THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE, good plot, better idea, decent execution

THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE
A.J. WEST
Orenda Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It is the year 1710, and Thomas True has arrived on old London Bridge with a dangerous secret. One night, lost amongst the squalor of London's hidden back streets, he finds himself drawn into the outrageous underworld of the molly houses.

Meanwhile, carpenter Gabriel Griffin struggles to hide his double life as Lotty, the molly's silent guard. When the queen of all 'he-harlots', Mother Clap, confides in him about a deadly threat, he realises his friends are facing imminent execution.

To the horror of all mollies, there is a rat amongst them, betraying their secrets to a pair of murderous Justices, hell-bent on punishing sinners with the noose.

Can Gabriel unmask the traitor before it's too late? Can he save hapless Thomas from peril, and their own impossible love?

Set amidst the hidden world of Georgian London’s gay scene, The Betrayal of Thomas True is a brutal and devastating thriller, where love must overcome evil, and the only true sin is betrayal…

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

My Review: I came out of my seat when I read "...love must overcome evil, and the only true sin is betrayal..." in the book's synopsis. It could not have been more directly aimed at my sweet spot, and timed more exactly as needed.

I still think that. I'm not one bit taking away from the author's acumen or clarity of vision. I only wish I'd had more...fun. It's a good plot, it's executed competently, but there is a lack of that indefinable *something* in the characterizations that gets me to invest in them and their plight.

After thinking and thinking about this issue, after probing my experience of the read for a solid while, I've come to the only logical conclusion. I was introduced to the stakes before I'd invested in the people. I knew what was going on but did not yet care that it was going to happen to these men. This same issue arose for me in the Shardlake historical mysteries.

I'm delighted by the evocative insults...discover them yourselves, they are priceless nuggets of invective...and engrossed in the setting of London's "molly houses" as reconstructed here. Honestly, having been immersed in this story's world, I think I'd know how to comport myself unobtrusively in this arcane, hidden world's manners and speech.

Because the stakes, the heinous betrayal of men like me by one of our own to the vile, revolting scum enforcing their distorted "morality" on pain of death, were instantly relatable to me, I found myself unwilling to put the book down. I think it was a single five-hour session that finished it off for me. That's pretty good going for three-hundred-ish pages! And blessings on the publisher for opening the proceedings with a Dramatis Personae list of real and molly-names!

I hope that makes clear the real pleasure of the story for me. I did not just slog through the pages. I finished the book because it was not one I could imagine leaving unfinished. That's praise indeed from a seasoned old campaigner like me. I think anyone who would like to see just what it costs to live your own truth in a way that satisfies your human need to give and receive love, amid a world full of messages threatening you with harm up to and including death for doing it, would like it.

History buffs eagerly flagged down to come into this authorial spiderweb of facts and research gems. Gay men over fifty sought especially vigorously...you'll see why. Believe me...learning the dreadful fate of our kind in a time only slightly less hateful than now will energize your resistance.

NATASHA PULLEY'S PAGE: THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET; THE KINGDOMS; THE HALF LIFE OF VALERY K

THE HALF LIFE OF VALERY K
NATASHA PULLEY
Bloomsbury USA
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1963, in a Siberian gulag, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive: the right connections to the guards for access to food and cigarettes, the right pair of warm boots to avoid frostbite, and the right attitude toward the small pleasures of life so he won’t go insane. But on one ordinary day, all that changes: Valery’s university mentor steps in and sweeps Valery from the frozen prison camp to a mysterious unnamed town that houses a set of nuclear reactors and is surrounded by a forest so damaged it looks like the trees have rusted from within.

In City 40, Valery is Dr. Kolkhanov once more, and he’s expected to serve out his prison term studying the effect of radiation on local animals. But as Valery begins his work, he is struck by the questions his research raises: why is there so much radiation in this area? What, exactly, is being hidden from the thousands who live in the town? And if he keeps looking for answers, will he live to serve out his sentence?

Based on real events in a surreal Soviet city, and told with bestselling author Natasha Pulley’s inimitable style, The Half Life of Valery K is a sweeping new adventure for readers of Stuart Turton and Sarah Gailey.

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

My Review: There is nothing one Earth more appalling to me than the attitude "My ignorance is better than your education, training, and expertise." It's not just wrong-headed. It is dangerous. It leads to very, very deleterious results for the people who have no say in...often no awareness of...the risks they are being subjected to by the wilfully ignorant. The Yucca Flats, Nevada, nuclear-bomb testing disaster that People magazine broke the story of in 1980...the 1956 filming of The Conqueror ring any bells, fellow oldsters?...wasn't the only such official-denial event in the world. In the USSR, there was the Ozyorsk disaster, outed to the world in the New Scientist magazine in 1976 by a brave scientist called Medvedev. (I have to say that Siberia has a very unlucky past. This disaster occurred in 1957; the Tunguska event in 1908 was a holocaust; and sixty miles away from Ozyorsk is Chelyabinsk, of 2013 meteorite explosion fame!)

The story of the many "closed cities" in the USSR, and in today's Russia, is similarly grim, similarly marked by denial and obfuscation and outright lying. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was going to be treated that way, only it was far too big to tamp down and deny. So, Author Pulley has me by the nose-hairs again. Again! I am putty in this wicked writer's hands. She tells stories that make my ears perk up, the hair on the back of my neck do its wolfman imitation, and my breathing to become labored in eagerness.

Valery K. the nuclear scientist, exiled to a colder and less hospitable part of Siberia than City 40/Ozyorsk is in, is suddenly ripped from his wretched routine without explanation or preparation. He's in the gulag...this is terrifying. But his worst fears...interrogation? execution?...aren't realized. He's sent to this comparative demi-Paradise of a place to study field mice. To assess them for effects of radiation exposure.

So, all is explained. He's a criminal, but also a thorough scientist trained in matters nuclear. Trained, talented, expendable.

What follows is a litany of nuclear-waste exposure nightmares. The effects on people, on the environment, are grisly. In the one plot strand I am absolutely sure is fiction (it says here) the authorities conduct radiation-exposure experiments on the people of City 40. The other plot strands, the environmental disaster, the carelessness and mismanagement that led to and characterized the ongoing handling of the disaster, are real. (Follow the links!) And gosh golly gee, wowee zowie, those sorts of things don't *ever* happen now. Especially the official lying and misleading! That could never happen in any authoritarian state in the twenty-first century, we have satellites and technology to sniff out problems, and scientists who would *never* lie to us here in the West.

So, the timing of the title's publication is now explained.

As one expects from Author Pulley, there are two men falling in love with each other amid the chaos and carnage that they are powerless to stop. Also as one would expect, there are events that occur that cause them trouble personally and interpersonally. I've said it before, the curse of adulthood is one never, ever has an unmixed emotion. Valery tries, in his what-got-him-gulaged way, to force officialdom to face up to the scale of the disaster. He wants to help people, to save them. Shenkov, his belovèd, is a married father, is in the game because it's the way to get ahead. And stay out of the gulag. The story, in other words, of generations of gay and bisexual men. Hide! They won't kill you if they don't have to notice your deviance.

But like calls to like. Valery knows that Shenkov loves him; he knows he loves Shenkov; things won't go well for City 40, but can things go well for them as men, as people, as...a couple? Fortune, as always, favors the brave. There must always be blood sacrificed before one gets one's rewards.

Morally grey characters, men past pretty on life's curve, the necessity of moving the world's blockages to make room for your authentic life: boxes all checked. The life you want, well...what do you know about how much it will cost, about what it will extract from you. You'll find out, if you're lucky. Or maybe unlucky. Most likely both. Consider, after reading the book, the title and its layers of meaning.

The right kind of read for me, right now, and it went down like the oldest, smoothest, most deceptively sweet tequila there is.

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

THE KINGDOMS
NATASHA PULLEY
Bloomsbury USA
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A time twisting alternative history that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved.

Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English—instead of French—the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer.

The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.

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

My Review: An exciting visit to the Aetherverse, to which we were introduced in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (below)...or so it seemed to me.

It cost me so much to read this book, with its star-crossed lovers, its perception of time as layered and mutable, and its grotesque unfairness, the first time. It wasn't easy a second one, either, even though I knew what was coming.

Yes. I, testy oldster with less than two decades left to him, read a book twice.

There is that much to unpack. There is that much to process. There is that kind of thought put into the structure of the story. All that makes an investment of eyeblinks that big both desirable and at some level necessary.

The nature of Time (as the Tenth Doctor called it, "wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff") and the nature of family feature heavily in this tale. Two men whose fates...whose lives entangle across timelines of startling "points of divergence" or "PoDs" but never forget each other. Imagine loving someone enough, with so much of yourself, that you remember them when you don't remember yourself.

That is the definition of the stakes in this alternate history/time travel novel. There's a weird place, in Scotland for once, where time doesn't behave as we think it should. This remains a weird, slightly underexplained, phenomenon throughout the iterations of the story. In every timeline, Man A meets Man B, falls in love with him, then for Reasons leaves him. Man B doesn't change much, if at all. His name is Kite. His past isn't fixed, though it's the little things that change. For Man A, the one who does the leaving, the past, the present, and the nature of each is...mutable. The world is, oddly, full of people like him who come to themselves in a place where they have no memories and no trauma to explain that lack.

We, readers, know what it is. We know because there is a man, red hair, terrible burn scars, and Man A...call him Joe, call him Jem, what you will...recalls him with love. He doesn't really know why. He isn't happy anywhere. He can't find connection to anyone around him. He floats, unanchored, when away from Kite. Who is a Napoleonic-Wars naval officer with a bad past. He's building a better future, he hopes, by letting Jem/Joe go through the Scottish time gate. But it's at his own expense. He's too used to that, to doing hard and painful things, as a result of his bad past.

What came through to me most strongly was the nature of Love. There is a scene early in the book where Joe, as he was at that time, was raped. By his wife. Who should've been his sister-in-law. And she gives birth to his daughter Lily, whom he adores. He struggles against his love for Kite for several years to stay with her. In the end, he can't fight it and they reunite...and Lily is never born. Yet always alive to Joe, Jem, Man A. A truly Torquemadan torment, losing your child.

What the hell! A man getting raped by a woman?! What's the old lunatic talking about? My own life: It's happened to me, perpetrated by my mother. And that is how I know that Author Pulley got the sensation, the misery of that kind of coercion, exactly and precisely correct. It was shattering to read. It was the very first time in my over-sixty years on this planet that I have read anywhere my private and unshareable truth. It healed and soothed me in a way I didn't anticipate ever experiencing.

If that is not enough to convince you to read the book, then how's this? These men are very dishonest with themselves. They can't afford not to be. But neither man has ever, for a single moment, lost his love for the other.

Come for the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff. Stay for the family that only love can form. Revel in the struggles of true lovers to live their truth.

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

THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET
NATASHA PULLEY (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street #1)
Bloomsbury USA
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1883. Thaniel Steepleton returns home to his tiny London apartment to find a gold pocket watch on his pillow. Six months later, the mysterious timepiece saves his life, drawing him away from a blast that destroys Scotland Yard. At last, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori, a kind, lonely immigrant from Japan. Although Mori seems harmless, a chain of unexplainable events soon suggests he must be hiding something. When Grace Carrow, an Oxford physicist, unwittingly interferes, Thaniel is torn between opposing loyalties.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a sweeping, atmospheric narrative that takes the reader on an unexpected journey through Victorian London, Japan as its civil war crumbles long-standing traditions, and beyond. Blending historical events with dazzling flights of fancy, it opens doors to a strange and magical past.

I CHECKED THIS ONE OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THIS FREE SERVICE OFTEN. THEY'RE ALREADY PAID FOR.

My Review: I was hoping this would be a five-star read. I hope that every time I open a book, albeit often with a forlorn sense of the hopelessness of such a thing. But this one, with Queer desire and relationship on offer? Yes please! Gimme!

Mori and Thaniel, the men in question, are indeed heading down Relationship Road. In no kind or sort of hurry, mind you. They live in *London, *Victorian times, with...magic? sort-of kind-of magic...that involves seeing the multiverse and manipulating your present to bring about a future you like the best from the possibilities. I love this idea, and the use of this trope alone would've gotten the book four stars!

The way it's handled is also really compelling to me, with Mori making his odd little machines to nudge reality into new shapes. I was also fascinated by Thaniel's kinesthesia...D# is yellow, for example...but too little was made of this for my taste, more of a small grace note. In particular I was sad that Thaniel didn't twig to something he heard being the proof he needed of what was happening around him...but he was simply too stressed out, I think was the reasoning behind that failure.

Quite a lot that I missed first time round.

I was sure I recalled this read pretty accurately, and was mildly taken aback by the amount of information I glided past before...for example, the way Thaniel says things to his, um, er, to Grace that, um, kind-of unhappen as the ending approaches...and now, on a years-later re-read seem *hugely*significant* and almost spoilery.

But that's because I really already knew them, and how they'd play out.

So what would I call this read, a re-read or a new read? It's kind of both. I've read The Kingdoms (see above) between that initial experience and this one, I'm hip to the author's tricks in a way I wasn't before; I was revisiting the story because I'm reviewing The Half Life of Valery K (see above) now, as well. It's clear as crystal that any author develops stylistic tropes, won't call them tics unless they irk me somehow, and Author Pulley's a one for hiding relationship signals in plain sight. It's a bit disappointing that Grace, after her *horrible* behavior, isn't made to suffer any consequences. Given that there's a second book with Thaniel and Mori at its center, which I haven't read, that could still be possible.

I've got the best of both worlds, then, revisiting an older read that's altered in interesting ways in light of later reads by the same author. It made this meditation on the etheric reality of chance and destiny intertwining so much richer than it was at first.

REBEL and KING'S MAN, a story and a novel in a new MM romance series

REBEL: An Outlawed Story
SALLY MALCOLM
Self-published Non-affiliate Amazon link
99¢ ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Falling in love is just the beginning...

Samuel Hutchinson has lived his whole life in Rosemont, Rhode Island. And as far as he’s concerned, his future is fixed: complete his legal training, marry a respectable woman, and settle down to raise a family.

But Sam never counted on meeting Nathaniel Tanner.

Clever, urbane, and dazzling, Nate has been banished to Rosemont by a father determined to remove him from the rising political tension in Boston. The last thing Nate expects to find in the sleepy Rhode Island town is a man who’s not only interested in Nate’s radical ideas, but who interests Nate in return.

In every conceivable way.

Over books and conversation, their friendship deepens. But when Nate dares to confess his true feelings, Sam faces a stark choice—reject his friend and continue to live a lie, or rebel against everything he’s been taught and embrace his heart’s desire…

This short story is approximately 12,000 words and comes with a HFN guaranteed.

I SUBSCRIBE TO THE AUTHOR'S NEWSLETTER. THIS WAS A FREEBIE FOR SUBSCRIBERS. NYAH!

My Review: What mattered to me most, in this precursor tale to what I expect will be a very interesting and exciting series, was that the men who fell in love with each other weren't just...okay with it. Right before the Revolutionary War in a provincial backwater Rhode Island town? Yeah, right, I was prepared to think.

Instead I was treated to a genuine coming out. Nate Tanner, Harvard educated Boston sophisticate, was exiled to this little burg to keep him from the fleshpots of a sinful city (Boston! sinful! a city!! *snort*). Apparently his father, the exiler, didn't know the whole of it or the exile would've been a lot more severe. Nate is all his father isn't: a nascent revolutionary, a free-thinker where gawd is concerned, and an avid shirt-lifter. He reads novels, and Richard Barnfield's The Affectionate Sheppard and Rousseau and Plato and...thinks about them. Ponders what he's read. I think he's my ancestor.

Sam Hutchinson is one of life's submissives. He believes what he's told; he doesn't question, does internalize the guilt and nastiness of his preacher father's revolting religion, feels he's Bad and Wrong and Must Be Punished. For all that, he's powerfully horny, and that speaks louder than gawd's blatherings when the near occasion of sin is seducing you with words and ideas and the promise of loosening that horrible knotted rope around your mind.

It's the first of a romantic-novel series. There was no mystery that the two were going to get their freak on. It was in an adorably eighteenth-century-virgin way, and it wasn't yee-haw-the-organs-go-mad. I still do not recommend the read to the squeamishly heterosexual. But it's 99¢ so if the idea of two men learning to love each other fully clothed and then learning to pleasure each other doesn't make your gorge rise, spend the buck.

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

KING'S MAN
SALLY MALCOLM
Self-published Non-affiliate Amazon link
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Two weeks on the road together. Two weeks trapped in a carriage. Two weeks to win him back, or part with him forever…

Had there been no war, Sam Hutchinson and Nate Tanner would have lived their lives together, as friends and secret lovers. But when the revolution convulsed America, it threw them down on opposite sides of history....

Five years later, Sam is a Loyalist refugee in London, penniless, bitter, and scrambling to survive amid the city’s shadowy underworld. It’s a far cry from his respectable life as a Rhode Island lawyer, and the last person he wants to witness his ruin is Nate Tanner— the man he once loved, the man who betrayed him. The man he can’t forgive.

Now an agent of the Continental Congress, Nate is in London on the trail of a traitor threatening America’s hard-won freedom. But the secret mission of his heart is very different. Nate longs to find Sam Hutchinson—the man he still loves, the man he lost in the war. The man he can’t forget.

When their lives unexpectedly collide, Sam and Nate are thrown together on a dangerous mission. Still nursing his resentment, reconciliation is the last thing on Sam’s mind, but every day he spends on the road with Nate weakens his resolve. And despite everything that divides them, old passions begin to reignite....

Can they seize this second chance at love, or is the past too painful to forgive?

This novel is approximately 76,000 words and comes with a HEA guaranteed.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. DOUBLE NYAH!!

My Review: What you need to know is that I loathe Sally Malcolm inexpressibly. You see that "HEA guaranteed" half-truth purveyed above? Shyeah, like she means that. Burgling and being arrested on a hanging offense and all while guilty of being a sodomite in a London that loved killing its citizens as much as Texas does now? Being subjected to period-accurate violence and imprisonment and all while numbed-yet-hypersensitized by your very most belovèd's horrible silent betrayal?! I mean! (Oh and ABSOLUTELY read Rebel before even thinking of reading this book. Ab so lute ly imperative that you do.)

Does any of that sound like it's leading to "happily" at all, still less "ever" and there's nothing but after when you're so broken, so violated in your core, that the notion of living is gone and the drudgery of existing feels too burdensome most days.

And you know what? The cotton-candy version of "HEA" is not only NOT guaranteed, it's risible even to moot it. So what's left? How the hell does a romance novel come from this set-up?

I'm elderly by world standards. Old enough by American ones. But in these sixty*cough* years and counting, I've learned that breaking up with the past is the worst, least successful break-up you'll ever attempt. In fact, I've never seen it succeed. Nate and Sam don't have a future together after the events of a horrible night in 1778. They are never, ever going to get back together, not least because they're prideful men but also because it's the eighteenth century and getting unfindably lost is so very easy at the best of times, but during wartime it's damned difficult not to even when unplanned. And Nate's going to go around the world pining for the unfindable, unfixable Love of His Life. Who, oh y'know how ya do, he totally and utterly failed when failure could've been lethal. So he figures why not go the rest of the way down the weasel-hole, becomes a spy, and ends up in London searching for a certain special kind of traitor to the newly born United States. Like his much-mourned belovèd.

Sam, that belovèd, isn't an easy man. (I suspect he's a Taurus born in 1757, the Year of the Ox. He's damned near the perfect match for the profile!) He's quite stubborn, he's pig-headedly unwilling to compromise when it's A Matter of Principle, he's sunny and sweet and deeply devoted...until betrayed. His country, this colony America, the town of Rosemont in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, has lost its fucking mind and is going to war with the *winners* of the planet's first World War (comme d'habitude, started by the Germans)! Yes, the British Parliament needs to welcome Americans if the laws they pass are going to apply to them and no, the taxes that pay for the colonies' protection from the French aren't wrong and besides who the hell likes tea anyway?

(I might've made that last bit up.)

These are men whose very essence is called into question by the other. And yet that is an attraction that's utterly unkillable, Opposites Attract, and its power is awe-inspiring. So they meet in the last place either really wants to be: London! A million people...just think of how *staggeringly*huge* that is to men who think Boston is a city!...and Fate *glowers at La Malcolm* in her blind ill will smashes the two into each other in a completely unavoidable, unignorable, and intimacy-demanding way.

What happens then is really quite fun, although it involves a lot less sex than I was expecting. The mud-wrestling (of a carriage!) doesn't count; the skinny-dipping (a perfectly astounding amount of the smexytimes in this series appears to be al fresco) isn't like that, and, when they Get It On at last, they're only slightly more ready to roll than is the reader. A vile person in the form of a barely-ennobled Baron does vile things to keep them apart. It works. There are misunderstandings, and missed opportunities to speak plainly (which, for once!, do not feel contrived to me), and machinations of people whose agendas have little to do with the spirits of two badly wounded, barely coping men who should be beside the Pawtuxet River fishing for their Sunday dinner. The entire time I was making my way around England with them, I felt so sad and bereft that they could never go back to Eden.

And really, that's what I mean about the obligatory HEA here...the two men who lost their demi-Paradise did not find it again in England's green and pleasant land. They found each other's bodies. But they had to work, and work hard, to find the way to be back in relationship. Like any long-term love, there are dark bits and things we don't say out loud and long, long silences. For many people, there isn't anything to cause them to seek ways to fix the broken bits. For Sam there isn't any way to forgive Nate's betrayal; for Nate there isn't any way to batter down Sam's walls.

It takes Death to do that job. And do it She does. That's your HEA for you, snatched from the actual jaws of Death Herself is the clarity and the love and the means to live with the awful hurts that never, ever go away, that leave scars. Tattoo a rose around the scar...make a feature out of a bug...love anyway, harder than ever.


Oh, and Author Malcolm...about that hit I had to place on you...tell your husband I am ever so sorry, but the w-bomb you dropped at 51% is simply not to be tolerated and Standards must be maintained.

DEATH AT THE BEGGAR'S OPERA, second John Rawlings the Apothecary mystery

DEATH AT THE BEGGAR'S OPERA
DERYN LAKE (John Rawlings #2) Review of #1 is here.
Endeavour Media
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: John Rawlings is among the beau monde enjoying a performance of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ in Drury Lane when the leading actor – the notorious philanderer Jasper Harcross – dramatically falls to his death on stage. As Rawlings and the Blind Beak hunt for vital clues, they discover a hotbed of rivalry both on and off the stage which produces numerous suspects and questions.

As the search takes on a new intensity, John Rawlings soon finds himself on an intriguing trail of obsession that leads to the dark heart of a cold-blooded murder.

My Review: I wasn't expecting the solution to this murder. I could see how it was prefigured, though not exactly in line with generally accepted ideas of "fair play"...the Apothecary sees something we don't and *flash* into focus comes the solution, a very Dame-Agatha thing to do...so I'm actually more, not less, interested in reading the third book. Also of great appeal and interest to me are the sensory parts of the story: the sights of a London where Kensington is a country town, the Lincoln's Inn Fields were actually fields, there were houses on Pall Mall, there was a "Chelsea Bun House" for real, all these are delicious to me.

I'm sure the twee use of job titles as character labels is to some tastes, but "the Apothecary," "the Blind Beak," et alii, aren't delightful to me. I accept them as attempts at whimsical charm; backfire in my ears, though.

I had a suspect all fitted up for the murder, and was quite sure I was right. (Look at all my Goodreads Kindle notes marked "spoiler" (membership required, but free) if you want to see my logic.) I enjoy it when authors catch me out like that, it makes me really think about why I was so sure before the reveal that X is guilty, and that means going back over the whole puzzle to see what I missed. For this seasoned citizen, anything surprising in a puzzle is a Good Thing.

I am quite hesitant to do so, though, because there are SIX w-bombs dropped *shudder* and there is more, though less offensive by a slight hair, homophobic idiocy present. There's a bog-standard heteronormative locution about red-blooded males lusting after women; but there's this gem of genuine, deeply felt venom:

‘D’you have some verdigris for my face paint?’ asked an emasculated nothing, waving a handkerchief stiff with powder.

The 1990s were quite some time ago, and that's when Deryn Lake wrote these books. But I was a thritysomething all the decade long, and I know of my own personal knowledge that this kind of effeminacy-baiting was frowned on even then. Period appropriate arguments are null and void: This book wasn't written in Georgian England. It was written in the sad, bad barely-post-Thatcher era. This nastiness, present in the first book as well, is a choice made by a modern person to use nasty, insulting language about people the author clearly doesn't like.

So that third book will wait to enter my Kindle until I have some utterly uncommitted money (so no earlier than after the 2020 elections, I give all my uncommitted money to the campaign I support until then), or someone gifts it to me. I don't like this trend. I disapprove of the sneering nastiness of homophobia. I'm not sure I won't see it again...actually, if I'm honest, I am pretty sure that I will see it again...so I don't want to give the person who's sneering at me and mine any more of my money.

My eyeblinks, I'll risk again. Barely.

A SPECTACLE OF CORRUPTION, second historical thriller

A SPECTACLE OF CORRUPTION (Benjamin Weaver #2)
DAVID LISS
Random House
$17.00 trade paper,$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Moments after his conviction for a murder he did not commit, at a trial presided over by a judge determined to find him guilty, Benjamin Weaver is accosted by a stranger who cunningly slips a lockpick and a file into his hands. In an instant he understands two things: Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to see him condemned to hang--and another equally mysterious agent is determined to see him free.

So begins A Spectacle of Corruption, which heralds the return of Benjamin Weaver, the hero of A Conspiracy of Paper. After a daring escape from eighteenth-century London's most notorious prison, Weaver must face another challenge: how to prove himself innocent of a crime when the corrupt courts have already shown they want only to see him hang. To discover the truth and clear his name, he will have to understand the motivations behind a secret scheme to extort a priest, uncover double-dealings in the unrest among London's dockworkers, and expose the conspiracy that links the plot against him to the looming national election--an election with the potential to spark a revolution and topple the monarchy.

Unable to show his face in public, Weaver pursues his inquiry in the guise of a wealthy merchant who seeks to involve himself in the political scene. But he soon finds that the world of polite society and politics is filled with schemers and plotters, men who pursue riches and power--and those who seek to return the son of the deposed king to the throne. Desperately navigating a labyrinth of politicians, crime lords, assassins, and spies, Weaver learns that, in an election year, little is what it seems and the truth comes at a staggeringly high cost.

Once again, acclaimed author David Liss combines historical erudition with mystery, complex characterization, and a captivating sense of humor. A Spectacle of Corruption offers insight into our own world of political scheming, and it firmly establishes David Liss as one of the best writers of intellectual suspense at work today.

My Review: Last time we saw the Lion of Judah, aka Benjamin Weaver (né Lienzo), he had brought a species of justice to some victims of the South Sea Bubble. Now he's standing in the dock, convicted of a murder he didn't commit and facing the death penalty.

Well, there's nothing like making the stakes obvious from the get-go: Fail to solve the crime you've been convicted of and die; solve the crime and bring the political system of your homeland to its knees. Drama for *days*!

And well-done drama, if a bit crowded. Inevitably, setting stakes this high means that some smaller areas of interest (eg, the "romance") don't come to satisfying fruition. But there is more than enough good stuff here to make the less successful moments less important than the overall tale's pleasures. It's very satisfying to see a man of honor operating in that cesspit of dishonor that has always been, and seems as if it will always be, political action.

What I enjoy most about Liss's historical fiction is that it is obvious to me that he roots the action in fact while still making a cracking good yarn. He sees history as "his story," as the college-freshman joke went. And that's how I got interested in history, and it's why I find satisfaction in reading David Liss's books.

A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER, thriller about the South Sea Bubble

A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER (Benjamin Weaver #1)
DAVID LISS
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, $11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London's gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.

In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have hidden their business dealings behind an intricate web of deception and violence. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation--a way of life that poses great risk for investors but real danger for Weaver and his family.

In the tradition of The Alienist and written with scholarly attention to period detail, A Conspiracy of Paper is one of the wittiest and most suspenseful historical novels in recent memory, as well as a perceptive and beguiling depiction of the origin of today's financial markets. In Benjamin Weaver, author David Liss has created an irresistibly appealing protagonist, one who parlays his knowledge of the emerging stock market into a new kind of detective work.

My Review: An honorable man sets out to right a wrong that he cares relatively little about. His quest leads him to wrongs he didn't know were possible, and that he cares a lot about righting. He can't fix it...nobody could then, and nobody can now...because it's all to do with human greed and viciousness.

David Liss came to my attention with this top-notch thriller. He takes the abstruse and impersonal concept put forth by (then-newly minted) economic scientists called "economist"s Hand of the Market, squeezes that bastard tight, and shakes out of it the economists' worst nightmare: The human cost of their depersonalized, accountability-free rent-reaping mills.

What makes Weaver a compelling character is his almost unbelievable level of alienation from every sector of London's social web. A Jew estranged from his family by disobedience. A Jew in the Christian London that persecutes Catholics, allegedly fellow Christians. An educated man who fought with his fists for money. An absolute outsider.

It makes for the best fictional characters, this does, and even better for a sleuth in a mystery. He has access to but not membership in many groups. He can ask questions because he's Different, and he can't be bought off by assimilation--too far outside the pale of anyone's social-group tolerance--nor can he be threatened by exclusion (from what that he isn't excluded from already?).

A successful thriller combines plausible action in service of believable stakes by a character with a definite and powerful moral compass. Delivered here in trumps. It's a pleasure to read a book that makes it clear that markets, all markets always and everywhere, must be controlled, damped down, and regulated to prevent the vile and contemptible from abusing the greedy and gullible. It is, in the end, the rest of us who pay the bill. It was ever thus. It will ever be thus, world without end.

Until we're no longer human beings, that is.