THE DYING LIGHT , ANN CLEEVES' Matthew Venn/Two Rivers series #4

THE DYING LIGHT (Two Rivers #4)
ANN CLEEVES
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Dying Light is a searing new novel featuring DI Matthew Venn, brimming with energy and taut with claustrophobic tension, as the detective peels back layer upon layer to discover the dark secrets this family is keeping.

A scorching heatwave marks the start of the summer in Devon. Detective Matthew Venn is called in to investigate a puzzling death, when the body of a young woman, Lottie, is found in the swimming pool of a luxurious holiday home. The girl’s best friend, Hannah, whose family owns the house, is missing. The girls had arrived in Devon a few days ahead of the family to celebrate the end of their school exams, and had managed to make waves during their short time there; they disrupted the folk music festival at the neighboring farm, with Lottie posting incendiary videos on social media mocking what she snobbishly considered to be a parochial community.

When further tragedy strikes, Venn and his team begin questioning a community filled with secrets. Hannah’s father, Paul Armstrong, is a rising political star, a fact that quickly draws intense media scrutiny to the case, not least because there are many who would want to take him down. With the summer heat come holidaymakers, and it emerges that some of them may have more connections with the Armstrong family than first thought.

Caught between a powerful family's secrets and a powder keg of local tensions, Venn and his team must navigate a treacherous path. He knows all too well that the real answers lie not in what people say, but in the silence that they keep . . .

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My Review: Mean girl goes after easy target, makes already angry people angrier, gets killed.

Another case where Matthew ought to clost the case with "person or persons unknown" and stamp a seal on it. Who cares if this nasty little pisher Lottie's dead? Let's take the gene-pool cleanse as a piece of luck and get on with solving terrible crimes.

Hannah, Lottie's buddy and the daughter of the man whose home Lottie was staying in, is missing. He also happens to be a big-shot political scum. Hop to, Matthew and scoobygroup...I mean, team. The locals whose police dollars are funding this investigation already resent Hannah's outsider family for "ruining" (ie moving into and making more expensive) their community. Like all resort-ifying communities the battle lines are sharply drawn. The problem for Jen, who took the initial report regarding Lottie who's her son Ben's age, and Ross who's still irked at not being seen as the genius he isn't, and Matthew himself (in the throes of a serious upheaval in Jonathan's life), is how to tiptoe down a superthin line between the sides while still extracting information that will allow Hannah, the missing young woman, to be found alive?

Oh dear.

More and more complexities and interconnections...Hannah's local boyfriend,the dead girls' mutual from the US, whose unfriendly parents are staying at the local boyfriend's parents' glamping resort...yes, it's all a bit much in a short review but honestly it's paced with Author Cleeves' usual skill and attention to misdireaction...I mean detail, of course I do. Quite a bit of time is, annoyingnly, going over what feels the precise same detail with the same people. Look closer.

Jonathan loves Matthew or he wouldn't have married him. Right now, though, Jonathan is a wreck because he's set up a meeting with his birth mother. Tis will sress any marriage...and it's not been *that* long that Matthew's religious-nut mother was widowed and thus could at least start to rebuild bridges with her queer son; so as always, like life, the stressors are not neatly sequential.

Series fans will be delighted that Lucy and her dad make an appearance.

That's as always the series mystery's greatest appeal for readers. The puzzles are nice but the people who stay, who come back, who thread through the series make the weather. Sunny and fair here in North Devon (which is how you know it's fiction), among interesting, relatable regulars and starkly weird contrasting outsiders. Don't start here, start with The Long Call. (And write nastygrams to ITV/Britbox for canceling the TV adaptation.)

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS, exploring the alt-hist "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS
JOHN BOYNE
Henry Holt & Co (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?

When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite." The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.

But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne's extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age forty-six, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?

In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the iconic Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.

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My Review: I am not a big fan of Author Boyne. I came within an ace of deleting this widget. Because I've learned to be super-scrupulous in reading the whole text of something my urge is to ignore/delete *before* I do it, I saw the open-sesame of the offer: "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

Sold.

You would have to go some to get me not to finish this story. The entire course of Anglophone culture would've changed without this famous sodomite...what an ugly word...being a complete idiot and suing a nasty little waster for saying a true thing in a vicious, pointed way. Wilde was fucking the man's son, a little anger and hatefulness was to be expected in that time and place. Of course it went very badly indeed for Bosie, but broken eggs∈omelette....

Author Boyne has this version of Oscar continue to be abrasive and obnoxious to the world at large (because genius y'know), continuing to flaunt...and I use this word in its strictest sense...his sexuality while continuing to produce literary genius for the enthralled masses. I know this is a hard swallow fo y'all "the way it is is the way it is and so it must only be this way" folks when the subject is history. The alternate history genre comes from the nineteenth-century thought experiment, a technique of gaming out what might happen in a multifactor scenario. War colleges in particular, giant corporations, political operatives, all use thought experiments...counterfactuals colloquially...to help with decision making. Applying the technique to fiction delights me.

Of course the hurdle he faced in bringing this scenario to life is writing a genius's words that were never spoken. I'm feeling charitable: the effort he put into the research, the absorption into Wilde and his world was so extensive, that I was able to suspend disbelief.

“Are you deliberately trying to be rude?”
“No, it comes quite naturally to me.”

It's the sort of line you or I would be proud as hell to skate off. It would not end up in The Big Book of Oscar Wilde Quotes.

Much as I absolutely loved "Oscar's Law" and, in honesty, felt it was a very reasonable conjecture on Author Boyne's part, it contributed to my growing sense of unease about the "Mary Sue"-ness of the Wilde in this story. Some of his Forrest-Gumpian meet-everybody-impress'em-all quality is just projecting his actual past into an unlived future. It does not take away one bit my unease at the way it reads.

Another qualm the Mary-Sueness of it all did not help the story is the sheer number of people who float through the six-hundredish pages. If one is not versed in the dramatis personae of the early twntieth century, this story will bore you rigid with "who was that? why should I care?" feelings that result from putting too much of one's research on the page. It clutters up the reading experience, though I'll say it delighted me personally. His take on Lady Thelma Furness versus Wallace Simpson...*chef's kiss*

It was a successful read, an enjoyable trip...for me. I suspect others won't entirely agree. The last words properly belong to Oscar Wilde hinself, summing up this imagines life succinctly and well:

“I wanted to be a writer. And I became a writer. That is how I spent my life. Sometimes loved; sometimes scolded. Sometimes celebrated. Sometimes loathed. Sometimes a force for change; sometimes my own worst enemy. But I was always read.”

As is meet and right.

TRAD WIFE, disappointing suspense story I was all set to revel in

TRAD WIFE
SARAH LANGAN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Good Neighbors comes a chilling tale of a journalist's descent into horror as she uncovers the dark secrets behind a trad wife influencer, blending suspense with a critique of modern femininity and the manipulative forces of social media.

Every day, millions watch Mia Wright, the “trad wife” queen, on her idyllic 300-acre farm. With her handsome husband, seven perfect children, and a life of from-scratch meals and pastoral bliss, she’s an icon of modern femininity. But behind every perfect image is a secret. And in this case, the secret is a horror.

Desperate to save her tarnished career, journalist Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm to profile Mia. Jenny is ready to write a scathing exposé, determined to expose the deception behind Mia’s curated life. But soon, Jenny has more to contend with than staged videos and picture-perfect poses. There’s something wrong at the farmhouse. Something slithers through Jenny’s dreams, and at night, the children sing strange nursery rhymes.

She’s losing time. She’s losing her hair. She starts to worry that she’s losing her mind.

There is a horror at the heart of Black Swan, and it’s waiting just for Jenny. Trad Wife will make you question what’s real and what’s just a perfectly curated deception…

Will you see the lie?

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My Review: Kind of resembles Yesteryear from the outside, with a malevolent animating force protecting Mia the trad wife and punishing Jenny the exposé-hunting journalist.

Jenny's been disgraced so is looking to this sitting-duck trad wife minor celeb to rebuild trust she lost from her audience of me-clone readers. Yes, I'd read Jenny's hit piece to revel in the fakery and façade-busting of someone whose presentation of self I strongly dislike and disapprove of.

Except there's a reason Jenny lost it all. There are many things Author Langan kinda tosses in and around that could be deeply offensive to people in their oddly missing narrative purpose in the story. I'm thinking most strongly of the sexual abuse of a minor. The cancer that's chucked into the grinder is pretty bothersome, too, though not for as powerful a reason.

Most troubling to me, however, as the craft failures throughout: action stopping for Jenny to follow an obsessive, destructive rumination of Jarron (her ex) enough times I wanted to give her my therapist's name was chief among these. I'm familiar with obsession and its attendant foreclosures of attention. As the PoV character's frequent emotional state, it just won't move things forward in a horror story, a cardinal sin; even in domestic suspense, it ends up making Jenny feel a bit too victimish as she's doing it to herself.

Almost as unhappy-making is the amount of time I'm reading Jenny's notes in italics immediately after the action she took notes on finishes. It is another way to stop the action dead. I was mildly amused once, maybe twice, by including call-outs to the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions in their entirety. But here again, the action comes to a screeching halt. There are enough moments where this occurs for me to find it obtrusive and a problem for my desire to continue the read.

But I did, and finished it because Black Swan Farm was a nicely evoked backdrop for what should've been a faster-paced suspenseful story of comeuppance and redemption.

JOHN BERGER: From Life, and what a life it was!

JOHN BERGER: From Life
TOM OVERTON
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A magisterial biography of novelist and critic John Berger, whose work—including Ways of Seeing and the Booker-prize winning G.—revolutionized the critical tradition in the twentieth century

John Berger (1926–2017) served in Britain’s wartime army before attending art school. The young artist became a critic and broadcaster, cutting a swathe through the staid world of post-war Britain, demanding political engagement in all things. In 1972, he came to prominence with Ways of Seeing, a TV series and book that inspired generations to look more closely and think more deeply about art.

Committed to the passionate exploration of life in all its forms, unbounded by convention, he applied himself to a panoply of genres, media, and subjects. His career defies definition. His work reimagined the relationship between art and society; human and animal; living and dead. He charted the disappearance of peasants from the world; documented migrant labour; explored the AIDS crisis; and was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s, as he was to the War on Terror that followed. Berger was deeply and vocally committed to the Palestinian cause.

Through working on Berger’s archive at the British Library and fifteen years of getting to know his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators, Tom Overton has produced a portrait of an artist and storyteller who defined and transcended his times.

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

My Review: First, read this:

You lived through enough zeits for there to be many geists.Ways of Seeing is part of a moment of experiment with televisual equipment all around the world, from The Hour of the Furnaces in Argentina, Nam June Paik in America, to Harun Farocki and Cristina Perincioli in Germany. Not experiments your producer...remembered knowing anything about.

A friend writing his friend's biography either is wielding one of the Long Knives in anticipation of the famously horrible Night of them returning, or is barely stopping short of a public act of fellation. The staccato rhythm of the above sentence supports either interpretation in its sibylline recounting of Berger's wide field of cultural vision.

Considering how many, many, many coital acts are presented as factual in this extended celebration of the interesting and salacious life of a man who thought deeply and was very willing to detail the trails his thought had brought him down. An artist, a Booker-winning novelist, a public intellectual with a strong leftist bent...he created the riposte to Kenneth Clark's deeply conservative and Eurocentric Civilisation, Ways of Seeing, in the same year he won the Booker...a career highlight for anyone, even a wunderkind polymath who never left the cultural radar after exhibiting paintings in the post-War gallery scene of London until his death as a grand old man of Culture in France in 2017.

Author Overton has worked on and with Berger, his children, and his archives on multiple fronts. It's expertise one feels as the story of John Berger, polymath and bounder, unspools. His 1972 Booker acceptance speech...well...what a moment. It's a master class in how to make a statement as a principled person, while using the system's kindness against its failings and cruelties to others. As one would expect, there are illustrations, though goodness knows there could be an entire photo essay on John Berger's œuvre.

I hope a few of y'all, who have not heard of Berger before, will discover him; and the rest of us who remenber some bits and fragments of his art(s) career will gain insight and context on him, on how he came to think, and what he came to mean to a world that had then and has now a limited attention span for those who don't think outside the box.

They disassemble it, reuse the best bits, and chuck aside the dross with both hands.

THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves, more from Hepola post-Blackout

THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves
SARAH HEPOLA
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of Blackout excavates the romantic entanglements that defined her adulthood—an electrifying and unflinching account of the ways we choose love, it chooses us, and how those choices build a life.

“I’m scared I only want what I can’t have,” I said.

“Oh baby,” he said. “It’s the only thing there is to want.”

Sarah Hepola wanted so much: a big career; travel and adventure; deep relationships; passion. Having realized so many of those desires, she also grieved the ways her life was not what she’d always imagined it would be. Did I want too much, she wondered. Did I make the wrong choices? Love the wrong people?

In The Only Thing There Is To Want, Hepola revisits three complicated love affairs from her past, seeking to understand how they might have kept her from the life she’d envisioned, but also made her who she is. Examining her own decisions, Hepola probes the question: Is love ever really a choice?

This dazzling portrait of the mirages of modern romance captures the paradox of desire: wanting propels us forward and holds us back. Funny, achingly tender, and fearlessly intimate, The Only Thing There Is to Want is about discovering the beauty in the life you’ve built.

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My Review: "Is love ever really a choice?", the synopsis poses.

No.

That's it then, we're done here, no further questions your honor.

You're the same person sober as you are drunk only masking better. Author Hepola is candid about her love for these men being...ill-considered...but without insobriety to blame for them, she sits with the uncomfortable reality that she makes questionable choices. It's a major moment in an adult's life. Face up, take stock, look carefully at what you are actually doing not the story you tell yourself about what you're actually doing...it can never be simple when the subject is as primal as Love. The stories are simple, we need that to make sense of the wildness of Love.

But go into it, make that fearless and searching inventory of you life, the story crumbles and with it the wall between your Self and your illusions, the stories you tell to yourself about yourself. Like the ones about too-young guys who need you, married guys who want you, and remote guys you want.

It's all there, it's all totally relatable, it's not one bit more romanticized or disingenuously justified than anyone else's baggage; it's a good idea, do it in public so you can't hide from the consequences. Someone out there *needs* to read this book, to know they are not alone or even unusual.

Well-aimed at a market that will not shrink any time soon, presented in a very unflattering warts-and-all top light, it is indeed a book many will need. I don't think I'm one of them because I've been in therapy for, like, ever and these are the techniques of being in a theraputic collaboration.

I hope multitudes feel drawn to Author Hepola's story of how Love deceived her, and I don't mean the men she loved I mean the emotion Love...leading her into emotional traps, through strength-sapping swamps of self-pity, through the powerfully seductive pitfalls of main-character syndrome. (It might not be in the DSM yet but it will be.)

Love powers the world, we're told. but no one extends the analogy to how power is made: burning irreplaceable resources and polluting the planet in ever-more toxic ways, or using rare commodities that can fuel your power generation at the cost of massively dangerous leavings that can kill for generations. Only very rarely have people used renewable, ever-cheaper, and limitless ways of making power.

Time to switch to renewables, though at huge cost, for all our power needs. Love perhaps most urgently of all.

THE RADIANCE, involving autofiction from Ayad Akhtar

THE RADIANCE
AYAD AKHTAR
S&S/Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture.

When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.

Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.

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

My Review: Autofiction as I've experienced it has usually fallen just a bit flat. It's a close, close relative, a fraternal twin to the roman à clef, as even Wikipedia tells the enterprising reader in search of a reason for all these damned labels slapped onto stories:

In autofiction, an author may decide to recount their life in the third person, modify significant details and characters, or use invented subplots and imagined scenarios with real-life characters in service of an accurately portrayed self within the narrative. In this way, autofiction largely resembles roman à clef literature, though autofiction typically acknowledges its depiction of the author's real life. {It also shares similarities with faction, a genre devised by Truman Capote to describe his work of narrative nonfiction In Cold Blood I included this because I suspect almost 100% of my readers have read that book}.

I think this read is better categorized as a roman à clef because I, not in Author Akhtar's circle, get the idea of the story and the point of telling it, but feel an empty place where SOMEthing should go...likely a name or names to tell me what is not being said.

It's not being said quite richly, in a finely textured presentation giving we-the-reader subtle and elegant extra clues to Book-Akhtar's emotional and psychic well-being or loss of same. Book-Akhtar's libido is gone post-accident, allowing him the quieter inner life needed to experience "inner transports," less base than mere orgasms. When driving to the college campus where he teaches, his "body seemed to extend beyond itself...as if it were enlarged." Quite a reward for losing one's erections, no? Now, though, he's trying to convey the "wordless magic" of this new self—eventually formally diagnosed as "post-traumatic neuropsychiatric syndrome," utterly new to me as a real diagnosis and, honestly, one I think opens up real possibilities for contextualizing PTSD.

Author Akhtar is a fascinating Asian-American creative and educator, a blend of inheritances from training to family to generational standing, all altered with finality by the awful hate crime that he's subjected to and wrestles control over by means of this book. I'm intrigued by all the most American things about him being used as fuel for hatred of a stranger: a thriver and a striver, he is the object of intended to be murderous rage. It's deeply poignant that one result of the crime is to deprive him of his libido—that essential quality needed to survive, to thrive as a human. It wasn't a planned thing, it can't be, but it was a cruel blow indeed.

In his messy personal life Book-Akhtar subjects himself to consequences after the investigation into the crime begins that are...it's a bad time to be individualistic, let's say, in academia as well as in the wider world. Lots of vectors for judgment, few of them justifiable. I'm more outraged at the intrusiveness of the modern surveillance methods available than I am about someone's private peccadillos. In the assembling of any lynch mob, the distorted version of facts plays a key role...and the said facts are much easier to access than ever today.

I'm not sure where the facts are massaged, that's the point of autofiction after all, but these outrage merchants who are trained to expostulate at the drop of a hat get very wearying. It is a story we're living through the development of in this century; it has, in this novel, therefore to seek an ending in its end. It has neither, which is why I'm giving it four stars; the point of reading a story that is still developing is to trade the satisfaction of an ending for a slice through the layer cake that is a modern academic/creative's life...to get to know the emotional landscape of a developing character.

Young Werther, anyone?

HELEN OF NOWHERE, inexplicably longlisted for the Booker

HELEN OF NOWHERE
MAKENNA GOODMAN
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 29, 2026

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the “brilliantly complex” (Jenny Offill) author of The Shame comes an electrifying dive into one man’s fractured psyche as he searches for a new life.

Taking place over the course of one day, Helen of Nowhere introduces an intimate cast: an unnamed man at the end of both his career and marriage, a young realtor showing him an idyllic house in the countryside, and Helen, the mystifying former owner whose spectral presence seems to imbue the house’s every grain of wood. Through stories of the remarkable woman, the man is presented with an alternate way of life. But, as evening fades into black, the specifics of how to live it become more than what he bargained for.

Philosophically adventurous, strange, and fascinating, Helen of Nowhere examines the structures that form our identity, staring the reader down to ask the haunting question: What is the cost of true happiness?

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

My Review: Well...there hadda be one full-on flop among the Booker reads. I'm delighted to say I did not buy this inexplicably longlisted book; it was vouchsafed me. In a shock twist I *forgot* I got the DRC despite having opened the file, bookmarked a spot with no note as to why, and then checked it out of my branch because...I totally forgot I'd ever received it.

::cue ominous theremin music::

So here's the first bit:

Act I, Man

I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year. Any more than that and her life will be about being beautiful, entirely. Anything less and she’ll feel a lack of love and attention. My wife always said I never told her she was beautiful enough. But like I said, I don’t think it’s good for women.

Someone told me that life is a collection of details you choose to pay attention to. Most of my life has been taken up by my work, but since my work has always been about observing nature, I consider my life’s work all about paying attention. This is what I told my students: The world is to be observed, and observing for its own sake is a life worth living.

The house, for example, was warm, despite its being unfurnished, with simple wooden features and beams containing echo strokes of a handheld chisel. There was a built-in couch with a dark blue fabric cushion, its edges sewn by hand, somehow both right-angled and arched in a crescent shape. Beside it, an ornate cast iron wood stove. The windows were large, single-paned. There was a piece of upright wood in the corner, a gnarled tree or trunk that had been elevated into something sculptural. Besides that, nothing but gleaming, empty space.

I...was not involved, did not care, felt literally nothing.

Ellen, who is one of my longtime LibraryThing friends and with whom I share a lot of literary opinions, said it best: *shrug*

Man, the MC, gives off zero Main Character Energy, which I guess we all know is meant to de-emphasize the phallocentric "Big Dick Energy" it replaced in pop culture. This guy's a cuck, and boring with it which is unforgivable. The clue I was not going to resonate with the read came when I was searching other opinions to see why anyone on the Booker committee noticed this in the first place: It's A Christmas Carol made feminist, built around either archetypes or stereotypes depending on how positive you're feeling about the retelling but not realistic characters. I don't happen to think Dickens did his best work on the Cratchits so no shade cast.

Sound dreary? It was. I'm no fan of Dickens, I'm not hugely impressed by reimaginings as a class of literary endeavor, so the headwinds began to make sense. Maybe if I *loooved* A Christmas Carol...? But instead I have a true cuck Ebenezer, a Present in the too-chatty Realtor, Past in the eponymous Helen of Nowhere, whose stage presence is the most interesting, and Wife as Man's diminished Future. I found nothing compelling in them, I wanted the under-150pp to be over before it was, and most damningly,did not remember I'd read the story at all.

So, on the whole: Glad it wasn't on the shortlist.