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This is a Good Book Thursday: Still Behind

This week I read the first half of Stealing Nadine, mostly written by Bob.  No, Arresting Anna isn’t done.  But close.

What did you read?  Was it finished?

123 Responses

  1. I continue to DNF new books at a horrifying rate. I continue to reread Murderbot with consistent and predictable pleasure.
    I am cautiously taking bites of a book just published by someone whose blog I have enjoyed for years. It is billed as a psychological thriller, but so far it reads like comedy. When I finish it I will reveal it, because it is available on KU for those who do that.

    1. I have the or for books in in the middle of that I can’t decide if I want to finish. And started All Systems Red again. So I’m with you!

  2. I read and enjoyed ‘Every Other Weekend’ by TA Moore, an MM romance, with one MC a lawyer and the other an investigator. Both MCs well drawn, and likeable, lots interesting background characters and a good plot (warning-domestic abuse is a key part of the story) with some tough decisions for the characters. There was more depth to the MCs than is often the case, complex families and the writing was good. I hadn’t read TA Moore before I’d tried one and stopped but I will go back for more.

    Also enjoyed a really good urban fantasy ‘Strange Practice’ by Vivian Shaw A Dr Greta Helsing novel. Greta is a doctor to the non human population of London (vampires, vampyres, ghouls, fallen angels and the like). It has a complicated plot involving serial killers of human and non humans, with a really good, evocative London setting. The characters are great, and you root for them, while Greta is completely normal and at the same time not. This is part of a trilogy and I’ll be back for more. Thanks to Kelly for this rec.

    Other reading, on AO3 I went back to thesameoldstreets (Catherine Cloud) ‘the miles are just an afterthought’. It’s a reread for me, I went back to it because one of the characters is crossing into her ongoing ‘Snippets from Seattle’. It’s good, low key not angsty MM hockey, but not her best, I think.

    Other hockey fans, do you find you mix up different author worlds? I do. For example, both sameoldstreets and youcouldmakealife have stories (both on AO3 and published) set in Seattle and Hartford and other places and I keep expecting certain characters to pop up, till I remember they are in completely different worlds and written by different authors!

    Finally on audio, I have been laughing out loud a lot as I listen to ‘About a Boy’ by Nick Hornby. I read it years ago, and the film is one of my all time favourite comfort films, this week the audiobook was available in my library wishlist, so I started to listen. It is both serious and funny, my favourite combination. Would recommend if you need distractions from the world, but do note there are a lot of 1990s references, specific to England, and Will, the MC is pretty awful at times (which is funny, but not great if you want likeable MCs). Basic plot, in case you haven’t heard of it, is that Will pretends to be a single father so he can meet available single mothers.

    1. Frozen Pond, a clear yes to the expecting characters from one fictional hockey team popping up in the stories of other authors!
      Some authors like AL Heard have very fictional teams, located in places where there might have been teams at some time but certainly not now. Which makes it slightly easier not to get confused. But it’s difficult.
      Also, some authors use the real arenas names – it’s not too easy not to confuse fiction and reality in some rare cases… Whishful thinking as the league would be far more open minded if it were the case.

    2. I can have multiple books going at one time, but they can’t be the same genre. Or the same genre too closely together sometimes, or the stories do tend to layer over each other.

    3. “Every Other Weekend” has just moved up my TBR pile — I forgot it was there… TA Moore has a series in the “Two guys investigating and falling in love” category called Digging Up Bones which I really enjoyed. And the good news is that book 3 in that series is due out in June.

      As for mixing up different authors’ worlds: YES! I have had that experience more than once. Whenever Hartford comes up I have to stop and consciously remember which world I’m in.

      About a Boy is my favorite Nick Hornby. I went through a phase of reading everything Hornby wrote and enjoying almost all of them but this one stood out and frankly, is the only ones I remember in any detail. I didn’t see the movie though (not sure how I missed that!) so I am going to check it out. Thanks for remind me of this gem!

    4. I’m so glad you enjoyed Strange Practice! I know there are other Greta Helsing fans here too, but I feel like that series deserves more love. The tone has so much kindness and heart (amid the terrible things that happen.)

  3. I’m delving into re-read of “Radical Acceptance” by Dr. Tara Brach. I’ve read it before, but had trouble really absorbing it. It hyped up my emotions and anxiety, but I’m hoping this time will be smoother.

  4. This week I unearthed a relic from my TBR pile, a book first published in 1987, Knightfall by Mary Monica Pulver. If you’ve ever wanted to know about the Society for Creative Anachronism and you like mysteries, this is the book for you. It interested me because the SCA occasionally holds events at a local county park and former students of mine took part.

    The SCA is for those who want to role-play in the medieval ages as authentically as possible and who want to do so at weekend festivals where knights play war games in home-made armor, etc. At this particular Pennsic in western Ohio, a murder occurs and Peter Brichter, a detective sergeant in his “mundane” life (read Muggle here, all you JKR fans), is present as Sir Stefan von Helle and is asked to investigate by his king, William. Meanwhile, the state troopers are also called in at this Woodstock-style even with over 5,000 participants. The book is an interesting look into two worlds that exist side-by-side because the participants fully embrace their SCA identities, which frustrates and confuses the police, who only want to deal with the real/mundane world. But the crime must be worked from both angles, and only Sir Stefan is able to mesh both in order to solve it before the festival concludes.

    I’m currently back in the contemporary world reading the latest Elle Cosimano, Finlay Donovan Crosses the Line. Basically, this is Lucy and Ethel fight crime to save themselves and friends from incidents they tumble into, sort of, with the best of intentions…mostly. Some Stephanie Plum and Lula vibes but without the bounty hunter license.

    1. Knightfall, originally published as Murder at the War, is the only one of the Kori and Peter Brichter mysteries that involves the SCA (mostly), and it’s good. But the others in the series are even better.

    2. The Pulver book is in KU, back under the Murder at the War title. I’ve never belonged to SCA, but there is a lot of overlap with the sf world and I’ve long been aware of it. When I was in college, it was just starting to spread to Chicago and the Middle Kingdom was being set up. I also knew people in it after I moved East. Anyway, the book looked interesting.

      Something has to go back to KU because of the borrowing limit, and I’m afraid that I chose Forbidden Waltz, which I had just downloaded. It opens with the heroine losing ALL her money and documents because she has been so blindingly stupid as to put EVERYTHING into her reticule. I suppose she’s supposed to be young and naive, but still. Possibly I’ll give it another try later.

      1. My favorite story that involves creative anachronism by far is Peter Beagle’s Folk of the Air. Reportedly he is rewriting it or writing a sequel. I think it’s only available in tree version (why???).
        I absolutely love this book; it definitely qualifies as fantasy.

      2. I really liked The Forgotten Duke, but Forbidden Waltz I did not. Basically I wish I had stopped when you did, and not finished it. I may still read the third one though.

  5. Glad to hear from you, Jenny!

    I read Hemlock and Silver, by T, Kingfisher. The FMC is a woman whose driving force is to find cures for poisons and venoms that have no cure. There is a king and Snow White, and a dead, maybe, Queen. An alternate title could be Snow White and the Mirror Palace. This is nothing like the fairytale. It has features of the fairy tale, but not a dwarf in sight. It has some monster-things, but it’s not what I would call horror. The FMC owns a venomous snake that she keeps caged, so she can milk its venom for a preventative for drug-induced deaths. She also has a rooster to experiment on. She has bodyguards, because the king thinks people will not want his daughter cured of her wasting disease.

    The seller in AZ accepted most of the requests for repairs that we made after the inspection, so I think I will not be homeless! I will have a lot to do to make this home the way I want it. The seller has two long-haired cats and a dog, but put carpet in one bedroom!! That’s a pet hair magnet!

    The dumpster is full and ready to be hauled away. My son and DIL came over and carried stuff out to it. I had a lot of empty boxes, which I saved, just in case. Certain things sell better if they are in the original box. Moving is easier if you still have the right box to fit certain things into.

    Now I’m dealing with the loan processor. They want a copy of my most recent tax return. I just filed for an extension yesterday for 2025 taxes, so the latest one is in my file cabinet in a pod, somewhere. Geesh! I did order a transcript of last year’s taxes so I could file the 4868 Request for Extension. They need certain information for that.

    I also hired a roofer so the buyers would go on with the purchase. The insurance will just pay for it. I am eating up all the stuff in my pantry. I have most things packed. The pets are clinging to me at night. I can’t blame them.

    1. You are making so much headway! And I know it is very millennial of me, but I have a deep distaste for carpet. Area rugs, tightly woven all the way!

      1. Whereas I remember fondly the chocolate brown velvety shag carpet of my first apartment – like a giant slaughtered teddy bear. I put a pink couch on top of it because No Style.

        1. My grandmother had carpet in every room in her house, including the bathroom. Shudders. And don’t get me started on those fuzzy toilet seat covers. The bacteria!

          1. And in the kitchen, what if you drop a raw egg? Or something even likelier to reek as it decays.

          2. Lupe, I had one of those seat covers in Illinois. The winters there were brutal, and I dreaded sitting down on that freezing toilet seat.It was just my bacteria, after all.

        2. In the mornings to tear myself away from the news and calm myself from PTSD of the current administration I tune in the Mary Tyler Moore show from the seventies. That’s when I focus on the god-awful orange shag carpet of her apartment. I can’t look at anything else. So, guess what our first journey into wall-to-wall carpet was. Uh huh!

      3. As a lifelong dust and mold allergy person (67 years of shots have only toned it down some) I feel more than distaste. More like hatred. I am thrilled to see carpet receding like melting glaciers! And no rugs for me. At all.

        1. I used to put cotton rugs in my kids rooms and wash them regularly because asthma. And we got a HEPA filter vacuum.

          We still have washable and regularly washed throw rugs in the kitchen; some nice Mexican woven throw rugs elsewhere.

        2. Ditto. I purposely bought a house with wood floors, in part because I love them (and detest vacuuming) and in part because they are so much easier on my allergies.

      4. The first thing I did when getting my parents’ home ready for sale was to pull up all of the wall-to-wall carpeting. I knew there were beautiful original oak floors underneath, but they had been carpeted since I was a kid. The house looked completely different with them uncovered and refinished.

        1. The house smelled completely different when we bought my grandmother’s house and pulled up the carpet. Years and years of pets. Ugh. At least my cats are good about using the boxes.

      1. Debbie, in about 10 days. The AZ son is flying in to help load the half-size pod, and then we will get in my truck, which will have two new tires, and put the crated cats and dog in the back seat of the crew cab, and our suitcases and the litter box in the truck bed. We’ll drive to Tucumcari to stay overnight, and then along the Mogollon Rim, and past Flagstaff to Phoenix. I think that’s right. I’m just along for the ride.

        Several bank people are hounding me for a copy of my tax return. I have explained that any copies of my taxes are in the large file cabinet in the back of the large pod somewhere. I finally remembered that last time I moved I had to give them permission to access my tax return from the IRS. I offered a DNA smear and a blood sample, if it would help. Earlier, the loan officer had insisted that I send him a photo of the middle page of my bank statement that had only horizontal lines on it. These folks are just bonkers!

        1. I suspect he needed the page with just lines to be sure it didn’t have information on it that would affect your loan.

    1. Me too. Reread the Corinthian by Georgette Heyer. I knew I would reread when retired but I am just surprised I’m not reading all my carefully collected women’s fiction. Well, except Jane Austen.

  7. I didn’t read anything new last week. I still have the Word Opera open. Book 7 is due to start any day now and won’t be finished in 2026.

  8. I’m rather scatterbrained these days, plus I went totally overboard with the audible sale… and whenever I’ve got too much to choose from, I start reading something completely different.
    Which is why I started Hannah Henry’s Buzzed on You and Scoring Chance by AJ Truman shortly after each other without finishing anything. Yet.
    And because an artist I follow on insta loves Keira Andrew’s figure skating book Kiss and Cry, I got the first book in this Love on the Ice series – because audible sale. I like the narrator a lot, so my finger was trigger happy getting the audiobook lol. A nice story – I like friends to lovers. I may continue with book 2 Kiss and Cry eventually.
    Similarly to my frantic ebook hopping (instead of finally finishing Star Shipped – at least I found nice illustrations for Star Shipped to rinse away the aftertaste of the audiobook), I am currently listening to two books that I’ve read a couple of times: Charles by Con Riley and Irresponsible Puckboy by Saxon James and Eden Finley. The latter is not perfect but I just like the idiots to lovers that are those two mmcs. In spite of them playing for the (at least only fictional) Vegas team.
    I also got the audio for Hannah Henry’s HomeIce disadavantage – released just in time for the sale! I’m looking forward to spotting the MCs German accent – though in the book it’s mentioned that he’s got more of a Canadian accent due to having relocated at 16. A nice safety net for the narrator 🙂

    1. I went overboard on audible too, but it was fun. And a fairly cheap spree! I have been having so much decision fatigue lately that I haven’t bought anything fun, or thrifted, so it felt like a release.

      1. Same. About 15 titles for what would have been 4 credits.
        Some titles for kiddo’s reading assignments, too for in one case less than 1 Euro… Okay, it’s a very short text, but still.

  9. I read VERY NICE FUNERALS and THE HONEY POT PLOT and I thought they were even better now than the first time I read them. Nobody is surprised. 🙂
    I scored some more book-sale books and read THE TALES AND TAILS OF A YORKSHIRE VET by Peter Wright. It was all anecdotes from his time as a vet in Yorkshire and here and there, some even together with Alf White (the real James Herriott) and his son, Jim. It was a nice read, but I wasn’t as captivated as I was by the All Creatures Great and Small-books.
    I moved on to read THE ROAD TRIP by Beth O’leary. It has timehopping, which I know a lot of people are not amused by. It didn’t disturb me, and I really liked the female narrator. the male one was good, too. O’leary likes to work her way to the finish through revealing bits of the past and make people solve and resolve, and eventually these people tried to fix their errors from the past and forgive. Nice read.
    Now reading THE NAME GAME by same author. Not sure what I think yet. The premise is that two people with the same name, Charlie Jones, apply for the same position as a store manager on a small island, and nobody is sure which Charlie is “the right Charlie”. Girl-Charlie and boy-Charlie both want to start a new life in a new place, and so they both try to get the position, and agree to share it until the owners of the store can decide who gets to stay. Not really sure what I think yet. Background is revealing itself bit by bit, as with most of O’leary’s books, and at least I’m quite sure there’ll be a HEA at the end. That’s good to know. 🙂

  10. I did better this week. I ended up finishing, or nearly finishing For the Fans by Nyla K, mostly because it was too much work to choose something else but I was heartly annoyed by the ending. One of the mmc’s suffered horrific abuse when he was younger at the hands of a trusted adult and then his parents completely dropped the ball on how to deal with it and messed him up for years and he was terrified to come out of the closet and it was all resolved with one sit down talk. Ta-da. Fixed. WTF? In 20 plus hours of book I feel like the author could have built on this, made it nuanced, and frankly it would have helped the story which was a little one-note and had too many sex scenes. Yes, even for me. End rant.

    I also started the audiobook of His Quiet Agent, but didn’t like the narrator, so switched to the regular book and it is really sweet and lovely. I may try more by this author if I am happy with the ending. It’ such a unique set up that I worry a bit that a ‘regular’ book won’t have the same charm, but it is worth a try.

    Also, Alexis Hall came out with a new historical this week, and the audio was only $7 so I got that and started it. It’s 13 hours of listening, which I have misgivings over. Somehow I had gotten the impression that it was going to be a shorter story and 13 hours is almost begging for a saggy middle but we will see. It is grittier than his previous historical/fantasy romps, thank goodness because those didn’t work for me. Closer to A Lady For the Duke, which I didn’t dislike but have no urge to read again. We will see. Oddly enough I keep thinking it is a KJ Charles because of the setting. Maybe the narrator as well.

    I am also annoyed with The Last of Us, Season Two, but have finally been able to start watching Heated Rivalry with my sister’s HBO login 🙂

    2. Really glad you’re enjoying His Quiet Agent, Lupe. I haven’t read anything of hers outside this (short) series, so don’t know how well the charm holds up.

  11. And the Crowd Went Wild by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. This one is another in the Chicago Stars series. It’s a second chance M/F romance between an actress and a burned out quarterback who have (high school) history. This one started out on the wrong foot for me with the FMC making dumb decisions and humiliating herself at a major public event — it made me not care for her right off the bat. The whole scene felt contrived and then it turned out that the actions didn’t fit in at all with her character for the rest of the book. I won’t provide spoilers but after reading to the 50% mark I lightly skimmed to the end because I could totally see every step that was coming and I didn’t care about either MC or what happened to them. Sadly, SEP’s last few books have been misses for me – maybe I am reading them when in the wrong frame of mind. That said, I still reread the early Chicago Stars books regularly.

    Flying Solo by Linda Holmes. This is also a M/F second chance and return-to-small-town romance. Last week’s discussion of “Evie Drake” by this author prompted me to go back and look for her back list. I really enjoyed this one — but it turns out it was a reread. I only realized it about 20% in and by then I was enjoying it enough to continue to the end. The MCs are a bit older than usual (late 30s) and I liked that they already knew who they were. This made the HEA believable.

    1. My first romance with a sex scene was Match Me if You Can by SEP and will always have a soft spot in my heart, but other than that one I have a really hard time with her books because she always seems to humiliate her FMC. It’s a shame because I liked a lot of the other parts of the books but she almost always did something that made me want to put the book down. And honestly at this point I feel like it is so hard to be a woman in this country that I hate to see even a fictional woman put down. I like Trisha Ashley as well, but I really wish she would stop doing horrible things to the historical sub-plot characters in her books. It strikes me as odd as her stories are fairly gentle and then she has to add this rape or murder or just sad life to some ancestor in the past. For me, they could overcome that hardship and have a happy ending too and it wouldn’t make her books too twee.

  12. I’ve been reading fast. I enjoyed a couple of Sarina Bowen’s Brooklyn Hockey stories – Overnight Sensation & Superfan – just before my KU subscription ran out, and decided to read the sample of My Kind of Guy next. I enjoyed this more than I expected to after last week’s comments, but when I tried to buy the book, Amazon suggested I read it for free instead – it must have just been added to KU. So I went for it, switching my Kindle to airplane mode so it wasn’t snatched away before I got to the end. I thought it was a good story – not my favourite of hers, but definitely not a reject.

    Then the library offered me Heated Rivalry on Cloud Library. This was supposed to be two months away, but apparently the library’s switching to another app on Monday, so I guess those before me in the queue didn’t think they could read it in time. I don’t know what my problem is, but Rachel Reid just doesn’t seem to be my cup of tea. Maybe too downbeat? Anyway, I ended up speed-reading a lot of it, so finished it in a day. Liked the ending more than the body of the book; and I can see how the strong characters would make good TV.

      1. They’re switching to BorrowBox, which I haven’t heard of. Fingers crossed. Although I don’t like reading books on my iPad, due to the glare. My phone’s very small, but is more usable. If only I could read library books on my Kindle!

        1. Borrowbox isn’t too bad, but I don’t find it to be as user-friendly as Cloud. I download the books I borrow through the library, import them to Calibre and export them to my kindle – seems to work, mostly.

          Is it a format problem – as in you have a an older kindle that won’t read ePub?

          1. My Kindle does read ePub – I download AO3 titles to it. Hadn’t occurred to me to try to convert the Cloud Library titles. Guess it seems dodgy re copyright – would be tempting to keep a book I enjoyed.

          2. If your Kindle reads ePub (mine is too old) then you shouldn’t need to convert them – just download to Kindle and should be readable, I think?

        2. I like BorrowBox but I haven’t used any other library apps so I didn’t have any expectations when I started using it.

        3. In the US, Libby has some arrangement such that books from there can be read on Kindle. I’ve never tried doing that, preferring to keep library books on Libby. I’d never heard of Borrowbox so I don’t know if anything analogous applies. Cloud appears to have a native library of its own, in addition to what (I gather) individual libraries may choose to add. My local library sponsors it just for the native books, as it does for Hoopla. Perhaps yours will similarly retain Cloud.

        4. Jane, I recently bought a kobo specifically so I could read library books. It allows me to read Overdrive/Libby, which my library uses, but I have a feeling it also works with BorrowBox.

    2. I’m not a Reid fan, either. I find that the story part of her books seems mainly to be there to string sex scenes together. The last book of hers I read, one of the MCs was really unredeemable to me, too.

  13. Sofi Laporte’s Lady Viola’s Accidental Husband, #7 in its series, was not the best, as historical romances go, but I did finish it. Even enjoyed parts of it. Unfortunately, other parts were barely tolerable. Overall: blah.
    Bob Mayer’s Rocky Road: A Rocky Start Novella was a nice surprise. I loved it. It started the way I expected from Mayer – non-stop action with new danger unfolding every few lines. I didn’t like it very much and wasn’t sure I would finish the story. Then Max got on the Appalachian Trail, and the mad action gallop stopped. The story slowed down. It turned introspective. It showed Max discovering his softer side. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
    Sofi Laporte’s The Forbidden Waltz was a decent historical romance, set in Vienna during the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). The forbidden love of a prince and a common girl, a daughter of a scholar, was fun to read about. The secret police involvement added some spice, too.

      1. As I think I said at the time, that was my reaction too. I’m strongly hoping for at least one more sequel.

  14. Best thing this week was the “Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation” by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (2023) – a five-volume cultivation novel with a gorgeous m/m romance between an introvert and an extravert, set in China that never was. The first two volumes are entertaining, and then it gets very angsty and delicious and I just loved it. Plus lovely art.

    “All of us Murderers” by KJ Charles was also quite a lot of fun. Very gothic early 20th century set m/m romance while trapped in a big old house on the moors. Maybe not my favourite by Charles but that is a very high bar and I really enjoyed the MCs.

    “Rule Breaker” by Lily Morton (2017) was a good m/m office romance – lots of amusing sharp-edged banter, and I liked that the attracted-to-your-employee/boss aspect was treated seriously. Enjoyed it, new author for my tbr.

    Kelly Bowen was another new-to-me author and “A Duke to Remember” (2016) almost worked for me. An m/f historical romance, with the FMC being asked to track down a missing ducal heir. The FMC’s background bothered me and I really needed fewer dukes, but I liked both MCs so mixed feelings by the end.

    Best of the short fiction was “After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens” by Rachel Swirsky (2025), pretty much what it says in the title and it turns really sweet: I couldn’t stop smiling. Free at https://reactormag.com/after-the-invasion-of-the-bug-eyed-aliens-rachel-swirsky/

    1. Yuri, if you liked Lily Morton’s Rule Breaker, have fun with her extensive back list! Banter is definitely her thing: in a podcast interview she mentioned that her parents were publicans (? owners of a pub) and she kind of grew up in a banter-rich environment. It shows 🙂
      Apart from the contemporary rom coms she’s also written a (so far) trilogy around Levi who’s inherited a house in the old centre of Yorkshire and Blue Billings, a ghost tour guide and psychic who somehow got stranded in this city. There’s one particularly hilarious scene with one of Blue’s tours ca in the first 20% which made me put participating in one of those ghost tours in Yorkshire on my bucket list. Those books are kind-of-horror stories, but I’m a wuss and was able to read/listen to them, so maybe for any other reader they’d be just mildly thrilling. I love them and saw with excitement that Morton is about to write a book 4 (no cliffhangers, the titles can be read as standalones though more fun when read in order).

      1. Sounds good. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to have a lot of books available via libraries but will keep an eye out for her.

        1. As far as I know she’s self publishing which makes it not very likely to find her in libraries I guess. Which is a pity.

          1. I think it depends on the author – I can find Goddard’s work and our hostesses work with Bob comes and goes …

          2. You can request that your library buy specific titles. We were always happy for suggestions when I worked there and tried to honor them. Sometimes buying is just a guess in the dark.

          3. Gah, our hostess’s work – didn’t mean to imply that Jenny had generated a clone or something!

  15. •Jamie Holmes, 12 Seconds of Silence, 2020.

    The eponymous 12 seconds are the time between when the engine on a Nazi V-1’s cruise missile cut out and when its warhead exploded on impact, a period of intense suspense for the inhabitants of London during the bombardment there in June to October 1944, and for those of Antwerp during the 1945 bombardment there.  By the end of the London bombardment, and for the full length of the Antwerp one, an effective new weapon against V-1s and manned Axis aircraft had been fielded: the proximity fuze for artillery shells.  Hitting an aircraft dead-on was next to impossible, at least unless it was flying low enough that machine-gun bullets could overwhelm the odds by sheer numbers. At first, the best that could be achieved with larger artillery that shot higher, but at a much slower rate, was a timed fuze that with luck might cause a shell to explode in the vicinity of the target.  But experience proved that it was impossible to get the timing right with any acceptable reliability.  The proximity fuze remedied this.  It put out a radio signal and detected its echo, exploding when a relatively strong echo showed that the shell was near enough to a target for the the shell explosion to actually do damage.

    Developing this fuze in the pre-transistor era required solving the preposterous problem of how to build a fairly complex device with *glass tubes* that could survive getting shot out of a cannon at an acceleration of 20,000 gravities, and could be mass-produced, since it still required multiple shells to guarantee a hit.  The organization that became the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory was founded to help solve this problem, although the work had started earlier on a more ad-hoc basis.  Holmes reports that after a burst of fame right after the war, for various reasons the developers’ efforts received less than their due credit.

    The book aims to remedy that, but it would appear that Holmes could not find out enough information about the development process to fill a book that he thought would interest the general reader.  Instead, he pads it relentlessly with tangential topics such as the 12-second apprehension of the London population, word portraits of the relatively few American military victims of the London bombardment, biographies of the main fuze developers, a sketch of the development of the V-1 in Germany (in a different part of the Peenemünde R&D site than the V-2 work), praise for the activities of a valuable French spy for the Allies, and more.

    I was most familiar with the WWII proximity fuze from its importance in defeating the kamakaze attacks on Navy warships.  Holmes mentions that function, but does not focus on it.  Besides its importance for defending against the V-1, I also had not realized how important the proximity fuze became for making possible shellbursts not on contact but in the air close to the ground, increasing their efficacy against enemy personnel.

    On the basis of this book, I had taken Holmes to be an ambitious but somewhat inexperienced writer, commiting an annoying number of rookie mistakes.  He makes the same error that I had noted in Fleming’s Enigma Girls, referring to unpowered barage balloons  as “blimps” just because they had a similar shape. Holmes claims that someone had “gained some fifteen pounds from his prewar days,” when the endnote shows the weigh-in in question to have been in 1928, leaving plenty of time for prewar weight gain (an uncaught typo for 1938?).  He also advances a number of assertions relying on unquestioned but shaky foundations, such as the exaggerations and misrecollections to be expected in oral histories unsupported by other sources.  I also wonder why, in a comparison inside this 2020 book, a “space shuttle launch” is referred to in the present tense, when that system had been retired in 2011.  When I read Holmes’s author bio, I was surprised to learn that he was in fact an experienced writer for multiple periodicals and had already published one previous book.  He needed a more diligent and stringent editor.

    Since its topic is still relatively unexplored, and Holmes did feret out a great deal of interesting information, I recommend the book despite its flaws.

    1. How fascinating. My library has it so I will see if it’s worth picking the nuts out of the shell.

  16. I listened to book 7 in the series “A Christmas Cozy Mystery” called “Holly Jolly Homicide” by Mona Marple. It was the worst one in the series, which made me sad as it was a key story for the romance subplot arc. It always bugs me when Holly – Dr. Holly Wood, MD – finds a body and freaks out. She’s a doctor. She should have rushed to the body to see if the person was alive. She should have the knowledge to know the body was dead by a blow to the head and that the person had been dead for a while – 6 weeks. There should have been a smell. Instead, she simply hangs back while the coordinator of the place checks on the body. The police put a candy cane emergency above a dead body. Holly pokes into places, and no one seems to find it odd that she’s snooping in the dead woman’s desk or the hall’s attic. The scenes seemed almost out of order, and it was jarring to jump from one to the next. I’m also not a fan of Gilbert, the annoying, perfectionistic house elf, who took over as the second most prominent character. These are novelas, so they’re super simple, but this one was just off.

    1. I had the opposite problem with Rose/House. The body there was only a few days old, and per the internet should not have been smelling at all even under normal conditions, but in fact the AI was keeping it at 40F and low humidity. Yet supposedly there was a huge stench.

  17. I listened to The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis, which has been on my TBR pile for a long time ever since Jenny you raved about it. I was a little wary because I didn’t love the other Willis I read first. And I have to say I don’t think anyone is as funny as you, Jenny, no kidding but The Road to Roswell was super fun. I kept wanting to go back to it. Definitely an awesome road book, complete with alien conspiracy theorists, Las Vegas, the FBI, and every western movie ever made.

    I read Art Heist: 50 Artworks You Will Never See, which coincidentally someone gave to me not knowing I’d recently read and loved The Art Thief nor that Jenny and Bob were writing an art theft themed book series. Anyway, read it cover to cover – really fascinating. Highly recommend as research or just for sheer interest.

    I also read a novella by Kaje Harper, Overdue Changes, in her m/m hockey series Changes. I think her other ones are better in this series; this one was a bit flat.

    I’m also making my way through the A03 Linsky m/m hockey fanfic. There’s a lot and I’m taking a leisurely pace so that by the time her book is published I’ll be ready for it.

    1. There are no Linsky fanfics on AO3 that are no RPFs, right? Or have I just been too bad at searching? RPF are just not my cup of tea, I’m too untalented at ignoring the “models” (and I guess one is expected not to do so).

    2. I enjoyed Road to Roswell a lot too. But I’m stuck in the early stages of ‘To Say Nothing of the Dog’s which I now listen to if I need something to make me sleep. That’s hardly a recommendation.

      I was excited when I got it, but…

      1. I on the other hand got through To Say but couldn’t manage to finish Road before its due date. I’ll try again at some point because I like most Willis.

      2. Oh that’s awful. Such a pity “To Say Nothing for the Dog” doesn’t work for you, but humour is so subjective!

      3. Sorry grammar police. Auto correct turned my quotation mark into an ‘s.
        I didn’t do it, I promise 🫣

    3. Oh and I dnf’d Icing the Kicker by Emily Shacklette in case any of you hockey fans were thinking of trying it.

  18. •Arthur Clarke, A Fall of Moondust, 1961. I reviewed this here for July 2025, but I reread it yet again for my sf book club. It held up well, for the imaginative setting and the suspenseful plot. Characterization is no more than adequate and the social extrapolation is much more timid than reality turned out to be regarding gender roles and sexual mores, although more optimistic than reality about space travel, Lunar colonization, and international cooperation.

    I also went back to the Andy Carpenter series, notwithstanding that, as reported last week I had planned to give it a rest after the novel I was then working on.  I couldn’t find anything else in audio that was light enough and gripping enough to suffice as I slogged my way through boring chores.  I also read some other stuff including most of an early Meg Langslow novel, but I’m not quite finished.  I still seem to me fighting off some lingering virus discouraging me from doing anything very active or requiring long periods of concentration. (This has occasionally happened to me in the past, and the best strategy seems to be to wait it out.)

  20. I’ve started to read Stolen in Death by J.D. Robb. The only other book I’ve read in her Eva Dallas series is Remember When the Big Jack/Hot Rocks of present and future Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb. As Stolen in Death is #62 in the series I don’t think I will go back and start at #1. Or only if there is an apocalypse and the only books left on the planet are the Eve Dallas series.

    Like Mary Ann in Kentucky, I’m also DNFing my share of books lately hopefully this will break the cycle.

  21. I read The One That Got Away by Nicky James, and regretted it. I should’ve listened to Tammy’s half hearted reaction to it. The transformation of the two MMC’s was too fast and unconvincing, and the cop, who has never read a book, gives a long spiel on how a book must hit each reader differently, which was basically a lecture from the author in the guise of a character comment. It has gone into my Duds folder.

    Then I reread Ten Things I Hate about the Duke and loved it to bits. I think it’s one of my favourite books from Loretta Chase – such a delightful transformation, and hilarious characters.

    Another good one was Two Truths by the undiagnosable. MM hockey romance with the protagonist miserable in his first NHL team, and the love interest his only friend. Major struggle for both of them trying to figure out the difference between friendship and love, in this very sweet, tender story.

    1. Aaah, this makes me want to re-read Two Truths very soon. As you said, a wonderfully tender story.

  22. I read BEREKET, the 12th and latest book in Rachel Neumeier’s TUYO fantasy series.

    Bereket, an enigmatic secondary character from a previous TUYO book, steps up to foil a sorcerous miscarriage of justice and forestall the execution of an innocent nobleman together with his wife, brother, and children. Bereket previously appeared in Rihasi as a wild card mercenary with scant respect for the law but a very particular moral compass. Here he reluctantly accepts a contract to aid and protect the expert striving to unmask the sorcerer, untangle the conspiracy, and save the innocent.

    I love the way Rachel Neumeier resolves the sorcerous mystery in a spectacular and satisfying way, while also taking time to explore culture clashes and family tensions that add depth and richness to the TUYO world. She really makes you care about her characters. I also love the way hard choices made throughout the series have major repercussions, sometimes years later.

    If you’re new to the series, maybe start with TUYO instead (I think it may be on sale right now). If you’re already a fan, this is an excellent addition to the canon.

  23. My hold on the second book in the Heather Fawcett series (Emily Wilde and the …) came in, and I’m enjoying it, but finding it just the tiniest bit less charming than the first. I’m not entirely sure if that’s because I’m under too much stress (contractors doing major work to the outside of my house) to fully appreciate it, or if the book suffers from second-book syndrome. It’s probably just me. The stress, plus I had no expectations of the first book, so everything felt surprising and charming, while with the second, I’ve got high expectations going into it, and hardly anything ever quite lives up to expectations.

    1. Hopefully it will improve for you, Gin. I get what you say about going into it with expectations, but I loved all three books, and didn’t find the second book lesser at all.

      1. That’s good to hear. I suspected it was a me problem, not a book problem. Just too many distractions in my life right now

      1. I think that’s the source of my uncertainty — I mostly like the two leads, but in the second book, there are more moments when I don’t particularly like the female MC, and it’s already been established that the male MC has some less-than-admirable traits. I guess I don’t mind when one of the main characters (especially the one who is clearly secondary) has some serious flaws, but it’s bothering me when they both do. Just makes it harder to care if they get their HEA (either romantically or on their fantasy-focused quest).

  24. I finished the Balanchine biography. Highly recommended. I may read her earlier book which is a history of ballet; I also want to find a documentary that interviewed six of his ballerinas. I knew his childhood was rough (although I had not realized he was only 13 when the revolution started which meant he was really young when he was trying to scrabble to survive the disease and lack of food) but I had not expected to feel so sad about his last years, when his health declined, and he fell prey to various dubious anti-impotency medical treatments. The book suggests the company was not at its best then but I went frequently ( one week 7 times) and it was spectacular. The biggest book was particularly thought provoking after that podcast the Turning. Among other things it drew a sharp line for me between sexual harassment (which I think Balanchine did although I don’t know that he realized he was using his enormous power over their lives when he approached women) and sexual abuse and assault, which it sounds like his successor Peter Martins did. Neither is acceptable; both are hard to address when the harasser is also the one man in the world that dancers want to dance for (which was not true of Martins) ; unfortunately Balanchine’s behaviors may also have created an environment which tolerated this from lead dancers. Left me thinking about the sources of power the abuse of it and the remedies.
    And still his ballets move me beyond words.

    I also read the new Anne Gracie. It had only a few minor twists on the conventional regency (I think) marriage of convenience plot. Pleasant; not a reread.

    Next up Jane Austen letters and one of a selection of history books. Possibly also a reread of Folk of the Air if I can find it on my shelves.

  25. Howdy y’all, it was nice to sign off work and find GBT waiting. 🙂

    1. ‘What is Wrong with You?’ by Paul Rudnick, not a romance but very much about love. Several main characters, but the core character is a 60 yr old NYC editor who’s not quite 2 yrs past losing his husband to ALS. The storyline is somewhat farcical as one might expect from Rudnick, but each character has important work to do in getting Core Guy from misery in chapter one to contentment at the end. Another character I love is the awesomely transgressive trash panda of a blogger Core Guy is currently editing. This could have been a much sadder book (and, from the afterword, was originally headed that way) but instead is funny and, essentially, sweet.

    2. ‘The Devil to Pay’ by Katie Daysh. 2nd of the Nightingale & Courtney books. This one opens and closes with relationship scenes, but for the bulk of the book Nightingale is absent – because the ship he was traveling on is captured by Mediterranean pirates. The book is from Courtney’s POV this time and he has a ghastly time of it; multiple godawful seafaring disasters ensue. Suspense, plenty of action, plenty of feels, and a hopeful conclusion.

    3. ‘Overdue Changes’ by Kaje Harper, which I liked better than Tammy did. 🙂 It’s a second-chancer in sports context with realistic concerns and a side plot about a young artist who needs to be liberated from her controlling shithead of a rich father.

    4. ‘Unruly’ by David Mitchell, which some of you have also read. A swift and entertaining history of 1500 years of absolute shitheaded fuckery perpetrated by people who wanted to rule England from the exit of the Romans to the exit of Elizabeth I.

    + ‘Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act’ by Kit Walker, a highly effective series starter; a fun & savage rage against the machine novelette.

    5. ‘Men of Tokyo: Sudden Bliss (White Tigers Book 1)’ by Sedonia Guillone, that’s a hell of a lot of title for a short book. Erotic romance feat. a burned-out salaryman grieving his adored stepmother and being pressured to marry by his hostile/abusive father & an attendant at a love hotel who’s grieving his first love. There’s a lot of sex and it’s mostly pleasant to read, plenty of consent and caring, but the notion of ‘safe sex’ is nowhere, which – with one character being closeted and the other a sex worker – gives me the icks. The grief subplots and discoveries relating thereto are well handled; friends and allies likewise. Aside from the ick factor, the only jarring note was inconsistent style. Much of the language is somewhat formal, even ceremonial, which reads “right” to me based on my experience of Japanese people. Then there will be a passage that reads like a transcript from an American dating show. Overall, rated this 4 stars but am not really inclined to follow up.

  26. Also reposting for those who didn’t see it earlier (I meant to get it up this morning but nope.)

    DS asked me if I had read Ada Palmer and in an effort to find Patrick’s review of her book mentioning her error about who could read bibles, I googled “Ada Palmer Argh Ink”.
    Imagine my surprise to learn Google thinks Argh Ink is the blog of Jim C. Hines, including “This is a Good Book Thursday”.
    (It did take me straight to Patrick’s review.)

    1. Chillimg how much crap AI produces.
      In my day job we noticed that really sound fact checking will be our top priority when (sadly not if) we use AI for varies purposes. And sometimes the nonsense is not as obvious as in your example.

      1. My employer acquired an enterprise version of ChatGPT, rolled out various levels of training, and ever since has been backpedaling along the lines of “AI output must be comprehensively fact-checked and if any AI cites or statements cannot be substantiated the output must be discarded.” Which, to my mind, screams “this was a giant and risky waste of time and money because if you have to look up all the facts yourself, you might as well START THERE.”

        1. You know, this really shouldn’t be a surprise considering the long tradition of software releases with bugs in them. But if we are going to use this technology for important things like healthcare, it would be reassuring to know that we weren’t being used as unwitting beta testers.

          2. That’s very disturbing. Not just that its a problem with AI, but it also indicates a problem with the peer review system – and sloppy research. Errors all the way down.

        2. I think the AI error rate is more a feature than a bug unfortunately. The people selling it don’t care whether it works, just that they can make us all believe it’s inevitable so they can recoup their investment and make mega-profits instead of mega-losses.

          Today I saw that an AI conference just rejected 2% of its papers for LLM use, and read an interesting article on AI refusal: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/its-open-season-for-refusing-ai

    2. Wow, that’s really a mess!

      I’ve got AI disabled on my desktop, so I searched for my blog on my phone (where I can’t seem to disable the AI summaries), and they got most of it right. Messed up a reference to the fiction I’ve written, but that’s about it.

      1. I really can’t stand the way they don’t allow users to opt out, or maybe ask us if we want it in the first place?! My phone is the generation where they ask you to register the phone which activates the AI, I just didn’t register it – but the latest update means that every time I open an app I get a prompt to register – so annoying!

  28. Almost finished with The Wedding People. I’ve mostly skimmed it but keep trying since it’s for our book club–such as it is.

    I reread several from my comfort shelf and I just started a nonfiction called Scent of the Missing by Susannah Charleson. It’s a memoir about her partnership with a search and rescue dog. I’m reading for research for a story idea I pitched to my editor.

  30. Lots of reading this week. Elizabeth Cadell has a huge bac list and writes what I think of as cozy romances: not to much angst and a satisfying HEA.

    Either the library or someone here recommended Susanna Kearsley. The three I read were The Shadowy Horses, The Splendor Falls and Belleweather. I will be rereading all of them. The Splendor Falls reminded me strongly of the writing of Mary Stewart, except better written. And I say that as a huge fan of Mary Stewart and regularly reread her work.

    I also read Beau Crusoe by Carla Kelly which several people recommended last week. Add me to the list. It was very good.

    1. I have a soft spot for Elizabeth Cadell — she was the first author I was allowed to read from the “grown-up” side of my local libray when I was a teen. I recently read a re-read her back list and found they held up well. They are definitely on my comfort-reads list.

    2. I love Susanna Kearsley. The Shadowy horses is one of my favorites but you haven’t yet read lots of my other favorites !

        1. The Winter sea, Mariana, The firebird, The rose garden, A desperate fortune, Bellewether …

          There are subtle interconnections between the books, little Easter eggs. I put the Winter sea first because it’s the first I read and a lot of the other books happen after.

  31. I was in the mood for a sweet time-waster and Evvie Drake Starts over, which someone recommended here a week or so back, seemed to fit the bill.

    But oddly, a week later, I can’t conjure a memorably vivid scene from it. Did it not have any or am I just in a meh mood? Which makes me wonder if the author’s subsequent books are worth buying. The Amazon summaries seem scattered.

    Thoughts, anyone?

    1. Go to the library. It is the perfect place for checking out those titles that you just aren’t sure of. If you get the book home and you are no longer in the mood, you can return it without being out anything.

  32. Best re-read by far was Charlie All Night by Jenny. It has to be on my top ten all time great books. Love the MMC and his development, loved the MFC and her flatmate. Adored the sick little puppy. It had corruption, and some really good things to say about male/female relationships and a heap of other great stuff. It is not a huge book but it is one I return to regularly.

    I read Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Kline which is the follow up to The House in the Cerulean Sea. I really enjoyed it. A story of found family, love, truth, trust. It also has a lot to say about bigotry and power.

    Got an omnibus edition of novels 4-6 in the Ian Rankin Rebus series and am starting to dislike the MMC. Too much alcohol and going it alone. I get why but still dislike it. What I do love is reading about Edinburgh in the 90’s and trying to figure out some of the places he has renamed. May take a break from these novels and come back to them later.

    Just started Obsidian Prey by JAK, thanks to Olga Godim for remembering which novel I wanted. Got it out the library and am enjoying it again. I have basically forgotten everything about it except the end!

  33. Last night was a sleepless night, between loud thunder, and worries about moving, so I read Rocky Road, by Bob Mayer. It has a frenetic beginning, and then moves into a lot of introspection on Max’s part. The ending caught me off guard. I do hope there is a sequel. I want to know what happens to Maggs and the people she and Max met on the AT.

  35. I am suffering mild TBR trauma. We had dinner guests and DH asked me to put way the stacks of books I have had since the holidays waiting to be read piled up around the arm chair I am recovering from hip surgery in.

    My sneaky plot is after the next dinner party on Sunday to take them back out or at least the 10 or so I want to read next …

  36. I just got off a nearly two hour call with my son and a large part of the time was spent discussing Heretic: Jesus Christ and the other sons of God by Catherine Nixey which he had been reading. MHe describes it as being about all the other saviors of the same time period who performed miracles and claimed to be the son of god (apparently this was a thing) who never made it to being major religions. Also the books about Jesus that didn’t make it into the New Testament. It seems to have made the Best Book of the Year lists of The Times (?London?) and The Economist and the first review on Amazon basically says Elaine Pagels did it better. So it’s now on my Libby if only for the one where a woman checks out Mary to see if she is really a virgin (meaning did she still have a hymen after giving birth) and the relevant part of Mary’s anatomy burst into flames and burned the woman’s hand off.

    I feel that’s a perfectly reasonable response to such an invasive test.

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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