Publisher: 47North

#BookReview: Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Snake-Eater by T. KingfisherSnake-Eater by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Elena Rey
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, Dark Fantasy, fantasy, horror, magical realism
Pages: 267
Length: 10 hours and 56 minutes
Published by 47North, Brilliance Audio on November 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award–winning author T. Kingfisher comes an enthralling contemporary fantasy seeped in horror about a woman trying to escape her past by moving to the remote US desert—only to find herself beholden to the wrath of a vengeful god.
With only a few dollars to her name and her beloved dog Copper by her side, Selena flees her past in the city to claim her late aunt’s house in the desert town of Quartz Creek. The scorpions and spiders are better than what she left behind.
Because in Quartz Creek, there’s a strange beauty to everything, from the landscape to new friends, and more blue sky than Selena’s ever seen. But something lurks beneath the surface. Like the desert gods and spirits lingering outside Selena’s house at night, keeping watch. Mostly benevolent, says her neighbor Grandma Billy. That doesn’t ease the prickly sense that one of them watches too closely and wants something from Selena she can’t begin to imagine. And when Selena’s search for answers leads her to journal entries that her aunt left behind, she discovers a sinister truth about her new home: It’s the haunting grounds of an ancient god known simply as “Snake-Eater,” who her late aunt made a promise to that remains unfulfilled.
Snake-Eater has taken a liking to Selena, an obsession of sorts that turns sinister. And now that Selena is the new owner of his home, he’s hell-bent on collecting everything he’s owed.

My Review:

I picked this up because, well, Kingfisher. That’s not going to surprise anyone. Howsomever, based on the blurb, I wasn’t exactly sure where this one was going to fall genre-wise – and now that I’ve finished it I’m still not sure.

Snake-Eater is wrapped around the crossroads where dark fantasy forks between magical realism and outright horror. At the same time, it’s also a bit of cozy fantasy written as a love letter to the author’s old/new home in the desert southwest. And it’s a kind of coming-of-age/coming-into-power story.

Not that Selena isn’t technically an adult – more that she’s been programmed to believe that she isn’t adulting ‘properly’ and has to reclaim that power for herself in a place where some of the old gods, myths and monsters tend her garden and creep into her bed.

Then again, she left a human monster back in the city she left behind. And she’s willing to tackle whatever the desert has to throw at her as long as her dog Copper is safe and she NEVER has to go back.

Which she doesn’t, as long as she can accept that part of what is being preserved out in that desert are old gods and older spirits who can still interact with the humans among them – for both good and ill. One of those gods snuffed out the life of the aunt that Selena came to stay with. Just as the human Walter has nearly snuffed out Selena’s life back in the city. Only a bit more literally. Or maybe not.

But Selena came to Quartz Creek to escape that fate, and she’s not about to let a different monster take the freedom she’s scraped out by her fingernails. All she has to do is beard this monster in his den, with the help of a septuagenarian with a shotgun, a priest who shapeshifts into a peccary, her faithful dog Copper – and all the little animals and spirits that she’s helped along the way.

In spite of herself, Selena has found herself in Quartz Creek, and she’s determined to stay. No matter what it takes. As long as it doesn’t take Copper.

Escape Rating B: Don’t worry, Copper is FINE at the end. I’d have been a whole lot saltier about this one if she wasn’t. But she is.

I started this in audio, but I’m not calling it an audiobook review. Why? Because I listened to less than an hour and realized that I could not continue in audio if I was going to finish at all. I was briefly concerned that I had just discovered the first T. Kingfisher book that I did not like at all and was so bummed by that prospect that I switched to text and it got better.

This is not a criticism of the narrator. Not at all. Rather, this was a case of the narrator being TOO good, in a story whose first-person perspective meant that I was stuck inside a head I didn’t want to be in.

(It didn’t help that I usually see the first-person protagonists of this author’s stories as being avatars for the author’s self. That’s either not the case here, or it’s that Selena represents the author’s past self and not her present. The avatar for Kingfisher’s usual wry, snarkastic and often profane voice in THIS book is the absolutely awesome Grandma Billy, and Selena and the reader don’t meet her until just after I switched to text. It figures.)

The point of this story is wrapped around Selena finding her own place and her own power, after an entire life of being told she was incompetent and utterly wrong and totally ‘less than’. Her mother criticized her every word and every utterance as representative of Selena’s possession by Satan. (Selena’s mother was clearly a LOT in some horrible ways and a bit too similar to the parent of a real-life friend.) But Selena’s mother basically programmed Selena to accept that kind of treatment, so when she met her current partner, Walter, she was so happy to be with someone who accepted her as she was that she didn’t realize until it was much too late that he accepted her as she was because her damage gave him plenty of places to pick at and neg her into compliance – all to make her feel ‘less than’ in an entirely different way.

At the beginning of the story, we’re inside her head as she’s trying to work her way mentally around an act of utter defiance that she feels completely incompetent to carry out. While I certainly sympathized with her plight, her constant negative self-talk while continually NOT talking about the actual problem made for a slow and difficult listen from inside her head.

At least in part because it was obvious what she was dealing with but it was a ‘Chekhov’s Ex’ situation where Walter was the villain who was obviously going to show up before the end and I needed the story to ‘get on with it’. Some of which, I recognize, is a ‘me’ thing and your reading mileage may vary.

Once Selena starts to accept the situation she’s actually in – as utterly batshit insane as some of it definitely is – the story just gets better and better. Also crazier, but in a really, really good way. (Quartz Creek is surprisingly cozy even if it’s also just down the road from Midnight, Texas.) It just takes the story – and Selena herself – a bit of time and mental fortitude, along with more than a little help from her newfound friends, to figure out that she’s finally found the place where she belongs.

And that not just the place is worth defending, but that she herself is as well. That’s a story I was definitely there for, I just needed to read a bit past my usual level of patience for it to get there.

#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
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.

Review: A Thousand Recipes for Revenge by Beth Cato

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Thousand Recipes for Revenge by Beth CatoA Thousand Recipes for Revenge by Beth Cato
Format: eARC
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, historical fantasy
Series: Chefs of the Five Gods #1
Pages: 411
Published by 47North on June 13, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A world on the brink of war and a mother and daughter on the run, in a thrilling novel of swashbuckling adventure, culinary magic, and just desserts.
Adamantine “Ada” Garland has an empathic connection to food and wine, a magical perception of aromas, flavors, and ingredients. Invaluable property of the royal court, Ada was in service to the Five Gods and to the Gods-ordained rulers of Verdania—until she had enough of injustice and bloodshed and deserted, seeking to chart her own destiny. When mysterious assassins ferret her out after sixteen years in hiding, Ada, now a rogue Chef, and her beloved Grand-mère run for their lives, only to find themselves on a path toward an unexpected ally.
A foreign princess in a strange court, Solenn unknowingly shares more with Ada than an epicurean gift. They share blood. With her newfound magical perception, she becomes aware of a plot to kill her fiancé, the prince. It’s part of a ploy by adversarial forces in the rival country of Albion to sow conflict, and Solenn is set up to take the blame.
As Ada’s and Solenn’s paths converge, a mother and her long-lost daughter reunite toward a common goal, and against a shadowy enemy from Ada’s past who is out for revenge. But what sacrifices must be made? What hope is there when powerful Gods pick sides in a war simmering to eruption?

My Review:

There are a thousand quotes about revenge and most of them are not kind to the person seeking it. But it’s possible that the one in the world of these particular five gods is the most bitter, literally and figuratively. “There are a thousand recipes for revenge, and they all taste like scat.”

In other words, revenge tastes like shit. In a world where the ability to perceive and even enhance the qualities of every single thing a person might eat or drink is the highest form of magic, that has to be one of its world’s greatest curses.

And a warning that entirely too many people have refused to heed in this fantastic story that has only just begun.

At first, we’re following two women who don’t seem to have much to do with each other. And even though we don’t know it yet, someone’s revenge has reached out, seemingly from beyond the grave, to do its best to turn both their lives into shit.

Or perhaps something a bit worse but surprisingly edible – even if it really, really shouldn’t be. Which is where this world’s magic comes in.

Ada Garland is one of the chefs blessed by Gyst, the God of Mysteries and Unknowns. Her tongue is literally magic. She can tell whether something is clean or polluted, poisonous or just badly prepared, too salty, too sweet, or perfectly balanced. Her magic allows her to make the dish that a person wants and needs most in that moment – and do it perfectly every time.

And she has the power to turn certain special ingredients, called epicurea, into magical items that will pass their magic on to whoever eats them.

It’s a gift and a curse at the same time, as all blessed chefs in her country are automatically conscripted into the royal service the moment their talents manifest. It’s a service that led Ada to her husband and their child. And it’s a service that split them apart when the alliance between their countries dissolved.

Ada is on the run, and has been for over a decade, taking care of her increasingly unstable grandmother while avoiding the grasping, greedy mother who wants to use her and her talent for ends that are even more unsavory than Ada first believed.

The revenge that reaches out for Ada, her friends and her family threatens to expose all of her secrets – and theirs. If it doesn’t get them all killed first. Or worse. Much, much worse.

Escape Rating A+: I picked this up because I was looking for something else with magical cookery after The Nameless Restaurant. Both stories do feature cookery as Magic with a Capital “M”, but that is the only thing they have in common. I’m still grateful for the push from the one to the other, because A Thousand Recipes for Revenge is just plain awesome and I’m so glad I read it, even if it is making me give the side-eye to pretty much everything I eat.

The magic system here is both fascinating and unsettling at the same time, because it’s all wrapped around magical foods, the ability to create them and the ability to taste them. This is a world where many people can cook, and unsurprisingly so or everyone would starve, but where it takes a gift from the actual gods to be a chef. But the silver lining of that gift comes with plenty of cloud wrapped around it, as both Ada and Princess Solenn discover to their cost.

This is also definitely one of those stories about being better off – or at least sleeping better at night – if one did not know how the sausage was made. It’s a secret that has been brutally suppressed in this world for excellent if entirely terrible reasons.

At first, this seems like a rather typical military type, gaslamp set fantasy. Ada is AWOL from her military service, while our second perspective on this story, Princess Solenn, is in the midst of being married off for a political alliance.

But then Ada’s old comrades start getting killed, Ada’s hidden existence is suddenly under threat, and it seems like she’s on the run from awful but otherwise mundane forces. Until things go completely pear-shaped and the gods start getting involved. At which point it’s off to the races – against time, against death, against the forces of oppression and most especially against petulant beings who would rather play with their food than either nurture it, treat it as a pet or kill it as prey.

And then things get really complicated.

I thought I knew where this was going. And then I thought I knew where this was going. But it didn’t go any of the places I thought it would, but where it did end up was both head spinning and stomach churning as well as a tremendous tease because there had to be more and at first I didn’t realize there was, but there is and oh thank goodness!

Ada and Solenn give readers two heroines to route for, as this is both Ada’s story of picking up the pieces of the life she left behind and Solenn’s coming of age story and both are fantastic. The world’s setup at first seems fairly standard epic fantasy and then goes to places that are fresh (if occasionally rotting) and new and unexpected. There are bits of Bujold’s World of the Five Gods and Jenn Lyons’ A Chorus of Dragons in the way that the gods of this world operate, as well as Guy Gavriel Kay’s and Jacqueline Carey‘s use of real world geography and history as a way of creating a fantasy world’s map and political divisions, but the magic system is just completely off a new wall and it’s marvelous in the way it suffuses the story.

Which, as I squeed earlier, thankfully isn’t done yet. There’s a second book in the Chefs of the Five Gods series, A Feast for Starving Stone, coming in January. And I can’t wait!

Review: The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Seventh Bride by T. KingfisherThe Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, horror, retellings, young adult
Pages: 236
Published by 47North on November 24, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Young Rhea is a miller’s daughter of low birth, so she is understandably surprised when a mysterious nobleman, Lord Crevan, shows up on her doorstep and proposes marriage. Since commoners don’t turn down lords—no matter how sinister they may seem—Rhea is forced to agree to the engagement.

Lord Crevan demands that Rhea visit his remote manor before their wedding. Upon arrival, she discovers that not only was her betrothed married six times before, but his previous wives are all imprisoned in his enchanted castle. Determined not to share their same fate, Rhea asserts her desire for freedom. In answer, Lord Crevan gives Rhea a series of magical tasks to complete, with the threat “Come back before dawn, or else I’ll marry you.”

With time running out and each task more dangerous and bizarre than the last, Rhea must use her resourcefulness, compassion, and bravery to rally the other wives and defeat the sorcerer before he binds her to him forever.

My Review:

I picked up The Seventh Bride because I love T. Kingfisher’s work and especially because I love her stories of young women – often very, very young – who have found themselves in a seriously large and potentially deadly pickle of epic proportions. Who, instead of whining, “oh woe is me!” or their world’s equivalent, put on the big girl panties they may not even be old enough to actually have yet and set about the business of saving themselves and everyone around them.

Just like Mona in A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and especially Marra in Nettle & Bone, Rhea is a young woman who is forced to adult really hard because the adults around her are either not up to the job (Mona) or are in positions of powerlessness relative to the evil aristocratic villain who is pulling everyone’s strings (Marra).

Rhea knows there’s something seriously wrong in the whole idea of a nobleman sweeping in to marry a miller’s daughter. Not because fairy tales don’t occasionally happen, and not that this won’t be one someday, but she knows it doesn’t happen to relatively plain girls in working-class families without some kind of magical intervention.

She’s also all too aware that no matter how the mysterious Lord Crevan might phrase his proposal, neither Rhea nor her parents have any real choice in the matter. He’s manipulating them all and he’s enjoying it.

Rhea’s just as aware that her parents are doing their best to pretend that this mess isn’t as wrong as it really is. She’s angry and frustrated because she knows there’s something rotten going on, and she’s exasperated almost beyond bearing that her parents keep trying to pretend that things might be okay after all. It takes a long time and a lot of thought for her to acknowledge that they are basically whistling past the graveyard and that they are hoping that if they pretend hard enough that things might not be quite so bad – although they probably will be.

But when Rhea arrives at Lord Crevan’s hidden country estate she discovers that actually – the whole thing is much, much worse than she imagined. That there are fates worse than death and that six of Crevan’s previous wives have all landed in those situations. And that Rhea is next unless she can find a way to stop him before its too late for her- and her hedgehog – if not for them.

Escape Rating A: The Seventh Bride is right at the crossroads between fairy tales, fantasy, horror and young adult. Or it is if there’s a skeleton buried under that crossroads.

It also reads like a bit of a ‘dress-rehearsal’ for Nettle & Bone, having been originally published eight years before Nettle. The two stories have a lot of the same elements, but as they are all elements that I love, that’s an excellent thing.

Like Marra in Nettle & Bone, Rhea is in an impossible situation, one in which she knows she’s utterly powerless. At least in any traditional sense of power. She’s low born, she’s young, she’s female, her family is dependent on the local lord’s goodwill. Even if Lord Crevan mistreats her – as she expects he will – if she refuses him her family will, at best, be thrown out of their house and livelihood. At worst, they’ll all be killed. She’s in that squeeze between the rock and the hard place. She expects the hard place to be hard, but her parents will survive her going there and it might not be AS bad as she fears. The rock will crush them all for certain if she doesn’t.

But that’s where the magic of the tale comes in, in its horrible, beneficent, and human aspects. All at once. Because if there’s one thing Rhea is good at, it’s making the best of her situation. There’s a band of sisters waiting for her at Lord Crevan’s estate – his other wives. She has allies – and she gives them hope. She finds a way to fight back that is both underhanded and subversive.

And why shouldn’t she? It’s not as if Crevan is playing fair.

The more she sees of the horror that she’ll have to endure if she submits, or is ground under, the more determined she is to find a way out. And the more she shows that he can be subverted, the more of his other wives are willing to help her do so.

The creepy factor in this one is very high. The sense of a band coming together is very strong. And the possibility of a villain getting EXACTLY what’s coming to him is EXTREMELY satisfying.

So don’t let the idea that this might be YA-ish stop you from picking up this marvelously creepy story of magic, helpfully intelligent animals (Rhea’s hedgehog friend is adorable), found sisterhood and evil getting hoist on its own pointy petard. (Especially as the ebook is currently on sale for 99 cents. It’s an absolute STEAL!)

And if the author ever writes a bonus scene of Rhea, Marra and Mona sitting down for tea in some place between the worlds, I’d love to be a fly on that wall – or at least a reader of that story!

Review: The Frame-Up by Meghan Scott Molin + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
Review: The Frame-Up by Meghan Scott Molin + GiveawayThe Frame-Up (The Golden Arrow #1) by Meghan Scott Molin
Format: eARC
Source: supplied free by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: romantic suspense
Series: Golden Arrow #1
Pages: 287
Published by 47North on December 1, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

By day she writes comic books. By night, she lives them.

MG Martin lives and breathes geek culture. She even works as a writer for the comic book company she idolized as a kid. But despite her love of hooded vigilantes, MG prefers her comics stay on the page.

But when someone in LA starts recreating crime scenes from her favorite comic book, MG is the LAPD’s best—and only—lead. She recognizes the golden arrow left at the scene as the calling card of her favorite comic book hero. The thing is…superheroes aren’t real. Are they?

When the too-handsome-for-his-own-good Detective Kildaire asks for her comic book expertise, MG is more than up for the adventure. Unfortunately, MG has a teeny little tendency to not follow rules. And her off-the-books sleuthing may land her in a world of trouble.

Because for every superhero, there is a supervillain. And the villain of her story may be closer than she thinks…

My Review:

First of all, think of Batman. Not because he appears in this story, except by mention. As does every geeky/nerdy movie, TV show, book, comic and game that you can think of. And a few you probably can’t. (Not just because a few of the geek references are made up for the purposes of this story, but because no geek, no matter how dedicated, is into absolutely every geekish everything on every geekish axis. I say this as someone who is fairly geeky, and recognized most but not quite all of the references and in-jokes.)

And I’m not sure if someone without at least a passing knowledge of geekdom will enjoy this story, because there are a LOT of in-jokes. And while the point of the romance part of the plot is that MG finally realizes that she doesn’t need to find someone who knows the ins and outs of geek culture in order to find her happily ever after, it does help the reader to know what at least some of what the flying references refer to.

Back to Batman. Among all of the famous superheroes, Batman is the one who is just “original recipe” human. He may be incredibly rich, and probably has a heaping helping of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but underneath the batsuit is just a (usually really, really buff) man. No extra-terrestrial origin, no mythic ancestors, no science experiment gone wrong. Just as Batman responds in Justice League to the question, “What are your superpowers again?”. His answer, “I’m rich.”. And that’s all.

The “caped crusader” who turns out to be at the heart of the mystery in The Frame-Up, the Hooded Falcon, is just like Batman. Not nearly as rich, but just as human. And only human. Excessively trained, and with a desire to see justice done, but merely human.

As a comic book, the original Hooded Falcon died decades before the opening of the events in this story, but MG Martin is a writer for Genius Comics, the company founded on the popularity of the Hooded Falcon. And even though the Falcon’s original creator is long since dead, his son still publishes a comic under the Hooded Falcon name – admittedly without any of his father’s, or his father’s creation’s spirit.

But someone in LA is committing crimes that recreate panels from the classic Hooded Falcon adventures. This person seems to have taken up either the banner of the Falcon himself, or perhaps that of the Falcon’s creator. Either way, there’s a vigilante on the streets of LA who has put himself (or possibly herself) in the sights of LA’s current generation of drug kingpins.

The police want to stop the crime spree before it’s too late. After a chance encounter, Detective Matteo Kildaire recruits MG as a police consultant expert on all things geek in general, and on her hero the Hooded Falcon in particular.

But all the clues point much, much too close to home, both for MG and Matteo. When his creator died, the Hooded Falcon was on the trail of both the drug kingpins AND the dirty cop who was covering for them.

History seems to be repeating, with both MG and Matteo caught in the crossfire. This time it’s not a crossfire of BAM and KAPOW, but real guns firing real bullets and dealing real death. They have to find the faces behind the masks, before it’s too late for our heroes.

After all, in real life there’s no possibility of a failure saving reboot if they get it wrong.

Escape Rating B-: The Frame-Up felt a bit like two books in one. One book that I really liked, and one that I really didn’t.

The first third or so of the story is the setup. We get introduced to MG, her coworkers at Genius Comics, and the opening frames of her relationship with Matteo. That relationship begins by being intimately tied to the case – not that it doesn’t take on a life of its own.

But the introduction to MG’s world is hard to take. MG is the lone female at Genius Comics. We see things entirely from her perspective, and that’s a realistically scary place to be. Geekdom in general, and geekdom-creation spaces in particular, are rightfully notorious for their misogynistic dudebro culture. Women are made to feel unwelcome, and it’s deliberate. MG is correct in her belief that she has to be “more badass” than any of the guys just to be taken half as seriously  – no matter how unfair it is or how much it hurts to be that defensive all the time.

Matteo, with his need to find an “in” so that he can surreptitiously scope out the company, absolutely DOES undermine MG’s position. That she falls for him rather than boot him to the curb at the first opportunity rankles quite a lot.

And the whole setup makes for very hard reading.

Once things are significantly setup, the story kicks into a higher gear and becomes a lot of fun.

The mystery is definitely a wild and crazy ride, only missing a few scattered BAMs and KAPOWs to make it completely part of the comic hero genre. I really liked MG’s nerdiness and felt for her desire to be her authentic best self. I particularly liked the way that Matteo, while he is a “virgin” when it comes to geek culture, is open minded about everything he experiences. It’s easy to see that he accepts MG for who she is, loves her as she is, and doesn’t feel any need to cram her into a box that won’t fit – as her parents and so many people in her life have previously tried to do.

The case has a lot of heart to it. It’s about children taking care of, writing wrongs for, or attempting to get past the legacies of their parents. It’s about superheroes and supervillains, and how real people come to fit into those places – whether they intend to or not.

And in the best superhero tradition, good triumphs, evil gets its just deserts, and the hero and heroine live happily ever after. At least until the next supervillain comes along…

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