WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, second Coldren County procedural

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE (Coldren County #2)
RACHEL LOUISE ADAMS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Following the USA Today bestselling series debut, No Rest for the Wicked, Rachel Louise Adams returns with Where There’s Smoke.

A lot has happened in Dolores Hawthorne’s life since the events of last Halloween. She’s divorced, traded being a forensic pathologist for a job as a medical examiner, and now lives in small-town Wisconsin, close—but not too close—to her family.

Dolores doesn’t have much in the way of work, but that all changes when a body is found at the local slaughterhouse. Benedict Marcy owned Marcy’s Meats, and is affectionately called Mr. Mercy across the region. This high-profile case quickly catches the attention of Dolores’s friends at the FBI.

From the very beginning, this case is full of contradictions and surprises, and the team quickly learns someone is willing to go to extreme lengths to stop them from finding out the truth behind Benedict Marcy’s murder.

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My Review: In common with her debut mystery, No Rest for the Wicked, which I mildly enjoyed and reviewed in January, this sequel is a pleasant reward for saying "yes" to the publicist in spite of thinking "...mmmaaayyybe." I wasn't excited by the small-Midwest-town-return aspect or the obsessed-by-Halloween town bit, but the story was compelling: where's my dad the US Senator, who took him and why,and after the childhood he gave me do I even care?

Now she's moved back to Circe, Wisconsin, to be the medical examiner and work on those pesky sibling relationships she was denied, the intense emotional damage her abandoned forensic science career at the heights she'd reached, and the husband...well, let's draw a veil over that.

New beginnings in old familiar places. And this murder? What a way to (re)start her law-enforcement career. We're not in cozy anymore...the victim owned a meat-packing business, where he was discovered in his slaughterhouse, and we are off to the procedural races. I was not so sure I'd last as we get a Moby-Dick level of detail very quickly in the said slaughterhouse. No one could possibly enjoy working in a slaughterhouse. Or being in one on...other business. Or even knowing what goes on in one. Or anything in it being made public.

Or, it turns out for Mr. Marcy the dead guy, being involved with the local PTB. Like anyone else whose murder garners law-enforcement attention, the life of the victim and all the lives of those around him are opened up to intense scrutiny by the most motivated nosy people on the planet. It is astonishing how many ugly secrets there are under the rug with barely a lump to give their existence away. A bit less troubling meanness and the rug would never've been moved to expose you, Mr. Marcy....

The story runs in parallel tracks because while all the investigation by Dolores' scoobygroup of Kate (a newbie in the FBI, welcome to the team hope you're a veggie or you will be soon) and Paul, whom we have met before is going on there's also Dolores' processing of her revelations from the first book. That's gonna hurt a long, long time.

Here, then, is the root of the series-appeal of this story: we-the-reader are involved in the larger life of Dolores, the colleague/friends she's lucky enough to have found, as well as in the puzzles she's required to solve as a result of the avoidant career she chose under the stress of her unprocessed trauma. It is the same for series mysteries across all modern time. If series X doesn't appeal it's the world-building that you're not resonating with. Keep shopping, someone's doing exactly, or almost exactly, what you want to read.

I've got this series in my "almost exactly" pile now. Excellent work, Author Adams, and thank you.

EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY, letting go of grieving

EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY
IMBOLO MBUE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were, a captivating novel about love lost—and the weight of regret

What if I’d never gotten into that car? What if I’d pulled out of the driveway five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later?

Three years ago, Wolo’s wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future. In the face of a loss that seemed insurmountable, Wolo has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life: he goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older women in his family. The grief that dogged him has, with time, become a little gentler.

Until a letter arrives one day, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. Wolo’s family pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil; his mother expressly forbids him from making further mention of it; his father’s second wife calls, from Cameroon, to tell him to destroy it. But Wolo ponders it for days, and ultimately agrees to meet with the woman who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman affects him in ways he had never imagined, and he begins to wonder if the long road to healing can be shared.

What do we owe to those who have hurt us? Are we defined by our worst moments and our deepest regrets? And, more than anything, can forgiveness ease our suffering? Moving and full of life, Every Story Is a Love Story charts the uneven path from heartbreak to healing.

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My Review: Wolo found true love with Yoma. It's the loveliest moment in someone's life: love is joyous before Life has its way with you, and Wolo? He was absolutely at the peak of joy because Yoma was pregnant!

Life had its way with him.

Victoria causes the accident that ends Wolo's happiness. It is impossible for Wolo to recover from this hideous, disfiguring agony of grief, and however loudly he tells his mother, his stepmother, his matchmaking aunties this he is still urged to date, to love again, to move on.

As if some random woman will be Yoma again, will be The One, will fill his life with laughter and excitement...impossible. And then. Will you look at that. Victoria writes to express her remorse for the awful thing she caused to happen to him. To ask Wolo to meet her and process their shared grief.

The Greek chorus of Wolo's life is unequivocal: Do not do this. Don't even think about doing this. You're morbidly obsessed with your loss already don't reinforce it is the universal subtext of their advice. Wolo's stunted, limited existence, the one he resists altering because letting go of his rage and agony feels like killing Yoma and their unborn twins again, has to change or Wolo will die. From the inside out.

So he says yes.

It was here I began to see why Author Mbue chose flashback, a style of storytelling I often find disinvolving, for Wolo's process of healing. It is reinjuring him, it is shoving his head in the waterboarding bucket again and again...it is allowing him just enough air to survive...it is letting him pull his feet under him on the wet floor and lurch and stumble away from the bucket...it is the light that shows the hand extended to him, showing a human is reaching with kind and helpful intent into his dark, drowning life.

It shows Wolo Victoria. Her pain from causing him pain. Her knowledge that she harmed Wolo, she (without malice) stole his life from him and wants so badly to do anything to help him because only that will help her.

And he reaches back.

Everything else I could say is spoilerific. I didn't give it a full-five rating because of spoilery stuff, but look how close I came. (Side note: I am so very happy to have as of October 2026 the ability to give quarter-star ratings on the country's biggest book-discovery engine.) It is Author Mbue's gift to be able to visit the darkest places in a person's life while they are floodlit in Capitalism's distracting material abundance and spiritual moonless midnight. This is another of her immigrants' tales of fitting in being less important than settling down.

It is a beautiful story with some odd edges to keep it from melting into the pleasant sameness of the bulk of entertaiment. That hard-to-differentiate mass gets so stultifyingly dull.

SLEEPERS IN THE SNOW, pretty sentences telling a supremely silly story just for fun...it is!

SLEEPERS IN THE SNOW
JOANNE HARRIS
Pegasus Crime (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping and powerful suspense story of love, loss, and the mysteries of memory by internationally bestselling author Joanne Harris.

Out on the moor, in the snow, a house stands beneath a pylon. It is a house full of memories and old things. And, in the dark, when the pylon sings in the wind, it is a house full of ghosts and fading memories . . .

The house, Kirkhill, has a new occupant—just moved in, fresh from a bitter divorce and looking for a new start. The moor is the perfect place for isolated, beautiful in the changing seasons, peaceful, and with just enough of the previous owners’ belongings that it’s a perfectly self-contained and cozy home.

Only, as the nights start to draw in and the weather takes a turn, so does the house. The cozy isolation becomes menacing, animals begin acting strangely, and it seems someone could be watching the house. And the diaries of the previous owners begin to reveal a terrible tragedy which befell Kirkhill—one which its new occupant may be unable to escape.

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My Review: Midsommar meets gender-flipped Rebecca sans Mrs. Danvers. Our unnamed narrator doesn't feel to the reader like he really belongs in Kirkhill—why is he so grateful the previous occupants left their stuff behind?—but we're on a slow reveal schedule with only him to rely on for details of what exactly happened in his past as well as is happening in the present. Was getting an isolated big pile of a place isolated on the moors a particularly sound idea for a recently divorced guy? (Not really, as it happens. Not precisely unexpectedly.)

As our PoV man ruminates about how angry he is at Her (must've been infidelity, nothing makes fictional men madder), he distracts himself by nosing into Caroline and Arthur's left-behind diaries. Right on cue, the house starts moving stuff around, making small things disappear and furniture suddenly be in shin-barking places. It's left nebulous if he believes this is why stuff is moving; as he is not getting any younger it's probably the ordinary aging memory issues.

My eyes rolled so far back I saw my brain. Hauntings aren't ever going to convince me presented like this. The spooky stuff-moving-around trope is bollocks; real hauntings are memories you can't shake, love you did not give when you could have, wanted to, but didn't; memories you cherish and can not ever share because they weren't made in shareable ways. This guy reads someone else's diary and somehow it all matters enough to him that he is going a bit crazy over what he has no way to know or reason to trust is not a lie or a fantasy?

It sounds like I disliked the read. I mostly didn't. I mostly fell in love woth Author Harris's beautifully evocative sentences taking me into chilly drafts, wide vistas of unpopulated ground that can't be built on because it's that halfway point between bog and dirt that is moorland, all to the souundtrack of the huge electrical pylon that's right over the house huuming and buzzing. Of course it's there over the house...it's the only buildable land for macres around. As someone who's had tinnitus since the mumps left me with them in 1965 (I think), I can confirm the sound of electricity buzzzing and humming can be very soothing or very very annoying, depending on one's mood and/or the other ambient sounds.

It's the kiind of detail that the author had no way to know anyone would for sre have experience of, but she got the effect of that kind of eerie variable hum on a person's mood, without ever obtruding into full awareness for someone whose tinnitus is not necessarily real, would have or know. Still she got it right. And not by accident. That's excellent craft work. My headcanoon is that the narrator does have tinnitus but there is no direct factual statement to that effect.

What there is, comme d'habitude with Joanne Harris, is good writing telling a good story about a person whose feelings are powerfully agitated; and we go on the journey through those feelings with the person until...an end is reached. It was not really an ending but it definitely was the egress from the story.

Well worth the trip for her fans, and if (like me) you loved Piranesi you'll hear echoes from that megaton explosion of creativity.

THE OCCIDENTAL BOOK OF THE DEAD: A (really long) Novel

THE OCCIDENTAL BOOK OF THE DEAD: A Novel
T. GERONIMO JOHNSON
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and National Book Award longlisted author of Welcome to Braggsville, comes this long-awaited, visionary new novel centered on a Black cop in an Atlanta precinct, whose façade of white alliance begins to crumble after a highly publicized murder.

George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta’s poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It’s 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described “redneck” who takes Jonson under his wing.

After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life for himself in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he’s still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies—all threatening to be exposed as investment in the case mounts to a fever pitch.

When the white-washed veneer of Jonson’s life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.

Employing a bold, inventive structure and spanning two fraught decades, vividly evoking the complexities of the South, and written with the same virtuosic dissonance and insight as his previously acclaimed novels, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a propulsive, pyrotechnic exploration of systems of corruption and conspiracy—and an epic, unflinching portrait of a nation divided.

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

My Review: Pay close attention to the format shift. Its tonal shift is obviously important; its timing might need some thought but it needs the effort to get the most out of it.

A very long read that, if you're at all like me, goes to some places so dark you will need some days off when certain sections are over.

What happens when ot's YOUR son/nephew/grandson, white people? Why does justice suddenly matter so much that millions get spent on intensive incestigations, careers are suddenly at stake, press conferences get held? I've never, in almost seventy years of life spent mainly in New York City and Texas...so among guns...had a gun pointed at me. Imagining it fills me with cold dread.

But that's all I do. I summon the image and play pretend because it's never happened to me, or to anyone I've ever known at all well. I'm not particularly unusual in this way.

I'm not Black. (Duh.) My Black friends and acquaintances are privileged, educated people. Yet I am sure we would get to gun violence faster checking in with them than with me.

Author Geronimo writes about the futility of expecting the privileged to see or to amend their access to privilege. It is a mug's game to think "ally" is meaningful and substantive label. I know this intimately from being among the QUILTBAG communities and seeing the ease with which people turn us into "them" really fast. It doesn't even need to be for a reason, there's no excuse required, you're suddenly, unexpectedly on the outside looking in.

And that, played out in a story about a man in authority, is a very powerful piece of literary ju jitsu. It is greatly to Author Geronimo's credit that he does not foreshadow things so heavily as to make them feel overly familiar when they occur. It takes considerable, and all too uncommon, levels of skill to achieve that device. It's a craft skill I wish was more widely distributed.

My criticism of this read is length. It can feel very much like we're living the story in real time. Considering it's a very weighty tale indeed, it's a big ask...let alone asking it twice in a row.

NIGHT OF A THOUSAND HELLS: A Novel, Indonesia's fascinating cultural mix made clearer than before

NIGHT OF A THOUSAND HELLS: A Novel
INTAN PARAMADITHA (tr. Stephen Epstein, Tiffany Tsao)
Europa Editions
$12.99 ebook, available now

On the 2026 Finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A genre-defying feminist gothic novel blending Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism, horror, and political reckoning

International literary sensation Intan Paramaditha returns with her most ambitious and haunting work to date. The novel opens with a devastating the youngest of three sisters becomes a suicide bomber. In the aftermath, her surviving siblings are forced to confront the violent, buried truths of their family history. Their search leads them to long-concealed secrets, and to the prophecies of their grandmother, whose shadowy wisdom has shaped their fates.

Set across Indonesia, the United States, and Australia, the novel explores class divides, sisterhood, migration, shame, abandonment, and the politics of care—all through a ghostly, atmospheric lens that draws on Asian folktales and occult traditions.

With its blend of political urgency, mythic resonance, and psychological depth, Night of a Thousand Hells is a singular contribution to global feminist literature.

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

My Review: After knocking around the publishing industry for a while, and after spending many decades thinking about stories and how they get made and sold, I've come to respond with knee-jerk skepticism to certain phrases. A particularly powerful example is "genre-defying." I read it, I hear the marketing department and the sales manager hollering "what the actual fuck IS this thing? what do we tell the Dubuque bus station kiosk owner to shelve it as?" with some poor editorial assistant saying back "it's beautiful writing!" because he has no idea what genre boxes are for yet.

It is indeed beautiful writing, Taylor or whatever, and you should be proud of your role in bringing it to market. Luckily the author and translators have track records of success because if this was a debut novel it would be on a *serious* uphill trajectory. Islam's long history in Indonesia, its region-specific folklore, and the US culture's present hostility to the mere mention of the religion is working against the country's readers finding a reason to read a book about a family's reactions to a young woman's suicide bombing done with her husband and one of her children...honestly, who would not find that a hard, hard topic to grapple with? Then we have the Indonesian cultural milieu separate from Islam, in the story they intersect of course, but the specific-to-Indonesia and its wide cultural diversity elements are not fully mappable onto religious strictures and shibboleths.

So there are a lot of issues to negotiate. Not gonna lie or frost your donut. The reason you should want to read the story anyway is the reason to read any story: It's as much fun as the effort you need to put into it. We're hearing from multiple people, most importantly the dead woman's sisters and their grandmother. We're given, at different times, words from the family's servant from days gone by; sober, factual news reports (as one might expect); phrases from the Qur’an, again expected given what's occurred; and sensational tabloid screaming, again expectedly. Maya, the sister who now lives across the globe in New York, is writing a novel, bits of which are included at emotionally relevant times. Mutiara the solid one, the one who does the maintenance on the family, and grandmother Victoria appear as very distictive voices. Annisa, the family's golden child who inexplicably did this awful thing, is met posthumously through diary entries.

It is here the fifth star sets under the horizon. As fascinating as the story is, Annisa appears to me the least-developed, thus least interesting to me, character. It was as though the author needed to tell us things to explain Annisa to us so we don't simply have a cipher dragging the story into ugly, sensationalist tabloid territory. I agree; I would've liked these diary entries to have emotional impact beyond purporting to be from a suicide bomber, and I did not get that. I got generic-feeling pronoucements and bland uninflected propaganda points.

This disappointment was clearly not fatal to my pleasure in the read as my rating should amply demonstrate. I found the cultural elucidation to be defy, not drawn out into sociology-text realms. I wasn't as immersed in the cultural exchange as a result, though it was a facet of the story it was never THE story. I might've liked that story as well, but it wasn't what I was told to expect so I didn't.

Patriarchy, religious as well as social, and its dark, evil use of secrecy to divide and conquer those it wishes to exploit and dominate comes in for a thorough drubbing. The way women in ordinary Indonesian Muslim families are indoctrinated in patriarchy's expectations, implying they are the immutable commands of God, is rotten. The isolation of these women from the outside world, and even from each other, is the tool used to psychologically warp and destroy them. Accustoming people to the horrific abusive realities of religious social control allows the religious leaders enormous leeway to foment violence as well as to commit it. No further text.

Part of the deeply unfamiliar cultural detail in this story comes from the QUILTBAG community's presence, never overstated, in these pages. It was fascinating and an enrichment of my delighted awareness of just how true "we're here, we're queer, we're not staying in your closet" needs to remain through action against high-control systems with delusions of global supremacy.

A story I'm going to think about, mull over, analyze for some time to come; and do all those things in an engaged, interested, involved way.

SAVING THE FIRE: A Novel, multiple prize-winner ITAMAR VIEIRA JUNIOR's follow-up to Crooked Plow

SAVING THE FIRE: A Novel (Trilogia da Terra #2)
ITAMAR VIEIRA JUNIOR (tr. Johnny Lorenz)
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The highly anticipated sequel to the Booker-shortlisted international sensation, Crooked Plow

Moisés lives with his father, Mundinho, and his sister, Luzia, in Tapera do Paraguaçu, a rural village in Bahia. His other siblings have left, and their mother vanished. Tapera, what remains of it, is a community of farmers, fishermen, and potters of Afro-Indigenous origin, overlooked from on high by a forbidding seventeenth century monastery, from which the church still rules over all they survey. With their mother long vanished, Luzia provides what she can by way of care and affection for her brother, but the long hours she works at the monastery, and the whispers about her strange powers, limit her capacity and she dreams of a family reunited and of liberty, of freedom from decades of suffering and decades of secrets.

Epic and lyrical, with the power to both enchant and outrage the reader, Saving the Fire shows us that the ghosts of a family's past are often indistinguishable from the shadows of a nation. Masterfully, Itamar Vieira Junior blends the intimate journeys of his characters with faithfully rendered elements of Brazilian life. It's a story permeated by the spectre of colonialism, the scars of which still show, and still ache.

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

My Review: Book two of a trilogy started by Author Vieira in Crooked Plow (link is to the Foreword Reviews review, as I have not read the book)...shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize...this story won the 2024 Jabuti Award for Best Novel (his second win, after 2020's for Crooked Plow). The name might not mean much to Anglophones, but the "tortoise" award is most of a century old and quite prestigious in Brazil. Jorge Amado won the inaugural award in 1959 (first of several); Clarice Lispector in 1978; João Gilberto Noll first in 1994; serious, heavy-hitting writers who deserve more renown in the US on literary merit, as well as on the principle that understanding other cultures is best begun by reading their favorite stories.

Continuing his exploration of rural Bahia, Author Itamar creates the village of Tapera do Paraguaçu to play out this polyphonic novel. An Afro-Indigenous family, broken and hag-ridden by tenacious, toxic African-religion superstitions, the Catholic Church's dominance in the community...and the very common trauma of sexual assault from Catholic priests...all stacking atop political and social marginalization plus dispossesion from the land that feeds them. The state of Bahia is a very old colonizer locus, thus the heavy influence of African-tradition religious activity as morphed by centuries of Catholic persecution. It's an old church technique, branding indigenous religion's flaws and faults as superstitions while hiding (in Brazil's case) behind absolute civil immunity for criminal acts. Of which there are plenty in this story.

Moisés da Silva, our primary PoV character for the first chapter, and his sisters are struggling along with everyone else jusy to find enough to eat. He chooses the common path of running away to the city in order to reduce the famiy's load; his sister Luzia (narrating the second chapter) remains, garnering a reputation as a witch because she's visibly disabled. She's working a paying job in the local monastery's laundry, which puts her in harm's way across several axes. All the other siblings, in common with the rest of the community, scramble to make the family's ends meet. Maria, the only other da Silva sibling we spend significant time with, had an "easy" path of marriage, taking her away from the family in the third chapter. Marriage is not ever an escape!

It has the intended effect of poverty. People who struggle to stay fed are less likely to foment rebellion, that's the behavior of those who can no longer even do that much. It's also a means of preventing families from developing the kind of intimacy that comes from being able to articulate your pain to each other, discovering how similar in effect you are to those around you. The opening scene throws you in medias res into the desparate and painful this life we're vicariously sharing truly is. People driven to these extremes aren't able, never having been taught how, to communicate and share their pain.

It is a lake of fire. It is life lived while the fire consumes you...living next to the living entity of the River Paraguaçu, unquenched in their burning, desperate in their thirst, locked away without the burning walls ever collapsing enough to set them free just ablaze. Wait...there are over four stars up there...what the what? It's dark and sad and terrible!

It's true and powerful and, in its survivors' acts of self-empowerment from the first pages onward, deeply inspiring. Humans gutting it out, battling injustice, refusing to be deprived forever...a modern take on The Grapes of Wrath, Brazilianized. In the story's structure the fourth and last chapter melds all three previous points of view, brings all the toughest troubles tohgether, provides the da Silva faily a jumping off point into the always-uncertain thing we call the future:

Time passes, but we don’t exhaust the world of its mysteries, and when we unveil the truth, we unveil just a part.

TAXI DANCER: A Novel, based on a sad, depressingly relevant true story

TAXI DANCER: A Novel
MARIVI SOLIVEN
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "Welcome to the electrifying underworld of California’s Depression-era taxi dance halls, where a dance could cost you a dime, a chance at romance, or a bullet in your back.”—Rick Bonus, Professor and Chair at the Dept. of American Ethnic Studies in the University of Washington

Based on a true story, Taxi Dancer is a gripping historical novel by Marivi Soliven that illuminates the hidden world of Depression-era Filipino taxi dance halls, weaving a forbidden interracial romance with a high-stakes murder mystery to explore race, desire, survival, and the Filipino American experience in 1930s California.

“If we can’t marry white girls, we can at least dance with them.” In response to Depression-era California laws that criminalized interracial marriage, Filipinos established taxi dance halls where they could mingle with American women. When Filipino farmworker Eli and American taxi dancer Lucinda fall in love, they hope to move to Washington State where they can legally wed. Their plans are derailed when Eli is arrested for the shooting death of a dance hall owner. As Lucinda fights to exonerate Eli, she uncovers a murder conspiracy orchestrated by Mamie Savage, a rival dance hall owner and Sal, her Filipino bartender. The capital punishment trial brings to light abhorrent secrets concealed by the conspirators, the victim, and Lucinda herself. Inspired by true events in San Diego’s Stingaree district.

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

My Review: Laws about whom you are allowed to marry are always popular among the "FREEDOM FREEDOM—not for you for me" religious or otherwise intellectually impaired sort. I get that the state has a need to know with whom its citizens and residents are forming households. Beyond registering those households formed, there's no need to poke further into their business.

That's not a popular opinion in these United States in the year of our lord two thousand twenty-six. It's being shoved down our throats that some people, white men especially, deserve more of the benefits that come from freedom than other, darker and/or female people, do. This is not new, nor is it confined to the US. It's a nasty, unjustifiable piece of cruelty that's been on the run for decades and that rollback of privilege is now taking root. Therefore the demographic and actuarial reality that fewer white males are being born thus diluting their godlike, "god given" dominion over...them...is fading. The present dangerous pass in public life is down to the death throes of the established order being played out with maximal ferocity because, once gone, there will be no way to get them all back.

Exhibit A: look at every "AI" controlling person's color and genitalia.

As proof it's not a new thing, look at the reason this book exists. It's telling the story of a statutorily "inferior" man forgetting his appointed place and having sex with a white woman. Stick to your own kind, race purity is paramount so you getting a white woman pregnant is not to be tolerated! This panic, fomented by the likes of Stephen Miller among others, has deep roots in white nationlism and authoritarian corporatocracy. The Filipina author of this story based it on a tragedy that occurred in San Diego, California; I was surprised at how totally unfamiliar I, a native Californian, was with this aspect of the state's ethnic history.

It was the first of several revelations. Like everyone of my generation, I'd at least heard of (in my case seen) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? so was aware in a vague, general way that there were things called "dance halls" and the dancing was a form of socially accepted foreplay conducted for profit by unsavory people. I had not put that together with the "shocking" idea that the races (stupid term) can mix! Panic! Horripilation! In structuring her story on the bones of a real, dreadful moment in San Diego history, Author Soliven uses the time-honored epistolary method for relevant passages from official records, newspaper accounts, and suchlike demonstations of the story's authentic roots, interspersing the imagined—I'd say better described as "recaptured"—dialogues. It makes Eli and Lucinda and Amado and all the other men and women in the story come alive in sharp relief. Like a change in lighting from fluorescent ceiling fixtures in linoleumed hallways into soft lamplight on carpeted upholstered comfortable spaces.

As the story unfolds the Filipino words and phrases become more than Google fodder, the sounds and the feel of the words in my mouth become part of a truly immersive journey into a cultural state of mind. I had not expected to experience this because I am very unfamiliar with more than the broadest outlines of the milieu. In US colonial history the Philippines loom large, after all General MacArthur had roots there and he was a huge figure in my early life; but that's not the Filipino people, their lives, their needs and wants from coming here. As I spent more time with these fictionalized people and moved between chapters through the epistolary bits, I got more and more into Author Soliven's characters in their raw form. It made me appreciate more and more her careful work of fleshing the factual bones with forms so real I was gripped. I cared more what was coming next in their story after each reminder of the facts.

It all leads to tragedy. All stories do, as death is always without fail the end of The Story. In this case, Amado is shot and killed in his successful dance hall for stupid, petty reasons (at the literal beginning of the book, it's not a spoiler)...but the system's wicked, cruel restraints are, as so often, the levers used to move the structures a bit more in the direction of Justice.

We're still working on fairness. It appears to be a Sisyphean task.