LOST IN YELLOWSTONE, Nicole Maggi's second National Park Mystery with ISB agent Emme Helliwell

LOST IN YELLOWSTONE: National Park Mystery #2
NICOLE MAGGI
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$23.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A foot in a geyser. A school in the wild. A truth no one saw coming.

When a human foot is ejected from a geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Special Agent Emme Helliwell of the National Park Service is assigned the chilling case.

Tasked with identifying the victim and uncovering what led to such a grisly end, Emme is drawn into the park's vast, unforgiving wilderness—and into the orbit of a private school for at-risk teens where extreme backcountry excursions are part of the curriculum. As disturbing truths begin to surface, Emme must also confront personal fault lines, including the unresolved tension with an ex-boyfriend who's suddenly back in her life and assigned to the same case.

In a place where danger hides behind natural beauty and good intentions can mask darker motives, Emme must navigate both treacherous terrain and emotional landmines to solve a mystery that could cost her everything.

Perfect for readers of C. J. Box, Paul Doiron, and Lisa Gardner

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

My Review: In the course of doing my due diligence, I looked for published book reviews of this second Emme Helliwell mystery (after A Murder in Zion) and ran across a depressing reality of our time: They were mostly book reports. I think that's a shame because opinions are helpful in deciding on the suitability of a read for one's own TBR shelf. If you read my reviews, I'll give you an opinion about a book's merits. Of course you might end up disagreeing, or might not like my way of expressing my opinion; but you will know more than a restatement of the blurb can tell you.

So, here I go:

Another really weird case death under unusual circumstances brings Emme to Yellowstone in order to poke her nose into the situation. Her still-smarting ex, whom I called "Thrush" throughout because it's the best name for him...smarting because Emme just ghosted him with not so much as fuck-you in explanation...and the dude she met last book who's really perfect for her, Finn, are involved in this weird case. Thrush and Emme *have* to be, they work for the National Parks Service's Investigative Services Bureau, but Finn chooses to be. The unattached foot and its mysterious companion object, a red pocket knife spotted by the informant of the probable crime's commission, cost both Emme and Thrush actual skin in the form of burns suffered while retrieving them as the "game" takes shape.

Emme is, as in the last book which ended mere days before this one starts, still processing her mother's death, her uneasy relationship with her younger sister, and now her awfulness to Thrush needs mending too. It's not only about the restoration of Ma'at in this story. It's about Emme becoming aware of how true the truism "hurt people hurt people" really is. It's all internal in this story, as her trail of devastation through genuinely good guy Thrush's heart is never shown to lead to her making any sort of adult apology to him, never acknowledging the hurt and harm she's caused, seeking forgiveness, promising to change her ways towards him. It's like Author Maggi decided her inner awareness of her unkindness was enough.

It ain't.

The case brings these two together, and if I'm honest, I sorta hoped Thrush would brush off Emme's halfassed request to be friends. With great unkindness. I'm all about FMCs being as complicated in their emotional lives as males have always been allowed to be. Look at Harry Hole: Popular novels, popular TV show, miserable nasty guy, so bring it Author Maggi!

The investigation leads to an outdoor program developed to rehabilitate teen offenders. To no one's surprise it's not run in such a way as to make the families sending their kids there feel good about it. Emme is a representative of law enforcement, so automatically suspect to the young offenders; winning their trust to get information she needs taxes Emme to the utmost. Her character is developed as the story delves into some dark and violent territory (in retrospect, not immediate and present until the ending). The manner she comes into possession of information to resolve this case harkens back to her Zion National Park case, unsolved in the legal sense....

I like the storytelling as well as the story told here. It's a series with developing promise. I'm glad Oceanview brings these stories from debut and early-career authors out. Conglomerates only want hits, not to make careers for authors who might, or might not, throw a hit out one day. I predict Author Maggi will be one who does.

PRESTIGE DRAMA, debut novel from a stellar storyteller

PRESTIGE DRAMA
SÉMAS O'REILLY
Grand Central Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Derry is already abuzz with news that famous American actor, Monica Logue, has flown to the city and will be starring in a new series set during the Troubles. And then she goes missing...

All eyes are on Diarmuid, the flaky scriptwriter who was the last to see Monica alive. From budding young actors hoping for a role to grieving parent whose story forms the backbone of the narrative; newspaper editors covering the mystery to taxi drivers hearing all the news from their clients, The Dogs in the Street follows the city's cast as they all try to locate themselves in Monica's disappearance.

Séamas O'Reilly's debut novel is a comedy about dramatising tragedy, and the responsibilities of a teller to a tale. It brings to life the voices of a city, the people, families and communities who find themselves obsessed with, and terrified of, interrogating their past.

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

My Review: Author of the poignant, hilarious memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? delivers a novel of The Troubles™...this seems to be a rite of passage for Irish writers born after 1950...via a lens I found mostly successful. A TV production hub in factual reality, Northern Ireland was a violent and terrifying place not that long ago. A multi-part limited series being made there is a welcome boost to the economy, and to the good image the country badly needs to project into the world.

But a film being made about The Troubles™ is a different proposition altogether. That topic is quite sensitive. So when Monica Logue starts researching her starring role in this prestige drama, the mere act of talking to people about the past..."How do you talk about the past as a person still living it, in a place that barely survived it?" the author has a character muse...sets off explosions of the same emotions that threatened to destroy the societal fabric of the place. Is it any wonder she just vanishes? The real question is "how." Did she run away from threats and intimidation, was she kidnapped by people she frightened with her research, was this another ugly political assassination to silence a voice digging in dirt some powerful people buried bodies in?

A very short read of under 200pp ought not to offer satisfying conclusions to these questions, that's just too little space. "Hold my beer" says Author Séamas, and delivers a series of tight storytelling-heavy chapters from multiple points of view. The only one you see more than once is, unsurprisingly, Diarmuid the writer of the television series. Each of them flows into the next, not always seamlessly, but that did not jar me out of the narrative flow. All the chapters are, as mentioned, storytelling-heavy...focused on making your idea of what's happening in that moment illuminate the journey to the resolution of the plot.

As a debut novel, this is the cream of the crop. Author Séamas is an experienced storyteller, his writing-craft chops are well-exercised from prior work done. In the places I was less that ecstatic, it was down to my feelings about the choice he made to have the novel mirror a screenplay in its tightness, its use of the delightful discursiveness of his characters mainly in dialogue. I'd've enjoyed more "Irishness" throughout. I found his memoir so very delighful because it had observations expressed in the same voice as the dialogue. That, of course, works better in personal and factual contexts. It adds distance in that setting, allowing truly horrendously painful memories to be seen as past, not immediate and awful...which is why I found their relative absence odd here.

I'm in no way trying to put you off the read, please understand that. It was a delight, well mostly a delight to learn why Monica was treated as she was. I want the pleasures of this read to be the main take-away you have for this story. I have a minor few cavils, none of which made me think I should move on to the next DRC on the Kindle.

A debut novel from a stellar storyteller that's a treasure of time to read.

SMOKING KILLS, deeply French story made accessible to Anglophone readers

SMOKING KILLS
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, preorder for delivery on 5 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this cozy crime novel with a witty, Parisian black-comedy twist, anti-hero Fabrice can only make smoking pleasurable by committing the ultimate crime

How far would you go to enjoy a cigarette?

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again—but with none of his previous enjoyment.

Then he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a man’s death, and, needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other previous smoke. What if he now needs to kill someone every time he wants to properly appreciate his next Benson and Hedges?

Unwilling to return to the numbness of a life without pleasurable smoking, Fabrice launches into a life of crime, finding ever more original murder methods—including the use of a poisonous Ecuadorean frog.

A blackly comic story of addiction and transgression, this is also an exploration of the human need for fulfillment, and the lengths we will go to in order to find it. In the end the book provokes us to question the limits we place on ourselves, and the true definition of joy.

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

My Review: Fabrice Valantine is in prison. He is so an unrepentant smoker, as the title implies, that he sees the joy of smoking as superseding others' right to life. Not quite the spin on the title you expected, eh what?

How a professional headhunter (noun Wiktionary serves three senses of the word:
A savage who cuts off the heads of his enemies, and preserves them as trophies.
One who recruits senior personnel for a company.
A pitcher who throws at the batter's head.)
Of these three I think the fairest to apply here is the third; the author intends the second; and implicit in all three is the first) with a genuine love affair with/oral fixation on the dick-shaped tubes of chemicals that, when ignited, provide particulate delivery directly into one's mucous membranes...and those of hundreds of others who happen to be passing by. When absolutely, as a condition of employment, required to stop smoking, Fabrice resorts to hypnotism. It works.

Sort of.

Fabrice loses the pleasure of smoking ("I faced these painful hours with no solace whatsoever, just the dusty taste of my cigarettes and the utter ineffectiveness of the nicotine"), not the need to smoke. Until after an awful, awful accident where someone loses their future to death due to his carelessness, the frisson of smoking returns. So it wasn't permanently removed by hypnosis, only recalibrated to require extreme stimulation to experience it. Being a smoker therefore selfish and self-obsessed, this shows a path forward into pleasure that Fabrice, narrating his story from prison, chooses to follow. But he's careful! He only kills those whose loss won't matter! Isn't he due a reward for, as I often say, cleanin' the gene pool?

A fantastical noir-tinged laugh-out-loud satire of capitalism is one way to see this story. So is a comedy of manners, replete with stock characters (Fabrice as Gordon Gekko leaps to mind). Most of all, though, I want you to read this pinnacle of the translator's art. Louise Rogers Lalaurie has rendered into high-level, delightfully readable English one of the most vibe-dependent reads from the very French pen of Author Laurain. It's not this team's first collaboration...I do not know if the author and the translator worked together to create their magic, but I'm inclined to view the evidence as supporting that interpretation...as the current rush of Pushkin Press's republications attests. I'm a fan because I think Author Laurain chooses his targets well. I'm a fan because the translator understands on a deep level the targets, their cultural position in France, and the sense of the language the author chooses to use and renders it into a different culture recognizably. Her skill is to make this extremely French book humorous in the extremely different cultural valences of English. That is a tremendous skill.

A book to savor like one's last cigarette.

DREAMT I FOUND YOU, lovely, evocative title indeed

DREAMT I FOUND YOU
JIMIN HAN
Little Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of The Apology, a contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo & Juliet, in which the cousin of the star-crossed lovers helps them avoid a tragic fate.

When Dahee Shin was nine years old, she made a promise to protect her favorite cousin, Channing, who has always been like a sister to her. Now, at thirty, Dahee has found herself in a Korean American community in a New England beach town, once more running to the rescue of her debt-ridden relative.

Ever the idealist, Channing—who has spent her life haunted by the tragic story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, Korea’s parallel Romeo & Juliet—has fallen in love with Minjae Oh, all the while fending off the advances of powerful, manipulative Kent Cho, a local politician. As Channing and Minjae’s romance blossoms, and as Kent's suspicion and obsession grow, Dahee begins to realize that it may be up to her to make sure her cousin and beloved escape Chunhyang and Mongryong’s doomed end.

For fans of Hello Beautiful, Dreamt I Found You is a wondrous, tender retelling of Korea's most classic love story, steeped in the travails of a rigid class system, the power of premonition, and shot through with Korean folklore and magic.

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

My Review: A double shot of romantic emotional caffeine. The story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, then the modern-day Korean diaspora story that evokes it, all juxtaposed with subtlety against the bog-standard Murrikin's understanding of Romeo & Juliet and set on the New England coast.

All of this is just fine, sure I'll read it no problem; what made me want to tell y'all about it, is that I saw more parallels to Shakespeare in Love than to Romeo & Juliet. I myownself found that *more* appealing not less so. I know I'll get body-checked into the glass (I need to stop reheating Heated Rivalry) for saying this, but stop telling me I must love Shakespeare's foreign-language drama with its now-stock characters for the depth of his insight. That depth has been added over the course of almost half a millennium of studying analyzing and commenting on the source text! We "know" it's there because so so many people have already "found" it and told us about it. It's now cultural shorthand in Anglophone cultures (possibly others but I have no direct access to those). "It's the Korean Romeo & Juliet" is not an analysis, it's an emotional appeal to the Anglophone reader's cultural furniture.

Author Han has very cannily gotten us Anglophones to do the hard work of buying in to her story in one fell swoop with this (apt, it seems to me) evocation of the very slightly older (c. 1591 versus c. 1694) iteration of the eternal star-crossed lovers story. I was primed by the clearly stated link between this modern-day version and its historical antecedents. I got the expected frisson from the love-conquers-all story, spiced up by the deeply satisfying comeuppance of a crappy human being. Beats there a heart so cold as to not race just a little when the lovers defeat a rotten, jealous monster?

I think not, at least not outside the ranks of the aromantic.

It's the beating heart of the story told here, that tension between what we're expecting, what we know, and what's happening on the page. While Minjae and Channing and Dahee and Kent do their literary gavotte with all its showy back-and-forths, its little hops and leg-pointings, and its apparently endless—at times feeling relentless—repetitions of the same movements to no internal resolution, the external story outline we've applied from long, long cultural familiarity serves as the musical accompaniment that grants us the readers as well as them the characters a stopping place.

I did say stopping place, not ending. The thing about a gavotte is that it's a folk dance all dressed up for aristocratic slumming, so it never develops beyond stylish-looking moves that show the dancers' stamina more than their grace. In Dreamt I Found You the characters are set a task...fall in love, overcome an obstacle, help or obstruct these actions...and repeat that task against a variations-on-a-theme backdrop. It's a time-tested technique that keeps on working because the specifics are fungible as a result of the audience's investment being all but assured. It requires little character development. All that is handled by the evocative models folloed, the stpes of the dance known to most all of us.

The "music" that provides the pace in Dreamt I Found You is the US culture on display. It must be said that culture is not shown to great advantage, but it also isn't deeply explored by the characters' interactions. They all execute the steps, do the hops, make the gestures; nothing derails their actions. The jolts and surprises are few because they're built into both model storys' bones and are well known to us. It doesn't really feel surprising, the biggest tension is will this be Shakespeare's tragedy or Korea's re/union?

Reading it to find out is the pleasure of discovery on offer. I resonated to the story, I liked the author's choice of which model to emulate, and at the end of the dance I bowed to my book-shaped partner and led him off the dance floor admiring how handsomely he had done the dance with me.

APRIL IN REVIEW

I wrote thirty-two reviews total in April. Twenty-five were for books published this month; so out of forty-nine DRCs I got that were publishing in April that's 51% of the total DRC haul. Quite a few, six of the twenty-four unwritten reviews or 25% of the unreviewed ones, are June-review bound because they're QUILTBAG stories.

I'm very pleased with this level of performance...I need to make a consistent effort to keep the current-month reviews at least that percentage of my total writing output. Otherwise I risk getting turned down by publishers and aggregators for things I really want. Like John of John, which I did not get despite raving about his previous books and my perfidious friend did. *sulphurous muttering*

There were three excellent reads in April: The Violence: My Family's Colombian War

and An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries,

...both memoirs and both highly politically charged on the non-fiction side. I'm glad I read both before May Day.

In fiction, the Azeri novel via those wallet-flatteners at New Vessel Press My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova and translated by Lisa C. Hayden. It's a deeply involving and truly disturbing story of a woman's sociocultural experience of femaleness and the physicality of womanhood.

My favorite read of the month was, however, my biggest surprise: Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living by Peter Jones, which I requested on a whim since I think about medieval times the way normal men do about the Roman Empire. It was enlightening, it was upsetting to my prejudices and ideas about the people of the times, and it humbled me for its astonishing and evident deep-diving into archives I did not know existed. Impressive work!

I didn't HATE my one Pearl-Ruled read, just...well, got squicked out by what it means, and whether I could really get behind that. Can't all be bangers, of course, or the very idea of the banger is meaningless.

My May plans involve mostly short-story collections and anthologies. I'm making this kind of round-up and planning report a monthly feature, unless it bombs totally because I already do a version of it on LibraryThing so why not go wide?

BOOMTOWN: The True Story of the Wickedest Town in Texas, latest social-history story from Pappalardo's searching eye

BOOMTOWN: The True Story of the Wickedest Town in Texas
JOE PAPPALARDO
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The true story of the corrupt and violent town of Borger, Texas in 1927--and the legendary Texas Ranger tasked with taming it.

Texas, 1927.

Just a year after the town of Borger, Texas was founded, the press called it “the wickedest in the state" for good reason. The town, sprung into existence overnight to support the oilfields, had become a lawless haven for bootleggers, pimps and gamblers, run by a crooked city hall.

That environment attracts some of the most unsavory characters in prohibition America, including a gang of murderous bank robbers who head into Borger to spend their money on booze, gambling and prostitutes. In the span of weeks, the gang kills three law enforcement officers, bringing the worst heat legendary Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer, who led the 1934 posse that tracked down and killed criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. His arrival threatens to break even this hardest boomtown in America--if it doesn't kill him first.

What follows is one of the most thrilling and violent untold stories from the era of gangsters, lawmen and vice. Author Joe Pappalardo brings to life a town previously lost in the haze of history.

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

My Review: Immersing myself into the chaotic cesspool of greed, interlocking scams, interdependent grifters and graft-grabbers, and general chancers that made up (apparently) the entire population of Borger, Texas, in its heyday was exhausting.

I get the impression it was pretty exhausting for the folks who were busily grabbing everything they wanted, as well as the OTHER folks trying to catch them in at least one explicitly illegal act, as well. I am completely convinced not one of them made old bones. Murdered or just worn out these were some intense alive people.

I wasn't so much involved in the read as I was sucked along in the story's slipstream, wondering who the hell this woman was or why that lawman's name rang a bell...turns out two chapters back he was doin' the nasty with another guy's wife...until nothing made a whole lot of linear sense.

Normally I'm a stickler for linear sense in a history story. This one, not so much. It's a social history for one thing. It's footnoted to a fare-thee-well for another. Y'all killjoys can do a timeline by following those, if it's that important to you. I got a far more interesting ride from sitting in my seat and letting Author Pappalardo direct my attention where he wanted me to look than I would've in a more traditionally structured narrative.

I can't think of a much more timely topic to read about than a bunch of greedy sociopaths in charge of an ugly little burg with too much money and too little to spend it on. It was as edifying in the 1920s as it is now (not at all, in other words) and as instructive: Do NOT let greedy people make their own rules. It does not end well for anyone, and only a few ever get the misery they've so richly earned.

A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE, an apt (if too mild) title

A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE
JORDAN HARPER
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.4* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic crime novel tells a story of Los Angeles power brokers and those at the edge—and a single shattering incident that threatens to bring it all crashing down.

Los Angeles, right now. America with its back up against the wall. This Frankenstein's monster of crimes and lurid dreams sewn together into something like a city.

A city ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested, and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A young woman goes missing—and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime...

JAKE DEAL is a gonzo live-streaming nightcrawler, beaming the city's chaos straight to his audience of blood-hungry subscribers, giving them the view from the top of the mushroom cloud—until a job he can't refuse drags him back into his old life of Hollywood glamour, drugs, sex and sleaze. Armed with cameras and hidden mics, he'll infiltrate private clubs, gather high-class dirt—and stumble onto a conspiracy woven into the center of LA's most powerful men, who call themselves "The Kids in the Candy Store."

DOUG GIBSON is a street lawyer, who fights for his clients against the army of cops, prosecutors and judges - he is the knife they bring to the gunfight. But when he's hired by a Hollywood pedophile ready to sell out his friends for a chance for freedom, he'll take on a fight bigger than he could have imagined. And when his client "commits suicide" in prison, Gibson will have to stop being a weapon—and become a warrior.

KARA DELGADO works for an underground private concierge company—a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich. She scores drugs, makes connections, and plans multi-million dollar sex parties. She has learned the secret truth of this world: there are no rules, only prices. Her best friend Phoebe has gone missing, and Kara's the only person who knows that Phoebe's place was wiped clean of evidence by men in black rubber gloves. But when she begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to Phoebe, and its connection to the killer known as the LA Ripper, it will drag her into the dark heart of the city.

As Jake, Doug and Kara all investigate these crimes, they'll encounter ketamine-addled sitcom stars, bloody riots, homeless gangsters, a killer cop on death row, secret vaults in Beverly Hills, tech-bro orgies, medical cannibals, true crime junkies, private security wet-work teams, reality shows, street takeovers, car chases, coyotes, a sadistic Tarzan, and a three day, fifty million dollar wedding, before everything is revealed and they must each make their choice about how to fight back in this violent world before the bloody, blazing conclusion.

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

My Review: A violent fever dream of a novel ripped from the fact-fueled fantasies of the next cult leader who will go about preying on bewildered, enraged, left-behind stooges. Nothing in this awful tale of those who serve the dreadful scum that has risen to the top of LA's heap as threats to their lives, their power, their money mount is ever clear. And each is more obviously from within their "charmed circle" than the last.

Author Harper's triumvirate of Jake, Doug and Kara each work on a corner of the to-them invisible puzzle of who threatens the elite, why, and work out what to do about it, they all draw more and more into one another's direct orbits. By the time Jordan Harper brings them together, the reader thinks "I am ready for the end to come."

No you are not.

If you have a trigger, you are warned. If you want to be ignorant of how very much misery the powerful feel entitled to inflict on others purely for their own amusement, you are warned. If you aren't willing to sit, slack-jawed and glassy eyed with horror, while brutality is described to you, you are warned.

Let the tumbrils roll.