NO NAMES, a #PrideMonth debut novel from a poet via Minneapolis's estimable Coffee House Press

NO NAMES
GREG HEWETT
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by the iconic punk scene of the late '70s, No Names blurs the lines of affection and sexuality in a haunting tale of desire, hope, and loss.

Mike and Pete were "no names," two working-class boys lost in the shuffle of their stratified town, brought together by their love of music. By 1978, their punk band was blazing across the underground scene. Now, in 1993, Mike is a hermit living alone on a dot of an island in the North Atlantic. When a mysterious letter from an unlikely fan named Isaac arrives, he's pulled right back into the pain he’s spent over a decade running from.

Isaac longs for an escape from his lonely teenage life. A chance discovery of the No Names’ only album catapults him into an obsession with the godlike rockers and the tantalizing possibility of connection.

As their stories collide, mistakes breed consequences that echo through the decades like the furious reverberations of a power chord.

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

My Review: Two-thirds of an excellent novel...after the twist, it's not excellent anymore. It's good, and as a contrast to almost two hundred pages of really outstanding build-up, I felt really let down by the ending. It was a messy trailing-off of several conversations, between characters and us, as well as each other. Multiple PoV novels are always...baggy...but this one's excitement and intensity came from the sense I had in the first part of the book that each person was picking up the thread of a narrative, was the response part in a call-and-response composition.

Much of that energy came from the way the voices wove around each other as they spoke of the times and events that the narrator before had no way of knowing. By the two-thirds mark, they were not telling the same story. They were following their own strands into a future not shared; it's like life, you meet, connect, intertwine for a time, then the time is over. The problem I had with that in this context is that it takes me from one kind of book...close harmony call-and-response...into another, the oratorio going chapter-and-verse through the wind-up of the stories I'd previously experienced directly.

What started as a five-star read ended at three and three-quarters because the narrative drive leaked right out, becoming severe with Mike's relating with the reader how Isaac fits in with the story. I began to nit-pick characters' word choices, their manner of addressing the facts they presented. That is never a good sign. I was disinvesting before the book ended.

But my goddesses, that first bit! A true joy of reading time spent well, and in the presence of a talented voice in storytelling. So not-quite four stars to celebrate the first novel of a writer whose next novel I want to read as soon as he writes it.

BELLIES, Author Nicola Dinan's Polari-Prize winning first novel

BELLIES
NICOLA DINAN
Hanover Square Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER of the 2024 Polari First Book Prize

The Publisher Says: I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

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

My Review: The depth of my youthful ignorance was forcefully recalled to me as I read this novel. I knew a transfem lady in my youth. I was utterly rejecting and actively unpleasant to her, a thing that recalling in my elderqueer years I view with horror at my cruelty.

If she is still alive (not a given for QUILTBAG people my age), I hope it is a life accompanied by a circle of people knowing her, giving her the fullest experience of being loved, accepted, and celebrated for being herself. It shames me what I thought, felt, and—mortifyingly—said to her when she came out to me. Living well is the best revenge. I hope she has had her revenge on me in spades these past five decades. My own trans family and friends have reason to thank her for bringing my unreasoning prejudice to the forefront to be confronted.

I came to this story, then, predisposed to find in it a measure of redemption. Not mine, but Ming's as she comes to realize transitioning is her only path forward to a fulfilling life..."I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space"...while knowing it means literally never going back to her birth family; and Tom's, as he comes into contact with an entirely new spectrum of identities just as being gay is really settling in as his honest identity. His gayness, kindness (edging into codependence), and almost desperate desire to help are deeply familiar to me. "I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren't right for me, and I'm just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people." So relatable!

Much as in Disappoint Me (q.v.), the heaviest desriptive lifting is being done in service of food. Like that book, it's always true that food descriptions are in a heightened register. Do not read this book while hungry. If you're wise, only do so after your favorite stick-to-your-ribs meal is on board and you have something dessertable on hand.

Like any story about being a young adult, still less one who is transitioning and one who is in love with someone making the transition, there are a lot of operatically heightened emotions flowing around. The friend group Ming and Tom create all have drama, upsets, ideas and opinions of Ming of Tom of Life...you remember. It's a messy, intense time. It's the meatiest chunk of a life well-lived, and these young folk are living it! I confess to feeling worn out by the intensity of it: "I'd spent years feeling happy to be nourished by Ming's light, so much so that I'd never asked what I could be for myself, only what I could be for her. I'd long suspected that Ming shone brighter than me, the same way I'd suspected Sarah {the girl he left for Ming} did, too". I suspect I supplied the intensity as Author Dinan reserves her descriptive riches more for food.

A beautiful, passionate evocation of one's early adulthood, replete with relatable drama, unimaginably brave and accepting people bound tighter than they ever will be again, and the most wonderful thing of all: Discovering Love.

A MURDER IN ZION: A National Park Mystery, one of mystery-publishing monadnock Oceanview's better discoveries

A MURDER IN ZION: A National Park Mystery
NICOLE MAGGI
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Beautiful views, deadly encounters

Grief-stricken over her mother's death and bruised by her failure on her most recent case, Special Agent Emmeline Helliwell with the National Park Service returns to her Utah hometown to heal and regroup. She's determined to turn in her badge and take over her mother's bakery for a much quieter life . . . until the body of a childhood friend turns up in The Narrows of Zion National Park.

The case is too personal for Emme to turn down, but the seemingly simple investigation turns treacherous as clues that connect to her previous case grow too glaring to ignore. When bodies start to pile up, Emme must track down the killer before they take more lives, venturing deep into Zion National Park to uncover the sordid secrets hiding beneath its stunning beauty.

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

My Review: If you've ever been to Zion National Park, this story will transport you there. Evoking its austere beauty in the kind of prose that feels the way the air of the park feels...clean, spare, slightly sage-scented...it will seep through your defenses to bring you right back: "The hard-packed rust-colored dirt crunched a bit beneath their feet, tall scrub brush and ponderosa pines reaching up toward the blue sky on either side of the trail. The red-rock cliffs rose alongside them, towering over the land below like a queen on a throne high above her subjects."

Now we move to the mystery bit: There's a lot of dark goins-on in Zion and environs featuring "...the Warriors for Armageddon, religious fanatics with multiple wives and too many guns," and if you're not now all set to dive in, I dunno what else to tell ya.

How about journalist Finn, working with FBI agent Claire to get the goods on the Armageddon cult looneys who everyone thinks murdered Emme's buddy Max? How about the archaeologist sister working in Tasmania, whose physical presence is required to settle their late mother's estate? Is Emme going to get to retire from being a Park Service cop and become a baker like her late mom? I haven't read her other series, "Twin Willows," but if she's on form there like she is here, I'll go get all the Nicole Maggi I can find.

The wonderful quality of a mystery series is its ability to help you feel Ma'at is restored, the guilty will answer for their crimes, and there's a community built around the crime-solver(s). I am glad to say this read did not drop even one of these balls in its execution.

I would offer more stars were it not for a somewhat thin veneer of villainy over the looney cultists...their looniness is their sole affect. I was also surprised that Emme was so unpleasant to her younger sister. It felt jarring for a woman who delayed/rescinded her law-enforcement retirement to solve her high-school friend's murder to be so angry...though doodness knows families breed anger at the best of times. It was not, clearly, a deal-breaker! I recommend the read.

THE GARGOYLES OF NOTRE DAME, the French Revolution...with sentient gargoyles!

THE GARGOYLES OF NOTRE DAME
GREG WALTERS (tr. Justin Beckham)
Free on Kindle Unlimited! (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 to purchase, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: History meets Fantasy in Revolutionary France!

Paris, 1789. The soaring spires of Notre Dame conceal more than prayer and piety. Within the cathedral lies the secret of the gargoyles, mystical creatures bound by ancient magic to the aristocracy. For centuries, these stone sentinels have ensured the power of the nobility and kept the oppressed powerless.

When Henri, a 22-year-old stonemason apprentice, accidentally forges a sacred bond with one of these creatures, he shatters a tradition meant to protect only the upper class. Betrayed by the gargoyles and hunted as a traitor, Henri flees into a city teetering on the edge of revolution.

As word of his forbidden connection spreads, hope ignites among the oppressed. To the people, Henri becomes more than a fugitive. He is a symbol, proof that the chains of oppression can be broken. With cries of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” rising in the streets, Henri faces an impossible choice.

Will he hide from the chaos or risk everything to lead a rebellion that could reshape France forever?

Perfect for fans of The Gilded Wolves and The Night Circus, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame is an exhilarating tale of magic, rebellion, and the courage to defy destiny.

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

My Review: The French Revolution plus sentient gargoyles. Sign me up.

Now, don't go gettin' all logical; this is a fantasy. It assumes that, for some reason never even lightly touched on, the French Revolution takes place as it did in our time despite aristos and royalty all having actual, sentient gargoyles in their service (Louis XVI has six of 'em!). Not as some odd innovation; not as a revolution in itself; but as an established way of marking them out as having rank.

Nothing about this makes one whit of sense, but it's cool, so run with it. Be prepared to stop, though, after a gangbusters start we begin to meander a bit. The "romance" between an adult man and a teenaged girl is squicky. Yes, that's my twenty-first century acculturation speaking. I live now, so I use now's ideas to judge things made now, and you may be sure that very much shows in the character voices. If this was a survivor of 1825 or even 1925, written about their past, that somehow reached me for the first time now, I'd be of a different opinion. It is not that. I'm squicked.

I found the gargoyles speaking in poetry a whole lot less irritating than I expected to. I screamed with rage only once! Who knows, maybe I'm finally old enough to "get" poetry. (I'm not.)

The entire exercise is, I believe, meant to be New Adult reading. I think the pacing is off for that reading segment; starting with action at full speed leads to an expectation of it staying there in less-experienced readers. It's too bad; this could easily be a good series if some detail tweaks were done.

Me, I'll stop at one. Not a bad one, so why risk leaving with a poorer opinion than my present overall positive one?

FOREST EUPHORIA: The Abounding Queerness of Nature offers a bracing dose of Reality to "gender essentialists"

FOREST EUPHORIA: The Abounding Queerness of Nature
PATRICIA ONONIWU KAISHIAN
Spiegel & Grau (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.

Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.

Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.

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

My Review: Honestly, our very much elder siblings the fungi, part of a family we do not share but the most distant connection with, have more to teach us about Life than I expected. Author Kaishian is a very well qualified guide into their world, having several degrees in mycological subjects and being the New York State museum's curator of mycology. An unimpeachable fount of expert knowledge, then.

I've never really thought about the gender realities of fungi before now. I knew they were ubiquitous...the wood-wide web...and enormous (that several-square-mile honey fungus in Oregon), for two memorable examples...but how they got it on was hazy, limited to fruiting bodies producing spores in my infobase. I am of greatly expanded consciousness now.

Fungus is just the beginning of queerness, of "gender non-conformity" that culture-specific ungeneralizable concept, in Nature. The examples are weird...eels? what the hell my dudes?...slugs *shudder* doing unspeakable things to each other after sex...and the list isn't even fairly begun. Vertebrates, our fellow spine-havers, get themselves up to some wild shenanigans, like the fish harems where the physically largest female becomes male when the old one dies. How do they know? Who thought this was a good idea?

But, overall, the thing I loved about this read was not the fount of factfulness but the fountain of meditative, calm reflection that Author Patty (she refers to herself as such on her website so I'm presuming to do so too) uses to soothe away the hurts being queer in a hostile world has wrought. Her Irish-Armenian heritages, her neurodivergent presentation of self, her life experiences, all give her the invaluable, painful gift of Otherhood. It is a thing I've been grateful for in my older years of life. It takes Otherhood to see the absurdity of the prejudices most people use in place of learning, thinking, meditating. Author Patty gets this on such a core level that as she lets us in on her uncoverings it feels organic (!) instead of calculated as is so often the case. Even her coinage of "eco-spirituality" to describe this manner of being in the world feels uncondescending. It could easily have read brummagem and insulting. Instead it's all of a piece with her shared factual information as viewed through her lens of personal reflection. Like this:

I like blurring the line between human and nature because I believe we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation. And it’s because of this that the planet is spinning through a devastating loss in biodiversity. The species that have brought me the most companionship, assurance, and inspiration are those furthest banished from human society, those least associated with the “desirable” traits of being human—upright and logical, two-legged and binary-sexed. My personal connections to these organisms have brought me a sense of queer belonging and comfort in the heaviest of times. In exchange, I hope to do my small part by sharing their stories. And I hope that in sharing these stories, you too will feel the closeness of the earth, the lack of space between our cells, and the memory of each other.

I think the last word has been had. I'm just that hair away from five stars because I still find slugs utterly repugnant and with a gardener's eye of loathing.

QUEER (IN)JUSTICE, dated, but very very trenchant examination of queer social inequality

QUEER (IN)JUSTICE
JOEY MOGUL·ANDREA RITCHIE·KAY WHITLOCK
Beacon Press
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first comprehensive work to turn a “queer eye” on the criminal justice system, providing an eye-opening study of LGBTQ+ rights and equality.

Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—from “gleeful gay killers” and “lethal lesbians” to “disease spreaders” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities.

An eye-opening study of LGBTQ rights and equality, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: Back in the innocent days of 2020, when I received it, this was a mind-blowing read. In 2025, a mere five years later, its infelicities are brought into sharp relief by the spotlight the current US regime is shining on issues of social justice by trampling on, trying to bury, and (where possible) expunge progress made.

I have trans friends and family members. I'm guessing that was either not the case for the authors, or they simply did not delve deeply into those folks' experience. Importantly, though it might seem trivial to some, referring to trans women as "trans" and cisgender women as "women" just perpetuates their othering. The terms "gender non-conforming" and "genderqueer" are not synonyms for "transgender." "Genderqueer" is a different thing, its own category of queerness. I grant you that, when I first saw it codified in the 1990s, it did not have the sense of meaning it does now. "Gender non-conforming" includes anyone, cisgender or even heterosexual, whose manner of self-presentation falls on the edges or outside of a specific culture'e gender norms.

It is a case of the times being unkind to a solidly researched and competently argued (and footnoted!) work of scholarship.

That lacuna, addressable if Beacon Press brings out a second edition of this thirteen-year-old work, aside, I have the greatest respect for this genuinely informative scholarly examination of why decriminalization of same-sex sexual acts is only one small step for humankind. It is a project worth examining in the current horrifying recrudescence of the intolerant ignorance of our never-distant past. When frightened by change, humans routinely find scapegoats and the cynical, power-hungry would-be tyrants feed that base, appallingly cruel need in our ape-brained characters.

An admirable facet of this treatment of the legal system's weaponization of power is that it never isolates the causes of victimization. Race, biological sex however expressed, and socioeconomic class are all very explicitly brought into the conversation. The extent of violence against transfem and gender non-conforming queer men around the world...I'm specifically thinking of the violence committed on the US-Mexico border, though it is by no means the only place this occurs...is often exacerbated by socioeconomic pressures leading these vulnerable people into prostitution. No such threats of violence appertain to their clients. Why would that be, if it is the act of having sex with another man that is being scapegoated here?

I'll leave that thought to marinate with y'all.

In many ways it is the abolitionist movement's intersection with queer-rights groups that powerfully reinforce each other's main thrust: Reform. The system is, as the looneys on the political right constantly complain, rigged. They do not see that it's been rigged for a purpose, and that purpose is also served by impoverishing and immiserating them. Reform for selectively applied to benefit some and exclude others is the antithesis of fairness, justice, equitable distribution...all those things everyone likes until the language they're couched in gets politicized.

DISAPPOINT ME, easily the title most easily misunderstood for #PrideMonth

DISAPPOINT ME
NICOLA DINAN
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

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

My Review: Is it possible to love someone after you know their worst moments? Is it possible to love someone when you don't know their worst moments?

That's an existential question, applying to each and all of us. It's one to ask yourself when thinking about any relationship, including your relationship with yourself. Max is doing a lot of thinking about relationships to self, and to Truth, and to facts...and Vincent. She's been blindsided in her complex developing relationship to him. Add to this a quite conservative Chinese family (pretty much a trope heading into stereotype-dom at this point) that's honestly struggling (I mean struggling, and being honest about it) with her transfem identity, and to the past actions Vincent undertook that form a separate narrative strand.

When Max decides she is going to pursue a heteronormative identity, it came after a crisis in her life. This makes it feel a bit forced. If this had been something Max was mulling over, I'd've found its narrative suddenness a bit less jarring. That said, I'm actually kind of relieved not to have the narrative focus on Max's transition...it's happened, it's done, what's next? Vincent being okay with her transness was, dare I say it, a bit less startling than I was perhaps expected to find it. Until, that is, we move into a timeline of Vincent's past and discover what Max now learns; this event is going to change everything in the present as it did in the past.

What matters in all these deftly plucked strands of Author Dinan's story-web is the essential unknowability of one's emotional life once given into the hands of another. What we feel for the other, what is felt by the other, how all that will intertwine to make the web that couplehood sticks us to, what new information—truth, fact, realty—means in that web is where we're meant to focus. At times the quotidian world intrudes and distracts, or is allowed to intrude and distract. The attentive reader will notice register shifts in Author Dinan's prose from pleasantly descriptive to nearly florid at those moments. I'm assuming food is a comfort drug to Max and her found family....

Where do we end up in this web? In it. I read the book assuming I'd reach a conclusion to some of those issues raised above. I do not think quite a few people will find the openness of the ending, the real lack of closure for Max and, to a lesser degree of investment, Vincent, to be satisfying. I took a star off because I was not given a sense that, by the end, Max had any kind or sort of response, still less plan, to all she's learned. We simply...leave the story, trailing web-strands of it behind us.


Not a perfect read, then, but one I very much enjoyed. More from you soon, please, Author Dinan!

THE SURGE is Author Adam Kovac's second release of this deeply felt story of men in combat mode

THE SURGE
ADAM KOVAC
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Larry Chandler knows what his fellow soldiers don’t—that war scars you and haunts you, leaving you with memories you’d prefer not to face. They’re all National Guardsmen serving together in Iraq, but he’s already done a stint in Afghanistan, whereas they’re fresh-faced youngsters on their first tour. The new soldiers are eager for something more interesting than life on a firebase, or boring guard duty at isolated outposts—and they’re about to get their wish.

Adam Kovac has written one of the great novels of The Forever Wars—one that captures both the dust and grit and sweat of soldiers on patrol, and the surrealism of their lives back on base. (Where they might be checking Facebook and ordering lattes one minute, and dodging mortars the next.) In its first edition, it earned comparisons to the likes of Hemingway, Mailer, and O’Brien; this revised second edition promises to find it the audience it so richly deserves.

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

My Review: I'm connected with Author Kovac across social platforms for ages now, because we support and repost stuff that falls into a leftier, less manosphere-friendly vibe. I got a copy of the DRC from his publisher without mentioning it to him, when one fine day he slid into my DMs asking if I wanted to read it.

Thus proving the old adage "you know your own."

Another old adage proved in this read is "be careful what you ask the gods for lest their answer be 'yes.'" Larry Chandler muses at one point that he doesn't know what to do with the genuine, but not civilian-life-friendly, love he feels for fallen comrades. It's real, this unnamed grief, but it's so very not part of the life your friends, family, spouse at home are leading that you can't see what you can do with it.

For me, that was the emotional heart of this read. In The Yellow Birds, Bartle has a job of work to explain how he survived and another man didn't. In Matterhorn, one of my annual 6*-of-five reads, Waino Mellas had the same gigantic realization in Vietnam. If you're sensing a theme, you're on my signal pretty tightly.

Why I read these war-experience novels by veterans is easy to explain. They are always real and honest; they carry some burden the veteran wants to put down; and they are almost always so polished in the author's writerly imagination that some genuinely lovely turn of phrase leaps out at me:

"People, man, they won’t shut up. Watch. They’ll keep asking what you’re going to do now that you’re back home. Compared to life downrange, I think it might be impossible to find anything as interesting."
–and–
"Civilian world. It’s a dead end. Man knows where he stands here. Where he belongs."

Terse, not flowery, not fancy, but impactful like the sound of an IED just out of sight is.

Why I like reading these stories is also easy to explain. I will never have an experience like this. Even if, as I suspect is the case, this inner conflict ripping up the US does not end without bloodshed, it will not be like this. War has moved on since the Aughties Iraq War. Drones do more killing than people do. I think that will lead to less empathy than even The Surge's men learn to experience. Now you'll simply see the aftermath of killing not commit or participate in it as a group.

I have the luxury of knowing I'll be dead before all that long, so might...probably will...miss most of it. Poor Author Kovac, having lived it, written about it, and now seen it coming again on home soil, just has to gut it out. I'm sorry, my dude. If it's any consolation to you, this story is excellent, and you're a dab hand at bringing your readers along with you as you make a narrative happen for us.

If you're in the modern world and wondering why the right-wing-nuts are whining about men being "too empathetic," read Adam Kovac's novel. Empathy is what war pounds into your skull. If you start out with it, with what it takes to learn it out in the killing fields, maybe...just maybe...you won't do it on command.

That makes this very good story a public mitzvah as well as a pleasure to read.

THE LEGEND OF VALENTINE, both christian and poorly written

THE LEGEND OF VALENTINE
SHELDON COLLINS
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99, or free to read on Kindle Unlimited

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: Rome, 268 AD
In an age of tyranny and turmoil, an eternal love story ignites a revolution.

Valentine, a once-fearsome warrior reborn from the brink of death, sheds his violent past for a new destiny inspired by his blind lover, Agatha. Amidst the ruthless rule of a merciless emperor, Valentine undertakes a clandestine to unite lovers in secret ceremonies, defying imperial decrees that threaten to obliterate the Christian faith.

As Valentine’s covert acts of defiance grow bolder, he challenges the tyrannical order, planting the seeds for a celebration of love that will echo through the ages—becoming the foundation of what we now cherish as Valentine’s Day.

The Legend of Valentine is an epic tale of love, war, faith, and rebellion. Against the backdrop of an empire in chaos, this gripping saga invites readers into a world where love defies all odds, heroes rise from the shadows, and the undying spirit of hope shines through the darkest times.

Discover the man behind the myth, witness the birth of a legend, and experience a love story so profound it promises to live forever.
Are there any limits to what one man will endure for his true love?

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

My Review: Poorly written apologia for the christian religion's most popular saint (who most likelynever existed because we can't find any sources that agree on his details). None of the Valentines in the different hagiographies are anything like this Valentine, but that's really not the biggest issue...the name was very popular in the third-century Empire, so the author can plausibly make up any Late Imperial male and call him that with impunity.

The biggest issue is the way the author wrote the book. Is this a plot-driven story? If so, is the plot religious development with imperial decline, spiritual awakening of a soldier who's Seen Things, or what? Muddled all together as they are one loses track of why any of this is happening. Or are we meant to cleave to Valentine, invest in the events that led him to christian faith? We're told almost brusquely things happen, but not let in on the reasons we should care, as we could do if we were shown actions occurring.

That really took me down a dark, twisty rabbit hole of trying to find anything reasonably widely agreed upon demonstrating there was A Valentine, not just a bunch of local cult stories syncretized in the Middle Ages and lightly draped over the Late Classical god Cupid and his festival of love millennia later. Being deeply anti-christian, I was cynically amused that there's a big ol' nothin' to indicate the actual existence of one true Valentine but a heap of men named that, as one would expect in that time, who seem to have been smooshed into one guy.

I started out my read hoping for a good story set in 260s Roman days, got a poor story trying to make yet another legend for some guy named the Roman equivalent of Liam, then enduring its gushing christian guff all over the place in wooden prose.

A truly regrettable waste of my ever-dwindling supply of eyeblinks.

May 2025's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

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

Think about using it yourselves!

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The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the midst of the woods stands a house called Lichen Hall.

This place is shrouded in folklore—old stories of ghosts, of witches, of a child who was not quite a child.

Now the woods are creeping closer, and something has been unleashed.

Pearl Gorham arrives in 1965, one of a string of young women sent to Lichen Hall to give birth. And she soon suspects the proprietors are hiding something.

Then she meets the mysterious mother and young boy who live in the grounds—and together they begin to unpick the secrets of this place.

As the truth comes to the surface and the darkness moves in, Pearl must rethink everything she knew—and risk what she holds most dear.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. CW: graphic nonconsensual sex

My Review: Heed my content warning. It's part of my biggest problem with this well-written, if awkwardly paced, gothic tale: Making action too graphic does not make a read go faster. If anything it slows the reader down to have this strong a tonal shift from beautiful evocative scene-building to bloody or emotionally violent moments.

Not without pleasures for tougher gothic-fiction fans in search of a powerful modern twist on Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest.

HarperCollins (non-affiliate Amazon link) asks $12.99 for an ebook.

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Echoes in death: an Eve Dallas novel (in Death series #44) by J. D. Robb

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: This chilling new suspense novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author J.D. Robb is the perfect entry point into the compelling In Death police procedural series featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas.

As NY Lt. Eve Dallas and her billionaire husband Roarke are driving home, a young woman—dazed, naked, and bloody—suddenly stumbles out in front of their car. Roarke slams on the brakes and Eve springs into action.

Daphne Strazza is rushed to the ER, but it’s too late for her husband Dr. Anthony Strazza. A brilliant orthopedic surgeon, he now lies dead amid the wreckage of his obsessively organized town house, his three safes opened and emptied. Daphne would be a valuable witness, but in her terror and shock the only description of the perp she can offer is repeatedly calling him “the devil”...

While it emerges that Dr. Strazza was cold, controlling, and widely disliked, this is one case where the evidence doesn’t point to the spouse. So Eve and her team must get started on the legwork, interviewing everyone from dinner-party guests to professional colleagues to caterers, in a desperate race to answer some crucial questions:

What does the devil look like? And where will he show up next?

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

My Review: What you signed up for, if you're already a series fan. All the near-future tech feels just as plausible, without the AI paranoia popular now; but as a starting place, it's subideal because it's more about Eve smoothing down her more dramatic expressions of PTSD. She and Roarke, her very high-class husband, are on a case that really could be more exciting in how they pursue it. Oddly, in this case that means less: less violent confrontations, less fraught choice of victims.

I recommend it to those who, like me, bounced off the earlier, ruder Dallas.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $11.99 for an ebook. Most people seem to love these books, so who am I to say don't?

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Dark in death: an Eve Dallas novel (in Death series #46) by J. D. Robb

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It was a stab in the dark.

On a chilly February night, during a screening of Psycho in midtown, someone sunk an ice pick into the back of Chanel Rylan’s neck, then disappeared quietly into the crowds of drunks and tourists in Times Square. To Chanel’s best friend, who had just slipped out of the theater for a moment to take a call, it felt as unreal as the ancient black-and-white movie up on the screen. But Chanel’s blood ran red, and her death was anything but fictional.

Then, as Eve Dallas puzzles over a homicide that seems carefully planned and yet oddly personal, she receives a tip from an unexpected source: an author of police thrillers who recognizes the crime—from the pages of her own book. Dallas doesn’t think it’s coincidence, since a recent strangulation of a sex worker resembles a scene from her writing as well. Cops look for patterns of behavior: similar weapons, similar MOs. But this killer seems to find inspiration in someone else’s imagination, and if the theory holds, this may be only the second of a long-running series.

The good news is that Eve and her billionaire husband Roarke have an excuse to curl up in front of the fireplace with their cat, Galahad, reading mystery stories for research. The bad news is that time is running out before the next victim plays an unwitting role in a murderer’s deranged private drama—and only Eve can put a stop to a creative impulse gone horribly, destructively wrong.

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

My Review: This one was fun for me. I'm a Hitchcock fan, (re?)discovering Roarke is too made me like him more...not that I dislike him, just kinda not as impressed as everyone else seems to be...and the Author Nora stand-in here, Blaine DeLano, was entertaining as well. The plot resolved itself pretty much on autopilot. That did not seem bad to me, as it meant Eve did less kickassery and more homebodying.

Don't start here; starting in the earlier series-40s, say #40 itself (Obsession In Death) is better. I will note that the endless cycle of violence against women wears me down.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $10.99 for this ebook.

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Faithless in death: an Eve Dallas novel (in Death series #52) by J. D. Robb

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In the new Eve Dallas police thriller from #1 New York Times-bestselling author J. D. Robb, what looked like a lover's quarrel turned fatal has larger—and more terrifying—motives behind it...

The scene in the West Village studio appears to be classic crime-of-passion: two wine glasses by the bed, music playing, and a young sculptor named Ariel Byrd with the back of her head bashed in. But when Dallas tracks down the wealthy Upper East Side woman who called 911, the details don't add up. Gwen Huffman is wealthy, elegant, comforted by her handsome fiancé as she sheds tears over the trauma of finding the body—but why did it take an hour to report it? And why is she lying about little things?

As Eve and her team look into Gwen, her past, and the people around her, they find that the lies are about more than murder. As with sculpture, they need to chip away at the layers of deception to find the shape within—and soon they're getting the FBI involved in a case that involves a sinister, fanatical group and a stunning criminal conspiracy.

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

My Review: Ruh-roh, Raggy...the Moonlighting Syndrome is bitin' hard. Eve and Roarke are gettin' a bit stale. The cultist who seems normal as a victim kept me trying to stay engaged, since I'm all about bashing on cults.

Among people like me, not deeply invested in the series, Roarke takes a lot of brickbats for being Too Much: too rich, too pretty, too cultured, too talented. Unfair, say I. Roarke is a bigger version of what someone not worn down by wage slavery, tired out by not-optional Life stuff could be. He's the poster child for a post-scarcity lifestyle I want to see come true.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $9.99 for this ebook.

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Perfect Opportunity (A Posadas County Mystery #26) by Steven F. Havill

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Octogenarian former sheriff Bill Gastner and Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman investigate a puzzling double murder in this twisty, page-turning instalment in the critically acclaimed Posadas County mystery series "If you haven't yet discovered these wonderful mysteries, you are in for a treat!" Anne Hillerman, New York Times bestselling author

The morning after his eighty-seventh birthday bash, former Posadas County sheriff Bill Gastner drives past a couple of vehicles stopped on the highway shoulder. It's not an unusual a sheriff's patrol unit, emergency lights ablaze, pulled in behind a pickup truck. The female deputy hasn't radioed for backup. But there's something about the scene that makes him feel uneasy.

The next day, Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman is called to a rather more dramatic and disturbing roadside scene, with the same truck the star of the show. But this time, its occupant is in no fit state to talk—his dead body stabbed through the chest with a Ka-Bar, a second corpse in the ditch beside the car.

What happened to the two men? And what were the dead man and the deputy discussing in the quiet of pre-dawn the previous day? The truth is more twisty and complex than even Estelle and her long-standing friend and former colleague Bill are ready for, and it will take all their combined years of experience to untangle the sorry tale and ensure justice is served.

Fans of CJ Box, Anne Hillerman and Terry Shames will love this thrilling, small-town Western mystery set in New Mexico, as will readers who love strong female protagonists and retired sleuthing heroes.

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

My Review: Wowee, did I screw this one up! I started with book TWENTY-SIX because, I suppose, I didn't believe a series could last that long...? Whatever my reasoning, I'm amazed I felt I could follow what was happening while knowing there were character nuances I didn't get, all while still enjoying myself.

It's as the comps say it is; I liked strong, unflappable Estelle, the oldness of Bill was not truly believable, the murder was a bit less twisty than I was led to believe, and I do not want any of those eyeblinks back.

Severn House (non-affiliate Amazon link) requests $14.99 at checkout. Unless you're familiar with the series, maybe asking the library to get one's a better idea.

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Last to leave the room: a novel by Caitlin Starling

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Last to Leave the Room is a new novel of genre-busting speculative horror from Caitlin Starling, the acclaimed author of The Death of Jane Lawrence.

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement belonging to Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster.

As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before—and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world.

With her employer growing increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads to.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. CW: body horror

My Review: What worked for me: Tamsin's doppelgänger discovery and subsequent action. What didn't work for me: the first third of the book's quotidian tedium, and the underused plot-point of the sinking city. Too much of one, too little of the other; while I, on balance, liked the read just fine, I put it down for a year at the 15% mark, and only picked it up because someone I trust told me I should. He was correct.

But I could've just left it very easily. Tighter beginning without some stuff I never felt I needed anyway would serve the really good bits better.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) expects $11.99 from you. I'd say it's a perfect library borrow.

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The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Woods

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Edie is … not in Paris?

Edie Lane left everything behind in Ireland for a once-in-a-lifetime job at a bakery in Paris. Except, thanks to a mistranslation, the bakery is not in Paris, and neither is Edie.

The tiny town of Compiègne, complete with its local bakery on the Rue de Paris, holds many secrets. This might not be where Edie intended to be but it's not long before she realises it's exactly where she needs to be…

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

My Review: Republishing an earlier work by a bestseller's a very old publishing-industry tactic. Unless the bestseller in question does a real overhaul, it's seldom a good idea. In this fine little essay in self-published magical realism, a few things were off...no one is middle-aged at twenty-nine, please do more with M. Moreau...but it's clear why all y'all like Evie Woods.

Perfectly fine way to spend your waiting-room time.

One More Chapter (non-affiliate Amazon link) only wants 99¢, so do not hesitate even a moment to ebook it right onto your ereader.

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78 Degrees and Bloody (The Casey Stafford Series Book 1) by George Prior

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: An Internet influencer and her boyfriend are brutally killed in their home in Los Angeles, and homicide detective Casey Stafford is under pressure by the LAPD and the news media to catch the disturbed killer—even as he desperately murders more people to cover his tracks.

It appears that their suspect is killing any potential witnesses, and each murder is more disturbing and out of control than the last.

The investigation leads Casey and his partner, Banchet, to a Chinese gang, a Mexican hitman, the FBI, a million dollars in stolen gold, and a leak in the LAPD itself, and with each murder, media interest in the case grows until the entire nation is watching.

Casey needs to stop the deranged murderer before he kills again, and he needs to do it before he is taken off the case by his commanding officers.

With Prior’s “crackling prose and relentless pacing,” each book in the Casey Stafford Series is filled with action, torn-from-the-headlines criminals, authentic LAPD police procedural details, and Casey’s joy in getting justice for his victims and just being a good cop.

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

My Review: The prose crackles like a police-band radio; the pacing is surprisingly tense and falters only at the very end; this read is as hyped. So why three stars?

I just don't care who killed these unpleasant, useless people. I dislike Casey's smug law-n-orderness. If you're not pushing me somewhere interesting...LA is uninteresting to me as a California native...I need to like SOMEbody. I did not.

Prospect & Main (non-affiliate Amazon link) charges $3.99 for an ebook. If you want entertainment without strings, it's a bargain!

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Cold Burn (National Parks Thriller #2) by A.J. Landau

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Agent Michael Walker returns when multiple deaths at Glacier Bay National Park are just the first steps in a potential global disaster.

In Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, a frozen woolly mammoth is uncovered by a geological survey team. When all of them are found dead at the site of the thawed-out carcass, National Park Service ISB special agent Michael Walker is called in to investigate.

In Florida’s Everglades National Park, FBI special investigator Gina Delgado traces the murder of an environmental science intern back to another U.S. Geological Survey team’s ongoing experiments that are decimating the fragile ecosystem. Beneath the icy waters of Alaska’s Elfin Cove, the crew of a stranded Los Angeles-class attack submarine is wiped out by a mysterious contagion, inexplicably causing their lungs to freeze. The link between these apparently disparate events lies in a deadly, prehistoric microbe that killed the mammoth the same way it did the USGS survey team in Glacier Bay and the crew members of the submarine. A microbe that a rogue billionaire is desperate to attain, and a Russian strongman will do anything to weaponize to achieve even greater, wide-ranging power.

Fighting a battle on several fronts—militarily, intellectually, and biologically—Walker and Delgado are running out of time to stop a devastating attack that would reshape the entire world.

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

My Review: Urgent, uneasy story about things James Rollins would have Sigma Force out to resolve. Propulsive, intense action scenes that do not exist to decorate the plot. A very fun read.

That sounds more like a four-plus star review. Would've been if we'd had more pages or fewer PoV switches. Also, maybe this is made clear in book one (Leave No Trace), but why are these two working together exactly?

Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Amazon link) requires $14.99 for you to legally possess the ebook. You don't want Walker and Delgado on your butt, looking into your trashcan, so procure legally.

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

As she says:

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

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

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Denying to the grave: why we ignore the facts that will save us by Sara E. Gorman and Jack M. Gorman (40%)

Rating: ?4?* of five

The Publisher Says: Why do some parents refuse to vaccinate their children? Why do some people keep guns at home, despite scientific evidence of risk to their family members? And why do people use antibiotics for illnesses they cannot possibly alleviate? When it comes to health, many people insist that science is wrong, that the evidence is incomplete, and that unidentified hazards lurk everywhere.

In Denying to the Grave, Gorman and Gorman, a father-daughter team, explore the psychology of health science denial. Using several examples of such denial as test cases, they propose six key principles that may lead individuals to reject "accepted" health-related wisdom: the charismatic leader; fear of complexity; confirmation bias and the internet; fear of corporate and government conspiracies; causality and filling the ignorance gap; and the nature of risk prediction. The authors argue that the health sciences are especially vulnerable to our innate resistance to integrate new concepts with pre-existing beliefs. This psychological difficulty of incorporating new information is on the cutting edge of neuroscience research, as scientists continue to identify brain responses to new information that reveal deep-seated, innate discomfort with changing our minds.

Denying to the Grave explores risk theory and how people make decisions about what is best for them and their loved ones, in an effort to better understand how people think when faced with significant health decisions. This book points the way to a new and important understanding of how science should be conveyed to the public in order to save lives with existing knowledge and technology.

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

My Review: Over the years (almost ten since I got the DRC) I've tried and tried to finish this read. I'm already inside the church on the subject...the psychology of science denial...but I stall out on "Confirmation Bias" chapter, where the repetitious nature of the prose just overwhelms me.

We need this information on why people simply reject objective truth...they deny it *is* either of those things...but I can't say I think this compendiously-footnoted tome is the way to get that done.

Oxford University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) asks for $21.99 for an ebook.

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The Fight That Started the Movies: The World Heavyweight Championship, the Birth of Cinema and the First Feature Film by Samuel Hawley (19%)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: On March 17, 1897, in an open-air arena in Carson City, Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons fought for the heavyweight championship of the world. The contest was recorded by film pioneer Enoch Rector from inside an immense, human-powered camera called the “Veriscope,” the forgotten Neanderthal at the dawn of cinema history. Rector’s movie of the contest premiered two months later. Known today as "The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight," it was the world’s first feature-length film.

The Fight That Started the Movies is the untold story of Corbett’s and Fitzsimmons’ journey to that ring in Nevada and how the landmark film of their battle came to be made. It reveals how boxing played a key role in the birth of the movies, spurring the development of motion picture technology and pushing the concept of “film” from a twenty-second peephole show to a full-length attraction, “a complete evening’s entertainment,” projected on a screen.

The cast of characters in the tale is rich and varied. There are inventors Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, William Dickson and Eugene Lauste, figuring out how to photographically capture and reproduce motion. There are the playboy brothers Otway and Gray Latham, who first saw the commercial potential of fight films, and their friend and partner Enoch Rector, who pushed that potential to fruition. There are fighters Jim Corbett with his “scientific” methods of boxing; Bob Fitzsimmons with his thin legs and turnip-on-a-chain punch; hard-drinking John L. Sullivan and the original Jack Dempsey and the gifted but ultimately doomed Young Griffo. There are loud-mouthed fight managers and big-talking promoters, and Wild West legends like Bat Masterson and Judge Roy Bean when the story heads to the Rio Grande river. And finally, there is the audience, our collective ancestors, discovering that movies were more than just a curiosity to gape at, but a new and enduring form of entertainment to rival the theater.

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

My Review: I was interested in the movie stuff. I quit when I hit: "Freed from middleweight constraints, Bob trained up rather than down for the Maher fight and stepped through the ropes weighing one-sixty-five, the heaviest of his career."

I can't make myself care in any positive way about boxing. It was just not gonna happen. It's too darn bad I can't because this is a pivotal moment in popular culture.

Conquistador Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) offers this through Kindle Unlimited, if you are less boxing-averse than I am.

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THE SECRETS OF ALABURG (Alaburg University #1) has maps and cool character art on its Ammy page!

THE SECRETS OF ALABURG (Alaburg University #1)
GREG WALTERS (tr. Patrick Moffatt)
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99, or free to read on Kindle Unlimited

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A hideous beast with glowing red eyes ambushes Bryn on his way home through the forest. After a narrow escape, the sixteen-year-old must flee with his foster father Gerald to the only place that promises Âlaburg University, where humans, dwarves, elves, and orcs come together to study the Colors of Magic.

Bryn soon discovers he can use all three magical colors, which renders him powerful and dangerous at the same time. Will he learn to channel his powers with the help of his unlikely new friends and secure peace for the land, or will he become the one who spells out doom for the enlightened nations of Razuclan?

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

My Review: Aged-up wizarding school story but without the added transphobia that so appalls and offends me, though with forced heteronormativity...just let Bryn be a kid without a love interest!

That series wasn't the first iteration of the story, so no talk of "ripping off," please. In that case everyone owes the Mauschwitz people royalties for that revolting rodent's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" bit in 1940's Fantasia. Or the composer, Paul Dukas, of that bit owes at least a nod to Goethe for the poem from 1797; which is a nod to Classical sources that likely derive from ancient Egyptian sources. This idea, laddies and gentlewomen, does not belong to, nor was it originated by, the transphobic Scottish woman.

Thank all those useless gods.

Okay, well, that's one hobbyhorse ridden. Now why did I give the read three stars? Simple. I'm tired of this story. Let this field lie fallow a few generations. The translator from the original German, Patrick Moffatt, did an okay job. I don't know what he had to work with, but it's pretty much all "low, green armchair"s and "dust dancing in golden light beam"s level stuff. It works; it's not clunky; but I remember no specific line at all.

So a serviceable read? Yep. I resent not one minute of those five hours. I don't think I'd say yes to a DRC of #2 in the series...just not that excited. The folks who love the special-orphan-learns-magical-truth books will eat it up with a spoon. On current evidence, that's a whole huge heap of y'all. PLUS there's seven of 'em and the series is completed!

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a massive fan of this plot. Earthsea thrilled me as a ten-year-old; the transphobic woman's book had to be read due to FOMO; other than that I'm a resolute take it or leave it guy fatigued into resistance by ubiquity. YMMV, and most likely will, so give it a whirl. It's low risk for these prices, and free on KU means you're really not risking anything except time.

THE EDGE OF GUILT might better be called the swamp or morass of guilt...but guilt there is

THE EDGE OF GUILT
DAVID MIRALDI
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Heather was only fifteen when she died by suicide.
Her father wants justice.
The system wants silence.

After his daughter’s tragic death, Dennis is devastated, convinced that her psychiatrist is to blame. Desperate for accountability, he seeks an attorney to settle the score.

Enter Paul Schofield, a struggling attorney who impulsively takes the case, hoping for a quick settlement. But the deeper he digs, the more he uncovers buried secrets, conflicting loyalties, and ethical dilemmas that shake him to his core. As courtroom tensions rise, relationships fracture, alliances shift, and the line between justice and greed begins to blur.

Inspired by true events, The Edge of Guilt is a gripping legal drama that delves into the gray areas of justice, morality, and grief—captivating readers from the first page and resonating long after the final verdict.

Perfect for fans of Defending Jacob by William Landay, Reversible Errors by Scott Turow, and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, this story blends courtroom suspense with emotional depth and real-world ethical complexity.

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

My Review: Legal dramas don't come much more grabby than a grieving father trying to wrap his head around his child's death. Failing that, he sets out to get revenge, or as he thinks of it, "Justice."

The big issue is an Eternal Verity: NEVER START A LAWSUIT IF YOU'RE GUILTY. Of what, well, look at Oscar Wilde if you just want a case study of why this is the world's worst idea. The author's a civil lawyer, so no doubt accustomed to lying clients. I'm not all the way convinced that isn't why there's a twist at the latter stages of the story...was that really a good idea is not settled in my mind.

The real characters here are the lawyer and the father. They eat all our attention, seemingly by design as there aren't any female characters including the dead daughter who speak much still less say anything important.

I won't say it was my favorite read of May 2025 but I never rolled my eyes and resisted picking it up. The comps above seem accurate to me. I liked the Landay book pretty much exactly the same intensity as I liked this one, and for similar reasons of moral complexity. If you like courtroom dramas, this definitely makes its bones there; if you're after a solid tale of grief managed poorly, here you go; if you like a surprise ending, the kettle's on in Author Miraldi's story kitchen.

RED LILY, first thriller I've ever called "cozy"

RED LILY
JANICE GRAHAM
Vendome Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook, available 26 May 2025

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Firebird comes a delightfully funny and tender tale of family secrets, reluctant spies, and one unforgettable woman!

Paris 1989.
A cold war is ending.
A new family is beginning.
And one dog is about to save the day.

Carl Box has never met his Aunt Lily. She was the family scandal — exiled, disgraced, and never spoken of. So when he’s named the heir to her Paris estate, he packs a bag (and his two-legged dog, Billy) and prepares for paperwork, not espionage.

But Lily is very much alive. And very much in trouble.

What begins as a simple inheritance turns into a Cold War caper filled with coded messages, eccentric operatives, and secrets that could still get people killed. Carl soon finds himself in the role of spy — dodging agents, covering for Lily, and wondering what exactly she’s been hiding all these years.

Red Lily is a warm, witty historical suspense about unexpected heroism and the mysteries of family ties — perfect for fans of Killers of a Certain Age, Jacqueline Winspear, and Only Murders in the Building.

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My Review: Thank goodness for the great middle-class Prufrock! He is that scion of privilege who's niggled by the sense of Something More being somewhere out there, though he can't really say where or why. He's a fixture in Graham Greene's Cold War novels: Our Man in Havana's Wormold and Travels with my Aunt's Pulling. Enough privilege and wealth to leave his quotidian life behind. It's never examined from the standpoint of his privilege, his white-male unquestioned freedom to just...chuck it all, no blame or manhunts pursuing him.

Aunt Lily is meant to be a Mame-like figure, a woman who wasn't shunned by her family for trivial reasons but for her utter unwillingness to conform. A sister to a man who left his son a paint factory and the surname Box, she's really more of an Ethel Rosenberg figure to me. She knows what she's doing, and that there are consequences, but she believes she's Right so she does it anyway. Best to keep family far away. Except when they come in handy, as her Prufrock-meets-Babbitt nephew does now.

There's enough action, enough entertaining woman-spy-trades-on-femaleness to make its more cozy aspects of forming found family and taking care of the people in your life (who aren't there from some societal pressure) to the bitter end to make it feel like a weirdly cozy thriller. Running around there is, but more importantly bonds are formed, forged, and honored.

Box himself is slow on the uptake. It frustrated me that Aunt Lily could run rings around him yet HE was the narrator. It was also more than a little effort to keep track of who's who, which is fine in a thriller but not usually part of the reading experience in a cozy, so a bit of the luster got dimmed for me there too.

All in all, though, I'm not mad at the read, nor especially mad for it either. Fun was had, smiles were smiled, and five hours were not wasted in reading it. Need something to wile some time away that still repays giving it your attention?

Seven bucks and it's yours.

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder, does more than just titillate with true-crime gore

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder
RACHEL McCARTHY JAMES
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant and bloody examination of the axe's foundational role in human history, from prehistoric violence, to war and executions, to newspaper headlines and popular culture.

For as long as the axe has been in our hands, we have used it to kill.

Much like the wheel, the boat, and the telephone, the axe is a transformative piece of technology—one that has been with us since prehistory. And just as early humans used the axe to chop down trees, hunt for food, and whittle tools, they also used it to murder. Over time, this particular use has as the axe evolved over centuries to fit the needs of new agricultural, architectural, and social development, so have our lethal uses for it.

Whack Job is the story of the axe, first as a convenient danger and then an anachronism, as told through the murders it has been employed in throughout from the first axe murder nearly half a million years ago, to the brutal harnessing of the axe in warfare, to its use in King Henry VIII's favorite method of execution, to Lizzie Borden and the birth of modern pop culture. Whack Job sheds brilliant light on this familiar implement, this most human of weapons. This is a critical examination of violence, an exploration of how technology shapes human conflict, the cruel and sacred rituals of execution and battle, and the ways humanity fits even the most savage impulses into narratives of the past and present.

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My Review: End-noted to a fare-thee-well, this rollicking romp through axes as historical objects isn't academic and dry, or deeply in-depth; it's a mountaintop view into the foothills and valleys of human material culture. Using the axe as our viewpoint stand-in makes a lot of sense. In anthropology classes I took in the 1980s, stone tools came in varieties like flakes, blades, and scrapers, all discovered by the carloads; a hand axe was treasure indeed. The knack of flintknapping is easier to acquire for smaller objects. An axe was high tech indeed.

There's a reason an axe centers the fasces in Roman art; there's a reason the axe was buried as often as a sword in Viking graves. They're not just useful, they're mightily impressive and have always been difficult to fashion until fairly recently. A sharp axe is a supremely useful tool for the agricultural way of life. Splitting logs to burn for warmth, making fenceposts to contain cattle and demarcate property, etc etc, are all made trivially easy with ownership of a good, sharp axe.

Splitting wood is, of course, not the only splitting an axe does with effectiveness and relative ease. Author Rachel starts us with split skulls in Neanderthal prehistory, when possession of an axe was a major symbol of power. As the reasons humans kill each other really haven't changed over the millennia (spoiler alert: we enjoy it), the means we choose to do it with haven't either. Whatever is handy, be it rock, knife, or axe. What we don't know in any detail is why the owner of a particular skeleton was deprived of the ghost driving it, though the remains are clearly damaged in specific, tell-tale ways. So Author Rachel talks about axes more in the first third of the book than murders. (Seriously, stop at 30%...chapter six...if details of what happens are not to your taste.)

In historical times, as details become available, they are vouchsafed you.I do not find this particularly bothersome, but if you do, understand this is not going to be an easy book for you to read. We're still focusing on the axes, though, which is what enabled me not to feel queasy. The weapon of choice is contextualized to the extent possible based on the records surviving, be they legal, social, or religious in nature. And has Author Rachel done her archive diving! Literal hundreds of endnotes could probably result in a visit from the spooks if I followed them all up on Google. The thing I appreciate most in a history like this one, focused on a reasonably narrow bit of human behavior, is that sense the author's done a lot more than the minimum. That is definitely the case here.

I don't classify this as a microhistory to myself. It has a narrow focus. It doesn't, however, confine itself to just one bit of History like The Forger's Spell or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, both estimable books. I suppose when your topic is something as universal or as ancient as an axe, one can't feasibly stay in the micro.

Speaking of micro, Author Rachel does not spare us Y-chromosome-havers in her analysis of why axes represent authority. There's a good bit about male insecurity as it relates to symbols of power and status. If I felt she was factually incorrect, or grinding an academic axe (!) too finely to make her point, I'd say so. Instead I shrank a little more every time the topic arose. Well done, madam, point well made. Dealing with how the labrys became a feminist/matriarchal symbol was fascinating.

The structural elements of the book are largely thematic. We're in chapters called things like "In Truth, An Enemy and a Man of Violence" (chapter four, the 500s BCE) and "Five Axes in the Cellar, One Axe on the roof" (chapter nine, Lizzie Borden). Author Rachel's style lends itself to hooks, positioned carefully at the ends of chapters. It makes the read hard to portion out; I usually read a chapter of a book, take a few notes, move to a different book; not here. I read through five chapters in a long afternoon. That's not common for me. I simply didn't want to stop, and the hook-y chapter ends (can't quote them, the Spoiler Stasi will trade their hoses and chains for axes) were designed to keep the reader engaged.

So what happened to the fifth star? It's half there, and deserves to be. I can't offer the full five only because the way Author Rachel mixes it up felt at times as though there were topics she could not go into that she wanted to. That left me wishing for an extra hundred pages and more ridden hobbyhorses.

No matter about cavils so minor as that. If you're interested in anthropology and history through a narrow but deep time-lens, have a good tolerance for murderous acts, and enjoy sly witticisms, this is a solid read for you.