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This is a Good Book Thursday: The Thrill of Preordering

I just got an e-mail from Amazon saying that my pre-order of the next Aaronovitch would be dropping in a couple of weeks. It’s like Christmas. The Rivers of London series has been going awhile, and it’s been getting harder to connect–I think Peter is just too powerful now, plus he’s the father of twins so he’s really settling down–but even lesser Aaronovitch is better than most writers’ best, so I’m sticking with him. Now all I need is a new Murderbot to look forward to. So instead, I’m reading old Nero Wolfe novellas. And the book we’re writing, of course.

What book thrilled you this week?

143 Responses

    1. When people talk about literary masterpieces this book is one that comes to mind. It is splendid. It remains one of the saddest I’ve read – so understated and so much desperation. All those suppressed emotions and the wasted opportunities. I remember occasionally tearing up for months after reading it whenever I thought of it.
      I still feel the impact of that book, years later.

      1. Agreed. I watched the movie way back in the day, and this is the first time I’ve read the book. Ishiguro is quickly becoming one of my all-time favourite authors.

        1. I saw the movie too and thought Anthony Hopkins did such an excellent job of conveying the desperation of the book. Again, I cried ugly. (And wondered afterwards why I had put myself through that AGAIN when I’d read the book and knew exactly what was coming!)

      2. So true.
        I remember that I bith loved the beauty of the writing and didn’t like the sadness ox the story.
        Reminded me a lot of Il Deserto dei Tartari.
        Wasted lives.
        I won’rmt say that I lived to the fullest but I didn’t serve and didn’t miss out on a partner and a family. Out of loyalty to whom???

          1. A translation of which book?
            I take it you mean Il Deserto?
            I’ve read it in Italian and maybe also in German (a looong time ago). Sadly, I can’t recommend a good translated version in English.

        2. Yes, same theme. I read Il Deserto die Tartari (In English I seem to remember it was called The Tartar Steppe) when I was much younger and remember getting to the end and asking myself why I had read it all the way through. 🙂 This time I definitely did NOT watch the movie version!

    2. I’ve not seen the film, but I remember very sharply the pain of the “doh” moments when he congratulates himself yet again for a “good” decision (which seemed to me to be the wrong decision, each and every time).

      Beautiful, simple, and ouch

  3. I’m also really looking forward the the next Rivers of London too. Much of it is going to be set in Scotland (Aberdeen) which I know quite well. It seems the whole cast of characters goes on holiday which could be fun and changes it up a bit.

    1. I got an ARC and I can tell you that it all takes place in Scotland, with the story alternating between Peter and Abigail.

  4. New author for me this week. I really enjoyed ‘The Oak and the Ash’ by Annick Trent. This is a historical MM, set in 1790s England. There is lots of politics and an interesting sub plot on the development of meteorology (and scientific research at the time). The MCs are likeable and well drawn, one is a valet to an earl, the other a surgeon. The plot centres around a duel fought by the earl with the surgeon called in to treat the wounds. Nicely plotted, low key writing style and well researched. Low smut. Part of a series (‘Old Bridge Inn’), so I’ll be reading the others.

    Liking the author’s style, I checked out her other series (Mont Blanc) which is a contemporary MM series of novellas with the MC a crime scene/forensic investigator, the other MC is in private security. Set in France on the Swiss border close to Geneva, the focus is on the developing relationship and, while there are investigations in each, the books are not ‘crime fiction’ as the investigation is in the background. Again, lovely writing and very nice setting with good character depth, I really enjoyed them. Three in the series (Off Trail, Cut Loose, Free Climb, by Annick Trent) and I just went from one to the next (also very good value!).

    Also read my book club book ‘Swimming Home’ Deborah Levy. Very much in the lit fic mould, nicely written and I like that I had no idea where the book was going or how it would end, but characters were not very believable. Interesting read though. Short too.

    1. I have put all these at the top of my TBR pile — Annick Trent sounds like just what I need right now.

    2. Yay, I’ve got Oak in my kindle library but totally forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me!!
      I do remember that I got it because KJ Charles had recommended it…

    3. I was sure I’d read that intro to the Oak and the Ash before, but it’s not on my Kindle, so maybe I’m wrong. It sounds good, and I’ve bought it. Thanks, frozen pond.

  5. Best thing I read this week was a novella “The Black God’s Drums” by P. Djèlí Clark (2018), a fantasy alternate history I wish Clark would re-visit – slaves and gaspunk, airships, gods and Mardi Gras, Haitians and Kalifornians and New Orleans as a Free City. Something grand in the tone and left me wanting more.

    Equally good was “A Sorceress Comes to Call” by T Kingfisher (2024) – a tale of a girl under the control of an evil mother, and an older lady worried about her brother’s new beloved. So nice seeing some a protagonist in her 50s, complete with family and friends and a love story. Quite dark but made me laugh at the end too.

    “The Right Swipe” by Alisha Rai (2019) is an m/f contemporary, where the FMC’s one night stand turns out to be working for a rival business. Enjoyable, the MCs were cute together, and it dealt with some serious issues along the way including sexual harassment and concussion related trauma. The FMC was the sister from “Hate to Love You”, which I enjoyed a few years ago.

    And back to reading shorts, best of the week was the rather sweet “The Ones Left Behind” by KJ Chien (2025). Free at https://grist.org/climate-fiction/imagine2200-the-ones-left-behind/

    1. Oops, should be “a protagonist” – not sure how I left the “some” in there. I swear I proofread these things!

      Also forgot to mentioned I watched “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” on Tammy’s recc a few weeks ago, and it was a lovely poly romance. Thank-you Tammy 🙂

    2. Thank you, Yuri. Or should I say K.J.Chien. Lovely. Just what I needed.

  6. Not much new reading this week. I’m concentrating mostly on my writing. I did pick up a book by an author new to me, Pamela Clare. Several people recommended her romantic suspense. But the first one I picked up and started reading the hero was a US senator. I set the book aside. Not in a good head space for something like that. So I picked a couple from my comfort read shelf. This manuscript is due on Monday the 16th so once that’s gone, I hope to spend a few days reading and recharging.

    1. Well, heroic US senators are pretty scarce at the moment, but we can always fantasize. I found that one of the main attractions of The West Wing in its heyday (about, obviously, Presidents, not Senators). Not that romantic suspense holds much appeal for me as a genre.

      1. Good politicians is a fantasy I think I might find re-assuring at the moment. Might dig into my re-read list.

    2. Ha! I too would have put aside anything where the hero is a US senator (or any politician for that matter.) Not much romantic about them at the moment: it would require way too much effort to suspend my disbelief!

    3. I preferred her American-set historicals, although I haven’t read any in a while.

  7. I’ve picked up several books in a row that I did not finish. They just didn’t grab me, so I stopped reading after the first or second chapter. Then I tried Wiley Cash’s This Dark Road to Mercy and the first chapter sucked me in. This is the second of his books that I’ve tried, and they both grabbed me right away. So I’m sure I’ll be reading the rest of his books and watching for his new ones.

    1. This sounds like something I must try! I’ve just ordered This Dark Road to Mercy from the library.

  8. I am taking a break from Penric and Desdemona to listen to Incandescent by Emily Tesh, recommended by Tammy. Mira’s book was lots of fun, although I am a little let down by the tidy resolution for the orphans in the next book, who had no messy emotions about being sent to boarding school and somewhat abandoned by the adults in their life. Again. But I am sensitive on the subject of orphans and adoptions. Still, I am looking forward to the next installment. Oddly enough I have to bump back and fourth between several libraries to get them all. Why would you have book one and three of a series, but not two and four, etc?

    I am enjoying Incandescent, although again I am a bit annoyed with the protagonist for not seeing the twist coming. That is probably not fair. The author is trying to give enough clues to not make it a gotcha, but it’s like when a character has a very important dream and then forgets it, but the reader has perfect recall of all the ominous foreshadowing. I do think it is funny that I keep reading stories that feature two beings in one body. What is my subconscious or the universe trying to tell me?

    1. I’m also on the two beings in one body pathway since I’m listening to my first Penric novella. But my unconscious mind is just saying to me read what Lupe reads.

  9. •Agatha Christie,  The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928.  Audiobook read by John Moffatt.  As I earlier noted, the novel has a very slow (and melodramatic and clichéd) start, which I partly skipped.  At the very end, there are some references to  the events of the start, but I am not sure that anything appears that was not also mentioned later.  If there was, the author would have done better to move the reference to a point after the real action begins.  However, Christie had been successfully writing for years by 1928, so I presume the novel did fit the tastes and tolerances of its day.  Anyway, the plot gets going when, or shortly before, a murder happens on the Blue Train, a luxury train running between Calais and the Riviera.  Hercule Poirot eventually solves the case in his usual fashion. 

    **SPOILER WARNING (if a novel nearly a century old can have one).**  Here Christie repeats something of her famous stunt in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).  Again the murderer proves to be someone whom the reader has discounted by novelistic convention rather than because of the revealed clues.  It looks like we have a romance subplot, where the relatively unmoneyed but worthy war hero wins out over the widowed, adulterous scoundrel who married his late wife for money and possibly murdered her.  In a normal mystery novel, the war hero’s winning the heiress would have been part of the happy ending.  Christie’s reversal, although ingenious, did not strike me as psychologically plausible.  Real-world embezzlers, con men, and spies have sometimes been that good at playing a long-term role, and at winning the approval of people who are normally good judges of character.  I find this harder to believe of a jewel thief responsible for multiple murders and managing multiple accomplices, and who is also famous in criminal circles under a flamboyant secret identity.  Moreover, his modus operandi with both a millionaire employer and the heiress also depends on his seeming to be self-effacing and letting the other person make the first move.  I can’t believe that this would work within a short time often enough to be effective. **END SPOILERS.**

    Anyway, an entertaining novel once it got going, although with many stereotyped secondary characters, and burdened with perhaps a hint of antisemitism. I think the puzzle is nearly fair-play, although the author withholds a few facts known to Poirot. The reading by Moffatt is good but not outstanding. 

    More to come when proofread.

  10. I have pre-ordered the new Josh Lanyon “Kill Your Darlings” that is coming out on June 27th and I agree, it really did indeed feel like Christmas!

    Otherwise, I continued in the reading doldrums this week, bouncing off a few recommended sci-fi books. I hope I won’t be run out of the Argh community if I admit that I have concluded this might not be the genre for me. Clearly I lack imagination.

    What surprised me more was that after getting half way through I have put aside KJ Charles “Copper Script”. It started out well but at about the 40% mark the anachronistic language started to get to me and I still didn’t care about the MCs. I’ve NEVER before put down a KJ Charles, so it is obviously me.

    To “reset” I reread some Heyer (Frederica and The Grand Sophy.)

    And now I am rereading The Same Old Streets on Ao3 — hockey story about 6 friends who find themselves back together again after having gone their separate ways after school. This one has my full attention even though it is a reread. The author — “Thesameoldstreets” i.e. Catherine Cloud – manages to pack a lot of emotion into few words.

    1. Yay to a new Josh Lanyon!

      I like sci-fi, but I am very very picky about it. Actually I think that I am very picky about most genres anymore. Except for Westerns. Those I don’t even try to read. I read one Zane Grey once and that was enough.

      I am showing up for the characters and am much less interested in plot, as a reader and I feel like some genres lend themselves better to one style of writing over the other. Fantasy is my first love, but it can get way to plot-y and I hardly ever pick up a true High Fantasy anymore. There are exceptions like Sherwood Smith and Patricia McKillip. I also hardly ever read male authors. Again, too much plot, not enough of how people feel about it…

      2. Heh, I did a back-of-the envelope calc a few years ago and realized I wasn’t really reading any male authors any more, other than Alexis Hall. Adrian Tchaikovsky, TJ Klune, John Scalzi and a few others have entered my tbr now, so I suspect it would (somewhat) more even if I re-did it. Its an interesting exercise – also prompted me to try and read more diversely.

      3. I started thinking I liked westerns after reading Louis La’amour. Nope, turns out I only like his.

        If you ever want to dip a toe into his (huge) world I suggest “Cherokee Trail” which has some good female characters, or our favorite “Reilly’s Luck”. He has some more straight up westerns but these are just good stories set in the historical west

    2. Did you try Cordelia’s Honor, Christina? Because that is more character than sci fi and/or plot.

      1. Believe it or not Cordelia’s Honor does not seem to be available on Kindle or in audiobook format! The library doesn’t have it either in hardback or paperback. Wonder what’s up with that…
        Does it make sense to start with the second in the series? ( And btw, is that “Warrior’s Apprentice” or “Shards of Honor”?)

        1. No do not start with the second one. Shards of Honor is actually the first novella that combined with Barrayer make up Cordelia’s Honor. So you could read Shards first.

        3. Christina, I’ve read thf Vorkosigan books almost completely out of order. And loved them to bits anyway.
          But as the others said, don’t read the second first. It’s easier to start with Warrior’s Apprentice if Shards of Honor and Barrayar should not be available.
          I’s recommended the books to my kid’s host mom and was surprised that they are out of print. According to a lovely book shop clerk in Maple Ridge who even tried to find me a second hand one.
          It’s bern far easier to find one here via my usual sources.

          1. Dodo, I doubt if they’re really out of print, although some may be out of physical print. As I noted here some time ago, Bujpld seems to have taken back the rights on some books and they’re now published at least as ebooks by Spectrum Literary Agency. I of course can’t speak with certainty about what is available in either Canada or Germany. Bujold is so popular that I can’t believe it’s hard to find print editions of practically everything of hers (except some recent Penric stories) as used books over the internet.

          2. Patrick, I had needed a physical book and was told those are out of print.
            Ebooks were no option. But I found a great edition, second hand but in mint condition.
            Bujold, afaik, never took of in germany to the same degree. About 20 years ago, a big paperbsck publisher tried s re-issue but SciFi is not easy to sell it seems.

          3. Agree, I think Bujold wrote each book to stand alone – although I think knowing the characters really helps for some books.

            I think maybe “Komar” would work as an entry point, followed by “A Civil Campaign”. Or “Cetaganda” as a stand-alone.

        4. Back in the day (when they were first published… in the 80s!) I started with The Warrior apprentice but read Shards of Honor right after, even though chronologically, Shards happens after.
          What’s amazing is that these books are still as good to read now as they were then. Not dated at all.
          I’d say read Shards first and then Barrayar.

          1. I meant chronologically Shards happens before.

            It is the first book in the Vorkosigan saga.

            Falling free happens before in the same universe but is a completely separate book in a different corner of that universe.

          2. LN and Christina, However, the gene-engineered quaddies from Falling Free do later show up in the later Vorkosigan books, as does the EvilCorp involved there, and possibly some other details, so one ideally should read it at some point early on. It wouldn’t hurt to start with it. I think the novel’s quality is as good as anything in the early series books. (I don’t think Bujold hit her best until Memory and later books, but opinions differ.)

    3. Good news that there is a new Josh Lanyon, though I haven’t read ‘Ghosted’ the most recent I think, but I was considering it this morning.

    4. Christina, Copper Script is high on my tbr pile. Everything to do with scripts/writing is my cat nip. I only need some headspace to start reading.
      I know the feeling of dnf Charles’ books- got stuck in two of Charles’ books lately (Dule of Hatard snd the first of the Marsh duology – maybe because of the narration).

      1. I’ll go back to Copper Script. I blame my inability to focus on the Florida Panthers! 😃

        1. I’m a nervous wreck with these playoffs. I böame my inability to read good books this week on the bl***dy Panghers, too. It’s really awful ghat one of the most fun players got traded there to wreck gavoc on my (SCF) fav team…

    5. Christina, I didn’t notice any anachronisms in Copper Script, which is just as well, because they annoy me and I was really enjoying the book!

  11. I am still reading Celia Lake. A new trilogy to me set in Victorian times. The first one is Enchanted net. I don’t think she has got the upper class linguo quite right but I can let that go because I love all the magic details she weaves into her stories and her characters are always interesting.

  12. I began listening to Penric and Desdemona since Lupe mentioned the series. I think I need to begin with book one not book 4. Hoopla didn’t have books 1-3 available. I do like two minds in one body. I am having trouble with the many new world “things “.

    Jointly listening to David Baldacci’s End game Will Robie and Jessica Riel series. I enjoy his ability to make one eager to know what comes next. His fight scenes are very accurate in weaponry but sometimes I just laugh because the main characters have some over the top (in my limited knowledge) weapons. Still it’s a good ride.

    Found another Kelsey Hoss romance series, Hello. It was more predictable than the previous but I enjoyed the curvy mom of three interesting children. Her books are graphic on sex. Sometimes too much time is spent on it, but i like her FMCs they are three dimensional and smart.

  13. I have been reading books, but dropping them after only a couple or chapters, for one reason or another. However, I’m listening to Leaving Everything Most Loved, #10 in Jacqueline Windspear’s Massie Dobbs series. I’ve listened to #1-9 in that series, and she’s still writing great stories.

  14. •Jim C. Hines, Terminal Peace, 2022.  Audiobook read by Rebecca Mitchell.  Volume 3 of Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse.  This series has been mentioned often enough here already that I won’t do a description.  This, the concluding volume, moves well and is exciting and humorous.  Hines’s resolution of the plot conflict is ingenious.  It looked for a while as if the author was going for a bittersweet ending, but I refused to believe it, and in the end he does pull off a happy one.  The audio reading is pretty well done. I thought that I had already read the second volume of the Janitors series, soon after it was published in 2019.  From occasional references here, it became clear that I hadn’t.  Despite that, I had no problem in following the plot here.  What is more, I still have another book in the series to look forward to!

    •Camille Minichino, The Hydrogen Murder, 1997.  First in the Periodic Table series. 

    I stumbled upon this novel while looking for something else.  Physicist Gloria Lamerino has taken early retirement at age 55 and has returned from California to her home town of Revere, Massachusetts—where she has not lived since leaving for grad school and, after her parents’ deaths, has not often even visited.  She did keep in touch with some of her contemporaries, both remotely and by hosting their California visits.  Gloria can live well enough on her pension, but she takes on various minor jobs to keep her hand in, one of which is an as-needed consultancy with the Revere Police Department.  This unusual arrangement is in a sense legitimate, since in the science-rich Boston area, many crimes will have a scientific angle, but the arrangement was helped along by personal connections.  The huge amount of local color that we get on Revere is one of the attractions of the series.  The present case concerns a murder in a lab attempting to produce metallic hydrogen. (At the time, the quest for metallic hydrogen was a big deal, because some theories predicted that, although it would take extreme conditions to form a metallic state of the element, once formed, it might remain solid at room temperature and serve as a superconductor.  Alas, the room-temperature prediction now seems untrue.)  Multiple complications ensue, both in solving the case and in Gloria’s attraction to the lead detective, a widower.  I found the main clue a bit frustrating.  I correctly guessed in general what it signified, but could not offhand find out enough information online about the relevant, and now-obsolete, 1997 technology in order to deduce who the guilty party was.  The murderer also goes to some lengths to destroy a clue that they should have realized was easily replaceable.  All in all, I thought that the mystery was not quite fair-play, that the plot was a bit iffy, and that the characterization was adequate but not hugely better than that.  I did like both the local color and the science connection, and I am now working on the next book in the series.  Mildly recommended.

    One review more coming eventually.

    1. If you like Hines, he has a new book out, Kitemaster. It’s got a young woman as a protagonist, so I’m not sure if they’re marketing it as adult or not, but I read it and loved it. Some of the most original worldbuilding I’ve ever seen.

  15. I listened to the first in Ginn Hale’s Lord of the White Hell: Book One – two young men in an Academy, lightly steampunk fantasy. It was okay. I love Ginn Hale and I’m going to listen to the second one but I’m not rushing to it, if you catch my drift.

    Chacha1 recommended In Perfect Time by KL Noone, a novella that was sweet.

    I also read Love in Tuscany, mentioned by Dodo last week, which is a series of three novellas all connected by the same wedding in Tuscany, two of them written by hockey authors. Oddly, one of my favourite writers, Hannah Henry, didn’t have the strongest offering; rather that was by JJ Mulder who is strictly tier three in the MM hockey book taxonomy. Anyway, I also wanted more connection among the three stories, not just the bride/groom and wedding. More Easter eggs, please.

    Mostly I re-read the Starian series by Iris Foxglove AGAIN. Sigh. Clearly, I lack imagination. And I re-read Bujold’s Memory and A Civil Campaign. Am re-reading that series in no particular order.

      1. The first five are great, although #1, 4 and 5 are my favourites. Then #6 is lacklustre, so is 7 – but 8 and 9 are good.

    2. Tammy, I agree with you on Love in Tuscsny. It’s a missed opportunity not to have made the three stories more interwoven. And include the wedding couple.
      I’m still not finished with the third novella…

  16. No thrills, but enjoying rereads. I reread Dorothy Gilman’s Incident at Badamya. You’d think, after reading this at least four times, I would remember the characters, but aside from the MC’s, I don’t. There are many characters with weird names, and they are not really filled out enough to be memorable. It’s an interesting premise about people, who are strangers to each other, being held hostage by insurgents in a foreign country. How they escape is also interesting.

    I’m also rereading Nora Roberts’ series about In the Garden Nursery, and its owners and employees. The through story is about a woman who was mistress to the wealthy owner of the mansion in the 1890’s, which has passed down to the current owner, who started the nursery next door. The mistress had a child, and at birth, it was stolen by her patron and taken to the mansion to be passed off as his legal heir. The woman was told her child was a stillborn girl, but she heard it cry, and she “knew” it was a boy. She eventually goes mad, dies, and her ghost wreaks havoc in the lives of the inhabitants of the mansion.

    There is a widowed Northerner with two young boys, who is hired as the manager of the nursery, the also widowed owner and her son, who are hands-on at the nursery, and a pregnant distant relative who is taken in and hired by the owner. They all live together in the mansion for ..reasons. The ghost of the mistress is a benign presence in the children’s lives, but hates men. Eventually her interference causes the mansion owner to hire an expert to research the ghost. Each book of the trilogy is named for a flower that represents a main character. There is Blue Dahlia, the manager, Black Rose, the owner of the mansion and nursery, and Red Lily, the distant relative. The romances are slow moving, and there is also the former second husband, and a grasping maiden aunt of the mansion owner, who are the villains, besides the ghost. My favorite character is the young pregnant woman who takes a chance on the charity of a distant relative and charms everybody with her grit and awed enjoyment of her new life.

  17. •Robert Sobel, For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga, 1973. 

    On my nomination, the June choice of my local sf book club is this alternate history.  It is not in the form of a novel but of a pseudo college-level textbook of North American history (xiv + 422 pp.), complete with plentiful footnotes and a 15-page bibliography.  For all of that, I found the volume far more readable than last month’s book-club choice, Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, which I discussed here earlier. Like the published book on our timeline, the in-universe textbook is also titled For Want of a Nail (since it too recognizes the importance of the Battle of Saratoga), and it too is written by a scholar named Richard Sobel, but one with a completely different biography.  Moreover, since the bibliography and (I think) the footnotes cite nothing published before 1777, every last source in the scholarly apparatus is the author’s own invention. 

    On our timeline, Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga lent credibility to the War of Independence and opened up French aid.  In the alternate world, the book’s premise is that Henry Clinton managed to reinforce Burgoyne in the nick of time, leading to a British victory and ultimately to the defeat of the rebels. A few of the worst of them, such as Sam Adams and Thomas Jefferson, are executed. George Washington is imprisoned for life in England. Most of the former rebels instead suffer the uncomfortable fate of the Loyalists on our timeline, except that the erstwhile rebels have no relatively welcoming English-speaking territory to emigrate to, analogous to British North America or Britain itself. 

    Many stick it out where they are, but from 1780, many former rebels trek to that province of Spanish New Spain already known as Texas (a name that, oddly, Sobel never uses).  Some Northerners number among the trekkers, including Alexander Hamilton and Benedict Arnold (the latter on this timeline did not turn traitor to the Independence cause). Most, however, are from the Southern colonies, by reason of distance and of Texas’s hot climate, and many are slaveholders bringing their slaves along.

    Spanish Texas is lightly populated, so that the immigrants are able to muscle in, merely passing through settled areas and ending up possibly somewhere around our timeline’s Dallas, where they found a town named Jefferson City, with their prospective territory to be named Jefferson. Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin on schedule in 1793, and the suitability of Jefferson for cotton cultivation immediately becomes clear, greatly increasing the rate of immigration.  Local Spanish colonial officials view all this with alarm, but, as on our timeline, Spain is in a period of political near-paralysis, and the king fails to act.  Jefferson is de facto independent, but landlocked by Spanish territory.  Only after Mexico becomes independent of Spain are matters resolved.  Jefferson first intervenes in a Mexican civil war to place its candidate in the presidency, and later intervenes again to take over the country, in about 1821.  (As much like white-imperialist fantasy as this may sound, it is not totally implausible.  Consider the result in 1847 on our timeline of the US-Mexican War, when, after Mexico’s defeat, some Americans called for the annexation of the whole country.)

    As reorganized by Andrew Jackson in the 1820s,  Mexico unites with Jefferson to become the United States of Mexico, a single nation, with the Jeffersonians de facto on top, but with the traditional, mostly-white Mexican ruling class only slightly lower and with a fluid boundary between them.  Below these two are various lower social strata.  (One can think of various analogies to this stratified social system in our own timeline’s history.)  The USM is in theory bilingual,  but English evidently quickly becomes the prestige language,  since Sobel’s citations include almost no works in Spanish. 

    From there, events diverge radically from our timeline. The lofty ideals of the original rebels, already compromised by the trekkers’ acceptance of slavery, have a sorry time of it in the USM.  East of the Rockies, the British colonies, including those north of our timeline’s US border, evolve into the Confederation of North America, with a governmental system somewhat like our Canada’s.  West of the Rockies, the USM expands to incorporate everything on the West Coast from Baja California northward, including our timeline’s British Columbia, Russian Alaska, and evidently our Yukon, plus overseas territories including Hawaii and at times even parts of Siberia.  Thus, in 1972, the North American continent lies in an uneasy standoff between the CNA and the USM.

    Since the textbook is limited to North American history, we learn less about events overseas.  The French Revolution never happens, presumably because of the absence of a successful US example and because Royal France did not bankrupt itself financing the American Revolution and the related European war.  The Germanies form a loose confederation in about 1815, and by the 1880s this has coalesced into a great power.  World War I never happens, but a horrific conflict even worse than World War II does occur from 1939 to 1948.  Atomic weapons are not invented until 1962, and it is not clear that anyone has thermonuclear ones by the history’s close in 1972.

    Sobel’s work is something of a classic in very restricted circles.  I am tolerably certain that some well known writers of alternate-history novels have been inspired by it, and there are multiple web pages devoted to it on the internet, but it is unavailable in e-print and its latest reprinting seems to be the softcover edition of 2002.  (It is fairly cheap as a used book over the internet.) I am writing this in advance of the book club meeting,  so I don’t yet know how well it will be received there.  For my part, I think I might have preferred an alternate world history, or one that went into greater, and more plausible, depth on the history and sociology of the USM, but Sobel’s book is still a notable achievement of the disciplined imagination, and one that I enjoyed.

  18. I just finished a new book by Tamara Berry, Murder Runs in the Family. Humorous mystery, with a fun protagonist, great side characters, and an elderly tortoise. Highly recommended if you enjoy this type of thing (which obviously, I do).

  19. I enjoyed Dead in the Frame by Stephen Spotswood (the fourth Parker & Pentecost mystery) and The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older (the third Mossa and Pleiti SF mystery novella.)

    I think I was traveling when I read The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar and never mentioned it here? It’s a gorgeous, layered mythopoeic fantasy novella that feels like it builds on (and stepped out of) a traditional murder ballad. I love El-Mohtar’s writing, but be aware that it has an intricate, literary fairytale feel — it’s a book I read slowly, not a book I could gulp down. If you enjoyed Catherynne Valente’s Orphan’s Tales, you’ll probably enjoy this too.

  20. I listened to Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts. Sloan Cooper is a cop who is shot on her way home from work and has to move in to her parents” house to recover and is offered a job with the local police force. People are going missing in the town. We’re given the POV of the killers which made it too dark for me. But after Mind Games and Bonded in Death, this is Nora at her best.

  21. Finishing up The Women, by Kristin Hannah. It’s intense, and a little flawed, but I was hanging unthere until she said Richard Nixon called in the National Guard at Kent State. No, that was Gov. Rhodes.

    A tiny error, and one that probably only an Ohioan of a certain age would even notice, but now I’m struggling to re-suspend my disbelief.

  22. Getting the return of kiddo #2 sorted took too much head space. So I just read samples and some Eargasm books that were free and mainly meant to hook one to the backlog of an author. Fair enough!
    Sadly, it didn’t work.
    Making him mine by Saxon James is the usual *hitting the sheets* novella without enough backstory. But nicely narrated and fine as distraction while doing chores.
    Breakthrough by Ana Ashley is the second and last one I tried. Nice enough story but it shows that the author is Portuguese-British while her MCs live in the US. And I can’t stand it when babies/kids are props. I remember quite well how busy life was with one small kid – juggling a job, a second job, studying for a GED and volunteering at a soup kitchen, plus the romantic bit?? The toddler is always well behaved, but gets handed over a lot to the very conveniently available elderly neighbour. The author doesn’t mention having kids if her own and very often, this shows in books with kids.

    And since I seem to have a masochistic streak – who knew – I’m halfway through Portia Blake’s rule #5 Crush on your Captain.
    If I follow Tammy’s tier system, just from the first half would be tier ground floor of a high rise.
    There’re so many good books but somehow deciding which potentially good one to tackle is too much for me right now.

    Ah, and apart from that I’m reading “Ace” – non-fiction, havd started Etoile (hubby wants to continue lol, I guess he likes feisty Cheyenne), have fast-forward-watched Dept. Q and will wait for more Murderbot episodes to binge. Their cliffhanger m.o. is cruel!

  23. VARIATION ON A THEME is up to chapter 68.

    I finished half of season 3 of HOUSE.

    I finished rereading Bjorn Hasseler’s NESS series.

    Brenda Margriet’s SUSPECT ATTRACTION is still open in my Kindle Ap.

    There was some other stuff in there. Mostly, rereading favorite chapters or scenes from books, not the whole book.

  24. Speaking of pre-orders, I just pre-ordered Rocky Start, Very Nice Funerals, and Honey Pot Plot from Audible. They will come out on June 24th!

    The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold by Ally Carter— the second book of Blonde Identity—is also available for pre-order. It will come out on August 5. Fun fact: Ally Carter is a nom de plume and she chose the last name Carter so her books would be shelved close to a writer she admires—Jennifer Crusie! This is according to her Wikipedia page. Awwww!

  25. I was excited when Jayne Ann Krentz had a book drop next week and were driving to a wedding. My husband was happy for an excuse to drive his Challenger, (color Hell Rasin
    )So I had at least 5 hours on there and 5 hours back. I drove to Barnes and Noble on Thursday at 8;30 to pick it up. I was psyched. It took me 4 days to read a 300 page book. Roxie the dust bunny went everywhere with her. kitchens, weddings and the heroine said it was okay because Roxie was an emotional support bunny. Roxie would get out steal food, scare people and it was “cute”. I have dogs. I would not bring them to a buffet. This made me crazy.

        1. Yes it was It takes a Pyschic. I have read all of her books. Jayne Ann Krentz, Amanda Quick, Jayne Castle even Stephanie James. The comic relief of the the dust bunny was just too much. Something about this book just bugged me.

    2. Hmmm, I might have a hard time with finding that cute… I’ll probably give it a shot anyway. I stick with reading JAK through the library.

    3. I loved It Takes A Psychic. And I loved Roxy. The dust bunnies are known for that kind of behavior. And the emotional support dust bunny thing made me laugh. I have an Aunt who is so aggravated by people bringing their pets places as emotional support.

      1. Before I outgrew my allergies to animal hair, it always drove me crazy. I get to have breathing problems and have my eye swell shut so that someone who does not have PTSD doesn’t have to leave their pet at home?

    4. Mark Twain also advised against bringing a dog to a funeral which seems reasonable to me. But I bet some do.

  26. Just finished ‘Reaper Man’ a DEATH Discworld novel. It’s one of those I’ll need to read again as there is lots going on.

    1. That is 1) one of my favorite Pratchetts, and also 2) the first one I read and 3) one of the ones I most recommend to others – excellent choice!

  27. I read Kitemaster by Jim C. Hines. I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a lot different from his other work. The main character is a 21 year old widow who is a Wisp, (short for wind whisperer), who on the one year anniversary of her husband’s death suddenly evolves into a Kitemaster, which is like a wind whisperer with superpowers. And suddenly lots of people from outside their tiny fishing village want her new powers.

    I also read It takes a Psychic by Jayne Castle, which was fun. The main character is the sister from People in Glass Houses. I feel I would have gotten more out of it if I had gone back and reread People in Glass Houses first.

    I read Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood. It wasn’t bad, but I found it unconvincing somehow. Senior in college gets helped out by her much older brother’s business partner and she falls in love as they talk on the phone repeatedly over the next couple of years but he gets squeamish because he’s 15 years older than her, so he dumped her. Now they are at her brother’s destination wedding.

    I also read Kate Johnson’s loosely connected three paranormal romances Hex Appeal, Hex and the City and Hex and Hexability. The FMC are all witches. The first one is set in rural Essex and is kind of confusing. I liked it the least of the three but well enough to try the next one. Which set in London, where terribly disorganized and borderline inept witch Poppy runs into a popular stage magician who buys a pendant that she accidentally cursed. And then things get strange. And the third is actually a Regency romance, where the main character is the daughter of an earl oppressed by her status obsessed sister-in-law, who discovers she too is a witch.

    2. I liked some of the banter in Problematic Summer Romance, but, like you, Gary, had mixed feelings about the book in general. I think it was because the “age problem” was made a much bigger deal than it really was, and the reasons the romance was theoretically problematic weren’t the right ones. Also, spoiler alert, the problem just suddenly went away in the end, which didn’t ring true. I’ll be interested to hear what the rest of Argh thinks.

      1. I quite enjoyed it. Not as well written as Deep End, but that was also a more serious book.

      2. I read Problematic Summer Romance this week too. Although I liked it, I thought it didn’t have as much heart as some of her other books.

        1. I think part of the problem is that the MMC had been trying to avoid his attraction to the FMC for several books and it didn’t go into what exactly(besides sexual attraction) finally changed his mind. And his former fiancee and her husband are still in the group and expecting a baby, but the possible undercurrents with that are also somewhat glossed over.

  28. I’m still enjoying my reread of Courtney Milan’s The Brothers Sinister. Currently on The Countess Conspiracy. Also just started listening to Postwar by David Runciman on BBC Sounds / Radio 4. Really interesting (though probably mainly for Brits).

  29. Question: Was Joan Hess one of those authors who, after a certain point, froze her series in time? I’m reading Murder as a Second Language (pretty late in the Claire Malloy series, but what I could find quickly). It was published in 2013, but the technology seems older than that. In particular, Claire says that she learned how to google only two years previously, and here she goes to the library to do it. Despite a well-heeled husband and a teenage daughter at home, evidently she doesn’t have home internet, much less a smart phone. So far I’ve seen nothing else to date it one way or the other, and it could be happening in the 1990s. As best I recall, amateur sleuths by Donna Anderson and Faye Kellerman were routinely using smart phones by the 2010s.

    1. Some pages later, it looks like Clare does have home internet but the only connection seems to be in her daughter Caron’s room. (Daughter goes upstairs to check something and comes back down to report info she learned on “something Caron called Facebook.”) And there is a reference to Homeland Security. I now think it’s supposed to be contemporary-set (circa 2013), but that Clare is portrayed as a huge technophobe.

  30. I stumbled on to Tanya Huff’s complete SMOKE series a few weeks ago. SMOKE AND SHADOWS, SMOKE AND MIRRORS, and SMOKE AND ASHES were released in 2004, 2005, and 2006, respectively. But somehow I missed this continuation of her vampire series featuring Vicki Nelson and Henry Fitzroy. As a result, I had a couple of very happy reading weeks–and a nice follow-up to her recent cozy horror, DIRECT DESCENDANT. Now I’m working my way through Nicholas Costa’s ATLANTIS, THE AMAZONS, AND THE BIRTH OF ATHENE, a nonfiction correlating and cross-referencing Egyptian and Hittite records, archaeology (not enough, IMO), and the Greek myths, for the Medusa story I’ve been working on for awhile. Lots of good, supportable info and conclusions. But day-um, for a journalist, he sure doesn’t know how to bring it all together. The lede isn’t just buried, it’s non-existant. And despite creating an entirely new way of examining what’s happening in the Aegean from 1800-1200 BC, he doesn’t even attempt to assemble his findings–which do hang together if you’re taking notes–into a cohesive narrative. I feel like I need to send him a CARE package of MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL and THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY.

    1. Jean Marie, I stumbled across those a while ago (I also somehow missed them when I read the first series, which I came to because of the all-too-brief TV series based on it), but haven’t read them yet because I figured I’d have to start from the very beginning. Do they work on their own?

      1. The Smoke trilogy can definitely be read as individual books or as a stand alone trilogy. In fact, I think I like this series better than the original series with Vicki Nelson.

  31. Mary Lancaster’s Escape of the Scoundrel was #1 in the author’s new series. It was a charming little historical f/m romance. Not too great, but not too shabby either.
    Mary Lancaster’s Escape of the Bridegroom was #2 in the series and a darn good yarn. I liked it better than #1. The trope was familiar – a poor British aristocrat marries a rich merchant’s daughter for her money – but the narrative flowed, and the characters were realistic and sympathetic. Overall, it was a quick and satisfying story, although maybe a little too short.
    Then I re-read Frederica by Georgette Heyer – such a treat!

  32. I read the new KJ Charles, Copper Script, and loved it. Great characters and very high stakes in early twentieth century London.

    Followed that up with James by Percival Everett, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn. A brilliant and hard-hitting story.

    Now I’m reading The Sign for Home by Blair Fell, which I kind of stumbled over but am loving. It’s the story of Arlo, a 23-year-old deaf blind man who has been raised by very strict Jehovah’s Witnesses, and his new interpreter Cyril, a middle-aged atheist. We get the story from both their points of view, as Cyril starts enlarging Arlo’s world.

  33. I’m in the middle of After the Armistice Ball, the first Dandy Gilver mystery by Catriona McPherson. Complex and interesting — I like her voice.

    Last week, did I mention The Body in the Bag by T.S. Robey? An entertaining cozy that I hope will be the beginning of a series. The author deals with characters and their emotions with a light touch — very enjoyable.

    Also, last week I forgot to mention reading Masque of Deceptions by Stella Riley. As always with her books, a good read.

    1. I thought After the Armistice Ball started out strong, but I ended up skipping to the end at some point just to get it over with. I’ll be curious to hear how you liked it!

  34. I was all about the audiobooks this week. I finished up my relisten of the Rivers of London series in preparation for the July release of the new novel and then listened to Tomb of Dragons, the final book of Katherine Addison’s Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy (the follow-on series to the Goblin Emperor). I was very sad to have it end. It’s been a while since I felt that way about a book. I think I may start again from the Goblin Emperor.

    It’s also Thursday, so the newest Murderbot episode will drop this evening. I’ve been rewatching the previous episode every Thursday and then going straight into the newest one. I’ve really been enjoying the show. It’s fun to see how they’ve incorporated information from the books into TV format, trying to keep the spirit of the books but making good TV. I don’t think I’m a very visual reader, so I’m able to separate the books from the show. Just two versions of the same story. I don’t get offended by changes they made to make it suitable for TV, unlike some people online.

    1. We’re finally watching Murderbot and I’m really enjoying the actors they chose. I think I would be enjoying it more if I hadn’t read the books. The show is really good, but I LOVED the books…

  35. I just finished reading Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Dinniman which was, whoo, a whopping 800+ pages long. I am not sure how much longer Dinniman can drag this premise out, because it’s getting a skosh repetitive, but if you liked the previous books, you will like this one too. I am looking forward to a series conclusion to see how it all turns out.

    1. I was expecting book 7, This Inevitable Ruin to be the conclusion, but it’s not. I’m now hoping that book 8, whenever it comes out, will be.

      1. There are 15? floors in the dungeon so I am halfway wondering if Dinniman thinks he might be able to spin this out for 15 books…

  36. I have the upcoming Rivers of London on my wishlist but am waaaayyy too cheap to pay $17.99 for an ebook. So… someday, my sale will come.

    This week’s reading began with three by one author:

    1. ‘Gary of a Hundred Days’
    2. ‘Gary the Once and Former King’
    3. ‘Catch and Release,’ all by Isabel Murray.

    The Gary books are sweet erotic romance (lots of sex but it’s sweet?) about a young nobleman forced to take the crown who then survives multiple assassination attempts with the secret aid of his former stablemaster and future lover. The two books tell a complete story of escape, safety, recovery, oh but they’re still after me, solved. Enjoyed both, recommended.

    The third book, ‘Catch and Release,’ is unrelated and very unusual. A sample chapter in book 2 caught me. It’s a M/M human + merman love story but I hesitate to call it a romance because the conclusion is bittersweet at best: the lovers are committed, but the human can’t live in the sea and the merman can’t survive indefinitely on land. There are erotic sex scenes, some funny scenes, some frightening / upsetting scenes, and some very sad scenes. Murray takes the premise seriously, meaning all the “but how does that work, exactly?” is not handwaved or left unanswered. The merman is not human. He’s not even human-like, aside from being able to assume a human-like form on land. He doesn’t speak a human language, and while he learns a few words over time, they are, to him, simply signals. So the communication between the lovers is very poor at the beginning, and while it improves, learning more about each other only reveals that … they can’t be together in the way either of them wants. A unique and thoughtful treatment of the fantasy trope.

    4. [re-read] ‘Shattered’ by Dick Francis. I think this was the last published under his solo name, but I feel Felix in here (though his anti-police bias is absent; a constable is the hero’s love interest). It’s not one of DF’s best, for sure. The hero is a glass artist, and that setting is interesting, but the plot is contrived, the characters are mostly unoriginal, and the big actiony confrontation climax is clumsy.

    4.5 ‘Game On’ by Matt Cain, a novelette that did not live up to either of the novels by this author that I’ve read. M/M, journalist + closeted soccer player.

    5. ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell’ by Nicholas Meyer. Title refers to the Zimmermann telegram. This book is stuffed full of real people and events. Elegiac in tone, structured as Watson’s journal entries, which is a departure but with both MCs in their 60s it feels right to make it more personal. Intrigue, mortal peril, and sadness, because WWI.

    6. ‘Box 1663’ by Alex Sorel. I rounded down to 4 rather than up to 5 for this M/M WWII romance / suspenser set at the Los Alamos site during the last push to develop the atomic bomb. MC1 (POV most of the way through) is an Army photographer sent to the site to document things after original photographer dies from what we suspect was radiation poisoning. He is also tasked with escorting an English scientist heading to the site. It’s a good book and I recommend it. The reason I rounded down is the conclusion. The romance is a major part of the book – more time is spent on that than on the (equally credible) official secrets arc and its intrigue, violence, etc – but the book concludes with a brief scene of reunion and reconciliation (after two-year separation post end of project) that leaves the characters not at HEA or even HFN but more like ‘hopeful maybe.’ If you’re wondering about the title, it’s the address for MC1 at the site, and does not feature in the story at all. Anyway, if you’re looking for a solid WWII M/M and have run out of Garrick Jones, give this one a try; you might not be as WTF about the conclusion as I was.

    7. ‘Drunk on Love’ by Jasmine Guillory, F/M hookup oops story set in Napa. F is co-owner of a winery; M is a former tech bro who turns up, the morning after they spend an evening and night together (having not shared full names, etc.), as the new tasting room employee. There’s a lot of poor communication in this book – it’s kind of *about* poor communication including negative self-talk, which can be frustrating. But the twisted threads are smoothed out and one does feel the HEA is credible.

    8. ‘The T in LGBT+’ by Jamie Raines, a trans Ph.D. who’s online as JammiDodger. Five-star resource for allies as well as gender questioning people or those embarking on transition.

    1. Jamie is soooo great, I remember watching his earlier posts on youtube with my kids (elementary age back then, they’re 20 and 17 by now): it’s fascinating to follow his journey. Very reflected and insightful as a 20s psychology student, now of course more.

  37. All meh reads for me this week.

    An urban fantasy series that had potential but the main character was pretty much devoid of personality and the romantic arc was tepid at best. The MC had way more chemistry with a lot of the secondary characters than with the love interest, sadly—including the bajillion year old crusty vampire who might be slightly evil. (The Grey Gates series by Vanessa Nelson)

    I read The Searcher by Tana French and found it depressing and disturbing. Which, I think most of her books hit me that way, but I do enjoy her writing style, so I get sucked into one occasionally.

    Finally, a cozy (?) mystery? where the main character cleans up crime scenes as her business? It was kind of dated as well as gory. Not continuing with the series. (The Remains of the Dead by Wendy Roberts)

    1. A while back, there was an Australian TV series showing here on a public television channel where a married couple owned a business like the one you describe in the Roberts book (and ended up solving crimes). I only watched a few episodes and don’t remember much.

      1. It may just not be the kind of profession you can build an entertainment concept on… (I was willing to give it a try because I love it when authors take a chance on something really different, but I will admit I found the premise off putting from the beginning…)

  38. I hadn’t seen anything about the next Murderbot (understandably, since Martha Wells has a big non-Murderbot release this summer and is focused on that, as well as the tv show), but there’s a really amazing piece in New Yorker that says she just finished a new Mb, PLATFORM DECAY, although it’s not clear whether it’s a novel or novella and doesn’t indicate even an approximate release date. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/do-androids-dream-of-anything-at-all

    Some of the article is a bit dense, but make sure to read the last two paragraphs — the last line is brilliant!

    1. I was a bit put off by the writers use of the word “hippies” – I’ve seen it used quite a bit. These are highly qualified scientists who come from a polity with a functioning government and codified regulations and behavior codes to which they ascribe.

      I know some hippies, and they’re lovely people, but just because someone isn’t horrible doesn’t make them a hippy.

  39. I’m now onto ‘Fast Wonen’, and a of sudden your books went from being ‘quick reads’ to much more involved reads. See quite a change, as in how your books/writing has evolved over the years. It seemed to be about this point where your style changed. Not that this matters a great deal to me, I love both the earlier books to the very latest releases, but reading them back to back has been quite an eye opener for me. Really enjoying Bella escapades in this novel and how she, herself evolves as a woman. Just got to the part where she is sticking it to Tim. Wanted to cheer when I read that part….

  40. This week I finished “Values” by Mark Carney. He is our new prime minister so I was interested to hear what he had to say. I’m proud of finishing it: 528 pages and you can definitely tell that the man has a Ph.D. in economics. I had to make myself stick to a reading plan to finish it before it had to go back to the library. It was written in 2020 and 2021 and parts come across as naive, I guess because the world just keeps surprising us with the depths of its awfulness. The best bit was his discussion of the great recession, when he was Governor of the Bank of Canada. He then went on to be Governor of the Bank of England through Brexit. I thought he was very circumspect in discussing that time. Much of the book felt like it was aimed at a UK audience. I wonder if he had further ambitions in the UK when he wrote it. A good quarter of the book was about addressing climate change. He mentions Canada’s carbon tax as an exemplar for the world in predictable, transparent carbon pricing. Too bad he cancelled it in his first day as prime minister. He wouldn’t have won the election if he hadn’t, though.

    So I didn’t go insane with the weight of Mark Carney’s tome, I read Tanya Huff’s Direct Descendant. Like many, I enjoyed it. I couldn’t enjoy it completely because I have read too much about colonialism in Canada, and the book felt like another act of obliviousness by settler Canadians towards Indigenous peoples. The local tribe is mentioned, but their experience with the supernatural effects of that patch of their traditional territory is brushed off as irrelevant.

    I also read a mystery, Midnight at Malabar House, by Vaseem Khan. It is set in India, with murder happening in the wee hours of January 1 1949. The victim is Sir James, and he is discovered in the library of his fancy house in Bombay (with no pants on!) Sounds like an Agatha Christie, but the story is very much about India and partition. The detective, Persis, is the first woman police detective in India. She is very young, and filled with ambition and selfishness. I liked watching her gain a little wisdom through the novel. There is a hint of romance at the end. I will probably continue with the series to see how Persis develops.

    1. I was a bit uncomfortable with the colonialism in Direct Descendant, too. I liked the book overall, but it wasn’t a great read for me the way it seems to be for most people. And I really like Tanya Huff’s writing in general—been a fan for many years!

  41. A new Rivers of London book is always welcome. I read widely (and write Sci Fi for kids) so I’m often looking/reading reference books. I am hanging out for the next Murderbot book. In the meantime I am hitting my old favourites – Pratchett, Scalzi, Crusie/ Meyer… My bed book is Wild Ride at the moment. My lounge book is M D Coopers Orion war series while I wait for Lindsay Buroker to get back to Sci Fi writing after her diversion into werewolves and magic. She is a fantastic writer of quirky characters so even tho contemporary fantasy isn’t my thing I will read anything she writes… a bit like Jenny Crusie really. Just love the snark and dialogue. It’s winter down under and I just curl up with a rug and hot drink and a Cruise or Buroker book and its bliss. x

  42. Love The Rivers of London and saw Ben at a local library event a few months ago with Mark Stay. I’ve read his The Crow Folk, the first of his Witches of Woodville series. I’ve also read Widowland by C J Carey, a dystopian novel set in 1953 England with the Coronation of Edward VIII and Queen Wallis is about to take place in the presence of Adolf Hitler. Not if the widows (the lowest caste in the land) can help it.

  43. Well, I’ve decided to read Rivers of London since the library has finally gotten most of the books, so I’m listening to book 1 right now. I read it yonks ago but need a refresher.

    I finished The Rules of Royalty, which is a pretty stress-free “two princes” gay romance in which literally nobody has a problem with their gayness, which seemed unlikely to me, but both of them are second sons. It was sweet if you want a cozy.

    I also read When The Moon Hits Your Eye, which frankly seems like a book of short stories about one issue (the moon randomly turning to cheese) and it never really comes together and there were just too many new characters every few pages.

About the Author

Jennifer Crusie is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author and co-author of twenty-three novels, one book of literary criticism, miscellaneous articles, essays, novellas, and short stories, and the editor of three essay anthologies. She lives in a cottage in Pennsylvania, where she often stares at the ceiling and counts her blessings.

Find out more about Jenny’s published works by visiting JennyCrusie.com

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