A- #BookReview: Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

A- #BookReview: Murder by Memory by Olivia WaiteMurder by Memory (Dorothy Gentleman, #1) by Olivia Waite
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Series: Dorothy Gentleman #1
Pages: 112
Published by Tordotcom on March 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple in this cozy, spaceborne mystery, helmed by a no-nonsense formidable auntie of a detective.
Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.
Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.
Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes…

My Review:

Some versions of the opening line for the blurb are way, way off. A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple is so far off as to be misleading. (The Becky Chambers version of the blurb is somewhat better.) I’m going to do my damndest to correct that misdirection as Murder By Memory is just a terrific cozy mystery that just so happens to be set on a spaceship.

Although that’s misleading too. The HMS Fairweather is more like a space-liner. Or, really, like that cruise line that almost-but-didn’t-quite manage to launch, the one where people were intended to move in and live on the cruise ship as it traveled around the world.

The HMS Fairweather is a lot like that Life at Sea concept, except that it really did launch and its intended journey is for considerably longer than three years. It seems like it’s been traveling for more than three centuries when this story takes place – with no end in sight.

It isn’t a generation ship and it doesn’t seem to have a destination. It’s an endless journey – and an endless life. The passengers do age and eventually die – well, at least their bodies do. Their consciousness gets uploaded and downloaded from one body to another – and life goes on.

The ship is a world unto itself, a surprisingly large and fascinating one. But humans are gonna human, even in the vastness of space, and that’s where Detective Dorothy Gentleman comes in.

Literally, as her sleeping consciousness gets dropped into someone else’s body, in the middle of the ship’s night, while all the passengers and crew – except for Dorothy and this one intrepid and/or intriguing individual who is for some reason out and about while everyone else is tucked away safe and sound in their quarters.

Except, of course, for the other person who is not where they should be, the woman whose sudden death triggered Dorothy’s own return from the sleep between lifetimes. Leaving Dorothy with a job to do and a problem to solve while wondering exactly how unethical it is to borrow someone else’s body after they’ve just used it to commit murder.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those stories where my one and only complaint is that I really, really, REALLY wish it had been longer. Because what we got was a whole lot of cozy, murderous fun and Dorothy Gentleman is a marvelous take on the lone detective chasing clues and unraveling puzzles in the middle of the long, dark night.

While I wouldn’t have gone within a parsec of the blurb’s description of Marple meets Teixcalaan, I absolutely would describe it as a combination of two books, the SF mystery plot of Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man combined with the secrets within secrets of life aboard a spacefaring cruise ship of Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis. Not that The Spare Man isn’t also set on a space cruise, but that ship doesn’t have the same vibe that living aboard the ship has in Floating Hotel and Murder by Memory.

So much of A Memory Called Empire is wrapped up in the high-stakes, deeply corruptive, politics of Teixcalaan and its imperial history and ambitions that it just doesn’t feel like any kind of match for Murder by Memory, which is, in spite of the murder, much lighter and frothier. (If the Chambers comparison is to her Wayfarers series and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, well, that’s somewhere in the virtually towering TBR pile and I haven’t gotten there yet.)

Dorothy Gentleman is good at her job – and it’s fun to watch her work. That she is working from within the body of her primary suspect adds just the right touch of grounding in the SFnal setting to make the whole thing just that much better AND more convoluted at the same time.

Because the solution to this mystery is a grand case of following the money. It’s just that the money that Dorothy is following has been both stolen and hidden in ways that are only possible in SF even though the motive is one of the oldest and most human – greed. While the final piece of evidence is found in the most science fictional way possible.

Dorothy herself starts out as just a touch noir – as she has been unlucky in love and seems determined to conduct her investigation the same way she intends to conduct her life – alone. That she is surprised by both the support of her new and remaining family AND that love might just have found her again made the story end on a high and hopeful note.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Dorothy’s adventures aboard the Fairweather. The setting is already delightful, and more time will just add more delicious layers. Dorothy herself is a fascinating character, someone who has lived a long life and turned her nosy nature to good use. That we’re inside her head for this story, hearing her true – and often wry and witty – thoughts as she works her way through the mystery made the whole thing just that much better and absolutely worth a read.

A- #AudioBookReview: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

A- #AudioBookReview: The River Has Roots by Amal El-MohtarThe River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
Narrator: Gem Carmella
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, retellings
Pages: 130
Length: 3 hours and 53 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.
“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.
There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.
But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

My Review:

Thistleford lies just on the borders of Faerie – or Arcadia as it is called in this beautiful, lyrical almost fairy tale. (It reads so much like a fairy tale, and it certainly turns out to be one, but I kept thinking it must be a retelling of something I just didn’t recognize – and maybe it is.)

Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn live on the banks of the River Liss, and their joy as well as their duty is to sing to the magical willows that thrive on the banks of the river. It’s a task, and a delight, that has been handed down through the Hawthorn family for generations. Not just the singing, but also the care, maintenance and very careful harvesting of the willows and all the magical things they produce.

Because there is still magic in this world, even as ‘modernity’ encroaches, and the willows that the Hawthorn family tends produce the best magic-infused wood for working this world’s magic. A magic that is based on language, on the conjugation of words, and the transition of forms from the word “grammar” into “grimoire” – and back again.

Which is where the story of the Hawthorn sisters turns from love to tragedy and back again. Esther, the older sister, has fallen in love, not just with the Fae lands of Arcadia that border their own, but with one of the Arcadians, the wrath of the storm that calls themself Rin even as they refer to Esther as ‘Beloved’.

But Ysabel longs to remain with hearth and home, and resents the parting that she knows will come. She wants Esther to marry the neighbor who continues to court her in spite of her rejection – because that’s the future she wants for herself.

Instead, they find themselves thrust into the middle of exactly the kind of ‘murder ballad’ that Ysabel always loved to sing, and it’s left to Esther to sacrifice even more than she already has to keep Ysabel from making the same terrible mistake.

If she can find a way to make the magic that saved her reach out to a woman who has always loved her sister but rejected the magic that drives her very soul.

Escape Rating A-: The audio narration of The River Has Roots, in the hands – and more importantly the voice – of Gem Carmella – is absolutely exquisite. Not that the story isn’t lovely, but the reading, and even more poignantly the singing, of the narrator puts this story over the top in more than one way. (That the background and transitional music in the narration was performed by the author and her own sister added an extra bit of loveliness to the entire endeavor.)

Most of those ways are very, very good. The music of the Hawthorn Sisters is an important part – sometimes THE most important part – of the story.

There were also, however, and very much on the other hand, points where she was voicing the villain of the piece and she was so damn good at portraying his slimy villainousness that I wanted to throw something – preferably at him. He was so vile, and portrayed so well in that vileness, that I wanted to wash that voice out of my ears.

It took me a while to figure out what bothered me SO MUCH about the villain – because it was done so beautifully well – is that he’s a particular kind of villain. He’s a broken stair villain. He’s toxic, Esther knows he’s toxic, the narrator handles voicing his toxicity so well that it’s screamingly obvious, but he’s the kind of villain that is embedded in the system and manipulates it to his advantage even as the people around him just claim that he’s socially awkward and Esther KNOWS she’ll be portrayed as a hysterical female or receive some other gendered dismissal as long as he continues to seem like he’s obeying social norms and just doing it badly when he’s really hiding his despicable intentions under a thin veneer of ‘polite behavior’ and what he’s really trying to do is box Esther in so that she has no choice but to submit.

I’m going to try real hard to get down off this soapbox, but I’ll admit that it’s giving me extreme difficulty. The whole thing disturbed me considerably more than intended – but it SO DID.

As is fitting for a fantasy where the magical system is based on language, I fell so, so hard for the gorgeous lyricality of this story. At the same time, I have to confess that I was one of the few people who just didn’t ‘get’ or ‘get into’ This Is How You Lose the Time War, so I came into The River Has Roots hoping that I would like it but not predisposed to do so. It was an experiment that this time paid off.

From the beginning, the story reminded me a LOT of The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed with its setting on the edge of a dangerous fae country and its rules about coming in and attempting to go back out. It also very much has the feel of a fairy tale, and if it turned out to be a reworking or retelling of an existing tale I wouldn’t be surprised. Additionally it held echoes of Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian-based Ballad series that begins with If Ever I Return Pretty Peggy-O, which, come to think of it, are also murder ballads.

All of which meant that I wasn’t expecting a happy ending and was VERY pleasantly surprised – as were the Hawthorn sisters – when one arrived anyway. I’ll certainly be back the next time the author publishes a solo endeavor!

#BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran

#BookReview: At the Fount of Creation by Tobi OgundiranAt the Fount of Creation (Guardians of the Gods, #2) by Tobi Ogundiran
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, historical fantasy
Series: Guardians of the Gods #2
Pages: 224
Published by Tordotcom on January 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The fate of the Orisha will be decided in the concluding volume of the Guardian of the Gods duology, inspired by Yoruba mythology.Perfect for fans of N. K. Jemisin, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Daughters of Nri, and Godkiller.For four hundred years, the world's remaining Orisha have fought to survive the rapaciousness of the soul-stealing Godkillers and the charismatic words of the singular, mysterious figure who leads them, known as the Teacher. Now they seek to kill the one person whose existence defies their very mandate.Now that Ashâke carries within herself the spirits of the surviving Orisha, she is on the hunt for allies who can help her defeat the encroaching army of Godkillers. But their influence is everywhere, and no one is immune―not even Ashâke. If she is to succeed, Ashâke will need to answer the question the Godkillers pose―are the Orisha even worth saving?

My Review:

I think I’m going to have to talk ‘around’ this story before I can get to talking ‘about’ this story because that’s the problem I had with reading the story and, as it turns out, with writing this review.

For a short book, it took me a rather long time to get into it, and it’s only now that I can see why that happened as well as what made it work in the end.

The first book in the Guardians of the Gods duology, In the Shadow of the Fall, drove me batty because it didn’t feel like a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. And even though it was clearly part one of a duology, that part still needed an ending – which it didn’t feel like it got.

I expected a cliffhanger, but instead the book read like it fell off a cliff – and took the reader right along with it.

It was a LOT of setup – necessary as background but frustrating in the character development. Then suddenly both Ashâke and the reader learn that everything she was taught was a lie and that all of her actions based on that lie were a deadly and dreadful mistake.

Now, in the duology’s conclusion, we learn the truths behind the lie that Ashâke was taught, the cost of her mistaken belief, not just to herself but to her entire world, and the revelation of the trick that lay behind it all.

In this particular story of discontented trickster gods and the manipulations they wield to get their way, it’s still a bit of a two-man grift – even if both are deceiving each other as much, or more, than they are the world at large.

Escape Rating B: For this reader, just as with the first book, it felt like the beginning of this half of the story was drifting rather than moving forward. After finishing, I realized that the story felt like it was drifting because the protagonist, Ashâke, was herself in a state of drift.

She’s not acting, she’s reacting, and she’s reacting to the drives and whims of the four active gods, for whom she is the combination of guardian, avatar, and only living channel. She was taught to see the gods, called Orisha in the West African myths in which this story is rooted, as all-powerful over the individual aspects that each individual Orisha represents.

And they ALL exploit that belief mercilessly because they have, in truth, lost control and are desperate to maintain some semblance of it.

Meanwhile, the social and political situation is out of control. The Orisha – and Ashâke – have been reduced to desperate straits because a charismatic ‘teacher’ has swayed the hearts and minds of the people who once worshiped the Orisha. Ashâke and the gods she guards are on the run and running out of room in which to keep running.

No one makes good decisions in such conditions – not even gods.

The final confrontation is huge and cathartic and is a truth that sets the people and even the Orisha free. Everyone, it seems, but Ashâke herself, who finally takes the position that was always meant to be hers. All she needed to do was rise to it in spite of all the things and people and even gods that stood in her way.

Grade A #BookReview: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire

Grade A #BookReview: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuireAdrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Wayward Children, #10) by Seanan McGuire
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, portal fantasy, urban fantasy, young adult
Series: Wayward Children #10
Pages: 147
Published by Tordotcom on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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Giant turtles, impossible ships, and tidal rivers ridden by a Drowned girl in search of a family in the latest in the bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire.
Nadya had three mothers: the one who bore her, the country that poisoned her, and the one who adopted her.
Nadya never considered herself less than whole, not until her adoptive parents fitted her with a prosthetic arm against her will, seeking to replace the one she'd been missing from birth.
It was cumbersome; it was uncomfortable; it was wrong.
It wasn't her.
Frustrated and unable to express why, Nadya began to wander, until the day she fell through a door into Belyyreka, the Land Beneath the Lake--and found herself in a world of water, filled with child-eating amphibians, majestic giant turtles, and impossible ships that sailed as happily beneath the surface as on top. In Belyyreka, she found herself understood for who she was: a Drowned Girl, who had made her way to her real home, accepted by the river and its people.
But even in Belyyreka, there are dangers, and trials, and Nadya would soon find herself fighting to keep hold of everything she had come to treasure.

My Review:

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is a bit of an origin story. Readers of the Wayward Children series first met the ‘Drowned Girl’ Nadya in Beneath the Sugar Sky. But that’s the story where her door finally opens for her AGAIN, because she’s sure that she wants to go BACK to Belyyreka, the world under the lake where she’s already built a life that fit her with people that she loves dearly – whether they are human people or not.

This is Nadya’s origin story, how she came to be the girl who loved turtles, found a door at the bottom of a pond, and grew up in a world that her heart called home. Only to be saved, and damned in the same instant, to return to a place she was never intended to fit.

Let’s just say that it’s a good thing that we already know how her story ends – from Beneath the Sugar Sky – because this one doesn’t have a happy ending – not for Nadya and not for the adopted parents who made her so damn sure in the first place that even the possibility of drowning was an improvement.

However, Nadya’s life in Belyyreka, the marvelous middle of the story, is terrific. It’s easy to see why her heart brought her there – and why it eventually let her go back.

Escape Rating A: The Wayward Children series, taken as a whole, is a story about acceptance. Individually they are stories about square pegs who are being shoved into round holes – all too often by their parents. Sometimes there’s a tragedy, often there’s merely a tragedy in the making that doesn’t get made because a door opens.

Even if that door leads to an entirely different sort of tragedy. The difference is that the worlds behind the door allows each of the children to choose their fates. Which is often, as is the case with Nadya, the one thing they’ve lacked on this side of the door. Choice.

In Nadya’s case, among the many choices that have been made for her is one that she is perfectly capable of having made on her own, even at age 9. Nadya was born with one and a half arms. While she’s aware that having two full arms – with hands – would be more convenient – it’s not how she was made and she hasn’t felt less than. Merely different.

Her adopted mother seems determined to make Nadya feel ‘less than’ at every turn, and has fitted her with a prosthetic arm that isn’t even all that functional. It’s a burden and not a help – exactly the way her ‘Mom’ wants her to feel, along with feeling grateful for having her lack pointed out to her and supposedly remedied.

In a way, it’s a bit like Jack and Jill from Down Among the Sticks and Bones in that each of their parents wanted a perfect child, a perfect girly-girl or a perfect tomboy, and didn’t care what either of the twin’s preferences might be.

The world that Nadya falls into is a world of water – a world under the water. She’s not a mermaid like Cora, the other ‘Drowned Girl’ at Miss West’s. Belyyreka is a world of water with weight, where heavy water forms lakes and streams, lighter water forms the air, and giant turtles tug boats from one to the other.

It’s a world where Nadya chooses to be part of a household, she chooses to let the river give her the gift of a water hand, she chooses to contribute and grow up and into herself. It’s not a perfect life, no life ever is – but it’s the life that Nadya chose even with its dangers and its trials. It’s a happy, fulfilling life – one that’s interrupted by a ‘rescue’ she never wanted. This would be a much more difficult read if I didn’t already know that Nadya found her door again and dove back through – although I wouldn’t mind learning what she found there if the series ever goes back to Belyyreka.

(Speaking of Belyyreka itself, the eARC I read spells it Belyyreka but the blurb spells it Belyrreka and I don’t know which is correct. If someone who has a final copy would let me know which is correct, I’d appreciate it!)

The Wayward Children series is a series about, not just love, but mainly about acceptance. Acceptance of self and also finding a place where that self is accepted instead of excepted. It’s for all the children and former children who didn’t quite fit but managed to find or make a life where they did. And especially for those who didn’t, who still need to find a place their hearts can call home.

If this series calls to you, or if it’s been recommended and you’re wondering where to dive in (whether isn’t even a question, the answer is an enthusiastic YES!) Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear would be an excellent place to start, second only to the first book in the series, Every Heart a Doorway. Nothing that occurs in this story relies on any previous knowledge of events – because it happens before all of them – especially the events in Beneath the Sugar Sky. The one thing that one does get from Every Heart that isn’t in this book is a marvelous introduction to the way in which this world that all the doors open from is set up, but the people of Belyyreka explain that to Nadya more than well enough for someone new – as she herself is – to fall right in.

If you’re still looking for your door, step through Nadya’s and see what you’ve missed.

A- #BookReview: The Bloodless Princes by Charlotte Bond

A- #BookReview: The Bloodless Princes by Charlotte BondThe Bloodless Princes (The Fireborne Blade, #2) by Charlotte Bond
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dragons, fantasy
Series: Fireborne Blade #2
Pages: 160
Published by Tordotcom on October 29, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Orpheus meets A Natural History of Dragons in a tale of death, honor and true love's embrace.
It seemed the afterlife was bustling.
Cursed by the previous practitioner in her new role, and following an... incident... with a supremely powerful dragon, High Mage Saralene visits the afterlife with a boon to beg of the Bloodless Princes who run the underworld.
But Saralene and her most trusted advisor/champion/companion, Sir Maddileh, will soon discover that there's only so much research to be done by studying the old tales, though perhaps there's enough truth in them to make a start.
Saralene will need more than just her wits to leave the underworld, alive. And Maddileh will need more than just her Fireborne Blade.
A story of love and respect that endures beyond death. And of dragons, because we all love a dragon!

My Review:

The road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions – it isn’t paved at all. Instead it’s a dropkick off of a VERY high bridge into a pit that the evil exilarch from The Fireborne Blade is trying to avoid by dragging his successor, Saralene, into the afterlife in his place.

This follow-up to The Fireborne Blade is a book that this reader never expected at all. Because at the end of The Fireborne Blade it seemed like the story was all wrapped up.

The dragon was dead, to begin with.

The dragon was dead, the disgraced knight Maddileh was redeemed, the Fireborne Blade was restored, the evil exilarch was dead, Maddileh’s betraying, body-stealing squire was dead – in exchange for Maddileh herself – and the true High Mage Saralene is back on her throne and in her office, with Maddileh as her bodyguard and captain.

All is right with their world – or would be if all of the above were as true as Maddileh and Saralene believed them to be at the end of that first book.

The adventures of this second book are necessary because those things are not true. In fact they are mostly not true. Especially the parts that have the worst potential outcomes.

The dragon is not really dead – only hibernating. The evil exilarch is dead – but he’s scheming from the afterlife to take Saralene’s body and her position and go right back to being the oppressive tyrant he was when he was alive. Because he will be. Again.

Unless Maddileh and Saralene can stop him – with the surprisingly willing assistance of the dragon they believed they killed.

All they have to do is convince the ‘Bloodless Princes’ who control the Underworld to let Saralene go – before she’s dead forever.

Escape Rating A-: The pattern of the way both books in this series are written is fascinating and more than a bit different. This story – as did The Fireborne Blade – works on two tracks that feed into each other in ways that the reader does not initially expect.

A piece of this story is told through tales that are myths and legends to Maddileh and Saralene – and then the actions they are actually performing move the story forward. Then it circles back to more legends – which inform the action to come.

What made the tales part of the action work was that those tales are told from two perspectives, the human and the dragon. Those points of view permeate these stories that talk about the same basic event but come to rather different conclusions and teach different lessons beyond the obvious one that whoever controls the recording of history sets the agenda for what history is believed to be – as opposed to what it really was.

All of which comes fully into play when Maddileh, Saralene and the dragon Mienylyth reach the Underworld, because the legends of the ‘Bloodless Princes’ have conflated order with good and chaos with evil, when in truth a LOT of time has passed, both princes’ attitudes have become set in very hard stone and either condition taken to extremes is no good for humans or other thinking creatures.

The whole, entire story kicks off with Maddileh and Saralene learning that the righteous ending they believed they’d earned at the end of their first adventure wasn’t an ending at all. This second adventure takes that fruit-basket upset and turns it into a story of adventure and upended assumptions that crosses the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with Lady Trent’s memoir, A Natural History of Dragons (by Marie Brennan) and turns it into a romance of longing and unfulfilled hopes and dreams that can only become an HEA if all the characters hold true to their oaths and their promises.

As much as the story is told from Maddileh’s and Saralene’s perspectives – as much as their human hopes and dreams drive the narrative forward – it’s the lonely dragon Mienylyth who steals the story and the reader’s heart.

I think this is the end of this saga – but then I thought that last time. If we get to see more of Maddileh and Saralene after all, I really hope that Mienylyth flies back as well. Because she was absolutely chock full of awesome – even when she was pretending to be a cat.

#BookReview: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

#BookReview: The City in Glass by Nghi VoThe City in Glass by Nghi Vo
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Pages: 216
Published by Tordotcom on October 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

In this new standalone, Hugo Award-winning author Nghi Vo introduces a beguiling fantasy city in the tradition of Calvino, Mieville, and Le Guin.
A demon. An angel. A city that burns at the heart of the world.
The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.
And then the angels come, and the city falls.
Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.
Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.
The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to burn a world to ashes and build it anew.

My Review:

Azril isn’t on any map. It never was – and not just because of what happened to it. But before we get to that, we have to begin at the beginning, because Vitrine happened to it first.

Vitrine was a demon. And in some ways she’s very demonic indeed. She’s immortal and powerful. She’s mischievous and capricious. She’s possessive and she’s protective. And in that combination of forces and attributes she’s not anything like the demons of popular mythology.

Because the way that Vitrine occupies herself down the centuries and the millenia isn’t chaotic and isn’t destructive – at least not in the fire and brimstone sense of destruction and not that those things don’t happen anyway.

The city of Azril is the thing of which Vitrine is the most possessive and protective. The city is HERS. She planted its seeds, she nurtured it, she’s watched it grow. She takes care of it and the people in it. Not by keeping them like children, but rather by allowing them to grow. Which means that people are born and they die, some of them leave and some of them return, some live good lives and others don’t. She lets them be what they are and helps the city as a whole to flourish.

Until the angels came, self-righteous, obedient and above all, destructive. The freedom she gave her people, freedom of both thought and action, may have been too much for Heaven to allow.

The angels leave Azril a smoking wreck, a tomb for all she held dear and all the people she loved. In her grief she cursed one of them. The proudest, the haughtiest, the one who expected her to beg even as he admitted that no pleading of hers would ever matter.

So she cursed him. And just as she was damned – so was he.

Escape Rating B: I picked this book up because I love the author’s Singing Hills Cycle and was hoping for something like that even though I knew this wasn’t part of that.

What I actually got was something completely unexpected – in a way I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

At the beginning, the immovable, implacable, rigidly self-righteous angels seemed straight out of Simon R. Green’s Nightside or some world adjacent to it. They’re like some of the avatars of justice in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. They’re entirely too much like the angels in Diablo 3 – which was a weird thing to think of. These are all varieties of angels where the stick up their collective asses has taken root and shoved out their brains.

But as the story progresses, the angel is forced to bend. He’s been exiled from heaven because he’s now flawed. He has a tiny bit of demon-stuff in him. But Vitrine isn’t a demon the way that we tend to think of demons, so what that demon stuff does is make him think and feel – and initially he’s pretty bad at both.

While Vitrine goes through all the stages of grief and he tries to ‘help’. And fails. Badly, frequently and often.

But Vitrine grieves and rebuilds. He hangs around and tries to help because he’s got nothing else to do. And they circle each other and drive each other mad and feel things they can’t articulate until I decided that this book is what you get when you combine This is How You Lose the Time War with Good Omens. Which shouldn’t even be possible and wouldn’t work at all if Vitrine was anything like what we think of when we hear ‘demon’.

The ending, in its own way, is just as equivocal as This is How You Lose the Time War – although it’s also entirely different. Whether it’s done out of love or hate is something that the reader is left to decide for themselves. I loved the form it took, and I certainly enjoyed the way they rebuilt the city, but this was as much metaphor as it was story and I’m still mulling it over.

A- #BookReview: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

A- #BookReview: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah PinskerHaunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, horror, paranormal
Pages: 161
Published by Tordotcom on September 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

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

My Review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A- #BookReview: Time’s Agent by Brenda Peynado

A- #BookReview: Time’s Agent by Brenda PeynadoTime's Agent by Brenda Peynado
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: climate fiction, science fiction, time travel
Pages: 160
Published by Tordotcom, Tordotcom Publishing on August 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

“What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?”
Forty years ago, archeologist Raquel and her biologist wife Marlena once dreamed of the mysteries they would unlock in their respective fields using pocket universes— geographically small, hidden offshoots of reality, each with its own fast or slow time dilation relative to Earth time—and the future they would open up for their daughter.
But that was then.
Forty years later, Raquel is in disgrace, Marlena lives in a pocket universe Raquel wears around her neck and no longer speaks to her, what’s left of their daughter’s consciousness resides in a robotic dog, and time is a commodity controlled by corporations squeezing out every last penny they can.
So when a new pocket universe appears, one that might hold the key to her failed calling, Raquel seizes one last chance to redeem herself to her wife, live up to her own failed ideals, and confront what it means to save something—or someone—from time.

My Review:

On the one hand, Time’s Agent is a familiar story about human greed and corporate rapaciousness, set in a near-future version of our world where climate change is proceeding apace, badly and past the point of no return, and the resulting dystopian society is running amuck right along with it.

And on the other hand, the way it tells that familiar story is through messing with time – even though Time’s Agent is explicitly not a time travel story – at least not unless Rip van Winkle’s story is a time travel story. Instead, this is a story about the “true” theory of the relativity of time. Not Einstein’s version, but rather Zall’s Second Law, the one that goes, “How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.”

The so-called “pocket worlds” that are discovered, explored and protected by their Institute represent vast, exploitable resources to the megacorporations that are well on their way to taking over the world. Some PW’s are fast relative to Earth standard time, and some are slow, and there are ways to monetize and use them up.

The Institute stands in the way of all that, at least until Raquel makes a terrible mistake and accidentally falls into a fast-time PW that spits her out forty Earth standard years later. Her disappearance – along with the disappearance of her wife who was inhabiting a slow-time PW around Raquel’s neck – turned out to be the catalyst for terrible changes, both for them personally and for the world in general.

Like Rip van Winkle, the place that Raquel and Marlena return to is nearly unrecognizable to the two “time travelers”. In the 40 years that they missed, their daughter died, their Institute was gutted, corporates control EVERYTHING, and the World War III that occurred in the interim pushed the entire Earth further and faster down the road to destruction.

The only hope that Earth has is to find a pocket world that is much more than a pocket. A world that is big enough to start both species and civilization over again. Raquel and Marlena’s only hope is to get there first and close the door behind them.

Escape Rating A-: Time’s Agent is a story where the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts are what we have in our hands to read. In other words, this is a mixed feelings kind of review because well, my feelings about the whole thing are mixed.

What adds to my extreme mixed feelings is that the overall feeling of the story is profound grief. Forty years into a terrible future, Raquel is grieving pretty much everything, her marriage is fractured, their daughter is dead, her friends are scattered, her once-shining hopes have fallen into disillusionment, the Institute she believed was both her family and her calling has been suborned and her world is dying.

Raquel’s grief permeates the entire story, to the point where she’s justifiably wallowing for much of its length – and the story wallows with it. It makes sense from her equal parts depressed and horrified perspective but it makes for a difficult and sometimes low, slow and even ponderous read as she tries to get her shit together in a world where she doesn’t know if the place she left it last still exists.

The SFnal parts of this one reminded me of a whole bunch of things, not all of which are themselves SF. The combination of the way that the pocket worlds work, that you can go in to a slow time PW, stay a long time and come out at the same minute you left, physically unchanged but mentally quite different echoes the Star Trek Next Generation episode The Inner Light, while the differences caused by Raquel and Marlena’s absence from the world and the way in which that absence occurred recalled Yesterday’s Enterprise and the profound changes wrought by the Enterprise C’s presence or lack thereof at Khitomer.

The exploitation of both the pocket worlds and the people who used and abused those worlds and/or were abused by them calls to mind Charlie Stross’ Merchant Princes series and especially Kage Baker’s books about the rapacious, time-traveling and looting Company. Consider all of the above readalikes or watchalikes for Time’s Agent, albeit in different ways.

One of the fascinating things about this story, and that puts it over the hump from B+ to A-, is the way that the story is both set in and steeped in the author’s Dominican culture, and the way that the setting emphasizes the evils AND the pervasiveness of both colonization and colonialism, using that setting to point out that the fate of the pocket worlds and THEIR exploitation has all happened before, is happening now, and will all happen again. At the same time, the characters’ perspectives on their world before Raquel’s fall into fast time and her return provides a fascinating contrast by showing both Raquel and the reader just how easy it was for her to ignore the already worsening state of the world as a whole as long as her personal little corner of it was doing just fine.

And at the same time, while I don’t want to call this a solution because it isn’t a solution overall but is one for Raquel and Marlena, is rooted in the nearly forgotten and utterly subjugated history of their own people, and it’s answer that could only have come from the survivors of colonization and not its perpetrators, and that is utterly right and woven into this story from the outset.

In the end, I still have, as I said, some mixed feelings about this one. Admittedly, my most mixed feeling is that this would have been better at a longer length, with a bit more of Raquel’s and, as it turns out, Marlena’s, planning made a bit more manifest a bit earlier on. Because there’s a lot to unpack in this story and this reader at least ended up relying on resemblances to the above readalikes/watchalikes to vault over some of those hidden bits, as well as using those vaults to carry me past the depths of the protagonist’s wallow.

All of that being said, this is the author’s DEBUT novel. Considering that this is her first novel, the number of wild but mostly realized ideas combined with the heartbreaking poignancy of the portrayal of the protagonist’s grief and desperation have absolutely put this author on my reading radar and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next!

A+ #BookReview: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djeli Clark

A+ #BookReview: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djeli ClarkThe Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djèlí Clark
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Pages: 208
Published by Tordotcom on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats.
Nor do they have tails.
But they are most assuredly dead.

Nebula and Alex Award winner P. Djèlí Clark introduces a brand-new world and a fantastical city full of gods and assassins.
Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins―resurrected, deadly, wiped of their memories―have only three unbreakable vows.
First, the contract must be just. That’s above Eveen’s pay grade.
Second, even the most powerful assassin may only kill the contracted. Eveen’s a professional. She’s never missed her mark.
The third and the once you accept a job, you must carry it out. And if you stray? A final death would be a mercy. When the Festival of the Clockwork King turns the city upside down, Eveen’s newest mission brings her face-to-face with a past she isn’t supposed to remember and a vow she can’t forget.

My Review:

Consider it 50/50 on the name. They’re not cats, they don’t have tails, (they’re also not wearing cat’s tails) but they absolutely are assassins and they are most definitely dead.

They are also not supposed to have a single, solitary memory of who they were when they were alive, or whatever caused them to swear themselves to Aeril, the Matron of Assassins and goddess of knives. And chefs, because knives.

Our story begins with a member of the Dead Cat Tail Assassins, Eveen the Eviscerator, taking a contract on behalf of her goddess. At first, it seems above board – or at least as above board as any contract to assassinate someone can be.

And that’s where things get interesting. And absorbing. And compelling. And utterly profane in the best way possible.

Because the person that Eveen is contracted to and absolutely MUST kill on pain of her own eternal torment is herself. Her old self. Her former self. The self she must have been twenty or so years ago, before she died and pledged herself to her goddess.

A self she is not supposed to be able to remember, because that’s the way the contract with the Matron of Assassins is supposed to work.

Someone clearly found a loophole. A big one. Eveen can’t kill herself, not even her rule-following, goody-two-shoes former self. Because seeing the person named Sky that she once was gives Eveen the one thing she’s not supposed to have – memories.

Not that either her past memories or her present ones explain not just how someone managed to tear this gigantic hole in the contract between Aeril and her contracted assassins, but a hole in the whole, entire, space time continuum.

And as big a question as that how is in a magical sense, an even bigger question is why anyone would go to this much trouble to torment one assassin, because this is way too big a mess to create for shits and giggles, and Eveen is merely one assassin among many.

But whether the motive behind this magical mess is in Sky’s long-dead past or Eveen’s recently dead past, this once and perhaps future assassin has until dawn to solve the mystery.

Or face consequences that this time she hasn’t even earned. Or has she?

Escape Rating A+: I picked this up because I adored the author’s Dead Djinn Universe, particularly the utterly marvelous A Master of Djinn. I wasn’t expecting this to be quite like that, although I certainly wouldn’t mind another foray into the Dead Djinn Universe, but I knew that whatever this turned out to be, it would be awesome. And it absolutely was.

Also cats. I fully admit he had me at cats. Even though I knew going in that there weren’t any actual cats.

What I was not expecting was a world that had some surprising resemblances to Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence/Craft Wars series, but it’s certainly there in the contractual obligations between gods and their agents, either or both of whom may be dead but still working and still bound by their contracts.

What makes this story work so well, so damn well in fact, is the relationship that develops between Eveen and Sky. They are day and night in so many ways, and yet, they are each other’s past and future and neither knows what caused the one to make the choices that led to the other.

In their mirror imaging of each other, they manage to reach through the silvered glass and work towards each other while still remaining who they are and it’s fascinating to watch. (It’s a bit like one of the Doctor Who episodes where the past Doctors get dragged into the present Doctor’s current dilemma, which was a lot of fun to see. Because it is.

At the same time, Sky’s astonishing advent into Eveen’s world lets Eveen show it to us as well. It’s a world that, for all its differences to ours, works both surprisingly well and every bit as badly in some of the same ways. Clearly, humans are gonna human, even when they’re dead. Or all powerful. Or both.

While the motives behind this whole mess are not, in the end, all that original, the execution (pardon all the puns) most definitely is, in a way that kept this reader at least on the edge of her seat until the bittersweet end. Which could, possibly, hopefully, lead to a new beginning.

Because if this turned out to be the start of a series, I absolutely would not mind AT ALL.

A- #BookReview: Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

A- #BookReview: Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de BodardNavigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction mystery, space opera
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on July 30, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Award-winning author Aliette de Bodard presents yet another innovative space opera that broadens the definition of the this time bringing xianxia-style martial arts to the stars.

Using the power of Shadows generated from their own bodies’ vitality, Navigators guide space ships safely across the a realm of unreality populated by unfathomable, dangerous creatures called Tanglers. In return for their service, the navigator clans get wealth and power―but they get the blame, too. So when a Tangler escapes the Hollows and goes missing, the empire calls on the jockeying clans to take responsibility and deal with the problem.

Việt Nhi is not good with people. Or politics. Which is rather unfortunate because, as a junior apprentice in the Rooster clan, when her elders send her on a joint-clan mission to locate the first escaped Tangler in living memory, she can’t exactly say no.

Hạc Cúc of the Snake clan usually likes people. It says so on her “information gathering”―right after “poisoning” and “stabbing.” So she’s pretty sure she’s got the measure of this they’re the screw-ups, the spares; there isn’t a single sharp tool in this shed.

But when their imperial envoy is found dead by clan poison, this crew of expendable apprentices will have to learn to work together―fast―before they end up cooling their heels in a jail cell while the invisible Tangler wreaks havoc on a civilian city and the reputation of all four clans.

My Review:

The ‘navigational entanglements’ of the title aren’t just a bit of clever phrasing – not that it isn’t a clever and evocative phrase! In the case of this novella, it’s also a literal description of the whole story – in more ways than one.

This SF mystery, shot through with political shenanigans and a tart but gooey center of sapphic romance, begins its entanglement with its solution for the faster-than-light travel conundrum with actual creatures called Tanglers who live in the realm of unreality that makes faster than light travel and the galaxy-spanning empires it makes possible, well, possible.

As is often the case in stories that use this method of FTL travel, navigating the Hollows requires highly skilled navigators who are born with special gifts. In this particular universe, the power of Shadows generated from their own bodies’ life force.

It could be considered magic, at least magic of the Clarke’s Law variety that “Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from.’ However one thinks of it, it takes special training and special talent and is especially valuable. Particularly to the clans who have a near monopoly on intergalactic shipping because of their success in nurturing navigators.

A hegemony that is under threat when this story begins. Which is why this story begins. The exact nature of the threat, and the clans’ decision on how to meet that threat, is the exact thing that Hạc Cúc of the Snake clan is pretty sure she’s not supposed to figure out.

The clans, or at least her own clan, should have known better. Because if there is one thing that Hạc Cúc can’t resist, it’s a secret. Especially not the kind of secret that is intended to get her killed whether she figures it out or not.

Escape Rating A-: I grabbed this book because I’ve been picking my way through the author’s vast, sprawling, Xuya Universe series and figured that this would be similar without being an actual part of THAT tangled mess.

Two things at the top, Navigational Entanglements is NOT part of Xuya. I’m not saying there aren’t similarities in style and in the way that the culture and history work, but this is a standalone. So if you’re looking to sample the author’s work, this is a good place to start.

Howsomever, one of the characteristics of Xuya is that the publication order and the chronological order don’t have even a nodding acquaintance. Each story in the series is intended to be read without prior knowledge and starts a bit in medias res of the whole series. As in the reader is thrust into the middle of a story that they may or may not have read the background of, or the background may or may not yet exist, and is supposed to sink or swim with what they have in front of them.

Navigational Entanglements is written in that same manner, even though there aren’t any previous or succeeding stories – at least not yet. (If we get more stories in this universe this reader at least would be very happy because the politics are just so fascinatingly messy.)

In other words, this is a story that requires the reader to figure things out as they go. Not that these characters don’t turn out to be doing exactly that, but going with their flow means that the reader has to jump in feet first and that’s not every reader’s comfort zone.

Part of what makes the story work, however, is that this is very much an SF mystery from the top and at the top. It’s just unusual in that the team was purposely created to fail, because they all hate each other. It’s only that Hạc Cúc’s love of secrets allows her to stand outside of the group’s bickering, see it for what it is, and redirect their weaknesses and their enmity into a productive, if not always harmonious, team.

Which allows friendship, love and trust to all blossom – rather like a cactus flower complete with spikes! – and provides this novella with its surprising – especially to the protagonists – happy for now with the possibility (hopefully) of more political and investigative shenanigans to come.