PHANTOM LIMB, Last Days #2...back to teaching us needed lessons

PHANTOM LIMB (Last Days #2)
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, preorder now for delivery 27 October 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After destroying the headquarters of an underground amputation cult, a burned and battered Kline finds himself in a holding cell. When he enlists the help of an ex-cop to commute his prison sentence, Kline inadvertently tangles with a schism of the very cult he sought to destroy. Can Kline investigate the sect’s ritualistic murder spree without getting lured into their ranks?

Frigid and precise, Phantom Limb interrogates our notions of wholeness, fate, and the lengths we are willing to go to connect with a higher power.

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

My Review: Kline's back! Oh joy. The christian lunatics, the "Brotherhood of Mutilation" (follow the link, I'm not going through *that* again), are serious about getting Kline the ex-cop who damn near destroyed the entire cult. And so it goes....

This is barely not a novella. It's short; it's not a "Calgon, take me away" read. Or, if it is, I'm very worried about you. There is a lot of body horror, a lot of symbolic anti-religious messaging in that body horror as well as conceptually anti-religious messaging in the entire witness protection element of the story. As we all know, their gawd, like organized crime, finds everybody in the end.

After five years of relative safety in prison that he serves on bullshit charges under a fake name, Kline isn't out five seconds before the schismatic from the Brotherhood of Mutilation cult who call themselves Paul (that bit of quiet calling-out was *chef's kiss*, Author Brian!) find Kline to finish the destruction he began in Last Days. It was not for nothing he served that sentence and hoped his trail went cold. Yet, like all things religious, you're never ever free of the pollution.

In returning to the mutilates doing their infighting in October 2026, it's my interpretation of Author Brian's purpose in piling up the bodies, causing harm with abandon, enshittifying the world to show the gore-seeking reader the real damage done by True Believers. It's not important what their zeal is directed towards, in support of, because it results in irreparable harms caused—including death—regardless of to whom the harms are caused. Zealotry has this way of overshooting any boundaries one thinks to set.

So here's Kline amid a welter of gore as always, trying to expunge a nightmarish hate group. It works, it doesn't, it causes harm on the way and creates new zealots if not today or tomorrow then soon. People love hate, rage, and being Right about stuff more than food and sex combined. This is human nature, visible in cultures throughout time in archaeology, then in writing, now in images. I see no reason to think there was ever a past of peaceful coexistence after there were enough people alive to form persistent families. It's why our cultural heritage is replete with myths, folktales, parables that show in grim, graphic detail the perils of transgressing The Order of Things℠...the selfish urge to do that is overwhelming at times. We all feel it, but the consequences after are the point of these kins of stories. Is this really the world you want? If yes, be ready for the coalition of the harmed to exact revenge.

And so it goes.

VENUS, VANISHING...queer love in late Weimar-era Berlin

VENUS, VANISHING
REBECCA BIRRELL
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 27 October 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A blisteringly passionate and page-turning story of desire, art, and the stories lost to the darkness of history—for readers of Sarah Waters, Yael van der Wouden, and Alice Winn

Berlin, 1928. Hannah is new to the pleasures and freedoms of the city. An artist, a runaway, she is building a new life, loving without boundaries and sketching with a cutting edge.

But the party is ending. Hannah begins a recklessly consuming affair with a powerful man’s wife and it soon threatens to do more than ruin both of their reputations. People are disappearing. The shadows of something unspeakable are growing darker. Her art could be the thing that secures her survival – or will deny her any chance of escape.

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

My Review: The relationship between a young striving creative and an older patron is fraught with tension. One way that plays out is the power play of status: "you need me to give you work, you pay me in humiliation," as in this story.

Hannah knows she is an artist, knows she has talent, knows she can't keep tailoring forever...knows she can't marry the older man who wants to buy her from her father with her mother's practically minded support or she will vanish to be replaced by no one she recognizes as herself. An age-old dilemma for women, exacerbated by Hannah's Jewishness thus ever-increasing vulnerability in late-Weimar Republic Germany. Elke, an Aryan to her manicured fingertips, takes Hannah under her protection with all the complexity of emotion that entails.

Hannah has a man, Saul, in similar circumstances of economic and social struggle as hers who provides guidance through Berlin's maze of modern art cliques, whose influence sets in train the developments for Elke and her circle to become famous in art circles (how titillating for older, bored wives!) in Hannah's risqué portraits of them...under an unambiguously Aryan male name. Elke sells the idea to Hannah as a way to be seen, and to be sold, in a world of increasing antisemitism as well as entrenched unchallenged misogyny.

History having already happened we know what Hannah and Saul have in store. Author Birrell is an art historian whose interests are in women and/or queer artists and their struggles to make art under the circumstances they find themselves. Hannah, Elke, Saul are all composites of artists and patrons whoes lives Author Birrell came to know in the course of her professional research. It was a surprise to me how deft the prose was for a debut, until I learned the author is not a debut writer but a debut novelist. I was deeply gruntled by Author Birrell's sumptuous and immersive evocations of Elke's world, of Hannah's art and specific paintings; it felt as though I should be able to see them on museum websites, buy a monograph about them, order a biography of her. That's a fantastic ability to have for a writer, that craft trick of making the craft feel as though it's entirely about something else. I was convinced I was reading non-fiction when art was our topic, still enjoying the story at other times. Tough to pull that off.

What I found less convincing was the ending Author Birrell crafted, as it felt to me not in keeping with the looming threats so carefully evoked. It was a niggle only; I was kind of dreading what I was sure was coming. A sentimental chunk of me was pleased she chose to do better by her characters than reality would have but it was a cheat in another sense.

I was repulsed by unworthy-of-her Elke's control of Hannah, and of her revolting freely expressed anti-semitism. Really I just disliked Elke and her ilk; the bored useless privileged "cultured elite." I grow less and less tolerant of bored people. There's a lot of work to do in the world, pick something and just go do it and make some effort to improve life for someone not you.

Ahem. My puritan ancestors speak.

Anyway, now you know why I didn't offer all five stars. On prose alone, it deserved it. Prose is not the sole axis of my own judgment. By every axis of judgment I hope this lovely artwork will land on your TBR.

THE FIST OF MEMORY, first contact in near-future Nigeria

THE FIST OF MEMORY
WOLE TALABI
DAW Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 26 October 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A strange alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky in this electrifying, action-packed first contact novel set in near-future Nigeria from award-winning author Wole Talabi

A hard science-fiction novel featuring an assassin-for-hire, a witchdoctor, and an astronomer, this fast-paced thriller is perfect for fans of Arrival.

When a non-communicative alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky, global powers are thrown into turmoil.

But for Tope, a principled Nigerian assassin with a talent for lethality in the employ of the mysterious witchdoctor known as "Baba," it’s all just business as usual. At least until a job goes wrong, and Tope is caught in the scramble—a high stakes game of power and politics for the future that is to come. Joined by Itumeleng, a South African astronomer plagued by mysterious dreams, they must find a way to survive, navigate their complicated pasts, and come to understand how they, and all of humanity, are connected to the alien craft before it lands and the world changes forever. But it won’t be easy. There are sinister forces marshalled against them, including a strange assassin obsessed with a single memory.

The Fist Of Memory is a first contact thriller unlike any other; a meditation on the nature of reality, memory and connectedness.

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

My Review: I enjoy hearing an author's idea of alienness directly from the aliens, à la Leckie's Radch. I didn't think Leckie's books were worthy of their worshipful hype. Author Wole intruduces his aliens, the Irunmole, as they are in the Kuiper Belt en route to Earth:

The Irunmole awaken to the glorious, manifold touch of the universe.
Rousing, they take stock of themselves; the curve of their stone-skinned cylindrical hull, the emitters and sensors and thrusters, the steady hum of their zero-point engine as it hungrily consumes the vibrational energies from the infinite ocean of fundamental wave fields around them. They are the ship, embodied in its every circuit and panel and processor. A cosmic altar, an interstellar archive, an immortal memory. As responses in the affirmarive come in, myriad signals dancing electric along a variety of signal waveforms, the Irunmole gradually increase the level of their active consciousness, projecting it outward, certain that nothing has been damaged on the long voyage.

It's a terrific way to put me mise-en-scène. I'm fresh to this story, don't know what my PoV voices are about yet, need to be led into this reality before I can feel connected to the story so I get time in the Irunmole ship/being(s) to hear them, to feel their immense difference from monadic me.

What are the Irunmole doing? We only know they're in the Kuiper Belt because the chapter title says so, they could be anywhere, anytime, on their way or arriving to or from any location in the universe. But two words..."Kuiper Belt"...pin us into a place albeit one we humans have never seen, not in any detail, not to need or to generate mental images, like the Irunmole themself we're only oriented because we're aware but not familiar with a space by title.

It's subtle. It fixes the subject of the book. Technology sufficiently advanced, all that jazz, meeting the numinous, the stuff of magic itself, in "consciousness." And so we begin with imaginations tempted, lured into firing our sparkplugs igniting primitive fuel producing power and pollution that obscures the reality of what's occurring. We don't know what that is but feel its immanence.

Now, cruelly, I need to stop telling you about this read because I found it crucial to my experience of this story to enter it only knowing we're going into First Contact territory, we're going into that with an enlightened soul who wants the enlightenment to leave him alone, and it's happening in Africa.

I *hate* when reviewers do that coy thing of "find out for yourself so you'll get the rush, the enlightenment will pound your head on the sands and leave you gasping." If you want to cheat, find out a little too much, here's the author on YouTube so you can click your chance at experiencing the Moment for yourself.

I'll note that I'm disappointed in you for being greedy, and that *I* watched Agranoff's podcast *after* I read the book; you do you, though.

Exploring the spiritual roles of seers and the practical roles of doers, the way that societies apportion attention and what that does to what is and can be seen, what violence used to do something (Ahanna) not simply get something (Tope), is what makes the human parts of the unfolding First Contact so deeply compelling to read for my "colonial empires were still a thing in my teens" self. Even "wrong" serves...the Irunmole, in arriving at Earth and choosing to form contact with a Nigerian sets the culture of SF on its ear...this most resolutely colonizer-centered genre of writing seen in the US as by and for white men follows a Nigerian hitwoman and a Nigerian astrophysicist as well as seer in close third person through a technothriller I crave seeing on a big screen while the Irunmole are...where? how do we know they're there from astronomical data? Because Itumeleng is not only an astrophysicist he's an ancestral line of seers' scion and try as he might he can't unsee.

It's heady philosophical stuff. I think telling the story in alternating third-person PoVs is as good a choice as was available for a story this kinetic, this visual, with a very seriously brain-bending ending. I'm proffering five stars the same way award shows proffer statuettes or bouquets of exquisite color and size.

October 2026's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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Death at King's Cross (A Four Queens of Crime Mystery #2) by Rosanne Limoncelli

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: DCI Lilian Wyles is confronted by a troubling case, one that only the four queens of crime can help solve—even amidst the ongoing war efforts.

Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh are back in the follow-up novel to The Four Queens of Crime.

1941, London. When DCI Lilian Wyles finds a young woman murdered at King's Cross Station, she needs the help of someone she can trust, but Richard Davidson, her former Scotland Yard partner, has joined MI5 and is busy tracking black market routes outside of London, so for now, she is on her own.

After having met the four queens of crime during a murder investigation two years earlier, DCI Wyles has kept in touch. But Agatha, Dorothy, Margery, and Ngaio are all involved in the war effort and have problems of their own.

Agatha is volunteering at the University Hospital Pharmacy, where a dangerous anesthetic has been stolen. Dorothy has heard unsettling information from her connections at the BBC regarding members of the Royal Navy. Margery, who has been in the countryside helping families escape the city from the bombing, is worried about one of her charges whose older sister has gone missing. And Ngaio, who has relocated to New Zealand and is volunteering as an ambulance driver, has begun gathering secret intelligence from wounded soldiers and sailors that may put her in danger.

When the four queens contact DCI Wyles for help, the information they share makes the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place. DCI Wyles once again finds herself collaborating with her old partners in crime to solve the mystery and close the case in this thrilling sequel, perfect for fans of Nicola Upson and Anna Lee Huber.

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

My Review: An idea I found fun, with the real-life Golden Age Queens solving crimes, gets a second story set in its storyverse. It was a perfectly fine, amusing to read, mystery on its own merits; I was gld to come back to it every time I opened the DRC.

I didn't remember to all that often because I was never fully convinced I agreed with Author Limoncelli's characterizations of them, so kinda felt weirdly underdelivered-to.

Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) says "$14.99 please" so either read and love the sample available, or try your library before committing to buy.

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Mercy House by Adam Cesare

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Welcome to Mercy House, a state-of-the-art retirement home that appears perfectly clean and orderly . . . but something is turning the residents into monsters. In this thrilling novel from the author of Clown in a Cornfield, you will find little mercy—only a shocking eruption of unfathomable horror.

Harriet Laurel notices the odor the moment she steps inside Mercy House, brought to the retirement home against her will by her son and his wife. In the early stages of dementia, Harriet has grown to resent her daughter-in-law for not providing grandchildren. Yet as she crosses the threshold, she notices her mind begins to sharpen. Then her hate begins to grow. . . .

Arnold Piper, an eighty-five-year-old ex-Marine, has always prided himself on self-reliance. But betrayed by his own body, he’s learning that surviving war-torn Korea was easier than facing the daily indignities of old age. And his worst trials are still to come.

Sarah Campbell, an idealistic nurse, is already stretched thin at the chronically understaffed Mercy House. Now her duties are about to take a terrifying turn. Can she survive the night. . . and her patients?

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

My Review: Seriously creepy for an old man living in assisted living to read at Halloween, but just a hair less creepy than I'd hoped. Why's every oldster divesting themselves of clothes, inhibitions against murder, and taboos around cannibalism?

Dunno. Author Cesare never says. The body horror will put off many in my age group. It *should* bother our descendants, seeing us in this vio;ent;y primal state, but whatever your gore tolerance is, it's the absence of a *reason* we all go hog-wild that ought to make you go "nah, I'm good" this #Deathtober.

Del Rey Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) is only asking $4.99 for an ebook.

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Chain Reaction (Jack Reacher #31) by Lee Child and Andrew Child

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The heart-pounding new Jack Reacher thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew Child.

Jack Reacher is hard to find. It's not easy to track him down. And he likes it that way. But General Susan Turner, based deep inside the Pentagon, has the means and the motive. She needs his help. A member of her team has been brutally murdered on covert duty. She can’t trust anyone she works with, not even her deputy. She needs someone from the outside. Someone who solves problems and disappears without a trace.

Reacher heads to Summertown, Colorado. A town as remote and bizarre as it gets. One diner, one motel, five massive data centers, two giant solar farms humming away in the dust. Total population: four people. And one of them is watching him. But Reacher isn’t built to run. He’s built to finish things. General Turner knows that if they come for Reacher, they’ll regret it—all the way to the top of the chain.

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

My Review: My first Reacher of the 2020s, chosen because Andrew is taking over the series and I wanted to scope it out. This is exactly what I would expect a handover of this long-running series to be. It's not indistinguishable from Lee's earlier work, in a good way.

It's a fine, refining difference that marks Reacher with the smallest bit more need to be human: Susan Turner's back. For series aficionados, catnip.

Bantam Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) has $14.99 on the cover of the ebook. It's #Deathtober, the data centers he's destroying should give you the happy they gave me, whatthehell.

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When the Night Comes Knocking by Katherine Daniel

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this Appalachian horror novel, two estranged siblings become trapped in a convenience store under attack by a monster from the mountains who feasts on guilty hearts.

Rattle, rattle in the dark…
The mountain’s bones seek out a heart.

Jane has not spoken to her brother Thomas since the accident that nearly killed them both. Their drive from college through the North Georgia mountains is uncomfortably silent, until they stop at a roadside convenience store, where a man stumbles in with a mutilated body, claiming to have been attacked by a monster.

At first, no one believes the man’s ravings, but when the next person to leave the store is brutally killed, they fear that local legend might be true: There’s a beast in these mountains who feasts on guilty hearts… and someone among them has lured it out of hiding.

Jane and Thomas each harbor secrets, but so do the other patrons, and as the monster claims more hearts, the survivors turn on each other, desperate to save themselves by uncovering the guiltiest among them.

If the siblings can’t overcome the rift between them, they’ll surely become the monster’s next victims…or worse, become monsters themselves.

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

My Review: #Deathtober spookiness in Appalachia; all in on that, me! Sadly the pieces never came together for a satisfying conclusion to the narrative.

I really disliked what I got to know about Jane and Thomas so that did not help.

Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $14.99 for an ebook. Library borrows are free and, if you enjoy it, great value. If you don't you've only lost time.

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The Haunted Librarian by Auralee Wallace

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A lonely librarian finds love, friends, and a few ghosts between the shelves in this cozy, paranormal tale from beloved bestselling author Auralee Wallace.

It’s a dark and stormy night…and Amelia Bates is caught in the rain. Life hasn’t always been kind to her, and being a ghostseer certainly doesn’t make things any easier.

Glowing warmly through the autumnal downpour is her safest the library. Amelia, the newly hired librarian, has always relished the comfort of curling up with a novel, vastly preferring it to the company of humans (alive or ghostly).

But Amelia is shocked to discover the building is full of more than quiet stories and warm cups of tea. There are curious, talkative patrons, a shy, bespectacled head librarian who makes her heart skip a beat, and three quirky spirits causing paranormal havoc that endangers the future of the library.

To help the ghosts and save the building, Amelia will have to gather all her bravery and wits, because learning to trust others might just be the first step to a happily ever after she only thought was possible in books.

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

My Review: Librarian + ghosts x cozy romantasy = terrific #Deathtober entertainment. Another story I was never sorry to pick back up, but didn't think to do so for days at a time. I thought Simon, Amelia's love interest, was very dull; I forget which ghost called Amelia "dude" all the time but that *really* grated after the skatey-eighth time.

The humor is gentle, the tone is the good kind of sentimental, the milieu could grow legs and be the book your grands are happiest to find after you die. It was fine, but I wanted to be able to invest in Amelia more. Next book?

Ace Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) only wants $12.99 for an ebook, which is exactly the right price.

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Brimstone Hollow (Annie Gore #2) by Archer Sullivan

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Following her powerful debut in The Witch’s Orchard, private investigator Annie Gore returns in Brimstone Hollow, bringing readers back to the mountains that author Archer Sullivan, a ninth generation Appalachian, knows so well.

There isn’t much that happens in the Appalachian Mountains that Private Investigator Annie Gore hasn’t seen. Before she joined the Air Force, she was born and raised in those rolling hills, and lately Annie's cases have called her away from her Louisville office and closer to the small towns of her youth than she ever anticipated. But when her newest client asks if she’s ever been to a snake-handling church, Annie knows she’s about to enter unknown territory.

Katie May has been estranged from her father―one of Appalachia’s last infamous snake handling preachers―for twenty years. But when Katie finds out he’s been fatally bitten, and a funeral was held within twenty-four hours, she questions whether someone deliberately rushed the process. Despite Annie’s doubts, she takes the case. After all, when she looks at Katie, she sees a version of herself: a girl who needs to understand her father in order to understand herself.

As she navigates the hidden hollers and dangerous secrets of this insular Eastern Kentucky town, Annie works fast, hoping to find the truth in record time for her client―and before too many memories from her own childhood surface. But it soon becomes apparent that someone wants Annie’s investigation to stop―by any means necessary.

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

My Review: The snake-handling preacher dying of a snake bite was *chef's kiss* and then Author Archer pulled a fast one on me and made it the mystery to find out if he really did die of a snakebite which totally harshed my buzz. (There's a joke in there for y'all to discover.) Not one thing stays the same for long: Victims and perps switch places, Honey the 260Z suffers gross indignities, Annie Gore damn near dies of rattlesnake bite...and by the end I was rooting for a guy who needed Annie to...get...him a severed finger to accomplish something "illegal" to get it done.

Problem is it's all so busy, so frantic in pace that I got left behind a little too often for me to offer a more elevated rating. Still, enjoyed my Appalachian #Deathtober visit fine. Get well soon, Annie.

Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $14.99 for an ebook. Start with #1, linked up top.

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The Raven by Susan McCauley

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: As illness tightens its grip, something darker begins to stir.

England, 1665. As plague ravages London and fear spreads north to York, Martin Blake, a humble cobbler, struggles to protect his family through a bitter, death-shadowed winter. When the parish rector, his wife’s domineering uncle, forces orphaned children from London into their already meager home, Martin’s fragile world begins to unravel.

Grief, illness, and the weight of buried sins close in. Ravens gather. Martin’s reason begins to slip. Whispers spread—of misused alms, of spirits that roam at night, of faith twisted into something monstrous. As snow blankets the land and the dead lie unburied, Martin must confront a chilling truth: is he haunted by guilt, or by something far more sinister?

A gothic tale of illness, obsession, and the perilous border between loyalty and madness.

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

My Review: A #Deathtober gothic story set during the witch panic and Black Death of the 1660s, this is a very creepy tale that is deeply immersive. It took me a while to sort put whether I felt the ravens were real, or simply the guilt/religious abuse and the overwhelming amount of death surrounding Martin the main character manifesting either in the world or in his head.

I'd give it a higher rating were it not for the repetitiveness of Martin's experiences ending up reducing my sympathy for him.

Celtic Sea, LLC (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $19.99 for a paperback.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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The Last Time We Saw Her (22%) by Jaclyn Goldis

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Ten years ago, a teenage summer camper disappeared while searching for a rumored treasure on a remote island. Now, the long-buried truth of what happened to her and the long-lost gold threatens the lives of her friends in this thriller from the critically acclaimed author of The Chateau.

Ten years ago, a group of American teenage summer campers went to a lush and isolated Azores island for a hiking and heritage trip. But when a clue to a local legend of buried treasure emerged, the summer devolved into a frenzied hunt and culminated in the disappearance—and rumored murder—of “it girl” camper, Sydney. She was never seen again and the treasure never found.

Now, a decade later, Sydney’s closest circle returns to honor her memory: Sydney’s sister and fellow camper, Olivia; a group of childhood camp friends; and their beloved counselors. They’ve all agreed to participate in a documentary probing what really happened to Sydney.

The group reunites in paradise and retraces their old haunts, hiking along crater lakes and submerging in thermal hot springs. But not everyone has innocent motives for returning to the island. And when the documentary filming reveals explosive truths and fresh hints resurrect the tantalizing treasure hunt, the group begins to implode. Old feuds reignite—and then one of them turns up dead.

Which means that a murderer has surfaced...again.

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

My Review: I read The Chateau a couple years ago when I was in Long Beach at a fellow reader's behest, and thought it was okay: nice setting well evoked, tidy climax.

Loved this setting, the Azores, but was never convinced by the true-crime documentary being that interesting; I gave up mid-transcript because it was just too grating.

Atria/Emily Bestler Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $13.99 for an ebook.

TRICYCLIST, slice-of-queer-life novella-length story

TRICYCLIST
JOON OLUCHI LEE
Nightboat Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The love child of The L Word and Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends, with a disaffected flair all its own.

It’s San Francisco in the early aughts, and Howie Song is floundering. His failed projects—as a professional ballet dancer, as a boyfriend, as a friend—have left him forever the “third wheel.” But maybe he likes it that way? Leaping wildly between lovers, centuries, and an ever-changing cultural landscape, Howie might just feel most himself in the fracture.

Delicious, poetic, and delightfully pornographic, Tricyclist is an ode to the “abnormal angles” of people and art. As Howie overcomes his own ambivalences—in large part thanks to two suitors, and a circle of supporters who happen to be lesbians—Joon Oluchi Lee portrays, with his signature flamboyance, all of life’s joys, pitfalls, and pirouettes.

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

My Review: The cover image is...arresting. In a compact 144 pages I was not expecting to get rich, immersive detail, like something explaining why there's a guy flashing his ass from under a schoolgirl's plaid skirt on the cover. That expectation was met. Howie's character is shown to me by the surfaces he gets distracted from his aimless wanderings by. Jeb, for example; the romance blossoming on Jeb's side was doomed because Howie...doesn't, and I went through the cycle of can't and won't before landing on that...reciprocate what I'm presented as sincere interest in Howie. He's not indifferent to Jeb, as we're presented with open-door sex scenes as the romance world describes them. I've read far more explicit and descritive gay sex scenes in the #Hollanov group on Tumblr. Far.

Val and Tish's romance, as Howie looks on, develops nicely; he does not lack for queer relationship success models. He had a past situationship with some guy that we're told stank. I bet I know why: Howie isn't commitment minded. Permaybehaps he will be, but I'll bet not based on what I know about people who seek and form commitments to romantic partners. Howie feels to me, with his surface-level vision and his general absence of attachments to the kind of people he wants to sex up, like a floater. He has his girl-pack who love him and emotionally support him, so he has no reason to risk boredom, domestic routine, deepened familiarity...all the things he appears to be uninterested in. His ballet "career" of useful, decent dancing without seemeing to desire improving his technical skills, still less exploring the deeper creative depths, to excel or even succeed at is a larger example of his aimless rootlessness.

It's a mixed bag of a read for me. I'm always pleased with the juxtaposition of raunch and refinement because that's the way the world really is. It's presented here in thoroughly measured, considered, polished prose. I'm not fond of Howie. I think people who don't want to make commitments are better off sticking to one-night stands. But of course the real issue is, does Howie introspect as well as he dissects others with his lesbian posse? I don't know, I never see it; and if I'm not seeing it I doubt it occurs; so Howie is probably unaware he's hurting others.

We spend 144 pages to make that unremarkable discovery, with pretty prose to sweeten the cup of Life's bitter dregs.

Need to feel involved in a real-life story? This one scratches that bump with the comforting distance of fiction keeping we-the-reader from feeling voyeuristic.

THE TULIP POPLARS, a poet's lyrical retelling of a story in every family tree

THE TULIP POPLARS
SILAS HOUSE
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping historical novel about hidden, forbidden love in the early 1900s by bestselling writer and former poet laureate of Kentucky, Silas House.

Amos and Tom fall in love while working in the tobacco fields during the hot summers of the early 1900s, yet Tom cannot shake his strict religious upbringing nor the responsibilities of his family’s farm. His longtime friend Maeve also pines for a man she can’t have, lest she endanger his already tenuous life in a town and world shaped by racial lines. How do you live a life that feels untrue, and at what point do you risk everything?

The Tulip Poplars is a gorgeous and moving novel spanning most of the 20th century, centering on four people trying to find happiness in a world that demands conventional choices. House tells a deeply intimate story of faith and doubt, race and class, sexual desire and the longing to be good when you’ve been taught that you are evil for loving who you love.

Based on the story of an ancestor, House’s new novel takes us from New York City to Southern cities to Appalachia and will leave you with a bigger heart.

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

My Review: It's a lovely, lyrical telling of a story every last one of us, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, has in our direct line of descent. In a world as hostile as it is to same-sex love (let alone sex) the closet has created a lot of unhappy marriages. Statistically there were happy ones, too, but I'm willing to wager there were, and are, fewer of those.

So I was predisposed to like and enjoy the story of the "good" people of Bright Star, Kentucky, and unsurprisingly I did. Especially the men falling in love across class *and* queer prejudice lines. Talk about an uphill battle, though, that's Maeve, a white woman breaking literal Jim Crow laws by indulging in carnal congress with Paschal, the only Black person in her father's Episcopal school. He risks his literal life being with her; she loses social standing by her miscegenation, and becomes a pariah by getting pregnant out of wedlock. Fortunately Paschal's whisked away in 1919 due to the Corbin Expulsion, an appalling event I'd never heard of before. Amos self-exiles to New York City, where revolting incidents of police violence against queers impact (!) his life; Tom's confined to a mental institution to undergo insulin-overdose induced coma to cure him of being queer. (In order to include this nightmarish torture, the author says plainly he moved its US application earlier than it took place in reality, which I appreciated.)

As the escapees from Bright Star form new connections, Tom and Maeve navigate their dishonest marriage, raise a daughter, live lives...longing for others. So very many of us do this. We find the scraps and hidden bits we can enjoy to the degree possible, but happiness is a bit strong of a word for the twilight state of anesthetized misery company, if we're lucky turning into companionship, preents in the absence of a love lost. I know all of us carry some unfixable sadness. Far fewer carry this level of punishing loneliness found in settling.

The role of the piano, whose keys I discuss below, stitches the emotional reality of Bright Star together. I know for sure all y'all will know Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 the instant you hear it. It will be less obvious until you read about the pieces why Author House likely chose them. Safe to say this is the point I fully got on board Author House's Yearning Express.

I've docked a star because on the first page, the first paragraph even, reference to a piano made in the nineteenth century having "Tanzanian ivory" keys caused me to stop reading for weeks. "Tanzania" is a name invented in 1964...during my lifetime. "Tanganyika" was used when it was a German colony in the 19th century, up through independence to the invention of the portmanteau of "Zanzibar" and "Tanganyika." This is easily checked, and as a throwaway line it could've been "African ivory" with no change in meaning. My remaining fraction of a star loss was down to my significantly lower interest and investment in the straight couples.

It's a lovely reading experience, another one of those where I'm compelled to read bits aloud. Normally I'd chuck one in here so you could feel smugly superior about not liking it, but there were six that I could not choose from, so I skipped it.

This caused me significant emotional anguish. It's beautiful writing, and proof one needn't insert weird line-breaks or fail to interconnect the ideas behind the words into grammatically correct sentences to evoke strong emotions and offer beauty to the Muses.

Take note of this before committing Poetry *ptooptoo* again.

A SHADOW OF JAGUARS, soon to be Cali's Morse and Lewis?

A SHADOW OF JAGUARS
D.C. FROST
Canis Major Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Shadow of Jaguars by D.C. Frost is a gripping cross-border noir thriller that follows Detective DJ Arias as he navigates murder, Hollywood intrigue, and immigrant struggles across Mexico City and Los Angeles, blending fast-paced suspense and richly drawn characters.

In Mexico City for a family funeral, Detective DJ Arias encounters a group of Robin Hood-style thieves who call themselves the Jaguars. Their activities reach across the border into Los Angeles with a Hollywood murder that entangles LA's elite and the nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners who serve them, and threatens DJ's own loved ones.

A sequel to the mystery A Punishing Breed, A Shadow of Jaguars finds DJ and partner Bobby Talbot struggling to untangle a murder where Hollywood, wealthy powerbrokers, and an immigrant population struggle to coexist and survive. Throughout it all, his faithful dog Evidence is by his side.

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

My Review: I haven't read A Punishing Breed, the first of the DJ Arias series of mysteries. From what I've read about others' thoughts on the book, several Goodreads friends having read it, it's a high-energy read with a lot of twists and turns. Permaybehaps too many, possibly a scoche too action-packed at the expense of clarity of purpose.

Checks all the way down that list.

Arias, an LAPD detective, starts the story held under the Basilica of our Lady of Guadalupe while in Mexico City for a family funeral. The leader of a violent gang called the Jaguars (cool name, but they're felonious yam's bad hombres incarnate), Señor Blanco, robs his family. After Arias is freed, his relatives dissuade the authorities from investigating Señor Blanco's Jaguars in typical intimidated-witness fashion: "No one was hurt; those men treated our women with respect," Arias's uncle says. Returning to L.A. Arias gets involved in the investigation of the death of Hollywood journalist Douglas Vago, who’s killed with the spiky end of a starburst clock in the home of a Mexican film director. Arias and his movie buff partner, Bobby Talbot, discover that the only thing taken from the crime scene was an unfinished script. Their suspect list is heavy with studio execs upset with Vago, a powerful magazine editor carrying secrets, and the director's undocumented household workers. Among the latter group is gardener Juan Tlaloc Duran, who has deep ties to the Jaguars. When you thought the Nutribullet was on full whirl, Vago's ex-wife is beaten to death.

I got really confused a lot. Bobby Talbot the movie buff/sidekick was invaluable for motives but kinda lackadaisical on doing policework meticulously. Arias feels like a lift of the Continental Op in his blockiness and his voice that narrates but never converses. But, again like the Continental Op, he is all-in on Justice. Laws be damned (flouted, anyway) if Justice needs serving. I'm probably more likely to call it ma'at than Justice because I see the latter term as besmirched by the US system that goes by that name, so prefer the clean, clear ancient Egyptian personification that also contains something like karma. I suspect Arias would, too.

There is a woman love interest. I really wasn't interested. Hesperia College was a decently well-limned location, integrated into the story with a slightly strained completeness...I felt at times that locations were sketched for convenience not seen as part of the story from the start.

There was a reckoning, one that arrived in good time...no waiting around, but not rushed or given short shrift only...hectic. And it was well in keeping with what we saw Arias learn. I'm not all the way sure I'll pick up the first one soon, but will certainly get it and read it.

I'm glad Red Hen/Canis Major introduced me to Arias and Bobby. May they develop into Cali's Morse and Lewis.