Saying that I didn’t get much this week is like saying water is wet. And it’s really weirding me out. To be honest, originally there was only one book on this list. Well, there was only one book after I moved the four books that don’t have covers yet to next week’s stack. Again. I know I shouldn’t just add stuff because the pile looks empty, but I did it anyway. Also again.

The book I’m most looking forward to is the one I started with, A Fashionably French Murder by Colleen Cambridge. It’s the third book in her An American in Paris series, meaning it’s the third book in the historical mystery series that features Julia Child as the protagonist’s sidekick. The first two, Mastering the Art of French Murder and A Murder Most French, were both awesome and I can’t wait for this next one.

The book I’m most curious about – and I’m terribly curious – is The Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren Willig. It’s based on the true story of America’s first famous murder trial, with Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr attempting to work together to defend the accused murderer. The book is based on the actual trial transcript – and it sounds fascinating.

Both the Memory Bank series and The Naturalist Society are books that I’ve looked out multiple times over the past couple of weeks but just didn’t pick up. With this week’s utter dearth of titles, I decided to pick them up after all.

For Review:
Aurora Fragment (Memory Bank #3) by Brian Shea and Raquel Byrnes
A Fashionably French Murder (An American in Paris #3) by Colleen Cambridge
The Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren Willig

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
The Memory Bank (Memory Bank #1) by Brian Shea and Raquel Byrnes
The Naturalist Society by Carrie Vaughn (Amazon First Reads)
Retrograde Flaw (Memory Bank #2) by Brian Shea and Raquel Byrnes

If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

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This stack has pretty covers and pretty cool covers as well!

I think the prettiest covers are The Geographer’s Map to Romance and Pets in Space 9, although they are clearly not pretty in the same way at all. Ill-Fated Fortune is also pretty, but mostly it makes me pretty hungry when I look at at. One Level Down is just a cool cover. I could see that background being used in some fascinating designs and Insta posts.

And then there’s Aunt Tigress, which I honestly got FOR the cover. It’s not exactly “pretty”, and if pretty is as pretty does, based on the blurb ‘pretty’ is going to end up being a really wrong word all the way around. Fascinating, yes. Compelling, I hope so. Possibly even a bit bloody – or at least bloody-minded. But pretty, well, not so much. And that’s a good thing for the kind of urban fantasy I really, really hope it is!

One more thing…the book in this stack I’m most looking forward to is, hands down, Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris, the OMG 20th book in the marvelous Sebastian St. Cyr series.

For Review:
Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin
Claim (Fury Brothers #5) by Anna Hackett
The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen (Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen #1) by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat Anderson
The Geographer’s Map to Romance (Love’s Academic #2) by India Holton
One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson
Our Nazi by Michael Soffer
Rebellious Grace (King’s Fool #3) by Jeri Westerson
Star-Crossed Egg Tarts (Magical Fortune Cookie #2) by Jennifer J. Chow
Stone Certainty (Holy Terrors #2) by Simon R. Green
Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr #20) by C.S. Harris

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
Ill-Fated Fortune (Magical Fortune Cookie #1) by Jennifer J. Chow
Pets in Space 9 edited by Carol Van Natta

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A slightly shorter stack this week. I do have a few more, but no covers to go with them – so they’ll be waiting a bit.

But the books with covers I do have are an interesting bunch. The pretty covers are The December Market and Greenteeth. The book I’m most looking forward to is The Sea Eternal by Emery Robin – because I loved the first book in the series, The Stars Undying.

The book I’m really, really curious about is The Vengeance by Emma Newman, because, well, vampires in the world of Alexandre Dumas and possibly his Three Musketeers. If that wasn’t a tease enough, I’m also wondering how it will compare to Genevieve Cogman’s Scarlet Revolution series (which begins with Scarlet), which mixes vampires with the French Revolution. Clearly there’s something in the literary air about vampires mixing with French history and I’m really curious what THAT’s all about.

What about you? What have you added to your stack this week?

For Review:
The December Market (Shelter Springs #2) by RaeAnne Thayne
Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo
Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill
Israel Alone by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Lifeform by Jenny Slate
One Final Turn (Electra McDonnell #5) by Ashley Weaver
The Sea Eternal (Empire Without End #2) by Emery Robin
Two Times Murder (Quiet Teacher #2) by Adam Oyebanji
The Vengeance (Vampires of Dumas #1) by Emma Newman

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I’m doing this a couple of days early this week because Hurricane Helene – not that she’ll still be an actual hurricane by the time she reaches Atlanta. But we will get LOTS of wind and rain, which has the potential for falling trees and downed power lines, so I’m running ahead a bit just in case. I’m hoping it works as a countermeasure, that by planning for it we won’t actually lose power.

Luna is clearly wigged out by the storm – even just the heavy rain Wednesday night. She spent the evening huddled under the sink in the downstairs bathroom, as it’s the one room in the house that has no windows.

I do have a few – just a few (LOL) – books to read if we get stuck indoors for the weekend. The pretty covers this time around are Austen at Sea, The River has Roots and Still Life with Remorse. Although I think an ‘honorable mention’ could be awarded for Eat the Ones You Love. That cover is beautifully done – but seriously creepy!

The books I’m most curious about are the Yard Birds series that begins with Crazy as a Loon. I read a review of the final book in the series, Free as a Bird, at Caffeinated Reviewer, and I was intrigued. Also hoping the series will be a bit reminiscent of Never Too Old to Save the World and A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark as they all feature female protagonists that are not so much ‘of a certain age’ but looking at that ‘certain age’ through the rearview mirror but still kicking ass and taking names even if they have to use a cane to do it.

The one I’m most looking forward to, for the next time I really need a comfort read, to absolutely no one’s surprise, is The Blanket Cats.

For Review:
10/7: 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron
Austen at Sea by Natalie Jenner
The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin
Murder by Memory (Dorothy Gentleman #1) by Olivia Waite
The Prince Without Sorrow (Obsidian Throne #1) by Maithree Wijesekara
The River has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
Crazy as a Loon (Yard Birds #1) by Hailey Edwards (ebook + audio)
Dead as a Dodo (Yard Birds #2) by Hailey Edwards (ebook + audio)
Free as a Bird (Yard Birds #3) by Hailey Edwards (ebook + audio)

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This is a not too ridiculously tall stack where everything turned out to be in pairs – not that it started out that way!

The two prettiest book covers, IMHO, are Hammajang Luck and The Serpent Called Mercy. Tea You at the Altar should have been a contender, but that slightly turned view that seems to be all that’s available at the moment makes the image too small to get the full effect. OTOH, it’s one of the two books I’m most looking forward to out of this week’s batch, with The Railway Conspiracy as the second in that category.

The two titles that I’m most curious about – although in entirely different ways, are the audiobook of The Atrocity Archives and the Mark Twain biography.

I’ve always meant to read Charles Stross’s Laundry Files series, of which The Atrocity Archives is the first book. But I was looking for a not-too-long audiobook to start this morning and saw that the narrator for this first book, along with most of the rest of the series, is one of my favorite videogame voice actors – and that made my decision for me.

The other book I’m really curious about is Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain biography. I don’t read a lot of biographies, and this book is an absolute doorstop at 1,200 pages, but I listened to Chernow’s Ulysses S. Grant biography at the same length and was utterly riveted – so I have high hopes for this book. (If Chernow’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the author of the Alexander Hamilton biography that Lin-Manuel Miranda used as the basis for the play Hamilton.

For Review:
Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
Cold Iron Task (Unorthodox Chronicles #3) by James J. Butcher
A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer (SCYTHE #1) by Maxie Dara
Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto
Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
Overcaptain (Saga of Recluce #24) by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
The Railway Conspiracy (Dee & Lao #2) by SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee
The Serpent Called Mercy by Roanne Lau
Tea You at the Altar (Tomes & Tea #3) by Rebecca Thorne

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files #1) by Charles Stross (audio)
Beginnings – The Sullivan’s Island Supper Club (Carolina Tales #1.5) by Susan M. Boyer

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Unlike last week’s stack, this time there are definitely some covers that are outright pretty, The Concealment of Endless Light, The Page Turner, and Rules for Ghosting. The books I’m really curious about are Kills Well With Others and Where the Axe is Buried. Kills Well With Others because it’s the follow-up to the marvelous Killers of a Certain Age, a book which, as much as I really wanted it to be the start of a series, showed no signs of actually being one. But now it is and YAY! I’m curious about Where the Axe is Buried because I’ve enjoyed the author’s first two books, The Mountain in the Sea and The Tusks of Extinction, very much, but neither is like the other so I’m extremely curious to read this one, which does not appear to be like either of his other books.

The book I most want to read in this stack is Murder of a Suffragette. The London Ladies’ Murder Club series, of which this is the fourth after A Body on the Doorstep, A Body at the Séance and A Body at the Dance Hall, has turned out to be quite charming – and I adore the main character. I’ve actually been jonesing for this next book in the series and now it’s HERE!

What about you? What books have you added to your stack this week?

For Review:
The Concealment of Endless Light by Yehoshua November
Kills Well With Others (Killers of a Certain Age #2) by Deanna Raybourn
The Library of Lost Dollhouses by Elise Hooper
Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner
Murder of a Suffragette (London Ladies’ Murder Club #4) by Marty Wingate
The Page Turner by Viola Shipman
Roman Year by André Aciman
Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore
The Way Up is Death by Dan Hanks
We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge
When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory
Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

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It’s not so much that this stack is shorter as it is that the stack of books for which I have covers is shorter. Some of the stuff that’s not being published until next year has eARCs available but no cover art yet. And so it goes.

I’m not sure that “pretty” is a word I would use for this bunch. Interesting, yes, but pretty, not so much. Although there’s certainly a whole lotta purple going on and that’s not bad.

But anticipation, well, I’ve got a TON of that. The books I’m most curious about at Cat’s People and The Museum Detective. The ones I’m most looking forward to reading are See How They Hide, The Tomb of Dragons and of course Scalzi’s latest, When the Moon Hits Your Eye because seriously WTF?

For Review:
Cat’s People by Tanya Guerrero
Countess by Suzan Palumbo
A Dragon of Black Glass (Moonfall #3) by James Rollins
Luminous by Silvia Park
The Museum Detective by Maha Khan Phillips
See How They Hide (Quinn & Costa #6) by Allison Brennan
The Tomb of Dragons (Cemeteries of Amalo #3) by Katherine Addison
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
The Will of the Many (Hierarchy #1) by James Islington

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There are a few, let’s call them themes, in this week’s stack. There are two books about books, two books with pretty much the same premise, some really pretty covers with very similar color schemes, more pretty covers, and one book I just can’t wait to read.

In no particular order, the books about books are pretty obvious, The Banned Books Club and The Booklover’s Library. They’re even first alphabetically, although the book covers sort randomly in the display.

The two books with the same premise are I Made It Out of Clay and Magical Meet Cute. I’m really curious to see just how much the resulting stories resemble each other, because the whole thing about “making” a “perfect” man by cooking up a golem is, well, just a bit different.

Days of Wonder, I’d Rather Be Destroyed and Olive Days are both kind of the same orange-yellow shade – as is Magical Meet Cute.

Days of Shattered Faith (LOTS of ‘Days’ in this bunch) and The Sullivan’s Island Supper Club are pretty – in entirely different ways.

Last but not least, the book I’m most looking forward to is A Snake in the Barley. I have adored the Owen Archer series since all the way back in the first book, The Apothecary Rose, which I read THIRTY YEARS AGO, on a trip to its setting of York, which probably explains a bit about why it stuck with me and I’ve stuck with it all these years. That plus the fact that the series is just an awesome work of historical fiction AND mystery.

What books are tickling your various fancies this last day/week of August/end of the whole entire Summer?

For Review:
The Banned Books Club by Brenda Novak
The Booklover’s Library by Madeline Martin
Days of Shattered Faith (Tyrant Philosophers #3) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Days of Wonder by Caroline Leavitt
Edenfrost by Amit Tishler, Bruno Frenda, Taylor Esposito
Final Verdict by Tobias Buck
I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander
I’d Rather Be Destroyed by Zach Goldberg
Magical Meet Cute by Jean Meltzer
Olive Days by Jessica Elisheva Emerson
One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery
A Snake in the Barley (Owen Archer #15) by Candace Robb
Street Corner Dreams by Florence Reiss Kraut
The Sullivan’s Island Supper Club (Carolina Tales #3) by Susan M. Boyer
Take (Fury Brothers #4) by Anna Hackett

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A slightly less ginormous stack this time around – even if it is no less splendiferous in its offerings. There are several really beautiful covers this time around, including Children of Gods and Fighting Men, Glance, and Upon a Starlit Tide. The two books that I’m most curious about are Picks and Shovels and Symbiote. Picks and Shovels because as much as I loved Doctorow’s first Martin Hench book, Red Team Blues, I didn’t expect the thing to stretch to a second book – which it did with The Bezzle. That there’s now a third makes me wonder where this technostalgia trip is going.

I’m curious about Symbiote because of the author’s c.v. which includes stints as a Space Shuttle engineer and in Antarctica.

And the book I’m most looking forward to, in a peculiar way, is Season of Death – no matter how off-putting the title might be. I’m loving the Barker & Llewelyn series, but I just finished book 8 (Hell Bay) and this is book 16. I’m looking forward to seeing how the series goes but I don’t want to get there TOO fast because then I’ll have to wait each year for the next one!

For Review:
The Children of Gods and Fighting Men (Gael Song #1) by Shauna Lawless
Following Similar Paths by Samuel C. Heilman and Mucahit Bilici
Glance by Chanda Feldman
The Library Game (Secret Staircase Mysteries #4) by Gigi Pandian
Marigold Mind Laundry by Jungeun Yun, translated by Shanna Tan
The Martian Contingency (Lady Astronaut #4) by Mary Robinette Kowal
Picks and Shovels (Martin Hench #3) by Cory Doctorow
Season of Death (Barker & Llewelyn #16) by Will Thomas
Symbiote by Michael Nayak
A Tainted Heart Bleeds (House of Croft #2) by Sophie Barnes
Upon a Starlit Tide by Kell Woods

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And we’re back! We’re still unpacking, it’s going to take weeks to sort through the books I picked up even though they are all ebooks, we’re still tired and the cats are all clinging tightly – they forgave us almost instantly and haven’t let us out of their sight for an instant ever since.

There are so many books in this stack that there are oodles of contenders on all counts; pretty, and curious and highly anticipated. The one I want to highlight has elements of all of the above, with just a little bit of something extra. I’m referring to The Legacy of Arniston House by T.L. Huchu, not just because I love the Edinburgh Nights series but because I heard him read from the book at Worldcon in Glasgow last weekend and now I can’t wait to sink my own reading teeth into the meat of what sounds like another outstanding installment in the series. The only sad note in my anticipation is that the author indicated that book five will be the final book in the series and I already know that this is one I’m going to miss a lot when it’s done – even if all my questions do finally get answered.

What about you? What new books are stacking your shelves this week?

For Review:
Beast of the North Woods (Monster Hunter Mystery #3) by Annelise Ryan
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 edited by Hugh Howey
Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3) by Heather Fawcett
Feuds (Tales of Valdemar #18) edited by Mercedes Lackey
The Four Queens of Crime by Rosanne Limoncelli
Ghosts of Panama by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll
Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher
Holmes is Missing (Holmes, Margaret & Poe #2) by James Patterson and Brian Sitts
How to Summon a Fairy Godmother (Fairies and Familiars #1) by Laura J. Mayo
I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com (Cosmic Chaos #1) by Kimberly Lemming
Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives by Tim Major
The Legacy of Arniston House (Edinburgh Nights #4) by T.L. Huchu
The Rainfall Market by You Yeong-Gwang, translated by Slin Jung
A Scandalous Affair (Daughter of Sherlock Holmes #8) by Leonard Goldberg
The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
Canines & Cocktails (Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries #4) by Kevin Hearne, Delilah S. Dawson, Chuck Wendig
Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni, translated by Paul Olchváry
Junkyard Roadhouse (Junkyard Cats #4) by Faith Hunter (ebook and audiobook)
Mr. & Mrs. Norcross (Norcross Security #9.5) by Anna Hackett
A Wounded Bird Sings (House of Croft #0.5) by Sophie Barnes

If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

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