PACKAGED LIVES: Ten Stories and a Novella, fiction that tells the truths of Iraqi lives

PACKAGED LIVES: Ten Stories and a Novella
HAIFA ZANGANA (tr. Wen-Chin Ouyang)
Syracuse University Press
$14.95 all editions, available now

August is Women In Translation Month! The publisher has a special sale: Save 50% on print copies through their website! Use code 05WIT22 at checkout for your discount.

Rating:

The Publisher Says: The carefully crafted, subtle, and humorous stories in Packaged Lives show Zangana at her best as a fiction writer. She portrays her subjects keenly, sensitively, and lovingly but without compromise. Iraqis living in exile come to life in her narratives as men and women who are caught between two worlds. They cannot return to their homeland and are forced to wait for news of Iraq from afar. At the same time, they are unable to fully adjust to life in Britain and make a new home for themselves. The question “What is home?” is at the heart of each story in this collection. Her protagonists, who are stuck in ready-made lives, or “packaged lives,” struggle to set themselves free from a web of relationships in which they are entangled. Art, poetry, and nature provide lines of escape. The relief may be fleeting, but the peace of mind and serenity are reached through the moment of epiphany at the end of each story, a much-needed balm.

Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi Kurdish writer and activist. She is the author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London, City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance, Dreaming of Baghdad, and Party for Thaera: Palestinian Women Writing Life, among others.

Wen-chin Ouyang is professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is the author of Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition, and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition. She has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road studies.

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

My Review: The author's life is, in the tiny squib above, an abbreviated roll call of her creativity. What is most important you don't discover until reading Michael Beard's Introduction: She is old enough to remember a pre-Saddam Iraq, one that was becoming its best self; then the translator, in her fresh bereavement, fills in those bones with the emotional muscles and life-lived sinews of her long friendship with the author and her own husband. The image called forth is of a loose, but powerful, bond of those few friends one makes in life who can be called "true blue through-and-through besties."



As is my established custom, you'll get a story-by-story note and rating, then a summation, or the Bryce Method as it's better known around here.

Evensong




Chatter




Delirium




Duck




Day




Refuge




Turnstile




Cave




Pilgrimage




Painting




Packaged Life

SEEKER, the first book of The Sentinel Archives, indie fantasy novels with an edge

SEEKER (The Sentinel Archives #1)
SAMUEL GRIFFIN
Panthe Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: "Today I am equipped with the knowledge that my future was to be far greater, more exciting, and more disturbing than anything so simple as my young imagination could then conjure. Indeed, looking back, my forecast was positively quaint. I ask myself a question often, and it is this: if I had understood all that was to befall me, would I have run, that day, or exulted?

I find I do not know."

Ancient leviathans have stirred from their long slumber. Their scent song marks where they might be found but only to those who have the means to somewhat hear it: Sentinel Archivists.

Shay Bluefaltlow finds herself training to become such a specialist when she is forced into indentured servitude. Her new home, the city of Fivedock, is strange and unfamiliar, as are her new companions: a belligerent surgeon, a remarkable little boy, and a formidable Sentinel Archivist tasked with teaching Shay the terrifying ways of the trade.

Her unanticipated position requires rigorous training, diligent study and a strong constitution. Shay, afraid she is unequal to the prodigious task but desperate to impress her superior, struggles to prove herself.

When war breaks out across the Concord, the office of the Sentinel Archivist is threatened by a terrible betrayal. And Shay has secrets of her own.

Packed with era detail to bring the world to vivid life, realistic, but with strong fantastical elements, a rich regency voice, and a bewitching touch of strangeness, Seeker is an immersive first-person fantasy for adults.

Griffin does for regency era fantasy what Robin Hobb did for medieval: this isn’t just a fiction, this is a living and breathing world you dunk yourself in. An intimate journey with real characters. With incredibly accomplished, enchanting prose, and a beating heart of a story.

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

My Review: You like fantasy novels more than I do. I promise you this is true. So why did I get a DRC of this title?

To see if there are cracks in my walls of resistance. And, well, I like this novel just fine. The ideas don't cause me to roll my eyes...the worldbuilding, in other words, does iits job with reasonable facility...but neither did the idea of an orphan-special-chosen-one meets scoobygroup cause me to get all excited. Executed well, or I'd've made tracks for the door; still, not the most energizing choice for this fantasy agnostic.

The faux-archaic tone, for some reason, hit me the right way. I was surprised by this, honestly because I usually find it arch and/or tedious. Author Griffin did a good job finding a middle ground between those unpleasant poles. As a result, I really enjoyed the read.

It moves slowly. The first half of the book is just not paced correctly, in that there were many times scenes went on way too long, and I was sorely tempted to shut the Kindle and move on to other things. That I didn't is honestly a little miracle. The Archivists kept me going. I wanted to know what the heck this was all connected to. But keep in mind I'm not a fantasy-novel reader as a rule. Maybe you fantasy aficionados will respond differently. Those who like the trend towards library- and archive-centered stories could, in particular, find something special.

Why I think you should give it a chance really boils down to that. You read the genre? Read widely! Wider than usual, for you "high-fantasy" folks. Much on a par for those who loved Susanna Clarke's magisterial Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Magic and fantasy, books and lore, people and quests, just belong together. Come get some more.

MY DARLING DREADFUL THING, sapphic Dutch Gothic horror...my first such...please not last, though

MY DARLING DREADFUL THING
JOHANNA van VEEN
Poisoned Pen Press
$17.99 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a world where the dead can wake and walk among us, what is truly real?

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the only good thing in Roos’ life, which is filled with sordid backroom séances organized by her mother. That is, until wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop attends one of these séances and asks Roos to come live with her at the crumbling estate she inherited upon the death of her husband. The manor is unsettling, but the attraction between Roos and Agnes is palpable. So how does someone end up dead?

Roos is caught red-handed, but she claims a spirit is the culprit. Doctor Montague, a psychologist tasked with finding out whether Roos can be considered mentally fit to stand trial, suspects she’s created an elaborate fantasy to protect her from what really happened. But Roos knows spirits are real; she's loved one of them. She'll have to prove her innocence and her sanity, or lose everything.

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

My Review: Satisfying sapphic romantic story of a woman who uses legit psychic powers in service of a horrible, harridanly charlatan. Or the story of an impressionable mentally ill young woman in thrall to a horrible, harridanly charlatan who grabs hold of sapphic love to effect her escape from abuse.

Either one fits. Both take us down the very dark, quite chilling paths that Author Johanna ushers the reader down. Roos, our PoV, has never experienced a normal life. It's the second culturally Dutch novel I've read this month that paints a very bleak picture of Dutch life after WWII, though I suppose that isn't exactly a shock is it. What does surprise me is the deeply homophopbic atmosphere Author Johanna portrays...I suppose the patriarchal horror of the world she's limned before our utterly appalled eyes is a big part of that, as the homophobia in question is directed at sapphic lovers.

If I'm to offer you one inducement to exceed all the others to get this book into y'all's hands, I'm going with: Dutch Author Johanna wrote this book in English, about lesbian survivors of a horrifying war in the Netherlands, because she's Dutch, because she's lesbian, and because she's clearly not quite right. How many people can accrete so many out-of-mainstream identities, write a story directly centered in them all, and get it published in the insular US market? And then, topping the high-calorie literary sundae with its obligatory gorgeously red cherry, create the undead/zombie character that twangs your readerly heartstrings with her fullness and pathos? Sweet, dead Ruth...my favorite zombie!

There are no others, just this one.

You can read, and there's a synopsis above this, so you know what's going on. I'm here to tell you if I think Author Johanna did the job of convincing me to invest in her world: Yes. Did she make me think long and hard about how the transactional world cheapens, while defining, human relationships: Better than the Southern Gothics. Roos is a classic Tennessee Williams character, a Blanche Dubois plus agency, with the psychic fragility and serious Love problems; Ruth puts me in mind of a gender-flipped Darl Bundren, articulate, doomed. Did her writing cause me to sit quiet for long moments, committing parts to memory: once, which is once more than most books I read. (It's a spoiler, so I daren't share; the Spoiler Stasi are ever vigilant and quick with their truncheons.)

The unique quality I literally never expect from horror, especially Gothic horror, novels is, here, the pervasive Dutchness of the story. It could not be reset in the US, or England, without losing the special something that kept luring me past my usual guardrails against con-artist faux psychics and fantastical stories of spirit lovers. These are usually the tropes I use as reminders that I have compararively few eyeblinks left and don't want to waste them. Author Johanna, in using postwar, post-Occupation Netherlandish settings, convinced me not to pre-judge these characters. Their long national trauma, their dark personal traumas, their battles faught against real cultural horrors, all formed a gestalt of world and people that convinced me to set my usual intolerance for these ideas aside and consider them as real...to the characters, thus opening the door to my belief as well.

That's a huge achievement for an author I'm unfamiliar with. I'm really pleased to say that I felt the ending was indeed a payoff commensurate with my investment of care and attention.

Brava, Johanna van Veen. Clearly your genesis as the odd-triplet-out was predictive of your sui generis selfhood. I'm eager for more from you.

VLADIVOSTOK CIRCUS, lovely tale of self-discovery through running away and joining the circus

VLADIVOSTOK CIRCUS
ÉLISA SHUA DUSAPIN (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent . . . when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall.

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader into Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

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

My Review: In less time than it takes Houellebecq to clear his throat in The Possibility of an Island, a book which goes on a similar trip, Dusapin starts and finishes this story. Nathalie is a woman who leaves, finds, and abandons in a country that, unluckily for the author, is an international pariah at the time her novel appears in English. Even more unluckily, it features a Ukrainian acrobat performing in a Russian circus troupe. So, through no fault of her own, Dusapin has created an artifact of a bygone time in this story.

Swiss-educated Nathalie has a fashion degree, which she is using in Vladivostok, Siberia, to work with a troupe of acrobats as they pursue a very difficult performance piece. So, already the theme of leaving is prominent: She left tidy, bourgeois Switzerland for the extreme edge of the wildest place in a wild country, Siberia, at the edge of Russia. The country is itself at the edge of the Asian continent; something I think a lot of people forget is that Korea, Dusapin's previously centered culture, is very close to Siberia. Nathalie is now, temporarily, in a port city, working with a troupe of performers who tour with a circus, and who are practicing an extremely difficult maneuver called "the Russian Bar," a name that carries a whole different cultural freight of metaphor in 2024 than it did when she wrote the book in 2020.

This is, one would expect, the McGuffin, the thing that motivates the action but, in itself is fungible. I thought it sounded like a great McGuffin for a young woman abandoning the bourgeois life that a Swiss fashion design degree virtually condemns one to, by literally running away from home to join the bloody circus.

Only partially true.

We do indeed have the young woman (instead of Daniel, the narrator of The Possibility of an Island and my idea of "the Houellebecqian man") on a voyage of self-discovery among the acrobats. Their extremes of hard, dangerous work, their deeply set bonds of trust built from many, many painful falls and much incredibly focused work on balance and dexterity, aren't exactly subtle metaphors for the young woman who abandons an entire life in Switzerland to start afresh to encounter. The work that Nathalie does, the external and honestly almost extraneous work of dressing these finely honed athletic bodies pales beside their training. Her choreography likewise is just a way of getting them out of one position in time to enact another athletic feat, while telling a story.

So she is only a part of the externals, the appearances of the actual group...the men and women whose work and commitment to each other, to building their trust in each other, makes the act...verb and noun...possible in the first place. But this semi-outsider is the one needed to refine and design the public face, the pretty dress that they need to sell the act...verb and noun...to a group of judges.

Okay? You with me on the meaning, and the stakes?

But the McGuffin is decidedly not just the moitvator here. Author Dusapin, deft of phrase, makes this McGuffin into a deeply explored reality:

Backstage, a pungent animal smell hits me. Straw scattered on the ground. Streaks of dirt on the walls. Like a stable but with velvet lining—hoops instead of horses, waist-high wooden balls, metal poles, tangles of cables, drones in the shape of planes, straw hats hanging on hooks. Leon tugs a cord and the curtains part.
–and–
She places a chair on the bar, balances it on two legs. They hold it in place for as long as they can, barely moving a muscle. Sometimes Leon is there with me. He explains to me why exercises of this kind are so important: the flyer has to rely entirely on the bases for balance and not try to stabilise herself at all. Think of Anna as the chair, he says, that’s how passive she has to be. It’s one of the hardest things about the Russian bar discipline.

There's a lot more detail about the specifics of the Russian Bar, and while I applaud Author Dusapin for making the physicality of the act...verb and noun...so starkly plain to us, and drawing our attention to the extreme discipline it takes a woman to perform as expected under the constant pressure of a hypercritical, unseen audience, its details are rather more prominent in the story than my interest in them required. It gave me rather less pleasure, then, than Author Dusapin's previous novels did.

But let's be clear about this: I enjoyed this novel a good deal more than most. I enjoyed the lovely translation. I enjoyed the thought-provoking metaphor of acrobatic performance for a young woman's acquired presentation of self; I enjoyed the Asian setting's evocative potentials. This is a compact, intense dose of good storytelling.

AFTERLIGHT, love, loss, and learning as they look from The End

AFTERLIGHT
JAAP ROBBEN (tr. David Doherty)
World Editions
$19.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This moving novel gives voice to the silent grief of the mothers of stillborn children

The young free-spirited florist Frieda grew up in a strictly Catholic environment in the 1960s. When she steps onto a frozen river on a late winter afternoon, little does she know that everything is about to change for her. On the ice, she meets the married Otto. They experience a love that begins stormy and ends with Frieda becoming pregnant—a scandal in the world in which she moves. And so she must never be the mother of her secret child.

For decades she kept her memories of this episode in her life to herself. But the grief for the lost child remains, despite the later marriage, despite the son she still has. At the age of eighty-one, Frieda is suddenly alone again. The silent sorrow returns with force. Only then does she dare to face her story—and to share it.

With Afterlight, inspired by true events, Robben not only pulls back the veil on Frieda’s story but also shines a light on the experiences of countless women between the 1950s and 1980s. The result is an impressive story about buried female trauma, caused by society, organized religion, and the dominant social mores.

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

My Review: I lost my love a lot earlier in life than Frieda did. He needed the level of care that Frieda does as the story begins, not me; nor have I yet reached the point where she is, of needing basic-living help.

Thank goodness the strokes I had in 2023 didn't make that help a lifelong need. But I still had the points of recognition and connection with Frieda from my life's story. I was right there with her as she adjusted to a new place to live that doesn't belong to her; I felt her dislocation as the night's disturbances had her groping around the unfamiliar space to find things she's sure she has, and still needs...only they aren't there and won't be again.

I am also familiar with the awful pains of being Othered by "religious" people, and told by The World that who you are is bad, and wrong, and will always cause their gawd to hate you and doom you to an eternity of punishment. Poor Frieda. I wouldn't say she overcomes that abusive horror in this story. I would say she makes her own way in life with the miracle of love offered her by the now-dead Louis...the one who fully expected he would survive her as she declined and lost more and more of herself. I asked Rob to read this book, and, after hearing what it was about, he looked at me through the computer screen and said, "No." Simple, final. Understandable.

It's a lot to ask: Frieda's happiness was bookended by a lot of pain. It is, though, the kind of pain that older people will relate to. It is a very familiar world that Frieda brings back to us in each time period. We've all been too young for some major life event that happened to us anyway. We've all felt unloved and abandoned...rightly, as in Frieda's case, or wrongly...and many, if not most, of us can relate deeply to loving someone and losing them. A lot of my readers are getting to the place where they, or their parents, are needing help that wasn't needed in the recent past. And all of that is what you and I share with Frieda.

Do you want to read about it for entertainment? Well, I did. I was pleased to have the fellow-feeling of Frieda's journey into the undignified, unpleasant (to me) world of bodily aging; as this is a story set in two timelines, though, I was expecting to be led into the sunnier meadows of the earlier life she led, and its youthful exuberance. Here is where the story fell short of the five stars all stories I read start with for me.

This is not a short book—three hundred-ish pages. There was space to develop the dual timeline, and it wasn't done. What's enjoyable about the way Author Jaap writes Frieda's story is the immediacy of it. He gets the sense of her, at every age, as a woman very much alert to the world around her; and yet unable to reach it, grasp it, without mediation...hearing aids, glasses, nurses, her husband, gawd...and so never fully having her own undiluted experience of anything.

Youthful inexperience prevented her from seeing the man who impregnated her in 1963 with any clarity, led to her downfall by the mediation of a religious upbringing that so starved her for genuine experience that she fell for the most unsubtle of lures. There's the consequences part of that in the book, but the stick gets applied without the carrot in my estimation.

That said, I liked this read. I liked its soft edges on hard realities...its gentle Impressionistic blur is, though, down to poor vision, not to a soft reality. That made it the more poignant to read. It's an enjoyable, relatable story well-told by an author who knows his subject. It's deftly translated...no clunks or clanks, and nothing that my early-learner study of Dutch saw as out of place...which helps.

Good is not the enemy of great when it is enough in itself.

THE REFORMATORY, death and reckoning in Jim Crow Florida...finalist for the 2024 LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL

THE REFORMATORY
TANANARIVE DUE
Saga Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead. Gracetown, Florida

June 1950

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.

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

My Review: FINALIST FOR THE 2024 LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL! Award will be given at the ceremony on 22 June 2024.

This is one long story. Long in words, long in facts, long! What it isn't is a dragging mess to read. Ghosts, abused boys, wretched families, the oppressive miasma of Florida's hideous climate...any one of these could've sent me on my way. Instead they all work as a gestalt of Horror, suffering, and terror that left me drained but made me as happy to know this story as an old white man who has never had to fear this kind of abuse and calculated cruelty can be at knowing, from the inside out, what the system I and mine have benefited from did while we were looking anywhere but there.

The single most awful part is that it's fictionalized, not fiction.

I just do not know why anyone would, based on skin color or other cosmetic or cultural factors, engineer a life designed to end quickly and prematurely for innocent victims. Othering, a long-standing weapon of mass destruction, is the cruelest and excuses the cruelest means of hurting those unloved. Why we keep burying our knowledge of its occurrence is perfectly clear after reading this story: Admitting that we tolerated this, knowing on some level that it was happening because these people vanished, but not how, not what horrifying acts occurred in our names, is acutely painful.

So is torture. So is the murder of your loved ones.

Suddenly the pain of reading about it isn't quite so bad, is it.

I hope this book wins the Best Horror Locus Award on the twenty-second of June. Pity it won't be Juneteenth.

BEASTS OF A LITTLE LAND, a beautiful read to disassemble one's complacency...its time come at last

BEASTS OF A LITTLE LAND
JUHEA KIM
Ecco
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter

In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. In an instant, their fates are connected—and from this encounter unfolds a saga that spans half a century.

In the aftermath, a young girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver’s courtesan school, an act of desperation that will cement her place in the lowest social status. When she befriends an orphan boy named JungHo, who scrapes together a living begging on the streets of Seoul, they form a deep friendship. As they come of age, JungHo is swept up in the revolutionary fight for independence, and Jade becomes a sought-after performer with a new romantic prospect of noble birth. Soon Jade must decide whether she will risk everything for the one who would do the same for her.

From the perfumed chambers of a courtesan school in Pyongyang to the glamorous cafes of a modernizing Seoul and the boreal forests of Manchuria, where battles rage, Juhea Kim’s unforgettable characters forge their own destinies as they wager their nation’s. Immersive and elegant, Beasts of a Little Land unveils a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviors, heroes are persecuted, and beasts take many shapes.

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

My Review: Starting an historical novel with a hunting scene is pretty much a statement of intent: We're heading into conflict! There's nothing about this going to be smooth and easy!

It isn't, for the characters at least. The value of self to family, to society; the value of individuation, personal or political; the value of loyalty, fidelity, honor: All strands in this novel's braid. What keeps these weighty themes from becoming burdensome to follow is the resonant writing.

It appeared to him that no matter how much he gave, he would always have more than enough. As he grew older, he even relished the struggles brought on by his sacrifices. There was a soaring awareness that illuminated his soul whenever he did the right thing, which also cost him something. This euphoria, however, was balanced by the utter terror he felt when he looked around and saw so many others to whom this consciousness was not only absent, but unknowable and abhorrent. Most people, MyungBo realized, were made of a different material than his, and it was not something that could shift, as from coldness to warmth, but an elemental and fundamental difference, like wood from metal.

This is, in my reading ear, the musing of a smart man on an immutable truth that does not ever appear the same way from person to person preceiving it; and, in his musing, retaining that awareness. I rang like a bell to this soft hammer striking me.

Current event make this read all the more trenchant. The world has never lacked people or peoples hard done by, consigned to lesser states of being than is their natural right by some standard or quality invented, "discovered," or detected without evidence of its relevance or importance. This passage in history, well, if I really need to spell it out for you I don't want to. This novel has a thriving culture that is suddenly deemed inferior, much to their mass outraged disbelief; this invented inferiority excuses a colonial oppression that has as its purpose eradicating a people's soul to be replaced with their oppressors' vision of perfect slaves.

And that, I expect you already know, is a hateful, criminal enterprise with many, many collaborators inside the edifice being created, as well as...much more terribly...many times more outside. When the day arrives that the false and ill-fitting, ramshackle and improvised, structure collapses, things brak and shatter and split and buckle in random-seeming shapes without patterns. Lives and loves and entire branches of family history jumble in lethal chaos, not every deat physical.

It might be the psychological ones that cause the most suffering.

What Juhea Kim has done for us is map that chaos onto one family of highly effective people who still can't save their lives, their loves, their lands without unthinkable suffering rippling out from the Korean nation's convulsive death-agonies, its multiplicity of death-agonies, and find in that chaos the undetected in the time of crisis pattern that supports random bits of the past just enough to provide the seeds for pearls to come, yet to come.

In 2024, this rread, beautiful for and in itself, means so much more than it did when it came out in 2021. It can speak its truth of betrayal and cruelty into a landscape more like itself; more like the one that needs to hear that truth said without rage or outrage or plangent pleading blame-shoving. I'd love for everyone I know, everyone I can reach, to at the least try this lovely flower's powerful fruit.

Please.

THE DEEPEST LAKE, eerie, nasty flensing-knife to the guts of the writing industry

THE DEEPEST LAKE
ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX
Soho Crime
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this atmospheric thriller set at a luxury memoir-writing workshop on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, a grieving mother goes undercover to investigate her daughter’s mysterious death.

Rose, the mother of 20-something aspiring writer Jules, has waited three months for answers about her daughter’s death. Why was she swimming alone when she feared the water? Why did she stop texting days before she was last seen? When the official investigation rules the death an accidental drowning, the body possibly lost forever in Central America’s deepest lake, an unsatisfied Rose travels to the memoir workshop herself. She hopes to draw her own conclusion—and find closure.

When Rose arrives, she is swept into the curious world created by her daughter’s literary hero, the famous writing teacher Eva Marshall, a charismatic woman known for her candid—and controversial—memoirs. As Rose uncovers details about the days leading up to Jules’s disappearance, she begins to suspect that this glamorous retreat package is hiding ugly truths. Is Lake Atitlan a place where traumatized women come to heal or a place where deeper injury is inflicted?

Perfect for fans of Delia Owens, Celeste Ng, and Julia Bartz, The Deepest Lake is both a sharp look at the sometimes toxic, exclusionary world of high-class writing workshops and an achingly poignant view of a mother’s grief.

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

My Review: Simplicity is a virtue in plotting, if not writing, a thriller. What complexity there is, in a truly involving example of the genre, comes from the characters and what they want that takes them far outside the safe confines of bourgeois life. The death of a child's good for rage, and even revenge; but the death of a child who evokes a guilt or a regret in a parent...that will move one far outside behavioral norms.

This iteration of the mother-hunting-murderer starts to show us complexity about halfway through. The first half is a not-that-exciting takedown of the Writing Industry as a hollow, pretentious ego farm. Been there, read that. I kept going because, as a hardened old reader, there was something prickling my arm hairs, something I couldn't quite put a finger on. The writing about the titular lake was lovely, but not unusually so. The character of the snobby writing coach, if that's what she is and not some super Svengali creating murderous minions out of lonely women who like to write, is in a word predictable. The mother...easiest point of failure because pathos wears thin fast...it's the mother, I thought. But why? echoed back at me.

I couldn't answer myself.

On I read, waiting for the...something. That was it! I was reading a book waiting for this unknown, but subtly prefigured somehow I couldn't quite grasp...something to occur. Let me say that again: Without being able to say what, or when, I got my expectation set on, I was hooked into not being able to put this book down. To beat you about the forehead some more with what an impressive feat that is, I'll tell you that I started reading mysteries with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in...well, let's just say people born that year are grandparents. Several times over.

No, I won't tell you what happens. I will tell you that, while I was satisfied that what ended the book ended the story, I was that smallest bit, that vague hint, disgruntled at how long it took to get there. That constitutes a quibble given how much enjoyment I'm going to get from exploring Author Romano-Lax's back catalog from Soho Crime. The synopsis writer gives you some very apt comps, and those should hint at the direction you can expect the story to take.

THE KOTARO ISAKA PAGE: The Assassins series, THREE ASSASSINS & BULLET TRAIN, as they're best experienced

THREE ASSASSINS
KOTARO ISAKA (tr. Sam Malissa)
Abrams (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Three Assassins feels like a fever dream that makes sense when you’re in it, but whose strange contours linger long after you wake up.” —New York Times

Three Assassins is the high-stakes, high-style, and utterly propulsive follow-up to Kotaro Isaka’s international bestseller, Bullet Train, a Crime Reads “Most Anticipated Book of 2021.”

Suzuki is an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. To get answers and his revenge, Suzuki abandons his law-abiding lifestyle and takes a low-level job with a front company operated by the crime gang Maiden, who are responsible for his wife’s death. Before long, Suzuki finds himself caught up in a network of quirky and highly effective assassins:

The Cicada is a knife expert.
The Pusher nudges people into oncoming traffic.
The Whale whispers bleak aphorisms to his victims until they take their own lives.

Intense and electrifying, Three Assassins delivers a wild ride through the criminal underworld of Tokyo, populated by contract killers who are almost superhumanly good at their jobs.

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

My Review: I read these books out of order; the fact is I didn't realize at the time I read them that there *was* an order! I strongly recommend reading this book before reading Bullet Train, because many details will make a lot better sense in the latter if you do.

A truly trippy, peculiarly anime-inflected story about...about...umm...Life, The Universe, and Everything, maybe? How easy it is to come unmoored from societal norms when they stop serving you? When an ordinary teacher's wife is assassinated, he doesn't grieve and get on with life. He turns his entire existence into a revenge-dealing machine. (Okay, okay, it's totally fridging and it's not a little icky in 2024, but the book was written in Japan in 2004; your 2020s US sensibilities are a liability in this read.)

What kept me reading in spite of feeling, quite often in fact, that I wanted to give Suzuki a hard shake and a two-cheek slap, was the inventiveness and gonzo pace of the exercise. Read it in chunks, not driblets. You'll think too much about how incredibly implausible the entire enterprise is unless you build a solid head of steam. The first ~30 pages at the least should be taken at a gulp.

A big part of the universe created here is the awful, cruel nature of modern society. The assassins who commit mayhem for money are no more horrible than corporate lobbyists who pay to pass laws that get their masters out of having to pay taxes, or damages, or take responsibilty for any awful thing that their (in)actions cause.

And that really os the heart of the book: Who are the clients for the terrible deeds that Suzuki and his co-workers are performing? Who has the money to make these terrible things happen, untraceably, repeatably, repeatedly?

Those in Control.

I'm not going to belabor this point. If you get it, you got it already. This, however, very important in the events that you're reading about in this book, and the next. The cruelty of the universe isn't personal. There isn't some vengeful gawd looking down on you and pointing an accusatory digit, using that to hurl thunderbolts and maledictions upon you more precisely. It would be, I suppose, comforting if there were.

Instead it's those in control looking at a population-level situation and moving the pieces of the solution into place. The motives, the results, the consequences...never vouchsafed to any of the victims inevitably suffering from those impersonal moves. Give someone a target for their misery and that target takes the heat and bears the blows. That's gawd's purpose in religion: the heat for the awfulness of the world is justified because gawd is mad at you, or your neighbors, or The Gays, or...the list is endless, changes with (often generational) fashions, and never includes the real culprits. If one depersonalizes, takes the face away from, the abuser, there's no outrage to build into rage, then erupt into violence.

Suzuki learns this horrible truth in the first thirty pages. No one murdered his wife. She was killed by a person, but not for a reason. Now what? Knowledge is power. Power over what you do next. Suzuki has to decide what will replace his desire for personal revenge.

And that, mes amis, is this novel's point. I'm not particularly edified by it, I'm not too happy about the violence herein so lovingly described. I was entertained by the full-throttle pace of the storytelling. I was abosrbed by this Everyman's decisions, the thoughtfulness of them, and the resultant mayhem. If you saw the westernized adaptation of Bullet Train, you have a grasp on the pace and style of events. But, and this is CRUCIAL!, you have no smallest idea of what the story is about. Read the books.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BULLET TRAIN
KOTARO ISAKA (tr. Sam Malissa)
Abrams
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Five assassins on a fast-moving bullet train find out their missions have something in common in this witty and electrifying thriller

Satoshi—The Prince—looks like an innocent schoolboy but is really a stylish and devious assassin. Risk fuels him as does a good philosophical debate, such as . . . is killing really wrong? Kimura’s young son is in a coma thanks to The Prince, and Kimura has tracked him onto the bullet train heading from Tokyo to Morioka to exact his revenge. But Kimura soon discovers that they are not the only dangerous passengers onboard.

Nanao, nicknamed Ladybug, the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world,” is put on the train by his boss, a mysterious young woman called Maria Beetle, to steal a suitcase full of money and get off at the first stop. And the lethal duo of Tangerine and Lemon are also traveling to Morioka. The suitcase leads others to show their hands. Why are they all on the same train, and who will make it off alive?

A bestseller in Japan, and soon to be a major film from Sony starring Brad Pitt and Joey King, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller which fizzes with an incredible energy as its complex net of double-crosses and twists unwinds to the last station.

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

My Review: Not the movie. The movie is fast and loud, American and violent. The book is slower, more nuanced, and very Japanese. It also has a universal message for its readers: Nothing, but nothing!, can be allowed to get in the way of Revenge. Call it Retribution: It is the eternal weighing of deeds for the pinpoint-accurate design of their equal and opposite results.

Revenge alone is sacred.

If you haven't read Three Assassins, a lot of the why of this story is not going to make a blind bit of sense. I strongly recommend getting into the universe of the assassins before embarking on this exciting outing into their world. Don't spend a lot of time asking "why" of this book only to get the unsatisfying answer a) because, 2) read Three Assassins, that's why.

A must for initiates, though. The increased famailiarity the book assumes you have is license for it to really ramp up the use of multiple, intersecting though definitely not parallel, PoV chapters...and that narrative technique requires practice to get used to when decoding tangentially connected story lines. This weird story of five assassins doing similar but not causally related things on one speeding train that's going nowhere special or significant to no unusual purpose. It's just moving at speed, and it's not going to stop for a predetermined period of time; perfect for a murder or two. The assassins, like in the first book, are very highly skilled at very weird specialties of killing. They operate at a superhuman level of concentration. They are, in short, very fictional. Since this is unabashedly fiction, that's okay by me. Big fun, nothing deep; the original story had more of the Message, this one merely plays the videogame for you.

Now, about that film: Like 3 Body Problem, it shifts things to a safely western, US-white-male footing so as not to run afoul of the clucking hens of the right wing who glare with their beady little eyes and three functioning neurons at any and all things queer (let alone Queer!) because...well, here I sit with my teeth in my mouth, unable to come up with any reason for their hostility except "they's stupid." Anyway, whatever the source of their rage, the entertainment studios won't take risks that will unquestionably, positively not pay off as increased profits in short, medium, or long runs, so here we are with a pallid, denatured action flick of what was a more subtle, subversive idea once in its life.

YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY, and so he should...and what fun getting him there

YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY
CAT SEBASTIAN
Avon Books
$18.99 trade paper, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An emotional, slow-burn, grumpy/sunshine, queer mid-century romance for fans of Evvie Drake Starts Over, about grief and found family, between the new star shortstop stuck in a batting slump and the reporter assigned to (reluctantly) cover his first season—set in the same universe as We Could Be So Good.

The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree.

Mark Bailey is not a sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to do that much. He’s had a rough year and just wants to be left alone in his too-empty apartment, mourning a partner he’d never been able to be public about. The last thing he needs is to spend a season writing about New York’s obnoxious new shortstop in a stunt to get the struggling newspaper more readers.

Isolated together within the crush of an anonymous city, these two lonely souls orbit each other as they slowly give in to the inevitable gravity of their attraction. But Mark has vowed that he’ll never be someone’s secret ever again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete. It’s just them against the world, and they’ll both have to decide if that’s enough.

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

My Review: I'm a Cat Sebastian stan. Her writing chops, her eye for a story, her politics...all *chef's kiss* in my experience. This derfinitely is, please note, a slow-burn love story. I don't think this is a bug, rather a feature; I'm pretty au fait with what happens between men in bed. I'm as interested in how they got there, and why, as in what it is they're gettin' up to.

The fun in this read is that, once the guys get their bodily freak on, I believe that they'll be able, and willing to stay there! These relationships, the ones you can actually picture as real and lasting, are all too rare in fiction...let alone in romantic fiction. It is not, I hurry to reassure the bodyloathers, a meaty, intimately observed intimacy; more of a noises-off kind of affair, where we know what happened and now we see what that brought to Mark and Eddie. One-handed reading is not really Author Cat's stock-in-trade, she hasn't started now.

That being my expectation, and it being met, next point of tension for many readers (including me) is the elephant in the room of any midcentury m/m story: Outing. A reporter and a baseball phenom in physical intimacy would've had a lot of anxiety about being seen to be...a little too close, a bit off in the macho world of baseball...because it would uneash the horrors of public, untrammelled homophobia on the men. This was, after all, the time of The Lavender Scare.

So this backdrop means, in my reading, the HEAs and even HFNs many writers engineer for two men being publicly together in this time-period ring hollow. "That could not happen!" I think, all suspension of disbelief flying away on noisy bat-wings of knowledge. As always, Author Cat spares me the discomfort by making these two behave circumspectly. Mark, a reporter, knows the Power of the Press, and respects the cultural norms to avoid awakening it. He's also just lost his longtime love, and so isn't exactly in a huggy-smoochy frame of mind; Eddie's in his first-ever existential crisis..."I can't do this thing I get praise and an identity from anymore! Help!"...so he's, well, not gonna rock the boat. Such a good way to ensure there's layers of meaning behind their period-appropriate decorous public demeanor.

What makes any story centered around grief readable is hope. The men here don't have a path forward, can't see through the fog of the present into a brighter, better-defined future. Only as they learn to trust each other's love and support as real, solid stones capable of being made into a foundation do they find the ease they're seeking. That was the payoff I needed from this unlikely duo's coming-together: The sense that, to their mutual surprise, they had found together the path that neither had been able to see alone.

In the end, these two find their happiness in their connection. They are, it felt to me, solidly, enduringly connected and will weather their future storms better for being together. Now, how often do fictional people draw out that level of thought and that depth of interest? For anyone who hasn't read Author Cat's earlier work, it might sound surprising that this has happened. I assure you who haven't had the pleasure that this is a long-term feature of all her stories.

Lastly, I hope you'll read this, and resonate to it. It is a very clear statement of a deep, abiding truth of the experience of being Other:

It’s not just the burden of continually lying, it’s keeping your existence a secret. When the world has decided that people are supposed to be a certain way, but you’re living proof to the contrary, then hiding your differences is just helping everybody else erase who you are.

This book, in a period-appropriate way, presents two loving souls whose socially unacceptable love and connection truly prevent them from being erased.

STROKE BOOK: The Diary of a Blindspot, trade paper edition of a book that speaks to me differently now

STROKE BOOK: The Diary of a Blindspot
JONATHAN ALEXANDER
Fordham University Press
$15.95 trade paper, available Tuesday

THE TRADE PAPER EDITION PUBLISHES ON THE 7TH, SO I'M REVISITING MY RECOMMENDATION OF THIS BOOK.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An archive of personal trauma that addresses how a culture still toxic to queer people can reshape a body

In the summer of 2019, Jonathan Alexander had a minor stroke, what his doctors called an "eye stroke." A small bit of cholesterol came loose from a vein in his neck and instead of shooting into his brain and causing damage, it lodged itself in a branch artery of his retina, resulting in a permanent blindspot in his right eye. In Stroke Book, Alexander recounts both the immediate aftermath of his health crisis, which marked deeper health concerns, as well as his experiences as a queer person subject to medical intervention.

A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously. Queer people often experience psychic and somatic pressures that not only decrease their overall quality of life but can also lead to shorter lifespans. Emerging out of a medical emergency and a need to think and feel that crisis through the author's sexuality, changing sense of dis/ability, and experience of time, Stroke Book invites readers on a personal journey of facing a health crisis while trying to understand how one's sexual identity affects and is affected by that crisis. Pieceing and stitching together his experience in a queered diary form, Alexander's lyrical prose documents his ongoing, unfolding experience in the aftermath of the stroke. Through the fracturing of his text, which almost mirrors his fractured sight post-stroke, the author grapples with his shifted experience of time, weaving in and out, while he tracks the aftermath of what he comes to call his "incident" and meditates on how a history of homophobic encounters can manifest in embodied forms.

The book situates itself within a larger queer tradition of writing—first, about the body, then about the body unbecoming, and then, yet further, about the body ongoing, even in the shadow of death. Stroke Book also documents the complexities of critique and imagination while holding open a space for dreaming, pleasure, intimacy, and the unexpected.

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

My Review: I reviewed the hardcover edition of this book in June, 2022. In January, 2023, I had three strokes. As Fordham University Press is releasing this trade paper edition Tuesday next, it seemed like a good time to revisit the read, and to tart up my review. In the year-plus since my own strokes, I have had a lot of time to think over what happened to me, how it happened, and what I have lost as well as gained from the terrifying bodily othering of one's brain being altered physically.

Here is my 2022 review:

Author Alexander does a lot of thinking. It is all in his prose.

I found myself thinking beyond {others}'s formal approach to the even more particularly queer nature of how I understood my stroke, of how I had been invited by a homophobic culture to think and feel about my body. A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously.

His world includes a husband, Mack, and a bunch of doctors who see him at need. So yes...he's white male privilege on legs. He's loved, employed, and creatively gifted (even works with my dote Michelle Latiolais!); he's able to get a publishing deal, so he's well connected.

None of that matters to cholesterol hanging onto the walls of this one artery, though, and when it takes off and lands in a new place that leaves him partially blind (and him with amblyopia already! PLUS it's his dominant eye that has the stroke!) He lands in that weird place called "chronic illness." And he'll never leave it. As a Queer man, that's a bad, grim journey...so many, many side-paths and so many losses and so much rage against the medical establishment that excuses its homophobia as "concern for patient privacy". But mostly, the fact is, this is a new resident in a community he's circled for decades, since AIDS through some "calculus of divine justice" has been seen as guilty without trial or concern for truth of Deserving It. Whatever bad thing "It" is, the gay men of the world Deserve It.

Not true; never was true; but there it is, like a rock in your panna cotta. Author Alexander asks, as he copes with his new situation as well as his mother's decline into old age, "is this what aging is like?" And answers himself, "Too soon. Always too soon." Amen, Soul Sibling. A-bloody-men!

***

So what would I add, what would I change, now that it has happened to me?

Really, not a whole lot of anything. I'll say that my recovery from three strokes has felt miraculous at times. I can't recall ever feeling as though I would need to adjust my quality-of-life expectations downward because of the strokes and their effects. My pre-existing issues have not worsened due to the strokes; if I have less and less energy, well, I'm not growing younger am I?

In short, I feel so very fortunate. I think the author realizes he was as well, though honestly he doesn't really make much of a meal about how he has changed, so I felt very much in tune with him and his attitude. Join him on a meditative journey through the changes that aging and its occasional curveball events will ring on your life.

THE JINN DAUGHTER, death magic, motherhood, and one very ill Death

THE JINN DAUGHTER
RANIA HANNA
Hoopoe Books
$17.95 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning debut novel and an impressive feat of storytelling that pulls together mythology, magic, and ancient legend in the gripping story of a mother’s struggle to save her only daughter

Nadine is a jinn tasked with one job: telling the stories of the dead. She rises every morning to gather pomegranate seeds—the souls of the dead—that have fallen during the night. With her daughter Layala at her side, she eats the seeds and tells their stories. Only then can the departed pass through the final gate of death.

But when the seeds stop falling, Nadine knows something is terribly wrong. All her worst fears are confirmed when she is visited by Kamuna, Death herself and ruler of the underworld, who reveals her desire for someone to replace her: it is Layala she wants.

Nadine will do whatever it takes to keep her daughter safe, but Kamuna has little patience and a ruthless drive to get what she has come for. Layala’s fate, meanwhile, hangs in the balance.

Rooted in Middle Eastern mythology, Rania Hanna deftly weaves subtle, yet breathtaking, magic through this vivid and compelling story that has at its heart the universal human desire to, somehow, outmaneuver death.

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

My Review: Mythology that tantalizes with its familiar outlines, and its very intriguing shifts, is always going to get my attention. Nadine has a very unusual job as a Hakawati jinn who must tell the story of the dead before their spirit can move to the next world. This is very appealing to me, as the medium of delivery is pomegranate seeds that fall from the sky. This use of the many-cultural pomegranate as a deliverer of information about the dead in its very numerous, sweet-fleshed seeds seemed like it should be used in more myths!

Demeter and Persephone add their cultural mite to the familiarity stakes as Nadine, our jinn mother, needs to keep her daughter from being drafted to assume the role of the soul-sickened, dying, Death. I don't guess any mom wants her little girl to grow up into a being universally feared and loathed. The tension seemed logical if overplayed: In the quest to save her half-human child from becoming Death, Nadine takes us through an afterlife of surprising charm and a weird kind of gentleness. I guess when Death and her court are female, that is what happens...? As a side note, the men here are one-dimensional walk-ons. I was fine with that, others might not be.

I kept thinking that Death sounded like a fine ruler, where do I go to learn necromancy? Nadine was way ahead of me. Lots of the stories in this very literary fantasy novel center on death as a bargain, making deals, and the like. That is not really something I think is factual, but this being fiction not religion I have no kick with it. The book is short enough that its one note, Motherlove, does not become tiresome. She needs to make some hefty decisions with serious consequences to keep her daughter safe, including the hail-mary pass of digging up her dead partner's horrible father, but in the end only truly good people can help Nadine do good things.

Does it all make sense? Not to me; but I am a cynical old man who thinks the job of being Death sounds spiffing. There is a lot of time spent doing the same thing a couple different ways...go with it. Be in the flow of the story. I recommend this quiet, loving story for US mother's day, as a gift or as a celebration of a deeply missed Mom.

1795: THE ORDER OF THE FURIES (The Wolf and the Watchman #3) ends the Winge brothers' trip through Enlightenment Stockholm

1795: THE ORDER OF THE FURIES (The Wolf and the Watchman #3)
NIKLAS NATT OCH DAG (tr. Ebba Segerberg)
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The spellbinding and eerie finale to the #1 internationally bestselling “cerebral, immersive” (The Washington Post) historical trilogy follows two unlikely allies as they struggle to end the reign of a powerful cabal of depraved hedonists in 18th-century Stockholm.

For more than a year, brilliant lawyer Emil Winge has dedicated himself to capturing the diabolical Tycho Ceton, with the invaluable assistance of one-armed army veteran and watchman Jean Michael Cardell. Their mission is made more difficult by the ever-increasing paranoia gripping Sweden’s royal family, who fear that a bloody revolution is brewing. A letter with the names of the revolutionary conspirators is said to be in the possession of Anna Stina Knapp, a good friend to Cardell. Now, Anna is missing and Cardell is determined to find her before the secret police take her into custody.

While Winge and Cardell fight for justice and for life, they find themselves caught between powerful enemies—those who will do anything to maintain the status quo, and those who will only be satisfied with its total destruction. Niklas Natt och Dag brilliantly concludes his immersion into the dark and turbulent waters of 18th-century Stockholm.

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

My Review: Dark, turbulent story finishes the arc of this series with the finality of an amputation saw. We met Cecil Winge and Mickel Cardell in 1793 as a truly appalling series of crimes come to light. These men, one in the terminal stages of the Great White Plague (tuberculosis) that ravaged the cities of the time, refuse to just accept that human beings can be treated in the vile ways they've seen without any consequences. Solid Enlightenment values on display, then. A human being has innate worth and dignity, and the kind of killing being perpetrated by someone(s) is an affront to that dignity.

It is hard for us to get into that mindset today. The privilege baked into the world we live in is now centered on money as worth and virtue; then it was god-given by birth. Whose vagina you were shoved out of was, forver and ever, the Place you occupied in this world and the next. Is it, I often wonder, better to base stuff on money? I mean, just look at the scum who hoard huge piles of money and get immense privilege! Unlike the old aristocracy, no one prepared them in any way for the responsibility of "high" social position so they waddle about, dribbling crudeness and outgassing idiocy like this wasn't a disgusting display of vulgarity.

Ahem.

Back to the book: The "high-born" people committing the crimes Mickel and the Winge brothers (Emil takes Cecil's place in the last two books of the series) are sufficiently enraged by to pursue them clearly don't have any noblesse oblige in them either. They behave disgustingly, but in private. The results of their disgusting behavior are simply dumped and there's no absolutely clear-cut way to pin it on the perpetrator(s) or to hold them accountable.

It's in the book! That's not me being political!

What happens in this last volume is the culmination of honest, honorable men pursuing justice across a corrupt landscape of privilege and abuse of power. It's a landscape that is absolute in its wins and losses. That is what suits the PTB, after all, since it's their thumbs on the scales of justice. The disgusting crimes, ones that repulse all honorable people of every station, in this book are less...meaty...but just as awful. The essential crime in the entire series, the one thing that unites the books and makes the reader invest in the characters and stories, is the abuse of power by the powerful. The lives of ordinary people are ruined at a whim, are altered for the worse by someone who has no consequences for that alteration. The team who set out to change that are doing so, bit by bit, in the teeth of a gale blown directly at them by men who do not want any precedents to be set that challenge their control.

The fierceness and appalling cruelty of the fight shows that they know the stakes are existential. Lose this one battle against two little nobodies and lose, once and for all, the Absolute Rights they presently enjoy. The force applied to Mickel and the Winges only makes sense when you look at it from the position of those whose power is at stake. The power that the little guys are fighting to take, the justice that they seek for victims cruelly used, is not out of proportion, that is overtly revolutionary, so why is it being resisted so fiercely?

Because once limited, absolute power dissolves. If held accountable for *this* crime, there is no longer immunity, no longer a usable reason to quash future and further reckonings. Why do you think there's something called a "consent decree"? The entire apparatus of Sweden's absolute monarchy topples if these two little men win Justice for the victims they're fighting for!

Do they, in the end, win? Read the book(s), dark and violent as they are, because I'm scared of the Spoiler Stasi. Those women take no prisoners.