THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition), is indeed deluxe and handsome to look at!

THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition)
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Pushkin Press Classics
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 4, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is a classic collection of weird tales that has captivated readers since its original publication in 1895. The stories in this collection are linked by the mysterious play "The King in Yellow," a fictional drama that drives those who read it to madness and despair. Set against the backdrop of a beautifully detailed yet unsettling world, the stories explore themes of existential dread, the supernatural, and the fragility of the human mind.

This illustrated edition not only brings the haunting prose to life but also offers captivating illustrations that enhance the eerie atmosphere of Chambers' tales. Alongside the stories, readers will find a summary of the collection, a biography of the author, and a comprehensive list of characters, providing further insight into the dark and mysterious world of The King in Yellow.

Chambers' masterful storytelling and exploration of the unknown have earned this collection a place in the genre of weird fiction, influencing later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft. This edition is perfect for fans of Gothic horror, supernatural fiction, and anyone who enjoys a chilling tale that lingers long after the last page is turned.

Whether you're reading for the first time or revisiting these tales, this edition of The King in Yellow offers a deeper connection to the eerie and the unknown, complemented by stunning illustrations that capture the essence of Chambers' haunting world.

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My Review: A collection of two halves, one being "The King in Yellow" sequence of gothic, eerie tales centering on the eponymous entity in art or (sur)reality; two stories set in Chambers' home country of the US (marked *) and two in the fin de siècle's default setting for perversity, Paris (marked **). These form what deels like a failed novel; like Chambers was heading for a larger goal but, for whatever reason, chose not to go there. I wondered if he simply lost interest once he thought to set the stories acrually *in* Paris, Sodom on the Seine working its decadent way on him as much as on his characters.

The remaining stories are only occasionally tinged with gothic overtones. They tend more towards romantic fiction in the older sense. They're not about modern concerns with coupling up and finding love, they're about the grand emotional sweeps and swoops of Romanticism. It's all very beautifully presented by Pushkin Press in this Deluxe edition.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the nine stories are herein dealt with by the Bryce Method of a short response to the story, a rating of it on its own, and the collection's gestalt being the overall rating.

**The Repairer of Reputations limns the iea of "have you found the Yellow Sign?" into your awareness. It is a strange, haunting, unsettling thing this sogn; it plays on arrogant narcissism ("Mr. Wilde" eh?) to induce paranoia which becomes the impetus for seeking it and the punishment fo seeking it at the same time. Deeply disturbing, very humidly told. 4.5*

*The Mask brings in the play "The King in Yellow," merely reading it will send a person into a spiral of madness! It unhinges all who dare to open it! Talk about a sales job, there's no better way to get huge sales for something than this except maybe banning it on grounds of immorality.

The sufferings of the artist who, drawn to experience these extreme things for Love (of course), mesh with weird period-appropriate pseudoscience in a fun but very, very 1890s way. 4.5*

*In the Court of the Dragon is so flippin' bizarre...why does the old weirdo want the guy's soul? What's the way he knows the guy's soul is of such interest and value? I fear this line of mental inquiry is why I'm just not a gothic-story habitué, but it's sure got the trappings of the best ones! 4*

**The Yellow Sign a coffin worm?!? *shudder* 4*

The Demoiselle d'Ys tells a very charming, if kind of trite in the twenty-first century, time-travel romance (in our modern usage). Left a mildly pleasant but very indistinct impression on me. 3*

The Prophets' Paradise compiles a series of prose poems that expand on the love, hubris, and dangerous supernatural bargaining of the first four stories' characters. Seems odd to me not to put it *within* those stories but permaybehaps Author Chambers didn't think of these small moments in time to do so...expanding the quotation from "The King in Yellow" that open the cycle's stories. 3.75*

The Street of the Four Winds is a Parisian tragic story in the era's typical style, with ruin and disaster following on from following a neighbor's cat. Very apt. 3*

The Street of the First Shell tells a deeply sorrowful tale set during the Siege of Paris (1870 through 1871), with tragic results from terrible decisions and awful actions forced by the cruelest of fates. 3.75* despite the melodrama (or because of it, NGL)

The Street of Our Lady of the Fields is another "bohemians bohemianing unoriginally across the dirty foreign streets of dirty foreign Paris' dirty foreign immoral soil." Spare me. 2.5*

Rue Barrée see above, only the story's as sick of the story as I am. Made it more fun to read. 3*
It's a beautiful object, and will no doubt be welcome for decorative value. I think many a gothic-story reader will get one, and that will be its fate. Sometimes it's not great to meet your heroes in person.

HAPPY LIFE, not a buck-up-bucko book despite the title

HAPPY LIFE
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A tender and wistfully satirical novel about the desire to change your life by bestselling French author David Foenkinos

"Foenkinos's surreal yet relatable novel…considers life in our age of anxiety, when other people's picture-perfect lives make our own seem drab in comparison." —Washington Post

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wants to be someone else.

Eric Kherson—40, divorced, distracted—is spiraling. He has devoted his life to a successful career as the marketing director of a leading sports brand. But when family disaster rocks him to his core, he finds himself adrift from his family and questioning all his choices.

That is, until an acquaintance from his schooldays offers him a high-powered government position. Desperate for escape, he throws himself into her enigmatic world of high-risk deals and endless networking, doing anything it takes to get a contract signed.

But on a business trip to Seoul, Eric starts feeling worse than ever. Wandering the city's streets, he comes across Happy Life, a store that offers its customers something that could change their lives: a fake funeral. Happy Life will write your eulogy, arrange the flowers, and allow you to lie inside your own coffin. Why? They believe the experience will help you reinvent yourself.

But above all for Eric, Happy Life sparks a business venture of his own that might do just that…

A celebrated French bestseller, Happy Life is a life-affirming story of hope and recovery, perfect for fans of Matt Haig and Nathan Hill.

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My Review: I am on record as a David Foenkinos fanboy. I have not (yet, anyway) rated any of his books I've read under four stars. I'm pickin' up what he's puttin' down because he's willing to take a classically realist setting and stitch some strangeness onto it. It's never a huge dissonance, it doesn't feel as though some clumsy editor from a different decade bookhorned a bad idea into the story...it's happened to other authors. I'm always *sure* this story of his I'm reading right then will be Foenkinos' breakout hit, and all y'all will see how Right I am about his humor, delicate honesty, and how very deftly Sam Taylor captures it in English!

To date, not so much. I persevere. I'm shocked that y'all read Solvej Balle's riff on Groundhog Day in your tens of thousands and shun a more fun version of the "things fall apart, emotions have entropy, no one gets outta here alive" story. There are over a thousand reviews of this book on Goodreads, average high three stars. Given the quotidian subject matter...there must be more than this...that strikes me as decent.

Happy Life, the business, is a very interesting conceit. Pretend you're dead. Read your obituary. Lie in your future coffin. Now, when you get up, think "is this good enough?" I'll bet most people look at life without depth until confronted with Death, the Reaper, the dirt nap, whatever euphemism tickles your fancy, whose cold grasp is very strongly focusing to everyone who feels it. Eric, our PoV character, is middle-aged, mid-career, peaking in power. He's miserable in the depressed person's way, shrouded in grey fog and honestly unable to see why that's even a problem anymore.

That's the true danger point, when a new challenge (his new job as a trade representative for France in this case) only points up the essential sameness of Life and futility of hope. On a mission to Seoul, Eric discovers Happy Life and its weird conceit of fake-deathing yourself to shed the fog, pull off the shroud of sameness, rise from the coffin renewed and revitalized. It works. And if it worked for Eric, unhappy and unable to think *why* he should be when he's got money, power, and purpose, then it probably will for other wealthy French people.

Can money buy happiness after all?

A mean little stereotype says literary fiction needs to be depressing. A cultural insult says French fiction's full ashtrays and empty lives must end stories in ennui. Both might've been true in the 1970s or 1980s but even then it was books written for the haute bourgeoisie, the people who had too much of everything so did not need anything; that's a soul-killer, that is, any era or country. Look at the billionaires today, they're purposeless and useless so they frivol away their substance on useless stuff while real problems need solving.

Eric brings Happy Life to France in order to jolt people into the same sense of purpose, of wanting something more important and rewarding than "more." Spoiler: Eric is a helluva salesman, as his entire career has shown.

Author Foenkinos is not writing for Literati. He's writing to tell people who like stories a story about a man who faces endings by casting about until he finds a new beginning. I like that story; it's not one we see in upper-echelon-aimed books but it's honestly all the better for it. It doesn't do that American thing of chirping five easy steps at you, just do *this* and you're all set MLM happy-clappy horseshit. It's a story that starts from "sad man doesn't want to be sad" and moves on from there through the steps of doing whatever comes his way to setting out with intention and purpose when one shows up worth his while.

It's not experimental literary or boundary-pushing shenanigans. It's a French guy writing a story he figures will resonate with French people of the 2020s. Is it also critiquing the PTB and their greed? Yeah, that's in there, but it's not what thee and me will see first. It's not yelling at you. It's on the next barstool over talking on the phone to someone who needs the same commonsensical splash of water you need.

I liked it, didn't fall madly in love with it, and think we need more like it from countries all over the world to show us how common this malaise really is. Better than floundering in the dark foggy corners wondering if we're alone in our befuddlement.

SKYLARK, Author Paula McLain's dual-timelines historical Paris novel

SKYLARK
PAULA McLAIN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman’s quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor’s dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time.

1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined.

1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.

A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few—the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above—Paula McLain’s unforgettable new novel chronicles two parallel journeys of defiance and rescue that connect in ways both surprising and deeply moving.

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My Review: Tunnels, underground/out of sight communication, hidden pathways...thematically this is the heart of Author McLain's story. The literal, factual tunnels under Paris start us out on the careful and hazardous reality of being a woman or, later, that other despised minority a Jew...yes, women were a social minority, rendered voiceless and affectless the way minorities always are...so we're going underground to follow them as they fight to survive without being Seen and still being effective actors in society. Spoiler alert: It doesn't go well.

There ya go. That's the story. It took almost five hundred pages of pretty sentences to get there.

They are pretty sentences but honestly, taken out of context they're pretty much meaningless. Describing a sculpture made by a side character, "... a lark with wings unfurled, fashioned from pale limestone with such delicate precision that it seems almost alive," is lovely...but its entire reason for being described is in fact its meaning and that's a gestalt. This is not a criticism of the writing, it's a statement of why I'm not quoting a lot more pretty sentences.

In my opinion reading this really interesting story-idea could have been a lot more fun had the author been less pretty and more concise in her writing. It's a fine way to spend a weekend in the company of two people marginalized for being...unpopular because they're Other...but I don't know that I felt adequately entertained to justify the length of time it all took to come together.

THE MIDNIGHT CAROUSEL, debut magical novel of loss, grief, and redemption

THE MIDNIGHT CAROUSEL
FIZA SAEED McLYNN
Park Row / Harlequin (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Night Circus meets Water for Elephants in this enchanting, darkly glittering story of grief, obsession, revenge, and enduring love.

Come children, come children from far and near. Come choose your steed, you galloping knights, to enjoy the fun of the carousel . . .

1920, Chicago
Maisie Marlowe has come to America for a fresh start. After discovering an antique fairground carousel, she is seized by the idea of running a glittering amusement park. But little does she know that the wondrous object has a sinister past of its own.

Paris
A decade ago, fairgoers inexplicably vanished riding an extraordinary carousel, and Detective Laurent Bisset closed the case with a suspect behind bars. So when rumors of fresh disappearances in Chicago also linked to a carousel make their way across the Atlantic, Laurent sets out for new answers to an old mystery.

Maisie and Laurent both hold clues to this dark puzzle.

But can they piece it together before the carousel claims someone else?

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My Review: Carnivals are intentional, designed liminal spaces. Carousels, maybe more than most attractions at a carnival, are meeting-places for mundanity...powered separate spaces that go in endless circles like the ritual dances of so many cultures accompanied by endlessly repeating music...and magic.

Magic always demands a price, a sacrifice of treasure. It works like all the other balancing systems in nature. Benefit given, cost exacted...it is the universal law, it functions across time and (on terrestrial scales for sure) space, many cultures have a divinity whose purpose is maintaining or restoring balance: in my case I refer often to Ma'at, the Egyptian goddess of balance and rightness. In this story a terrible painful tragedy rips the balance utterly and without redress...so a perspectiveless human seeks out a powerful way to exact a price for it.

Tragedies ensue, all linked to that loss...though not obviously or directly.

What works best for me in this read is the atmosphere of unreality, made stark by the very quotidian writing. This enhances the surreal events being evoked in the direct prose. It's a debut novel, so I can't say from experience with the author if this is a stylistic trope of hers or not. As a novel, it's got some flaws. There is a great reliance on coincidence, which might or might not have been intended to heighten the sense of mysterious forces in action to redress that balance discussed above; there are dangling threads that could be intended to evoke the certainty that no pattern is ever truly complete.

Debut novels get the charitable interpretation from me. Especially debut novels that evoke similar reading experiences to The Night Circus, a read I adored in the Aughties. I hope some more work of Author McLynn's will come out soon for my delectation.

THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS, who knew from "beguines"?

THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS
ALINE KINER (tr. Susan Emanuel)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A captivating story of love, jealousy and faith, set amid a community of independent women in medieval Paris — the perfect summer read for fans of historical fiction

This thrilling, sensual evocation of medieval Paris sold over 100,000 copies in France and offers a fascinating insight into the world of the beguines — communities of women who lived independently of men and successfully managed their own affairs all the way back in the Middle Ages.

A heretical text, a vengeful husband, a forbidden love...

It's 1310 and Paris is alive with talk of the trial of the Templars. Religious repression is on the rise, and the smoke of execution pyres blackens the sky above the city. But sheltered behind the walls of Paris's great beguinage, a community of women are still free to work, study and live their lives away from the domination of men.

When a wild, red-haired child clothed in rags arrives at the beguinage gate one morning, with a sinister Franciscan monk on her tail, she sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter the peace of this little world-plunging it into grave danger...

This rich historical drama makes a great summer read for fans of Hamnet, The Lost Apothecary, The Wolf Den, and The Yellow Bird Sings.

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My Review: I read "beguine" in the book's description and immediately began humming. This is not, obviously, the beguine meant by the late Author Aline. I had not heard of this particular religious movement prior to encountering the story told here. I strongly wish these people had left descendants of the soul in the larger religious landscape. The world would be a better place had they done so.

Be that as it may, the setting and the background are of such interest to me largely because the characters were...out of focus...to me. I got more of an atmosphere, an ethos, than the sense of getting to know real people. At first this felt slightly distancing, removing me from the immediacy of the unfolding conflict with The Church℠ that monolithic squasher of all liberty.

Then it hit me...of course! That's part of the point! A beguine, in this sense, is a community united in serving a purpose, answering a calling, that transcends monadism. By taking the unstated risk of diffusing the emotional connection readers make to individuals, Author Aline pointed up the real purpose of a beguine, to think and act as a member of a collective. It also sets a background whose textures are suggestive of a reality we in this century can only grasp at never fully grasp...the world is so very different now.

It also works to make the terrible central conflict with the Franciscan over the wild little redhead the more stark. In a sense it's the technique of Steven Spielberg's use of the one girl in a vivid red coat as the one colorful image in Schindler's List. It carries so much more impact, freighted with all the meaning you, the viewer, can conjure and thus heap on it.

I can't quite offer a full five stars. For all I found a key to comprehending Author Aline's purpose in making the collective the focus, it still made my reading experience...less intense, more of a read than a ride when it could have been both. I think anyone who liked Hamnet would like this story as well. The women in this beguine reminded me a bit of Agnes's world in that read, the not-quite-complete depersonalization.

A fascinating introduction to a world I'd never encountered. Recommended reading.

RILKE IN PARIS, pretty object, interesting tale, but about someone I did not like knowing more about

RILKE IN PARIS
MAURICE BETZ (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century

In 1902, the young German poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city’s high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century.

Much of this work, despite its perennial popularity in French, German, and Italian, has never before been translated into English. This book brings together Rilke’s sublime poetic meditations on existence Notes on the Melody of Things and the first English translation of Rilke’s experiences in Paris as observed by his French translator Maurice Betz.

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My Review: I've read as little poetry as I've been able to over course of the past sixty-plus years. I've stated why (I don't enjoy it), I've explained why (it's pretentious and condescending), and yet here I am reviewing with praise a book about a poet, by his French translator, published after his sad, early death from leukemia.

Praise?

Praise: The essay on why Rilke wrote poetry is beautiful, deeply moving, and really makes me wish I didn't hate the experience of reading the...stuff. Song lyrics are poetry, so why do I listen to music voluntarily if I hate the stuff in a song? It's in the essay. The melody of the world is not audible to all of us in the same way. I "hear" prose; Rilke "heard" poetry, and made some beautiful poems in the world's opinion. I'm not arguing they're not; based on the essay in here I will bet there are gorgeous poems to his name.

For those who like poetry. I am still not one of you.

Maurice Betz observed Rilke being in the Paris of his time with an intensity I reserve for my lovers. I would guess Rilke was a little bit aware of the depth of Betz's attention. Rilke was under the influence of Rodin and swayed by the older man's frankly nonsensical contention that artists, true artists regardless of métier, must forego personal life and the pursuit of family and sex and friendship. Hogwash! But Rilke did somewhat wake to the foolishness of that, though never completely; he was a rootless wanderer despite being married and fathering a child; not to mention an impressive sexual CV of important artists and creatives, as well as that aforementioned wife.

He was, in other words, the bog-standard thing of beauty and a boy forever; Peter-Panning his way through life and taking nothing but himself seriously. I read this between Betz's besotted lines. What a selfish, rotten way to live one's life. Yes, he wrote right nice. I'll agree to give him that. It does not, in my 2025 eyes, redeem his narcissistic personality that used and discarded multiple people.

But lawsy me, does Maurice Betz love him! It was warming to feel how much he resonated to the Rilke shy-boy charisma. The way he wrote about Rilke is so apt, so fully aware of him: "Paris both fundamentally oppressed Rilke, compelling him to depart elsewhere, and summoned him back with a kind of nostalgic urgency, which he was unable to resist. ... In fact, it is evident that, along with Italy in a supporting role, France and French culture are the dominant guiding forces of Rilke's adult life, exemplified perhaps by the fact that he celebrated this relationship by writing some four hundred poems in French, translated a clutch of French poets, chose to settle in a French-speaking region and became, in his later years, more deeply absorbed in the work of the French poet Paul Valéry than in that of any other poet."

With photos I can't show you, this text is very much more suited to someone who loves poetry, has more than a Wikipedia-level familiarity with his work; my main connection, and a pleasant one, is to Rilke's Francophilia, to his off-kilter sense of himself as other than how his friends saw him.

I'm glad I red the book. I'm glad I didn't know him, or he'd've got an earful about his using others. No loving Maurice Betz, me.

IN THE ABSENCE OF MEN: A Novel, by France's Felice Picano

IN THE ABSENCE OF MEN: A Novel
PHILIPPE BESSON (tr. Frank Wynne)
Scribner (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of the international bestseller Lie with Me comes the tale of an affair between an aristocratic teenager and a soldier, as they discover the possibilities and perils of first love.

Summer, 1916. With German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, sixteen and still too young to fight, this moment of dread is also a moment of possibility. An electrifying encounter with Marcel, an enigmatic middle-aged writer, draws Vincent’s desires out into the light. As he’s taken under Marcel’s wing, Vincent begins a dangerous affair with Arthur, the son of his governess and a young soldier on leave. Together, they share a secret that everyone seems to know and yet everyone remains silent about.

In this stunning portrait of young love, Philippe Besson depicts a young man who plays by his own rules and is not afraid of who he is. In the afternoons, Vincent is mentored by Marcel, the great novelist, in the city’s opulent cafés as they draw the judgment of society. And at night, he hides Arthur in his bedroom as the two risk everything to be together. Their affair initiates them into a world of pleasure and shields them from the encroaching war. During this magical week away from the trenches, Vincent shelters Arthur with happiness, reassuring him, “Nothing will happen to you.”

Tender and harrowing, In the Absence of Men captures how exhilarating and heart-crushing it is to fall in love for the first time.

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My Review: Tragedies hardest to endure, that produce the most emotional stress in me, are stories whose endings we know are coming while the characters do not, and we can do nothing to stop their devastation. This is that story writ tight and tart.

I'll say now that it takes a giant pair to use Marcel Proust...In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust!...as a character guiding and mentoring, in a platonic way, your PoV character. It could, you know from the off, go horribly wrong, end up derailing your story, cause the beau ideal of a reader for your story to scoff, nitpick, judge, and tut his way through it because—well—hubris much?

That was me as I approached the read. I left it without the tutting, but with reservations.

I loved the setting, Paris during the Great War as they knew it, and will always resonate favorably with first gay love stories. I'm glad Author Besson did not make Proust more than a controlling mentor, I think that would've overpowered any positive feelings anyone could've developed for the story. As it was, Marcel's controlling side wasn't foregrounded, but was there in story-appropriate places. It's up to you how you feel about an older man leading a teen through the terrifying, obscure, all-consuming first experience of Love by a man for a man. I know I wish to gawd he'd been there for me to consult and be guided by!

I think most of what takes place in the under two hundred pages of the story is defined by brokenness, by change that can't be slowed or processed therefore controlled, by the absolute certainty of war: nothing survives unscathed. Arthur, Vincent's governess's son, is the love of Vincent's young life. He is sexually attracted to Vincent, he is just enough older...and rougher...to make their love passionate and fulfilling, and he is away to war amid all the changes accumulating in their lives.

Herein my half-star off's origin. The wartime separation means a good deal of what's happening is epistolary. I'm sad to say that, despite the words being lovely and the device being central to the story's core of reality, this shift in mode brought the momentum of the read too far down. It is undeniable that this is a feature not a bug...how could a war-set love story not separate its lovers?...and represents the most natural and logical evolution of this pair's inevitable trajectory, but it still just stopped me in my tracks. Recalibrating my pace cost me some emotional investment in the men's love story.

The twist did not surprise me, but did affect me profoundly. Some sniffling and a modest dampening of my pillow might have occurred. I'll never tell.

I'm very, very glad I read the story; I think Translator Wynne rendered the French he found into seamlessly readable English that feels almost as though it's not translated; but there's that botched downshift from fifth to second that juddered me a hair too much, caused a bit of excessive mental transmission wear, for me to get all the way to five stars.

Definitely a read I recommend all the same.

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

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

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: History meets Fantasy in Revolutionary France!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 3.5* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven bucks and it's yours.

THEY DREAM IN GOLD, debut novel from tyro publisher SJP Lit...both worth watching

THEY DREAM IN GOLD
MAI SENNAAR
Zando/SJP Lit
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A “luminous” (Tara Conklin) literary debut following two dreamers, one intercultural family, and the diasporic pursuit of home.

When Bonnie and Mansour meet in New York in 1968―his piercing gaze in a downtown jazz club threatening to carry her away―their connection is undeniable. Both from fractured homes, with childhoods spent crossing the Atlantic, they quickly find peace with each other. And as Mansour’s soaring Senegalese melodies continue to break new ground, keeping time with the sound of revolution and taking him and Bonnie from Paris to Rio and Switzerland, it seems as though happiness might finally be around the corner for them both.

Then Mansour goes missing. His Spanish tour was only meant to last three weeks, but three months later, he and his band have not returned. In his absence, Bonnie reckons with her memories of him, and comes to understand that the hopes of so many women―her mother and grandmother; his mother, aunt, childhood friend―rest on her perseverance. Stirred by the life growing inside her, Bonnie puts a plan in action to find him.

Spanning two decades and moving through the hotbeds of the African diaspora, They Dream in Gold is an epic yet intimate exploration of the migrant hunger for belonging and a powerful, intergenerational testament to our shared humanity, for lovers of Tara Stringfellow’s Memphis and Abi Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice.

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My Review: Buckle up...this is a complicated read. Long at over four hundred pages, complex in its interrelated cast of characters, difficult to summarize as a result. Senegal, Paris, New York...the Twenties, the Sixties...familys seen in passing, a family being formed...this novel's a web.

It's a debut novel for the storyteller and close to a debut for the publisher. Sarah Jessica Parker's SJP Lit is part of a company called Zando Projects (Zando's website). SJP Lit's mission statement is:

Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP Lit publishes sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking, and discussion-driven stories that are inclusive of international and underrepresented voices. SJP Lit books capture the contemporary imagination and reflect a wide range of ideas and experiences.

So someone famous decided not to start a book club, or an imprint in the Corporate World, but a company publishing books she curates and pays for and edits for us to see what she wants to read and offers us as worth it to read, too. As I would expect from Parker's résumé, the story told here is very much focused on character development. Bonnie and Mansour are not, despite what you could reasonably expect from the synopsis, the only or even the best developed characters. Because the story does not conform to linear time's slightly tedious constraints, we get the family polyphonics as well as the dynamics. This is a fancy way for me to say, if you're expecting a straightforward family saga, you're going to be left wanting. If you really want a book you can inhabit, one that feels more like a series (I mean this in the good way!) than a standalone, here's a great summertime immersion.

The way we move from time to time, from place to place, demands of the reader a level of participation, of code-switching, that might be off-putting for some. I think you'll twig quite quickly to the cues that indicate we're going to shift, though they are not the same from one instance to the next. What I like about that is the mood of the read never stagnates, a danger that family sagas can fall into readily. After a time many of them feel like trauma porn, or a weird triumphalism celebrating a character's Strength, Nobility, and Fortitude. Yeeeccchhh

Author Mai Sennaar doesn't succumb to that too-easy, too-incredible stuff. Her women are beset by worries and doubts. They wonder if things are worth it if they hurt this much, demand this much of them. They stumble, fall, and fail. But they never stay down for good.

It is a distinction, not a difference, but it is a consequential one that speaks to the author's intent. She is not going for the facile road to storytelling success. That is clear from the start. For this old white man, that made the read all the more interesting and involving. Some of that could be down to the slightly more...distant...way the narration is deployed, it gets an overview feeling across. Back to that polyphony of PoVs. This is a natural outgrowth of it. I found it enhanced my reading experience, in part because it enabled Author Sennaar to put me more firmly into the time and place the different strands of her story-web flow through.

I found I was disgruntled by one big, star-losing thing: Like Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (whose author flatteringly blurbed this book), every one of these women is circling a man. The story's center is a man (absent though he be). Is it that hard to make these women interrelate around themselves and each other?

A crotchet of mine. The Bechdel test still matters to me because the queer equivalent is abysmal still...gay characters feature more than ever, less than reality says is fair. So, no fifth star for you, debut novel. Author Sennaar is deeply talented and should be supported, make no mistake.

Maybe she's got more to say, soon. Let's show we're listening.

THE PERFUME THIEF, WWII espionage in a beautifully evoked Paris setting

THE PERFUME THIEF
TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT
Doubleday
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A Gentleman in Moscow meets Moulin Rouge in this stylish, sexy page-turner about Clementine, a queer American expat and notorious thief of rare scents, who has retired to Paris, only to return to her old tricks in hopes of protecting the city she loves when the Nazis invade in 1941.

Clementine is a seventy-two year-old reformed con artist with a penchant for impeccably tailored suits. Her life of crime has led her from the uber-wealthy perfume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down and opens a legitimate shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets.

In 1941, as the German's stranglehold on the city tightens, Clem's perfume-making attracts the notice of Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who comes to demand Clem's expertise and loyalty in his mysterious play for Hitler's favor. Clem has no choice but to surrender fully to the con, but while she knew playing the part of collaborator would be dangerous, she never imagined it would be so painfully intimate. At Oskar's behest, and in an effort to win his trust, Clem recounts the full story of her life and loves, this time without the cover of the lies she came to Paris to escape.

Complete with romance, espionage, champagne towers, and haute couture, this full-tilt sensory experience is a dazzling portrait of the underground resistance of twentieth-century Paris and a passionate love letter to the power of beauty and community in the face of insidious hate.

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

My Review: Lush, lovely prose telling a story that made me squirm so hard I wore a hole in my upholstery.

Stories about coercion of trans folks using their identity as trans are not comfortable reads. I do not think this was intended to be a comfy-cozy kind of a read but it was clear in its empathy for its trans main character. So, blessedly, I was not left with the rather unclean film of exploitive appropriative use of trans identity as a negative signifier on my lens into the story.

Still, this story causes me horripilation. As things that have Nazis as the antagonist should.

The felt-like-he-was-factual Oskar Voss, nasty boss Nazi spymaster, based like the rest of the story—as per the author—on real people who were in Paris to escape the judgments of Society in the safety of the big city. Then, the worst-possible worst result happens to them all when the vileness of the Nazis come barging in with their giant, outsized hatreds, and their very overblown sense of purpose. Oskar is typical of the cynical bandwagon-hoppers that puritanical movements attract like horse apples attract dung beetles. He is very much not interested in the ideology of his paymasters. He wants power over others. His means of getting more of his drug is to use whoever and whatever he can to buy himself a seat at a higher-placed table.

Enter Clem(entine). And a lot of Clem's fellow misfits. They need to survive, and their Otherness has equipped them to do this any and every way they possibly can including stealing and blackmailing any and everyone they need to. Oskar wants to ensorcel Hitler with some super-special scent, which TBH just fell flat for me as a motivation...but it led to butch lesbian/transman Clem recounting, for honestly flimsy reasons, her lifetime's-worth of stories to the rapt Oskar. Whatever excuse made that happen is good enough for me.

Clem, a very old person for that era at seventy-two, has Lived A Life, maybe three or even four, in those years. A born tale-teller, as anyone making a living as a con artist and thief operating among the very rich must be, Clem completely wraps Oskar up in the memory palace of the past. How much of it would pass the fact-checking of the internet age, well...who cares. I do not really buy into the motivations of Oskar for any of his actions, but that left me no less delighted to spend time with Clem.

The horrors of Nazi-occupied Paris, the horrors that were to come, all seemed to Clem to be clear because these puritanical control freaks are just like the others from the past. None of it is downplayed, and there are terrible passages in this story, but the way it is presented feels...convenient. Oskar is easily led by his greed for power, Clem is easily swayed by a murky sense of responsibility that all just jelled a bit too patly for this reader.

I will not, though, say anything to discourage anyone who longs for ancestral representation for their own kind to get stuck in right away. I think the transmasculine Clem, while imperfect, is perfectly delightful to spend page time with. The hurts and betrayals of lives long over make for great stories, even knowing they were painful and hard to live. You will come away edified for knowing the honorable, sensible, deeply relatable hero that is Clem.

LITTLE JEWEL: A Novel, a very different kind of storytelling from 2014 Nobel Laureate Modiano

LITTLE JEWEL: A Novel
PATRICK MODIANO (tr. Penny Hueston)
Yale University Press
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing novel by Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, now superbly translated for English-language readers

For long standing admirers of Modiano’s luminous writing as well as those readers encountering his work for the first time, Little Jewel will be an exciting discovery. Uniquely told by a young female narrator, Little Jewel is the story of a young woman adrift in Paris, imprisoned in an imperfectly remembered past. The city itself is a major character in Modiano’s work, and timeless moral ambiguities of the post-Occupation years remain hauntingly unresolved.

One day in the corridors of the metro, nineteen-year-old Thérèse glimpses a woman in a yellow coat. Could this be the mother who long ago abandoned her? Is she still alive? Desperate for answers to questions that have tormented her since childhood, Thérèse pursues the mysterious figure on a quest through the streets of Paris. In classic Modiano style, this novel explores the elusive nature of memory, the unyielding power of the past, and the deep human need for identity and connection.

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My Review: I understand that many Modiano fanciers find this to be a slight, even a negligible, entry into his oeuvre. I am, of course, required to bow to their expertise since I do not have it. I will say, though, that if this is a slight entry into Author Modiano's catalog, the Nobel committee slept on this award by leaving it unawarded until 2014.

Thérèse, in common with most of us whose mothers weren't all that motherly, sees and feels the present with intensity and immediacy that our better-grounded peers seem to lack. It's a hypervigilance, an awareness of things that aren't always notable or even noticeable to others.

Thérèse's mother abandoned her for that most selfish of reasons, addiction, and so Thérèse can never really find her mother in her memories. We, listening to Thérèse, don't know what images among the blurry watercolors inside her head are real. Is her mother dead? Did she abandon Thérèse in that absolute and final way? Thérèse doesn't seem to know, so we don't know.

But that's the nature of the child of loss: We don't know what, if any, of our memories are valid, externally valid that is, and that is all we've come to trust. Validation must come from outside when your life has consisted of things you simply can't control, can't even influence...they just Happen, from the outside. So that is where Reality lies.

And lie she does, does Reality.

That is the genius of this work. It's not the usual third person exploration of the Idea of Identity, the Scenes of Paris, that Modiano is so very very good at. Thérèse is telling us about the grey, grim Paris of her life. Thérèse is putting herself in the frame deliberately, and that is unique. To Modiano, whose work is always at a very French remove from the immediacy of American novels. To Thérèse, whose marginal life is never even the center of her own thoughts...that position belongs to her mother. (That there is a father is self-evident, but one it never treated to a thought centering him. He exists only because The Mother got pregnant by him, whoever he was.)

We, the audience, see that there are men...an older pharmacist, a young student...who care for the waiflike Thérèse. She remains unable to process their proffered affection. It is here that Modiano achieves something I am absolutely stunned by: In a novel told all in first person, he manages the feat of making the emotional reality of other characters as clear to the reader as are Thérèse's disordered thoughts. It is a rare stylistic attempt, and it succeeds more often than not.

Why, you'll be excused for asking, isn't this a five-star review? Because, ma amie, Thérèse is nineteen and solipsistic in the extreme as are all emotionally abandoned children. It grows wearisome to trudge around after this yellow-raincoated woman to no avail, with no closure, by no authority empowered to address her. I don't for an instant think this is Thérèse's mother. I'm familiar with the trajectory of addiction and it's unlikely that someone lied to the girl Thérèse about her mother's fate. That's the sort of lie that comes with good intentions. No one's ever had an intention towards Thérèse, good or bad.

The ending of this novel is not really an ending. It is a place where we can leave Thérèse, like a safe street-corner near a police station, but knowing that we're out of there and no longer responsible to looking on at her life's messy, pale, unlikely to come into focus, trajectory. It's the proper place to leave her. It's what the entire trajectory of the story demands.

It feels a bit like we, the only people who will ever see Thérèse from the inside, are repeating the cruelty and abandonment that has been and will be her lot.

Brilliant. Unsettling. Evoking the eternal question that consuming art, novels in particular, wrenches forth from the sensitive: Is this just fancied-up voyeurism? Am I not being the low-life peeper that I condemn when she's listening at bedroom doors, he's got one eye on the braless busty babe?

THE LEIGH RUSSELL PAGE: JOURNEY TO DEATH, first Lucy Hall procedural & GIRL IN DANGER, the second

JOURNEY TO DEATH
LEIGH RUSSELL
Thomas & Mercer
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five for suiting my exact mood

The Publisher Says: Lucy Hall arrives in the Seychelles determined to leave her worries behind. The tropical paradise looks sun-soaked and picture-perfect—but as Lucy soon discovers, appearances can be very deceptive. A deadly secret lurks in the island’s history, buried deep but not forgotten. And it is about to come to light.

As black clouds begin to gather over what promised to be a relaxing family break, Lucy realises that her father stands in the eye of the coming storm. A shadow from his past is threatening to destroy all that he holds dear—including the lives of his loved ones.

A dark truth is about to explode into their lives, and that truth is going to hit them right between the eyes.

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

My Review: The wages of sin are paid by those born of it. This is the first of a new series starring the woman who will pay for hte sins of the past. It definitely kept me going as we start the book following George in the 1970s...a time of terrible political crises and much violence, as any of us who lived through it remember. Despite the terrible things happening, we're moving at a dream-like pace...it kept me from being fully immersed and presented a problem for me throughout the read.

Landing in the Seychelles for a family vacation, Lucy, George's twentysomething daughter, is ready for a complete change because she's just broken her engagement to a man whose idea of marriage isn't like hers. Because we do hear a LOT about that subject, I was about to skip the rest of the read. I kept going because the descriptions are fully and completely involving. I can't really extract one to show you, sorry...the problem with reading a DRC is that I can't copy-and-paste the way one can with normal Kindle books.

What I found ironic is that ever-so-betrayed Lucy's mother, put in jeopardy by her husband lying by omission, doesn't seem ready to snatch some passing policeman's gun and shoot him dead. I assure you that, were my Young Gentleman Caller to whisk me off to a beautiful foreign destination where he (searching for a lost love) got me kidnapped, you would need one sheet of blotting paper and a whisk broom to clean up what was left of him once I was free.

Anyway, I love reading about tropical places, I enjoyed Lucy's complete unwillingness to accept anything told her at face value no matter whose face was uttering it, and I wanted just this level of readerly demand. It's not perfect, it's not fast-paced, but it is lush and it gives you plenty to think about. Recommended!

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

GIRL IN DANGER
LEIGH RUSSELL
Thomas & Mercer
$3.99 Kindle editon, available now

Rating: squeaks to 4* of five on its mood-suiting qualities

The Publisher Says: Chasing a story, reporter Lucy Hall plunges into a desperate fight to save her own life.

Lucy Hall’s first summer in Paris promises to be idyllic. She’s fallen in love with the city and enjoys her new job as an investigative reporter. When her friend Nina comes to stay, the girls look forward to a wonderful summer. But Paris is a city of contrasts and Lucy is about to experience its dangerous side.

When an anonymous source promises her a scoop, Lucy can’t resist the chance to make her name. The deeply unsettling meeting with her informant indicates that there may be more at stake than she’d suspected. Returning home with questions instead of answers, Lucy finds her apartment ransacked and Nina gone.

Lucy knows her friend is in danger, but the police are unwilling to help. When her informant is found dead, she realises she may be next. Lucy has something the killer wants and he’ll do anything to get it back…

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My Review: Another case of feeling the scenery is a co-star in the read and might deserve a cut of the royalties. This time it's set in a place I've been! So I felt even more connected to the locales.

Another situation where I wonder how the bloody hell the woman got there...how is a twenty-four-year-old going to get an investigative journalist's position in a city she's not from, and barely speaks the language? And what journalist's boss would chastise her for pestering people for story ideas? That is the literal definition of her job.

Well, no matter, I wasn't asked to fact-check the MS so I let it go.

I totally bought that Lucy, knowing she's dealing with a dreadful underworld figure, would go to the police the second her visiting gal-pal vanishes and her apartment gets ransacked; I also totally bought that the police, knowing what they are bound to know of the criminal in question, basically shrugged and said "come back after forty-eight hours, kthxbye" because the young visitor will either arrive back confused from being lost or in Ziploc baggies piece by piece to scare Lucy away from being a journalist investigator. Either way the police don't really need to do much.

A little harder to buy is Lucy teaming up with Alain Michel (Alan Michael, the author didn't spend much time researching names), the proverbial P.I. with a Past; of course he Knows Stuff. It's a pearl-clutcher, this level of suspense. I will say that the author makes a serious effort to add some physical danger to this entry (largely theoretical last time), but most does this with details of the aftermath of violence and that doesn't have the same effect long-term.

But as I thought these dismissive thoughts I realized I was more than half-way through the read. What?! How did that happen? It happened because the prose is direct, well-formed, and the plot is familiar enough to make few demands and still involving enough to require that I finish the read. I enjoyed the sentimental journey to Paris, I liked the resolution of the plot, and found myself exactly the right read for a sloppy Sunday in this series.

PANCAKES IN PARIS, being who you were always meant to be means being alive to possibilities

PANCAKES IN PARIS: Living the American Dream in France
CRAIG CARLSON
Sourcebooks (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$1.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Paris was practically perfect...

Craig Carlson was the last person anyone would expect to open an American diner in Paris. He came from humble beginnings in a working-class town in Connecticut, had never worked in a restaurant, and didn't know anything about starting a brand-new business. But from his first visit to Paris, Craig knew he had found the city of his dreams, although one thing was still missing—the good ol' American breakfast he loved so much.

Pancakes in Paris is the story of Craig tackling the impossible—from raising the money to fund his dream to tracking down international suppliers for "exotic" American ingredients... and even finding love along the way. His diner, Breakfast In America, is now a renowned tourist destination, and the story of how it came to be is just as delicious and satisfying as the classic breakfast that tops its menu.

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

My Review: Do not even think of eating...that is, reading...this book on an empty stomach.

This is a memoir. It's not a happy-families, aren't-people-grand memoir. It's a people will help you...if you make it so it's either help you or admit they're letting you fail because reasons story. The working-class background Author Carlson comes from doesn't lead him to pursue academic excellence or anything other than box-ticking adequacy. His emotional life is, it's plain, neglected completely. He doesn't exactly tell us this but the stories he tells are tendentious. Lucky for him, he inspired others to help by being too good to just abandon.

What matters to most of us, in reading memoirs, is seeing either ourselves in the other make good, or ourselves as we wish we could be. In Author Carlson's case, I saw an American man making his way in a world that doesn't love Americans very much...Paris. And making that way against many kinds of social, political, and cultural odds. After all, how many working-class cooks (NOT a chef!) still less plain ol' restaurateurs do you know about? He's the guy with the idea that no one thinks is great but him. He sells the idea to enough money people that he gets to open his dream: American breakfast food in, of all places, the capital of world-wide food snobbery, Paris, France.

It works. It really, really works. Go look at the website linked in the description! So perfectly American...so popular in Paris. Despite EuroDisney.

Author Carlson does a lot of describing in this book. And he lards in a lot of French. (Well, it stands to reason, but be aware!) It's clear as day to me why he tried to make it as a screenwriter: he has a visual imagination. There's a minuscule recipe section containing recipes I can vouch for from having made them several times apiece, in my own weird variations and under Rob's very attentive eyes, over the years. (This book is six years old now and this is my first review of it! How gauche of me.) But most of all, Author Carlson's love of his creation, Breakfast in America, and his love of France, French food, a French guy who becomes his husband, and the world of making people happy (I contend that's the only reason people go into the food business) made me happy.

Should you read it? You bet your sweet bippy. And on Kindle, all the photos and the miscellaneous stuff shows up very well, which makes the regular price a bargain. (The sale price is incitement to riot.) Go get one now. It's a summer beach trip spent in good, fun company learning about how someone with real, honest-to-gawd stick-to-it-iveness makes it in this world.

By doing everything that scares him witless.

THE VANISHED COLLECTION, a family's heritage raped away by Nazis

THE VANISHED COLLECTION
PAULINE BAER de PERIGNON (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press
$12.95 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five, for the message if not the messenger

The Publisher Says: It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo and more. Pauline Baer de Perignon knew little to nothing about Strauss, or about his vanished, precious art collection. But the list drove her on a frenzied trail of research in the archives of the Louvre and the Dresden museums, through Gestapo records, and to consult with Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano.

What happened in 1942? And what became of the collection after Nazis seized her great-grandparents’ elegant Parisian apartment? The quest takes Pauline Baer de Perignon from the Occupation of France to the present day as she breaks the silence around the wrenching experiences her family never fully transmitted, and asks what art itself is capable of conveying over time.

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

My Review: Well, this review went through some changes. A lot like me as I read this book. I think the world needs to attend to the huge, stinking pile of denial in the center of Culture Inc. What happened to the art collected by Jews? It was stolen by the Nazis. Those bad Nazis!

...and then what happened? *blank stare*

In Author Baer de Perignon's tale of family, legacies, and fairness denied, you will learn that the reality is...nothing happened. Museums bear extraordinary responsibility for the nothing that happened. They don't want to give their ill-got gains back to the families whose rightful property it is. The whole raison d'etre of "the Museum" (in its broadest cultural-institution sense) is thus opened to serious question.

This isn't a small issue. The 2003-2011 Iraq war resulted in *appalling* levels of art and antiquities being looted or damaged, often destroyed. There is some tut-tutting over this. Not a lot, given the scale and value of it. Why? Because that leads to lots of awkward questions about how "the Museum" got the stuff in the first place. "Provenance" and "spoliation" in other words. Then that opens lots of graves "the Museum" wants to leave closed.

This isn't the first time that this issue has been raised, or wrestled with. Read a book called Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade (it's excellent, BTW, highly recommend it to you). The topic simmers along, looted antiquities are topics of concern on slow news days around the world. For a minute. They don't rate high on most folks' outrage meters. But the Impressionists and Academicians and Old as well as other Masters aren't talked about in media or entertainment almost at all (pace George Clooney's lukewarm The Monuments Men, which did poorly at the box office). Because people love them, come to see them in their hallowèd homes, are inclined to buy tat with the (profitably licensed) images on them (from "the Museum"'s store). The fact that many were looted from Jews by the Nazis is bad. But whatcha gonna do.

Nothing, for as long as possible, until the heirs of the murdered millions forget (I was *astonished* at the number of people Author Baer de Perignon met who just knew nothing about what had been looted, spoliated, from their ancestors!) or give up. "The Museum" will still be there, after all, taking in cash from ill-got gains they should've given back most of a century ago.

It is a scandal but no one wants to bring up the solution: restore spoliated property to its proper owners, or otherwise their descendants. As I read this book, I realized the case for this is unassailable. But I realized also why I had such trouble writing this review: I dislike the author.

She's quite sarcastic, very judgemental, has a serious oh-poor-me attitude. She snarks, in the text, about people she fawns over in the Acknowledgments. One assumes she thinks these people won't read the actual book.... Her scattered, disorganized research method draws criticism she fobs off as passing...but I promise you that her "mentors" did the real heavy lifting. I read this between the lines, I recalled many author Acknowledgments from when I was an agent that left out lots of realities not to the Author's Taste. And I realized that I support the message of repatriation, restitution, and acknowledging the harm done to generations of people simply because they were Other...but I dislike this messenger.

It's a shallow, personal response, and it shouldn't prevent anyone from picking up this book for its message of ma'at, fairness, justice, and the value of saying "I'm sorry."

Postscript: Sotheby's has auctioned the painting the author worked so hard to reclaim. Watch her conversation with the auction house's staff. In the end, it brought $1.23 million hammer price.

THE 7TH WOMAN, CROSSING THE LINE and THE CITY OF BLOOD, Paris-set procedurals from "France's Michael Connelly" deliver the goods

THE 7TH WOMAN
FRÉDÉRIQUE MOLAY (tr. Anne Trager) (Paris Homicide #1)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of France's prestigious Prix du Quai des Orfèvres prize for best crime fiction, named Best Crime Fiction Novel of the Year, and already an international bestseller with over 150,000 copies sold. There's no rest for Paris's top criminal investigation division, La Crim'. Who is preying on women in the French capital? How can he kill again and again without leaving any clues? A serial killer is taking pleasure in a macabre ritual that leaves the police on tenterhooks. Chief of Police Nico Sirsky—a super cop with a modern-day real life, including an ex-wife, a teenage son and a budding love story—races against the clock to solve the murders as they get closer and closer to his inner circle. Will he resist the pressure? The story grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the last page, leading you behind the scenes with the French police and into the coroner’s office. It has the suspense of Seven, with CSI-like details. You will never experience Paris the same way again!

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

My Review: What makes me feel like a putz is that I haven't read this since 2014. I needed to revisit it, clearly. In the meantime, I'll offer some comments about the clear memories the story has left me with, then come back if I have more to say.

I'll tell you what I *do* remember, the way Author Molay renders the crime scenes. It's very very grim, and don't think for a second you're ready for it! I remember the way they were slaughtered vividly. The sensitive are forewarned.

Nico Sirsky, our PoV cop, is a surprisingly vivid character. I was, given the women's-body-parts nature of the killings, expecting him to be less than fully realized in the 250-ish pages we're granted. I was wrong. His ex-wife, Sylvie, has just dumped their teen son Dimitri onto his doorstep at precisely the moment Nico is falling in love with the (annoyingly perfect, if I'm honest) Caroline. The cases are all demanding his attention...the evident serial killings are urgently necessary to solve, to stop, to explain somehow...and the threats aren't just to random women.

Thanks, Sylvie, for the well-timed breakdown. Not surprisingly, this adds a lot of stress to Nico's madly stressed life. I'm pretty sure a lot of the bad stuff in the dénouement is exacerbated by Sirsky's stunningly high stress levels.

The crimes are very close to home indeed, and Nico's entire world is badly damaged by the perpetrator and reason for the killing spree.

I enjoyed very much the details of the French legal system. Author Molay has made a career of creating the procedural tales beloved of American audiences and has gifted us with a lot of our own violent tropes, "perfected" and returned. The differences are plentiful...what's an investigative magistrate when it's at home?...and there are many little moments where it's clear the translator slipped in a tidbit of Paris geography for her US audience. But there are also the deep dives into Nico's thoughts and methods. There are less successful dives into the killer's methods. (Ugh.) All the way around, the story felt to me like a French person's idea of an American procedural, explained for a French audience and then translated for an American one. The details and grace notes that would entertain a French reader do the same job on me, at least.

This is, in fact, the thing I liked best about the read. It worked on a procedural level. It worked on a novelistic level. And it gave the reader the chance to get fully involved in less book-bulk than the typical bloated four-hundred-page overstuffed story-sandwich you can't fit in your mental mouth. And still made me care about Nico, Dimitri, Caroline, and even that wretch Sylvie. One important note, besides the violence perpetrated on women by the plot's demands, is that French gender relations of a decade-plus ago were not anywhere near the levels of pre-#MeToo US gender relations. It's simply not that way, and if that isn't okay with you, don't bother to try.

It's $5 on your Kindle. Risk it! I bet most of y'all won't be a bit sorry.

***NOTE THAT ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE COULD BE A SPOILER FOR THIS BOOK.***

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CROSSING THE LINE
FRÉDÉRIQUE MOLAY (tr. Anne Trager) (Paris Homicide #2)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It's Christmas in Paris. Chief of Police Nico Sirsky returns to work after recovering from a gunshot wound. He's in love and raring to go. His first day back has him overseeing a jewel heist sting and taking on an odd investigation. Dental students discovered a message in the tooth of a severed head. Is it a sick joke? Sirsky and his team of crack homicide detectives follow the clues from an apparent suicide to an apparent accident to an all-out murder as an intricate machination starts breaking down. Just how far can despair push a man? How clear is the line between good and evil? More suspense and mystery with the Paris Homicide team from the prizewinning author Frédérique Molay, the "French Michael Connelly". This is the second in the prize-winning Paris Homicide series.

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

My Review: "I was murdered" isn't something a cop expects to hear from a dismembered dead person. That's exactly what starts the machinery of a French homicide investigation moving in this exciting book. Second of Molay's "Paris Homicide" thrillers, we're more or less starting with Nico Sirsky, chief investigator from the last book, as he starts his normal day. I realize a lot of readers don't like the catch-you-up parts of procedurals, but I appreciate them...it's been most of a decade since I read The 7th Woman; no way in hell could I have recalled who these names were attached to without a refresher. I get it...I really do...lots of names, lots of titles, none of then familiar. Take your time, really best to start with The 7th Woman, but no matter what I recommend that you read slowly until they all fit into place.

They will! Paris, her police, the men and women who serve the unexpectedly dead as their interlocutors, all have a slot in Molay's stories. Something that Bruno Guedj, he of the "I was murdered" message hidden in his obviously, clumsily worked-on tooth, clearly expected to work as it always had. Donating his body to science...out of nowhere, blindsiding his wife and sons...was clearly calculated to get his message NOTICED and it worked.

The best thing about reading these books is the same thing people who enjoy Stuart Woods's Stone Barrington books, or James Patterson's Women's Murder Club books, are getting: Minimum of fussy stuff and maximum of forward momentum. Just what you want in a thriller. A bit less like those books is the way so much of the action, like press conferences and suchlike, take place off-screen. It's clear that Auteure Molay hasn't got her eye firmly set on a movie deal. One fillip in this book that I didn't care much for was the single-page chapters from the perpetrator's point of view...I didn't feel they served The Greater Good, somehow.

A great deal of the story has to do with how much Love rules our lives...Guedj, the victim, making sure his dearly and deeply loved family is cared for, and still making sure they won't be taken into dark places wondering why he died; then Nico, recovering from his nasty wounds inflicted by the killer in The 7th Woman, finally able to deal with his delight and love Caroline...his son Dimitri...all his team...Molay never forgets that the reason we read is that the characters mean something to us. I'd say that the series is a throwback to the days when 200-page thrillers were the norm. That makes the author's stakes high: must get action and character development from the off. The w-bomb dropped at 64% was an unpleasant surprise, out of keeping with the overall brisk and business-like tone. But to repeat the offense at 69%...! And then the coup de grâce at 88%, where it took me right out of a very high-stakes scene, well I ask you. Can that explain a whole star missing from the rating? You bet it can, sugarplum.

The details of Russian-descended Sirsky taking an interest in his heritage, the way this reconnects him to his teen son and his parents...all in this short word count, well, it's admirable. A note here to chuckle, albeit a bit wanly, about the pop-culture easter eggs in so many names..."Marc Walberg," "Dr. Queneau," et alii. Most amusant, Mme l'Auteure. I'm also a fan of the glimpses into the operational realities of the French justice system, the roles different people play in it, and how, like the US, so much happens due to needing to respond to the media's reporting on what has occurred.

Ending the story how, and where, she did made the underlying theme of Love, love, and luuuv as they intersect and intertwine so poignantly complete. I think the ultimate reveal is a good, solid ending. Had it not been for those blasted w-bombs there'd be four-plus stars on this outing in the "Paris Homicide" series. Molay has made a career in writing; she decided that her storytelling chops would sustain her, and I see that they truly have.

A special note of thanks to Translator Anne Trager. The careful, not-obtrusive explanations of things that wouldn't need explaining in the home audience's edition truly does help. I'd recommend that, at some point, a map of the parts of Paris we're going to be cruising through would be very helpful.

You need an exciting series, played for high stakes, and set in a lush landscape? Here it is, ready for you....

***NOTE THAT ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE COULD BE A SPOILER FOR THIS BOOK.***

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THE CITY OF BLOOD
FRÉDÉRIQUE MOLAY (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman) (Paris Homicide #3)
Le French Book(non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: When a major Parisian modern art event gets unexpected attention on live TV, Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and his team of elite crime fighters rush to La Villette park and museum complex. On the site of the French capital's former slaughterhouses, the blood is just starting to flow, and Sirsky finds himself chasing the butcher of Paris, while his own mother faces an uncertain future.

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

My Review: You know what you're in for with the Molay procedurals: Action. You're going to get action from the start and Sirsky, in charge of his usual posse of law-enforcers, is about to enter a world that scares many more than it beguiles: Fine Art. Avant gard fine art. Of the twentieth century...art that makes anti-capitalist and anti-waste statements.

See why I wanted to review this now, at this juncture?

Much more stress for poor Nico comes from his mother, a woman...barely more than a girl!...of sixty-five. There is nothing easy about parents grpwing older, and Nico Sirsky the cop knows it well. He is on the receiving end of news he usually needs to break..."we have unfortunate news about your mother"...at the same time that he and his team solve a decades-old disappearance that brought life to a halt for another mother.

It seems that the supply of sexual violence in Paris was reasonably well-capped until the Cassian exhumation. Suddenly there's so much more happening, and in the cruisy Parc de La Villette, with unknown perp(s) making their awful desires manifest in reducing young gay men to bloodless meat.

What winds through this entire book, and through all three Molay stories that I have read, is a sense of the inviolability of two things: Love and Hate. Every crime is deeply seeded with both of these things, and every time Nico and his team work on a case, it is clear that each of them has been imbued with Nico's so-Slavic sense of the duality of the world as represented by this pairing. The future is not guaranteed, not to anyone, and those who seek a guarantee before committing themselves to Life are always, always left with regrets and unhappiness.

This according exactly with my own life's course, I've got no kick with it. And the ways in which Auteure Molay makes these bones dance is always a pleasure. One of the additional joys of this story is the simple, direct path that Nico unhesitatingly follows to solve a thirty-year-old crime, one that ended more than one life. And will now end others, as there is fallout from any act of Hate committed in this world. A large thread of Nico's life is his love of his family, and his resultant willingness to put himself in the shoes of anyone who needs his professional services. It is a pleasure to read about such a fine character...as one of the bereaved says to Nico, towards the end of the story, "Maigret can sleep well, you are a worthy successor to him."

We do spend some time in the peculiarly placed gay hookup world, a thing I wouldn't've expected La Molay to give so much space to. It's not played for comedy, it's not presented as Abnormal; it's a reality, it's where the crimes committed have led; therefore, thence goes (tall, blond, blue-eyed hunk) Nico. It fails to shock me that he ends up on a gay club's dance floor....

I was a bit more shocked that Nico sought out a Russian Orthodox priest to, I suppose confide in...? He's pretty resolutely a materialist. Still and all, it was worked into the story as well as such a thing could possibly be. The artists of the 1980s and the hothouse world of Fine Art is a significant character in the tales. It isn't *explored* per se, but its limits and its passions are very much part of the reason for the crimes that are experienced in this compact, intense read.

I encourage thriller readers to check out all three of these Paris Homicide series reads. Rev up the translation-reading you do painlessly, pleasurably, and with added thrills.