Genre: mystery

Review: Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: Chaos Terminal by Mur LaffertyChaos Terminal (The Midsolar Murders, #2) by Mur Lafferty
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Series: Midsolar Murders #2
Pages: 369
Published by Ace on November 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, and fled to outer space to avoid it…but when one of the new human arrivals on a space shuttle is murdered, she’s back in the game.
Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, thank you very much. But no matter what she does, people persist in dying around her—and only she seems to be able to solve the crime. After fleeing to an alien space station in hopes that the lack of humans would stop the murders, a serial killer had the nerve to follow her to Station Eternity. (Mallory deduced who the true culprit was that time, too.)
Now the law enforcement agent who hounded Mallory on Earth has come to Station Eternity, along with her teenage crush and his sister, Mallory’s best friend from high school. Mallory doesn’t believe in coincidences, and so she’s not at all surprised when someone in the latest shuttle from Earth is murdered. It’s the story of her life, after all.
Only this time she has more than a killer to deal with. Between her fugitive friends, a new threat arising from the Sundry hivemind, and the alarmingly peculiar behavior of the sentient space station they all call home, even Mallory’s deductive abilities are strained. If she can’t find out what’s going on (and fast), a disaster of intergalactic proportions may occur.…

My Review:

The title for this one works both ways. There’s plenty of chaos at this terminal, and much of it is terminal. But that’s not exactly a surprise with Mallory Viridian on the case. Even if part of the chaos at Station Eternity happens BECAUSE Mallory Viridian is on the case.

And entirely too much of the rest of it happens because not ALL of Mallory Viridian is on the case. To the point where Mallory isn’t even aware that there’s a case at all until someone literally drags her to the scene of the crime, and Mallory finally figures out that whatever has gone wrong on Station Eternity has gone wrong with her as well.

It’s not actually a surprise that something has gone wrong AROUND Mallory, or even that something has gone wrong WITH Mallory. Mallory is a chaos magnet of the first order, and both of those things are always happening whenever Mallory is around.

Because people always end up dead in Mallory’s vicinity. Not because she’s some kind of serial killer, but because the kind of chaos that Mallory attracts – and is then both blamed for and stuck with solving, not necessarily in that order – is the chaos that surrounds murder. She doesn’t perpetrate it, she doesn’t cause it, but wherever Mallory is, murder happens.

What Mallory is still adjusting to, and the reason that Mallory isn’t initially aware of the problems that the station is having, are directly related to Mallory’s discovery about herself and all those murders in the first book in the Midsolar Murders series, Station Eternity.

Mallory was bitten by a wasp as a child. But it wasn’t a wasp. Mallory was bitten by an advance scout for the Sundry, an alien insect species that either infiltrated Earth or arose there long before First Contact. The Sundry, as a hivemind and as a species, like gathering data and are attracted to chaos because there’s plenty of data to parse in chaotic conditions.

It’s unfortunate for Mallory that the scout that bit her was from a hivemind that was particularly attracted to the chaos around murder investigations, leading to pretty much everything that happens in Mallory’s life afterwards.

Leading Mallory to the isolation of Station Eternity – as a mere four humans aren’t enough to generate the coincidences that lead to Mallory’s brand of murder chaos.

There are, however, plenty of other species living and working aboard the station, including the chameleon-like Phantasmagore and the rocky Gneiss. And the Sundry, who in their love of chaos and data make a specialty of handling the semi-autonomous functions of spaceships and space stations.

But something is wrong with the Sundry aboard Station Eternity – and it’s wrong with Mallory as well. It’s so wrong that when a whole shipload of humans arrives on the Station, Mallory isn’t panicking about the near-certainty of murder in her vicinity. Not even as the coincidences start piling up. Suddenly there are entirely too many humans aboard Eternity, and too many of them know Mallory entirely too well.

It’s only when the bodies start dropping that Mallory finally figures out that the murders aren’t the only thing going wrong on the station, and that she’ll have to solve those murders without her murder-solving mojo – or get it back.

If she can.

Escape Rating B: One of the things that made the first book in this series, Station Eternity, so damn much fun was its relentless pace. From the moment we meet Mallory, the chaos starts swirling, Mallory starts panicking, and the whole thing is off to the races.

But when we get back to Mallory in Chaos Terminal, Mallory is not feeling herself. At all. She thinks it’s some kind of space flu. Whatever it is, she’s so far from firing on all thrusters she isn’t even aware that a huge chunk of what makes Mallory BE Mallory is totally offline.

The story isn’t told from Mallory’s first person perspective, but she is very much the reader’s perspective on events, which means that Mallory being in a complete fog for the first third of the book means that we are as well.

So it’s a third of the way into the story before Mallory’s fog lifts and the real action kicks into gear. At that point, it’s suddenly, thankfully and blissfully gangbusters, but it’s a LONG slog to get there and I very nearly didn’t.

The story, and the mystery, in Chaos Terminal is wrapped around cleaning up the many, many fascinating loose ends that were left laying on the deck of Eternity after the chaotic, nearly cataclysmic events of that first book – especially Mallory’s own, personal loose ends.

Which means that Chaos Terminal is probably not the best place to start the Midsolar Murders because a LOT of this story was set up in that first book. Howsomever, if you got caught up in Mallory’s bloody, madcap situation then, there’s a lot of fun in seeing most of those loose ends get tied up, quite possibly in a series of Gordian Knots, here in this second outing.

In spite of the science fictional setting – which is utterly fascinating – this SF mystery is pretty much character driven. Meaning that if you like Mallory as a character and enjoy her multi-species Scooby Gang, it will probably work for you. I did like Mallory a LOT in Station Eternity, so I came into Chaos Terminal expecting to love it as well. I think it works a bit less well than that first book because Mallory REALLY isn’t herself for that long beginning, and the less polished and/or less likable characters’ rough edges are very much on display while Mallory is getting her act together.

But I do like Mallory Viridian as a character, and as a human perspective on humanity’s first toehold in this near-future, post-First Contact, wider galactic universe. A universe that is not only not centered on humans, but doesn’t even seem to be centered on humanoids, making it every bit as fascinating a character as Mallory herself.

Which means that I absolutely will be back to see who, or what, ends up dead when Mallory’s next investigation/adventure/crisis appears!

Review: Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Some Danger Involved by Will ThomasSome Danger Involved (Barker & Llewelyn, #1) by Will Thomas
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Barker & Llewelyn #1
Pages: 290
Published by Touchstone on May 18, 2004
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An atmospheric debut novel set on the gritty streets of Victorian London, Some Danger Involved introduces detective Cyrus Barker and his apprentice, Thomas Llewelyn, as they work to solve the gruesome murder of a young scholar.
When a student bearing a striking resemblance to artists' renderings of Jesus Christ is found murdered -- by crucifixion -- in London's Jewish ghetto, 19th-century private detective Barker must hire an assistant to help him solve the sinister case. Out of all who answer an ad for a position with "some danger involved," the eccentric and enigmatic Barker chooses downtrodden Llewelyn, a gutsy young man whose murky past includes recent stints at both an Oxford college and an Oxford prison. As Llewelyn learns the ropes of his position, he is drawn deeper and deeper into Barker's peculiar world of vigilante detective work, as well as the dark heart of London's teeming underworld. Together they pass through chophouses, stables, and clandestine tea rooms, tangling with the early Italian mafia, a mad professor of eugenics, and other shadowy figures, inching ever closer to the shocking truth behind the murder.

My Review:

Fair warning, this review is going to be LONG, even for me. I really, truly, seriously LOVED this book – even more than I expected. And I had pretty high hopes going in.

We first meet our protagonists in a tried-and-true manner that does an excellent job of hinting at the mysteries and the reveals yet to come.

Cyrus Barker is a ‘private enquiry agent’ (read as private detective), in search of a new assistant, while down-so-low-bottom-looks-like-up Thomas Llewelyn, formerly of both Oxford University and Oxford Castle & Prison, has nothing left either to live for or to live on. He sees Barker’s advertisement as a decision point. Either he’ll get the job or he’ll throw himself in the Thames.

Of course, he gets the job – otherwise we wouldn’t have this marvelous book to read, let alone the series that follows.

But the job that he gets is nothing like he expected. On the one hand, his new employer likes to hold all his cards VERY close to his vest. Llewelyn is constantly flying blind, expected to figure things out by the seat of his pants.

Pants – along with every other stitch of clothing he has on – purchased for him by his employer, who is also providing food, board, education, and all the books the former scholar can read in his spare time – of which there is admittedly little.

Most important, Barker gives him purpose, keeps his mind fully engaged, and sets him to the task of learning the ins and outs of his new job while thinking on his feet and occasionally employing his fists.

But the ‘Help Wanted’ listing said that there was ‘some danger involved’ in the job, as the title of the book indicates. Barker’s previous assistant was killed while performing that job. Llewelyn will have to keep his wits about him every second to make sure that he doesn’t suffer the same fate.

Working with Cyrus Barker promises to be the making of him, IF he manages to survive it. We’ll certainly see how well he manages in the books ahead!

Escape Rating A+: I generally require my comfort reads to have a bit of body to hold my interest. I mean that literally, as my comfort reads tend to be historical mysteries, preferably in series, so that when I have a ‘bail and flail’ day – or week – there’s always another known quantity of a book to sweep me into its world.

Buuuut, I’m caught up with one series I was using as comfort reading, the Sebastian St. Cyr series. And I’m nearly caught up with its readalike series, Wrexford & Sloane. Which left me scrabbling for another, which is very much where Barker & Llewelyn came in.

This first entry in the Barker & Llewelyn series turned out to be a comfort read on not just one but multiple levels, which is pretty amazing.

Most importantly, the partnership of Barker & Llewelyn is at its very beginning in this book, and they are fascinating – partly because of the second reason. The period in which this series takes place is the Victorian era, the bailiwick of the Great Detective and his equally famous amanuensis. In other words, Barker & Llewelyn could easily find themselves in competition with Sherlock Holmes – even more than they already are.

It’s not difficult to see Barker as Holmes and Llewelyn as his Watson, but that famous duo serves mostly as a jumping off point for our protagonists in this series. This isn’t a true Holmes pastiche as the Lady Sherlock or The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes series, or the TV series Sherlock and Elementary, are.

Not that Barker doesn’t have similarities to Holmes, but more in the sense that any capable senior partner in a detective duo shares at least some characteristics with the Great Detective. What sets Barker apart is the way that Barker is, well, set apart.

Detectives are often outsiders in their own cultures, it’s what gives them the ability to observe in detachment and solve the case. Sherlock Holmes is an outsider because of his idiosyncrasies, as is made extremely apparent in the modern interpretations. However, from what little we know of Holmes’ earlier life, he’s at least a member of the squirearchy and was raised in at least upper middle class comfort with all of its privileges.

Barker has been an outsider all of his life, an English orphan abandoned in China, making his way around the globe from a rough start as a cabin boy, initially seeing the world from outside the British Empire and from the bottom up. He’s earned his place by working his way into it.

He’s also a considerably more human character than Holmes frequently is. Barker often hides the real depths of his humanity to outsiders, but it is always present to his intimates. It’s a much fuller portrait of a Victorian detective, and also one that, through Barker’s haphazard but global education, manages to credibly eschew the common prejudices of his day that Holmes exhibits in the original text.

Llewelyn is just as fascinating a character as Barker, and just as much of an outsider, although he comes at that perspective from an entirely different direction. He’s very much the apprentice in this first book, and so it should be. We’re just starting to get hints of how he ended up in depths of the slough of despond he is in when he arrives as Barker’s office for the first time, and his education in the arts of the ‘enquiry agent’ as Barker prefers to be called provide an in-depth introduction to their world.

On a personal note, part of what made this such a special comfort read for this reader is that the story takes place among the Jewish community of London in 1884 as a gruesome murder causes the leaders of that community to fear that a pogrom just like the ones that they or their families fled in Eastern Europe is about to boil over in London.

Much of the story is steeped in that community, and requires Barker to display his own familiarity with its customs and ways AND his respect for its people to Llewelyn. Even more importantly, the inside/outsiderness of the Jewish community in London, and Llewelyn’s open-mindedness to learning about it lets readers into a time and a place that history often sweeps under the carpet.

(Although my own family was still spread across Eastern Europe at this time period, I have pictures of my great-grandfather, and this would have been his generation, letting me connect to this story on a deeper level than I expected – which is where those multiple levels of comfort read come comfortably in.)

So I began Some Danger Involved in the hopes that the danger promised would lead me to a book and a series that would hold me in its thrall until the very last page, and give me something to look forward to whenever I next need a reading pick-me-up.

This first of Barker & Llewelyn’s investigations more than delivered, and I expect to dive back into their world in the next book in the series, To Kingdom Come, sometime over the holidays. If I can make myself wait even that long!

Review: Night Train to Murder by Simon R. Green

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Night Train to Murder by Simon R. GreenNight Train to Murder (Ishmael Jones #8) by Simon R. Green
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Ishmael Jones #8
Pages: 192
Published by Severn House on March 3, 2020
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle on the late-night train to Bath, Ishmael Jones is faced with his most puzzling case to date.

When Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny are asked to escort a VIP on the late-night train to Bath, it would appear to be a routine case. The Organisation has acquired intelligence that an attempt is to be made on Sir Dennis Gregson's life as he travels to Bath to take up his new position as Head of the British Psychic Weapons Division. Ishmael's mission is to ensure that Sir Dennis arrives safely.
How could anyone orchestrate a murder in a crowded railway carriage without being noticed and with no obvious means of escape? When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle, Ishmael Jones has just 56 minutes to solve a seemingly impossible crime before the train reaches its destination.

My Review:

Reading Reality is having a bit of a theme going in the days leading up to Halloween, and this visit with Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny Belcourt is just horror-adjacent enough to be a part of it.

And I was having a hankering for some high-quality snarkitude and this author ALWAYS delivers!

Ishmael Jones is a fascinating character – to himself most of all at times. He’s an alien. Specifically, he’s a version of E.T. with no way to phone home because he doesn’t remember where it is. When he crash-landed his ship in 1963 the ship’s last act was to transform him into a human adult the best that it could – and erase all his memories of who and/or what he used to be.

It didn’t exactly do a BAD job at Ishmael’s transformation. He blends in just fine. But he doesn’t change or age, so he’s looked like a man in his mid-30s for almost 60 years at this point and has the same problem that vampires often do in paranormal stories. He has to move on every so often before too many people start to notice too much.

Ishmael’s solution has been to work for a series of agencies so black and so secret that they don’t even know what their own right and left hands are doing – let alone anyone else’s. They keep his secrets and in return he keeps theirs and does the kind of dirty work that actual humans aren’t capable of for very long – if at all.

His work and romantic partner, Penny Belcourt, knows as many of his secrets as Ishmael himself does. They met on a case, the first one in this series, The Dark Side of the Road, a story that began as a rather typical English country house mystery that went seriously far into the Dark Side of multiple Forces.

Ishmael and Penny are the coyly-named Organization’s best agents, so it’s not exactly a surprise for them to be ordered to report for a top secret, rush-rush and hush-hush job, not even to London’s St. Pancras Station. It’s just annoying and both of them are at least somewhat annoyed by being handed tickets to an express train to Bath with not nearly enough information about their instructions to guard a high-ranking politician who has just been promoted to an equally high-ranking top-secret job on said politician’s imminent journey to take up his new post via that London to Bath train.

The trip will take less than two hours. It shouldn’t be that difficult to keep the man alive for that length of time on a moving train that will not stop to take on anyone or anything until it reaches its destination.

But if it were an easy job the Organization wouldn’t be putting its best agents on the case. And they are, so it isn’t. It’s just that it’s even more clandestine and hush-hush than even Ishmael and Penny suspected. And they suspected a lot, and everyone, from the very beginning.

Escape Rating A-: There are two things I find pretty much endlessly fun about this particular series. One, of course and always, is the author’s trademark snarkitude. It’s a signature that follows him everywhere from urban fantasy like his Nightside series to science fiction such as his Deathstalker series to the genre-mashup that is the Ishmael Jones series.

The other thing is a particular feature of the Ishmael Jones series, and it’s that this series is a genre-mashup of pretty much everything. It’s a bit of SF in Ishmael’s alien origins, a bit of urban fantasy in that he often faces monsters that are believed at the outset to be things that go bump in the night, and there’s generally a bit of horror in that whatever he’s investigating leaves a thoroughly gruesome trail of dead bodies and parts thereof.

But ultimately – or at its heart or a bit of both – the Ishmael Jones series are mysteries. Someone gets dead early on in each book, if there isn’t already a corpse laying around at the start. It’s up to Ishmael and Penny to figure out whodunnit and put a stop to them one way or another before the story reaches its inevitably grisly end.

What makes the mystery so much creepy fun is that as the mystery deepens there’s always a sneaking suspicion that the perpetrator is paranormal in some way, and that in the end that suspicion is nearly always a very tasty red herring. This particular mystery takes that assumption one better, as there is, for once, something actually paranormal going on but it isn’t either the monster or even the victim.

Because one of the things that this series does so very well, and with so much high-quality snark and occasional sheer bloody-mindedness, is that the worst monsters in this or any other universe are inevitably human. And that’s what keeps me coming back to this series, over and over and over again.

If this series sounds like it might be your jam, or if you’ve ever wanted to see just how far a classic-type mystery like a country house mystery or a strangers on a train type mystery can be led very, very far astray, take a look at The Dark Side of the Road and see if you like the view from that side.

I’ll be continuing with my journey with Ishmael Jones and Penny Belcourt with the next book in the series, The House on Widows Hill, the next time I have a yen for either high-quality snark, horror-adjacent mystery, or a bit of both!

Review: The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Last Devil to Die by Richard OsmanThe Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club, #4) by Richard Osman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Thursday Murder Club #4
Pages: 432
Published by Pamela Dorman Books on September 19, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.
An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.
As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.
With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

My Review:

The first ‘devil’ to die in this fourth entry in the Thursday Murder Club series is an old friend who helped them solve the case in the previous book in the series, The Bullet That Missed. Kuldesh Sharma was an antiques dealer who was lucky enough to be making a decent living in a business where too many people get caught up in buying things they love rather than trading in things they can sell at a profit.

But his luck ran out on a lonely country road with a bullet in his head that absolutely did not miss this time around.

Technically, his luck ran out earlier that Boxing Day, when he was one of the few antique shops open for business on a day when the local heroin importers needed someplace to hold onto a box for them. It was an offer he knew he couldn’t refuse, lest he end up exactly the way he did, dead with his store ransacked.

Those events aren’t linked the way that anyone expects them to be, and thereby hangs a tale. Specifically, this tale of bad luck and worse choices, an utter inability on the part of several unlucky individuals to distinguish friend from foe, a trail of bodies both guilty and innocent, and a small box that may not be bigger on the inside but is certainly a great deal larger in some dimensions than it appears.

Escape Rating A: The Last Devil to Die turned out to be the perfect capstone to this series so far, but I had more than a bit of an approach/avoidance problem to reading it all the way to the bitter end.

I also had the same hard time writing this up because there’s a point near that end that gave me the weepies. Seriously, I started crying. If you read the whole series so far, there’s a strong possibility that you will, too. It’s not exactly unexpected but it does invoke one hell of a lot of feels. Those tears rain over this entire review. Consider yourself warned.

What makes this case so convoluted is that, at least at the beginning, NO ONE really knows what it’s about – but everyone has made assumptions in that regard. Which makes the whole thing fall directly into that cliché about ‘assume’ and asses.

To the police, at least in the persons of the Thursday Murder Club’s police buddies Chris and Donna, it’s all about the heroin, or at least it’s about the local drug kingpins chasing the heroin. Because it would be a really serious feather in Chris and Donna’s caps if they could manage to nail those bastards to the wall.

But there’s a big deal officer from London who has come to take over the case and thrown our friends off the case – with rather extreme prejudice. Leading Chris and Donna to continue their investigation following rather more closely in the footsteps of the Thursday Murder Club – at least in regards to extra-legal methods – than either of them is strictly comfortable with.
Whatever the police think this case is about, the local drug gangs seem to be making a much bigger fuss over a mere 100,000 pounds worth of heroin. That not 100,000 pounds of heroin, which would be a pretty big deal, but rather a small amount of the stuff worth 100,000 pounds.

Big difference. Huge difference. Orders of magnitude difference. It’s only after the Thursday Murder Club follows that trail of bodies that Elizabeth Best puts together what it’s really all about, in a scene worthy of the best of the classic murder mysteries – even if the trail and the reasons for it are anything but old fashioned.

What makes this series work as a whole is that, in spite of how fanciful the idea of a bunch of septuagenarians solving murders might be and often is, and as quirky and eccentric as the members of the Club absolutely are, there’s nothing silly or twee about the way they go about their business.

And it’s not just that they are as deadly serious as the corpses they discover, but also that they are pragmatic and savvy about their place in the world, that they have many more days behind them then ahead of them, that they are often discounted because of that, and that the end is coming for all of them and it’s important how they occupy that time and take care of that end as it comes.

I appreciate their perspective and their approach to their lives at this stage of them even more than I might have otherwise, as I’m now in my mid-60s and honestly I’d like to be them when I grow up. Preferably without having to deal with a string of dead bodies every other month, but the way they all work together and make a difference in the world, as well as their beautiful and supportive friendship, is something to aspire to.

There’s a hint at the end that the Thursday Murder Club will be tying up the loose ends of a case tangential to the one they investigated in The Bullet that Missed when this series continues. Which, according to the author’s afterword, won’t come as immediately as fans would prefer, but will happen once the Club and their legion of fans recover from their grief over The Last Devil to Die.

Review: Prophet by Sin Blache and Helen MacDonald

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Prophet by Sin Blache and Helen MacDonaldProphet by Sin Blaché, Helen Macdonald
Narrator: Jake Fairbrother, Ryan Forde Iosco, Charlotte Davey
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: espionage, mystery, science fiction, thriller
Pages: 480
Length: 17 hours and 1 minute
Published by Grove Press, Recorded Books on August 8, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Daring, surprising and superbly plotted, this is a fresh, thrilling page-turner from a dynamic new duo in genre fiction
Your happiest memory is their deadliest weapon.
THIS IS PROPHET.
It knows when you were happiest. It gives life to your fondest memories and uses them to destroy you. But who has created it? And what do they want?
An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. It's brightly lit, warm and inviting but it has no power, no water, no connection to the real world. It's like a memory made flesh - a nostalgic flight of fancy. More and more objects materialise: toys, fairground rides, pets and other treasured mementos of the past.
And the deaths quickly follow.Something is bringing these memories to life, then stifling innocent people with their own joy. This is a weapon like no other. But nobody knows who created it, or why.
Sunil Rao seems a surprising choice of investigator. Chaotic and unpredictable, the former agent is the antithesis of his partner Colonel Adam Rubenstein, the model of a military man. But Sunil has the unique ability to distinguish truth from lies: in objects, words and people, in the past and in real time. And Adam is the only one who truly knows him, after a troubled past together. Now, as they battle this strange new reality, they are drawn closer than ever to defend what they both hold most dear.
For Prophet can weaponise the past. But only love will protect the future.

My Review:

From the opening of Prophet, two things are immediately clear. Sunil Rao and Adam Rubenstein are both FINE, and the situation they are in is already FUBAR.

Whatever is going on – which neither they nor the reader know yet – Adam and Rao are both Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic (and) Egotistical (although Rao is way more of the last than Adam) and the world is already Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. FINE and FUBAR to the max, both of them and all of it.

In other words, they’re both hot messes and not a single thing that happens in Prophet helps either of them get any better.

Pretty much the opposite, in fact.

Calling Sunil Rao a human lie detector isn’t nearly enough of a description. It is TRUE, which matters a lot because that’s what Rao, as he prefers to be called, really does. He can tell when someone or something is true. Which explains why Rao gets called in – and out of a psychiatric institute after a suicide attempt – to the sight of something that so clearly does not belong even as he’s staring at the manifestation of it.

Come to think of it, Rao’s ‘gift’, for lack of a better word, also explains the psych hold, as well as why his work partner/keeper, Lt. Colonel Adam Rubenstein, has been brought in to make sure that Rao doesn’t go off the rails, again, no matter how much the situation they have been dragged into might justify it.

And that’s where both the thriller and the SFnal aspects come into this story. Prophet isn’t a person, there is no one predicting the future. And it’s not ‘profit’, which is what I first thought when I heard the title and hadn’t yet seen it in print.

Although, that’s for select definitions of both of those things, as there is a cabal that intends to make profit on Prophet in the long run, and they do believe that they can control the future with it. They’re oh-so-far off base on both counts.

Prophet is a drug. It’s an attempt to weaponize nostalgia. Which would be one hell of a power IF the side effects could be dealt with. At least the side effects that are a bug and NOT an actual feature. (As we already know because it’s already sorta/kinda happening IRL)

But Prophet isn’t exactly what anyone thought it was, and Rao’s special talent isn’t exactly what anyone has been led to believe, while Adam’s motivations for letting himself get roped into this FUBAR are not what anyone who thinks they are in charge of the whole thing has any reason to have a clue about.

Which leads to this story about finding those clues, the truth about Prophet, who thinks they’re behind it and what actually is. The truth about what Rao can really do. The truth about who Rao and Adam really are. The truth about the relationship between them that they have spent years trying to hide from themselves and each other.

And especially the truth about the nature of the universe, which is not a place that anyone would have predicted this story would go – but is oh-so-utterly fascinating once it gets there.

Escape Rating A+: The thing about Prophet as a story is that it is damn difficult to categorize. It’s kind of like Michael Crichton and Robert Ludlum had a book baby, and as wild and crazy as that thought is the whole thing still needs a lot of midwives and stepparents to get a glimpse at just how much is packed into the story.

But still, that’s a start. (It’s also a clue that any expectations that Prophet will have any resemblance at all to co-author Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk are going to be thoroughly disappointed.)

At first it all seems a bit SFnal, of the laboratory school of science fiction – much like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. Prophet is created in a laboratory, and tested in a more-or-less scientific fashion. Or at least a scientific fashion for scientists who had their ethics surgically removed – which would also be science fiction. (We hope, we really, really do!)

But the way the story works is as a kind of mystery/thriller, particularly of the spy thriller school. Which is interesting because espionage fiction is usually about governments spying on other governments and that’s not what’s happening here. It’s not even, exactly, corporate espionage. Although it’s not exactly not either. (There are a LOT of things in Prophet that are not exactly what they seem but not exactly not what they seem, all at the same time.)

It’s more that Adam and Rao are kind of but not exactly undercover within the organization that is working with Prophet, playing with things they don’t understand, and trying their damndest to figure out what the hell is going on.

Which leads to the mystery. At first it’s the mystery of what created a 1950s era, American-style diner in the middle of the English countryside in a literal instant with someone actually watching the whole time. And what keeps happening to the people who get exposed to Prophet, whether accidentally or on purpose. Mostly on purpose.

Along with the mystery of why Adam Rubenstein is immune and Sunil Rao can safely extract it from people who have been exposed. It’s all a puzzle and a mystery and Adam and Rao become deeply invested in solving it – because they must.

Mixed in with ALL of that, and it’s a lot, is the relationship between Rao and Adam that is, that isn’t, that might be, that can’t be, and that is always more and different than anyone thinks it is. Which includes themselves. And quite possibly, the multiverse.

The inability to figure out what box Prophet falls into will drive some readers bananas. Certainly it gave the reading group that recommended it to me a whole bunch of very mixed reactions because it’s not easily defined. They collectively liked it and were not sure about it at the same time.

What carries the story, and carries the reader through the story, is the ever-evolving, often hidden, always on the verge of heartbreak relationship between Sunil Rao and Adam Rubenstein. They are not who they appear to be – not even to each other. Their histories are both shared and opaque to each other. And they’re both so FINE (in the sense of the acronym) that they are on the edge of mutually assured destruction almost all the time. And yet, they’re always on the same page and always have the same goals, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first, not even to them.

If the reader falls for them and their relationship, and I did, the story is an absolute WOW from beginning to end. An end which still manages to be a bit deus ex machina in spite of the reader being able to see it coming a mile away AND the way that it’s not the deus that saves the day. It’s the machina.

I listened to this one all the way to the end, and the readers were terrific every step of the way, even when they were voicing each other’s characters because the story is told in three, sometimes dueling, first person perspectives. This is the kind of first-person narration I love listening to, because the readers were so good and the story so compelling and the characterization, both in the text and in voice was so very much each of them individually that I really did feel like I was in their heads. Which made for an awesome listening experience.

One of my ongoing frustrations with multiple narrators in audiobooks, as much as I utterly love the style and how much it adds to the storytelling, is that while the list of narrators is credited, it’s seldom detailed into precisely who narrates whom. In this particular production, I believe that Jake Fairbrother ‘played’ Rao and Ryan Forde Iosco took Adam’s part, but I can’t be 100% certain of that in the way that I’m sure that Charlotte Davey voices Veronica, the absolutely psychopathic researcher in charge of Prophet R&D.

To sum things up, Prophet is absolutely bonkers in the best of all possible ways. If you like laboratory-based SF, the implications of the story are fascinating. If you love espionage fiction, especially if you miss it and wonder how those kind of stories are going to be told post-Cold War, this is a fantastic exploration of who might still be spying on whom and why. And if you love a good bromance/buddy thriller, especially one that has the potential for more, Prophet could be your jam across the board, and even better in audio.

It absolutely, positively was mine.

Review: Payback in Death by J.D. Robb

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: Payback in Death by J.D. RobbPayback in Death (In Death, #57) by J.D. Robb
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: futuristic, mystery, romantic suspense, suspense, thriller
Series: In Death #57
Pages: 368
Published by St. Martin's Press on September 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A retired colleague's suspicious death puts Lt. Eve Dallas on the case in Payback in Death, the electrifying new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author J.D. Robb.
Lt. Eve Dallas is just home from a long overdue vacation when she responds to a call of an unattended death. The victim is Martin Greenleaf, retired Internal Affairs Captain. At first glance, the scene appears to be suicide, but the closer Eve examines the body, the more suspicious she becomes.
An unlocked open window, a loving wife and family, a too-perfect suicide note—Eve's gut says it's a homicide. After all, Greenleaf put a lot of dirty cops away during his forty-seven years in Internal Affairs. It could very well be payback—and she will not rest until the case is closed.

My Review:

The case in Payback in Death is a fascinating one that could just as easily work in a contemporary police procedural as it does in their near-future world, because cases about ‘who watches the watchers’ are always relevant, and raise interesting questions about just how much of that watching is necessary and who watches the watchers who watch.

There’s a rabbit hole there that this story doesn’t have to go down, because retired NYPSD Internal Affairs captain Martin Greenleaf honored his badge and his service during a career spent on that often thankless watch.

Now he’s dead, and it’s Dallas’ job to stand for him. Because whoever killed him did a really poor job of faking his suicide. The man was murdered in his own home, and left for his wife to find. But fate intervened in the person of a detective that Greenleaf mentored. A detective who may have struck out once and badly with Dallas, but who knows she’ll bring her best to the case of the man who stood in for his father.

Which, in the end, is what this case turns out to be about. Father-figures, and the devastation they leave in their wake when they go down. Whether that happens in the line of duty – as it did for Martin Greenleaf in spite of his retirement – or whether it happens because someone like Greenleaf discovers that a man who should have at least been a hero to his family, was someone that those watchers not only watched, but ultimately discovered had feet of clay up to the knees.

Escape Rating B: At this point, I’m here to see how all my ‘book friends’ are doing after whatever happened in the previous book in the series (which in this case was Encore in Death). I just plain enjoy spending time with Dallas and Roarke’s ever-growing ‘family’ and am always happy to catch up with the gang. It doesn’t matter whether the particular case is all that interesting, and it doesn’t matter what kind of case it is. I just like these folks a lot and want to be sure they’re all still okay.

That being said, at 57 books and counting, the In Death series breaks down into three kinds of stories. First are the cases that are just cases – like the case in Payback in Death. It’s appropriately puzzling, the motives are twisted and the clues are deeply buried at first and convoluted to the end, and it’s an important case that requires that Dallas and company bring their “A” game to get it solved, but in the end it’s still just a case that gives the NYPSD a chance to prove they are the best at what they do – which they are.

The second kind of story are the ones where someone is threatening one or more members of Dallas and Roarke’s extended family. Those get messy. Always interesting, often revelatory about their pasts as well as their present, but those cases stick much closer to home and get more emotional, no matter how many of NYPSD’s finest get involved by the end.

And then there’s the third kind of story, which can dig itself into either of the above. The stories that are trips to the angst factory because they bring back the specters of either Roarke’s or Dallas’ horrifyingly terrible, thoroughly abusive childhoods. Those stories are always hard because I’ve come to care about all the characters a great deal and I hate seeing them suffer again in their present over the crap in their pasts.

This was a case that turned out to be just a case – no matter how much the perpetrator tried to make it more than that. And failed.

But it was still riveting and held my interest from the first page to the last because the story was every bit as relevant today as it is in Dallas’ time. Cops are human – and all of Dallas’ crew are certainly that, from Peabody’s pink coats to Reinecke’s eye-watering ties to Dallas’ own inability to make sense out of cliches and figures of speech – because they mostly don’t if you dissect the words.

Someone does need to watch the watchers, to police the police, to make sure that flawed human beings, because we are all flawed human beings including the police, don’t take the ability to use force and even deadly force to the point where it becomes perceived as the right to do so – because it isn’t.

Part of what made this work for me was the way that it went into the amount of painstaking work that was required to dig through everything that Greenleaf had been part of in a long career to see where the motives might be, no matter how deeply buried they were.

And that the investigation displayed yet again the reasons that Dallas and her squad are the best at what they do.

The part that cast a bit of a pall over the riveting case was that the ‘B’ plot of the story, the sidebar case of the now (former) detective who went off the rails and took a swing at Dallas, didn’t feel like it got either explained or resolved – or at least not to this reader’s satisfaction.

Which did not stop me from reading Payback in Death in a single sitting, as I often do with each, always much anticipated, entry in this series. Obviously, I’ll be back in Dallas’ early 2060s New York City for book 58(!), Random in Death, coming in January, 2024. I’m already full of anticipation!

Review: The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Bullet That Missed by Richard OsmanThe Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club, #3) by Richard Osman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Thursday Murder Club #3
Pages: 413
Published by Pamela Dorman Books on September 15, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

One Thursday afternoon in the seniors' center, a decade-old cold case --their favorite kind-- leads the Thursday Murder Club to a local news legend and a murder with no body and no answers. A new foe they call "Viking", wants Elizabeth to kill former KGB chief Viktor, or he will kill her sweet best friend Joyce. Activist marked for death Ron and psychiatrist Ibrahim chase clues for Viking's identity, and investigate mob-queen prisoner from last book.
This third adventure ranges from a prison cell with espresso machine to a luxury penthouse with swimming pool high in the sky.

My Review:

How far would you go to save your best friend’s life? What lengths would you go to? Perhaps a better question would be to ask what lengths wouldn’t you go to? Because that is certainly one of the big questions at the heart of The Bullet That Missed.

First, there’s a cold case, because that’s what the Thursday Murder Club does in its Thursday meetings – it investigates cold cases.

The case they pick this time is close to home, both in time and in distance. Ten years ago, a young reporter disappeared, and has been presumed dead for most of a decade. Bethany Waites was working on a huge story about smuggling cell phones and tax fraud. Millions of pounds disappeared so thoroughly into the labyrinth of money laundering that the money was never found. Which didn’t stop the police from sending one of the perpetrators went to jail for it, while the likely instigator managed to stay out of legal trouble – most likely by doing something else seriously illegal.

But the reporter left her apartment one night, her car was found on the shore bloodied but empty after having been pushed over a cliff, and the woman was never seen again. She’s still much missed, by her friends, her colleagues, and most especially her mentor who never got over her death.

One of the seemingly trivial issues surrounding that very non-traditional event was that the young, female reporter was receiving nasty little threatening messages dropped in her purse, left on her desk and even stuck to her car.

Just as Elizabeth Best is receiving ten years later, although the messages Elizabeth is receiving are much more specifically life threatening rather than the job-threatening ‘mean-girl’ type messages Bethany was getting.

A mysterious personage has threatened Elizabeth that if she doesn’t kill a particular former KGB agent, both Elizabeth and her best friend Joyce will be killed instead. Joyce first, of course, so that Elizabeth has time to reflect on the folly of her (non) actions.

But the man that the mysterious criminal Elizabeth ends up calling “the Viking”, because he very much resembles one wants so very, very dead, is also a friend. An old and dear friend who Elizabeth would very much like to save as she doesn’t have many of those around – not just anymore but ever.

The cases don’t really intersect when Elizabeth and company get involved in them. They really, really don’t. But, and it turns out to be a big, huge, but, ten years isn’t all that long ago, especially in a small town like Cooper’s Chase.

Because all of the players for the cold case are still around for the fresh case. All except one.

Escape Rating A-: There are two ways of looking at the adventures of the Thursday Murder Club. On the one hand, the mostly fun side of the equation, there are the murder cases that seem to find their way to the club’s door – even if Elizabeth has to push them in that direction more than a bit. And sometimes they push back – as the Viking’s part of this entry in the series does.

But then there’s the much more serious side, the one that can be summed up as “old age is not for sissies’. Because it isn’t and they aren’t and none of them are remotely planning to go gentle into that good night no matter how hard some people – including Elizabeth’s oldest and dearest enemies – try to shove them in that direction. With a surprising amount of extreme prejudice.

Then again, one does get the impression that Elizabeth Best is the spiritual sister of Hetty Lang from NCIS: LA and Victoria Winslow, the character that Helen Mirren played in the movies RED and RED 2.

But seriously, the mystery – in spite of or because of the increasing number of victims – is the fun part of the story. It’s also the part that changes most from book to book in a series.

The real reason that people keep coming back to any particular mystery series over and over again (this is book 3 in this series already, after The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice) is because we get involved with the lives of the ‘Scooby gang’ that does the solving of the murders and not so much the murders themselves.

So what makes the Thursday Murder Club work as a series is the way that it revolves around and utilizes the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the club. The particular charm of this series is that it neither shies away from the issues of aging nor does it turn the idea of septuagenarians successfully solving crimes into anything twee or cutesy. (If you remember the Mrs. Pollifax series by Dorothy Gilman, that got both cutesy and twee over the course of its run.)

The members of the Thursday Murder Club are also all dealing with loss (realistically but differently according to each of their personalities), either in the past or the present, but are still very much living in the here and now – and dealing successfully with it – something we don’t see nearly enough.

I was tempted to say something like ‘they still have a lot to give’ which doesn’t convey the right sentiment because it implies they’re an exception to some rule in the same way that telling a woman she doesn’t look her age may be intended as a compliment but actually reinforces the idea that looking whatever age she is isn’t good enough – when it should be.

I’d say that Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron have always had a lot to give and have never stopped giving it. While giving readers a terrific mystery to savor along the way.

Speaking of which, they have one more mystery to give us this year. The Last Devil to Die will be out later this month. And it’s already on my reading calendar because I can’t wait!

Review: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard OsmanThe Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2) by Richard Osman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Thursday Murder Club #2
Pages: 355
Published by Pamela Dorman Books on December 16, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

It's the following Thursday.
Elizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. He's made a big mistake, and he needs her help. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster, and a very real threat to his life.
As bodies start piling up, Elizabeth enlists Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron in the hunt for a ruthless murderer. And if they find the diamonds too? Well, wouldn't that be a bonus?
But this time they are up against an enemy who wouldn't bat an eyelid at knocking off four septuagenarians. Can The Thursday Murder Club find the killer (and the diamonds) before the killer finds them?

My Review:

The Thursday Murder Club series is not merely a guilty pleasure of a read, it’s just the kind of guilty pleasure you feel when you filch some of the semi-sweet chips straight out of the bag while baking chocolate chip cookies. You know you’re not really supposed to, but they taste so good, sweet with just the right amount of bitter in the aftertaste that you can’t resist – and you can’t eat (or read) just one.

This series is the same, with its story of murders in a retirement community solved by the skills, the talent and especially the combined experience of the 70something residents, who live in a place where the appearance of an ambulance screaming through the streets is an everyday occurrence – and that the next time it might be for one of them.

We first met the members of the Thursday Murder Club in the book of the same title, as the four septuagenarians who solved Cold Cases as a hobby found themselves in the middle of a fresh case right on their doorstep.

At the end of which, their ‘leader’ Elizabeth Best received a letter informing her that a man she thought was very, very dead was not only alive but back in her life, followed by the virtual ‘mic drop’ of the book’s end.

In The Man Who Died Twice we get the full story behind that mysterious missive, a story that wends its way back to Elizabeth’s days in the spy game, combined with her personal past in the form – and eventually the body – of her ex-husband and fellow retired spy Douglas Middlemiss. (I’m sure there’s a pun in his name, but I’m not quite getting there. Or it could be one of the many, many tasty red herrings that abound throughout this story.)

Dear Old Doug needs a safe house and protection from the mob. And he wants one more chance with Elizabeth, who was most likely the love of his life even though the reverse was absolutely not true. But then, Doug always believed he was a bigger hit with the ladies than he actually was then – let alone now.

He may not have a chance with Elizabeth, but he really does need that safe house and he knows she’s still damn good at the game even if she acts like she’s no longer playing it. Although the number of favors she called in during the first book call that into question – and so does the agency she used to work for.

The thing is that Doug really did steal £20,000 in diamonds from the New York mafia by way of their, let’s call him their escrow agent and insurance broker, in Britain. There really are assassins, and that’s definitely plural, out to get both him and the diamonds. It’s not personal, it’s just business.

Whether it was a successful business or not is an entirely different question. At first it looks like at least one set of assassins succeeded, but the clues that Doug left his ex-wife about where he stashed the diamonds make it seem like maybe they didn’t.

And Doug has form for that, leading the Thursday Murder Club on a merry chase to figure out who done what to whom. Just in case that the old spy had one last game in him after all.

Escape Rating A-: I started this book back when it came out in 2021, but bounced off it for some reason that I absolutely cannot remember nearly two years later. The reason I can’t remember is that when I picked it up this weekend, I absolutely could not put it down. So whatever it was, it must have been both a ‘me’ thing and a ‘then’ thing, because this cozy-ish, thriller-ish mystery was a whole lot of fun.

What makes the Thursday Murder Club so much fun is the way that the members of this little gang both are and are very much not exactly what they appear to be. They are all in their 70s, they have all lost a step or two physically, but often fewer steps than people assume from their age. And they all have hidden depths AND hidden assets that they are able to bring to bear to protect their friends and each other – and to help Elizabeth take care of the secret business she was never supposed to tell anyone about – but did anyway.

Part of the fun of this particular entry in the series is the way that Elizabeth’s adversary is also her mirror, a woman very much like herself who has also made her way into the upper echelons of the spy agencies, who came up through the ranks hearing about the ‘great Liz Best’ and wanted to best her at her own game. The way they work both in concert and in opposition, as each tries to ‘win’ a game that was never a contest, is fascinating to watch even as it throws so very many red herrings out of the basket and into the plot.

The ‘B’ plot of this book (and these do have an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ plot like a TV series that I wouldn’t be surprised to see come out of the BBC one of these days) is even closer to home as one of the Club members is attacked, and the Club pulls out all the stops to make it as right as they can – all the while acknowledging that at their age not everything can be put right, that they can only do the best they can.

But there is a touch of bitter mixed into the sweet of a good caper well solved and justice being righteously served, and that’s in the real identity of ‘the man who lived twice’. A revelation that has nothing to do with the spy game and everything to do with being all too human.

The Thursday Murder Club series continued with last year’s The Bullet that Missed, and I’ll be reading that sometime in the next few weeks so that I can catch up with the series in time for The Last Devil to Die, arriving – and apparently dying, late next month.

Review: Where the Dead Lie by C.S. Harris

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Where the Dead Lie by C.S. HarrisWhere the Dead Lie (Sebastian St. Cyr, #12) by C.S. Harris
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #12
Pages: 334
Published by Berkley on April 4, 2017
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The gruesome murder of a young boy takes Sebastian St. Cyr from the gritty streets of London to the glittering pleasure haunts of the aristocracy . . .
London, 1813.Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, is no stranger to the dark side of the city, but he's never seen anything like this: the brutalized body of a fifteen-year-old boy dumped into a makeshift grave on the grounds of an abandoned factory.
One of London's many homeless children, Benji Thatcher was abducted and tortured before his murder—and his younger sister is still missing. Few in authority care about a street urchin's fate, but Sebastian refuses to let this killer go unpunished.
Uncovering a disturbing pattern of missing children, Sebastian is drawn into a shadowy, sadistic world. As he follows a grim trail that leads from the writings of the debauched Marquis de Sade to the city's most notorious brothels, he comes to a horrifying realization: someone from society's upper echelon is preying upon the city's most vulnerable. And though dark, powerful forces are moving against him, Sebastian will risk his reputation and his life to keep more innocents from harm . .

My Review:

The dead lie in multiple meanings of the word AND in multiple places in this twelfth entry in the long-running, utterly marvelous Sebastian St. Cyr series.

The dead, and their deaths, circle around three points: a serial killer, a supposedly lost work from the pen of the late Marquis de Sade, and lost, missing or abandoned children. Those are three topics that sit uneasily in the mind separately, together they are a nightmare.

Or rather, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin’s nightmares – and he already has PLENTY of those to keep him awake on entirely too many nights.

It begins with a child’s dead body, as a midnight burial is interrupted by an old soldier with a long-standing grudge. But it’s only the first body that’s found in this frequently macabre tale of murder and privilege. Benji Thatcher, abandoned, abused, stabbed, raped and killed, was not the first body to be murdered in such a heinous manner – only the one whose accidental discovery leads to more.

Too many more as Devlin discovers. Even more horrific, there are also too many people in the circle he is supposed to be a part of who don’t give a damn. Along with at least one who is adding to the body count even as Devlin does his damndest to see him hanged.

That he fails isn’t on Devlin, but rather, on the privileges of a society that protects both him and the killer – even as it fails to protect those without that privilege. Those like the children abandoned on London’s streets because their parents have been transported to remote penal colonies such as Georgia, or Botany Bay.

As well as those who have the misfortune to have been born female – no matter their class – not even the most privileged. Not even Devlin’s own niece who could still be saved – but refuses to let herself be.

Escape Rating A-: This one is a really hard read. It’s excellent, just as the entire St. Cyr series is, but this one is difficult because there’s just so much tragedy and horror uncovered within its pages.

At its heart, this is a story about lost children, and all the ways that society (not just his but also, frankly, ours) allows children to be lost, abandoned and abused. These children are being preyed upon because no one will miss them and the killer knows it.

And has exploited their position, over and over again, because they know they are so privileged and so protected that even if they are suspected, which they are and have been long before St. Cyr becomes involved, few will believe they could possibly be guilty of such heinous crimes and even then there are people in very high places who will guarantee they never pay.

Wrapped around the ongoing horror of finding not one but three mass burial sites, there’s a story about a lost child who is found, an adult child who loses a parent to an untimely death, a formerly lost child who recognizes that he has found a home, and a lost child who finds his way back to a home he once rejected.

With one child’s, as well as their mother’s, tragedy yet to come in the later books in the series.

This entry in the series is of the ‘read ‘em and weep’ variety, as everyone in Devlin’s true circle is as harrowed and horrified as the reader – which is made infinitely worse by the people who are informed but simply refuse to care. If “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” then there is more evil in the world than even Devlin can fix – and he is made all too aware of that in this entry in the series.

My reading of Where the Dead Lie completes my ‘catch-up’ read of this series, so I’ll be waiting with the proverbial ‘bated breath’ for the forthcoming new entry, What Cannot Be Said, currently scheduled for publication in April of 2024. And in the meantime, I have the readalike Wrexford & Sloane series to catch up with, as it reads quite a bit like the St. Cyr, series would read if we were viewing the Regency from Hero Devlin’s perspective rather than Sebastian’s.

Review: Who Buries the Dead by C.S. Harris

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Who Buries the Dead by C.S. HarrisWho Buries the Dead (Sebastian St. Cyr #10) by C.S. Harris
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #10
Pages: 338
Published by Berkley on March 3, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The grisly murder of a West Indies slave owner and the reappearance of a dangerous enemy from Sebastian St. Cyr’s past combine to put C. S. Harris’s “troubled but compelling antihero” (Booklist) to the ultimate test in this taut, thrilling mystery.
London, 1813. The vicious decapitation of Stanley Preston, a wealthy, socially ambitious plantation owner, at Bloody Bridge draws Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, into a macabre and increasingly perilous investigation. The discovery near the body of an aged lead coffin strap bearing the inscription “King Charles, 1648” suggests a link between this killing and the beheading of the deposed seventeenth-century Stuart monarch. Equally troubling, the victim’s kinship to the current Home Secretary draws the notice of Sebastian’s powerful father-in-law, Lord Jarvis, who will exploit any means to pursue his own clandestine ends.
Working in concert with his fiercely independent wife, Hero, Sebastian finds his inquiries taking him from the wretched back alleys of Fish Street Hill to the glittering ballrooms of Mayfair as he amasses a list of suspects who range from an eccentric Chelsea curiosity collector to the brother of an unassuming but brilliantly observant spinster named Jane Austen.
But as one brutal murder follows another, it is the connection between the victims and ruthless former army officer Sinclair, Lord Oliphant, that dramatically raises the stakes. Once, Oliphant nearly destroyed Sebastian in a horrific wartime act of carnage and betrayal. Now the vindictive former colonel might well pose a threat not only to Sebastian but to everything—and everyone—Sebastian holds most dear.

My Review:

Whenever I flail around looking for a comfort read, I end up back in Regency England, following Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, as he investigates yet another murder that touches upon the high and mighty of his time and place – whether the high and mighty like it or not.

Especially, and sometimes just a bit gleefully, whether his powerful father-in-law, Lord Charles Jarvis, likes it or not. Devlin enjoys discomfiting his father-in-law, while Jarvis would just as soon see Devlin dead, and is more than capable of arranging it. The only thing keeping the two men from killing each other is that they both love Hero Jarvis, Lord Jarvis’ daughter who is, much to the consternation of her father, Devlin’s wife.

The case in this 10th outing of the series begins with a murder. Not just the usual garden-variety murder, either. Stanley Preston, a man who loved collecting memorabilia related to the famously dead, is found not merely dead but decapitated much like the late King Charles I. Or, to be a bit more accurate, like Oliver Cromwell, whose body was decapitated after death – and whose head is part of Preston’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’.

The late, mostly unlamented Mr. Preston was one of those people who are so cantankerous and so outspoken about all the many and varied things they are cantankerous about that it’s not hard to imagine that someone killed him. In fact, it’s all too easy and potential suspects are legion.

Or would be if not for that grisly, gruesome and downright difficult to accomplish decapitation. Not that plenty of Preston’s enemies weren’t more than wealthy enough to hire it done. Including, quite possibly, his daughter. Or one of her long-suffering suitors who believed that her father stood in the way of their happiness.

Bow Street would love to pin the murder on Miss Preston’s most objectionable suitor – at least the most impoverished one. Devlin hopes that the crime can be laid at the door of one of his own enemies, newly returned to London.

Unless the whole thing comes back around to Preston’s cantankerousness combined with his inability to keep his objectionable opinions behind his teeth. And a man who with a secret that he can’t afford to have exposed.

A secret not all that different from Devlin’s own.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up this week because yes, I was having a comfort read flail, and Sebastian St. Cyr always delivers – or rather whisks me away from my time to his. Which got me to thinking about the nature of comfort reads in general, and why this works for me in particular.

I had originally hoped this week that Blind Fear, being the third book in a series I’m definitely enjoying, would scratch some of that comfort read itch – but it didn’t – leading me straight to questions about why and why not.

What makes mysteries in general so much of a comfort is the romance of justice. If a story is a mystery and not purely a thriller, then it’s guaranteed that in the end the crime is solved, evil is punished and justice triumphs.

The Finn Thrillers have a mystery component, but they are exactly what it says on the label. They’re thrillers. At the end of the whole series, it seems highly probably that justice will triumph and evil will get its just desserts. But it hasn’t happened yet and doesn’t look like it’s happening any time soon. And in the meantime Finn is dealing with a lot of injustice, directed at himself as well as others, and wading all too frequently in some of the nastier cesspits of human behavior as he searches high and low – mostly low – for that justice.

In a historical mystery like the St. Cyr series, the historical setting adds to the comfort. Not that the past was any better, easier or safer than the present, but rather that its problems and its evils are not open-ended. We know what got solved or resolved, which situations improved and which are still plaguing the world today.

Not that justice writ large always triumphs in the St. Cyr series, but writ small it generally does. Even if the evils of the socioeconomic issues of the day are frequently appalling. Devlin and Hero attempt to do some good with the money and power they have, and often succeed if only a bit.

Bow Street may attempt to rush someone to judgment because it’s convenient for the high and mighty, but Devlin is always successful at standing in their way on that front, at least. The official story that gets into the papers may sweep things under the rug that shouldn’t be, and some of the rich and powerful escape the full range of justice they deserve, but no one is successfully railroaded to the hangman’s noose who hasn’t earned that punishment, at least not on Devlin’s watch.

And that is most definitely a comfort to the reader. Or at least this reader.

Who Buries the Dead was the penultimate title in my quest to catch up with the Sebastian St. Cyr series. I have one book left, Where the Dead Lie, and I’m pretty confident at this point that I’ll have that read long before the 19th entry in the series, What Cannot Be Said, gets said, done and published in April 2024.

After that, if I get desperate for a comfort read that is very like St. Cyr, I’ve got more of the Wrexford & Sloane series to look forward to. And I am!