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

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 WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter 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!

#BookReview: Single Player by Tara Tai

#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 WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter 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- #AudioBookReview: Trap Line by Timothy Zahn

A- #AudioBookReview: Trap Line by Timothy ZahnTrap Line by Timothy Zahn
Narrator: Greg D. Barnett
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 49
Length: 1 hour and 21 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazon
Goodreads

An engineer’s groundbreaking solo mission is rudely interrupted when he stumbles into an interstellar trap. The New York Times bestselling author of the Thrawn trilogy is back with a wholly original short story of first contact.
En route to far-off stars, Toby’s consciousness has a crucial mission: inhabit his clone long enough to repair a spaceship, then zip back to Earth. He’s done it a million times, more or less. OK, twelve times. It should only take a few hours.
Until he wakes up in jail. And he’s not alone.
His fellow prisoners: a cadre of alien soldiers. His prison: an ethereal boundary that will imprison their spirits until their bodies die. His jailers can’t even see him. But their pet cat (er, iguana cat?) can—and it’s got a serious case of the zoomies.
With humanity’s place in the odd and ever-widening universe riding on Toby’s choices, it’s time to saddle up for a ghostly game of cat and mouse.

My Review:

What Toby Collier comes to appreciate when his ‘astral’ manifests in an alien trap instead of aboard the Terran FarJump ship Janus out in the far flung galaxy is something attributed to poet William Butler Yeats centuries before Toby was born, that “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”

Certainly neither Toby, nor anyone from Earth, has ever met anyone similar to the vaguely avian-like Hyfisk, the soldiers with whom Toby is trapped in a small, family-operated space ship in the middle of the great, wide galaxy that all of them were traversing.

The family, Porpou, his wife, their daughter Ibbi and her ‘iguana cat’ Bisqitty, make their living by trapping astrals like Toby and the Hyfisks and reporting them to the ‘Overmasters’, whoever or whatever THEY are. For the family, it’s a living – if not necessarily a luxurious or even steady one.

But the trap is a roadblock for the astrals, an interruption that will lead to Toby’s death when he doesn’t complete his job out on the far reaches of human-discovered space and return in a reasonable time frame. Because his bosses will cut their losses along with the life-support of his physical body.

The Hyfisks’ situation is more dire – they are soldiers on the way to defend an important colony from an aggressive enemy. Not that they also won’t die when their life support is cut, but their duty is more important to them than their individual lives.

Except that they have been stuck in that trap long enough to give up. Toby, freshly trapped, hasn’t. And is determined not to. He’s also an engineer rather than a soldier, and he hasn’t yet met a puzzle that he’s not going to at least attempt to solve.

The Hyfisk can’t solve the problem with the knowledge they have. Toby, on the other hand, brings fresh – if non-corporeal – eyes and mind to the same problem and figures out that if they share their knowledge, they can escape. If they trust each other enough.

And if they can get the iguana cat to cooperate – which might be the most difficult part of the whole thing. Her name isn’t pronounced ‘BisKITTY’ for nothing.

Escape Rating A-: Trap Line turned out to be a whole lot of fun and I’m very glad I listened to/read it. Even though I initially picked it up because I was having a difficult time getting into anything. Monday’s book seriously did a number on my concentration, but this little story turned out to be the cure.

I picked this up through Kindle Unlimited – a subscription I get happier about all the time. It was fun, it was quick, the audio narrator did a great job portraying Toby AND the Hyfisks and it all just made for the reading pick-me-up I was desperate for.

For an SF story, Trap Line was surprisingly cozy. It’s a small cast in an even smaller setting, just ten Hyfisks, three insectoid aliens, an iguana cat, and Toby. It’s also small in length, but it sets itself well AND gives the reader just enough to get why and how Toby and Irion, the commander of the Hyfisks, manage to come to (mostly) trust each other in this “enemy of my enemy is my friend’ scenario. Particularly as Toby and the humans aren’t aware of the Overmasters enough to BE their enemy – at least not yet – AND Toby manages to convince Irion that the trap-keeping family are not really an enemy to either of them. They’re all just trying to get by – like everyone else.

That this is also a story about the cleverness of humans and the inventiveness of our species instead of any attempt to win by domination or violence – and not just because it wouldn’t work in this situation AT ALL – made this a whole lot of fun, with a comforting layer of competence over the whole thing.

It broke my reading slump – and I’m incredibly grateful for that!

Even though Toby, the Hyfisks, and Porpou have no ability to communicate all together (Toby and the Hyfisks can communicate because they’re all astrals), they still manage to concoct a mutually beneficial plan that has the wonderful added benefit of sticking it to the Overmasters for all of them without the Overmasters being aware that they’ve been shafted. Toby, the Hyfisks and Porpou have made friends, even if they haven’t managed to share a single word in ANY language – and their quiet rebellion makes for a glorious – and friendly – ending to this delightful short story.

A- #BookReview: The Three Locks by Bonnie MacBird + Giveaway!

A- #BookReview: The Three Locks by Bonnie MacBird + Giveaway!The Three Locks (Sherlock Holmes Adventure #4) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #4
Pages: 418
Published by Collins Crime Club, HarperCollins on April 13, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A heatwave melts London as Holmes and Watson are called to action in this new Sherlock Holmes adventure by Bonnie MacBird, author of "one of the best Sherlock Holmes novels of recent memory." In the West End, a renowned Italian escape artist dies spectacularly on stage during a performance – immolated in a gleaming copper cauldron of his wife's design. In Cambridge, the runaway daughter of a famous don is found drowned, her long blonde hair tangled in the Jesus Lock on the River Cam. And in Baker Street, a mysterious locksmith exacts an unusual price to open a small silver box sent to Watson. From the glow of London's theatre district to the buzzing Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where physicists explore the edges of the new science of electricity, Holmes and Watson race between the two cities to solve the murders, encountering prevaricating prestidigitators, philandering physicists and murderous mentalists, all the while unlocking secrets which may be best left undisclosed. And one, in particular, is very close to home.

My Review:

I lost count of the total number of locks in this story early on, but I’m absolutely certain there were considerably more than three such items, particularly as more than one escape artist festooned himself with several at a time. Including Sherlock Holmes.

But the first lock in this story is certainly the most poignant, not because it’s a trick lock – although it absolutely is – but because the key to it is locked in Dr. John Watson’s mind or memory. The fancy, filigreed, metal box arrives as a very late delivery from Watson’s equally late mother. The woman is 20 years dead, the box was supposed to have been delivered 10 years earlier, and Watson isn’t certain how he feels about what might be inside other than frustrated as it was not accompanied by its key and more than one locksmith has already thrown up their hands at the thing.

As this story opens, Watson is likewise frustrated with, or certainly in even less charity than usual, with Holmes’ rather high-handed treatment of him as well as his incessant showing-off of his gifts of observation by both observing and remarking upon things that Watson would rather not hear about. Such as the fact that Watson is frequently short in the pocket because he gambles more than he can afford to lose. And that perhaps he’s picked up a pound or three of excess avoirdupois that he can’t afford to gain.

No one enjoys being reminded of their own shortcomings – particularly when that reminder comes from someone who can’t seem to resist crowing about it more than a bit even as they refuse to acknowledge their own.

The cases that find Holmes and Watson as they are somewhat on the outs with each other present the pair with plenty of opportunities to disagree while there are several rather puzzling games afoot.

They are called to Cambridge by a nervous young clergyman who fears for the life of one of his parishioners. That said parishioner is young, beautiful and wealthy, and that she is dangling her possible affections in the path of not one or two but THREE young men – including the clergyman – makes this seem like the sort of melodrama that Holmes usually steers far away from.

They are also visited by a dynamic and vibrant woman of the stage – not the theatre stage but the magical stage. Madame Ilaria Borelli sees herself as an angel who takes promising stage magicians on as projects, provides them with career-making trick devices and effects – and then leaves them behind when they start believing that their new-found success is all their own doing. Her motives for calling on Holmes are obscured – as if by the smoke and mirrors of her profession – but he can’t resist this mystery any more than he can the conundrum in Cambridge.

That these two parallel mysteries, both involving provocative women who seem to lie like they breathe, and both involving locks of vastly different types, coalesce into one deadly mess is just what we expect from this pair. Two of the three locks in this case turn out to be deadly. But one heals a bit of Watson’s long-held heartbreak and guilt. All of which seems fitting for Holmes and Watson, as they put the lock on two murders and solve one of the great locked puzzles of Watson’s life.

Escape Rating A-: When I began reading this series back in November, that first book, Art in the Blood, had been buried deeply in the virtually towering TBR pile for nearly a decade. I was looking for a comfort read. As I always find Sherlock Holmes stories comforting, and I’d just finished something Holmes-like and was in search of yet more comfort, I remembered this series and as the saying goes, “Bob’s your uncle”. That I have now finished this Sherlock Holmes Adventure series – at least until the next book appears – in just six months says something about how much I’ve enjoyed the whole thing. Which I absolutely have.

Part of the fun of this series is that the portrayals of these well-known characters owe every bit as much to the screen portrayals of Holmes and Watson over the past 40 or so years (since Jeremy Brett on Masterpiece Theatre) as they do to the original canon. Many readers have claimed that this particular version owes more to the Robert Downey Jr/Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies than it does any other. Certainly, Watson and Holmes’ byplay in this particular entry in this particular series feels like it’s more from those movies than some of the other variations as they are more impatient with each other than is usually seen.

But what makes this particular series different from the others is the way that this author dives a bit more into their respective pasts. While the lock that opens this story is a piece of Watson’s past that we haven’t seen before, the overall series shows us a Holmes who is and has always been aware that he is a bit different from the norms of his time – and not just because he’s a genius. And that awareness gives him a sympathy with others who are similarly affected that we definitely see in this story.

Both Ilaria Borelli and Odelia Wyndham are women who refuse to fit into the boxes that Victorian society would imprison them in – and that’s why Holmes takes up their cases. He is particularly sympathetic to Odelia Wyndham, a bird in a gilded cage trying to break free by whatever means are available to her – and he fears from the very beginning that her thrashing within that cage is going to get her killed. Which it does, ensnared in Jesus Lock on the River Cam.

These are both the types of cases that the canon Holmes wouldn’t have touched. That he does here gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of a man who refuses to admit that he’s being driven by his heart and it adds new dimensions to a character we thought we knew.

If you like twisty mysteries, if you enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories, or if you’re looking for a new take on something familiar, this Sherlock Holmes Adventure series is delightful. So delightful, in fact, that I’m a bit sad that I’m caught up because now I’ll have to wait and see whether or not it continues with my fingers crossed in hope.

~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

I’ve read through the (so far) six books in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series by Bonnie MacBird in just six months because they feature fresh interpretations of characters that I know and love, they are marvelous and absorbing historical mysteries, and they ably filled my need for comfort reads at a time when such have been needed more than ever. I’ve had a grand time slipping into this world with these characters, and I fully confess I’m more than a bit sad that I don’t have any left until the much hoped for next book in the series arrives.

So I’m sharing my love of this series with all of you, in the hopes that making more readers for it will bring the next book faster. At the very least, I promise a good reading time – especially for the winner of today’s giveaway. On this the FIFTH day of this year’s celebration, I’m giving away the winner’s choice of ANY book in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series by Bonnie MacBird in any format, up to $25(US) which should be enough to get even the latest book, The Serpent Under, if you’re already caught up.

Good luck with today’s giveaway, don’t forget to check out the previous days’ giveaways and remember that there’s still more to come!

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Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. HarrowThe Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow
Narrator: Aida Reluzco
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, dystopian, fantasy, horror, short stories
Pages: 36
Length: 1 hour and 17 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazon
Goodreads

New York Times bestselling author Alix E. Harrow weaves a dystopian fairy tale that follows the town storyteller as she struggles to protect a local demon from the knight hired to kill it.
In this gritty, haunting tale about doing whatever it takes for love, a small-town storyteller resolves to keep the local monster—and her own secrets—safe from a legendary knight.
Nestled deep in the steep hills, valleys, and surrounding woodlands lies Iron Hollow, a rural community beset by demons. Such horrors are common in the outlands, where most folks die young, if they don’t turn into monsters first. But what’s causing these transformations?
No one has the answer, not even the town’s oral historian, seventeen-year-old Shrike. And when a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest beast to haunt their woods, Shrike has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still human, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.
Determined to keep May safe, Shrike stalks the knight and his demon-hunting hawk through the recesses of the forest. But as they creep through toxic creeks and overgrown kudzu, Shrike realizes the knight has a secret of his own. And he’ll do anything to protect it.

My Review:

I picked this up for two reasons. The first reason – and the more important – is that I really loved The Starling House by this same author, also in audio. The second reason is that I’ve been experimenting with a Kindle Unlimited subscription and have really liked some of the Amazon Original Stories with audio that I’ve discovered, notably my holiday romp through the Under the Mistletoe Collection.

The Knight and the Butcherbird looked like exactly the kind of story I’ve been enjoying more lately, dark fantasy hovering over the edge of horror, in a nice, bite-sized audio version by an author I already like. It sounded like a win/win – and it absolutely was. All the more so because this is one of those stories that straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy in a way that chills, thrills, and makes the reader, or at least this reader, go both “Aha!” AND “Ahhhh” at the end.

It also turned out to remind me of a whole lot of different, differently weird and differently creepy stories while blending into a darkly satisfying whole.

This is very much a dystopia, the kind of dystopia you get when your story is set on an Earth that we’ve fucked around on and left the consequences for our descendants. At first, I thought it was a bit Mad Max but things aren’t quite that bad – or at least the violence isn’t quite that widespread.

Instead, it’s very much like the world of Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds duology, where pollution has ruined the ground, the air, the wildlife and the weather, but people are hanging on by the literal edge of their fingernails, like the grim death that’s inevitably coming for them sooner than it should.

But that’s the view in the ‘outlands’, which is very much where Iron Hollow survives in remote, rural Appalachia. Just as in Clouds, there are “Enclaves”, protected places where technology is still functional, where the elite live in abundance, health and prosperity and look down upon the dying primitives that send them raw materials to keep their technology functional so they can remain all of the above.

Those outlands, still rife with pollution and radiation and microplastics, produce more than just raw materials. They are also plagued by monsters. Monsters that the Enclave-folk call demons. Monsters that used to be their friends and their loved ones, transformed by an alchemy that no one understands and no one can cure.

The Enclaves send out knights to eliminate those monsters. Not out of altruism. Not out of the goodness of their hearts. Out of need and greed. The populations of the Enclaves have grown too large for their technology to maintain. The outlanders are dying off, each generation smaller than the next. Extinction is in sight. All the Enclaves need to do is wait to sweep into what will soon be empty lands.

But those lands are filled with monsters, and until the science of the Enclaves can find a way to stop humans from becoming monsters, the land they covet is not safe for them to take.

The knight that comes to Iron Hollow has come to kill the latest monster. The monster that, as far as Shrike, Iron Hollow’s scribe and archivist is concerned, is still her wife May. Whether May is a monster or not. Because, when all is said and done, aren’t all of us capable of becoming monsters if the need is great enough?

Escape Rating A: This was a story that chilled me to the bone – even though I laughed myself silly when the knight of this story, Sir John, said that he had been sent by the “King of Cincinnati”. (I don’t see my old hometown mentioned much in fiction, and I absolutely wasn’t expecting it here.)

This story starts out dark, and it gets darker as it goes, and not in the ways the reader initially expects.

First because it’s saturated with Shrike’s bottomless grief. She and her wife were childhood besties, young sweethearts, happy marrieds, and now Shrike is a widow. At seventeen, because people in the outlands don’t live past 40 if they even reach that milestone.

Most monsters are found early, because the metamorphosis manifests as an illness that changes people from, well, people, to red-eyed shapeshifters with hoofs and horns, or feathers and claws, or gills and fins, and eventually to all of the above in a neverending kaleidoscope of transformation.

Shrike, as the historian, archivist, chronicler and storyteller of the hollow, knows that the mutation isn’t truly a disease, and that there is no real cure. Her only real fear about the nature of her wife’s condition is her fear that the transformation has wiped out May’s recognition of her and her memory of their love.

The knight’s secret provides Shrike with the answer she has long hoped for, even as her storytelling provides him with an answer that he wishes he had never learned.

As I listened to the audiobook of The Knight and the Butcherbird, read marvelously by Aida Reluzco, even as I was absorbed in the story I was surprised, teased and occasionally outright puzzled by all the stories it reminded me of. And I want to share those before I close as on the one hand this story was exactly the right length for what it wanted to tell AND I wanted more like it at the same conflicted time.

The setup of the elite Enclaves vs the disease-ridden outlands is very similar to The Annual Migration of Clouds and We Speak Through the Mountains, definitely including the patronizing attitudes of the Enclave citizens towards the outlanders they exploit. The slow, hidden transformation of humans into monsters, as well as that creepy border-shifting sense that the story is on the sharp and pointy line between the darkest of fantasy and the fear-shiver of horror is similar to T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night as well as Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater. (Tracking down that the thing stuck in my head was Star Eater took quite a while because I didn’t even like it all that much but it there were parts of it that were creepy in exactly the same way that The Knight and the Butcherbird is creepy, although Star Eater has plenty of extra creepy bits that are all its own.) There are also hints of Idolfire in those dying dystopian outlands.

But the biggest surprises were just how much of The Last Unicorn and the movie Ladyhawke I found in The Knight and the Butcherbird. I wasn’t expecting both the state of the world and Sir John’s quest to hit so many of the same notes that The Last Unicorn did. And I absolutely did not come into this story thinking that Ladyhawke would fly away with the whole thing after all.

The Knight and the Butcherbird is not exactly a happy story, but it is a haunting one. It is also very, very satisfying, in an astonishingly rueful way. I’m glad I spent an hour with the knight, the butcherbird, and their beloved monsters.

#BookReview: One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed

#BookReview: One Message Remains by Premee MohamedOne Message Remains by Premee Mohamed
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, horror, short stories
Pages: 188
Published by Psychopomp on February 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

Pageantry, pomp, pretense, and peril—"The General's Turn,” originally published in The Deadlands, drew readers into the dark world of a ceremony where Death herself might choose to join the audience... or step onto the stage.
Award-winning author Premee Mohamed presents three brand new stories set in this morally ambiguous world of war and magic. In “One Message Remains,” Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them—and they have chosen their weapons well.
In “The Weight of What is Hollow,” Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor.
Finally, in “Forsaking All Others,” ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother's village, he is joined by a fellow deserter—and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself.
“Premee Mohamed is one of Canada's most exciting thinkers and writers of speculative fiction. Her stories bravely go where few dare to, each employing a deftness of language and surety of form that offers a fresh experience each time. One Message Remains and the stories within are no exception, each tale different from the other, yet all very much quintessential Premee stories. Readers of her works, long and short both, will find much to love here.” — Suyi Davies Okungbowa, author of Son of the Storm and Lost Ark Dreaming

My Review:

I picked up this collection because I found several of the author’s previous works compelling, particularly The Annual Migration of Clouds, We Speak Through the Mountain, and especially The Butcher of the Forest. (I keep finding more and more books that remind me of Butcher, including yesterday’s book!)

It might look like all of the above are novellas – only because they are. The stories in this collection are as well – or toe up to that line from the novelette side. In other words, none of these are terribly long – and they don’t need to be.

Together, they make a fractured whole. Fractured because they are loosely centered around a fractured place, the conquered province of East Seudast by the conquering country of Treotan. The individual stories, three of which are new for this collection, revolve around the states of conquering and being conquered. Of what it means to see every country in the world as ‘lesser’ and ‘barbaric’ and ‘incapable of using their resources properly’, as though that gives another country the right to roll right over them.

And all of those are mere excuses for overweening cupidity and above all, hubris.

On the other side, there’s the cost of all of that rapaciousness. That seeing everyone and everything else on the face of the map as beneath their notice means that the conquerors learn nothing about those they conquer, learn nothing about the land, and learn nothing about the beliefs that bind those who resist.

Not even the dead.

“One Message Remains”
Major Lyell Tzajos believes that he has been assigned an important duty by the Treotan military, a task that will result in promotions all around once he – and the team whose names he can’t even manage to remember – completes their task. A task which Tzajos considers a humanitarian mission towards the people of their newly conquered province.

But Tzajos is a small man in a job that is still much too big for him, assigned to this command because, on paper at least, it suits his punctilious, meticulous, duty-bound, bean-counting nature down to the literal ground. Which is, in fact, the literal bedrock of the duty. Digging up the graves of the enemy, identifying each and every one of their bodies, and repatriating those bodies and their effects to families who must still be looking for closure in regards to the fate of their family members.

Of course, the Treotans didn’t ask the Dastians what they thought about this mission, because from their perspective, including Tzajos’ obedient, practically slavish devotion to the standards of his homeland, the Dastians are ‘barbarians’ and their beliefs about corpses and spirits and Death are unscientific and illogical.

Even though, as it turns out, those beliefs are entirely true.

There is a LOT to unpack in this story, so it is fitting that it is the longest one in the collection. We’re inside Tzajos’ head – and the man is a hot mess from the beginning. He is truly a small man, trying to pretend that he is bigger, failing, knowing that he’s failing, and still not seeing the ways in which he is. He IS, after all, trying to do his best. It’s just that his beliefs about what constitutes best are so deeply ingrained in his own culture that he is WAY off course. He’s not actually evil, he’s just so brainwashed that he can’t see that what his country is doing IS evil. He starts out lost and gets even more so and doesn’t take any control of anything at all until his end, and even then he only gets glimmers of understanding. That I could easily map Tzajos onto any overworked, underqualified functionary in any rapacious empire, fictional or historical, made this story even more compelling and more thought provoking than the premise hinted at. Escape Rating A

“The Weight of What Is Hollow”
This is the story that should have been the creepiest – and it is – but not in any of the ways that one might think going into it. Because it’s not really about the truly creepy idea of building a gallows out of human bones for the purpose of hanging a criminal which will provide more human bones. Because the bones may be the creep but they’re not the point.

The point is about creepy humans with power, and quiet resistance to that power. The local Treotan commander thinks he can overpower a female apprentice boneworker through might, intimidation and threats. Her family is afraid, and begs her to submit – because they fear for their own necks and they are right to do so. So she appears to step on the path the commander wants, knowing the end. But she only appears to, and appearance as it turns out, is everything.

I liked this a lot. OTOH, at its heart the story could fit into pretty much any fantasy world, and I adored the way that Taya subverted the narrative that was planned for her. Very much on the other hand, the details of their traditions added depth to the worldbuilding and pulled me in hard and well and truly. I also enjoyed the way that this story was about the war without being buried neck deep in the war. It’s a much subtler way of fighting back that was needed in this collection. Taya’s the one character in all of the stories that I would LOVE to see more of. Escape Rating A+

“Forsaking All Others”
This one didn’t quite stick for me. I was into it while I was reading it, but it didn’t catch at my memory the same way that the other three stories did in their different ways. At first, it’s a story about two deserters trying to find a place to lay low where the Treotans won’t find them. But then the story changes into something that’s more about the traditions and beliefs of the conquered land – and that they are still alive and well and may have deadly consequences for anyone who believes that they’ve won. Escape Rating B

“The General’s Turn”
This is the one story in this collection that has been previously published, in this particular case in The Deadlands, Issue 3, July 2021 as well as The Long List Anthology Volume 8: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List because this story was on the long list for the Hugos in 2022. It’s also the one story in this collection that leaned the furthest into horror AND the one story out of the four that didn’t work for me, although not because of the horror.

The story here feels like it’s about exploring the rot at the heart of the Treotan ‘empire’. On the one hand, it’s VERY creepy, all about an elaborate murder machine operated by a bunch of supposed elites who claim to be carrying out a grand, old, ritual but are really just there for the humiliation of the chosen victim and the inevitable carnage as that victim is toyed with and then literally ground into a bloody pulp.

We’re in the head of the ‘general’ controlling this whole affair, someone who believes in the spirit of what this ceremony used to be, and who is tired – possibly unto death – of all the inevitabilities baked into it. In a fit of ennui – he decides to change the script. It’s not mercy, it’s not enlightenment, it’s just another and different way of turning the screws.

It’s probably intended as a play on the idea that the ‘empire’ is really a gigantic clockworks that is intended to grind everyone, friends and enemies alike, under the wheels of its so-called ‘progress’ and ‘efficiency’. I may have needed to message to be a bit more explicit if that is the case. Escape Rating C

Overall Escape Rating B

#AudioBookReview: Do Me A Favor by Cathy Yardley

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

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

My Review:

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

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

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

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

Which is what makes this story special.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#AudioBookReview: The Conjurer’s Wife by Sarah Penner

#AudioBookReview: The Conjurer’s Wife by Sarah PennerThe Conjurer's Wife by Sarah Penner
Narrator: Helen Laser
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 40
Length: 1 hour and 2 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on January 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazon
Goodreads

In nineteenth-century Venice, a young woman’s marriage to an illusionist hides secrets that go deeper than his spectacular acts. The stage is set for transformation in a mesmerizing short story by the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Apothecary.
In 1820s Venice, world-renowned magician Oscar Van Hoff confounds sold-out crowds with his astounding manifestations. Even his beautiful wife and assistant, Olivia, is mystified. Her job is to smile and recite her lines—onstage and in society. But the thankless routine is bringing out her rebellious side. Then, on the eve of what promises to be Oscar’s greatest performance yet, Olivia uncovers a secret with the power to shatter all her husband’s illusions. Now the finale belongs to her.

My Review:

The story begins simply, and seems a bit familiar even if, or especially because of its historical setting.

We open with, and looking through the eyes of, the titular conjurer’s wife, Olivia Van Hoff, standing on the stage of an early 19th century Venice theater, waiting for the curtain to rise on her husband’s masterful magical show filled with absolutely breathtaking illusions that no one can penetrate. Not even Olivia, who is not only his wife but also his assistant both onstage and off.

But Oscar is a man who demands that everything be ‘just so’, both on the stage and in their private life. Olivia is standing, knowingly, willfully and rebelliously, three whole entire inches off her mark when the curtain rises.

She can tell that Oscar is incensed. Olivia, however, is practically drunk on the tiny flame of rebellion kindled in her heart. Just as Olivia learns that defiance can be intoxicating, we learn that Oscar is an abusive bastard, and that Olivia has a form of amnesia so all-encompassing that she remembers nothing before their hasty marriage only one year previously.

And just as Olivia has a whole lot of sneaking suspicions about her life before the terrible accident that resulted in her amnesia, the mysteriously masterful nature of Oscar’s illusion, and the suspicious coincidence of timing between her accident and his rise to fame – so do we.

Olivia isn’t necessarily searching for the truth, or even, specifically, a way out of her marriage and the life in the spotlight that she has no desire for. Or, truthfully, for Oscar himself. But that does not mean she does not know precisely what to do with the truth when she finds it.

Escape Rating B: I initially picked this up because it looked like a quick read on a cloudy day, and because I liked two of the author’s previous books, The Lost Apothecary and The London Séance Society. At only 40 pages I read it over lunch, thought it was interesting but not very deep – which is fair for a 40 page story – and moved on with my reading.

(The Conjurer’s Wife also reminded me more than a bit of The Ladies of the Secret Circus by Constance Sayers, which is also a story about magic, performing under the spotlights, and secrets. Lots and lots of secrets.)

Then I picked up an eARC of the author’s upcoming book, The Amalfi Curse. Again, because I enjoyed The London Séance Society and The Lost Apothecary, and not just for their utterly gorgeous covers. But the blurb for The Amalfi Curse seemed like it was teasing me – specifically about something mentioned in The Conjurer’s Wife. Which led to the discovery that the audio of that short story was available through Amazon Prime, and that it would take me about an hour to listen to.

Which brings me to this review, because the story was even more interesting the second time around and the narrator, Helen Laser, did a terrific job as Olivia Van Hoff. Also, the story absolutely does tease something about the ‘witches of Positano’, Oscar’s potential and presumably unrealized ambitions in their direction, as well as the Amalfi coast if not (yet) The Amalfi Curse, making me all the more eager for the book coming at the end of April.

#BookReview: The Devil’s Due by Bonnie MacBird

#BookReview: The Devil’s Due by Bonnie MacBirdThe Devil’s Due (Sherlock Holmes Adventure #3) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #3
Pages: 384
Published by Harper Collins on October 10, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

After Art in the Blood and Unquiet Spirits, Holmes and Watson are back in the third of Bonnie MacBird’s critically acclaimed Sherlock Holmes Adventures, written in the tradition of Conan Doyle himself.
It’s 1890 and the newly famous Sherlock Holmes faces his worst adversary to date – a diabolical villain bent on destroying some of London’s most admired public figures in particularly gruesome ways. A further puzzle is that suicide closely attends each of the murders. As he tracks the killer through vast and seething London, Holmes finds himself battling both an envious Scotland Yard and a critical press as he follows a complex trail from performers to princes, anarchists to aesthetes. But when his brother Mycroft disappears, apparently the victim of murder, even those loyal to Holmes begin to wonder how close to the flames he has travelled. Has Sherlock Holmes himself made a deal with the devil?

My Review:

Two competing quotations ran through my brain as I read this third entry in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series, quotes that could not be further apart if they tried. One is the famous and often misquoted, mistranslated and/or misappropriated quote from the French writer, journalist and critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, who wrote in 1849, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. In English, that’s the more familiar, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” and it’s a phrase that Holmes and Watson would have been well familiar with.

The other quote is considerably later, and is also frequently misquoted and misappropriated. “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain!” As Montgomery Scott commented, or will, in 2286.

Together, those quotes encapsulate The Devil’s Due in some rather surprising ways.

On the surface, this is very much a classic mystery conundrum, as a serial killer is stalking London. One that it seems that only Sherlock Holmes recognizes as such. The police, in the person of the odious new Commissioner Titus Billings, are MORE than willing to take the various rulings of accidents and suicides at face value. Then again, Billings is obviously more interested in convictions than justice – in more ways than one.

Billings clearly hates Holmes to the point of mania, and is well on his way to infecting all of Scotland Yard with that hate along with the gutter press who are always in search of sensational news. Painting Sherlock Holmes as being in league with devils and demons is VERY sensational indeed.

That Billings sees everyone not of his race, class and national origins as an actual devil of one sort or another just adds to the furor. Or at least Billings’ fury. Billings wants to lay every crime in London at the feet of immigrant anarchists who are naturally inferior in every way to good Englishmen. He’s even lobbying for permission to arm and militarize Scotland Yard to see all those he hates harshly regulated and eventually expelled.

Even from very early in the story, it’s clear that Titus Billings is “A” villain in this story. Whether or not he’s “THE” villain is another matter entirely.

The case, or rather cases, that Holmes is investigating in spite of Billings’ interference are puzzling in the extreme. A group of philanthropists are being cleverly murdered in ways that appear as accidents or suicides. All by different means, all by different methods, often in different parts of the country, but always including collateral family damage in the form of yet more accidents and suicides.

Holmes is doubly captured by this case because it is both so diabolically clever and because his brother Mycroft is on the list of possible victims.

And again, there’s a character who stands out as “A” villain but not necessarily “THE” villain.

So Holmes is distracted and at cross-purposes with himself in this investigation even as he does his damndest to evade both the police and the reporters who are determined to catch him in a compromised position. Even if they have to arrange it for themselves. Which they have. And do. And most definitely ARE at every turn – or perhaps that should be wrench – of the screw.

Escape Rating B-: And this is the point where those quotes come in, along with the good old British expression about “over-egging the pudding”. Because, as much as I did enjoy this entry in the series, I didn’t like it nearly as much as the others. I ended the story, and actually middled the story, feeling like the pudding had been over-egged in every direction.

Previous entries in this series have read as if they owed some of their portrait of these beloved characters to late 20th and early 21st century portrayals. That’s both to be expected and at least a bit necessary, as Doyle’s Holmes was a man of his time, and we like to at least think we’ve moved beyond some of the extreme bigotry of that era – whether we actually have or not.

But this entry in particular, due to the over-the-top, over-egged and utterly odious Titus Billings, reads as though the story crossed the line into speaking more TO our time than FROM its historical setting. Billings as a character reads like a caricature of all that is odious in our now. Not that his attitudes weren’t common and not that those prejudices didn’t exist and have terrible influence, not that the movements against homeless people (often military veterans), immigrants (popularly ALL believed to be terrorists), women (who are presumed to be hysterical), etc., weren’t prevalent, but the details of the way Billings operated felt just a bit too pointed at now instead of then.

The character very much invoked that saying about the more things change, the more they remain the same, but in his methods and what little reasoning we saw from him, he was a bit too on our time’s nose instead of his own.

On the other hand, the crime spree itself very much lived up to Scotty’s comment about overthinking a system to the point of making it easier to break instead of more difficult. Which turns out, in the end, to be exactly how the true villain gets caught in Sherlock Holmes’ trap instead of the other way around.

But again, the villainy was extremely over-egged. It got so theatrical and so complicated that not only did the right hand not know what the left hand was doing but as a reader I got more than a bit lost in all the theatricality to the point that I stopped caring about the victims and just wanted to get ALL the players off the stage so that they – and I – could recover from their collective shenanigans.

In the end I’m glad I read this one because events in this adventure do get referred to in later books, but it felt a great deal longer than Unquiet Spirits in spite of that story being nearly 150 pages longer than this one.

Speaking of other books in this Sherlock Holmes Adventure series, I’ve been winding my way through this series over the past several months and for the most part enjoying them immensely. I was planning to review the latest, The Serpent Under, THIS month for a blog tour, but the tour organizer has taken ill and postponed the tour. While that is on hiatus, I felt the compulsion to fill the hole in my schedule with a different book in the series, hence this review. This didn’t quite live up to the other books in the series for this reader, but I have to say that The Serpent Under very much did and I can’t wait until I can post that review!

A- #AudioBookReview: Free as a Bird by Hailey Edwards

A- #AudioBookReview: Free as a Bird by Hailey EdwardsFree as a Bird (Yard Birds, #3) by Hailey Edwards
Narrator: Stephanie Richardson
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: paranormal, urban fantasy, witches
Series: Yard Birds #3
Pages: 119
Length: 3 hours and 35 minute
Published by Black Dog Books, Tantor Audio on September 10, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

When an old friend reaches out to Ellie, asking for help locating her missing coven members, she’s ready for her big comeback. Witchlight is financing the op, and it feels damn good to be official again.

But when her friend’s lies begin to unravel, Ellie realizes she’s let her ego lead her into a trap. And she’s brought her coven down with her. With the girls’ lives on the line, Ellie has to decide what’s more important—reliving her glory days or saving her best friends from a permanent retirement.

My Review:

There’s that quote that goes “All happy families are alike…” something that is probably a bit true even in tiny Samford, Alabama, where more of the families than even they know has at least a bit of witch blood nestled in their family tree.

Because that’s the way the witches planned it, long, long ago.

Even so, the families of Witchlight Hub Ellie Gleason and the members of her coven are just a bit different from most, as Ellie, Betty, Flo, Ida and Joan are all practicing witches, and their happy families have more than a few paranormal members, including Betty’s adopted sons, shifters all, and Ellie’s husband Wally, whose soul was cursed by a black witch into an (in)animate object. Currently that object is the bell around a mischievous kitten’s neck – so his lack of animation is occasionally up for debate.

Ellie and “her girls” have settled into retirement, more or less, sorta/kinda, however reluctantly. Ellie still itches for the “good old days”, or perhaps that for the “powerful old days”, when they all – at least together – had power to burn and more official, sanctioned missions than they could handle.

So when Leslie Brower,  their former boss at Witchlight, also a retired witch and leader of her own coven in nearby Mobile, calls Ellie to tell her that HER coven members have gone missing and that she needs the help of Ellie and her coven to investigate the disappearances, Ellie is all in. It’s one last shot at an official mission and she can’t wait to get to it.

The rest of the coven may be doing it for Ellie instead of for any last grab at glory, but that’s the point of the story in more ways than one – they are all in it together, whatever may come.

Even if what’s coming is a sharp turn way, way, way into the dark side of the force – fueled by their deaths.

Escape Rating A-: All happy families may be alike, but the lives that follow from those happy families may follow diverging paths. As a result, happy endings are NOT all alike, and that’s the story of this last entry in the Yard Birds series. A series which turns out to have been Ellie Gleason’s journey all along and is marvelously narrated from her first-person perspective by Stephanie Richardson in the audio versions.

The problem for Ellie is that the shape of her happy ever after got thrown out of whack when a black witch cursed Wally into a plastic fish. He’s still with her, but he’s also not, both at the same time. Part of her restlessness and unwillingness to deal with being retired is that those good old days of power were the days when Wally was human in body as well as in spirit.

When this entry in the series begins, Ellie is as restless as she has always been. The coven’s powers have waned over their long lifetimes, and they don’t have enough magical ‘juice’ to be active Witchlight agents. But Ellie keeps their collective hand in, as has been demonstrated in the first two books in the trilogy, Crazy as a Loon and Dead as a Dodo. They may have lost a good bit of their magical mojo but their brains are still plenty sharp and capable – even if they are all one bad fall away from joining Betty in the mobility scooter brigade.

What made the case that brings Ellie to Mobile so fascinating, as well as such a perfect wrap for the series, is the way that it isn’t about the whodunnit, which was obvious early on. It’s about the “whydunnit” in a way that holds a mirror up to Ellie. Leslie is who Ellie might have been, who she was in danger of becoming, someone who can’t accept the things she cannot change and goes the worst route possible to stave them off. Ellie could have been the perpetrator in the right/wrong circumstances, which makes this every bit as much of a wake-up call for her as it is a dark and satisfying urban fantasy adventure for the reader.

The ending of Free as a Bird is the right one, bittersweet and cathartic as it gives Ellie – and her friends – something that no one ever thought Ellie would accept, that the life she has, right here and right now, in tiny Samford IS her happy place, even if she’s reached that place via a road she never thought to travel.

The saga of the Yard Birds has come to a somewhat surprising – especially to Ellie – conclusion. I’m going to miss Ellie and her dear friends and coven mates – as well as Stephanie Richardson’s voice in my ear telling me every single thing going through Ellie’s head along the way. Ellie may have finished with her adventures – although this reader/listener certainly wouldn’t mind hearing from her again – but the author and the narrator have teamed up on quite a few more books that I’m planning to pick up the next time I’m looking for a reading/listening pick-me-up!