Publisher: Tor Books

A+ #BookReview: Legalist by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Legalist by L.E. Modesitt Jr.Legalist (The Grand Illusion #4) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, gaslamp, steampunk
Series: Grand Illusion #4
Pages: 576
Published by Tor Books on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., bestselling author of Saga of Recluce and the Imager Portfolio, continues the Grand Illusion, a gaslamp political fantasy series (Isolate, Councilor, Contrarian) with a prequel, Legalist.
Fifty years after the establishment of the Imperium, and 450 years before the events of Isolate, Dominic Mikail Ysella―ancestor of Avraal Ysella―is the grandson of the last king of Aloor. Stripped of most of their land, Dominic, as the third son, must support himself.
Dominic becomes a legalist and is elected to the Imperial Council quietly working as an isolate, someone unreadable by government telepaths.
Amid a time of a crumbling imperial line, Dominic must build a coalition within the Council and quietly draft a new constitution to save the Imperium from itself. Uncovering rampant corruption, graft, and potential to be arrested for treason, Ysella discovers any number of ways that simple legal specialist in water rights could get himself killed.

My Review:

Looking back at the Grand Illusion series, the very first book in the series, Isolate, was, among its many other marvelous themes and threads, a story about staging a mostly non-violent political coup from the inside. Following with Councilor and Contrarian, the series continues to explore what happens AFTER the balance of power has shifted as certain people attempt to shift it back to where THEY believe it belongs. With them, of course.

Whether that’s good for the rest of the country – or not.

This fourth book in the series takes a step back from those first three books and literally kicks the story back more than 400 years, but to a similar conflict. One that creates the possibility that occurs in the series’ ‘present’ in Isolate. A situation that is, come to think of it, is predicted late in THIS book, Legalist.

The ‘grand illusion’ of the series’ title is the illusion that government can make EVERYTHING better for EVERYONE at the same time. An idea that is so illusory it might as well be a mirror image of the famous line that goes, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time.” (The quote is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but may have originated with P.T. Barnum substituting “fool” for “please” – and doesn’t that fit all too well!)

However, just because many people either see government as utterly useless OR expect it to solve all their problems – and sometimes both contradictory thoughts at the same time – that doesn’t mean that government – or at least people in government – are completely ineffective at helping the people they claim to serve.

And it certainly – and unfortunately – doesn’t mean that they are not  absolutely capable of harming the people they serve.

It sounds as if I’m talking about now, doesn’t it? And I am, but only in the sense that the grand illusion of what government can and cannot do is fairly universal.

The story in Legalist is about a crisis in government and about a change in the form of that government in the hopes of making that crisis a bit less, well, terrible. Because humans are gonna human, and that’s true on all sides of the equation.

So the story focuses on one single member of the Council of Guldor, water legalist Dominic Mikhail Ysella – not coincidentally the ancestor of one of the primary characters in Isolate. Ysella sees the current crisis coming from miles away – and so do many of his fellow councilors.

The Imperador, the man who brought the country together and held it together, is dying. His virtually unlimited power is about to pass to his remaining son, a man who enjoys wielding unlimited power and is not at all tempered in that wielding by experience, intelligence or anything even vaguely resembling a moral compass.

Under the Heir, Guldor will become the kind of tyranny that incites rebellions – until the country breaks apart in civil war. The current Imperador may have unlimited power, but he still has the sense not to rule in such a manner as to drive the entire country into revolt. His son will have all of that power but nothing to temper it and no desire to even try.

However, the country that the Imperador created does have a founding document that outlines who has what powers AND provides a method for altering that power. The trick – and it’s going to be a trick and a half – is to get the Imperador to agree to curtailing his own power.

Or to retain his own power while limiting the powers of all who will come after him, knowing that it will happen much sooner than anyone would prefer. Change is coming, whether anyone likes it or not. The question before the Imperador, the Council, and especially Councilor Ysella, is whether this is a chance to turn that change from the unquestionable terrors of tyranny to the questionable future of a constitutional monarchy.

And who will survive the turmoil that will inevitably go into making it happen.

Escape Rating A+: This series is reading catnip for me, but I also think it’s a bit of an acquired taste – just that I’ve fully acquired it.

For one thing, all of Modesitt’s series are the ultimate in competence porn. Just like the protagonist of the Imager Portfolio, Dominic Ysella is simply damn good at his job – and he’s a decent human being as well. He doesn’t rely on luck or connections, just training and education and hard work and doing the right thing instead of the easy. He sees opportunities and he seizes them, but he also knows when to temper his own impulses.

And we see this world through his eyes as he does his best and damndest to make his country a better place than he found it.

From one perspective, it’s all about meetings and documents and political machinations – and on the other hand, it’s about not just being in the room where it happens, but making the moves needed to become the person who creates the situation that opens the room FOR it to happen.

This story could have been a bit dull – but it never is. Instead, as we follow along, we get deeper into the situation that Ysella finds himself in, we see the rock hemming him into the hard place – and watch as he opens up an unexpected space between the two so he has room to maneuver – and to make a difference.

And the story IS exciting. He’s constantly under threat of assassination, whether merely a character assassination or a bloody one. He knows he has enemies on all sides, as well as friends. He’s caught in the midst of secret work that will save his country and himself – but only if he can prevent it from a too early reveal that will inevitably lead to a charge of treason.

Ysella often feels as though he’s dancing one step forward and two steps back, on a tightrope, with no net, in the dark. We watch to see if he’ll fall even as we hope he’ll succeed.

Obviously, I loved this one, as I have the entire rest of the series. Due to this entry being a prequel to the rest, it would be possible for someone to start with Legalist, decide if this is a taste they’d like to acquire, and if it turns out to be so then going back to Isolate and reading the rest.

But speaking of the rest of the series, the author has announced that he has turned in the manuscript for what he says will likely be the last book of the Grand Illusion series, which will return to the main line of the series and take place after Contrarian. The publication date has not yet been set, however, the title of that final book will be Premier, as I predicted when I finished Contrarian. So I’m a bit chuffed about that even though I’m going to have to impatiently wait at least a year to read it.

A+ #AudioBookReview: Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: Hemlock and Silver by T. KingfisherHemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Jennifer Pickens
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 368
Length: 11 hours and 50 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on August 19, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind.
Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.
Not to die, but to save— seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.
But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.
Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.
Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

My Review:

Snow. Glass. Apples. The images are iconic, aren’t they? Snow White. Mirror Glass. Poison Apples.

Howsomever, particularly considering that he was married to a woman who might as well be Maleficent, the King of this little fantasy kingdom is actually a rather decent – and somewhat nondescript – man. Also a desperate one. His 12-year-old daughter, Snow, seems to be dying by inches – and it’s not an easy or an easy death. None of the official court healers has a clue. That this seems to be an era when leeching and purging and OMG blistering the feet were the height of medical expertise, well, that’s not a surprise.

So he turns to a very unofficial healer, the spinster daughter of one of the kingdom’s prosperous merchants, a woman referred to as ‘Healer’ Anja. In Anja’s case, the title is a courtesy only, because she’s not really a healer and she’d be the first to admit that. But the church’s blessing on her work DOES keep the witch burnings away. At least so far.

Anja is more of a medical researcher than an actual healer. And the medicine that she has spent her life pretty much obsessed with is poison. Not exactly. (There’s a lot of not exactly and sorta/kinda and maybe and well, well uh, in the way Anja talks inside her head. The place from which this entire story is told – and told well if you like protagonists who are a bit too honest with themselves and frequently to their own detriment.)

The fact that some, many, possibly even most, poisons have no known cure is a problem that Anja has spent her life solving just a tiny corner of. She knows she’s not doing much, but solving the problem of poisons has consumed her life. Treating the patient attached to the problem isn’t her thing. At all. (She’s Gregory House only tactless rather than acidly cutting. She doesn’t want to emotionally wound the patients, but she just doesn’t know what to say to make the truth more palatable than it generally is.)

The king asks Anja to come to his daughter and figure out what’s the matter with the girl. Anja knows she’s being ordered to go, even if he never, ever uses those words, because he’s the king and he can do her father’s business untold damage, or simply have them all killed, if she refuses. This king isn’t like that – although he could be – and we get to experience all of Anja’s thoughts and fears on the subject as she agrees to go, caveat-ing all over the place that it might not be poison at all.

It is, and it isn’t. Just as there’s not exactly a poisoner – but there’s not exactly not one, either. Anja’s whole investigation runs headlong into a whole lot of people and things and situations that aren’t quite what they appear to be – but aren’t exactly not what they appear to be, either.

Because there’s an entire strange, fascinating and terrifying world that isn’t nearly so benign (and yes, that’s sarcasm) as what would in our world be Alice’s side of the looking glass. Filled with men, and monsters, and a queen who spent too long looking in the mirror and painted herself RED.

Escape Rating A+: This is surprisingly cozy for a fantasy about poisons. Then again, I’m not completely surprised because this is T. Kingfisher, and a LOT of her stories have quite a bit of cozy hidden inside. Like much of her work, it’s not cozy in any overt way, rather it’s cozy because she puts in a lot of cozy details about life in her created worlds, and it’s the kind of detail that feels cozy even when the events happening around those cozy details are very much NOT.

This story, like so much of her work, rides or dies on the back of – or rather in the head of – its first person protagonist, Anja. If you enjoy Anja’s voice – a voice that often feels like the voice of the author herself – you’re going to love this book. But if Anja’s constant second-guessing and self-deprecation and constant prevarication gets in the way of the story – for you – instead of BEING the story as it was for this reader, this may be more of a cup of chime adder venom than it is a delightful cup of tea.

(I listened to this one in audio, and the narrator, Jennifer Pickens, was just perfect for Anja. I loved the way that she was calm and reassuring, just the way that I thought Anja should sound, particularly when the person she was trying to reassure was herself.)

The thing about Anja, that I enjoy a lot about this author’s protagonists, is that the stuff she is gibbering inside her head is exactly the sort of thing that we all hope goes through our heads – and doesn’t spew out of our mouths too often – in the face of some of what she faces. And we all think we’re kinda weird and wonder why anyone puts up with us and all our faults are glaring and we’re never enough, etc., etc., etc. In other words, Anja has the same kind of impostor syndrome as the rest of us, so if you like seeing someone very real as a hero, she’s lovely. If you want your heroes to be heroic all the time, she’ll drive you bananas.

The story is also a lovely paean to the joys of scholarship and the delights of finding an answer to a question that has been plaguing you for ‘lo these many years’ that is terrific. Particularly if you’re female and have been told repeatedly and often that you’re too smart or like things that other people find inappropriate or distasteful for females but think is just fascinating when a male goes off on the exact same tangent.

I’ll get off the soapbox I borrowed from Anja and get back to things.

What made this story so much fun, for me, were the details of Anja’s life and her investigations and her desperation to solve the problem of Snow’s poisoning. Not that she doesn’t want to save the child, but what spurs her is her love of discovery.

The world that she finally discovers behind the mirror – with the help of an obnoxious, egotistical, self-centered and entirely much too cattitude-filled CAT is every bit as thrilling and frightening as any hero could have wished makes everything both simpler and more complicated – as such discoveries do. She has a big piece of the puzzle – and so MANY more questions that need to be answered.

I have to admit that I was surprised at the way the mirror world worked, because a fairy tale reimaging is absolutely NOT the place I expect to find the Star Trek “Mirror Universe”, but it’s here anyway. Not exactly, but close enough, right down to the description of the characters as “aggressive, mistrustful and opportunistic” – which describes the Mirror Queen to a “T”. Or perhaps that should be an “A”, as in apple, and we’re back where we started from.

In the end, this story is terrific, and it would be even better if it weren’t a reimagining of Snow White. But it is and that makes it all the more delicious, as this is a Snow White who in the end, gets her own damn revenge thankyouverymuch – with the help of a fairy god-cat, a gang of monstrous helpers who are pretty much the opposite of dwarves, and a female healer who solves the puzzle, saves the day and earns her very own happy ever after.

A- #BookReview: The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Shattering Peace by John ScalziThe Shattering Peace (Old Man's War, #7) by John Scalzi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction, space opera
Series: Old Man's War #7
Pages: 288
Published by Tor Books on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

After a decade, acclaimed science fiction master John Scalzi returns to the galaxy of the Old Man's War series with the long awaited seventh book, The Shattering Peace
THE PEACE IS SHATTERING
For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. A tripartate agreement between the Colonial Union, the Earth, and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay, even when some would have preferred to return to the fighting and struggle of former times. For now, more sensible heads have prevailed – and have even championed unity.
But now, there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu, the most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met, are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war. This war is between Consu factions... but nothing the Consu ever do is just about them. The Colonial Union, the Earth and the Conclave have been unwillingly dragged into the conflict, in the most surprising of ways.
Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of humans and aliens alike... or destroy them forever.

My Review:

Twenty years ago, a book by a then up-and-coming author was released on January 1, 2005. That book was Old Man’s War (original cover is pictured at left). The story is still stuck in my head all these years later, because the premise was just so utterly bonkers. It begins with 75 year old John Perry fulfilling his earlier enlistment in Earth’s Colonial Defense Forces.

Which is where all the fun began – for ‘may you live in interesting times’ values of ‘fun’. First because Earth’s Colonial Defense Forces aren’t exactly that. They don’t really belong to Earth. They use Earth for cannon fodder, while keeping the entire population under ‘mushroom management’ – meaning that they are keeping Earth’s people in the dark and feeding them (bull)shit about the actual state of the galaxy and the human colonies eking a living out amongst the stars.

This story, set in the same world twenty years and six books later, is all about reaping the whirlwind of those original choices. Because humans are far, far, FAR from alone in the galaxy, habitable planets are scarce, every species needs a place for their excess population – and no one likes being lied to, particularly not on as grand a scale as the Colonial Union had been lying to the population of Earth.

The colonies – everyone’s colonies – and the need for more of them had set the Colonial Union and the everybody-but-human Conclave on a collision course that the CDF was doomed to eventually lose even before Earth pulled the plug on recruitment. But ten years ago a fragile peace was cobbled together between the opposing parties, a peace based on a moratorium on colonization for all sides.

Of course, that agreement was broken. But the breakage – in the form of a joint colony populated by non-humans, Earth humans, and colonial humans – was more or less working. Whether it was working more, or working less depended a LOT on whose reports one had access to.

Then the reports stopped. And so did everything else. Because the colony disappeared from space. Completely. Totally. It didn’t even leave any debris behind.

Which is where Gretchen Trujillo, her Obin assistant and best friend Ran, and a whole shipload of scientists, engineers, diplomats and administrators enter the scene of the crime. Or whatever this is.

It’s their responsibility to figure out what happened to the missing colony before that fragile peace shatters into the shards of war – no matter how impossible that task might be.

Escape Rating A-: The opening scene of this book is a stunner. Literally. Gretchen Trujillo walks into a training class for potential diplomatic security personnel, promises that she’s going to kill them all, and then does so. Repeatedly. They’re not really dead, but they do, EVENTUALLY, get the point. That the universe isn’t fair and their preconceived notions about what does and does not constitute a threat to their protectees – and themselves – has to get chucked out the nearest airlock ASAP if they want to have half a chance at doing their damn jobs.

And it’s a terrific introduction to Gretchen, who will be our point of view and tour guide to the currently effed up state of the galaxy – as well as to the thoroughly FUBAR’d mission she’s about to become a part of.

She needs to go to the place where Unity Colony used to be because, as those recruits just learned, Gretchen thinks outside the box to the point that the box might as well give up and go home. But that’s not the only reason. Gretchen also needs to go because she’s the one human who has a chance of being respected and listened to by at least one of the alien races – if not a few more. And that’s because of Gretchen’s ties to the people and events of two of the earlier books in this saga, The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale. Even if her presence and participation did not make it into the movie. Which she hates. The movie, not that she’s not included in it.

Which leads to an interesting question that I can’t really answer. The Shattering Peace is book seven in a series that’s been going on since 2005. I did read the whole thing but I haven’t read any of it recently. I believe there was enough backstory to remind me of enough of the details of past events to not feel lost in the present story. I THINK that would be true for someone who hasn’t read the whole thing – however long ago. But I can’t prove that assertion because I DID.

With that caveat, let’s get back to THIS story, which is every bit as much of an SF mystery as it is epic space opera – if not a little bit more. It’s also a story about humanity out among the stars in a situation where we are absolutely not the top dogs and where our frequent xenophobic and ethnocentric behavior is a ginormous problem.

It’s also a story about a whole lot of ‘home truths’ hiding in plain sight while everyone tiptoes around them hoping that they won’t explode. Even though they have, and are, all the damn time.

The fun part of the story is wrapped around the super-advanced aliens who are messing with ALL of the species involved, not just with the colony, but with the whole, entire galaxy. While at the same time being as completely unable to deal with their own bad behavior and interpersonal conflicts as any of us ‘less advanced’ species. Emotions get the best of everyone – and petty behavior gets very petty indeed – no matter how advanced anyone thinks they are.

(Fans of the author will get a particular chuckle over the names that a frustrated Gretchen gives to the two feuding über-advanced aliens. I’m still having a good laugh about THAT part of the story, no matter how chagrined Gretchen is at the consequences of her own petty behavior.)

The solution that Gretchen comes up with is as far out of the box as it gets – only exceeded by the out of the box problem that she’s been presented with. It feels like a happy ending, but then the previous book, The End of All Things, ALSO felt like a happy ending. So maybe.

Or maybe we’ll see Unity Colony again in another decade. They’ll have either done great things – or torn a hole in the space-time continuum. Either way, it’ll be fun to find out.

Grade A #BookReview: The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie MartinezThe Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, horror, queer fiction, retellings
Pages: 352
Published by Tor Books on September 9, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A gorgeous, atmospheric debut fantasy that reimagines the Jewish myth of golem in a tale rooted in history, folklore, and sapphic romance—perfect for fans of Katherine Arden, Ava Reid, Hannah Whitten, and Naomi Novik.
The forest eats the girls who wander out after dark.
As the healer’s daughter, Malka has seen how the curse of the woods has plagued her village, but when the Ozmini Church comes to collect their tithes, they don’t listen to the warnings about a monster lurking in the trees. After a clergy girl wanders too close to the forest and Malka’s mother is accused of her murder, Malka strikes a bargain with a zealot Ozmini priest. If she brings him the monster, he will spare her mother from execution.
When she ventures into the blood-soaked woods, Malka finds a monster, though not the one she expects: an inscrutable, disgraced golem who agrees to implicate herself, but only after Malka helps her free the imprisoned rabbi who created her.
But a deal easily made is not easily kept. And as their bargain begins to unravel a much more sinister threat, protecting her people may force Malka to endanger the one person she left home to save—and face her growing feelings for the very creature she was taught to fear.

My Review:

Malka’s village is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the established Ozmini Church which has tithed her people to the breaking point for being non-believers. Her people are Yahadi, which, in this alternate fantasy world of quasi-Europe in a time similar but not quite the Middle Ages, are this world’s equivalent of the Jewish People.

And, of course, just as the church did in real history, the Jews are fair game to be accused of any crime and automatically convicted, to be imprisoned and executed without trial, to be maimed for looking at a clergyman or a church knight in whatever manner is called ‘wrong’ at the moment, for any women who protest being raped to be beaten to death. This has all literally happened before and may all happen again.

The woods that surround Malka’s village, once a source of food animals and healing herbs, are now dark, dangerous and deadly. The woods eat women. They also turn formerly edible animals into poisonous monsters. The woods take what the church does not.

Putting Malka herself between that rock and that hard place. The churchmen have taken her mother for execution for a crime committed by the deadly woods and its monsters. The church would rather accuse a Yahadi because it furthers their narrative of using the Yahadi as scapegoats in order to gather more power instead of investigating the villagers’ claims that there is a monster in the forest.

Malka takes her life and her mother’s life into her own hands, and bargains with the clergy to go into the woods, kill the monster and bring the body back to prove her mother’s innocence. Malka bargains in desperation and in good faith. She’ll brave the woods and make the attempt – or die trying. Probably the latter.

The clergyman’s faith in this bargain is questionable. On all sides and for all possible motives. But Malka believes because she HAS TO.

And that’s where her true story begins, and leads her to THE true story behind the evil that has taken hold of the woods that surround her home – and the country of which they are a part. That, along the way, Malka learns that the monster she believed to be the scourge of her people is the love of her life, and that the magic of her people that she has been taught to fear is the greatest gift of her faith, are only part of the lessons that she needs to learn in order to save her mother, her people, and herself.

The Maharal of Prague and the Golem

Escape Rating A: The story of The Maiden and Her Monster stands on two foundations, one is the very real and terrible history of Antisemitic persecution across all of Europe during the Middle Ages. The second is a response in Jewish folklore to that persecution, the tale of “The Golem of Prague”, where a great rabbi, the Maharal of Prague, builds a golem out of clay in order to protect his people from persecution.

From those two starting points, the author has crafted a dark fantasy world that skates right on the edge of horror, giving that horror not the face of the monster as one might expect, but rather the human face of greedy and rapacious men who believe the righteousness of their own cause and the inevitability of their own power and don’t care who is sacrificed for their so-called ‘greater good’.

As if that weren’t enough to make a fantastic and fantastical story, layered on top of that foundation is an equally dark sapphic romantasy, as Malka falls in love, not with the good man who has tagged along on her quest but rather the female monster she once feared, hated and reviled at every turn. That love builds slowly and inexorably, step by reluctant step, even as they do their damndest to wound each other and push each other far away.

At the same time, even though the horror and the adventure and the romance along with a daring rescue and a desperate, last chance to defeat an evil that has very nearly won, there’s also a marvelously written meditation on the power of stories themselves, the power to move mountains, to inspire people, but also to hold them back in fear. That the point of view from which a story is told affects every retelling thereafter, and that the most triumphant of tales can conceal the darkest of motives.

There is a LOT to savor in The Maiden and Her Monster. The language is beautiful, the story is a desperate walk through very dark places that ultimately turns towards the light, and it’s an epic love story that springs from the rockiest of beginnings. This is one to literally ‘read it and weep’ with the understanding at the end that ‘not all tears are evil.’

A- #BookReview: The Murderbot Diaries: Obsolescence, Compulsory, Home, Rapport by Martha Wells

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews> Short Story Review
A- #BookReview: The Murderbot Diaries: Obsolescence, Compulsory, Home, Rapport by Martha WellsThe Murderbot Diaries: Obsolescence, Compulsory, Home, Rapport by Martha Wells
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook
Genres: science fiction, short stories, space opera
Series: Murderbot Diaries #0.1 #0.5 #2.5 #4.5
Pages: 92
Published by Tor Books on various dates
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

My Review:

Martha Wells is the Guest of Honor at this year’s Worldcon, which has just begun in Seattle. So, I was looking for something appropriate to review, but there’s no new Murderbot novel this year. Howsomever, there is a new short story, so here we are with a review of, well, Murderbot shorts. (I keep wanting to refer to this collection as ‘Murderbot’s shorts’, but that would be something different altogether. So I resisted. Barely.)

The first gleam of Murderbot – or at least Murderbot’s universe – is a lot further back than I thought, as well as a lot closer to now than I expected. The earliest story, Obsolescence, doesn’t talk about Murderbot at all. But it does explore a bit of the corporate-controlled universe that Murderbot inhabits. This one is a murder mystery, set in the early days of the Luna and Mars colonies, at a point of transition where the exploration has been completed, the initial colonies have been established, and life is starting to settle into its new normal. It’s a time when the part-human, part-cyber ‘Rovers’, Murderbot’s ancestors, are mostly retired if not deceased, but are still known and celebrated as early heroes. (Also the stars of a serial that Murderbot eventually watches). But the corporate hegemonies already exist, as they do, and are already doing evil in the universe and leaving their cast-off, obsolescent former forced laborers to make their own ways in the galaxy. No matter who it costs.

Escape Rating B: The story is better as an SF mystery than it is anything else, and seen from that perspective it’s a lot of fun, but the knowledge that this is the world that gave birth to Murderbot puts a sting in the tale, as all of Murderbot’s own stories do. (This story is available as an ebook for free as part of the collection Take Us to a Better Place.

Compulsory is the first ‘real’ Murderbot story, and it’s the only one of these shorts that is told from Murderbot’s own point-of-view. In other words, it’s the first instance of Murderbot’s singular voice and it would be fascinating from that perspective alone. It’s at a point in Murderbot’s existence where they have already ‘borked’ their governor module, but are still pretending – mostly – to be an ordinary SecUnit while spending over 90% of their time, energy and attention watching entertainment serials. But they are already very much who they are in this story, and it’s refreshing to read that voice and know that their personality, complete with snarkasm, coalesced early on.

Escape Rating A: It was just so damn much fun to read that voice and that perspective again. It’s been two years since System Collapse came out, and Murderbot wasn’t feeling all that much themself during a whole chunk of that story. It was good to hear them again. At the same time, this story is very much Murderbot, being very salty about the stupidity of humans and the even bigger stupidity of systems designed to serve them, while sticking their neck out just enough to save someone – quite possibly because they’ve been inspired by the serial they’re watching at the time.

The final two, so far, Murderbot shorts are Home and Rapport. Home takes place right after the events of Exit Strategy. Home – and also Rapport – are not told from Murderbot’s perspective. We don’t hear their voice, but their presence and influence lies heavily on both stories. We view Home from Dr. Mensah’s perspective, at the point where she’s desperately attempting to cover up her PTSD after the events of Exit Strategy. She’s shaken because she very nearly didn’t have one of those, Murderbot saved her life, and now it’s her turn to save them. If she can. Even though Murderbot is still saving her – this time from herself. They serve as a steadying presence, and sometimes an immovable wall, giving her time and space to take the steps she needs to complete the rest of her journey back to wholeness.

Escape Rating A-: This story is titled Home because Dr. Mensah is having a hard time reclaiming her sense of home and safety, even as she’s doing her damndest to give a home, or at least a safe harbor, to Murderbot. Quite possibly whether they want one or not. This story provides a lovely coda for the events of Exit Strategy, and it was a great story to focus on Mensah and her team from a more compassionate – or at least less snarky – perspective. And by seeing Murderbot from the outside, it’s an opportunity to see just how much they’ve changed from Compulsory.

The final story is Rapport. At least it’s the one most recently published. It’s actually #2.5 in the internal chronology, set after the events of Artificial Condition – although I’ve seen references that it should be read after Network Effect which is where my memory says it belongs. In any case, it’s a mission that Murderbot’s frenemy ART told Murderbot about, but the SecUnit isn’t present. Instead, it’s a story about Murderbot’s and ART’s influence on another machine intelligence, Perihelion. Peri seems to have picked up a lot of tips and tricks from Murderbot by way of ART, and it seems as if Peri has a bit of a crush on Murderbot. Or, at least I hope it’s on Murderbot because ART’s first name is ‘Asshole’ and they are happy to live down to that epithet whenever possible.

Escape Rating A: This is a story that spreads Murderbot’s influence out into the wider world, gives readers a perspective on inter-machine communication, and is just generally a fun story set in this fascinating universe. It’s a lot of fun to see an entirely different machine intelligence applying the lessons that Murderbot has mostly learned the hard way, and it’s a great story to put a pin in this collection of Murderbot shorts.

The next novella in the series, Platform Decay, is scheduled for publication in May, 2026, and in spite of the somewhat ominous title, I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Pearl City by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Pearl City by Julia Vee and Ken BebellePearl City (The Phoenix Hoard, #3) by Julia Vee, Ken Bebelle
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Phoenix Hoard #3
Pages: 400
Length: 12 hours and 38 minutes
Published by Sixth Moon Press LLC, Tor Books on July 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Blade. Butcher. Thief. Worldbreaker.
Emiko Soong has been called many things but Worldbreaker is the worst.
She unmasked the General and returned to San Francisco where her power is greatest. But the city, once her sanctuary from Jiaren intrigues, turns into her living nightmare. Clan war tears at the seams and her life becomes a treacherous quicksand of friend and foe. Unsure of who to trust, Emiko finds herself more alone than ever.
When an ancient power rips through the Realm to land in her city, the General will stop at nothing to take this power for his own. Emiko must face her past, her present, and her future, as she races to stop the General.
Is Emiko’s fate written to be the destroyer of worlds, or can she chart her own course to save her family?

Phoenix Hoard
#1 Ebony Gate #2 Blood Jade #3 Pearl City

My Review:

Pearl City is the end of the vast, sprawling, truly epic saga that began in Ebony Gate, and continued in Blood Jade. It’s marvelous and utterly compelling every step of Emiko Soong’s winding, twisted, churning way – and I was left both sad and smiling at the end.

Sad because the journey is over – at least for the reader. Smiling because Emiko’s hard road and long dark nights of the soul have come to a hopeful and hopefully happy ending for her, her friends and loved ones, and especially her city, San Francisco.

(This is also a huge hint not to start here. Start with Ebony Gate. Please. Soon. This thing is marvelous, absorbing and utterly compelling every step of the way.)

The story picks up right where the previous book, Blood Jade, left off. And it picks up with Emiko in the exact same position she was in when the series opened in Ebony Gate. Everybody hates and fears her because of the abilities she has revealed. And she’s just discovered, yet again, that her parents have lied to her about, well, pretty much damn everything.

She’s always believed that she was ‘less than’. That her dragon talents were minimal and that she was a failure among her people. That her only way of serving her family was as a nearly mundane blade of vengeance wielded by her powerful father. And that her mother was so disappointed in her that she spent most of Emiko’s life far away on endless missions.

Then again, Emiko has also believed all the legends about her people’s mysterious and powerful Dragon Gods, left guarding the gate to this world so that their people, Emiko’s ancestors, could escape the destruction of the Realm from which they all draw their power.

Not much of what Emiko believed turns out to be true. Her talent is so dangerous that it was deliberately broken when she was so young she doesn’t remember. She’s never been a failure – but she’s certainly been emotionally manipulated to believe that she is – and that damage lingers.

Their gods were tyrants. Tyrants they fled in order to escape slavery. Masters who want their hoard, their hoard of sycophants, servants and slaves, back under their dominion.

Emiko is as certain of that as she is anything, because the dragon people may be descended from dragons, but they are just as capable of self-deception and hubris as any garden-variety human. And one of them has connived and conspired to let one of the dragons in.

It’s up to Emiko to send that dragon back where he came from. Before he destroys her, her people, her city, and her world. Because Emiko is the Sentinel of San Francisco, and the city, and ALL its people, magical and mundane, friend and enemy alike, are hers to protect and defend.

Or die trying.

Escape Rating A: I’ve been looking forward to this book for most of a year at this point, because the previous book, Blood Jade, while it didn’t end in a cliffhanger did end on an obvious precipice that the world was just not done messing with Emiko yet. I NEEDED to find out how it ended.

But I also had to wait for the audiobook, read by Natalie Naudus, who is the perfect voice for Emiko. The whole series is written from Emiko’s first-person perspective, so we’re inside her sometimes very messy and often self-deprecating head the whole time. We’re there WITH her in that fantastic way that only happens when there’s perfect synergy between the character and the narrator providing their voice.

(However, I need to insert a kind of trigger warning here. Emiko goes through some seriously terrible stuff in this story. She’s already in a lot of emotional pain, she suffers from a hell of a lot of pre-installed angst, AND she’s forced into battle after battle where she gets deliberately tormented and grievously injured over and over again. Experiencing all of that from inside her head is a LOT. Not that it all doesn’t happen in text, but it’s just that much more immediate and visceral when you’re hearing her voice in your own head. There were points where I wanted to scream and/or hurl right along with Emiko.)

The story in this final volume is also a LOT, and an awful lot happens, a lot of it is awful, and Emiko is always right in the middle of it. There was so much going on, the way that the hits just kept on coming and it seemed like the situation was getting worse with no hope in sight that I had moments where I wondered whether or not the authors were going to need another book to resolve everything.

But it does come round right in ways that perfectly fit the world and the person that Emiko has become, yet still manage to surprise and delight the reader as the tide finally turns and Emiko comes into her own in ways that neither she, nor we, ever expected.

One minor, discordant note in this story, at least for this reader/listener, was the reveal of the true story – or at least the truth-y story – about the true history of the dragon gods reminds me a lot of the Evanuris in Dragon Age: Veilguard. Emiko’s naivete about that story doesn’t ring as true as the rest of her character, not just because she’s old enough to know that all origin stories are full of holes and made up out of the whole cloth to serve the tale’s original tellers, but also because by this point she’s already discovered that a rather large number of the stories she’s been told about herself, her family and her people were not true at all. I admit my perspective on this was colored by the speech and mannerisms of the asshole who explained it all to Emiko in oh-so-condescending tones. He was so obviously high on his own hubris that I couldn’t take his words seriously. His actions, very, but his words, not so much at all. Howsomever, this might be a ‘me’ thing and not a ‘you’ thing. In other words, your reading mileage may vary.

In the end, I’m so very glad I picked up this trilogy, because damn but it’s been an awesome ride. It also left me with the same epic book hangover as Jade Lee’s Green Bone Saga – which the Phoenix Hoard still reminds me of very much – as well as Brian McClellan’s Glass Immortals because the characters are just the same sort of misfit heartbroken heartbreakers.

One final note, not exactly a spoiler but more of a hint. ALL the titles of the books in this series, AND the series title itself, are all clues about the stories within. Awesome, marvelous, fascinating, fantastic stories filled with characters that leap straight off the page and into the reader’s heart. Including the glorious and magical city of San Francisco.

#BookReview: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka OlderThe Potency of Ungovernable Impulses (The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, #3) by Malka Ann Older
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, gaslamp, mystery, science fiction, science fiction mystery, space opera, steampunk
Series: Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti #3
Pages: 246
Published by Tor Books on June 10, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Hugo and Nebula nominated science fiction detective series continues with The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, featuring a new mystery concerning alarming incidents of targeted, escalating academic sabotage.
When a former classmate begs Pleiti for help on behalf of her cousin―who’s up for a prestigious academic position at a rival Jovian university but has been accused of plagiarism on the eve of her defense―Pleiti agrees to travel alongside her and investigate the matter.
Even if she has to do it without Mossa, her partner in more ways than one. Even if she’s still reeling from Mossa’s sudden isolation and bewildering rejection.
Yet what appears to be a case of an attempted reputational smearing devolves into something decidedly more dangerous―and possibly deadly.

My Review:

The first two Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, both began with missing persons cases rather than the corpse that kicks off most mysteries.

This third entry ALSO begins with a missing person, but not in the same way – at all. In the earlier books, the missing persons WERE the mystery, where this time the missing person is the person who usually investigates the mystery. Not that it’s not mysteries all the way down from the human-settled platforms that circle Giant (AKA Jupiter) to the roiling surface of that gas giant of a planet.

But Mossa is the person who is missing, sorta/kinda, and Pleiti is definitely the person who is missing her. (Not that THAT hasn’t happened before in their relationship!)

Mossa is lost, not physically but emotionally, deep in a depression that is so endemic to the human colony on Giant that it has a name and a pathology of its very own. Pleiti, on the other hand, is just a bit lost, leaving her partner behind in order to take a long trip around the transport rings to Stortellen, the university that sees itself as the rival of Pleiti’s own institution, Valdegeld.

Because a friend is being threatened, and she needs Mossa and Pleiti to investigate. If all she’s going to get is Pleiti, that’s going to have to do.

And it does – even if it doesn’t do at all for Pleiti herself until it’s nearly too late.

Escape Rating B: Part of what made the first two books in this series work so well, and made them so much fun to get into, was the way that Investigator Mossa and Scholar Pleiti balance each other out, both in personality and skill set. Not that they aren’t both capable in their own fields, but rather that the mystery usually involves tackling a puzzle that straddles both specialties and they need each other to reach the solution.

Neither of them can see the forest for the trees, as that saying goes, but they can each see the forest for the other’s trees, and when needed, the other way around.

This time around, Pleiti leaves Mossa behind to help out a friend – at Mossa’s seemingly indifferent behest – then feels guilt-ridden because she didn’t recognize her lover’s depression. But she’s stuck, and stuck in, and has to make the best of the situation no matter how deeply she feels like an imposter.

It should work, because the case is very strongly rooted in Pleiti’s personal bailiwick. It’s a story about academic reputations, the fragility thereof, and the ease and rapidity with which an unfounded rumor can derail an entire career. It’s steeped in the maliciously incestuous incivility of the worst of academe, and it’s an environment that Pleiti, as a scholar herself, knows all too well.

But without Mossa, Pleiti flails and angsts a LOT. Not that the situation doesn’t warrant both, and not that she doesn’t wish for Mossa’s ability to obtain an actual, legal, warrant when needed, but mostly she needs Mossa’s pragmatism and laser-focus to balance her out.

I have to say that, as much as I wanted to slip back into Mossa and Pleiti’s world, and as much as I enjoy them as characters and find their setting fascinating, this entry in the series didn’t work for me as well as the first two.

There were a few reasons for that. One is the obvious as stated above, they are better together than they are separately. With Pleiti as the first-person narrator, combined with her tendency to angst-spiral, it sometimes got a bit hard to take.

And that’s on top of the deep dive into the darker corners of bad behavior in academe, of which there was a lot and I have to say that the motives for the reputation bashing were a bit opaque and off-the-wall at the same time. I did figure out whodunnit, but their reasons for doing it mostly get chalked up to ‘ungovernable impulses’.

Also, because of the way this story was deep into the academic life, AND because English or whatever common language has evolved over the decades if not centuries on Jupiter, that language used has gone out and mugged a whole lot of other languages for words, to the point where I kept dropping out of the story to get a translation for a word that I was almost but not quite sure of in context. My immersion in the story got broken OFTEN, and I don’t believe this was the case in the previous books, but without Mossa it seemed that Pleiti got deep into the jargon and cliches and colloquialism of her own profession to the exclusion of those not a part of it. Which is exactly what kind of insider-speak is intended to do, but it frequently lost this member of the intended audience.

Your reading mileage may vary.

I still like Mossa and Pleiti, especially when they’re together, so I’m still following this series. Based on the ending of this book, this sapphic, gaslamp, SF mystery is planning to go full Sherlock Holmes in the next book, with Investigator Mossa striking out on her own as Giant’s first PRIVATE investigator and presumably, hopefully, Pleiti as her Watson-esq chronicler.

I’m looking forward to finding out!

#BookReview: Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Harmattan Season by Tochi OnyebuchiHarmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, fantasy mystery
Pages: 240
Published by Tor Books on May 27, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Award-winning author Tochi Onyebuchi’s new standalone novel is hardboiled fantasy Raymond Chandler meets P. Djèlí Clark in a postcolonial West Africa
Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don’t leave my place much these days.

Veteran and private eye Boubacar doesn’t need much—least of all trouble—but trouble always seems to find him. Work has dried up, and he’d rather be left alone to deal with his bills as the Harmattan rolls in to coat the city in dust, but Bouba is a down on his luck deux fois, suspended between two cultures and two worlds.
When a bleeding woman stumbles onto his doorway, only to vanish just as quickly, Bouba reluctantly finds himself enmeshed in the secrets of a city boiling on the brink of violence. The French occupiers are keen to keep the peace at any cost, and the indigenous dugulen have long been shattered into restless factions vying for a chance to reclaim their lost heritage and abilities. As each hardwon clue reveals horrifying new truths, Bouba may have to carve out parts of himself he’s long kept hidden, and decide what he’s willing to offer next.
From the visionary author of Riot Baby and Goliath, Harmattan Season is a gripping fantasy noir in the tradition of Chandler, Hammond, and Christie that will have you by the throat—both dryly funny and unforgettably evocative.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

My Review:

The Harmattan wind, dry and dusty, blows into West Africa from the Sahara and coats everything in dust. But this is a story about an entirely different kind of dust, the dust of old bones and old memories of bad deeds and good old days that have turned into the dust of history.

And it’s a mystery. On that dusty surface, it’s a mystery, and it’s a mystery all the way down to those dusty old bones – just not the same kind of mystery. At least, not until it is.

Boubacar is one of those people who, if it wasn’t for bad luck, wouldn’t have any luck at all. He’s down at heel, down on his luck, behind on his rent, all that’s showing up on his doorstep are bills and yet more bills.

He’s a private detective who desperately needs a case – but he’s given up on expecting one. He’s certain that all of his bad luck is the result of a curse, but he knows that’s one case he’s unlikely to solve.

When the girl knocks on his door, he’s expecting bill collectors. Or the police, coming to arrest him for something he hasn’t done. Or at least that he hasn’t done yet. Instead there’s a young woman bleeding on his doorstep, clutching her wounded side and begging him to hide her.

So he does, even though he knows the police will be right behind her. He thinks he’s stopped caring.

But he starts caring again, not because the police DO arrest him – although they do – but because the next time he sees the girl she’s dead and FLOATING over the site of a massive explosion – along with most of the debris and destruction caused by whatever blew up the street.

Leaving Boubacar attached to a case that’s likely to break him, one way or another. A case where, in the end, he’s both the victim and the original perpetrator. Or at least one of them. A crime that others are more than desperate enough to see buried – along with Boubacar.

Escape Rating B: I finished this book with a whole host of mixed feelings, because I was fascinated with what I got and intrigued about what I learned but frustrated beyond measure by the parts I had to tease out without nearly enough clues.

I’m not referring to the mystery itself, because that’s the part that absolutely worked.

The setting of this story is just a bit nebulous, but I think the reasons that I teased out for that made sense. We don’t know precisely which West African country this takes place in, but the harmattan puts it somewhere in West Africa. The country is a former French colony, but based on the political climate described, its post colonial setting doesn’t feel all that post. More that legal colonialism has morphed into economic colonialism which feels all too real and that the deliberate lack of geographic specificity allows the setting to stand in for a LOT of very real places.

What made the story work was the way that Boubacar digs and keeps digging. The mystery starts simply, a woman is missing, later found dead in equally mysterious circumstances.

But Boubacar doesn’t let go no matter how much he’s encouraged – often with other people’s fists – to do so. And as he digs he brushes past the simplicity of the missing persons case and into the depths of political corruption – and he keeps going into what dirty deeds all of that corruption is moving to prevent from seeing the light of day.

Which is where he finds his own sins, his own complicity, and his desire to stop covering up. No matter what it costs.

I did enjoy this for the mystery, for the way it explored the effects of colonialism through its characters and their actions, and for Boubacar’s wry voice and hesitant pursuit of redemption. The story reads like a combination of the hardboiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler with the fantasy worlds of P. Djeli Clark, particularly the early novellas of the Dead Djinn Universe like The Haunting of Tram Car 015. Harmattan Season also gave this reader, at least, some of the same feels as the works of Nnedi Okorafor and Moses Ose Utomi. They are all readalikes for each other, and if you have been loving the rise of both science fiction and fantasy mystery Harmattan Season any and all of the above might also be your jam.

Reviewer’s Note: I did have one huge frustration with this story. I felt like I was missing a lot because the text included what felt like important words and phrases that I didn’t understand and could not find a translation source for. This may be because I read an electronic arc and that the published work will include translations not present in the advance reading copy. The online translations programs utterly failed at translation, which could have any number of causes from euro-centricity to jargon or slang or neologisms or creativity on the part of the author. I still got into Harmattan Season, but I’m left with the feeling that I would have gotten into it more deeply if I’d been able to grasp the bits that eluded me.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Devils by Joe AbercrombieThe Devils (The Devils, #1) by Joe Abercrombie
Narrator: Steven Pacey
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, grimdark, historical fantasy, horror
Series: The Devils #1
Pages: 560
Length: 25 hours and 6 minutes
Published by Tor Books on May 6, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds.
Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.
Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it's a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.

My Review:

The story begins on a saint’s day in one supposedly holy city, and ends on a different saint’s day in a different holy city. Which is just one of MANY ironic twists in the story, as there are absolutely ZERO saints anywhere else in it – and not much in the way of actual holiness in either of those two cities.

Because what this whole entire world needs isn’t saints. Which is a good thing because there don’t seem to be any. Not even on either side of the schism that makes up the not-nearly-as-holy-as-it-claims-to-be church. What this world needs, even if neither church is willing to admit it in public, are devils.

At least, that’s what the church calls them. Because that gives at least the church of the west a reason to lock them up and hold the key very, very close to the ecclesiastical vest until it needs those devils to sow a little chaos among their enemies.

Or take on a mission that the church WANTS to fail. After all, those monsters are the congregation of the clandestine (and unlucky) thirteenth chapel, the Chapel of the Holy Expediency. And monsters – or devils – make a VERY expedient sacrifice when your goal is to save the world.

Even if you plan to damn yourself and everyone else in the process.

The mechanism by which this vast, sprawling, epic fantasy is told is a quest. Or so it seems. But the quest that those devils think they are on isn’t exactly the quest they’ve been told they are on. Well it is, but it isn’t. Because it’s not expedient to tell devils the truth – and why would anyone do that anyway?

Especially since the truth isn’t true on so many levels that it’s lies and deceptions all the way down. It’s all part of one sad and glorious trip to hell that isn’t so much paved with good intentions as it is greased skids towards likely doom.

Which is when the twist in the tail pulls the whole story back up into a future that no one planned to ever see the light.

Escape Rating A: I started this in audiobook, and the audiobook as read by Steven Pacey was excellent. But I got stuck into this one hard, and just couldn’t listen fast enough. So I switched to text. Even reading wasn’t fast enough, but it at least it was FASTER.

This was a WOW of an epic fantasy, and I’m every bit as twisted up by the ending of it as nearly everyone involved in the story turned out to be. Because it was wild and crazy and fascinating every step of the way. Even though I knew everyone was deceiving each other, I didn’t know quite how until the very end, and the thing I thought was the BIG scam turned out not to be. Although there were more littler scams than I had figured out along the way.

I’m also not quite sure this is exactly grimdark. It read more like ‘cynical dark’. Not that the situation is any less dark, but the snarky voices of the protagonists make it feel like a somewhat lighter shade of black than outright grim even though it actually isn’t.

It’s very much as if the Suicide Squad decided to traipse through Westeros to clean up the blood by making it gorier – but with more attitude along the way. Something like that.

But this is definitely a ‘squad’ of some kind – even if a reluctantly gathered one. Which makes it difficult to decide exactly whose story this is. We follow all the characters in turn and turn about so we don’t get a LOT of depth on anyone in particular but we do watch the group coalesce into a surprised but reluctant whole as they keep surviving by pulling each other’s asses out of increasing hot fires.

Very much on the other hand, the lack of a single central character feels intentional, as this is the first book in a series featuring the group of devils and not the people they actually manage to save – because they can’t save themselves and that’s kind of the point.

As much as I loved this one, and I did, I have mixed feelings about some of the specifics. Specifically the alternate history and the lack of a central character. Let me explain…

The history is very much based on actual history at the point where the Catholic Church was split between Rome and Byzantium. However, the point of the split in this book seems to be that Carthage either fell later to the Romans or sent out more – and more highly ranked – refugees when it fell. Or something like that as we don’t get as much detail as I would have liked. (My constant lament.) There’s also quite a bit of magic treated rather scientifically just to add to the fun. And the body count.

The one detail we do get that I have mixed feelings about on multiple levels is the way that Elves are substituted for the Saracens in our own history. That’s either going to work really well or come off very badly but we don’t have enough evidence to know which. At least not yet.

The result of these twists in history is that things feel almost familiar and yet not at the same time. It feels like an uncanny valley, in that it’s almost right and then goes a bit sideways and I’m knocked off the pins of my familiarity. (It reminded me a bit of Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History as that alternate history fantasy world also involved Carthage.)

At the same time, the church schism in The Devils had a lot of elements of the Chantry schism in Dragon Age, in that in this fantasy world, the savior was a woman, and all the church officials and hierarchy in the east are women including the Pope, while the church of the west is headed by a Patriarch and men run everything. With magic being elevated in the west and decried in the east, which is where the monsters of the Chapel of Holy Expediency come into the picture. (Dragon Age made this split north vs. south but it is the same split, including the way that magic and its practitioners are treated.)

Because there is no central character – instead a large cast of them – I’m not quite sure this stuck the dismount. The ending feels like it isn’t. An ending, I mean. More like this particular adventure came to something that seems like an end – or at least a pause in hostilities – and that there is more to come. Which is likely intentional as this is the start of a series. Whose title and publication date are TBD and ARRGGGHHH.

A couple of final thoughts before I close this and try to get over the book hangover it’s left me with. One is that this is LONG. It sucks the reader in pretty quickly, and goes trippingly by once you’re in it, but reading this in small sips doesn’t work AT ALL. These people are out of the frying pan and into the fire so often and so quickly that you’re pretty much always thinking, “just one more page, just one more chapter, just until they get out of THIS fix” until you become conscious at the end that you’ve been sitting for hours in the same position and the cat still doesn’t want you to move – or however that works in your house.

Second, this does leave the reader with a big book hangover. If you’re looking for something to tide you over until we at least know when the next one’s coming, I’d recommend taking a look at Brian McClellan’s  In the Shadow of Lightning and Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker for the snarkastic voice, The Moonsteel Crown by Stephen Deas for the gang of cutthroats, Mary Gentle’s Ash and/or pretty much anything by Guy Gavriel Kay for the slightly alternate fantasy history, and especially The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman for the misled and misleading gang of ne’er do wells on a mission they’ve been deceived into that takes them on a walk through different, but equally dark places on its and their way. With the same kind of heartbreak at the end.

#BookReview: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

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

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

My Review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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