MURDER OF A MERRY GENTLEMAN, Lady Petra Inquires series book 4...the fun continues

MURDER OF A MERRY GENTLEMAN (Lady Petra Inquires #4)
CELESTE CONNALLY
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Bridgerton meets Agatha Christie in this dazzling fourth installment to the captivating Regency-era Lady Petra Inquires mystery series.

London, December, 1815. It's Christmastime, and Lady Petra Forsyth is assisting the Lady Patronesses of Almack’s Assembly Rooms with four bachelor-auction dances to be held in the fortnight before Christmas Eve. With one eligible young lady per night winning the right to dance with the four eligible bachelors―called “the Merry Gentlemen” in a nod to the season―it’s sure to be a delightful event.

Until the first dance, when Petra and a group of science-minded young ladies discover the dead body of one of the bachelors. The death is deemed an accident, but when another bachelor’s life is nearly ended, Petra fears something sinister may be afoot. What’s more, Petra’s young friend Teddy has arrived at her door, begging for help. His long-absent mother has been imprisoned, and Teddy is certain she is innocent of her crime.

Time is of the essence in both cases, and Petra is asked to investigate from within by pretending to be one of the ladies vying for the bachelors’ attentions. Indeed, it’s enough to make an obstinate headstrong girl scream.

As she works to unravel the truth, Petra will need to act like a lady―a Lady Patroness, that is―think like an enterprising scientist, and use every investigative tactic she’s learned to solve two mysteries before she becomes the next target.

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My Review: A treat, as are all one's encounters with Lady Petra despite those encounters being predicated on a murder being committed. She is an amusing companion, much given to asking questions that, from the lower sort of person, would be quite impertinent. It has established Lady Petra as quite a necessary figure among those who are able to get a voucher for Almack's.

One is never willing to discuss one's troubles openly so Lady Petra, a gently-born person who understands one's social...concerns do not always admit of a frank or open discussion can act on information not quite suitable to speak aloud. With aplomb and with a most gratifying record of success, Lady Petra undertakes a discreet inquiry into the sad fates of some seemingly suitable suitors; early graves for unmarried and eligible bachelors are simply not to be shrugged off as regrettable. Lady Petra, without being bluntly directed to cast a wide net, investigates without regard to social standing those who could be regarded as possible malefactors. Discreetly! Always discreetly! The Lady Patronesses of Almack's beed to know what hass happened, though not appearing to concern themselves with shocking topics of common, vulgar gossip like....murder.

As you'd expect from the latest entry in a series of cozy mysteries, rgere's a scoobygroup...two, this time...of daffy, delightful folk who just *might* take themselves a bit too seriously. The Merry Gentlemen stand accused of stealing the researches of the Minerva Society, secretive women inquiring into the way the Universe works. Men stealing women's ideas and work? My pearls, my pearls. It all kicks off when one of the Merry Gentlemen and a very eligible catch dies. Suddenly. Not peacefully. It's the dead middle of the (slightly anachronistically Dickensian) Christmas festivities. Society's mating rituals cannot be interrupted and require a full cast. One man down and one more a close call, Lady Petra begins to feel there is much she is not being told.

Her setting out to discover whose secrets are so important as to require murder to keep means she interacts with the accustomed lage cast, uses skills she does not reveal she possesses or else many awkward questions would ensue, attends balls she does not enjoy...though I sure did, that gargantuan use of the produce of the world is *lush* and those bakers should all be on Bake Off...and in the end a solution is revealed.

It fits. It's not a cheat. And I was not a fan, not convinced by it.

I delighted in getting there, I was so involved in the story, that I can't go less than four and a half stars.

But it teetered on the precipice of five.

THE BODY IN THE BATH finishes some things, leaves others hanging, and starts new ones

THE BODY IN THE BATH (Helgi Trilogy #3)
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Philip Roughton)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the bestselling author of The Mysterious Case of The Missing Crime Writer comes the next mystery featuring detective Helgi Reykdal.

As snow blankets Reykjavík and Christmas approaches, young detective Helgi is looking forward to a quiet holiday―until those plans are torn away in a flash. One month after his girlfriend Aníta is killed in a car accident, he returns to work in Reykjavík, haunted by loss and rage. The driver―Helgi's ex-girlfriend Bergþóra, a violent alcoholic whose abuse he kept secret―insists Aníta's death was an accident and walks free.

To escape his mounting despair, Helgi throws himself into the unsolved disappearance of his predecessor, Hulda, a retired officer long presumed dead. But as he follows the traces she left behind, the lines between her past and his present begin to blur . . .

When Bergþóra is later found lifeless in her bath, suspicion falls squarely on Helgi. With his own colleagues turning against him, can he uncover the truth in time?

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My Review: Bergþóra/Bergthora dies!! I was a teeny bit bummed because there was no loving description of her death agonies, nor was Helgi poppin' champagne corks and dancing through Reykjavík in joyous abandon. Of course, Aníta is recently lost to that car accident...here's a good place to strongly caution you to read the stories in order...so it makes some sense.

It's how Hulda and Helgi, arrayed against the time-serving 'tude of their colleagues on the police force who lack the zeal for justice and the satisfaction of conducting the chase after the truth those two share, in their shared love of Golden Age crime writers, always put a foot down, then the other, then repeat until the trail ends...usually with the murderer at the end...that makes these such good reads. It means the Wimseyness of Ellerying out a resolution to murder keeps them going, keeps we-the-reader flipping pages.

Hulda, whose PoV we follow in two timelines, is an excellent detective who has vanished in the book's present. Helgi reads the books she's known to be reading during a case from 30+ years ago that Helgi thinks will explain her disappearance. The list is at the front of this book, so you'll never lack for ways to acquire clues. That 1980 case is one I'd expected to be the key to discovering Hulda's disappearance that her lovely colleagues in the book's present simply can't get worked up about. Helgi believes these men came up with the idea that Hulda ran away so they just wouldn't need to work the case, so he relentlessly follows her case in 1980...whan she solves it...and nothing doing on more help figuring out why she's disappeared.

After that disappointment, Helgi's lazy colleague Máni propounds the theory that Helgi murdered his murderin' ex so he needs to arrest him. How startling, one of Helgi's colleagues does not think on his level and sees an easy way to score a W without needing to do a lot of leg- or brain-work.

Here's where that quarter-star pulled a Hulda and vanished. There's a wat that it all works with Máni and Helgi ending up the same place at the same time to have the murderer of Bergthora confess and explain why that murder took place. It's convoluted and kinetic and, while it takes us where the resolution to the charges against Helgi are made clear, it does not fully end the story.

That's both good...I like the way Helgi works and want more...and annoying because it gives Helgi a reputational hit. I trust Ragnar to make that work into the plot. I also want to slug Ragnar for the Hulda-in-1980 rugpull. You're evil, Ragnar.

When's the next one coming?

THE WONDER THAT WAS OURS, 2017 Dzanc Prize-winning in paperback at last

THE WONDER THAT WAS OURS
ALICE HATCHER
Dzanc Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: FINALLY IN PAPERBACK!
WINNER OF THE 2017 DZANC PRIZE FOR FICTION
CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE—LONGLIST

Wynston Cleave, a Black taxi driver on a small Caribbean island, spent years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of the death of a wealthy white tourist. Finally released, he tries to piece his life together working as a bartender and reading literary classics to the unruly cockroaches infesting his taxi.

On the anniversary of his arrest, Wynston picks up two white Americans just kicked off a cruise ship. The next day, the ship reports a deadly viral outbreak. As the tourist economy collapses, the island succumbs to riots and a devastating spiral of violence, and Wynston’s fate becomes entwined with that of three strangers: his American passengers and a local named Tremor, the focus of a vicious police manhunt.

Narrated by the sharp-witted roaches infesting Wynston’s taxi, The Wonder That Was Ours explores deep racial and class divides through the most unlikely eyes imaginable, taking a unique perspective on prejudice, compassion, and the absurdity of the human experience. A poignant, worldly, and unforgettable novel in the spirit of Exit West and Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.

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My Review: Alice Hatcher's Dzanc-Prize winning comedic send-up of colonialism's twitching Caribbean corpse was funny. It's got one issue I can't shake: the tone does not feel fresh, inevitably for a 2018 publication skewering the social tenor of times.

Wynston(look at that name, turn its choice around in your head...Churchill or Smith?)'s irritating to me, the people around him are well enough realized as individuals that *they* annoy me as well...and the laughs I'd barked out in 2018 didn't return. A case of a story that met its moment during what I now realize, and this story crystallized for me, was a wholly different, clownishly clumsy era of Cheeto Benito, Mango Mussolini, and the confused clown show that was Trump I. We are now midway through a carefully planned blitzkrieg against the idea of democracy itself in felonious yam's grifterpalooza, spearheaded by Eichmann...I mean Steven Miller, as less than ably assisted by a rotating cast of incompetent and venal idiots with the shadows full of canny stringpullers who sacrifice the idiots as soon as their loyalty to the idea hurting people they hate being limited solely to people they hate blows up and they say "ouch."

It's not L'elisir d'amore anymore. It's I Vespri Siciliani.

The reason this matters when reading...or selling...this book is the tonal mismatch with the existential stakes 2026 readers exist inside. The narrators being cockroaches infesting Wynston's taxi is the most successful of all the book's tropes in a 2026 context. If your humor will support a trip among real-feeling, annoying twidgees doing farcical things for obscure-to-me reasons as narrated by vermin I myownself squish on sight, it might just be for you. If you'd like to see a comedic work by an author whose worldview is cooly ironic, a good choice. A book I respected for its craft but never fell in second love with.

JUST PILLS: The Extraordinary Story of a Revolution in Abortion Care, nuanced but incomplete due to intractable issues the author can't solve

JUST PILLS: The Extraordinary Story of a Revolution in Abortion Care
REBECCA KELLIHER
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: As women's rights are increasingly under attack, journalist Rebecca Kelliher dives into the gripping history of abortion pills, weaving together the many people who, across decades and continents, have sought to ensure access to these medications

Spanning more than a century and several continents, with a tenacious cast of feminist activists, scientists, politicians, doctors, and abortion seekers, Just Pills tells the fascinating history of mifepristone and misoprostol, better known as abortion pills.

Millions of women around the world for more than two decades have been using one or both of these medications to safely end their own pregnancies, within or outside the law. These pills continue to hold a promise of expanding abortion access for all. Rebecca Kelliher dives into their invention, their legalization battles, and the ongoing proliferation of care models under bans, deftly introducing people who strive for better.

As women’s rights to control their own bodies are increasingly undermined in the US, this little-known history of the many people behind these life-saving medications will educate, enrage, and inspire.

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My Review: If you do not support a woman's full autonomy over her body, you accept that "They" have a power of compulsion over anyone, literally anyone, that can extend as deeply into that anyone's intimate life as "They" wish it to.

It is that simple.

No power on or of this Earth should be able to tell *you* what to do, of course; just them you know, those people who don't deserve the rights you deserve. Here's the thing: Rights are for all, or no one. It is that absolute.

We carve out those beings being trained about rights, what they are, and how they interact with responsibilities, with the society around us, what exercising a right can and cannot include...we call that "minority" in legal terms, childhood colloquially. It's never really simple, it's certainly never starkly obvious what cultural norms are going to be allowed to override a person's inherent rights. In the US, non-religiously motivated mutilation of male genitalia is ordinary, performed before the male in question is capable of thought still less consent. Yet those who sit blandly by as this occurs are appalled and horrified at other cultures' practice of adolescent clitoridectomy.

So...rights are universal or they are not; customs are to be respected or they are not; and nowhere in any of this hellbrew of passionate opinion is there an obvious path for nuance, discussion, negotiation of a modus vivendi that accomplishes protection of people from the tyranny of ideology.

Just Pills: The Extraordinary Story of a Revolution in Abortion Care provides a clear argument for the legal availability, on health grounds, of these genuinely life-saving means of ending unwanted and/or unsafe pregnancies. Author Kelliher does this job with facts and a clarity of argument I admire.

I agree with her. Restricting availability of these safe, effective healthcare treatments is, in my never-remotely humble opinion, tantamount to a sentence of death for women, more particularly very young women with few, often poor, role models of the consequences of sexual activity. Abortion will always happen. Safe and legal abortion will simply be replaced by unsafe, too often fatal, abortions.

It's a risk that's being forced on the most vulnerable, least prepared people disproportionately. It's being forced on everyone, without exception, because some ideologues and those with a societal bias towards women do not like the idea of women as full citizens with defensible, inalienable rights.

In the Great NO of 3 November 2026, these (re)marginalized women turned out in *huge* numbers to shout at the US political establishment. They helped all of us by pushing back. We, all of us but especially men...straight or gay or all the shades in between...should support the restoration of women's right to choose their own futures as a favor returned. As moral actors in a world full of people who demand women as human sacrifices to their agenda, men should stand as tall and wide as they can between those evildoers and the women we all know best: mothers, sisters, mates. It is only right and proper to oppose harm being done to others right in front of you.

Step up, men, it's a chance to solidify opposition to a destructive, controlling agenda into a firm foundation that favors autonomy for all. Women I exhort to refuse to stop exercising your autonomy in every way.

THE FIRST HOUSE: A Novel, when you lose your head, find Diana, and gain a billion cicadas

THE FIRST HOUSE: A Novel
AVNI DOSHI
S&S/Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Booker Prize finalist author of Burnt Sugar comes a riveting novel of rupture and rebirth, of one woman’s journey to understand the fault lines in her marriage, her home, and her family.

When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My head is missing.

A husband announces he is leaving, that he was never happy. A woman is left behind with their two children in the house they built together, reeling at this forced recasting of the story of their marriage. Everything becomes an encounter at the grocery store, a looming cicada horde, a statue of Diana that suddenly appears in her neighbor’s yard. Or was it always there?

As she wades through the aftermath of her marriage, her complicated family resurfaces. Although close to her parents, her relationship with them is strained, and she is fully estranged from her older sister—the perfect daughter—who still lives at home and always disapproved of her husband. So when did the trouble begin? And where will she go from here?

When she was a child, an astrologer in India told her parents that the family would die in water. Ever since, they’ve avoided pools and lakes and the ocean; no one ever learned to swim. From the Booker finalist and beloved author of Burnt Sugar comes a brilliant story of betrayal, renunciation, and renewal, of a woman spiraling who swims to the other side and comes up for air.

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My Review: I have had the experience of learning, abruptly, that I was having a different relationship than my partner was, while we were still having it. It is...disorienting, to put it mildly. What did I miss? is on a loop in the broken-up-with one's head. What happened, what did I do, what can I do...unanswerable because if the answer was in you, you would've seen it, probably would've stopped it from reaching the breaking point...like the way he refuses to to discuss why her credit card keeps failing, where it is he disappears to. I don't think I really need to belabor these points since Author Doshi doesn't.

Knowing you're not in love with someone several children into a marriage isn't an unusual state of affairs...happened to my mother, my father too albeit with a different woman. It's weird, this thing we call marriage in the US, so wildly consequential to your health, wealth, and happiness and so very very few guardrails to the roads entering it while so very very many trammel your pathway out. The narrator did not have the support of her family going into this marriage, her parents and sister found her husband untrustworthy; now that he's decided to go for his own happiness and she's still in the first house dealing with the consequences, she sees the obstacles and restrictions ahead.

It's a good moment to discuss the astrology underpinning the story. A blocked novelist turned praticing astrologer, the narrator sees how wonderfully astrology assembles a narrative for the failure of her marriage in the first angular house. (Interesting she, a first-generation South Asian immigrant family member, did not choose Vedic astrology to practice. Avoiding racializing yourself in that way has first house implications.) I'll put the Wikipedia précis of the meaning of the first house here: "The angular houses of the horoscope are considered to be the most ardent, or forceful, and are considered to have the greatest impact in the chart. The influential 17th-century astrologer William Lilly states simply: 'Planets in angles do more forcibly show their effects.' Angular houses rule those critical things in our life, such as our appearance and how we behave, our family life, our married life or partnerships, and our career." Our understanding of astrology as readers is best surrendered to Author Doshi, though. Follow her lead.

What resonated with me was our narrator's use of astrology rather than her understanding of it as a practice. As raising children fully eats one's creative force in many, many people, the narrator must find both income and outlet from and for her creativity. Astrology to the rescue. It provides moments of easter-egged humor as we go though the story. On the narrator's quest to put this life-changing shift in her marriage into context, figure out how to be a functional parent and (self-)provider, find her feet with the birth-family who candidly disliked the abandoner from the start and will recolonize her every thought, feeling, and action unless she is truly vigilant, when in this mishegas does she have a minute to grieve her loss?

Never. So the human thing to do is to find a story. Her own springs being low, maybe even goddesses forfend dry, she turns to the myths that underpin astrology and culture more broadly. Have the neighbors always had a statue of Diana in their yard? Diana, huntress, virgin, changeable Diana thirty feet away? There it is though...whenever it got there, it's there...and it's the catalyst for the narrator to examine the fear, the wilful blindness of her (and her older sister's) carefully padded, packed away, crated for storage emotional lives: "What I had believed to be indestructible was gone. The way I had engaged with the world was no longer possible. The children came into the room, already in their pyjamas, and caught me talking to myself. They couldn't understand that I was meeting myself as someone new."

Child of immigrants who carry very different ideas about how to feel with the narrator's new status from her own, still muddled, ones, the narrator has to confront her adult self's precarity by resisting her family's intrusive bullying with enough panache to maintain a thread of connection. In her meeting with herself as a monad, the narrator understands mother's and sister's worlds are her world: compromise, retreat, rock no boats follow no clues to pay for Security. The narrator's bargain was reneged on by the party of the second part. Her female relatives...they have feelings, no reason to look into them like the narrator has, and estrangement makes them unwilling to listen to her.

The great power of betrayal, of destruction, is its undeniability. The ruins are there. The foundations aren't there. The situation of economic and emotional dependence on outsiders, others, is the root of her first-house troubles. In her attempts to find a self while becoming of necessity someone new in practical terms, the narrator channels all her story-stuff...research, reading, thinking...into a scaffolding to hang a new self woven intentionally in full knowledge of where the old version failed first.

There was not one person in this story I liked, would invite to my home for a day's relaxing chat and cooking and just...being. They're all determined to make their forced-from-without changes as hard and as noisily painful as possible. What I felt for them was compassion. What I could not believe was how invested I was in their irritating nonsense. I wanted each of them to figure it out, to get to the floorboards that might creak...gotta make noise...but will hold them up while they learn to support their own internality.

It is why I landed a bit above the baseline four stars this kind of capable, slightly overwound storytelling merits. Author Doshi, I will be delighted to see where you decide to lead me next.

WE WERE PROMISED: How an Appalachian Grandmother Fought a Corporate Giant, stirring citizen activism

WE WERE PROMISED: How an Appalachian Grandmother Fought a Corporate Giant
JULIA FLINT (foreword by Elizabeth Catte, Appalachian and author of What You're Getting Wrong About Appalachia)
University Press of Kentucky (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all print editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Karen "Momma K" Gorrell did not consider herself to be an activist. But when those she cared about were wronged, she refused to remain silent. With the economy still reeling from the Great Recession in 2011, Karen's husband and other retirees of the Century Aluminum plant―a pillar of industry in their rural community of Ravenswood―had their healthcare benefits terminated. The United Steelworkers had negotiated for these union members to have a portion of their wages deducted to fund future benefits, and the employees worked for decades with the promise of health insurance upon retirement. When Century idled the plant and reneged on its agreement, retirees were left without affordable care at the time they needed it most.

Knowing lives were on the line, Karen vowed to do whatever she could to pressure Century to reinstate retirees' promised benefits. Within months, she became the lead organizer and spokesperson for a grassroots campaign that would capture the attention of lawmakers and Century's CEO. The campaign would also test her resolve, her relationships, and her faith in the systems that promised to protect working-class people.

We Were Promised follows Karen and a group of determined retirees on their long journey to seek justice―from staging an Occupy-inspired camp at the Ravenswood plant in West Virginia to confronting Century's corporate executives in Illinois and California. In highlighting Appalachia's role in the modern labor movement and the impact of women activists in the region, this story serves as a powerful example of everyday folks, as Karen said, "having the courage to stand up and raise hell and fight back."

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My Review: As usual, when you're looking for justice being done, or being demanded to be done, look for an older woman who's had it with patriarchy, sees through the clouds of horseshit-scented hot air stinking up the space in front of her nose where she sees reality.

Momma K, in other words.

She saw through the stinking air men were blowing at her, hoping sh'e fall down and choke on the nightmarish conditions "They" promised her would not happen to her people. Nevertheless, she persisted. "They" never see that, when the women get mad, much trembling and backpedaling is called for, and excellen truthful communication of why "They" will now change "Their" ways is de rigueur. I refer you to 3 November 2026's US election.

If we are going to use the name "Karen" to represent a class of women, I suggest we delete the pejoritive use prevailing now to me a revolting, entitled, Gross Old Pedophiles voting bleached blond intellectual midget and chang to the class-defining character as Momma K Gorrell. Author Flint has written an engaging and timely story cenering around this tough woman whose moral compass is not variable depending on the strength or volume of the shouting around her. "We were promised" meant and means something to women like Momma K. It should to all of us.

For those rolling their eyes in an access of Authority, Privilege, and Precedent rule the world arrogance, I refer you again to the US elections of 3 November 2026.

Tick-tock, bitches.

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, it seems to be drawing to a close

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR
GIULIANO DA EMPOLI (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling assessment of international politics in our time, from an internationally bestselling author whose work has sparked controversy and debate across the world

Blending the author’s personal insight with startling historical comparisons to the days of Machiavelli and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, The Hour of the Predator describes the growing influence of tech billionaires, the rise of autocratic regimes and the erosion of traditional diplomacy, to paint a chilling picture of a disintegrating world order.

Giuliano Da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator is a timely and incisive examination of the shifting power dynamics in global politics, where traditional governments find themselves increasingly outmatched by technology tycoons and autocratic geopolitical predators who shape the world through brute force, deception, and disruption.

Drawing on his experience as a political advisor to a former Italian Prime Minister, Da Empoli takes the reader on an eye-opening journey around the international political circuit—from New York to Riyadh, and from the United Nations to Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz-Carlton— and through the looking glass to a world of ruthless power struggles, where the tech lords already seem to inhabit another world and AI is already out of control.

The Hour of the Predator is the latest book from the internationally bestselling author of The Wizard of the Kremlin, which has been translated into thirty-five languages and is now being adapted for a major movie by Olivier Assayas.

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My Review: Author da Empoli states a truth we're all familiar with succinctly: "All the guardrails of the old world—the respect for the independence of certain institutions, human and minority rights, a concern for international repercussions—have no value now that the hour of the predator is upon us." This has been true for forty-plus years, starting with the election interference that installed Ronald Reagan in office in 1981 and ushered in the most efficient, nost rapacious looting of the US national treasure by the greediest scum on the planet.

It is now a beautiful moment in our cultural history. The US Congress is, at last, returning to the control of the president's political enemies so will be able to function as Congress again. The greedy scum that's risen to the top has finally made we-the-people suffer privations bad enough to deliver "Them" a ringing rebuke: "Enough."

Author da Empoli has crystallized a large portion of the reasons why in this book. The Cold War gave the greediest capitalists and other grifters an extremely useful straw man to wave in the hoi polloi's faces as they steadily set the stage for their revolution of greed. When the straw fell out slightly before the stage directions were fully drafted, "They" were forced to share the benefits of peace "They" had not planned on ever occurring while scrambling for another way to keep accumulating more. More what? Whatever. Just MORE. Money, power, toys, MORE.

There is no satiating this greed. The story of "Golden Age" Spain in these pages is vivid proof of that. The wildly misinterpreted guidebooks for greed by Baltasar Gracián, for conquest and dominion by Machiavelli, became morally celebrated by many bad-faith actors over the centuries. Always, always ending in the practicioners steadily growing more and more incompetent at exercising the (wrong) lessons they learned from these misinterpretations.

Our present moment is seeing the collapse of kakistocracy across the globe: Hungary rejecting Orban. deeply admired by felonious yam, was the one that stunned me the most. Macron is in a lot of trouble for trying to take things away from the French that they do not want to lose; and his mistake? The only reason for this is to make the banksters richer. Our Gross Old Pedophiles did better for decades by promising they were fighting the insiders who make we-the-people poorer by loading up their wallets with taxes not dollars. The illusion popped when diesel hit $8 a gallon because the war felonious yam and his stooge Kegsbreath the TV presenter who wanted to cosplay soldiers catastrophically failed to do what their boardgame view of the world wanted.

Reading Author da Empoli's refreshingly snarky and irreverent words in this moment of unbelievable possibility is an excellent way to solidify the startling fragility of "Their" power. Elon Musk alone spent close to HALF A BILLION DOLLARS to get the Gross Old Pedophiles party's candidates elected. He lost all those races with "Them" because money = speech = influence only works on docile people.

I am neverendingly astonished at "Their" inability to see why FDR should be "Their" God: his reforms quieted the socialist revolution well underway and that would've taken a lot more from "Them" that actually, by right of conquest, was defensibly theirs. Whatever else one can say about elite education, it has signally failed to teach any one of its graduates the importance of making concessions to get long-term buy-in to an inherently unfair system. "They" are once again on the precipice of losing the war because "They" don't see the point of strategic retreat that can be sold as "Their" loss to appease, re-docilify, us.

I'm glad. We-the-people need to win the war this time.