THE KEY TO A KILLER, third Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries #Deathtober treat

THE KEY TO A KILLER (Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries #3)
OLIVIA BLACKE
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman and her ghost roommate investigate their most personal case yet in Olivia Blacke’s The Key to a Killer, the next book in the Anthony Award winning Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries.

When Ruby Young discovered that her Boston apartment was haunted, she did what any reasonable person would do: befriend the ghost. Their relationship overcame a shaky start—Cordelia Graves never wanted a roommate in life, she certainly didn’t want one in death. After working together to solve a few murders, the two are close friends, but there’s a lingering question neither of them have been able to answer: what led to Cordelia’s death?

Lately things have been adding up that suggest foul play. And when Cordelia’s memories of that day start to come back, the roommates can’t ignore it anymore: Cordelia was murdered. Ruby and Cordelia are going to have to piece together what Cordelia’s final days looked like—otherwise a killer could go free.

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

My Review: Every #Deathtober I get a lovely present from Minotaur Books: a funny, fun mystery about two poorly-assorted roommates who solve crimes together. Their skill sets mesh well. They do far better together than either does apart.

Oh, and one's alive. The other isn't.

This time around the spin cycle of Life, which even the dead have, they're going after the solution to Cordelia's death. This is not a drill, this is the big one, y'all. Cordelia, in life, would've completely rejected Ruby and her youth with a curt dismissal. Now the dirtnapped fortysomething has, over two previous investigations, learned to respect and value Ruby, who returns the sentiments. As Cordelia's memories of her death are absent and as Ruby's learned more about her, she's become sure Cordelia was killed.

Cordelia can't remember if anyone wanted to murder her, or think of a reason anyone might. With fridge-magnet letters, the two go over the facts and Ruby gets a twinge of an idea. She's going to get a job at Cordelia's old firm.

Now here's where I say The Formula℠: Don't start here, or a lot of the really strange established-relationship stuff will feel arbitrary and weird instead of cute and endearing. Ruby gets UGS (United Ghost Service) delivery service of things she needs but can't afford by means I'd just rather not look into so I can keep thinking Cordelia's a mensch. I know she's a mensch because Ruby's arachnophobia means Cordelia's just assumed the role of de-spidering their environment. And Ruby's become convinced foul play that needs addressing took her pal's life before she was through living it.

See how one hand washes the other here? Then, as is reasonable and customary in our US lives in this year of our lord twenty twenty six, Cordelia's newly-released brother Ian, formerly imprisoned for, well never mind, begins breaking into the apartments in their building to search for clues to Cordelia's death.

I boggled a bit at this. As the story flowed on smoothly I allowed my hackles to relax. Ian discovers that he, oddly enough, still has his dead sister's number on a weird kind of speed dial. All us mystery series readers know the scoobygroup is most of the fun of a story in that particular storyverse and Ian is one of the most interesting ones in Ruby and Cordelia's. I'm hoping as time goes on Ian will learn from his oddly ameliorated loss to be a more mature character...I typed and erased "person" a couple times, so you see how my idea of the series is heading.

As a resolution to Cordelia's present unaliveness impends, I was struck by an uncomfortable realization: Cordelia, with her fragments of memory returning, was getting the absolute most abysmal exit interview conceivable. Ruby at her side she was going through hard-to-stomach realizations about the life she thought she was living not matching the one that was really happening. Cordelia has a lot to think about. Luckily she has a lot of leisure time to do it in. And a close supportive friend, maybe also brother, to be there as she does it.

I was a bit...um...the ending had an impact on me. That's IT? I asked my Kindle screen. No matter what the lady next door says I did NOT scream, and who asked her anyway. It's resolved, it makes sense, and I will be hornswoggled if I buy for one instant that this is the last we will hear about this.

Spending a few hours alternating between Cordelia and Ruby's PoVs gave me a real feeling that I was in the room with them as the investigations made progress. I was always happy to see Ian, I think Tosh the neighbor's a sweet nebbishy guy on course to get his heart broken, and truly enjoy the slightly edgier-than-before banter between the now more equal friends. It's been more and more fun to get to know them.

I'm not joking, though. This book's the reward for investing eyeblinks into Ruby and Cordelia. Taking a shortcut to get here won't make it more exciting to be here but less. And it really is worth it for these evolved versions of good people.

NEEDLEMOUTH, latest K-Ming Chang women's wrongs weirdness

NEEDLEMOUTH
K-MING CHANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Bestiary, three cousins are forced to complete an impossible and violent task set by a vengeful demon.

Cousins Cindy, Yangyang, and Mandy’s hot, tedious summer unfolds in their grandmother’s hauntingly familiar house. Mandy, the eldest, seeks connection online and exchanges emails with a stranger. Yangyang, the youngest, retreats into her own imagination in search of meaning. But every morning Cindy wakes with strange objects in her mouth: a button, a berry, a coin.

One night, a starved figure with a mouth the size of a needle-tip appears at Cindy’s bedside. She is hunger-afflicted, a demon with no descendants to feed from: she is Needlemouth. Part vampire, part hungry ghost, Needlemouth forces the girls into a grim task to end a man’s life.

Cindy, Yangyang, and Mindy are plunged in and out of the demon realm, where they are called to break out of the indifference and numbness of their claustrophobic worlds, and where they are met with the most rageful and resistant parts of themselves. In a quest to satisfy the demon’s hunger, they unravel their shared grief and reckon with the cyclical violence that shaped their family. For readers of Akwaeke Emezi and Carmen Maria Machado, K-Ming Chang has crafted a reimagined coming of age novel that asks: what does it mean to become the monster instead of slaying it?

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

My Review: Cecilia was my intro to the...earthy, primal...fascinations of K-Ming Chang. A writer with a strangely lyrical way of presenting yucky realities of having a female body goes right into the lifeblood (!) of blood in menstruating females and vampires.

Needlemouth wants the cousins who are her targets to figure out a major problem for her: Daddy Dearest is a horrible, abusive, misogynistic, etc etc world without end, bastard who's cursed her...see title...and thus end her pain. Oh, and theirs, because he's involved in their family's losses somehow. (It was explained, I *think* anyway; either poorly or incredibly in the literal sense. I retain no sense of it.) It's your fates, women, to either rebel or collaborate. Passive little Yangyang already collaborates that way. The other two? Ready to ride and/or die to strike a blow for Womankind! Passively Yangyang goes with. Astounding, no? (Why is it Needlemouth, an actual demon {if female-presenting} can't do this herself, exactly?)

To accomplish their task the cousins are transported (disorientingly and that uncertainty I can say with certainty is deliberate) between mudanity and the demon world of the vampires. It is a beautiful virtuoso performance by K-Ming Chang, noticeably, lyrically lovely in sound...I read it aloud at times...and very effectively indicating our frame of reference has shifted. Author Chang does not write workmanlike prose at any time in the two books of hers I've read; this perspective shift still stands out as graceful and intense.

The young women are, as I am learning is usual with Author Chang, aware of the living human body. It is very, very, very present. I'm beginning to wonder if "K-Ming Chang" is not simply Chinese for "Joe Abercrombie" or, at the very least, if she is not his descendant. I thought The Devils was a shitty, as in "shit-filled," story. Hold my beer, says K-Ming Chang. It can, at times, overwhelm my sense of the complexities I'm needing to track in the story. It is a fine balance to get right. It's not always calibrated properly for even my pretty strong stomach.

You will not clutch your pearls upon learning Needlemouth is not always a reliable narrator. She might've left some details about consequences out of her stirring pitch to the cousins. I'll say this about how it all turns out: I was shocked, repulsed, and downright irked at how very much of the human body's workings were made plain, laid bare, and how intense and viscaeral the poetice prose-hallucination was; but the ending was unexpected, was so balanced on a kinfetip let alone edge, that I reattached the full fourth star that slipped off after a particular...facial, let's call it.

My squeamish sensitive souls should not come within hailing distance of the story. All the female rage, all the smoldering hatred of petty tyranny all the shrieking outrage at the tyrannical, unfair patriarchy will not make up for that...facial.

Take my word for it: Revenge and vengeance are only cousins, not siblings, and their goals are not always compatible.

Vengeance is a nobler victor.

THE TWO WILLS: A Novel, from the DISCO WITCHES OF FIRE ISLAND author

THE TWO WILLS: A Novel
BLAIR FELL
Alcove Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 20 October 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunningly beautiful LGBTQ+ novel for fans of Hamnet and Song of Achilles.

Willy Hughes, an arrogant young hustler in Elizabethan England, is used to conning drunken men into believing he’s a young woman of ill repute—and then robbing them of their purses. But behind his thievery, he’s heartbroken over his first love, Barnaby Stubb, ending things between them. Not one to lick at his wounds for long, one night, Willy spots a newly famous stage poet in the alehouse. Will is ten years his senior, and he looks at Willy in a way he’s never been looked at before. Rather than robbing him blind, Willy decides that the sharp-eyed poet is meant to be the greatest love of his life.

Will wants Willy as his muse and perhaps as something more, but the older and more experienced poet is playing a dangerous game with people’s hearts. The confusion is driving Willy mad. Willy’s treacherous connection with Will—who is already married and involved in another love affair—becomes even more complicated when Will’s rival poet comes into the picture.

Christopher Marlowe is sexy, stunning, and dangerous. And he’s pursuing Willy with all he’s got. When Barnaby suddenly comes back into his life, Willy must determine once and for all who his heart belongs to. But London’s burgeoning acting companies have a darker side, and, as Willy goes from lowly apprentice to full-fledged star, he must rise to the occasion and stand up against exploitation and abuse.

A love story for the ages, where the loves you thought were lost forever aren’t ever really lost. Especially when the greatest writer in English literature dedicates his books of sonnets to you.

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

My Review: Will Hughes is a hustler in all modern senses of that word. Sixteenth-century London has just as many horny men who want sex from a pretty face as any other time and place. Heartbroken by the loss of first love, Will Hughes targets a slightly older drunken man for hi usual con of pretending a femininity he doesn't possess then robbing the traduced horndog; he chose both poorly and well, as his target is not the least bit embarrassed, but goes on the attack himself.

The Disco Witches of Fire Island did niot prepare me for the tonal shift of this, Author Fell's second published novel. I say "published" because one does not achieve this command of his material unless one has a good chunk of experience behind him. There are novels in the Fell files that cannot see the light of day, with mistakes galore, with ideas that petered out for no obvious reason...I've got one of those about the Cristero War that I'm still salty at for refusing to take any shape I wanted.

This romantic gay love story is not a romance. There's a HFN ending...but not the one you might expect. I was a wee bit saddened by that. I liked Shakespeare's scheming mistress Rose well enough, but...why? It's not my book, so I will confine myself to that whiny single-word complaining bleat. I love all things Marlowe because he can be presented as queer and no one bats an eye, still less bellows an accusation of "wokeness." (Yeah, I'm woke, I don't want to sleepwalk through my life. Idiots.) I like Will Hughes because he doesn't wait around for someone to help him, he helps himself and then reaches back to help others. He's a mensch, he's a man who earns and deserves his happiness.

Will Hughes does get a little annoying in his unrequited pining for "The Poet." That arch convention of reference wears on me fast, Will Hughes' scheming against Rose Williams seems self-defeating, but then again he's in love which state of diminished capacity is well-known throughout history to have deleterious effects on one's intelligence. I can't offer a full five when I spent much of a read wanting to pound some sense into the two leads, but...well...it's a well-made story about interesting people, doing interesting things and each other (not very interestingly) while the turmoil of Elizabethan London roils and upsets many a person's plan.

So, a quarter-star onto the four it absolutely earns on its merits represents my appreciative pleasure in a take on Willy Shakes I haven't had the pleasure to meet before. Definitely think this one should make its way onto your reading shelf wherever you keep it.

THE LOCKUP PERIOD, debut Silicon Valley thriller

THE LOCKUP PERIOD
VINCE THOMPSON
Dubious Ventures Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ ebook, preorder now for delivery 20 October 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 90 Days to IPO Riches–if they can just figure out what to do with the body!

A fast, fun, and twisty ride through the underbelly of Silicon Valley—where fortunes are made overnight, and everyone is chasing their cut.

Mario Kennedy yearns to be part of tech’s in-crowd. But with an unfair rap sheet and a job slinging pizzas, he’s stuck on the outside. When MenuAi—a startup in which he holds advisory shares—announces it’s going public, he finally gets his shot. That is, if he can survive the ninety-day lockup period… and the stock lives up to the hype.

Driving that hype is Ravi Singh, a rising star in venture capital determined to land his first unicorn—no matter the cost. Covering the frenzy is Jamie Villanueva, a young reporter caught between breaking the story and settling a personal score.

On the night of the IPO, a troubling twist: A dead body turns up in the CEO’s apartment. Expose the truth, and everything collapses. Conceal it until the lockup period expires, and walk away rich.

In Silicon Valley, it may be that making a killing… isn’t just a figure of speech.

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

My Review: Glossy surfaces are hard to limn without feeling that tacky and brummagem have become their limits. That's what happened here, that was what I honestly expected to happen, and I suspect it's what Author Vince intended to give me.

It's a satire, it works itself into a knot showing me its satirical intent, and I still feel myself curling my lip at Mario as well as Ravi and Noah all the while thinking "wow I wish MenuAI was real." Jamie might just be the most relatable character in the story because she's passionately *determined* to end this tentacle of AI's viabiity and existence before finding she has more passion for a person in place of A Cause.

And I despise her too.

Which is the strength of Author Vince's writing, he's made all-there characters into people. Most debut authors would make the easy choice of making the story about the satirized action, like a medieval mystery play. I'm very glad he chose not to and that he possessed the skill at characterization to make it work. It's also notable that Author Vince kept the action moving, no one sat on their butt and thought and thought then moaned for a chapter or two about how sore their butt was. Navel-gazing "Я" not us. Also missing is the expected jargon-heavy, whether tech talk or finance speak, wodges of stodge. I'm probably happier about that than any other facet of the read.

It's distasteful to me that these amoral fools do not see that they're well and truly screwed no matter what happens so are better off being honest and taking theirr lumps instead of making everything worse for everyone. Like Martha Stewart going to prison rather than pay a fine when the Feds had her dead to rights on that insider trading mess.

I'll stress again that this is me wagging my finger at naughty fools, not thundering Old-Testamently as I chuck the works under a bus. Author Vince got me to buy in when that was a longshot; kept me involved when that was unexpected; and made me very glad I'd been on the trip as I finished the read.

It's unexpectedly easy to say that y'all did oughta read this story even if you *hate* tech stories/people/procducts, revile all things financial/bankster connected; and do not care if all these people end up dead and buried in a ditch.

All of those statements applied to me, too, and here I am offering the read to you in honest expectation you'll like it.

COFFIN ROAD, an unposted 2017 review of the best PETER MAY novel I've read

COFFIN ROAD
PETER MAY
riverrun press
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In his latest mystery set in Scotland and the Outer Hebrides, award-winning author Peter May spins a tale about three disparate cases that may or may not be linked...

On the remote Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, a man washes up on a deserted beach, hypothermic and completely disoriented. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. The only clue to his condition is a map of the island showing a desolate, ancient path called the Coffin Road. With a sense of dread and no clear idea what lies at the other end, he knows he must follow the trail if he has any hope of discovering his identity.

Meanwhile, homicide detective George Gunn makes the rough ocean crossing to a remote, sea-battered lighthouse on a rock in the northern Atlantic, twenty miles west of the Outer Hebrides, to investigate a brutal murder. Despite its isolation, the tiny island has seen its share of tragedy: more than a century earlier, three lighthouse keepers disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. And now there is a new tragedy, and Gunn must figure out what happened.

At the same time, a teenage girl lies in her Edinburgh bedroom, desperate to discover the truth about her father's death. Two years after the discovery of the pioneering scientist's suicide note, Karen Fleming still cannot accept that her father would willingly abandon her. And the more she discovers about the nature of his research, the more she suspects that suicide had nothing to do with it.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER IN 2016. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ten years ago I flew through all 400pp of this read, and excitedly left this note:

Far and away the best book of Peter May's that I've read. An exciting and involving read. More later. Or earlier, I suppose, depending on which end of the telescope you're looking through.

When I went looking for my notes made to write my weekly summary post for GBBO over on LibraryThing, I found my unposted review! (Not the notes I wanted, though.) So I'm posting it here for this year's #Deathtober blogging, and in sad acknowledgment of Author May's death on 25 September 2026. I suspect I never came back to post it because that was about the time I ran seriously afoul of the Spoiler Stasi abd decided "hell with it" and forgot it existed.

The story opens on a beach. Don't get too excited, it's a Scottish beach so colder than a Republican's heart. A man awakes cold and confused:

I have no idea where this is. And for the first time since consciousness has returned, I am aware, with a sudden, sharp and painful stab of trepidation, that I have not the least notion of who I am.

That breathless realisation banishes all else. The cold, the taste of salt, the acid still burning all the way up from my stomach. How can I not know who I am? A temporary confusion, surely? But the longer I stand here, with the wind whistling around my ears, shivering almost beyond control, feeling the pain and the cold and the consternation, I realise that the only sense that has not returned to me is my sense of self. As if I inhabit the body of a stranger, in whose uncharted waters I have been washed up in blind ignorance.

Nothing like the smell of the North Atlantic Ocean in the morning. As he searches for a name (it's Neal, for now), for a way to discover who he is, ID or any other details, belongings...anything...he encounters a woman who seems to know him as she walks near the beach. Sally helps Neal-for-now home, some data starts coming into his slippery memory and mostly slides right out again having nothing to stick to:

They say that all any of us are is the sum total of our memories…Take them away and all you are left with is a blank. Like a computer without software.

It's true, and it scares me, as it does most people or writers would not use the trope with the regularity they do (particularly in thrillers where the need for the main character to act fast and to have a great urgency to do something is acute). Our hero reflects, "{it's a}s if I inhabit the body of a stranger, in whose uncharted waters I have been washed up in blind ignorance," as he attempts to unferstand what on Earth has landed him in a situation where:

Nothing, absolutely nothing since I found myself washed up, semi-conscious, on the Traigh Losgaintir, has made sense. My memory loss. My failure to find a single clue to my identity, beyond my name, even in my own home. My affair with Sally. The book on the Flannan Isles mystery that I am not writing. Beehives on the coffin road. My missing boat...someone trying to kill me. And someone else stepping in to save me. The weight of it all is very nearly crushing.

As he puts together who he is and what he is doing, why he us at great risk of death, many truths and dacts sort themselves into an extremely ugly pattern:

Politicians and political parties, particularly in America, rely on {corporate criminals} to fund election campaigns. They are powerful lobbyists. Which is why the US has not banned the use of neonicotinoids, and thousands of tons of the stuff are still being used on crops there every year. Biggest usage is on oilseed rape. They coat the seeds with insecticide, so that, when it germinates, the insecticide is diffused throughout the plant, including the nectar and pollen that’s harvested by the bees.

Neal-for-now's discovered, conveniently near a cursed murder site in a lighthouse, evidence that chemical companies researched neonicotinoids and knew what effect the pesticide would have:

‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’ The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to {Bad actor}, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can. The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor. {Bad actor} is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth. I grab {a hostage he's rescuing} by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing. Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull {the hostage he's rescuing} off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination. We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air. I guide {the hostage he's rescuing} away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth.

As you'll see from my rating there were some issues with the way the story unfolded, plot holes, a looseness with the timeline; but you also see how exciting the story is. This is proof Author May began writing in the vineyards of television...you can see the above in your inner TV room, I'm sure...before retiring to the vineyards of the South of France to write exciting novels. I like this one best of all of them I've read.

HEAR THE DEAD, tinnitus as haunting

HEAR THE DEAD
ANN DÁVILA CARDINAL
Sourcebooks Landmark (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From award-winning author Ann Dávila Cardinal comes an edgy, genre-bending thriller following a retired photographer who begins to hear the murders of women she knew in her punk youth, forcing her to reckon with the past she's desperate to forget.

One woman. A string of unsolved murders. Only she can hear the victims.

Elena Altieri never wanted to be famous, and certainly not at sixty-six years old. For over forty years she's been hiding from her New York City punk rock youth in the hills of Vermont, but now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she losing her hearing, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral. Suddenly, she finds herself summoned back to the city for an exhibit celebrating her work and thrust into a world she'd hoped to keep locked away forever. A world where her best friend, Sin, is dead.

At the exhibit, Elena hears the screams of a woman ringing among the hum of her tinnitus, and she's sure something horrible has occurred. But since no one else can hear them, she convinces herself it's just her damaged ears playing tricks. She tries to put the event behind her, but when the auditory visions continue whenever she touches something of Sin's, she becomes convinced she's hearing her friend's murder. Desperate for answers, she has no choice but dig into the past, and what she'll uncover will not only force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin, and other innocent women from their youth, were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve. Old punks never die, and Elena's going to prove that.

Edgy, mysterious, and full of heart, Hear the Dead is at once an inventive and biting story following one aging woman desperate to solve crimes from her past, and a thought-provoking meditation on friendship, justice, and what it means to remember who we are.

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

My Review: Elena's not a lot younger than me; she lived in 1980s New York like me; she has tinnitus like me. I was primed to love her, to fall in love with her story. I didm't quite get all the way there. It was a slow climb up the story's mountain to the resolution, or as we in less sexually savvy times called the climax. Call it that in these pursey-mouthed prudey times and you'll get A Look from some "protect the children" overreactor.

Ahem.

Ann Dávila Cardinal uses the weird effects on what one can hear when afflicted with tinnitus to mysterious, spooky purposes for the first time in my long experience. Author Cardinal has Elena grow increasingly deaf from tinnitus by getting odd auditory hallucinations that relate, she thinks, to a hideously traumatic murder she...knows of...in her past.

I'm not being coy, there; the point of this entire story is the murder of lovely young Sin is not in Elena's memory as anything but a bald fact, unattached to details but imbued with dread and a sick discomfort buoying it up in the immense ocean of completely anonymized memories anyone over sixty knows full well. Now that the ringing in her ears is morphing into voices and a changing cast of them Elena is going to have to fish for facts among the sounds. Voices speak words. Voices have conversations. Voices resonate with the ringing of tinnitus, is the modulation into words or just...screaming? Is this Elena remembering Sin's death at last or is this Elena's guilt over...whatever happened, if she heard it is she surfacing something that could lead her to resolve Sin's long-ago murder?

Listen sharp.

From the floor I could shoot from an awesome angle. A guy’s face on the receiving end of a punch, blood and spit spraying out of this mouth. The growling expression of one of the bouncers as he pulled some kid right off his still-kicking feet. And my favorite shot of the night: tiny Josie Bluth, a powerful singer who Sin had worked with for a time, in her short plaid schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, hanging off the back of one of the goons who’d harassed me. I captured the exact moment when she bit off a piece of his ear.

A badass in her youth, a badass now: Elena listens intently to the screaming, with the intention of understanding what she is hearing. What a great way to use a very uncomfortable, isolating phenomenon. Elena was a big part of the "underground" scene of the 80s as a photographer, a visual chronicler of the times and places on the punk scene. How telling that she has no visual memory of the awful murder. She has blown-out ears ringing with voices, clamorous with screams, and her visual record of it...absent, gone, vanished, repressed. All of these? None of them? But decades of not knowing, of not consciously being able to assemble the reality into a picture, makes her photographers' eyes twitch.

There is a resolution. You get your answer.

What interested old-man me was Elena's clearly intense desire to make Sin's death right at last. She needs Sin to be in the explained column of Life's spreadsheet because, well, because Death is supposed to end, to finish, to stop. It was murder, as yet unsolved; Death does none of those things for the murdered, so Elena will now listen to her lovely friend's death until she hears the fact that is so terrible, so fearsome, that her photographer's eyes can't see it.

That's tough. That's badass.

That's love.

The astounding pounding that misogyny, that ableism, that crude powerplays wreaked havoc on Elena and her fellow women in that scene, that time, her Nuyorican culture were, I felt, overemphasized. Dramatic effect wears out, like opioid hits; at forst righteous anger burns, then punchdrunk disorientation, then numbness; Reality did all these things to all y'all but fiction has different rukes. I know Author Cardinal knows this. I can only think that she felt so strongly about this story that it *had*to*have all the blows, all the kicks, every cruelty from casual to calculated.

For this reader it stopped having the desired, needed, salutary effect.

STRANGE LIGHTS, paranormal found-family horror/SFF tale of raising a chupacabra as a single mom

STRANGE LIGHTS
MIRA GONZÁLEZ
Bindery Books|Ezeekat Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: squeaks to four full stars

The Publisher Says: Parenting is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot harder when your toddler is a chupacabra.

Paranormal investigator and cryptozoologist Reggie has embraced her fate as parent to an adopted toddler, Eldi—a blood-sucking chupacabra with a fondness for goats. Reggie wants nothing more than to put her complicated past in the rearview mirror and fade into as much obscurity as her toddler will allow. But a rash of UFOs in the night sky and a couple of crop-circle-carving Roombas force Reggie into an investigation that attracts the attention of an old enemy, an anti-supernatural agency hunting for creatures like Eldi. To outwit them, Reggie must team up with Calvin: a podcaster-turned-werewolf whose charm is a real threat to Reggie’s rule against romantic attachments.

With Reggie’s history quickly catching up to her and Eldi in the agency’s crosshairs, any shred of normalcy evaporates. Reggie must decide: Can she confront her dark past to save Eldi—and an entire alien species—from getting wiped out of the universe?

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My Review: A Winnebago so tricked out it's almost a spaceship...but is much more than appearances suggest.

A single foster mom/cryptozoologist...raising a half-chupacabra toddler.

And several cornfields of crop-circle making Roombas.

Oh, and also a yummy-looking cryptid-debunking podcaster. Who's a werewolf.

Nothing's quite normal, quite as it appears, in Reggie's world. No one is ready for anyone else's unrevealed private truth; everyone's really fine with it when the masks come off. Mostly fine. Most of the time. It's a rollicking story most of the way, at about 55-60% it gets into necessary-but-long backstory exposition. It ends the forward momentum at the point in the story where it genuinely can't be recovered because there's not enough story left to do it. I think most readers won't really notice the placement (and there's no better way or place to do it, I really tried to figure one out) but could be slightly put off by how much the action slows while feeling totally wowed and bumfuzzled by what they're learning.

Reggie and Eldi are truly parent and kid-charge in the most endearing way, a slice of serendipity such as an uncaring universe fails to fuck up every once in a while. It's part of Author González' magic that while she's telling a wildly improbable wad of truth...the cryptid-debunking werewolf podcaster makes complete and entire sense after the initial laugh/headscratch/forehead wrinkle...she's sneaking the sentimental sniff and a teardrop out of you. Eldi the half-chupacabra will wring your withers with "baaawww"ness before the next goat goes. Calvin the werewolf, now *there's* a man I want to meet! They're all in a twilight zone between normies and the larger world whose truth we can't handle, to quote Jack Nicholson's speech pretty much whole. The fearsome task of running interference while running away from the Big Bads (plural very much intentional) is the root of the unit forming before us, and has now reached the point where there are pasts to normalize within this found family.

The intersubjective—the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties—is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you—the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents.

It's part of a fantastic essay my sister forwarded to me as I sat contemplating what to write about this book. It explains aome issues I've been noodling over and had got nowhere with trying to form usefully. The ineluctable quantum effects show themselves everywhere, now we've seen them we can't unsee them.

A story resonating on a quantum level and rocked by gravity waves is not going to stay tidy. It makes me feel a bit sad that many of y'all are going to wonder a little too hard about that backstory/pacing hurdle and choose not to spend your fiercely protected eyeblinks on the read; yet I'm never going to shy away from sharing truths I know are risky to tell. I urge you to go steadily onward to get yourselves to the ending.

It is where I vaulted from three-plus to a full four stars.

No more—spoilers—but an exhortation to do #Deathtober's spooky vibe with something fun, substantial, and weird as fuck.

BIRD KING RISING, second in Letters from Maynara series by Samantha Bansil

BIRD KING RISING (Letters from Maynara #2)
SAMANTHA BANSIL
Bindery Books | Violetear (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A new queen reigns. A rebellion stirs. Will she risk it all to rule?

Newly crowned queen Laya Gatdula is determined to prove her worth to her subjects, her family, her rivals—and herself. When whispers of rebellion and rumored sightings of a giant raptor in the mountainous Skylands reach the capital, Laya must face the terrifying realization that her ex-lover and rival, Luntok, might still be alive and coming for the throne. Though she already wields power over wind and rain, to quell the threat from the north, Laya seeks the ultimate weapon: lightning.

Torn between the counsel of two men—her beloved confidant and her ruthless uncle—Laya must trust herself to cement her legacy and hold the throne. Is it better to earn her nation’s loyalty through benevolent rule, or risk everything to become an all-powerful god? And with Luntok rapidly gathering his army, will she live long enough to make the choice?

From Samantha Bansil, a brilliant, fresh voice in AAPI fiction, Bird King Rising returns to the world of Black Salt Queen with the gripping conclusion to an epic story of duty and strength, passion and betrayal, and the devastating cost of war.

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My Review: If you have not read Black Salt Queen, which you certainly should, this story will lose a lot of impact though you will get a flavor of the world. The conflicts will I suspect, not need a lot of background, though the motives and the intensity brought to bear might surprise you absent that earlier tale's details. I'll quote myself from my earlier review for clarity: "It's rooted in precolonial Philippine culture, adding fantasy elements; this is a part of world history I'll bet big money most of my fellow old white people have less knowledge of this cultural milieu than they do of Middle Earth...very few of y'all need any context to know who Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Legolas are or represent."

I'll say of this resolution to the earlier story's arc, I was all ready for it to be about what it is that separates the handover of power due to rebellion from a revolution. Was Laya merely leading a rebellion? I'd wondered in the first book; now she's in power, wielding her magic is...influenced...by the always-present web of interpersonal obligations, favors owed and ones desired to be accrued. It's a very fertile field to work, deep story-soil to till and many's the crop of plots it will sustain. I found the depth of this story's digging a tiny bit disappointing, like Author Bansil chose story resolution in a timely way over the longer, more complicated exploration I'd anticipated. That's why this book is a quarter-star lower than the first one in my personal rating; and, of course, the second-book phenomenon of post-joyous-discovery familiarity where there had been novelty.

What is foregrounded instead is the deeper look into individuals' ethical natures. I am here for women's wrongs as much as rights. I like women in power making terribly difficult decisions and getting them ambiguously right but somewhat wrong. Being in power very very seldom offers a leader the delight of choosing an unambiguously good course. But maybe, in addition to these reasons they'll make hard choices, could we also see justifications, rationalizations, pressures responded to that evoke right-becomes-wrong perspective shifts?

I sound more carping and negative than I feel. I think this series could easily go on a good while before the setting yields its last bumper harvest; the setting is one that bids fair, in Author Bansil's capable hands, to support many excellent tales to come. I am here for them all as they come.

Soon please, Violetear Books.

THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF ILIANA MAREK, SFnal mysterious thrilling doings in Florida

THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF ILIANA MAREK
DAVID LISS
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A young man with a tragic past finds an unlikely protector in a strangely altered enforcer of his backwater town. In his immutable style, Edgar Award winner David Liss (The Peculiarities) incorporates the elements of a crime novel within a satirical combination of sci-fi, justice, and mercy in 21st-century America.

Who is Iliana Marek? Is she the bully who alongside her foster father Police Chief Bryce Hillard, controls and terrorizes Tylor, Florida? Or is she the reborn guardian angel of Dan Gibson, a social pariah responsible for the suicide of Faye Kristic, a death which he cannot remember ten years later.

Dan’s once-promising future is in tatters. He lives in an apartment on his estranged parents’ property, works at a convenience store with a terrible boss, and is addicted to prescription drugs. But ten years after Faye’s death, Iliana suddenly takes Dan’s side, and a lot of bad people start dying fast.

As Dan becomes entangled in the ensuing chaos, he needs to finally discover what part he played in the death of Faye Kristic, and why the changes to Iliana make her no longer entirely human.

In a novel as though Carl Hiaasen had collaborated with Michael Crichton, David Liss’s newest work is a powerfully astute, entertaining allegory right out of today’s headlines.

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

My Review: The unjustly-accused hero is irresistible to me, a story conceit I'm so sat for because Hitchcock. From The Lodger and Saboteur to North by Northwest, with stops at The Thirty-nine Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much...my whole conscious life I've been enjoying the real hero being misjudged.

Dan's severe mistreatment at the hands...presumably...of law enforcement resulting in his concussion bad enough to rob him of his memory, well, sign me up for the cruise in first class comfort please. Iliana, a child under the care of this rotten sheriff who (presumably) led, or allowed at least, Dan's beating without knowing or caring that he was actually guilty of provoking the suicide of sweet little Faye, the dearest girl anywhere ever so of course the town went nuts! He harmed her!

Says who?

Everyone. And Iliana, plus foster dad sheriff, make sure everyone hears that version of events. Dan is beat down for ten years from all sides. You wrote these horrible, bullying things about Faye! She was a super-excellent coder and you never could be! the townsfolk spit venomously at beleaguered Dan, driving him into substance abuse and a miserable dead-end job. Why does none of this ring even a distant bell? Because you're guilty! shout the peasants, armed with the twenty-first century's pichforks and torches, chasing Dan into the town's windmill-equivalent, the local gas station/convenience store, there to suffer a miserable work life getting abused.

But Faye was working on something big, something that also cost the billionaire who hired her for the job his life (boo hoo). And that has some outsiders wondering why the entire fatal event was so tightly controlled, so free of loose ends, so improbably speedily resolved. Enough chatter about it keeps reaching Dan over the years..so heavily implicated (maybe too heavily, absent concrete proof) tat he *must* be included in the gossip, he decides to do what an outside crime reporter texts him to do: show up at the suicide site, a tower, for a meeting. It's maybe reckless, but life can't get worse than being reviled, right?

Unless you're Dan. Arriving at the tower to meet the reporter, he finds Iliana already there.

Burying bodies. And after a truly bizarre moment of unforgettable SFnal deus ex machina, acting weirdly...nice...to him. Unsettlingly, Iliana has now decided she will protect Dan from detractors defaming him...just as she did, up until now. This is all exceedingly weird, what happens and how and why are very very unexpected. It's also very welcome indeed. Having someone convert from detractor to defender...even though murderous in her execution (!) of the role...is a kindness Dan had stopped expecting anyone to show him.

What follows is an increasingly daffy and disorienting peeling of the onion's layers. No one is who they present themselves as. Nothing is uncomplicated by lies and the secrecy the entire town and attendant characters practice. It isn't just impossible to figure out who's lying, it's impossible to determine why some withhold truths and some just outright lie about the same thing.

There's a real, solid reason; you will learn it; it is not, shall we say, edifying. Dan carries trauma and guilt unjustly heaped on him. He was not, it turns out, guiltless. He never really dealt with the real guilt nor does he here, but there's an excellent reason why in the decade of cruelty he's suffered. I'd've liked to see him grow as a character but the scope of the story told here would not allow i. Nor does that scope allow for Iliana's alteration to be explicated as I so very badly wished it would be. Again, I get why, but here I sit with my teeth in my mouth....

Not a whodunit like the Benjamin Weaver stories Author Liss regaled us with, so don't expectfair-play clue laying. It's really more a mysterious, psychologically oriented, vibe-of-thrillers gone by, story. And it's good fun indeed. My quibbles are just that: quibbles. Go forth, procure, and enjoy.

SCARLET SHADOWS, The Scarlet Mysteries Book 1

SCARLET SHADOWS (The Scarlet Mysteries Book 1)
JO SZEWCZYK
Czykmate Productions (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Scarlet Jameson is a taekwondo champion with a badly injured leg, a short fuse, and absolutely no intention of becoming an amateur detective.

Then her friend Michelle is attacked by three masked strangers.

Before her failing sight ended Michelle's career as a pediatrician, Emily had been her first patient. Years later, she became her last. When a desperately needed transplant fell through, Emily died—leaving behind a tragedy Michelle thought she'd buried.

Apparently, someone else is determined to keep the past buried too.

Scarlet, Michelle, and their loyal but unpredictable friend Bean start asking questions. They should have left the past alone. Because the deeper they dig, the more dangerous the answers become—and someone is willing to make sure they never reach the truth.

Fast, dark, and full of wry, quick-witted banter, Scarlet Shadows is a modern Las Vegas crime mystery about buried secrets, the people who'll kill to keep them, and three friends who don't know when to walk away. Perfect for fans of Veronica Mars and Finlay Donovan.

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My Review: Plots centering the theft of a laptop containing the secrets that no one could possibly not desiire enough to kill for are common as pig tracks. Medical maguffins are very en vogue because, y'all, we live in a time of miracles and should all be bathed in the astonishing accomplishments of scientists, researchers, and technologists.

Ahem.

None of that's in this book, but I'm taking every opportunity I can find or create to remind anyone who sees my words that this is true.

Scarlet, mouthy sarcastic kid she is, annoyed me. So did Bean. Truthfully anyone their age is going to rub me the wrong way. But add in Scarlet's tae kwan do codified violence and I am already late for the door. Michelle's career as a pediatrician is ending, cruelly and uncomfortably for old-man me, as her sight fails. *deep prolonged shudders of horror* Being an actual doctor, therefore , at the youngest, in her later thirties, I could not understand her undifferentiated interests and communication of them from youthful Scarlet's or Bean's. If she'd been sleeping with one or both of them I could see it....

Speaking of seeing things, Jean-Claude Van Damme? While he had an epically muscular butt back in the day, he's my age and his fighting days (supported by the said epically muscular butt) are behind (!) him, so why? Never explained that I noticed.

Snappy wit is hard to pull off. Here it felt more like kids bantering. It was not The Thin Man or Slaughterhouse-Five. If I reach for a comparison to my era of youth-wit writers, I'd say its closest analogue was In Watermelon Sugar by largely and justly forgotten chronicler of the nonce Richard Brautigan.

Astute and observant as I know all my readers are, y'all will have noticed there are three and a half stars up there. The reason is...I like violent, goofy Scarlet. She's bright, she's curious, she's got a definite moral compass; she believes in taking action against injustice; she does not have any time for fools. My kinda sleuth. Her scoobygroup is probably going to change over time...what're you gonna do with Michelle after this? Or Bean?...but they'll always be quirky and scrupulous which...that's hard to do this well.

Great, no; fun, yes. A pleasantly amusing layover download.

THE PARIS FILES: A Novel, truly deeply involving alternative way of telling a familiar story

THE PARIS FILES: A Novel
EVA JURCZYK
Pamela Dorman Books/PRH (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Told entirely through police interviews, this stylish, sophisticated thriller captures the disastrous aftermath of Parisian rendezvous following the disappearance of a new lover

Genie St. Onge’s heart is broken more often than it’s not—but that doesn’t stop her from diving in head-first when she meets Jacob Ford. Their connection is instantaneous and consuming, and they agree to meet again in Paris. In a heady mix of sugared pastries and rumpled bedsheets, they begin plotting their future together. In the dreamy apartment they're renting in the 11th arrondissement, they become intoxicated by each other.

Until Jacob disappears.

Genie knows Jacob would never leave her. Not by choice. When phone calls to hospitals turn up nothing, she grows convinced that someone must have taken him. It's the only explanation.

Under the scrutiny of the French police, however, Genie’s story doesn’t quite hold up—and it sounds like Jacob might not be all he seems, either. Through police interviews with Genie and nearby residents of the 11th arrondissement, the truth remains elusive. She swears has no idea what happened to Jacob—so why doesn’t her story align with anyone else’s?

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My Review: I reviewed Author Eva's 6:40 To Montreal last year, that marvelously involving remake of Murder on the Orient Express the same 4.5* as here. The close model for the police-interview transcript format (of the answers only) used to tell the entire story...a kind of take on The Lady Vanishes... in this book is Robert Pinget's The Inquisitory, one of his noveau roman works from the 1960s. Permaybehaps Author Eva is using this stylistic, if not thematic, hopping around to participate in an unjustly underknown effort to sharpen appreciation of the novel...whatever truth there might be in that, I'm just grateful she chose not to emulate the absence of punctuation Pinget chose for his transcripts. That made for a long read.

So, Genie (!) and Jacob's mildly astounding story. A woman mets a man while she is on holiday; they feel It; they (bizarrely) being to plan a life together in Paris; and then they start the said life in Paris...without ever so much as texting each other in the months between making these plans, traveling other places, and then meet to begin their new life. Jacob promptly vanishes. Genie goes to the police.

Presented with that story as the beginning of the novel, the police begin to investigate and—to absolutely no one's surprise—can't verify Genie's story. Bits and parts of it match bits and parts of others' stories. It was, in fact, a touch odd to me that Genie annd Jacob's private lives felt as though they were pretty much a more open book than certainly *I* would be comfortable with. But a lot of that is Genie herself...she does not do demure or discreet. Her emotions run hot, her presentation of self is so deeply unnervingly *On* that I would find her a wearing person to keep company with. Jacob, now, is someone I'd look at Genie and then at him and think, "...???...maybe Jacob's just ghosted you, dear lady, so maybe lick your wounds and move on...?"

Police pursuing this line of discovery get a roaring earful. It is an uneasy thing to read about a woman being disbelieved by Authority in 2026. It is not unrealistic. And that is why it feels so...unsettling, so uncomfortable, to be with Genie as she negotiates the process of giving statement to Authority that Authority simply does not think reflect the facts when I don't entirely believe the statements myself. Compounded by the fact that it's painfully clear that every person giving Authority their statements is lying about something, and has a reason to dislike and mistrust Authority so to be dishonest.

At no time were my readerly feet firmly under me, at no point did I have any idea other than a developing one, at every turn of the page or change of chapters I had to brace myself for the next course alteration. It kept me fully engaged with this improbable story's improbable course, and ultimately its surprising if not fully convincing resolution.

It was a lot of fun, and while I was always sure there was going to come to light a huge international government-toppling plot or a dreadfully cruel revenge scheme a la the Monte Cristo gag for something Genie'd done to a grudge-holding tech billionaire, what actually happened was...condign.

No one who calumniates macarons shouuld get a HEA.

PLEASE ENJOY YOUR STAY, ghastly truths emerge about a family tragedy

PLEASE ENJOY YOUR STAY
TARA GOEDJEN
Atria/Emily Bestler Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, treorder now for delivery on 13 October 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After a true crime podcast reopens her cousin’s murder case, a woman must confront her past at a glamorous European castle-turned-hotel where she follows a trail of toxic family secrets and deadly lies.

When they were teenagers, Mia’s beloved cousin was murdered during their stay at an infamous castle in the Austrian Alps. As the only witness, Mia’s testimony put the killer behind bars, but it tore her life apart: the media accused her aunt, a controversial true crime author, of being involved. Now, a decade later, the murderer is appealing his conviction, and a popular true crime podcast starts covering the case, determined to exonerate him, and resurfacing lies about Mia’s family in the process.

Desperate to protect her aunt—and what she knows to be the truth—Mia returns to Austria. The castle is being revamped as a luxury hotel, and Mia gets a job as a nanny for the new owner, hiding in plain sight as she investigates, needing to set the story straight once and for all. But after someone mysteriously disappears on the property and sinister new evidence emerges regarding her cousin’s death, she realizes she might have accused the wrong man...and put her own life in danger.

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My Review: It disconcerts me when I read a debut novel this expertly crafted. I expect untacked hems, unblocked waists and armholes, some lumpy seams...none of that here. Comes the dawn...she's been busy the past ten years tending the story vines in the YA vineyard.

So why move to the adult side? I thought maybe some smexy content...not by my adult lights, but maybe for teens it would be? Nope, this isn't a bonkbuster. It's maybe a little deeper on the fragility of Mia's confidence in herself and in her judgment and memory than is good for YA stories, but that's a problem I have with YA stories aimed at girls a lot of the time. The gothic elements...crazy mother, brooding heroes with dark secrets who tell lies for genuinely good reasons, eville greedy men who want the heroine to fail...aren't too disturbing for any goth teen I've ever met.

Well, here we are. This solidly crafted mystery is a pleasure to read, the setting is so well evoked I put on my cardigan against the chills, as Mia's memories of the deeply traumatizing murder she witnessed are attacked and undermined I was frothingly furious with the liars abusing her for their own gain.

There's that half-star gone. In a truly effective gothic novel I expect to feel doubt about the heroine's perceptions. I expect I'll have to wonder id the lies aren't more evenly distributed. Never, not once, did I think so much as "...matbe she misremembered...?" Mia was victimized, and I truly got angry about it.

Author Tara doesn't deliver by-the-numbers gothic storytelling. She keeps the story moving, bending around some pretty sharp corners. Never once did she cheat on the ghostly horror front, by which I mean it was all revealed as regular ol' skulduggery seen from a particular, carefully engineered angle.

What provided the horror for this out-of-step old man was the true-crime podcasting angle, the way the search for Truth is weaponized and twisted and manipulated. Humans scare me far far more than "ghosts" or the "paranormal" ever could. Humans harm and kill each other for fun and profit...and that horrifies me more than spooky set-dressing ever could.

Uneasy reading for spooky season your jam? This story will deliver, though not for the usual reasons (IMO). Need a heroine to root for? Here she is. Need an ending you can close the book, smile, and say to yourself "okay, that's good"? I got that here almost in spite of Mia having less faith in herself than I had in her...that christawful true-crime podcast...and think most of y'all would too.

LUNA, PHOENIX, QUEEN, the progression will make sense in hindsight

LUNA, PHOENIX, QUEEN
JULIE ORRINGER
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 13 December 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A spellbinding tour de force from the bestselling author of The Invisible Bridge—a novel about varieties of infidelity, the provenance of a literary masterpiece, and the power of storytelling to shape identity and destiny.

Dava and Barr Pennington, professors at a Midwestern university, both harbor potent secrets. Fiction writing is his specialty, English literature is hers. But Dava is unhappy in their marriage, and secretly in love with a colleague, Svetlana White, who teaches in the Russian Studies department; spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel about two women who run a domestic violence shelter in coastal Maine. Though she loves the work and the refuge it provides, the writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail; tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. After a precipitous decline, she moves to a memory-care facility in a neighboring town. Soon afterward, her husband, alone in the house at night, discovers her hidden manuscript, which he reads with envy, and then with anger, as he extrapolates his wife’s affair from the relationship described in the novel’s pages. Over the next two years he rewrites the novel and publishes it as his own, to wide acclaim. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him to confess his theft to an unlikely party, who leads others to the truth.

Luna, Phoenix, Queen tells its tale of artistic and marital betrayal in a chorus of voices. We hear from Barr as he becomes obsessed with Luna, a horrifically injured dog at a local shelter; from Dava as she meets Svetlana for the first time, on a transatlantic flight to Dublin; from Milo, Dava’s son, as he hides in the woods with Naomi, Svetlana’s daughter; from Svetlana, experiencing the loss of a relationship that ended before it could come to fruition; from Evie, Barr’s research assistant, who witnessed Dava’s last days at home with her husband; from James, the Penningtons’ younger son, who makes a startling discovery after his father’s death; and from Milo and Svetlana again, as they grieve the injustice of Barr’s theft and confront the devastation of Dava’s disease.

In a narrative that spans four decades and four thousand miles, Luna, Phoenix, Queen illuminates the power of storytelling and explores the terror of losing the ability to make sense of our world. It is a cry of rage against our vulnerability and helplessness; an acknowledgment of the mysteries beneath the familiar surface of our world; and ultimately, if unexpectedly, a radical testament to love in its many forms.

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My Review: I'm a sucker for a revenge story. I know, I know, cheating on your wedding vows is okay when you're unhappy and also discovering your same-sex attractions in escaping your tedious, dull, humdrum, bad-heterosex marriage.

Not to me. Talk about it. Make a deal that gets you closer to a happier life. "I can't because {wafflewafflewaffle}." Yes you can; if there's no communication divorce them already and THEN go live that happier life. Be a grown up not a selfish adolescent in other words.

Happily for revenge-story lovers like me, most people are selfish adolescents. Like Dava. In love with Svetlana, not Barr her husband and father of her children, does she say "we should figure out how to get along in honesty while we finish raising the kids" or even the truthful "adios chickenfucker, my lawyer'll be in touch"? No! She lies and sneaks and Barr kinda-sorta knows it but can't be arsed to do anything about it until the horror of dementia eats Dava.

What he does is steal Dava's life of love that she led with Svetlana in the shadows and corners of theit bad-heterosex lives. Dava, you see, wrote her first-ever novel about her true love. Barr's got to clean out Dava's stuff as she disappears from the life she once led, of course; Svetlana has no legal standing to act in protection of Dava's life. (An excellent reason to be upfront with spouses being cheated on: they'll tell your lover the real deal about health and prospects for the future if only crow viciously, victoriously.)

Barr uses his creative writing teaching career's lessons to turn a good story into an excellent novel that catches a strand in the culture and rises on the blending of Dava's happiness away from him and his skill at shaping that story. And Dava can't do anything about it; she doesn't remember it. Svetlana? No legal or moral standing. A good reason to hide her sneakin' lyin' ways from her and Dava's mutual employer (I have to think it's all a fictionalized Iowa Writers' Workshop; it's in Iowa anyway). So Barr has free rein. His employer (the actual workshop) sees Dava's book's success in the wake of a terrible personal tragedy of spousal loss. He's not going to tell the real truth: he stole his cheatin' wife's tainted happiness and made it into better art than she could've, then let the market reward him.

Sleazy enough for a soap opera. But this, my olds, is not the last word on the subject.

Luna the (sadly but accidentally maimed) shelter dog gets Barr's urgent confession. She is then on a walk with her new doggy-daddy. In his declining years by now, Luna becomes the focus of Barr's need for an uncritical audience. His ever-more necessary assistant, Evie, ends up adopting Luna and renaming her Phoenix (why people think it's okay to rename animals grown into full personhood is a mystery to me) while catalyzing surprises.

Milo and Jamie, sons of Dava and Barr, reach out to Svetlana after their father's death brings the whole picture into focus. They want to know the woman Dava, obviously so different from their mother. It is Author Orringer's gift, by structuring the story as she did...alternating narrators by chapter...to keep homing in on the process of family secrets becoming known at a surprisingly effective pace. I'm aware of how judgmental I sound about Dava. I judge Barr harshly as well. I understand and empathize with them both now I've read the novel, and even willingly grant grace to Svetlana for her role in this needlessly complicated love triangle of sorts. Svetlana's utterly uninteresting daughter Naomi, and Author Orringer's use throughout these eight chapters filling under three hundred pages of the evil satanic second person for all narration combined cost the story a whopping quarter star.

Not ordinary for me. I'd've tossed it onto the Pearl-Rule pile early on most days! But I was forewarned that I'd need to read a lot of satanic second person text, so I persevered. The delicate dissection of the characters' reasons and decisions to do the things they did are so believably, humanly, laid out and so gently treated as the very difficult choices they were that I was never going to whap the story with the paddle I'd propped in the corner of my mind. I relate. Not condone but accept. I get it; I wish all y'all'd done different better things.

You couldn't. It's the human tragedy told again, told with accepting love that I hope to high heaven I receive when I go offstage the last time.

And Luna, the Phoenix...she truly got this story over the hill of my intolerance. She was my star, my belovèd dote of a character. You'll see.

Or you'll miss out on a truly delightful read.

WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival, "extreme" is an addiction of its own no matter what it's to

WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival
MARC GAUSS
Sibling Rivalry Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is a fearless memoir of spirit, sex, and survival.

Raised in a strict Christian home where every desire was measured against sin, Marc Gauss grew up believing that love-especially the kind he felt for other men-was something that had to be hidden, prayed away, or punished. As he moves from small-town boyhood to college campuses, locker rooms, churches, and the neon freedom of gay nightlife, Gauss confronts the contradictions between the life he was taught to live and the truth of who he is.

Along the way he encounters cruelty, rejection, ecstatic freedom, and moments of devastating despair—including the kind of spiritual shame that nearly costs him his life. Told with disarming candor, humor, desire, and vulnerability, What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is the story of a man who survived religious judgment, sexual awakening, and the many identities others tried to force upon him. It is a memoir about reclaiming joy, owning one's body, and learning-finally-to live without apology.

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

My Review: No one on Earth survives contact with high-control systems unchanged. It's not possible to be told how to be yourself without responding to that pressure somehow. Marc Gauss fell into many unhappy experiences on the road away from the horrors of his family's deeply unChristian take on christianity. His story is another block of evidence that "what does not kill me makes me stronger" is a choice of how to respond to your life's less carefree passages.

If you're hoping for non-fiction porn about sex work, not in here, you could be disappointed. Discussions of Sex are aplenty. The sex act itself isn't absent...it can't be. What's not given to you is the salacious stuff that nosy old queers (me) might've thought we were getting.

It's a better book than that. Becoming you, finding a Self in the noise of life is hard for most of us; all of us, I suspect, but I always leave wiggle room because if I don't some annoying twidgee or another will "well, actually" me and I'll be forced back to the poppet-making curse-casting ways of my English ancestors. Ways Author Gauss must've seen for the rage trap they are.

A book that will heal a hurt many gay men of every generation bear. A story that only adds to the world's stock of recovery from evil without succumbing to it examples. Well worth seeking out and spending a weekend with.

And I am positive I am not the first old queer guy to say that about, or to, Marc Gauss.

BEN CANAAN SERIES: historical mysteries by A.E GOLDIN featuring Jewish sleuth Canaan

DEATH ON THE PEARL RIVER (Ben Canaan #2)
A.E GOLDIN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Ben Canaan returns in this darkly gripping stand-alone adventure mystery set in Hong Kong, sequel to the acclaimed Murder in Constantinople!

Ben Canaan is riding high on the recent string of cases he has solved successfully on the payroll of Her Majesty’s Executive. Then a notorious crime boss is found murdered on the city streets, the latest in a series of brutal killings targeting the most powerful men in the opium trade.

The scale of the danger is global. To track down the culprits and prevent more blood from being shed, Ben is sent out to the newly-founded British colony of Hong Kong: a lawless frontier town on the southern shores of China's Great Qing Dynasty. All the victims have had ties to the prominent trading firms that use the Pearl River and the South China Sea as their base of operations—ranging from the firms’ heads, to high-ranking partners, supercargoes, merchants, even sailors.

Ben is plunged headlong into a labyrinthine conspiracy, set against the backdrop of an empire in collapse and a sweeping civil war. As his hunt brings him closer to the truth and the ruthless corporate interests that want him dead, Ben is forced to choose between what is necessary and what is just.

Alfred Hitchcock meets Indiana Jones, this immersive, globe-trotting historical mystery is the second installment in the acclaimed Ben Canaan Mysteries series. Thrillingly paced and filled with enchanting historical settings, this series provides all the nostalgic reading pleasure of classic Sherlock Holmes.

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

My Review: It utterly blows my mind to realize Hong Kong as we know it now is so very young as a city. It does not bear thinkiing about what is happening there now, or what that portends for its inabitants' future. Still, being a Crown Colony was no picnic...as Ben's busy finding out in this wildly improbable, very kinetic tale of derring-do in support of the British opium trade.

Ew.

Of course Ben's not responsible for this global scourge. He's been told where to go and whom he should see by his bosses. Of course there's another terrible choice of woman for him to fall in love with, this time an opium widow grieving her husband.

All the expected gadgetry, intrigue, secrets to uncover that his bosses would really rather he didn't. And then there are the fights Ben needs to win, battles to wake up to instead of the ones he was told he'd be fighting. It still barely hangs together at the plot level and then only if one exercises good will and willingness to overlook how a lower-class Jew in 1850s England comes to be trusted with such important tasks as Ben is.

It all comes out okay in the end. It has to in a series mystery/thriller. Please not this entry does not have any significant characters from the first story. If you're looking for cozy sciibygroups, this is not the read for you. Like the Bond or Bourne books, Ben's the main point of continuity in these stories.

Enjoyable as fluff, but a second outing so soon after I had read the first might not've been rge greatest idea...pace yourself.

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

MURDER IN CONSTANTINOPLE (Ben Canaan #1)
A.E GOLDIN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: squeaks to 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Alfred Hitchcock meets Indiana Jones in this acclaimed, globe-trotting historical mystery about a wayward Jewish kid drawn into a sinister plot

This entertaining historical mystery is the exciting debut novel from London-based musician and screenwriter A.E. Goldin. Thrillingly paced and with an enchanting historical setting, it launches an unforgettable new hero in a series that provides all the nostalgic reading pleasure of classic Sherlock Holmes.

London, 1854. 21-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the 'Good-for-Nothings', just want adventure.

Then the chance discovery of an enigmatic letter and a photograph of a beautiful woman bring Ben an adventure more dangerous than anything he’d imagined. Suddenly he is thrown into the heart of a mystery that takes him away from everything he has known and all the way to Constantinople, the jewel of an empire and the centre of a world on the brink of war.

Ben’s only clue is 3 words: ‘The White Death’. Now he must find what links a string of grisly murders, following a trail through kingmaking and conspiracy, poison and high politics, bloodshed and betrayal. In a city of deadly secrets, no one is safe—and one wrong step could cost Ben his life.

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

My Review: Like the TV version of The Wild Wild West that ran from 1965 to 1969 (I'm still salty it got canceled by sustained pressure from lamebrained Congressmen), the book has trouble picking a tone. It does not feel entirely intentional, so gives an impression of lurching from sweet to sour to violent to off-the-wall daffy. Had the author, a screenwriter, recalled the true statement "every reader is the director of their brain's movie" there might have been smoother transitions among fewer tonal shifts.

How did a small-time chancer whose petty crimes were the impetus for him to stow away on a Royal Navy ship heading for the Crimean War; then after jumping ship in Constantinople, how'd he end up in the iddle of international intrigues well above his social station? How did he blend in well enough not to be rumbled minunte one? Let alone how did he get the information he's needed for the solutions to immensely consequential international intrigues?

Don't look for logic is how. Either buy in or leave the table, because this game is mad, it's incredible, and it's either going to charm you or piss you right off.

Me, I'm more charmed than any other response. I like Ben's verve and bravado. It makes him exciting to follow around. I don't think a sleuth should be reckless with impunity because life ain't like that. I do enjoy someone screwing up and learning from the screwing up, as failing upwards is relatable to anyone who's ever done anything that semi-succeded knows. Ben has that infuriating knack that real people I hate have of knowing just the right person to accomplish the thing that most needs doing so he can figure a puzzle out.

There is no slowing down either. Infodumps are quite rare and mostly very short indeed. It helps that I needed the ones I got. Plenty of female badassery on display, and integral to the plot...a certain portrait subject in particular. I enjoyed Ben's encounter with a marvelous Florence Nightingale, who factually was where she's met by our (anti)hero at a most amusingly delicate juncture.

Think of this as an 1854 European version of The Wild Wild West featuring a Jewish young man with a love for gadgets and a penchant for picking the wrong woman, and there you go. Again, id any of that is not causing you to break out in purrs, stay or go away soonest, it won't suddenly become your cuppa.

MURDER ON 34th STREET: A Novel, Christmas-season story to scratch you murderous itch

MURDER ON 34th STREET: A Novel
MARIAH FREDERICKS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of The Girl in the Green Dress comes a delightful and captivating novel about a fictional murder mystery at the iconic Macy's parade leading up to the holidays in historic New York City.

New York, 1932. Grace Verlander is the secret beating heart of Macy’s. She’s the “assistant to the assistant to the someone who’s in charge”, the go-to person for keeping everything running smoothly behind-the-scenes at the famous, bustling store.

It’s not every day you get a letter from Santa Claus, but three days before the Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, Grace arrives at work to find a note from the store Santa Claus in her someone has sent him a death threat. Shocked, Grace promises to look into it and speaks to the store detective about the parade’s security, confident that they’ve found a solution that will keep everyone safe. But on the day of the parade, despite all their precautions, a dead body is found on one of the floats.

Using her wits and deep knowledge of the ways of the place, Grace is determined to find the killer and seek justice―not just for the dead man, but to save the reputation of this iconic store from ruin.

Steeped in glittering glamor and nostalgic wonder, this is a remarkable, unpredictable mystery set in the evocative world of one of New York’s most memorable institutions.

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

My Review: I'm being only a little disingenuous with my tag "Chrismtas romance" applied to this one. There is a romantic subplot. It exists. It isn't the focus of much action. I want all my fellow Christmas/Yule holiday fans to find this story so I'm baiting my hook.

Grace is one of those women who crop up in fiction so often, the one who knows exactly where the bodies are buried, the one who needs Stuff to be Right because that's how it all works best for people...even the ones who don't do Right. They don't know it yet, but they'll live in a better woeld because Grace and her sisters in crime fiction will make sure Right triumphs. (Of course, they'll be in jail and, if they come out, will forever have a criminal record...)

Why on Earth would a woman in 1932 New York, who works for Macy's in a sort of "minister without portfolio" way, get involved in a murder investigation? She is the only person, three days before the Thanksgiving Parade (which I called "Macy's Day parade" as a kid) who knows to call this giy not that one to fix whatever's gone wrong. That's why a threatening note against this year's Santa results in her involving Frank, head of Security for Macy's, in bringing this weird turn of events to NYPD's attention. How would it make the city look for Santa Claus to be murdered here?

Guess we'll find out, say the cops. Cranks will say anything for attention. Been true since forever, y'all, since people been peoplein'.

So when a shot is fired and someone dies, Grace takes her Rolodex (figurative) and starts flippin'. The police have a lot less institutional knowledge after all...and Author Mariah shows us that by peppering the text with really interesting to me Macy's trivia specific to the flagship store on Herald Square...plus she sees the inner workings of this small town that is the store itself every day, made obvious by the startlingly large cast of characters she interacts with. Seriously, Author Mariah...couldn't a few of them have been cut? I got very confused a couple times, expecting some one-shots to pop back up but someone else showed up instead.

That said, Grace and Frank made an effective team. The resolution to the fatal parade shooting was satisfying, and I failed to assign guilt properly, so there's your half-star gone to reader's petulance. (In truth it got added for that, to what otherwise was a four-star, too-busy story.)

What makes this fourth story by Author Mariah that I've read with pleasure so effective is her eye for the details to use from her prodigious store of facts and factoids and trivia. In days of yore I'd picture her in a huge, book-lined room that's organized by some arcane principle that's entirely her own. Now I picture a browser with umpteen tabs open in two screens worth of windows. Same stuff, different era.

I'm hopeful that y'all will trot right out to the local bookery and procure yourself this enjoyable holiday-set restoration of ma'at. It merits your time and treasure in the season coming especially, pr any time you need a Christmas-holiday story variolated into your bloodstream.