t allow that for an instant.

All in all, there’s a LOT to savor in this story. Including those recipes in the back. There’s a recipe for Salted Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies that I’m planning to try. I loved the setting and the setup, enjoyed the baking competition but probably not as much as someone who is really into those shows, adored the group of found family that gathers around Arleta in spite of herself AND finds its way to Adenashire afterwards. I was looking for a sweet treat of a fantasy and this definitely satisfied that craving, so I’ll be back with the next book, A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons, because I can’t resist either part of that combination!

#BookReview: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac FellmanNotes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: fantasy, relationship fiction, science fiction
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Notes from a Regicide is a heartbreaking story of trans self-discovery with a rich relatability and a science-fictional twist from award-winning author Isaac Fellman.
When your parents die, you find out who they really were.
Griffon Keming’s second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to be trans, paid for his transition, and tried to love him as best they could. But Griffon’s new parents had troubles of their own – both were deeply scarred by the lives they lived before Griffon, the struggles they faced to become themselves, and the failed revolution that drove them from their homeland. When they died, they left an unfillable hole in his heart.
Griffon’s best clue to his parents’ lives is in his father’s journal, written from a jail cell while he awaited execution. Stained with blood, grief, and tears, these pages struggle to contain the love story of two artists on fire. With the journal in hand, Griffon hopes to pin down his relationship to these wonderful and strange people for whom time always seemed to be running out.
In Notes from a Regicide, a trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, Isaac Fellman goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.

My Review:

The story begins at the end, which doesn’t mean that either the narrator or the reader is in any way spoiled about how it began. Because that’s the point of it from the beginning.

Griffon Keming is trying to understand who his parents really were before they became his parents, now that their larger-than-life personas are no longer there to get in the way of that knowing. And because they’re gone, and he misses them, he’s trying to process that grief and that absence and memorialize them – at least for himself. Or perhaps in a way that’s JUST for himself, as a way of bringing them back to life one last time.

But he only knew his parents after the point in which they came into each other’s lives, when he was fifteen and they were into their forties. The places and events that made Zaffre and Etoine Keming, and the things that made them famous, were already behind them. Already memories and nightmares that may still have influence but they have no desire to exhume for either the enlightenment or the amusement of their adopted son.

So, in the wake of their passing, in what was once Zaffre and Etoine’s New York City apartment, Griffon discovers the writings his father left behind. An angry, angst-filled, sometimes ranting and raging diary of his decades of sobriety, and a manuscript that Etoine had titled Autoportrait, Blessê in his native language, Stephensportois.

But that autobiography wasn’t so much an autobiography of Etoine as it was an attempt to immortalize Zaffre, the woman he loved so much that, once upon a time, he killed a king for her.

Escape Rating B: There are multiple avenues of approach to Notes from a Regicide. The above was the way I got into this book and found my way through it, but it may tell a different story for each reader.

For some, the most obvious point of entry may be that Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre were all trans, and this is the story of the family they created together out of love and choice. A family that was far from perfect but that worked for them and that nurtured Griffon into a healthy adulthood after a childhood filled with physical and emotional abuse.

It can be interpreted as three broken people who made each other strong in their broken places – which were legion and not limited to Zaffre’s neurodiversity, Etoine’s alcoholism and the mental contortions Griffon forced himself to go through in order to protect his birth father from the consequences of his abuse of his own child. No one comes out of any of those things unscathed.

And then there’s the part that initially caught my curiosity, the question raised by the title. Who was the ruler, and where, and why were they murdered? That’s where the story slips into speculative fiction – somewhere on the border between science fiction and fantasy.

Because Stephensport is one of those places that’s on no map we know, that perhaps may have or will exist in a bit of a fever dream – or a drunken hallucination. And the story of Stephensport is the story of a bloody revolution that arose in paranoia and ended in exile, that brought down a tyranny and ended a dream and a nightmare at the same time.

Exactly how a reader will feel about Stephensport and the rebellion that Etoine accidentally fomented and Zaffre willingly fostered will depend a lot on how much one wants to believe it happened versus just how unreliable a narrator one believes Etoine to be. And I’m not at all sure but fascinated either way.

And if part of that fascination is related to T. Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier series that begins with the chilling and awesome folkloric horror of What Moves the Dead, set in the equally fictional country of Ruravia, that’s just fine with this reader.

In the end – as it was in the beginning – Notes from a Regicide is two things for certain. It’s a passionate love story between two beautifully damaged people, Zaffre and Etoine, because that’s the way Etoine wrote his Autoportrait. And it’s a son’s last love letter to the parents of his heart.

A++ #BookReview: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson BennettA Drop of Corruption (Shadow of the Leviathan, #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery, urban fantasy
Series: Shadow of the Leviathan #2
Pages: 465
Published by Del Rey on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The brilliant detective Ana Dolabra may have finally met her match in the gripping sequel to The Tainted Cup—from the bestselling author of The Founders Trilogy.
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.
To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.
Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.
Worse still, the killer seems to be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud. Here, the Empire's greatest minds dissect fallen Titans to harness the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the destruction would be terrible indeed—and the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.
Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat.

My Review:

There is something rotten in the state of the Empire. There are PLENTY of somethings ROTTING in the state of Yarrowdale, some naturally so, some deliberately so, some neglectfully so and some, even, all of the above. It’s a matter of which is which, which is what has brought Ana and Kol from their previous assignment to this rotting backwater on the edge of the Empire.

In a situation where the words “rotting”, “backwater” and “edge” should all be taken as many ways as possible – which is just the sort of situation that Ana Dolabra revels in solving.

Din’s first case assisting the eccentric genius (The Tainted Cup) began with the gorge-revolting sight of entirely too much corpse, as the victim had died as the result of a tree taking root in his stomach and growing downwards to root in the floor of the room in which he died even as the tree grew upward to entwine its branches with the ceiling.

This second case opens with much too little corpse, as all that officials have in the remote. soonish to be (negotiations are ongoing) imperial province of Yarrowdale of their latest assigned case are the right hand, left shoulder, and partial ribcage of the murder victim. The head comes later.

The carnivorous turtles that were clearly intended to handle corpse disposal must not have been quite hungry enough to get the job done before chance threw the remaining bits up and into the path of Imperial Iudex Commander Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol.

It’s all part of just the delightful kind of clever, confounding, murderous puzzle that Ana Dolabra literally seems to live for, as it begins with a diabolical bit of a locked room mystery that sends out roots and tendrils until it blossoms into a vast, far-reaching conspiracy that threatens to topple the Empire.

Only for the entire, province-spanning construct to collapse of its own weight into the person of one small man who has lost sight of his purpose – as well as his mind – in a web of greed of his own manufacture, leaving Ana Dolabra bemoaning the banality of his crime even while she brings down its perpetrator and saves the empire yet again.

As she was made to do.

Escape Rating A++: For this enthralled but still somewhat emotionally exhausted reader, A Drop of Corruption – at nearly 500 pages (I think that estimate is LOW) – represents a lost weekend. I dove into the story late on Saturday and didn’t emerge until Sunday evening, still mired in a book hangover that seems as if it will require every bit as much time to recover from as one of the psychotropic drug binges that aid Ana in her deliberations.

I picked up the first book in this series, The Tainted Cup, because I couldn’t resist the premise. It’s billed as a take-off, or perhaps homage would be a better word, to Holmes and Watson. But it’s set in an epic fantasy world – for epic in multiple senses of the word. I haven’t seen this combination done at all, let alone as well as it is here, since the late Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series a VERY long time ago.

There has been a recent run on science fiction mysteries, including an SF Holmes and Watson-esq duo in Claire O’Dell’s A Study in Honor, but fantasy mystery, not so much. (The exact opposite is happening in regards to fantasy, SF and romance, as fantasy romance is hugely on the uptick, but science fiction romance is ticking along at the same rate it has always been – meaning some and some really good but not a lot.)

What makes Ana and Kol’s investigations so fascinating – and so much weird fun to watch – are the way that the series combines their very peculiar characters – and Ana in particular is quite peculiar in multiple ways – the way their strengths and weakness shore each other up in a relationship that is clearly NEVER heading towards the romantic, AND the way they stand on the shoulders of Holmes and Watson without ever being slavishly devoted to the portrayal yet STILL managing to sharply delineate the outlines we know, love and expect.

At the same time, those character outlines are firmly set in a fantasy world that is wild and weird and strange in ways that are completely unexpected while still sitting in a frame that practically defines current epic fantasy.

There’s no epic battle between good and evil here. There’s just the evil that men, and women, and other creatures, do. Those evils are committed in a corrupt empire that is rotting from within and without – and those evils are battled by people, like Ana and Din, who are doing their damndest to stem the tide and make sure the Empire remains a place worth fighting for – in their own way.

Layered on top of all that is that there is no wand-waving magic. But there are magical potions, and concoctions, and decoctions, and grafts, and pills in a vast pharmacopeia that literally boggles the mind. It certainly boggles Ana’s mind whenever she’s in need of inspiration, stimulation, or simply something to stave off ennui.

That pharmacopeia serves as both the foundation of the empire and most likely the source of its eventual destruction. That drop of corruption in the title, is everywhere and in everything and is what makes this world go ‘round even as it brings it ever closer to the edge of annihilation. As it very nearly does in this entry in the series.

A series which I dearly hope is not even close to done yet. Because damn but the whole thing is mesmerizing and fascinating and more than reminiscent of a fever dream created by Holmes’ own 7 percent solution – if not something a bit stronger. And I’m absolutely riveted by every single part of it.

(Book three is listed in Goodreads but with no title and no date. Still, that gives me hope!)

So come for the mystery, because it is compelling from the moment its tiny locked room is opened, all the way through its mind-blowing vastness and right into its surprisingly small conclusion even as its consequences spill out to bankrupt a province and change the course of an empire. Stay to watch that drop of corruption cause gigantic ripples in the course of a vast empire. Then wait and hope with me for more in this compelling series.

#BookReview: Last Chance to Save the World by Beth Revis

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Last Chance to Save the World by Beth RevisLast Chance to Save the World (Chaotic Orbits #3) by Beth Revis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Chaotic Orbits #3
Pages: 133
Published by DAW on April 8, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The explosive, satisfying conclusion to the Chaotic Orbits novella trilogy sees Ada and Rian breaking into a high-security facility to give Earth a fighting chance at survival

Sexy, fast, fun and funny, this happily-ever-after ending is perfect for fans of the Murderbot novels and the Wayfarers series

After a few weeks trapped on board a spaceship with Ada (and, oh look, there’s only one bed), Rian has to admit that maybe Ada’s rebels have a point. The nanobots poised to be unleashed on Earth are infected with malware that will ultimately leave the residents of Earth in a worse position than they’re in now. But is it too late?

Ada and Rian arrive on Earth with little time to spare. Together, they have to break into a high-security facility and infect the nanobots with a counter-virus before they’re released in order to give Earth a fighting chance. And if Ada happens to notice some great tech laying around in this high-security facility she shouldn’t have access to and then happens to steal a bunch of it when Rian’s not looking? Well, he knew who she was before he teamed up with her. And if he wants it back, he’s going to have to catch her first.

With countless twists and turns, this enemies-to-lovers slow-burn and high-tension romance plays on a Sherlock and Moriarity character dynamic rooted in science fiction with a heavy romance and mystery angle.

My Review:

Ada Lamarr’s caper-and-heist riddled ‘chaotic orbit’ of the galaxy is on its way back to a corporate controlled, pollution ravaged Sol-Earth when this third entry in the series opens. Ada and her reluctant passenger, government agent Rian White, have finalized their plans to thwart an evil corporate kingpin who planned to hold Earth’s environmental recovery for ransom for the next, well, forever.

Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy. The second biggest problem with this plan is that the first enemies it has to survive are each other, because Ada and Rian, no matter how much they might be on the same page when it comes to Earth’s potential recovery – are enemies in every other way.

They might both wish that they were enemies-with-benefits, but they are also both smart enough not to get that deeply involved – all puns intended – with someone they can’t trust. Particularly when they know that said enemy ALREADY has plans to betray them at the first available opportunity.

But the real problem, at least from Ada’s perspective, is that the first enemy that her plan has to survive isn’t the uptight government agent she’s been lusting after since they crashed into each other in Full Speed to a Crash Landing.

The first enemy Ada’s plan has to get passed isn’t Rian, it isn’t the government, it isn’t even the squadrons of corporate security drones and goons her target has stationed to protect his ‘investment’.

First, foremost and with way less prep than Ada ever likes to have, Ada has to get her crazy, convoluted scheme past her mother.

Escape Rating B+: A HUGE part of the fun of the Chaotic Orbits series in both Full Speed to a Crash Landing and How to Steal a Galaxy is that the story is told from the inside of Ada Lamarr’s, wheels-within-wheels, lies-hiding-lies and misdirections all around very intelligent and utterly snarky head.

Which means that we’re aware that Ada is pulling some kind of con – but not necessarily the same con – on every single person around her. Including herself. So even though we’re in her very own skull there are still secrets that aren’t revealed until the very end of the caper – if not a bit after – because there are plenty of things in Ada’s mind and heart that she doesn’t want to think about. Possibly ever.

The biggest thing she’s not willing to think about is her sure and certain knowledge that Rian is going to betray her in the end – if he hasn’t already. It’s only fair, because her plan to betray him has been baked into this caper from its opening gambit back in that first book.

The part that she’s not willing to think about is that she wishes the situation were otherwise. He’s Mister Law-and-Order. He can’t live the chaotic, one-step-ahead-of-the-authorities, the ends-justify-the-means-as-long-as-there’s-a-big-payday, next-heist-please life that Ada thrives on.

And those natures are much too baked into both of their psyches for either of them to ever change. So in addition to her many, many thoughts and concerns about her plans for this particular caper, Ada also spends a lot of her internal energy veering away from the heartbreak she tried to avoid but knows, deep in her heart, is coming anyway.

So, on the top level of this story, the takedown of the stupid evil villain/greedy corporate monster, the thing that Ada has been working on from before the beginning of the series, and every single lie and misdirect since – all of that is absolutely righteous. And it’s a win all the way around. Earth has a chance to get better – if we don’t screw it up again.

But the catharsis of that HUGE win is blunted because we’re pretty much all on Team Ada, we’re all shipping Ada and Rian – and their relationship takes a HUGE, messy hit in this story. They’ve both been forced to realize that what they feel for each other, as totally ill-advised as it might be, is also absolutely real. And that they can’t both be themselves AND have each other.

That part of the story ends on a note of possibility, both for Ada and Rian finding each other again and for that finding to be part of another caper/heist of some sort. Whether that means another book in the series, or was just a way to end things with a hint of will they/won’t they/can they/should they is something we’ll hopefully see in the future. Which means that the HEA promised in the blurb is still some ways off – at best.

As for this reader, I want to keep right on shipping Ada and Rian, but I can’t see a way to make it work. I hope the author can, and that we ALL get to see it!