SEE YOU ON BOXING DAY!

Another #Booksgiving done and dusted. I hope at least a few reviews piqued your interest in a title you wouldn't otherwise have heard of.

It feels good to be able to write to a few readers, hopeful feelings stir when I see signs of folk checking in to see what's on offer. Writing hundreds of reviews in 2025 has kept me sane, prevented me from falling into a pit of despair as the world changes around us all in ways I hate and must (to keep faith with my moral beliefs) resist in the only ways I can.

Thanks for reading, and I do not mean just my words...thanks for being a reader. It matters how you get your stories delivered. It matters that you develop the habit of getting your stories in more than one way, from more than one source. Your choices matter. Don't lose sight of that fact in the days, weeks, months, and years you'll be told that they do not matter. No one bothers to insist that something truly irrelevant and unimportant does not matter. It's the same kind of high-control social engineering as making rules against actions and beliefs. No one ever tells you not to do something unimportant, or bad for you, unless they mean it's bad for them in some way. (Safety is never the real reason for warning labels, it's to prevent you from being able to sue them.)

Well, that turned dark. Let's sweeten the tone: I found an excellent six-stars-of-five read for 2025 in THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER by ANJET DAANJE, and translated from Flemish by David McKay via the estimable tastemakers at New Vessel Press. My review should say it all about the layered, subtle evocation of memory's centrality to identity, about the effort love takes, about the nature of desire and its propulsive projective power. It's the kind of (long!) read that I want to put in peoples' hands to explain themselves to themselves.

Support an excellent indie press! It is a New York Times 100 Notable Books designee, it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Fiction, on lists from Publishers Weekly and LitHub and the Wall Street Journal...it deserves the patient companionship and compassion of readers seeking a window into forming, discovering identity through its loss and rebuilding...trauma does not have to be war, you know. The world can, and does, do similar things to us callously and carelessly in the course of Life. Buy one, tree book or ebook, ask your library for one so they'll know people want it, get on their wait list for it, or get one via their ILL program. It is a good, impactful story told the best way a story can be: carefully, caringly, with the cares and the needs of characters and readers in its sights.

Some stories go beyond a solid idea and a good execution, beyond even a lucky meeting of idea and author. A few other books were truly extraordinarily good in my 2025 reading. I enjoyed my Jess Zafarris reads the most of any in October, Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology and Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds were each separately delightful...read together I was giggling and snorting my way through the month. "Rantallion" is my new favorite weird word to unleash on the unsuspecting. Jess and Rob's video podcast, Words Unravelled on YouTube, is a must listen every week.

August was, as always, Women In Translation Month (#WITMonth); as usual it was a solid month of pleasure reads. Funny way for me to say it, though, because it was the month of Fang Fang's Soft Burial, anything but a "pleasant" read...the true nature of memory seemed to be my August accidental theme. It's memory's loss that clues us in to the centrality of memory to identity, to selfhood; I got that from a male perspective in The Remembered Soldier and a female one in this read. Dementia is a better guide to the effects than is the soap-opera stuff we're trained to think of. It's brutal, devastating; it's happened to many for no causal action on their own part, and that's the worst, cruelest, most repugnant part.

Back in June, the most satisfying read I had was The Surge, Adam Kovac's war story via Tortoise Books. It's told in laconic warrior-appropriate prose. It exemplifies an experience I do not think soldiers will ever have again as AI and automation turn war into a weirdly impersonal industrial slaughterhouse...as we're seeing in this year's oil war they're starting in Venezuela. Moving on...May brought a lovely, up-buoying quality via Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature that made it my beacon-of-sanity read. This book was genuinely smile-granting. I hope it will go on to become a standard text in biology classes (once sanity is restored and we start teaching again).

In April, a good month for reading, I read my first merman/man romance, When the Tides Held the Moon, amusing enough if...well...silly. Laurent Binet's superb Perspective(s) elevated my mood. Not so elevating was Sad Tiger, likely the most important book I read, possibly in all of 2025, for what it has accomplished in the world with the conversation around incest and assault it has started.

I liked The Case of Cem best of March's reads because it made polyphony its most interesting point through the device of a court case in the Afterlife. More Earthly and still legally based was the utterly infuriating The Man Nobody Killed, the latest from Elon Green. What an enraging travesty of justice! I still boil up over it. In a translation-heavy year of reading, an early delight was the extraordinary Río Muerto, my first all-five-stars read of 2025, by Ricardo Silva Romero and translated from Spanish by the gifted Victor Meadowcroft. Voiceless narrators don't come better than this; many language-choice delights in its pages. My January best-quality read, Fire Exit by Morgan Talty, was this Native American talent's first-ever novel. Aaalmost all five stars from me, and happy to give them I was!

I began 2025 deeply unhappy and very, very scared. I'm ending it much the same, but with the perspective that there's always, always the heartening world of literary imagination to grant a different view to a reader. In writing reviews of books I've read over the past ten-plus years, I've learned that I am a creature of deep greed, insatiable hunger, for that magic of storytelling: the gift of perspective.

I have never in my life been more grateful to be a reader than I am right now.

AMERICAN DREAMER, first in the Dreamers series by ADRIANA HERRERA

AMERICAN DREAMER (Dreamers #1)
ADRIANA HERRERA
Carina Press
$7.75 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: No one ever said big dreams come easy

For Nesto Vasquez, moving his Afro-Caribbean food truck from New York City to the wilds of Upstate New York is a huge gamble. If it works? He’ll be a big fish in a little pond. If it doesn’t? He’ll have to give up the hustle and return to the day job he hates. He’s got six months to make it happen—the last thing he needs is a distraction.

Jude Fuller is proud of the life he’s built on the banks of Cayuga Lake. He has a job he loves and good friends. It’s safe. It’s quiet. And it’s damn lonely. Until he tries Ithaca’s most-talked-about new lunch spot and works up the courage to flirt with the handsome owner. Soon he can’t get enough—of Nesto’s food or of Nesto. For the first time in his life, Jude can finally taste the kind of happiness that’s always been just out of reach.

An opportunity too good to pass up could mean a way to stay together and an incredible future for them both...if Nesto can remember happiness isn’t always measured by business success. And if Jude can overcome his past and trust his man will never let him down.

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

My Review: I gained at least 15lb reading this book. Nesto's food truck needs to park here on the beachside lots so I can eat there every day.

Author Herrera is a dab hand at using Spanish in her mainly-English text in such a way as a monoglot will get what was said, a bilingual reader will get the feelings of the speaker, and both will be able to feel involved and invested in the story. It's a tricky thing to accomplish.

It felt to me as though the main issues in Jade and Nesto's relationship were...details. Not superficial, understand, but the kind of things couples have to negotiate as time tugs them in different directions. Nesto needs reminding that Jude needs his time as much as the food truck does; Jude needs reminding that Nesto is focused and so needs reason to focus on him.

I stepped away from the vehicle, taking a long look at it. Emblazoned on the back was the logo for my business, OuNYe, Afro-Caribbean Food in huge bold black font on a red background. The black and red contrasted with the flags of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica painted over the entire truck. To name my business, I used a word from the Yoruba language. Which had been spoken all over the Caribbean by our ancestors, the West Africans who were brought there as slaves. Ounje is the Yoruba word for nourishment, and I’d decided to play a bit with things and put the NY right at the center.

You know the kind of stuff, it's happened to all of us who are not terminally single. It's not that it's inaccurate, but it arose really fast; we sped through the getting to know you phase a wee bit less lingeringly than I think is ordinary.

I'm pretty sure Nesto knows what Jude needs from him but is Jude clear on it? We're reading Nesto's PoV so I wasn't all the way sure...though it's obvious Jude knows he'd be a fool not to make a real family, away from the rigid, rejecting Evangelicals who raised him,right by Nesto's side. He's experienced the darkest side of the Murruhkun Dream, its eager hatefulness at those it deems not good enough; Nesto lives the anti-immigrant, racist bit daily; they're in tune already on this, but still need to work out their harmony. Very much what makes real couplehood so much fun, so much work, so deep a reward when it's done, to build.

A romance with its flaws. but those are minor; a love story it's easy to invest in; and a food-based novel that ought to come with recipes...or an online ordering app.

CLINCH: The Stockholm Trilogy: Volume One, bisexual Swedish boxer turned enforcer has a bad day

CLINCH (The Stockholm Trilogy: Volume One)
MARTIN HOLMÉN (tr. Henning Koch)
Pushkin Vertigo
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Dashiell Hammett meets Raymond Chandler in this ultra-gritty piece of contemporary Swedish noir, set in a decrepit, highly atmospheric 1930s Stockholm

The writing's on the wall for Harry Kvist. Once a notorious boxer, he now spends his days drinking, and his nights chasing debts amongst the pimps, prostitutes and petty thieves of 1930s Stockholm. When women can't satisfy him, men can. But one biting winter's night he pays a threatening visit to a debtor named Zetterberg, and when the man is found dead shortly afterwards, all eyes are on Kvist.

Determined to avoid yet another stint in prison, Kvist sets out to track down the only person who can clear his name. His hunt will lead him from the city's slums, gangster hideouts and gambling dens to its most opulent hotels and elite nightclubs. It will bring him face to face with bootleggers and whores, aristocrats and murderers. It will be the biggest fight of his life.

Blending noir with gritty violence, Clinch is a visceral, compulsive thriller that packs a punch and leaves you reeling.

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

My Review: This one was a surprise to receive the year I got it. I had it on my list, and whaddaya know, in it came. I wasn't expecting to get a really dark, pretty nihilistic read but really feel glad I did.

Male bisexuality is all but invisible in all parts of our culture. No matter how much progress gets made, this is true. Gay guys are deeply suspicious of and fairly hostile to bi guys; straight women prefer their fantasy men either straight or gay, no spectrum tolerance there, either. I've never heard a lesbian express an opinion on the matter.

Harry is a rough-and-tumble guy. He's got the marks of a life in boxing on his body; he's got the marks of a beginning that leads a man into boxing on his being. He's on hard ground in his life because he's been in prison for fucking who he pleases instead of who society says to.

It's not like Sweden in the 1930s was the socialist paradise, however alloyed it may be, that it is today. Society was more aligned with the Nazi German model. Neutral Sweden provided a lot of raw materials to the Nazis and never helped the Jews...that was piecemeal, individually made decisions, not real help despite some of its diplomats doing their best. It's complicated, as what is not? Go look at Lise Meitner's experiences in Sweden, Othering was alive and well.

Harry, found guilty of sodomy, is shoved further down the social hierarchy until he arrives at loan-shark debt collector. It's here the action begins...his latest collection effort is found dead the day he comes to make good. Well, this ain't good. Harry's guaranteed to go back to prison if he gets convicted of the crime, and who the hell will make any effort to get him a fair trial rather than just pin the crime on him and go on with their day? Only Harry...so who saw him? Oh no, only a whore and a man in a snazzy sports car who tried his sexual luck with Harry. Not great choices.

Author Holmén, whose debut novel this is, creates a believably complex Harry, a pragmatic earthy survivor who loves animals and kids, helps anyone who needs it when he can (Lundin, his landlord the undertaker, is one), and satiates his needs as he experiences them however is available to him. He knows the deck is stacked against him so he doesn't hesitate to use violent means to get what he needs, to protect himself and others from predators, and even to become a predator when he must.

That flexibility and willingness to do what needs doing is what enables him to solve the murder he's wrongly accused of. It's a very dirty business that started him off on this search...it's not getting cleaner the further up the social hierarchy he goes. There are the usual noir novel twists, a resolution to the crime that requires a gigantic double-cross, and a setting where cold does the narrative job that heat does in Southern noirs: keeps everyone on edge, keyed up, on the point of suffering dire consequences.

It's a wonderfully gritty tale of an ugly side Sweden doesn't show the world. Voluntarily, anyway. Deeply satisfying.

RIPPLES & WAVES: A Queer Retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid

RIPPLES & WAVES: A Queer Retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid
L.A. WITT
self-published
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Colin Everroad should be dead, but after his lobster boat founders during a violent storm off the Maine coast, he wakes up on a beach. He’s cold, but unscathed… with strange memories of a face he can’t conjure and a voice he doesn’t recognize.

No one can explain it, but a friend suggests Colin was saved by one of the mer. Except the mer don’t exist. Do they? But… that face. That voice. Someone was in the water with him. Someone saved him. If not a mer, then who? And whoever it was, Colin wants to see his face.

Lir broke protocol by rescuing a land person, but he couldn’t just let the man drown. When he disobediently resurfaces to see his beautiful land man, he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s forbidden to leave the depths again.

One clandestine visit turns into more. Soon, Colin and Lir are meeting at the shore as often as possible, and the connection between them deepens. The only problem is that neither can live in the other’s world. Or can they?

Then Lir finds a way for them to be together, but only for a little while… and at a cost. As time grows short, they have to choose: does Lir return to the sea and never see Colin again, or stay forever with the man he loves in a world that will never love them?

Ripples & Waves is a modern, queer retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

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My Review: A world in which merfolk are real is clearly not our reality. It's a fairy tale, a story HC Andersen invented to explain what love between dissimilar-background and -culture people would cost them...and how that cost was exacted on the partner who did the moving.

I'm glad someone thought to make this over into a queer retelling. It applies more thoroughly to queer couples than even straight ones. Colin regaling Lir with the awfulness of humans to same-sex couples wasn't exaggerating too much.

Why Colin needed rescuing in the middle of a storm at sea isn't interrogated at all until practically halfway through the text. It's a funny choice to wait so long. Once Lir saves Colin in defiance of all the rules set by his people, he appears not to suffer much in the way of consequences. Well, the sea is *immense* so it would be tough to effectively track him...but there are eyes everywhere and a merman meeting on the regular with a landman wouldn't strike any observer as ordinary.

The desire to, shall we say, be with one's love object is a powerful imperative indeed. In the source tale, the Sea Witch offers the little mermaid the same choice as Lir receives from her in this version: a potion that lasts three days, but costs you your voice. A more perfect metaphor for cross-cultural love matches I've never heard of or read: you lose your native language, your familiar cultural references, and your automatic responses make no sense whatever in the new world. It's like being queer in straight spaces. You'll never ever be one of them; they'll know it, you'll know it, so no one's ever really at ease.

These real-world subtexts are largely absent from Author Witt's retelling. It bears down hard on the sweet, loving, needy side of the story. Lir and Colin are required to make changes with life-defining consequences, seemingly very much without angst. I'm not going to criticize that heavily because this is a fantasy novel. If it were set in a realistic world, I'd have some scathing comments to make on that storytelling lacuna.

On the count of holiday escapism informed with enheartening vibes of love conquering all, this novel gets my hearty endorsement. On the count of repurposing an old heteronormative tale to be queer, it gets croons and warbles of delight. It's Yuletide...ditch reality for a world where men come out of the deep ocean to find you for true love.

SANTA DADDY, kink romance for celebrating the holiday

SANTA DADDY
KEIRA ANDREWS
self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mall Santas aren’t supposed to be hot!

Hunter is hopelessly adrift after college. He’s still romantically inexperienced, can’t find a real job, and has no clue what to do with his life. Desperate, he returns to his humiliating old gig as an elf at the Santa's Village in his hometown's dying mall.

Enter the sexiest Santa ever.

Twice Hunter's size and age, lumberjack Nick makes Hunter tingle. Too bad he's super grumpy and intimidating. Years after the tragic death of his partner, Nick has his beagle and long, hard days on his Christmas tree farm. That’s plenty. But he can’t refuse a loyal friend’s plea for help and finds himself filling in as Santa. Despite Nick's attempt to stay aloof, the beautiful, anxious young man playing elf brings out his long-dormant daddy instincts.

Then a surprise blizzard traps them alone in Nick’s isolated forest home. Will they surrender to the sizzling spark between them and find the release and comfort they crave?

Santa Daddy is a sweet and spicy holiday gay romance from Keira Andrews featuring an age gap, m/m first times, role playing, Christmas romance feels, and of course a happy ending.

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My Review: Spicy indeed! Eww-ick homophobes strongly cautioned.

Workplace romance that would get both guys canned (!) in 2025, with an age gap that would cause serious high-volume tuttage from the puritanical purseylipped posse of pisspots who decide these things for other people. I trust my strenuous exercise of kindness and diplomacy is masking my real feelings from their gaze or further contumely will head my way.

Those tedious persons dispensed with, we'll now enter the chatroom.

These men are insta-lust bonded, as a novella's limited size demands, and believably so to me, as they're each in very needy stages of their lives. Nick's lost a partner long enough ago that he's past the rawness of fresh grief. Hunter's out of school, transitioning to adulthood and as astrologers say, "void of course." He's casting about for what to do now, and meeting Nick plants the seeds of a future he realizes he wants. Nick, as Santa, is incongruous being so majorly studly and not a little grumpy of affect. Te saving grace for Nick is the way Hunter brightens his world. It's a little uncomfortable, he's told himself he's a hookups-only kinda guy, but Hunter...gets under his skin.

Of course he can't show that to Hunter. He presents himself as cold and judgmental. He's ready to be more but this is who he's been for so long that, well, the mask became the man.

Hunter's not having it. He's hot for the body and convinced there's a volcano under the snowpack. He's excited by the domineering way Nick chastises him for being late to work...he's got his kinky side...and wants a bit of the heat he feels coming off their mutual interest.

Generally daddy kink needs more room to develop than a novella. It works better if we see the men settling into their roles in the lifestyle, see them negotiating their needs from each other and finding the balance point between love and desire. That's something that's rushed through...dare I say past...in Santa Daddy.

I think this is a good chance to say these guys were made for this kink, they were just waiting for the right partner to come along. Nick even has moments, like in Ghost, where his dead partner urges him to let loose and live again. It's creepy to the materialists, but I see it as his own emotional system communicating his real feelings using imagery he'll trust to be truthful and safe.

You're getting a good, happy-results holiday story and a nicely smexy package it's wrapped inside, with most all Keira Andrews stories. This one is a good example of a shorter-than optimal version.

A LITTLE CHRISTMAS MAGIC delivered on its title for this old Grinch

A LITTLE CHRISTMAS MAGIC
K.C. FAELAN
Beaten Track Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It's the day after Thanksgiving and Ryan Forsyth is helping his friends decorate for Christmas. Little does he know that the weekend will usher in a profound change to his life, a chance for happiness if he isn't too afraid to reach out and grasp it.

Boone Ainsworth has been friends with Ryan since junior high, ever since their mutual friend Greg Hayes introduced them. Since the day they met, no one has stood a chance at claiming Boone's heart except Ryan, but Ryan is so deep in the closet, he hasn't got a clue.

Their happily ever after is just a step away, until a panicked decision changes everything. From that point on, things don't go smoothly and Ryan and Boone make mistakes neither may be able to forgive. But it's the holidays, and Ryan is banking on a little Christmas magic to help smooth the way.

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My Review: A story written for an anthology, it's a novella-sized bite of Yuletide sentimentality that I ate up with a spoon. Four friends get together to crap up...decorate, I mean decorate...the home that's a kind of shared base for the four of them. Kai and Greg, the couple whose home it is, have been together for a while. Ryan and Boone are two points on a school-age triumvirate of friendship that's survived the angst and anger of adolescence. Ryan's out, came out with Greg in school; Ryan's straight. He proved this by dropping Greg and Boone after they came out...only for a while, only until he realized they were his friends first and gay second. Making up then meant a real connection could last until young adulthood.

But single Boone has always known that Ryan has first call on his heart. And Ryan is conspicuously single, too. Ryan thinks his jealousy of Boone's casual dates with guys is about the time they use that Boone could...should...spend with him. As buds. It can't sexual possessiveness. He's straight...goes out with girls!

After a car accident affords him the chance to really look at his life in detail, Ryan starts facing up to his emotional reality: he loves Boone as more than a friend. He also has a lot of internalized homophobia. It isn't easy to come out to yourself, it's scarier than saying it to others because you're saying it for the very first time: "I'm gay" when you barely know what that might mean to you. By the time it comes out of your mouth, it's at least possible to *think* the word gay in relation to yourself.

Screwing things up is a young-person specialty. It's scary how much of life consists of trying to make good on your screw-ups at every age. Ryan and Boone go from goof to solecism to fucked-up nasty and yet...this one relationship gets these bonehead boys to work at it, keep working at it, try again.

That's the Yule spirit I needed in 2025. It might as well be 34th Street out there I feel such a need for a miracle! In this brief story of two young guys seeking a path to each others' hearts I felt closer to it than at any other time this ugly, fractured year.

ONCE UPON A WOLF, gay romance novella with solid omega vibes

ONCE UPON A WOLF (Wayward Wolves #1)
RHYS FORD
Dreamspinner Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Once Upon A Time, There Was A Wolf….

Gibson Keller’s days are fairly routine: wake up early, get some work done, drink lots of coffee, and take care of Ellis, his older brother stuck in wolf form after coming home from the war. It’s a simple life made up of long runs on two legs—or four—and quiet evenings…. Until Ellis chases a handsome man off a cliff and into the frozen waters beside their cabin, changing Gibson’s life forever.

For Zach Thomas, buying an old B&B is a new start. Leaving behind his city life, he longs to find peace and quiet, and hiking the trails behind his property seems safe enough—right up to the moment an enormous black wolf chases him into a lake, nearly drowning him. Discovering werewolves are real astounds him, but not as much as the man who rescues him from the icy water then walks into Zach’s heart as if he owns it.

Loving a werewolf—loving Gibson with all his secrets—has its challenges but Zach believes their love is worth fighting for, especially since his heart knows the big bad wolf is really a prince in disguise.

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My Review: A series-starting novella whose series never started. It kinda shows; there are details that don't always track. Like Zach seemingly both does and doesn't know what Gibson and Ellis are before they become neighbors.

Ellis as a werewolf with PTSD is really not a lovely, cheery fella, and younger brother Gibson works around it as best he can where Zach is concerned. Zach's newfound heart-family, Ruth and Martha, don't figure that much in the story, but seem to be primed for more...that never came. Speaking of coming, Zach and Gibson did Rhys Ford's insta-lust thing that works for you or really does not. Consummation is not as rapid to arrive. A slower burn is more appropriate here because Zach really has trouble believing he's in this relationship with a shapeshifter.

The usual werewolf strong possessiveness is mitigated in Ellis. He behaves more as a human would, feeling awkward about his powerful drive to own Zach. I found that made sense to me...he's brother to a man so psychically wounded as be stuck in his wolf form, it's going to make things about his own nature clearer for him.

The tender and loving care both men exhibit for Ellis, the careful way they coax healing into him, makes the book feel more like it's about Ellis than the lovers. Their first physical union is the only one in the story. It's a novella, maybe 45,000 words, so it's not like there's a lot of room to add more.

Low steam, relationship focus, strong emphasis on forming family...if that's for you, and it was for me, this is a good example of it. Available on Kindle Unlimited.

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE, charming Regency spy story seasoned with gayness

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE
SARAH GRANGER
Entangled: Select Historical (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A French musket ball to the leg takes Captain Hugh Fanshawe from the battlefield and leaves him enduring long, quiet days compiling paperwork at Horse Guards headquarters. He knows his lameness makes him the object of pity and distaste at the stifling social engagements he dutifully escorts his mother and sister to, but everything in his orderly life changes when Colonel Theo Lindsay arrives.

Theo is everything Hugh is not. He’s a man of physical perfection and an enjoyable companion, and their friendship deepens into love. But when the army suspects there’s a French spy at Horse Guards, Hugh discovers nothing is as it seems, and the paper he shuffles daily could save his lover’s life.

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My Review: A steamless spy drama set in an underused Napoleonic Wars setting, with a lovely little gay romance on top of it. The men who fall in love aren't in rut, they're in a more Heyeresque kind of connection. The author uses on-page euphemism, as opposed to more old-fashioned "the fire flickered and died," to gloss over the physicality of sexual activity. Even a visit to a molly-house is...social, not exclusively sexual. Hugh meets Theo there, yet does not connect this to Theo's later act of seeking him out at the workplace they share.

It is the kind of story I enjoy, set in what feels like a reasonably accurate Regency re-creation. I didn't point and laugh at the...heightened...Heyerlike language, which is a feat. Trying to make champagne with Thompson seedless grapes is usually how the imitators come across; Author Granger, not so much. The spirited exchanges are there to keep me entertained while thinking "shouldn't they be fucking?"

If you're not interested in the steamier side of a story, this one will keep you busy with Hugh's idolizing of Theo as a dashing, omnicompetent godlike beauty. With his serious self-image problems. With his wounded-warrior syndrome. There is a lot to be recovering from after being crippled by a war wound, and by a lifetime of being told you're wrong just for existing.

Add in some amusing family shenanigans (his younger sister keeps Hugh and his mother on the hop, steering her away from trouble), and there was enough oddness with his friend Emily and her ambiguously intentioned attention to him to keep subplots going.

What there is not is the always desirable HEA, because that was not on offer in 1810s England. If Hugh and Thheo transgress bounds of propriety in their attention to each other, they face dreadful consequences. This results in HFN endings being the best one can hope for in this milieu...if that's a deal-breaker, be alert for it now.

A good historical story without sexual content beyond social bounds.

D. P. LYLE'S PAGE: The Jake Longly series 2

CULTURED (Jake Longly #6)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Money, sex, power. Jonathon Lindemann offers it all—just don’t mind the missing girls.

Jake Longly, ex-pro baseball player turned restauranteur, is back where he belongs: relaxing on the beach in front of his restaurant in Gulf Shores, Alabama. His peace is interrupted, however, when he receives a call from his private investigator father—April Wilkerson has gone missing from Lindemann Farms, the rustic, yet posh, resort built by self-help and financial guru Jonathon Lindemann.

Lindemann, founder of The Lindemann Method (TLM), recruits wealthy people to join his program, charging a hefty entry fee but in return promising huge financial gains and self-enlightenment. Jake’s celebrity status makes him the best person for the case.

When Jake and his girlfriend, Nicole, go on an undercover visit to Lindemann Farms, some suspicious activity makes them wonder about the legitimacy of TLM. Soon, a private conversation with one of the girls hired to work at the resort reveals their unorthodox, and immoral, recruitment methods.

As the layers peel away, darker edges appear. Does Jonathon truly make money for his investors, or is he a scam artist? Is April merely the latest in a series of missing young women? Jake and Nicole need to find her, and soon, before TLM catches wind of their true reasons for visiting the farm.

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

My Review: My, how Epsteinesque, how very similar to Madoff's financial scams, how end-stage capitalism and awful pedophile-adjacent this entry in the series is.

It's book six; I say start with any of the first three. I started with #3, Sunshine State; it was an easy lift to get the basic idea of the series at that point. By #5, The OC, things are a great deal darker and the humor won't read as well for a newbie.

This entry in the series is darker still, it's much more threatening and anxiety-inducing to be around people disappearing; the smooth, unctuous face of the organization is so offensively slick it's just horrible to read. As always, Jake has snark to spare, unleashing it on these dreadful lying sacks of shit.

As the deeply weird cultists try to smarm Jake and Nicole into believing they're the good guys, the hairpins keep falling. The dynamic duo are pretty experienced by now. They can smell rats from a closed car ten miles from the nest; what that talent gets then in this case is unhappy certainty of unpleasant things. The actual resolution is a gut punch. I does not come from a simple direct relationship to the set-up, though. It takes you through the weeds. It makes you think about people's deepest motivations, more often than not greed prominent among them.

I'd love to tell you I didn't think this actually happens. I can't.

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

UNBALANCED (Jake Longly #7)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jake Longly is never saying yes to his father again

It was a simple task. Five minutes tops.

Ex-pro baseball player Jake Longly and his girlfriend, Nicole, are asked by Jake's father, Ray, a private investigator, to pick up some papers from a realtor for his business. Jake would rather be lying on the beach outside of his Gulf Shores restaurant, but he begrudgingly agrees. It'll only take a few minutes.

But somehow, things are never simple in Ray's world. When Jake and Nicole reach the office, they find it empty—except for the dead body of the realtor lying on the floor, a single gunshot wound to his head. Who could've wanted him dead? The long suspect list and the numerous possible motives make untying the knot difficult.

Working with the police department, Jake, Nicole, Ray, and their friend Pancake dive into the deceivingly simple investigation, which grows more complex by the minute. With millions of dollars at stake, weeding through the realtor's entanglements requires all hands on deck, and yet again, Jake is dragged into the PI business he can't seem to escape.

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

My Review: Anyone who's ever bought property knows the feeling of rage and frustration that accompanies this complex process. Multiply that many times over for large investment properties, and you can relate to someone putting a bullet into this guy's head.

Only he wasn't a bad guy, he was actually a helpful soul...and Jake's dad Ray (the ex-military black ops dude) trusted him enough to work with him...only to have the dude accuse him of embezzlement! So what gives?

Naturally Jake and the ever-perfect Nicole need to find out. Clues build up, there seems to be some kind of offshoring of sizable sums of cash. There also surfaces an entire separate life the guy was leading that he definitely could not afford to have his family know about.

Jake is his usual snarktastic self. It was nice to be back in more salubrious surroundings after the last story! It's not quite by-the-numbers yet, but it's treading familiar paths.

It agrees with me, so I'll keep going until it doesn't anymore.

D. P. LYLE'S PAGE: The Jake Longly series

SUNSHINE STATE (Jake Longly #3)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Serial killer’s message to PI Jake Longly: Two of those seven murders I confessed to are not mine—but I won’t tell you which two.

Jake Longly and Nicole Jamison are confronted with the most bizarre case yet. Serial killer Billy Wayne Baker now denies that two of his seven murders were actually his work. An anonymous benefactor, who believes Billy Wayne’s denials, has hired Longly Investigations to prove Billy Wayne right. Billy Wayne had confessed to all seven. Not only did the confessed serial killer have the motive, means, and opportunity for murder, but his DNA was found at each crime scene. Bizarre doesn’t quite cover it.

Jake and Nicole travel to the small Gulf Coast town of Pine Key, Florida, where three of the murders occurred. The local police, FBI, state prosecutor, and crime lab each did their jobs, uncovered overwhelming evidence of Billy Wayne’s guilt—and even extracted a full confession. Is Billy Wayne simply trying to tweak the system to garner another fifteen minutes of fame? It’s likely all a game to him, but, if he’s being truthful—someone out there is getting away with multiple murders. How? Why? And most importantly, who?

Dark clouds loom in the Sunshine State.

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

My Review: Third book in a series now seven books in...first one I read...have now read them all.

Is that enough to cause that one-click to go into buy mode? No? Well, retired baseball player and private investigator Jake, his gal-pal Nicole, and dad/employer/owner of investigations agency Ray, land up in a tatty little Florida burg to solve a series of murders...again...as the serial killer who confessed now says there were two he confessed to that were not his crimes. Then he went all coy and refused to say which ones weren't his, or who really committed them. Though he says he knows that, too. And why's he saying it to Ray? Because someone rich wants the truth told about these two crimes. We do not get to know who.

Reluctantly leaving his retirement career as a bar owner—again—while he helps his dad and old friend Pancake (so nicknamed for his astonishing capacity for 'em) look into the likeliest place for a copycat to be found: the one town where three victims were killed not just one.

Nicole is absolutely not a reluctant sidekick, she is an eager participant in this investigation. Her uncle is a rich producer who helps out the scoobygroup by "filming a documentary" about victim's families in the aftermath of a serial killing. Perfect cover, holds up on all checkable points.

What will sell you on the read or repel you from it is the narrative: almost all in Jake's voice, reflecting his moods, reporting his impressions of friend and foe alike. He doesn't stop himself from saying when he thinks one of the friends makes a bonehead mistake to them or to us if he can't to them right away. It's not to everyone's taste. I like it because I like Jake, as when he observes,"The air held a salty must, and a gentle breeze came off the water. The sky was blue and pock-marked with wads of fluffy clouds." It's not poetic, it's a regular guy looking at the world his regular way. It's also exactly like the Gulf Coast.

The main feature that caps my rating at four stars is the fantasy-fulfillment of Nicole being the hot, funny babe who wants sex with Jake All. The. Time. I got adept at recognizing the signs of an impending...romp...and skipped ahead. I'm just not interested in that.


I was interested in the resolution, which surprised me with how well it was misdirected. It's logical; it's not obvious. What more can you ask for?

Fun in the sun for wintertime escape sound good? Here's a series to follow.

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

RIGGED (Jake Longly #4)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Love triangle—motive for double murder?

First loves are never forgotten. Ever. Certainly not for Tommy "Pancake" Jeffers. His first-kiss, sixth-grade love, Emily, who he has not seen since grammar school, is sliding toward divorce in the artsy Gulf Coast town of Fairhope, Alabama. Longly Investigations has been charged with looking into the finances involved. When Emily doesn't appear for their nervously anticipated meeting, Pancake's radar goes on high alert. Her body, along with that of Jason—one of two guys she has been dating—is found murdered, execution-style, Pancake calls in Jake, Nicole, and Ray.

Who would have done this? Could it be the soon-to-be ex, who has an ironclad alibi; the other guy Emily was seeing—jealousy being a motive for harm; or do the drugs found in Jason's pocket indicate a drug-related hit? That world yields a host of suspects. As they peel back the layers of this idyllic community, dark secrets come to light and convoluted motives and methods of murder are revealed.

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

My Review: We start with Jake in trouble. An incident at Captain Rocky's, his bar, requires Jake to call in his lawyer (who happens to be the same one who cleaned him out when his ex-wife divorced him) so he needs money. Luckily Ray, his dad, and Pancake, his dad's deputy muscle and Jake's kidhood pal, have a case. Nicole, Jake, and the scoobygroup head to Alabama to find out why Pancake's grade-school crush did not show up for their meeting. The discussion wasn't going to be about their long-ago first kiss but her need to know what her soon-to-be ex-husband is hiding from her financially.

That's a meeting she'd keep if she was on her deathbed. Not if she was dead, though. The way she and her paramour are murdered makes the entire group sit up and take notice. Was she a victim of wrong-place-wrong-time bad luck or do the drugs found on her paramour (one of two...maybe more) show a slightly more sordid side to her death?

Banter, fun asides, a murder to solve that's got more layers than you think it will have...this is what I was hoping and looking for from this series. It's here in abundance, along with icky straight-people sex. I was really amused by the invisible Tammy (Jake's ex) whose presence as a thorn in his side is all telephonic. It is a good way to add very quick hits of comedy that require little set-up but can change a mood immediately.

There is the preponderant first-person PoV from Jake, the expected moments of interpolation from different others in third person, and a satisfying resolution that comes from information the reader has already been given.

A winning entry in a good (oversexed, though) series.

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

THE OC (Jake Longly #5)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thrill-a-minute crime fiction—infused with wry humor

Restaurant owner and former professional baseball player Jake Longly is hoping for a few weeks of fun with Nicole Jamison in the warm Orange County, CA sun—The OC, baby. After that, they’ll be on their way to LA for the filming of Nicole’s sure-to-be-a-hit screenplay.

On arrival, they discover that Nicole’s friend Megan Weatherly, a local TV reporter, has picked up an anonymous stalker. Megan downplays any real danger, but her new intern Abby, as well as Jake and Nicole, don’t agree. Bit by bit, as the harassment escalates and the shadowy man invades Megan’s world, Jake calls in the big guns from back home in Ray and Pancake. But will Ray’s military black ops experience and Pancake’s technical skills be enough to expose the predator in time?

The stalker is no fool and likely has a predatory history. He makes no mistakes and manages to cover his trail completely. So, how do you identify and locate the untraceable? How do you protect Megan from a potentially lethal phantom?

Suddenly the sunshine and safety of The OC seem more facade than reality. Jake and crew must punch through that facade and dig into the dark world of celebrity stalking. The clock is ticking.

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

My Review: More daffy fun with the scoobygroup in the sunny surfside locales they favor. Only this time the water's frigid: The Pacific is so huge and so deep it's colder than their usual Gulf of Mexico bathwater warmth even in Southern California.

Pancake shines in more ways than size and muscle this outing. Stalking is a very real problem in the modern world. As Jake and Nicole hit the vacation spots in the OC, they're worried about Nicole's old friend having a stalker in escalation mode. Pancake's cyberskills show that her stalker is very cybersavvy. No usable traces in the threatening emails. Jake's dad Ray dusts off the black-ops military training that got him into the private investigation world in the first place, because everyone except old-friend Megan, who (understandably) tries to cope with the anxiety of being stalked by downplaying it. It's her good luck that everyone around her says "uh-huh" and moves right along investigating the stalking.

It all comes about for the scoobygroup because Nicole's screenplay, sold at last, is now being filmed! Murderwood is coming to life! In this way we're really prepared for Jake to be a plus-one on the entire action. He still narrates a lot of it but is more or less our eyes and ears instead of a mover and shaker. It is not as light-hearted as the earlier entries because the subject isn't really one where too much humor is available. After violence is done it's not retractable, so laughing doesn't feel as...inappropriate, awkward...as when one's trying to prevent violence.

Never fear, series fans, Jake's his irreverent self, only at two-thirds strength. The stalker is identified at last and all is well—it's a series, ma'at must be upheld at both ends—so we don't feel unsatisfied. It's fun; it's darker; it's got Nicole experiencing the moviemaking life at last.

It felt like a good time was had by all, in spite of the crazy person doing crappy things to a woman.

THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY, looking back nigh-on seventy years at a crime that rings familiar bells today

THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY (Inspector Onitsura #1)
TETSUYA AYUKAWA (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5 of five

The Publisher Says: THE JAPANESE CRIME FICTION CLASSIC: A prize-winning railway murder mystery set in 1960s Japan—for fans of Agatha Christie and Seicho Matsumoto! Full of devious twists and turns, this brilliant puzzle mystery is considered to be one of the greatest alibi deconstruction mysteries ever written

Early one morning, the owner of a local mill is found lying next to the railway tracks just outside of Kuki Station. Suspicion initially falls on the workers' union, with whom the man had been embroiled in a labour dispute, then on a new religious sect that has been gaining followers recently.

Chief Inspector Onitsura and his assistant Tanna are called in to investigate, and soon set off in a journey across Japan, from Tokyo to Kyoto and Osaka, and finally to the island of Kyūshu, in a hunt for the killer.

But as they investigate, the killer strikes again, and again. Will they be able to catch the murderer before even more people are slain?

Fans of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington and Seicho Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express will delight in the devious twists and turns of The Black Swan Mystery, as well as in the characterisation and portrait of 1960s Japan.

The author, Tetsuya Ayukawa, is considered to be the master of alibi deconstruction mysteries–a talent that is on full display in this brilliant classic railway murder mystery, which won the prestigious Japanese Detective Writers Club Prize.

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

My Review: I really struggled to apply the tag "historical mystery" to the 1960s setting of this story. It was written in the time period, and wasn't ever revised by the author to reflect later knowledge; but people born in the 1960s are (great-)grandparents as I have cause to know. Historical mystery it is.

Japan's train-riding culture is alive and well today unlike the US version. That alone makes this short novel feel very much like historical fiction in 2025. That and the clues being heavily involved in facts of train-riding culture, so harking back to another of Dame Agatha's classic mysteries, The ABC Murders. An interesting side note on the choice of trains as the setting for this story is that the author was an employee of Japan's imperial colonial railway system in Manchuria until that regime ended in 1944.

The death of a wealthy industrialist embroiled in an ugly labor dispute is seldom cause for me to weep. As ma'at must be preserved, and as those who transgress must be made to feel the weight of their arrogation of the power of life and death, I was reluctantly drawn into the procedural search for a murderer whose crime seemed reasonable to my id.

There is a lot of to-and-fro travel as Onitsura-san does his evidence-gathering...it felt a lot like a train-travel brochure at times...but the result is one of those logic puzzles that, when it comes together, one can't unsee the pattern. I'm not a sympathetic audience to those who holler about spoilers. In the case of intricate designs like this, however, any tiny hint of the real way the thing happened can feel just too revealing too soon. The pleasure of this Japanese crime classic is matching wits with the criminal beside the sleuth. I'll assert my inalienable human privilege to be inconsistent and decline to say more about the mystery bit.

I'll tell you instead about the reading experience. Translator Karetnyk did a very good job of enabling me to feel I was reading a fresh, new work. I was not given the occasionally inevitable experience of dislocation, of distance from the story being told about a culture not my own in a time gone by.

That's quality work, that is. I really hope it sparks a demand to translate the entire series of Onitsura stories...I'm here for 'em. See if you are too.

BONES UNDER THE ICE, Sheriff Jhonni Laurent series #1

BONES UNDER THE ICE (Jhonni Laurent #1)
MARY ANN MILLER
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Jhonni Laurent is the first female sheriff of Field’s Crossing, Indiana—and now she has her first murder case

Two days after a blizzard hits Field’s Crossing, Indiana, Sheriff Jhonni Laurent discovers the frozen body of a high school senior under a fifteen-foot pile of snow and ice. Murder is rare in farm country, and this death marks the beginning of Jhonni’s first homicide case.

Just as the investigation gets underway, Jhonni’s opponent for sheriff from four years ago wages a bitter reelection battle to oust her. Then, Jhonni finds another body, and further complications arise when a century-old feud between two families reaches its breaking point.

Soon, a slew of newspaper articles causes the Indiana State Election Board to doubt her credibility. Jhonni must fight to maintain her reputation, keep the small farming community together, and find the murderer at large—all while demons from her own past threaten to crush her. Can she find the killer and mend her battered spirit before it’s too late?

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

My Review: There's a lot of nastiness in any murder. No one should take to themselves the responsibility for ending another person's life without facing consequences. In the meantime there's a lot of truly tedious legwork to do to make those consequences come about. Jhonni Laurent does that slogging work.

Of course it starts with the victim: who the heck would hate a high-school senior enough to kill her? Is she a victim of her own behavior...a popular way to discredit women of all ages...or is she simply a victim? It's a puzzle Jhonni is not getting any help making headway on. Her (male) deputy is harboring a grudge at the election defeat she handed him when they both ran for sheriff. He's well-connected in town and willing to call in his favors to get Jhonni either recalled or simply scupper her re-election bid.

Fate steps in, so to speak, when a local pooh-bah is found dead in his ice-fishing hut. So is this a murder as well? Is this the same killer if it is a murder? These are all vexing questions for any law enforcement agency, let alone one run by a complete tyro to anything like this level of crime. Jhonni's asking questions, getting lied to, figuring out how to go about this, while she's under constant pressure from the local reporter (a good buddy of her resentful deputy's) and coping with her past coming back to meet her...literally.

Small-town wintertime setting, woman fighting for her literal life and livelihood, and passels of nasty secrets suppurating for generations, all get their moment in the story spotlight. It does rather feel like a spotlight, though; I'm clear who's doing what, but without a lot of why until we reach the resolution. It is all drawn together, and there's a resolution had; there's clearly got to be another book because there are *major* threads left unresolved.

I'll be here next time, though. Jhonni won me over with her ability to learn on the job, deal with more ugliness than any one person should have directed against them, while reckoning with her past better than most ever could. A terrific way to get away for a few hours without feeling you've wasted your time.

FACE OF GREED is Detective Emily Hunter's first outing

FACE OF GREED (Detective Emily Hunter #1)
JAMES L'ETOILE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Greed, corruption, and betrayal—no murder is as simple as it seems

When a prominent Sacramento businessman is killed and his wife injured in a brutal home invasion, Detective Emily Hunter and her partner, Javier Medina, are called to investigate. At first glance, it seems like a crime of opportunity gone horribly wrong, but Emily soon finds there might be more to both the crime and the dead man.

The high-stakes investigation also comes at a time when Emily is caring for her mother, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Emily struggles to balance her job with her personal life. The city’s political elite seem to want the case solved quickly, but darker forces want it buried.

Could there have been a motive behind the attack, making it more than a random home invasion? Emily uncovers clues that cause her to reconsider her understanding of the crime. A deadly game of greed and deception pulls Emily deeper into the shadowy world of gang violence and retribution. She has to walk the razor’s edge to identify the killer—without becoming the next victim.

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

My Review: I was inspired to pick this book for a review by Luigi Mangione's case developments...most state charges dismissed, the fate of the evidence prosecutors wish to present uncertain. This novel predates that alleged crime by several years but still has resonances with it...powerful people want a conviction, other forces don't want any such thing for intense, irreconcilable forces each competing for their purpose to prevail.

As a procedural, Emily and Javier lead us through the maze of conflicting evidence. Their detecting seems to be run on vibes, the leads they follow up assessed and occasionally dismissed based on things I found unconvincing. In the end, Author L'Etoile crochets it all into one big design that was, once you've seen it, inevitable; it just takes a shift of your idea of the violent thing that happened to see.

Emily, as our lead detective and primary PoV, gets the majority of the development in the story. Her personal life is complicated by a mother with early-onset dementia and the urgently needed carer for mom living in her house. It adds stress to her already stressful life. In a lot of ways I felt Emily was responding to some...irregularities...in a key witness's account of what seems on the surface to be a terrible but random act with her own pent-up frustrations. Equally it can be argued that her pushback against what's clearly an attempt to shut her and Javier's fact-finding down before embarrassing truths are revealed is sharpened by that frustration.

Author L'Etoile moves the story along at a solidly even clip. I was no more done with emotionally processing a domestic event of Emily's than a key piece of evidence is suddenly...shifted...like playing Uno when the reverse card smacks you. It's deft, it's handled well, and it exemplifies his chops as a writer and plotter of mysteries. I was always ready to dismiss the case because it's clearly not one the PTB think needs a real resolution just a speedy end. It turns out Emily has a lot of stiffness of spine. She needs it as a woman in a misogynistic world and as a support for an increasingly dependent mother.

Quite a lot of cussin' and discussin' of women in sexualized terms happens. It's not presented in a way meant to titillate but in a matter-of-fact evocation of the milieu the characters inhabit. It will bother some, so be prepared for it or make your decision to read accordingly. I think the grittier edge it gives is both appropriate and within ordinary peoples' boundaries.

As is often the case with procedural stories, the whodunit bit of the story is almost less important than the whydunit bit. The motives for this crime are in the title; the blowback from Emily and Javier following leads is in the title; it was very clear, when I got to the proper perspective point in the story, why this particular man was killed.

Can't say I'm sorry to know he's dead. I suspect you won't be either.

REMI BONE, funny...serious...fun the way the best of crime novels can be

REMI BONE
WILLIAM L. MYERS Jr.
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Single father Remi Bone knows that his daughter’s Ivy League education will cost an arm and a leg . . . or a few bodies

Remi Bone is a good guy. He’s a hardworking mechanic, a single father raising his late wife’s daughter, and now, he’s dying of heart failure. But his daughter Kayla was just admitted to the college of her dreams. How will she afford college with two dead parents?

Before he dies, Remi decides to stockpile as much money as possible for Kayla’s future. When a chance to participate in a lucrative gun-for-hire scheme arises, Remi, out of desperation, agrees to execute a hit on a shady Philadelphia drug dealer.

This becomes only the first of several murders Remi is hired for, and soon, Remi’s the most sought-after hitman in town—both by his clients and by the police. He leaves investigators little to work with, but ear witnesses identify him by the phrase he recites before each “Tick tock says the clock, time’s up . . . ”With the police catching on to the “Tick Tock Killer,” Remi has to work quickly to earn enough money for Kayla’s school—all while ensuring he dies with a clean record. Tick tock.

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

My Review: The "good-guy-does-'bad'-for-good" trope is fun to read. I like Breaking Bad despite Walter White's odiousness, so no matter Remi's traits I was ready to give him a fair shake. Turns out I like him fine, he's a stand-up guy who faces an ugly death by thinking of the child he loves not his own little self.

The uncharitable might also say he's in denial, running away from the end of a life he thinks is not worth living anymore. I think maybe both are true, and neither are as complete explanations as Remi's character supports. Author Myers, a lawyer by trade, knows how to put on layers of implication and unstated emotional truths. Remi turning to being a hit-man, one who kills only the ones who need killin' as I often say, is factually stockpiling money for his stepdaughter's future. But why turn to it now? Because, with a deadline (!) fast approaching he isn't going to face consequences. He can do the right, but illegal, thing. He has courage at last.

Why not before? And how is this pile of suddenly-acquired money he's leaving Kayla going to be explained to the IRS without causing her huge problems? Are the Authorities and the bosses ignorant of who he is? It's the reason I give this read over four stars that the answer is no to all these questions. Remi's, umm, sordid past isn't foregrounded to the point one thinks he's expiating sins, but is added to explain things that enable him to turn forty-five degrees from a law-abiding life.

What kept the fifth star from manifesting was an ending so rushed, so chaotic, that I felt I was watching a montage of Pulp Fiction, Bullitt, and The French Connection. I'm always about the dismount as much as the story-dressage. I think this book, at under 300pp, might've benefited from ~50pp more to wind things up more comprehensibly. Still a ride I'm glad I took. I think anyone who enjoys a leavening of humor in their crime fiction, a load of pathos, and a really easy-to-root-for protagonist will enjoy this trip on Philly's dark side.

DROWNING IN THE DESERT: A Nevada Noir Novel

DROWNING IN THE DESERT: A Nevada Noir Novel
BERNARD SCHOPEN
University of Nevada Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Desert stillness meets the cacophony of Las Vegas.

Norman “Fats” Rangle, an ex–deputy sheriff, operates a horse stabling and excursion business with his brother and sister-in-law on their family ranch in the small rural community of Blue Lake, a few hours outside of Las Vegas. By chance, high on a southern Nevada mountain range, Fats discovers the wreckage of a plane that crashed two years earlier. Although he reports his find to the sheriff, he does not disclose that someone had already been to the crash site—evidence that Fats deliberately destroyed.

Soon, Fats is tracking back and forth between Las Vegas and Blue Lake in a search for a missing cousin, a briefcase full of cash, and, finally, for a killer. Along the way, Fats also begins to understand that he’s searching for himself and his place in a rapidly changing West.

Angry and alienated, Fats distrusts everyone he meets, from sleaze-merchants and political power brokers to two women: one he wants to believe in, a retired judge; and the other, a police sergeant, he can’t quite believe isn’t deceiving him. After all, in this Nevada, corruption is a given. Everybody lies. Much is uncertain—motives, loyalties, affections. But in Drowning in the Desert, one thing is certain: water is a precious resource that can both kill and be killed for.

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

My Review: One thing I think people in the rest of the developed world do not "get" about the western US is the absolute centrality of water to all local politics. At no time is the subject of the water supply, water rights, and the technology of water treatment far from the center of local talk.

I enjoyed this noir novel as much for its setting as for its story because Author Schopen gets this in his native-westerner bones. Born in Deadwood, South Dakota—how could he not? I also appreciated the fact that his sleuth is an angry, bitter man because he's been turfed out of the job of Sheriff he sought by someone more physically attractive. His record was good...the other guy would not be called "Fats" as a nickname so he was ghosted out of the job.

After Fats' cousin and ranch hand vanishes after saying he was going into Vegas to see a girl, Fats needs to find out what happened and get him back...if he can. Investigating comes naturally to Fats after twenty years in law enforcement so off he follows the trail, reluctantly it must be said as he'd rather just live his life. What he discovers is surprising. A crashed small plane near Blue Lake, which seems odd because in his job he should've known about it even though it wasn't in his former jurisdiction. Reporting his discovery to the new, attractive sheriff gets him nowhere.

Except in the sights of the people who lost the plane. It had illicit cargo that they badly want back. And in following his cousin to Vegas, Fats discovers he was boasting of having a lot of money. The penny drops...now the disappearance, the sudden interest in him from people he'd never dealt with before, and the local water wars the current sheriff isn't working to resolve all make sense.

It's fun for me to revisit the West in a realistic way. I found the necessary exaggerations that make novels fiction relatively mild in this story. If you expect noir to be gory, there's no need to fuss, this is a very unviolent example of the genre. We're following Fats as he pieces together the trail his cousin blazed then the skulduggery the politicos are up to in order to profit from Las Vegas' insatiable need for water.

Resolutions in noir fiction get to be morally ambiguous. It is part of their charm. I enjoyed this story across multiple axes. I'm going to recommend it for Yuletide escape reading because nothing needs more escape from than Togetherness and Fats' ambiguity about rescuing his cousin reinforces the fact that family is complicated. Sometimes maddening. But in the end, no matter how much your inner Schweinhund urges you to stay on the sofa, you're rewarded for doing the right thing...even if only internally.

Satisfying puzzle, terrific setting got right for once.

THE MEIJI GUILLOTINE MURDERS, seeing the birth of Japan's modern police

THE MEIJI GUILLOTINE MURDERS
FUTARO YAMADA (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic Japanese mystery—a pair of sleuths investigate a series of bloody murders in 19th century Tokyo

A captivating locked room murder mystery perfect for fans of Stuart Turton and Janice Hallett!

Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion.

Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them?

Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan's greatest crime writers.

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

My Review: One of those wonderfully Japanese locked-room puzzles that regularlt defeat me, forcing me to rethink my self-image as an experienced mystery solver, all while the author's playing fair with the reader. It's exhilarating.

You read that right. I find being bested in these contests fun because I need to feel challenged in order to feel awake not simply trudging ox-like in the ruts already worn in. Chief Inspector Kawaji Toshiyoshi (a real historical man who established Japan’s modern police force) and his colleague, the fictional Chief Inspector Keishiro Kazuki, of the new Imperial Prosecuting Office, each feel that way as well. They decide to keep themselves sharp by engaging in a rivalry over the case resolutions each attains...to demonstrate they're both the cream of the crop, to share triumphs and get input on tougher cases.

Meiji Japan must've been as exciting a place to live as 1960s London as the stifling fog of overweening tradition was beginning to lift. It extended into such modern ideas as policing, crminal prosecution, and execution of the condemned. Kazuki, whose naming convention was altered to Western style while he was living in France (!!!–a Japanese person voluntarily living abroad!) returns to his new appointment to the Imperial Prosecuting Office to fight the scourge of corruption that lingers from the Shogunate's old-style power dynamics. Kazuki believes passionately in merit and fairness, being the beneficiary of them. He also returned with two guillotines: one device, one woman. The Frenchwoman Esmeralda Guillotine is Kazuki's mistress and a trained...medium/mystic/seer.

Kawaji is more of the old school, more deferential, more traditional..but steely in his determination to see crime and corruption extirpated. He is less the big-picture man in the dynamic duo of this novel (while it is seventh in the Japanese series order, it works fine as an introduction to it). A number of details he spots are crucial to resolving the seven cases in this novel. I feel it's more a braided-stories novel, but with far more robust linking material than that description usually implies.

Esmeralda was the real surprise to me. Kazuki bringing an intimate partner back from France where she faces truly appalling racism and equal fascination from the Japanese was the touch that set the stories apart. Her central contribution to crime resolutions isn't from detection but from more...esoteric...sources. I enjoyed this flip from the usual stereotype of Eastern mysticism I see in Western fiction: the exotic Westerner has access to the Beyond! she can help us!. And she does.

I hope Pushkin Vertigo commissions more translations of this series. It's very high-quality reading for the ma'at addicts. A wonderful, pausable way to distract yourself briefly from Yule duties, or an immersive read depending on your need of the moment.