Genre: paranormal

A+ #BookReview: Twice as Dead by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Twice as Dead by Harry TurtledoveTwice as Dead (City of Shadows #1) by Harry Turtledove
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: alternate history, fantasy, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: City of Shadows #1
Pages: 341
Published by Caezik SF & Fantasy on March 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Rudolf Sebestyen is missing, and Marianne Smalls is involved in an illicit affair with the shady Jonas Schmitt. Both cases converge when Dora Urban, Rudolf’s beautiful and mysterious half-sister, and Lamont Smalls, Marianne’s suspicious husband, hire Jack Mitchell, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking private investigator. Dora wants Jack to uncover what happened to her brother, while Lamont seeks proof of his wife’s infidelity.
But Dora is a vampire, in a city teeming with creatures of the night.
As Jack dives deeper, he discovers that both cases are linked to vepratoga—a dangerous new drug spreading through Los Angeles. Twice as Dead is brimming with vampires, wizards, zombies and zombie dealers, the Central Avenue jazz scene, an exclusive after-hours club, adultery, a New England ghost who prefers Southern California’s warmer clime, corrupt cops and politicians, spying rats, and a smart-mouthed talking cat.
When Jack’s home is burned to the ground, the strands of his investigations culminate in a showdown at a tire factory, where even the reliefs on the walls are not what they seem. In this unique noirish urban fantasy set in postwar Los Angeles, Jack finds more adventure, danger, and romance than he ever imagined—and learns that success may come at too high a price.

My Review:

The story begins the way all the best hard-boiled, noir stories begin, with a private detective in his down-at-heel and behind-on-rent office in the less salubrious part of town waiting for either the phone to ring, for someone to knock at the door, or for his willpower to resist the bottle in his desk drawer to run dry. Only one of those three is ever a frequent occurrence.

The knock on the door is followed by the entrance of a mysterious woman with a sob story, a need for his professional services and a whole lot of secrets she’s not planning to share unless she has to. He knows she’s likely to be more trouble than she’s worth – in more ways than one – but he can’t resist her siren song OR the temptation of the mystery she represents.

The ‘real’ Angels Flight, Los Angeles, CA 1955

It’s an opening straight out of Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep)  or Easy Rawlins (Devil in a Blue Dress), but this isn’t exactly our Los Angeles. Welcome to the City of Shadows, where the government is corrupt, the police are on the take, zombies clean the streets, vampires have their own neighborhood in the midst of the city districts filled with other so-called marginal populations and there’s a new drug on the streets that can even get the undead higher than the literal Angel’s Flight over Bunker Hill.

A real angel, an angel who has been ferrying passengers up that hill on his own wings since LONG before the Spanish missionaries were brought to meet him.

Private investigator Jack Mitchell might finally become solvent if the three cases that arrive at his door all get solved and all pay their bills – as rare as that combination has been in Jack’s experience. Lamont Small’s wife is having an affair. Clarice Jethroe’s husband is missing. So is Dora Urban’s half-brother.

Initially, the only thing the three cases have in common is that law enforcement isn’t going to help and any other PI is going to show these potential clients the door without listening to them. Lamont Smalls and Clarice Jethroe – and their respective spouses – are black. Dora Urban is a vampire, and so is her half brother.

Jack Mitchell, mixed-race enough to ‘pass’ in either direction, and all too aware of who ‘sees’ him, who doesn’t and what it means to walk that narrow line, is their only hope.

If one of the three cases doesn’t get him killed before, or after, they intersect. Unless Dora bleeds him dry first.

Escape Rating A+: I wasn’t expecting this at all. I wasn’t expecting Twice as Dead to be SO DAMN GOOD. I really wasn’t expecting a story that reads like the very best ‘Old Skool’ urban fantasy with a protagonist who could have hung out with Philip Marlowe, Easy Rawlins or Dan Shamble (Death Warmed Over) with ease even though Mitchell would be wondering the whole time whether Marlowe and Rawlins would see him for who he was (Rawlins almost certainly yes, Marlowe maybe not) while zombie PI Shamble would have creeped Mitchell out down to the bone.

I expected to like this. I like urban fantasy very much, and you just don’t see a lot of it these days, especially urban fantasy that doesn’t fall over the line into paranormal romance. Which this doesn’t, if only because Dora Urban doesn’t believe that vampires are capable of the feeling.

In fact, the one and only complaint I have with this book is the cover. It’s really cheesy, and Dora Urban wouldn’t be caught dead – pardon me, as a vampire she would say finished – in that get up. She’s way classier than that. And this book deserves something better.

What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with this story from beginning to end, setting, characters, mystery, alternate history, and absolutely ALL, even more than Mitchell thinks he’s fallen for Dora.

Then again, he’s quite possibly going to discover that he’s been a complete fool in a later book in this series – while I’m certainly NOT. This was GOOD. Downright EXCELLENT. If the subsequent books live up to this series opener I’m going to be one very happy reader.

(In case you can’t tell, I’m having a difficult time getting to the meat of this thing because I had such a good time with it. Everything keeps turning to ‘SQUEE!’)

I’m not sure whether what first dragged me so deeply into this story was the characters or the setting. Actually I do know the first thing. Mitchell talks to his cat, Old Man Mose – and Mose talks back. I got teased by the question of whether Mose was really talking or whether Mitchell was putting words in his mouth – as people who are owned by cats often do.

Because that question led immediately to two others – just how magical is this alternate post-WW2 Los Angeles, followed by the question about how big those alternatives are and in exactly what ways.

And then there’s Mitchell himself, who is so very much in the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe/Easy Rawlins hard-boiled detective mode, but with the nod to Marlowe and Rawlins because they both operated in our LA during the same time period that Mitchell does in his.

The cases Mitchell is confronted with combine the classics – a missing husband, a cheating wife, a missing brother who was clearly mixed up in something illegal and might have deserved whatever happened to him – which his sister doesn’t want to reveal because she knows damn well that he probably had it coming.

Then it spirals out into the differences. Two of his clients are black, and both his clients and himself acknowledge that the color of their skin means that they can only get help from one of their own, and that reaching out to the cops will only bring more trouble. While vampire Dora knows the cops don’t want to deal with her kind any more than she wants to deal with theirs – and that whatever her brother was in up to his neck was both ill-advised and illegal. Of course, trouble finds all of them anyway or this story wouldn’t exist.

Downtown Los Angeles ca 1950

What captivated me was the careful way in which this both was and was not Los Angeles as our own history knew it. At first, the reader believes they can place this story in time as well as location. It’s five years after the war in which Mitchell served. And that war was analogous to World War II, but it wasn’t exactly the same and is never called that, and neither were the opposing forces ever referred to as Nazis, but rather a name that translates to swastika. And they had sorcerers on their side. But then, so did the Allies.

There are other references that let the reader feel comfortable that this is post-World War II, but jazz musicians ‘Bird’ and ‘Lady Day’ are never referred to by their full names as we know them. So they might be, they might not exactly be, and we might or might not be further down the other leg of the trousers of time than we thought.

(I expected this part of the story to be marvelous because alternate history is what this author is award-winningly famous for. I just wasn’t expecting to see this depth of craft in a story that many will assume is ‘light’ entertainment. And I should have. If you are interested in alternate history and haven’t read Harry Turtledove, go forth and begin immediately because he’s awesome at it whether you agree with the choices he makes or not.)

I just settled in for the marvelous ride as Mitchell starts out with those seemingly common cases that in the best hard-boiled mystery fashion slowly congealed into a single case. An investigation that zigzagged from robbery to illicit drugs to dangerous magical experiments and landed in the machinations of an evil corporation secretly controlled by ancient gods who resorted to the most arcane method possible to silence any inconvenient enemies.

Considering how much trouble Mitchell is making for them, it’s a fate that he fears for himself and all his friends and associates – including the cat! – unless he can put together the right crew to fight back, not with knives and bullets – but on the magical plane.

Twice as Dead is the first book in the City of Shadows series, so clearly someone gets out of this story alive. Or at least, not dead. Or in the same state they went into it, if not a bit better. But the ending is just as clearly the start of something that goes with no good deed being unpunished, and this reader absolutely cannot wait to find out what that punishment is going to be.

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

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
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 Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.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!

A- #BookReview: Shattering Dawn by Jayne Ann Krentz

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Shattering Dawn by Jayne Ann KrentzShattering Dawn (The Lost Night Files Book 3) by Jayne Ann Krentz
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: paranormal, romantic suspense
Series: Lost Night Files #3
Pages: 331
Published by Berkley on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An unsettling investigation teaches two deeply suspicious people how to trust in the next thrilling novel of the Lost Night Files trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz.

Amelia Rivers, a member of the Lost Night Files podcast team, hires private investigator Gideon Sweetwater to catch the stalker who has been watching her. Amelia suspects the stalker may be connected to the shadowy organization responsible for the night that she and her two friends lost to amnesia—a night that upended their lives and left them with paranormal talents.

Gideon suspects that Amelia is either paranoid or an outright con artist, but he can’t resist the chemistry between them. He takes the case despite his skepticism. For her part, Amelia has second thoughts about the wisdom of employing the mysterious Mr. Sweetwater. She is wary of the powerful attraction between them, and deeply uneasy about the nightmarish paintings on the walls of his home. She senses they were inspired by his own dreamscapes.

Amelia knows she doesn’t have time to find another investigator, and Gideon is forced to reckon with the truth when he disrupts what was intended to be Amelia’s kidnapping. Now the pair is on the run, with no choice but to return to the haunting ruins of the old hotel where Amelia’s lost night occurred. They are desperate to stop a killer and the people who are conducting illegal experiments with a dangerous drug that is designed to enhance psychic abilities. If they are to survive, they will have to trust each other and the passion that bonds them.

My Review:

The Lost Night Files, the podcast at the center of this series, began after three women, Pallas Llewellyn, Talia March and Amelia Rivers, all lost a night, together, in the crumbling ruins of the old Lucent Springs Hotel.

They all believed that they were there for a job. Their combined specialties would be ideal for working on the rehabilitation of the formerly grand hotel and spa into a thing of beauty as well as a destination resort.

After being drugged, experimented upon, nearly killed in an out-of-control fire and/or crushed by an earthquake – all in the same night – and then, of course, disbelieved by the local cops, they banded together to give themselves, well, a job. Just an entirely different job than the one they thought they were being interviewed for.

Together, they started the podcast, searching for answers. Over the course of the series, beginning with Sleep No More and continuing with The Night Island, they found some of their answers – as well as other victims of the same nefarious operation – AND a whole hell of a lot more questions. Not to mention links back to the Bluestone Project behind the mysterious events at Fogg Lake that were explored in The Vanishing, All the Colors of Night, and Lightning in a Mirror.

Also, what look like happy ever afters for Pallas (Sleep No More) and Talia (The Night Island).

This time around its Amelia Rivers’ turn – in more ways than one.

It doesn’t take Amelia’s enhanced paranormal senses, courtesy of that mysterious experiment, for her to realize that someone is watching her. But her senses do give her the tools she needs to photograph and possibly even identify her stalker – at least in the paranormal spectrum where her talent manifests.

But Amelia’s talents as a photographer, whether paranormal or mundane, don’t exactly give her the tools she needs to hunt down someone who really is out to get her. (It’s not paranoia if it’s real, and this is very, very real indeed.)

Which is where private investigator Gideon Sweetwater comes in. Or will if Amelia decides she can trust him to be open-minded about her case. Little does Amelia know that Gideon’s mind was opened LONG before Amelia ever walked into his life. Not because he was part of the experiment, but rather because paranormal talents have been part of the Sweetwater family for generations.

And it’s his uncle’s misguided attempt to find more people like their family that started this whole entire mess. And might just end them all.

Escape Rating A-: Welcome to the ‘Jayneverse’ a place where psychic powers and paranormal talents hide in plain sight in some very surprising times and people and places – when they bother to hide at all.

Everything connects up eventually, from the 19th century Arcane Society, where the rationalization of the Industrial Revolution forced those talents underground – and gave rise to some seriously mad scientists – to the 20th and 21st century of this series and its predecessor Fogg Lake where those talents are hidden to keep the talented from being labelled as crackpots – to the far flung future of humanity out in the stars where paranormal talents are not merely accepted by downright required for survival on the lost colony of Harmony.

Howsomever, just because this book, and the trilogy it’s a part of, is part of a much broader tapestry, that does not mean that you can’t dive in right here – because you absolutely can. The links between the individual series and subseries are loose and tangential. If you know what came before – and after – it gives the story just a touch more resonance, but each book gives more than enough hints to pick up what has already happened in ITS subseries. Not that the links to other times and places aren’t irresistible – because they are. Just that you don’t have to know the ins and outs of all of those links to become immersed in the one that you have in your hands at the time.

That being said, Shattering Dawn is the wrap up of The Lost Night Files, and it does work better if you start with Sleep No More so that you’re right there with the fans of the podcast when Amelia needs them to rescue her – not that Gideon isn’t already working on that little problem.

What makes this story, and this series, so much fun is that there are always multiple strings to the author’s bow. So to speak.

The primary story is always the mystery to be solved, and in the case of The Lost Night Files it’s a doozy. Pallas, Talia and now Amelia have been pulling at the threads of that mystery from the very beginning. They know they’re closing in on the truth – and Amelia is certain that the truth is closing in on her as well.

Part of what makes this story such a page turner are the wheels within wheels of that truth. Amelia and her friends are not the only victims in a race to a deadly finish. There are conflicting and hidden motives on all sides, with each party having its own idea of what the endgame should be and who should be permitted to walk away from it.

At the same time, the heartbeat of this story, like the rest of the series, is the burgeoning romance between Amelia and Gideon. They begin by not trusting themselves or each other, and their steps towards even a possible alliance are hesitant and yet still every bit as hot as the power they wield separately – and even more explosively together.

I had a marvelous time reading Shattering Dawn – as I have with all of this author’s work, especially in the Jayneverse. Now that The Lost Night Files have found their answers, I’m looking forward to her next, It Takes a Psychic, written under her Jayne Castle pen name and set in fantastic, futuristic Harmony. If I’m really lucky, the story will even feature an intrepid Dust Bunny or two. I can’t wait to find out!

A- #AudioBookReview: Dead as a Dodo by Hailey Edwards

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Dead as a Dodo by Hailey EdwardsDead as a Dodo (Yard Birds, #2) by Hailey Edwards
Narrator: Stephanie Richardson
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: paranormal, urban fantasy, witches
Series: Yard Birds #2
Pages: 97
Length: 2 hours and 50 minutes
Published by Black Dog Books, Tantor Audio on February 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Ellie has done her best to keep the spark alive in her marriage to Wally, but she has limited options with her husband cursed into the body of a vintage novelty toy. She thought everything was going okay, aside from the fact he’s battery-operated and bursts into song whenever his motion sensor is triggered, but he’s done being a collector’s item.
When the Middles turn up with a half-dead coworker on her doorstep, Ellie jumps at the chance to help her nephews find who’s responsible to avoid the problems at home. As the attacks grow deadlier, and the rift between her and Wally grows wider, Ellie has to focus on saving herself if she ever hopes to save her marriage.

My Review:

Someone is targeting the shifters of the Sweetwater Pack as this second entry in the Yard Birds series. Ellie and her coven may not be part of the pack, but they are allies and two of her nephews absolutely are members. It’s not a surprise that those same nephews bring the hacked up victim right to Ellie’s door because he’s sure the coven can heal the victim – if she can be healed at all.

But that drags Ellie out of the funk she’s in and straight into a case that probably isn’t any of her business. Not that THAT’S ever stopped her. She wants to investigate and not just because she’s constitutionally incapable of keeping her nose out of other people’s business. Ellie’s having a personal crisis of her very own and she’d much rather handle someone else’s troubles than deal with it. Thankyouverymuch.

At least for a while. As a distraction. Until she can get down off her high horse and work on the mess that a curse has made of her marriage. Before it’s too late. Even if it already should have been – and if Ellie wasn’t a witch, would have been.

The case that Ellie, with able assistance and enablement from her nephew Zander, is a relatively simple one. Bloody, deadly and messy, but ultimately a bit stupid and easy to resolve.

Fixing her relationship with her husband is going to be a whole lot more complicated – and potentially heartbreaking. But a witch’s gotta do what a witch’s gotta do – no matter how much it’s going to hurt them both.

Escape Rating A-: This whole series, at least so far, is all about female power in its various forms. The members of the Witchlight coven may be entering their ‘crone era’, even if Flo is holding the signs of that back through sheer force of will and gallons of botox, but it’s not just them. In this second entry in the series (after Crazy as a Loon), it’s obvious that most of the paranormal and supernatural groups in Samford are run by women, including the Sweetwater Pack of shifters. A mixed pack whose alpha may be five foot nothing in human form but shifts to a whole lotta BEAR when her pack is threatened.

As it definitely is in this story.

The males in this story serve as helpers, assistants, annoyances and even outright ornaments, as exemplified by Ellie’ s beloved husband Wally, who is literally hanging on the wall as a battery-operated singing fish novelty toy.

Poor Wally has been cursed into the body of a plastic ‘Walleye’, literally, figuratively and frustratingly for both Ellie and Wally. (I really want the story of how that happened, and more about how Witchlight hubs operate when they’re not theoretically retired AND stories about the hijinks and adventures that Ellie and her coven got up to back in the day. If those stories already exist I’d appreciate it if someone would tell me!)

But all that female empowerment means that there were bound to be some males in town, whether human or shifter, who can’t hear the word “NO!” when it’s shouted in their faces – or beaks, or muzzles – and who can’t stand being beaten by a woman. Of course they’re just dead certain they’re entitled to be in charge because they have pricks. Or are pricks. Or both.

I did figure out the pattern to the attacks on Sweetwater long before Ellie and Zander did. Then again, she’s used to her and her coven and the other females in town being in charge of things. Out here in the real world, it just isn’t so and women get attacked just for being women all the damn time.

I’m going to try to climb down off my soapbox now but it’s not easy.

So the case Ellie has to solve was relatively simple, which makes it the perfect foil for Ellie’s personal issues – which are not going to be easy to resolve at all. Although, come to think of it, those issues are also about power, specifically the imbalance of power that has swum into Ellie’s marriage.

This story, the whole series in fact, is told from Ellie’s first person perspective, so we’re inside her head as she wrestles with her NEED to keep what she has of Wally SAFE. His form is fragile and easily broken or even stolen. But his heart and mind are EXACTLY what they were before the curse, meaning that inside that fish is a grown-ass adult who needs what we all need, purpose and independence. He’s starting to see Ellie as his jailor more than his wife and their marriage won’t survive that. And Ellie knows it even if she’s having a damn hard time figuring out what to DO about it.

Which is where the heartbreak and angst come into the story by the bucketful, and which the reader experiences even more fully and practically personally if they’re listening to Stephanie Richardson’s narration because she’s channeling Ellie’s internal voice perfectly. We hear Ellie, we feel for Ellie, and DAMN it’s hard to be there with her. (It’s what the story needs, but it’s still hard.)

The investigation may be over, but it feels like Ellie’s worries and woes have just dug in a little deeper as this story ends. I can’t wait to find out how, and for that matter if, everything works out in the third book in the series, Free as a Bird, which I know I’ll be listening to SOON even though I really, really don’t want this series to be over.

#BookReview: Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn FisherGrimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, historical fiction, historical romance, holiday fiction, holiday romance, paranormal
Pages: 299
Published by 47North on November 5, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Victorian England, a young woman inherits her father’s curiosity shop and all its ghostly secrets in a bewitching novel by the author of Salt & Broom.

It’s 1851 in old York. Lizzy Grimm struggles to save her late father’s charmingly creepy yet floundering antique shop, Grimm Curiosities. Then, during a particularly snowy December in this most haunted city in England, things turn…curiouser.

Lizzy meets Antony Carlisle, whose sister suffers from the same perplexing affliction as Lizzy’s mother—both stricken silent and unresponsive after speaking with ghosts. Working closely together to fathom what power has transformed their loved ones and why, Lizzy and Antony discover an important her father’s treasured set of rare books on ancient folktales, enchantments, and yuletide myths. Books that a persistent collector is awfully keen to purchase. Books Lizzy can’t bear to sell.

Every bewitching passage and illustration opens a doorway to something ancient and dangerously inviting. Keys to a mystery Lizzy and Antony are compelled to solve—even if doing so means unleashing one of this bright holiday’s darkest myths.

My Review:

To paraphrase a much more famous Victorian Christmas ghost story, Herbert Grimm was dead, to begin with.

And, while he has a chance to rectify his mistakes and failures from the afterlife, it’s a job that’s much too big for any number of spirits to handle in just one night.

It’s 1851 in cold, snowy, OLD York, and Lizzy Grimm has been doing her best to maintain the curiosity shop she inherited from her father – as well as somehow keep body and soul together for both herself and her mother.

The problem for Lizzy, the many, many problems for Lizzy, is that entirely too many of her father’s former customers and suppliers, both, are unwilling to deal with a woman, and her mother is ill and can’t help with the shop. Mrs. Grimm has disconnected completely from the world and can’t even help herself without supervision.

The rent is 10 weeks behind and getting more behind by the day, Lizzy can barely keep herself and her mother fed and prevent them from freezing to death in the winter cold. Christmas is less than two weeks away and, while business always improves BEFORE the holiday, it hasn’t improved enough to see them through the dearth of the bitter months after.

Which is the day when two men of considerably better means than Lizzy enter the shop and each present her with potential solutions to her woes. Collector Ambrose Stokes wants to purchase some mysterious books of myth and legend that her father set aside with a note not to sell. Antony Carlisle comes in seeking a present for his younger sister. A sister who is in the exact same walking somnambulance state as Lizzy’s mother.

It’s clear from the beginning that Stokes only wants to use her to get at something he covets badly and probably shouldn’t have. Meanwhile Carlisle is obviously searching for both help and friendship – even if he doesn’t recognize that the latter is only a small portion of what he seeks in Lizzy’s company.

Stokes can solve her immediate financial difficulties, while Carlisle is likely to only cause her heartbreak – even if that is far, far, from his intention.

Between them, they open up her world to the true legacy that her father intended to leave her. A legacy that holds the key to every question she’s ever asked, and every answer she never thought she’d need.

Escape Rating B-: I picked this up because it looked like it was just the kind of horror-adjacent story that I generally enjoy. And because it was set in York, the setting of one of my favorite historical mystery series. (If you’re curious about the York of four centuries before this story, check out the Owen Archer series of historical mysteries, beginning with The Apothecary Rose. Because if there is one thing that Lizzy Grimm is right about, it’s that York is absolutely rife with stories just waiting to be told!)

So I was expecting a bit more Halloween and got a whole lot of the Victorian Christmas season instead – mixed with a trip to Narnia and more than a soupçon of historical romance. Even though even a soupçon of actual soup is something that Lizzy has been forced to worry about a LOT.

Also, and I know this is a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing, Lizzy’s straddle of the line between having agency as the protagonist while being a woman of her time was even more uncomfortable for me than it was for her – and it was plenty uncomfortable for her. It just wasn’t what I was in the mood for and your reading mileage may definitely vary.

What was absolutely fascinating was the way that the supernatural and paranormal crept into the story on ghostly feet, that the gift she thought had passed her by was doing its damndest to warn her that she was heading for her own damnation if she didn’t figure out what was going on on both sides of the actual, honest-to-supernatural, wardrobe before it was too late.

From the standpoint of this reader, it felt like this story had too many irons in its fire. Each of the individual parts had the potential to be a whole, fascinating story, from the ghostly visitations to the world inside the cabinet, to the myths and legends coming to life to the mystery of just who the collector was and what he was up to and last but not least to the class-barrier hopping romance between Carlisle and Lizzy with Carlisle’s overbearing father serving as second-villain.

There were a LOT of fascinating story parts trying to weave themselves into a whole cloth – but they didn’t quite manage it and/or there wasn’t enough book for them to manage in. It had the bones of a good story – but either not quite enough bones or not enough flesh for the story-creature it was meant to be.

A- #AudioBookReview: Crazy as a Loon by Hailey Edwards

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Crazy as a Loon by Hailey EdwardsCrazy as a Loon (Yard Birds #1) by Hailey Edwards
Narrator: Stephanie Richardson
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: paranormal, urban fantasy, witches
Series: Yard Birds #1
Pages: 133
Length: 4 hours
Published by Black Dog Books, Tantor Audio on July 4, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Ellie Gleason has protected the town of Samford, Alabama for decades. It’s not as glamours as her glory days as the WitchLight Hub, but it keeps her active during her golden years.
Life is good.
Well, it’s okay.
Fine.
It could be bloodier with a smidge more gore, but retirement is meant to be low-key. It’s not like her fragile bones could handle the strenuous hunt for monsters anymore, even if her current duties are dull as dishwater.
But when her great-nephew shows up on her doorstep in tears—or is he her great-great nephew?—begging for help, Ellie straps on her beloved shotgun, Bam-Bam, and gets the coven back together.
Sure, Betty just had a hip replacement, and Flo would rather flirt than fight, and Ida is busy with her anniversary plans, and Joan is…Joan. But Ellie is certain she can whip the girls into shape in time to defeat the creature preying on kids at a nearby summer camp. She might even have them home in time for dinner.

My Review:

Ellie Gleason isn’t, really, and neither are the rest of her friends. Well, maybe Joan is just a bit. Crazy as a loon, I mean. None of them are crazy, loony or otherwise, no matter how much Ellie might fake it by running around the tiny town of Samford, Alabama in her housecoat with ‘Bam-Bam’ strapped to her back.

Bam-Bam is her shotgun. And nope, still not crazy.

Because when you’re still patrolling as a working member of Witchlight – even if you are in your second century – it’s better to be armed as well as dangerous. Which Ellie and the rest of her coven certainly are. Even if it takes them a little longer to get to the scene of the crime.

Or, for that matter, to the point of any discussion, because they’ve been together so damn long that there are plenty of times when the pointed barbs and the old grudges take over the planning of any and every op.

It’s mostly small town stuff – because they’re not the top tier of Witchlight operators no matter how much they all still wish they were kicking ass and taking names and riding monsters to the rescue. So when this case literally crawls into their laps, they’re all a bit giddy with the adrenaline of the chase.

Even if the person at the heart of the mess is a child under their protection. Particularly because another member of their family is doing their damndest to keep it from them.

They may not be what they used to be – but when one of their cubs is threatened it brings out the mama bear in every single one of them. Even if not one of them shifts into an actual bear. That’s okay. After all, one of their sons is bear-shifter enough to handle THAT part of the job.

Escape Rating A-: I picked up this book and audiobook, in fact this whole, entire series, on a recommendation from Caffeinated Reviewer. I caught her review of the third book in the series, Free as a Bird, and had to ask myself where had this been all my life and how had I missed it?

Based on this first book, this series is an absolute hoot from beginning to end. It was also the perfect book for this week as it is a hilarious pick-me-up with a heart wrapped around found family and lifelong sisterhood.

The combination of elements got me from the opening paragraphs. Because this takes off from the same premise as one of my favorite urban fantasies, A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark, but goes about it differently.

That book, and I still mourn that it was only ever the one, took off from a question about what happens to all those young, limber, kickass urban fantasy protagonists if they survive to middle age and even older. Marley Jacob got herself a kickass sidekick and went about her own personal kickassery through negotiation and mediation once the years caught up with her.

Ellie and her coven have just kept on kicking – even as they also kick against the inevitable slowing down of age. They use magic to slow down slowing down – and then they do too much and pay the price later. But they all refuse to quit even as they are forced to change gears.

They’re a LOT like the sisterhood of retired spies turned assassins in Killers of a Certain Age – complete with the sharply pointed banter and the lifelong grudges. So if you liked that and want to give urban fantasy a try, you’ll love Ellie and her Yard Birds.

The case here, and there certainly is one, does a great job of introducing Ellie and her sisters and setting up their family situation – which is just a bit complicated – while giving them a case that is close to their hearts even as it shines a light on just what sorts of things can go wrong in a world where the paranormal exists but still has to keep itself under wraps.

And then the case managed to tie itself back into the reason they all got involved in the first place, as both the evil they fight and the reason they’re fighting it come from the same place – a mother’s love.

The story is told from inside Ellie’s snarky head – and I loved every minute of it. The narrator, Stephanie Richardson, captured the essence of Ellie perfectly, so I’m very happy that she is the narrator for the whole series so far.

I only have two quibbles about this whole experience. One is that I wish there were more. Which there is, of course, as the second and third books, Dead as a Dodo and Free as a Bird, are already out and I already have them.

But the second is that I hope those later books resolve a niggle left over from this one. They did solve the case. They absolutely did. But there was a dangling potential co-conspirator left in their midst. I may be wrong about their co-conspirator status, but there was something rotten left in the heart of the family that got a rug pulled over it. I hope that rug gets pulled back in the books ahead.

I’m certainly there for it. I definitely want to hear as much more from Ellie as I can get!

#BookReview: Buried Memories by Simon R. Green

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Buried Memories by Simon R. GreenBuried Memories (Ishmael Jones, #10) by Simon R. Green
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, mystery, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Ishmael Jones #10
Pages: 219
Published by Severn House on October 25, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


Returning to the small town where he crash-landed in 1963, Ishmael Jones is in search of answers. But his investigation is de-railed by a brutal murder.

"I think something very bad and very dangerous has come to your little town, Inspector . . ."
As long-buried memories from his hidden past begin to resurface, Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny feel compelled to return to the small country town where Ishmael crash-landed in 1963; the place where his memories began.
Norton Hedley is no ordinary town. Apparitions, sudden disappearances, sightings of unusual beasts: for centuries, the place has been plagued by a series of inexplicable events. Ishmael's first task is to track down local author Vincent Smith, the one man he believes may have some answers.
Ishmael and Penny aren't the only ones seeking the mysterious Mr Smith. When their search unearths a newly-dead body in the local mortuary - a body that's definitely not supposed to be there - Ishmael becomes the prime suspect in the ensuing murder investigation. His only hope of discovering the truth about his origins lies in exposing a ruthless killer.

My Review:

Ishmael Jones is as he has always been. The problem is that he’s been the same, absolutely unaging, for 60 years now. And he doesn’t remember who – or more likely what – he was before that. Before 1963, when his alien space ship was blown out of the sky over Earth and crashed in a field near the tiny village of Norton Hedley.

Which doesn’t seem to have changed much either in the intervening 60 years.

A situation that is quite a bit more worrying than Ishmael’s own unchanging face, because he at least knows why THAT’s happening. Or not, as the case may be.

But Norton Hedley, a place where people come and go and live in hope for a good tourist season every year, seems to be a haven for the uncanny. After all, that’s what has brought Ishmael and his partner Penny to the village.

Because Ishmael and his unchanging appearance began – at least as far as his memory goes – with the crash landing of his alien spacecraft in the woods surrounding Norton Hedley in 1963. He’s returned because his previous two cases, Night Train to Murder and The House on Widows Hill, have provided him with some scattered but ominous clues about who and what he used to be.

And he needs to know. Because he needs to know if he’s a danger to Penny. Or anyone else on Earth who doesn’t deserve it.

In his research about Norton Hedley, or the research the coyly named black ops group, the Organisation, has done on his behalf, he – and they – have learned that Norton Hedley has been weird central for years. Not just the years since his ship crashed in 1963, but for centuries. Millenia even.

Something in, on, or more likely under – like the thing that was under The House on Widows Hill – has been creeping its creepy way along into the lifeblood of the town for eons uncounting. It might have the answers he’s been searching for for decades.

And it might not want to let him know.

Escape Rating B: This series has been one of my Halloween reads since I first discovered it, so it seemed appropriate to finish it up this Halloween. As I’ve already read the final book in the series (so far), I’ll have to pick something else horror-adjacent next year.

The author is an acquired taste – one that I acquired decades ago. It’s the snark. It’s always been the snark no matter what the ostensible genre or subject of ANY of his many series might be. If you like his voice, then when you’re in that mood nothing else will do. But if you’re not, you bounce off, and bounce hard. Your reading mileage may vary.

The concept of this particular series throws a whole bunch of speculative fiction tropes into one hell of a blender. The series began, back in The Dark Side of the Road, as English country house mysteries where the supernatural agencies turn out to be merely human – but with a touch of the paranormal or extraterrestrial for spice and added bodies.

Over the course of the series it has turned into Ishmael’s quest to learn enough about who or what he used to be to figure out just how he can continue to stay one step ahead of all the various secret agencies that would like to use him up in one way or another. Even more important, he’s thoroughly invested in keeping Penny safe – if necessary from himself.

At first, what made this series work as well as it does – at least for this reader – was the revelation in each case that no matter how weird things got – often very – that the enemies were always human after all.

What has kept me going this far have been the questions about Ishmael’s past and Penny’s future. While Ishmael has been unchanging for 60 years, the series has been set in a sort of ‘perpetual now’. Days and weeks pass but seemingly not years. This entry in the series is one of the first that confronts head on the problem of Ishmael and Penny’s relationship.

Not that they have problems, but that together they have a problem. Penny is an ordinary human, she will age, and Ishmael will not. Short of a deus ex machina – and not that there haven’t been plenty of powerful machina around over the course of the series – this can’t end happily. Howsomever, I already know that it does not end in the next book, Haunted by the Past. And in spite of the ominousness of that title, it doesn’t dive nearly as deeply into Ishmael’s past as Night Train to Murder, The House on Widows Hill and Buried Memories have done.

So, I have begun to wonder if the author is planning to end this series at all. I wonder even more whether or not he should. I’d rather just think of Ishmael and Penny in that perpetual now, continuing on their quest to find evil humans at the heart of supernatural hoaxes, raging together against the dying of their light.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Candle and Crow by Kevin Hearne

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Candle and Crow by Kevin HearneCandle & Crow (Ink & Sigil, #3) by Kevin Hearne
Narrator: Luke Daniels
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Ink & Sigil #3
Pages: 352
Length: 11 hours and 4 minutes
Published by Del Rey, Random House Audio on October 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles comes the final book in the Ink & Sigil series, as an ink-slinging wizard pursues the answer to a very personal mystery: Who cast a pair of curses on his head?
Al MacBharrais has a most unusual job: He’s a practitioner of ink-and-sigil magic, tasked with keeping order among the gods and monsters that dwell hidden in the human world. But there’s one supernatural mystery he’s never been able to solve: Years ago, someone cast twin curses on him that killed off his apprentices and drove away loved ones who heard him speak, leaving him bereft and isolated.
But he’s not quite alone: As Al works to solve this mystery, his friends draw him into their own eccentric dramas. Buck Foi the hobgoblin has been pondering his own legacy—and has a plan for a daring shenanigan that will make him the most celebrated hobgoblin of all. Nadia, goth queen and battle seer, is creating her own cult around a god who loves whisky and cheese.
And the Morrigan, a former Irish death goddess, has decided she wants not only to live as an ordinary woman but also to face the most perilous challenge of the mortal world: online dating.
Meanwhile, Al crosses paths with old friends and new—including some beloved Druids and their very good dogs—in his globe-trotting quest to solve the mystery of his curses. But he’s pulled in so many different directions by his colleagues, a suspicious detective, and the whims of destructive gods that Al begins to wonder: Will he ever find time to write his own happy ending?

My Review:

When we first met sigil agent Al MacBharrais back in Ink & Sigil, standing in the apartment of his seventh and latest apprentice – along with the corpse of said apprentice AND a caged HOBGOBLIN – we’re instantly aware of several things. Al’s world is just a bit bigger than the one we think we know, he has an absolutely fascinating line of work, and he’s in deep shit.

Or shite, as Al would say. It’s the same substance either way and no one wants to be standing in it as deeply as Al is already standing. And the story has barely begun!

It began in Ink & Sigil with Al hunting down the beings who were trafficking in beings from the fae planes – like the hobgoblin Buck Foi. It middled with an ‘adventure’ in Australia in Paper & Blood, and it ends here, back in Al’s native Glasgow in Candle & Crow, as Al’s mission to end the careers of as many traffickers as possible – no matter what species of sentient being they might be trafficking – ties itself up with Al’s personal quest to learn who cursed him AND why so that he can finally train up an apprentice to mastery and retire before the myriad dangers of his fascinating line of work catch up with him – fatally.

Candle & Crow perches right on that crossroads between “crying because it’s over” and “smiling because it happened.” I’m going to miss Al and his friends, but this was absolutely the right end for this series and I’m happy that I got to see it – and that Al’s office manager, Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite finally got to see the awesome shite that she came to see.

Escape Rating A: First of all – and last of all – Candle & Crow is an ending. Not just to the Ink & Sigil series, but by extension to the whole, entire Iron Druid Chronicles from which it sprang. Consider this a ginormous hint not to start here. It’s not necessary to start all the way back with the first book in the Iron Druid Chronicles, Hounded, and it’s absolutely not essential to have finished that series – because I haven’t and I still loved Al and his crew.

But you do need to start Al’s story with Ink & Sigil. And if you like urban fantasy, it is absolutely worth reading the whole glorious adventure.

I actually read this twice, or rather I read it once and had it read to me once. The first time I read it I was sitting in the train station in Al’s native Glasgow, waiting for the train back to London and eventually home after the close of the Glasgow WorldCon. It was the perfect place to read this story, with the one caveat that it made me regret not having taken the time to visit the Glasgow Necropolis, if only to see how close the book’s description of the tomb of Isabella Ure Elder is to the real thing. (Based on the photo at right, the answer is VERY – admittedly without the “dreich” weather experienced both in the story and, honestly, for much of our trip.).

In the series of mad dashes, long waits, and exhaustion at the end of a glorious trip, I didn’t have the opportunity to write this review before the details flew – or more likely slept – their way out of my head. But Al’s story has been marvelous every step of the way, so I picked up the audiobook and listened to it all again. And loved it again.

However, I have to say that, although the story is obviously the same, listening to Candle & Crow is a MUCH different experience than reading it. (I also wonder whether the author wrote this book, or perhaps the whole damn series, at least in part, just to mess with his audiobook narrator Luke Daniels.)

About that story…some stories start out as a whole, then the layers get peeled back until it’s much bigger on the inside than it looked like from the outside. Candle & Crow goes the other way.

Initially it reads as a loose pile of unrelated threads. There’s Al’s continuing investigation into the curses that have done their damndest to wreck his life. Then there’s the problem that hobgoblin Buck Foi is drinking to keep himself from thinking about. On top of that there’s Al’s attempts to help the police by providing them with evidence of human trafficking – only for the local police to decide that Al only has such information because he’s one of the traffickers and harass him repeatedly over that mistaken assumption.

(This is the point where I need to comment that, as much as I enjoyed most of the narration, the voice used for Detective Inspector Munro would have worked equally well for Dolores Umbridge of Harry Potter infamy. That character grates, the voice used for her grated to the point that chalk on a blackboard would have been an improvement – and possibly at a lower and more tolerable pitch as well. Getting down off my soapbox now. Hem-hem.)

On top of the issues that directly involved Al, there’s also the Morrigan’s desire to step away from her identity as “chooser of the slain” so she can fall in love, Al’s accountant Nadia and her search for a demi-godly purpose that turns to the founding of a new and potentially dangerous religion, and the ever-present question of exactly what sort of deity or superbeing Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite might be when she’s not being Al’s receptionist and just how dangerous the shite she has been waiting around in Glasgow to see might be for Al and his friends.

Al has a LOT on his mind at all times. That discovering the ‘nine ways to Nancy’ turns out to be the perfect metaphor for tying all of the many threads of Al’s story into a neat bow of a perfect ending for the series made for a fantastic conclusion to a marvelous series.

A- #BookReview: The Village Library Demon Hunting Society by C.M. Waggoner

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Village Library Demon Hunting Society by C.M. WaggonerThe Village Library Demon-Hunting Society by C.M. Waggoner
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy mystery, paranormal
Pages: 339
Published by Ace on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A librarian with a knack for solving murders realizes there is something decidedly supernatural afoot in her little town in this cozy fantasy mystery.
Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle keeps finding bodies—and solving murders. But she's concerned by just how many killers she's had to track down in her quaint village. None of her neighbors seem surprised by the rising body count...but Sherry is becoming convinced that whatever has been causing these deaths is unnatural. But when someone close to Sherry ends up dead, and her cat, Lord Thomas Crowell, becomes possessed by what seems to be an ancient demon, Sherry begins to think she’s going to need to become an exorcist as well as an amateur sleuth. With the help of her town's new priest, and an assortment of friends who dub themselves the "Demon-Hunting Society," Sherry will have to solve the murder and get rid of a demon. This riotous mix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Murder, She Wrote is a lesson for demons and murderers.
Never mess with a librarian.

My Review:

Teeny, tiny Winesap, New York might just be the murder capital of the whole, entire world, and from a certain perspective it’s all Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle’s fault. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

Which is exactly what Sherry realizes when the latest victim of the town’s absolutely-not-a-serial-killer crime spree is the gentleman she’s been seeing for several months now. (Sherry, as a woman of a certain age, has a difficult time thinking of him as her ‘boyfriend’ because that just sounds ridiculous – but it is the truth all the same.)

But Alan Thompson’s murder is the first death that has touched her personally, and it shakes her out of her waking daydream of being Winesap’s equivalent of Jessica Fletcher, assisting the police with their investigations no matter how much it embarrasses them.

After all, just like Jessica, Sherry is good at it, and the local police clearly need her help. Just as much as Sherry needs to feel useful and needed and smart and at the center of everything – something that she’s otherwise never been in her whole, entire life.

Alan’s death shakes Sherry and rattles her self-absorbed, contented little bubble. She doesn’t feel any compulsion to investigate Alan’s death – she just wants to grieve for the man who might have been the love of her life. If she’d let him.

Which is the point where the story switches from Murder, She Wrote to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not that there are any actual vampires around Winesap in need of slaying. But the town might be sitting on a Hellmouth all the same.

Because suddenly there are demons – or at least A demon – possessing random townspeople who all berate Sherry, at increasing volume and at all hours of the day and night, to stop crying over Alan and put on her big girl panties and investigate his murder – whether she wants to or not.

As far as all of those possessed townspeople are concerned – or at least as far as the demon possessing them is concerned – investigating murders is Sherry’s purpose in Winesap and she needs to get right to it.

So she asks herself, “What Would Buffy Do?” (not exactly but close enough) and puts together her very own Scooby Gang to figure out what’s really going on in Winesap and what she needs to do to set it right.

Even if it involves closing a Hellmouth. Or her own.

Escape Rating A-: Were you teased by that blurb description of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Murder, She Wrote?

I absolutely was, because that’s not exactly a combo that anyone would expect to see, pretty much ever. They absolutely are two great tastes – but whether they’d be great together is definitely an open question.

It turns out that it is, but not in the manner that you might expect. Just like it certainly is a cozy fantasy mystery, but likewise, not in the way that blurb might lead a reader to expect. And I definitely have quibbles about the description of it being “riotous” because that’s not true at all.

More like darkly snarky and filled with a lot of wry ruefulness – along with a bit of righteous fear and a whole heaping helping of pulling back the corners of a surprising amount of self-deception.

I think that the blurb description should be reversed, because at the opening it’s very much Murder, She Wrote, to the point where Sherry acknowledges that she often feels like she’s playing the part of Jessica Fletcher in a story for someone else’s entertainment, just as Angela Lansbury played Fletcher in the TV series.

What makes the story work AND descend into the creeping darkness of Buffy is that Sherry discovers that feeling is the literal truth. Winesap is a stage set where murder plays are acted out in order to entertain and amuse an epically bored demon.

Because immortality is both lonely AND boring, and this particular demon, like so many humans, has discovered the joys of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, particularly the stories of Agatha Christie, and is having a grand time watching Sherry and her fellow villagers play out ALL the parts for her.

Particularly as the demon doesn’t actually know how it will end. She claims she’s not forcing anyone to do anything – the increasing frequency and volume of her importuning of Sherry notwithstanding. The demon claims she’s only making suggestions and providing opportunities, that all of the murderers Sherry has ‘caught’ have acted of their own free will.

As has Sherry in her zeal for investigation.

All of which, if true – and it might not be, after all demons lie every bit as much as humans if not a bit more – makes the story a whole lot darker than it first seemed. And opens up the possibility of a sequel – which has the possibility of being even more fascinating as Sherry would have to enter into the thing with full self-awareness.

Along with the awareness that her cat, Lord Thomas Cromwell (the blurb infuriatingly misspells his name – and it MATTERS) really does contain the spirit of the actual historical figure, Lord Thomas Cromwell, the architect of Henry VIII’s infamous divorce, and that her cat is not only watching and judging her – as they all do – but has the ability to tell her all about herself whenever he damn well pleases. Or whenever the demon lets him. Pretty much the same thing.

I hope we’ll get to see them both again.

A- #BookReview: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah PinskerHaunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, horror, paranormal
Pages: 161
Published by Tordotcom on September 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

On the set of a kitschy reality TV show, staged scares transform into unnerving reality in this spooky ghost story from multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Sarah Pinsker.
“Don’t talk to day about what we do at night.”
When aimless twenty-something Mara lands a job as the night-shift production assistant on her cousin’s ghost hunting/home makeover reality TV show Haunt Sweet Home, she quickly determines her new role will require a healthy attitude toward duplicity. But as she hides fog machines in the woods and improvises scares to spook new homeowners, a series of unnerving incidents on set and a creepy new coworker force Mara to confront whether the person she's truly been deceiving and hiding from all along—is herself.
Eerie and empathetic, Haunt Sweet Home is a multifaceted, supernatural exploration of finding your own way into adulthood, and into yourself.

My Review:

This wasn’t the book I planned to read this week, but after yesterday’s book I needed something with a bit harder of an edge, or a bit more adventure in its heart, or something other than cozy relationship fiction. I also needed something short because I flailed a bit.

I picked this out of the virtually towering TBR pile because I read the author’s “One Man’s Treasure” as part of my Hugo reading this year. I didn’t think it stuck the dismount but the story was a whole lot of fun as it went along.

And the premise of this one also looked like a whole lot of fun. I’m not sure whether it’s more fun or less fun if you believe, as I do, that “Reality TV” is an oxymoron, an inherent contradiction in terms. (And come to think of it, there’s another recent horror-adjacent story with a similar premise, The Holy Terrors by Simon R. Green – but Haunt Sweet Home is a much better, and more original, story.

Haunt Sweet Home lies at a surprising intersection of tropes and genres. OTOH, it’s a bit of an exposé of how the not-so-ghostly sausage of spooky reality TV shows get made. On a second hand, it’s about the grind of clinging by one’s fingernails to the lowest rung of the entertainment ladder – and discovering that the work is the thing one has been looking for all along.

And then there’s that third, ghostly hand, which really surprised me by circling back to Susan M. Boyer’s Liz Talbot series and thereby tying itself to yesterday’s book, as the protagonist, Mara, seems to have manifested or acquired or midwifed or all of the above, a sort of family ghost of her very own. By a method that owes more than a bit to Pygmalion – not the play or any of the adaptations of the play including the movies, but the original Greek myth about the man who sculpted his perfect woman and brought her to life.

Mara doesn’t sculpt a perfect paramour. Instead, she sculpts a perfect – or at least a more functional – version of her very own self. A version of herself that is a bit better at people, a bit less of an indecisive screw-up, much less of the family joke, and a whole lot better at believing in herself.

And very nearly decides to throw it all away. Because she’s started to believe entirely too many of her family’s so-called jokes than any one person can stand.

Escape Rating A-: I liked this a whole lot, and in fact a whole lot more than I expected to. Clearly, I don’t believe “Reality TV” has anything to do with actual reality, so reading a story that lampooned that genre at every turn was a good choice for me.

I also liked the horror-adjacency of this one, even though that’s why I had passed it by earlier in the month. I wasn’t sure how adjacent the horror was, but as it turns out the answer is – VERY. The TV series is simulating horror, manipulating or editing reactions to make it seem like horrors are happening – but everyone involved is very aware that it isn’t. Except for a bit of a tease at the end which just makes the whole damn thing work even better!

What really makes this story work is the character of Mara. She seems to be an afterthought for her whole family, the butt of every joke and the person voted least likely to succeed at every turn, to the point where she’s internalized all of that attitude.

It hurts her but she can’t make it stop. Every single thing she says or does goes through the family story editing machinery until it comes out that Mara is always lifeless, feckless and useless. She’s become entirely self-effacing because it no longer matters what she does – not even to herself.

At least not until her alter ego, her creation, her ghost avatar, Jo, comes into the picture. Because Jo IS Mara every bit as much as she is her own self. Jo sees Mara for who she really is on the inside – and isn’t in the least bit shy about telling Mara all about herself – no matter how much Jo KNOWS it’s gonna hurt. Because it needs to.

Someone needs to make Mara listen to the truths she doesn’t want to hear, and who better to make herself listen to those truths than herself? So Jo’s very existence, and Mara’s family’s reaction to a ‘better’ version of Mara forces Mara to confront those truths and do something about them. Which they do. Together. Even if it broke my librarian heart to watch them destroy most of a library to get there.

In spite of the terrible treatment of that poor library, it was still a terrific end to a really fun story.