THE TWO WILLS: A Novel, from the DISCO WITCHES OF FIRE ISLAND author

THE TWO WILLS: A Novel
BLAIR FELL
Alcove Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 20 October 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunningly beautiful LGBTQ+ novel for fans of Hamnet and Song of Achilles.

Willy Hughes, an arrogant young hustler in Elizabethan England, is used to conning drunken men into believing he’s a young woman of ill repute—and then robbing them of their purses. But behind his thievery, he’s heartbroken over his first love, Barnaby Stubb, ending things between them. Not one to lick at his wounds for long, one night, Willy spots a newly famous stage poet in the alehouse. Will is ten years his senior, and he looks at Willy in a way he’s never been looked at before. Rather than robbing him blind, Willy decides that the sharp-eyed poet is meant to be the greatest love of his life.

Will wants Willy as his muse and perhaps as something more, but the older and more experienced poet is playing a dangerous game with people’s hearts. The confusion is driving Willy mad. Willy’s treacherous connection with Will—who is already married and involved in another love affair—becomes even more complicated when Will’s rival poet comes into the picture.

Christopher Marlowe is sexy, stunning, and dangerous. And he’s pursuing Willy with all he’s got. When Barnaby suddenly comes back into his life, Willy must determine once and for all who his heart belongs to. But London’s burgeoning acting companies have a darker side, and, as Willy goes from lowly apprentice to full-fledged star, he must rise to the occasion and stand up against exploitation and abuse.

A love story for the ages, where the loves you thought were lost forever aren’t ever really lost. Especially when the greatest writer in English literature dedicates his books of sonnets to you.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Will Hughes is a hustler in all modern senses of that word. Sixteenth-century London has just as many horny men who want sex from a pretty face as any other time and place. Heartbroken by the loss of first love, Will Hughes targets a slightly older drunken man for hi usual con of pretending a femininity he doesn't possess then robbing the traduced horndog; he chose both poorly and well, as his target is not the least bit embarrassed, but goes on the attack himself.

The Disco Witches of Fire Island did niot prepare me for the tonal shift of this, Author Fell's second published novel. I say "published" because one does not achieve this command of his material unless one has a good chunk of experience behind him. There are novels in the Fell files that cannot see the light of day, with mistakes galore, with ideas that petered out for no obvious reason...I've got one of those about the Cristero War that I'm still salty at for refusing to take any shape I wanted.

This romantic gay love story is not a romance. There's a HFN ending...but not the one you might expect. I was a wee bit saddened by that. I liked Shakespeare's scheming mistress Rose well enough, but...why? It's not my book, so I will confine myself to that whiny single-word complaining bleat. I love all things Marlowe because he can be presented as queer and no one bats an eye, still less bellows an accusation of "wokeness." (Yeah, I'm woke, I don't want to sleepwalk through my life. Idiots.) I like Will Hughes because he doesn't wait around for someone to help him, he helps himself and then reaches back to help others. He's a mensch, he's a man who earns and deserves his happiness.

Will Hughes does get a little annoying in his unrequited pining for "The Poet." That arch convention of reference wears on me fast, Will Hughes' scheming against Rose Williams seems self-defeating, but then again he's in love which state of diminished capacity is well-known throughout history to have deleterious effects on one's intelligence. I can't offer a full five when I spent much of a read wanting to pound some sense into the two leads, but...well...it's a well-made story about interesting people, doing interesting things and each other (not very interestingly) while the turmoil of Elizabethan London roils and upsets many a person's plan.

So, a quarter-star onto the four it absolutely earns on its merits represents my appreciative pleasure in a take on Willy Shakes I haven't had the pleasure to meet before. Definitely think this one should make its way onto your reading shelf wherever you keep it.

THE LOCKUP PERIOD, debut Silicon Valley thriller

THE LOCKUP PERIOD
VINCE THOMPSON
Dubious Ventures Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ ebook, preorder now for delivery 20 October 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 90 Days to IPO Riches–if they can just figure out what to do with the body!

A fast, fun, and twisty ride through the underbelly of Silicon Valley—where fortunes are made overnight, and everyone is chasing their cut.

Mario Kennedy yearns to be part of tech’s in-crowd. But with an unfair rap sheet and a job slinging pizzas, he’s stuck on the outside. When MenuAi—a startup in which he holds advisory shares—announces it’s going public, he finally gets his shot. That is, if he can survive the ninety-day lockup period… and the stock lives up to the hype.

Driving that hype is Ravi Singh, a rising star in venture capital determined to land his first unicorn—no matter the cost. Covering the frenzy is Jamie Villanueva, a young reporter caught between breaking the story and settling a personal score.

On the night of the IPO, a troubling twist: A dead body turns up in the CEO’s apartment. Expose the truth, and everything collapses. Conceal it until the lockup period expires, and walk away rich.

In Silicon Valley, it may be that making a killing… isn’t just a figure of speech.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Glossy surfaces are hard to limn without feeling that tacky and brummagem have become their limits. That's what happened here, that was what I honestly expected to happen, and I suspect it's what Author Vince intended to give me.

It's a satire, it works itself into a knot showing me its satirical intent, and I still feel myself curling my lip at Mario as well as Ravi and Noah all the while thinking "wow I wish MenuAI was real." Jamie might just be the most relatable character in the story because she's passionately *determined* to end this tentacle of AI's viabiity and existence before finding she has more passion for a person in place of A Cause.

And I despise her too.

Which is the strength of Author Vince's writing, he's made all-there characters into people. Most debut authors would make the easy choice of making the story about the satirized action, like a medieval mystery play. I'm very glad he chose not to and that he possessed the skill at characterization to make it work. It's also notable that Author Vince kept the action moving, no one sat on their butt and thought and thought then moaned for a chapter or two about how sore their butt was. Navel-gazing "Я" not us. Also missing is the expected jargon-heavy, whether tech talk or finance speak, wodges of stodge. I'm probably happier about that than any other facet of the read.

It's distasteful to me that these amoral fools do not see that they're well and truly screwed no matter what happens so are better off being honest and taking theirr lumps instead of making everything worse for everyone. Like Martha Stewart going to prison rather than pay a fine when the Feds had her dead to rights on that insider trading mess.

I'll stress again that this is me wagging my finger at naughty fools, not thundering Old-Testamently as I chuck the works under a bus. Author Vince got me to buy in when that was a longshot; kept me involved when that was unexpected; and made me very glad I'd been on the trip as I finished the read.

It's unexpectedly easy to say that y'all did oughta read this story even if you *hate* tech stories/people/procducts, revile all things financial/bankster connected; and do not care if all these people end up dead and buried in a ditch.

All of those statements applied to me, too, and here I am offering the read to you in honest expectation you'll like it.

COFFIN ROAD, an unposted 2017 review of the best PETER MAY novel I've read

COFFIN ROAD
PETER MAY
riverrun press
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In his latest mystery set in Scotland and the Outer Hebrides, award-winning author Peter May spins a tale about three disparate cases that may or may not be linked...

On the remote Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, a man washes up on a deserted beach, hypothermic and completely disoriented. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. The only clue to his condition is a map of the island showing a desolate, ancient path called the Coffin Road. With a sense of dread and no clear idea what lies at the other end, he knows he must follow the trail if he has any hope of discovering his identity.

Meanwhile, homicide detective George Gunn makes the rough ocean crossing to a remote, sea-battered lighthouse on a rock in the northern Atlantic, twenty miles west of the Outer Hebrides, to investigate a brutal murder. Despite its isolation, the tiny island has seen its share of tragedy: more than a century earlier, three lighthouse keepers disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. And now there is a new tragedy, and Gunn must figure out what happened.

At the same time, a teenage girl lies in her Edinburgh bedroom, desperate to discover the truth about her father's death. Two years after the discovery of the pioneering scientist's suicide note, Karen Fleming still cannot accept that her father would willingly abandon her. And the more she discovers about the nature of his research, the more she suspects that suicide had nothing to do with it.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER IN 2016. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ten years ago I flew through all 400pp of this read, and excitedly left this note:

Far and away the best book of Peter May's that I've read. An exciting and involving read. More later. Or earlier, I suppose, depending on which end of the telescope you're looking through.

When I went looking for my notes made to write my weekly summary post for GBBO over on LibraryThing, I found my unposted review! (Not the notes I wanted, though.) So I'm posting it here for this year's #Deathtober blogging, and in sad acknowledgment of Author May's death on 25 September 2026. I suspect I never came back to post it because that was about the time I ran seriously afoul of the Spoiler Stasi abd decided "hell with it" and forgot it existed.

The story opens on a beach. Don't get too excited, it's a Scottish beach so colder than a Republican's heart. A man awakes cold and confused:

I have no idea where this is. And for the first time since consciousness has returned, I am aware, with a sudden, sharp and painful stab of trepidation, that I have not the least notion of who I am.

That breathless realisation banishes all else. The cold, the taste of salt, the acid still burning all the way up from my stomach. How can I not know who I am? A temporary confusion, surely? But the longer I stand here, with the wind whistling around my ears, shivering almost beyond control, feeling the pain and the cold and the consternation, I realise that the only sense that has not returned to me is my sense of self. As if I inhabit the body of a stranger, in whose uncharted waters I have been washed up in blind ignorance.

Nothing like the smell of the North Atlantic Ocean in the morning. As he searches for a name (it's Neal, for now), for a way to discover who he is, ID or any other details, belongings...anything...he encounters a woman who seems to know him as she walks near the beach. Sally helps Neal-for-now home, some data starts coming into his slippery memory and mostly slides right out again having nothing to stick to:

They say that all any of us are is the sum total of our memories…Take them away and all you are left with is a blank. Like a computer without software.

It's true, and it scares me, as it does most people or writers would not use the trope with the regularity they do (particularly in thrillers where the need for the main character to act fast and to have a great urgency to do something is acute). Our hero reflects, "{it's a}s if I inhabit the body of a stranger, in whose uncharted waters I have been washed up in blind ignorance," as he attempts to unferstand what on Earth has landed him in a situation where:

Nothing, absolutely nothing since I found myself washed up, semi-conscious, on the Traigh Losgaintir, has made sense. My memory loss. My failure to find a single clue to my identity, beyond my name, even in my own home. My affair with Sally. The book on the Flannan Isles mystery that I am not writing. Beehives on the coffin road. My missing boat...someone trying to kill me. And someone else stepping in to save me. The weight of it all is very nearly crushing.

As he puts together who he is and what he is doing, why he us at great risk of death, many truths and dacts sort themselves into an extremely ugly pattern:

Politicians and political parties, particularly in America, rely on {corporate criminals} to fund election campaigns. They are powerful lobbyists. Which is why the US has not banned the use of neonicotinoids, and thousands of tons of the stuff are still being used on crops there every year. Biggest usage is on oilseed rape. They coat the seeds with insecticide, so that, when it germinates, the insecticide is diffused throughout the plant, including the nectar and pollen that’s harvested by the bees.

Neal-for-now's discovered, conveniently near a cursed murder site in a lighthouse, evidence that chemical companies researched neonicotinoids and knew what effect the pesticide would have:

‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’ The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to {Bad actor}, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can. The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor. {Bad actor} is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth. I grab {a hostage he's rescuing} by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing. Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull {the hostage he's rescuing} off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination. We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air. I guide {the hostage he's rescuing} away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth.

As you'll see from my rating there were some issues with the way the story unfolded, plot holes, a looseness with the timeline; but you also see how exciting the story is. This is proof Author May began writing in the vineyards of television...you can see the above in your inner TV room, I'm sure...before retiring to the vineyards of the South of France to write exciting novels. I like this one best of all of them I've read.

HEAR THE DEAD, tinnitus as haunting

HEAR THE DEAD
ANN DÁVILA CARDINAL
Sourcebooks Landmark (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From award-winning author Ann Dávila Cardinal comes an edgy, genre-bending thriller following a retired photographer who begins to hear the murders of women she knew in her punk youth, forcing her to reckon with the past she's desperate to forget.

One woman. A string of unsolved murders. Only she can hear the victims.

Elena Altieri never wanted to be famous, and certainly not at sixty-six years old. For over forty years she's been hiding from her New York City punk rock youth in the hills of Vermont, but now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she losing her hearing, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral. Suddenly, she finds herself summoned back to the city for an exhibit celebrating her work and thrust into a world she'd hoped to keep locked away forever. A world where her best friend, Sin, is dead.

At the exhibit, Elena hears the screams of a woman ringing among the hum of her tinnitus, and she's sure something horrible has occurred. But since no one else can hear them, she convinces herself it's just her damaged ears playing tricks. She tries to put the event behind her, but when the auditory visions continue whenever she touches something of Sin's, she becomes convinced she's hearing her friend's murder. Desperate for answers, she has no choice but dig into the past, and what she'll uncover will not only force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin, and other innocent women from their youth, were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve. Old punks never die, and Elena's going to prove that.

Edgy, mysterious, and full of heart, Hear the Dead is at once an inventive and biting story following one aging woman desperate to solve crimes from her past, and a thought-provoking meditation on friendship, justice, and what it means to remember who we are.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Elena's not a lot younger than me; she lived in 1980s New York like me; she has tinnitus like me. I was primed to love her, to fall in love with her story. I didm't quite get all the way there. It was a slow climb up the story's mountain to the resolution, or as we in less sexually savvy times called the climax. Call it that in these pursey-mouthed prudey times and you'll get A Look from some "protect the children" overreactor.

Ahem.

Ann Dávila Cardinal uses the weird effects on what one can hear when afflicted with tinnitus to mysterious, spooky purposes for the first time in my long experience. Author Cardinal has Elena grow increasingly deaf from tinnitus by getting odd auditory hallucinations that relate, she thinks, to a hideously traumatic murder she...knows of...in her past.

I'm not being coy, there; the point of this entire story is the murder of lovely young Sin is not in Elena's memory as anything but a bald fact, unattached to details but imbued with dread and a sick discomfort buoying it up in the immense ocean of completely anonymized memories anyone over sixty knows full well. Now that the ringing in her ears is morphing into voices and a changing cast of them Elena is going to have to fish for facts among the sounds. Voices speak words. Voices have conversations. Voices resonate with the ringing of tinnitus, is the modulation into words or just...screaming? Is this Elena remembering Sin's death at last or is this Elena's guilt over...whatever happened, if she heard it is she surfacing something that could lead her to resolve Sin's long-ago murder?

Listen sharp.

From the floor I could shoot from an awesome angle. A guy’s face on the receiving end of a punch, blood and spit spraying out of this mouth. The growling expression of one of the bouncers as he pulled some kid right off his still-kicking feet. And my favorite shot of the night: tiny Josie Bluth, a powerful singer who Sin had worked with for a time, in her short plaid schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, hanging off the back of one of the goons who’d harassed me. I captured the exact moment when she bit off a piece of his ear.

A badass in her youth, a badass now: Elena listens intently to the screaming, with the intention of understanding what she is hearing. What a great way to use a very uncomfortable, isolating phenomenon. Elena was a big part of the "underground" scene of the 80s as a photographer, a visual chronicler of the times and places on the punk scene. How telling that she has no visual memory of the awful murder. She has blown-out ears ringing with voices, clamorous with screams, and her visual record of it...absent, gone, vanished, repressed. All of these? None of them? But decades of not knowing, of not consciously being able to assemble the reality into a picture, makes her photographers' eyes twitch.

There is a resolution. You get your answer.

What interested old-man me was Elena's clearly intense desire to make Sin's death right at last. She needs Sin to be in the explained column of Life's spreadsheet because, well, because Death is supposed to end, to finish, to stop. It was murder, as yet unsolved; Death does none of those things for the murdered, so Elena will now listen to her lovely friend's death until she hears the fact that is so terrible, so fearsome, that her photographer's eyes can't see it.

That's tough. That's badass.

That's love.

The astounding pounding that misogyny, that ableism, that crude powerplays wreaked havoc on Elena and her fellow women in that scene, that time, her Nuyorican culture were, I felt, overemphasized. Dramatic effect wears out, like opioid hits; at forst righteous anger burns, then punchdrunk disorientation, then numbness; Reality did all these things to all y'all but fiction has different rukes. I know Author Cardinal knows this. I can only think that she felt so strongly about this story that it *had*to*have all the blows, all the kicks, every cruelty from casual to calculated.

For this reader it stopped having the desired, needed, salutary effect.

STRANGE LIGHTS, paranormal found-family horror/SFF tale of raising a chupacabra as a single mom

STRANGE LIGHTS
MIRA GONZÁLEZ
Bindery Books|Ezeekat Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: squeaks to four full stars

The Publisher Says: Parenting is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot harder when your toddler is a chupacabra.

Paranormal investigator and cryptozoologist Reggie has embraced her fate as parent to an adopted toddler, Eldi—a blood-sucking chupacabra with a fondness for goats. Reggie wants nothing more than to put her complicated past in the rearview mirror and fade into as much obscurity as her toddler will allow. But a rash of UFOs in the night sky and a couple of crop-circle-carving Roombas force Reggie into an investigation that attracts the attention of an old enemy, an anti-supernatural agency hunting for creatures like Eldi. To outwit them, Reggie must team up with Calvin: a podcaster-turned-werewolf whose charm is a real threat to Reggie’s rule against romantic attachments.

With Reggie’s history quickly catching up to her and Eldi in the agency’s crosshairs, any shred of normalcy evaporates. Reggie must decide: Can she confront her dark past to save Eldi—and an entire alien species—from getting wiped out of the universe?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A Winnebago so tricked out it's almost a spaceship...but is much more than appearances suggest.

A single foster mom/cryptozoologist...raising a half-chupacabra toddler.

And several cornfields of crop-circle making Roombas.

Oh, and also a yummy-looking cryptid-debunking podcaster. Who's a werewolf.

Nothing's quite normal, quite as it appears, in Reggie's world. No one is ready for anyone else's unrevealed private truth; everyone's really fine with it when the masks come off. Mostly fine. Most of the time. It's a rollicking story most of the way, at about 55-60% it gets into necessary-but-long backstory exposition. It ends the forward momentum at the point in the story where it genuinely can't be recovered because there's not enough story left to do it. I think most readers won't really notice the placement (and there's no better way or place to do it, I really tried to figure one out) but could be slightly put off by how much the action slows while feeling totally wowed and bumfuzzled by what they're learning.

Reggie and Eldi are truly parent and kid-charge in the most endearing way, a slice of serendipity such as an uncaring universe fails to fuck up every once in a while. It's part of Author González' magic that while she's telling a wildly improbable wad of truth...the cryptid-debunking werewolf podcaster makes complete and entire sense after the initial laugh/headscratch/forehead wrinkle...she's sneaking the sentimental sniff and a teardrop out of you. Eldi the half-chupacabra will wring your withers with "baaawww"ness before the next goat goes. Calvin the werewolf, now *there's* a man I want to meet! They're all in a twilight zone between normies and the larger world whose truth we can't handle, to quote Jack Nicholson's speech pretty much whole. The fearsome task of running interference while running away from the Big Bads (plural very much intentional) is the root of the unit forming before us, and has now reached the point where there are pasts to normalize within this found family.

The intersubjective—the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties—is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you—the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents.

It's part of a fantastic essay my sister forwarded to me as I sat contemplating what to write about this book. It explains aome issues I've been noodling over and had got nowhere with trying to form usefully. The ineluctable quantum effects show themselves everywhere, now we've seen them we can't unsee them.

A story resonating on a quantum level and rocked by gravity waves is not going to stay tidy. It makes me feel a bit sad that many of y'all are going to wonder a little too hard about that backstory/pacing hurdle and choose not to spend your fiercely protected eyeblinks on the read; yet I'm never going to shy away from sharing truths I know are risky to tell. I urge you to go steadily onward to get yourselves to the ending.

It is where I vaulted from three-plus to a full four stars.

No more—spoilers—but an exhortation to do #Deathtober's spooky vibe with something fun, substantial, and weird as fuck.

BIRD KING RISING, second in Letters from Maynara series by Samantha Bansil

BIRD KING RISING (Letters from Maynara #2)
SAMANTHA BANSIL
Bindery Books | Violetear (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A new queen reigns. A rebellion stirs. Will she risk it all to rule?

Newly crowned queen Laya Gatdula is determined to prove her worth to her subjects, her family, her rivals—and herself. When whispers of rebellion and rumored sightings of a giant raptor in the mountainous Skylands reach the capital, Laya must face the terrifying realization that her ex-lover and rival, Luntok, might still be alive and coming for the throne. Though she already wields power over wind and rain, to quell the threat from the north, Laya seeks the ultimate weapon: lightning.

Torn between the counsel of two men—her beloved confidant and her ruthless uncle—Laya must trust herself to cement her legacy and hold the throne. Is it better to earn her nation’s loyalty through benevolent rule, or risk everything to become an all-powerful god? And with Luntok rapidly gathering his army, will she live long enough to make the choice?

From Samantha Bansil, a brilliant, fresh voice in AAPI fiction, Bird King Rising returns to the world of Black Salt Queen with the gripping conclusion to an epic story of duty and strength, passion and betrayal, and the devastating cost of war.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you have not read Black Salt Queen, which you certainly should, this story will lose a lot of impact though you will get a flavor of the world. The conflicts will I suspect, not need a lot of background, though the motives and the intensity brought to bear might surprise you absent that earlier tale's details. I'll quote myself from my earlier review for clarity: "It's rooted in precolonial Philippine culture, adding fantasy elements; this is a part of world history I'll bet big money most of my fellow old white people have less knowledge of this cultural milieu than they do of Middle Earth...very few of y'all need any context to know who Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Legolas are or represent."

I'll say of this resolution to the earlier story's arc, I was all ready for it to be about what it is that separates the handover of power due to rebellion from a revolution. Was Laya merely leading a rebellion? I'd wondered in the first book; now she's in power, wielding her magic is...influenced...by the always-present web of interpersonal obligations, favors owed and ones desired to be accrued. It's a very fertile field to work, deep story-soil to till and many's the crop of plots it will sustain. I found the depth of this story's digging a tiny bit disappointing, like Author Bansil chose story resolution in a timely way over the longer, more complicated exploration I'd anticipated. That's why this book is a quarter-star lower than the first one in my personal rating; and, of course, the second-book phenomenon of post-joyous-discovery familiarity where there had been novelty.

What is foregrounded instead is the deeper look into individuals' ethical natures. I am here for women's wrongs as much as rights. I like women in power making terribly difficult decisions and getting them ambiguously right but somewhat wrong. Being in power very very seldom offers a leader the delight of choosing an unambiguously good course. But maybe, in addition to these reasons they'll make hard choices, could we also see justifications, rationalizations, pressures responded to that evoke right-becomes-wrong perspective shifts?

I sound more carping and negative than I feel. I think this series could easily go on a good while before the setting yields its last bumper harvest; the setting is one that bids fair, in Author Bansil's capable hands, to support many excellent tales to come. I am here for them all as they come.

Soon please, Violetear Books.

THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF ILIANA MAREK, SFnal mysterious thrilling doings in Florida

THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF ILIANA MAREK
DAVID LISS
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A young man with a tragic past finds an unlikely protector in a strangely altered enforcer of his backwater town. In his immutable style, Edgar Award winner David Liss (The Peculiarities) incorporates the elements of a crime novel within a satirical combination of sci-fi, justice, and mercy in 21st-century America.

Who is Iliana Marek? Is she the bully who alongside her foster father Police Chief Bryce Hillard, controls and terrorizes Tylor, Florida? Or is she the reborn guardian angel of Dan Gibson, a social pariah responsible for the suicide of Faye Kristic, a death which he cannot remember ten years later.

Dan’s once-promising future is in tatters. He lives in an apartment on his estranged parents’ property, works at a convenience store with a terrible boss, and is addicted to prescription drugs. But ten years after Faye’s death, Iliana suddenly takes Dan’s side, and a lot of bad people start dying fast.

As Dan becomes entangled in the ensuing chaos, he needs to finally discover what part he played in the death of Faye Kristic, and why the changes to Iliana make her no longer entirely human.

In a novel as though Carl Hiaasen had collaborated with Michael Crichton, David Liss’s newest work is a powerfully astute, entertaining allegory right out of today’s headlines.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The unjustly-accused hero is irresistible to me, a story conceit I'm so sat for because Hitchcock. From The Lodger and Saboteur to North by Northwest, with stops at The Thirty-nine Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much...my whole conscious life I've been enjoying the real hero being misjudged.

Dan's severe mistreatment at the hands...presumably...of law enforcement resulting in his concussion bad enough to rob him of his memory, well, sign me up for the cruise in first class comfort please. Iliana, a child under the care of this rotten sheriff who (presumably) led, or allowed at least, Dan's beating without knowing or caring that he was actually guilty of provoking the suicide of sweet little Faye, the dearest girl anywhere ever so of course the town went nuts! He harmed her!

Says who?

Everyone. And Iliana, plus foster dad sheriff, make sure everyone hears that version of events. Dan is beat down for ten years from all sides. You wrote these horrible, bullying things about Faye! She was a super-excellent coder and you never could be! the townsfolk spit venomously at beleaguered Dan, driving him into substance abuse and a miserable dead-end job. Why does none of this ring even a distant bell? Because you're guilty! shout the peasants, armed with the twenty-first century's pichforks and torches, chasing Dan into the town's windmill-equivalent, the local gas station/convenience store, there to suffer a miserable work life getting abused.

But Faye was working on something big, something that also cost the billionaire who hired her for the job his life (boo hoo). And that has some outsiders wondering why the entire fatal event was so tightly controlled, so free of loose ends, so improbably speedily resolved. Enough chatter about it keeps reaching Dan over the years..so heavily implicated (maybe too heavily, absent concrete proof) tat he *must* be included in the gossip, he decides to do what an outside crime reporter texts him to do: show up at the suicide site, a tower, for a meeting. It's maybe reckless, but life can't get worse than being reviled, right?

Unless you're Dan. Arriving at the tower to meet the reporter, he finds Iliana already there.

Burying bodies. And after a truly bizarre moment of unforgettable SFnal deus ex machina, acting weirdly...nice...to him. Unsettlingly, Iliana has now decided she will protect Dan from detractors defaming him...just as she did, up until now. This is all exceedingly weird, what happens and how and why are very very unexpected. It's also very welcome indeed. Having someone convert from detractor to defender...even though murderous in her execution (!) of the role...is a kindness Dan had stopped expecting anyone to show him.

What follows is an increasingly daffy and disorienting peeling of the onion's layers. No one is who they present themselves as. Nothing is uncomplicated by lies and the secrecy the entire town and attendant characters practice. It isn't just impossible to figure out who's lying, it's impossible to determine why some withhold truths and some just outright lie about the same thing.

There's a real, solid reason; you will learn it; it is not, shall we say, edifying. Dan carries trauma and guilt unjustly heaped on him. He was not, it turns out, guiltless. He never really dealt with the real guilt nor does he here, but there's an excellent reason why in the decade of cruelty he's suffered. I'd've liked to see him grow as a character but the scope of the story told here would not allow i. Nor does that scope allow for Iliana's alteration to be explicated as I so very badly wished it would be. Again, I get why, but here I sit with my teeth in my mouth....

Not a whodunit like the Benjamin Weaver stories Author Liss regaled us with, so don't expectfair-play clue laying. It's really more a mysterious, psychologically oriented, vibe-of-thrillers gone by, story. And it's good fun indeed. My quibbles are just that: quibbles. Go forth, procure, and enjoy.