THE MINIMALIST, music is a hard, demanding master to serve

THE MINIMALIST
KAILEE PEDERSEN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Tár and The Piano Teacher, this gruesome and unsettling psychological drama is a darkly lucid portrait of a classical composer’s descent into madness.

As the last and greatest student of famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield, Mia Voss’s rise to prominence in the insular world of classical music has long been assured. When Ryder dies unexpectedly, she inherits everything—including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, the mysterious Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra.

Haunted by memories of her tragic romance with Ryder’s late son, Oliver—like Mia, an Asian American adoptee—Mia leaves her girlfriend behind and returns to Ryder’s home to finish his last work. There, Mia is forced to confront her complex relationship with Ryder, who hid his Jewish and gay identities to become one of the most important twentieth-century American composers; her lingering guilt over Oliver’s suicide; and her own musical ambition as the manuscript begins to exert a disturbing, mesmerizing hold over her.

Drawn from the author’s own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, The Minimalist is a harrowing examination of loss, torment, mental illness, self-harm, and artistic self-destruction.

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My Review: Music is not a career, a job, or even a calling so much as an identity. "A musician" is not always employed making music, but they are still a musician. Those whose income derives from whatever facet of performance or creation are not *more* musicianly but simply luckier.

Or maybe not.

My second Kailee Pedersen read gave me deeply unsettling dreams about the (to me) horrifying psychological agony of being A Musician who is simply unfit for other work. Its Procrustean demands, its necessary or sometimes just conveniently available pressures to conform to a standard of self-presentation can cause deep psychological wounds. As the astonishingly complex intersectionality of Mia's identities are laid bare in her reckoning with Oliver, Ryder, adoption, musicianship, we're drawn into her psychic damage. It's horror, it's horrifying, it's horripilating as it unfolds in Author Pedersen's words. I had never once given any thought to the true extent extant in the phrase "putting oneself into one's work," but I will not be using that phrase lightly in future.

Is music a thing, an entity outside us? Is a musician possessed by music? Or does the rigorous mathematical nature of composing and performing music simply attract creative people with obsessive personalities? I don't know; I didn't even know to ask the question before I read this story. It is the best kind of reading experience for me, that. When an author's chosen story gives my endlessly curious brain something new to chew over, to turn at unusual angles so I can see its lumps and rough patches, I am deeply satiated and grateful.

So where's that fifth star? That all adds up to a rave review, doesn't it? It does; tempered with a slight squeamishness. It's often the case in body horror stories that I, on the rare occasions I buy into the horror elements, think "that right there is a bridge too far." I got there during this read. A whole half-star's worth of there. *shudder* I don't think many gore-readers will batten on the careful, attentive buildup of the story, either; it's really, despite the shuddersome bit, a psychological unraveling story where the unraveled bits also form mummy-wrapping strips of Mia's psychology.

It was a fascinating reading experience. I am reinforced in my high opinion of Author Pedersen's storytelling eye. I am also never going to be able to listen to music blithely, unthinkingly appreciating the sounds in the air...I'll be ever afterward aware of how much music costs the creators.

And how much of themselves they put into it.

LEV A.C. ROSEN'S PAGE: THE DISASTER GAY DETECTIVE AGENCY & EVANDER MILLS P.I. SERIES #1, #4

THE DISASTER GAY DETECTIVE AGENCY
LEV A.C. ROSEN
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From award—winning, critically acclaimed crime writer Lev Rosen comes a punchy, hilarious mystery—thriller. Meet the disaster gays: They're messy. They're queer. And they're about to solve a murder… Or die trying.

Brandon is a hopeless romantic. So when a handsome stranger named Jon checks in at the hotel he works at and invites Brandon to his room, Brandon ignores the advice of his crew—a group of loveable and messy queer twenty—somethings—and accepts. What follows is a tale as old as time: they hook up, Jon promises to text, Brandon falls in love, and Jon ghosts. Case closed—or is it?

When Jon checks out early, leaving behind a bag of belongings and his cellphone, Brandon takes the phone and sets out to find him, thinking that this must at last be his Cinderella story.

But he gets more than he bargained for when he witnesses a murder—and sees Jon fleeing the scene.

Determined (and not in over their heads whatsoever), Brandon, Ollie, Nicole, and Ian decide to solve the mystery of the murder and uncover Jon's true identity…they just have to figure it out before a target falls on their own backs.

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My Review: Those heady first friendships, the ones you really learn how to adult by forming and inhabiting...they're deep and they're still important to older you because you are formed by them for better and worse.

Here we are among Brandon, Ollie, Nicole, and Ian as they navigate the first changes in the structures that supported them. It's usually a significant other arriving or one departing. Most of us have been through that.

Few of us have had a potential love discovered in what looks like a guilty act at what certainly is a murder scene, like Brandon.

What ensues is the scoobygroup all pitching in to resolve Brandon's maybeboyfriend's involvement (if any) in the murder he was seen running away from the scene of. Naturally this means they need to solve the murder. A lot like Dame Agatha's Five Little Pigs we're treated to the scoobygroup's individual PoVs on the investigation and on the unfolding issue of who it is Brandon's found himself to fall for. I think the technique is one that works or fails on your readerly taste for the writing style. Author Lev uses a solidly comedic register throughout the story, giving the different scoobygoupers reasonably distinctive voices and just enough difference in what they see to keep me focused.

I don't want to tell you there's a rom-com vibe to the proceedings because that suggests the group will be all matched up by the end of the story. It's not like that, though the bantering suggests it will be in the formula of rom-com. I was partly glad that it didn't end up in the predictable couplings. It certainly would've been...forced...unless they found partners outside the scoobygroup.

All said, I was pretty convinced this was really a screenplay made novel-like because Author Lev's a well-established force at Poisoned Pen Press. It was almost obtrusive how filmable, how designed for visual scenes, this story is. I'm not saying that as a knock, I found myself reading happily along with the movie playing in my mental Grauman's Egyptian Theater in 70mm CinemaScope. It was a hoot!

I can't quite attach a full fifth star. I felt the reality, the full gravity, of the events the scoobygroup uncovered really sat uneasily with the narrative technique. Still, four and a quarter stars for the chaotic energy of the story, the sheer verve of the cast for their different roles and discoveries as the truth and the facts begin to converge...it was immersive to me, will feel like the spin cycle of your washing machine for others.

I expect we'll see more from the Disaster Gays. I'll be there.

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

LAVENDER HOUSE (Evander Mills #1)
LEV A.C. ROSEN
Forge Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A delicious story from a new voice in suspense, Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House is Knives Out with a queer historical twist.

Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in.

Irene’s widow hires Evander Mills to uncover the truth behind her mysterious death. Andy, recently fired from the San Francisco police after being caught in a raid on a gay bar, is happy to accept—his calendar is wide open. And his secret is the kind of secret the Lamontaines understand.

Andy had never imagined a world like Lavender House. He's seduced by the safety and freedom found behind its gates, where a queer family lives honestly and openly. But that honesty doesn't extend to everything, and he quickly finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy—and Irene’s death is only the beginning.

When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever. Running a soap empire can be a dirty business.

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My Review: First in a new series of gay-led private-eye mysteries. Set in 1952 San Francisco, borning and burgeoning gay Mecca on the cusp of the Lavender Scare that was the less-famous shadow of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, the story concerns a murder within the quiet confines of rich queers. Queerness has always been more or less tolerated among the wealthy...Peter Thiel and Sam Altman aren't being shouted about on the screamy white guys channel, faggots though they are...whereas guys like our sleuth have to live with police harassment and the possibility of ghastly consequences for one's life if outed.

As is always the case in a mystery series, I recommend starting here at book one to get the foundational ethos of the sleuth...in this case Evander Mills, called Andy, a private investigator whose specialty will become among the queer community he once helped to oppress. These are taxpayers who cannot expect helpful, effective action on their problems from the police. Andy becomes a discreet and effective investigator. This time his talents are required by the wealthy and privileged, who *still* can't reliably command the services of police without facing ugliness. Andy's never been in that world before. He's dazzled by it...he's coming to terms with how people like he once was have perpetuated a cruelty they've inflicted as much as received.

Andy's learning how much his skills are needed among those who he honed them against. The emotional heart of the novel is his coming to terms with his own awful past, his awful actions, and what he can do as an adult (emotionally speaking) to help people who can't expect it if they're honest and truthful about themselves.

It's a story I thoroughly enjoyed, told in a voice I resonated well with, about people who belonged to a generation I had family among. I'll pursue the series with the zeal of a vice cop.

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

MIRAGE CITY (Evander Mills #4)
LEV A.C. ROSEN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Lev AC Rosen delivers a new and captivating 1950s mystery in this dazzling, award-winning series

Private Investigator Evander “Andy” Mills’ next case takes him out of his comfort zone in San Francisco—and much to his dismay, back home to Los Angeles. After a secretive queer rights organization called the Mattachine Society enlists Andy to find some missing members, he must dodge not only motorcycle gangs and mysterious forces, but his own mother, too.

Avoiding her proves to be a challenge when the case leads Andy to the psychological clinic she works at. Worlds collide, buried secrets are dug up, and Andy realizes he’s going to have to burn it all down this time if he wants to pull off a rescue. With secret societies, drugs, and doctors swirling around him, time is running out for Andy to locate the missing and get them to safety. And for him to make it back to San Francisco in one piece.

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My Review: In the time of the Lavender Scare, there was an equal and opposite reaction from the Mattachine Society among mostly gay men and the Daughters of Bilitis among lesbians. These brave souls were fighting for recognition that is now under threat...queers are just plain ol' people, entitled by their basic common humanity to equal access to civilization's resources. Laws are applied unequally in most of the world but aggressively so among queer folk. These early rights-seekers were incredibly brave, very effective, and thus targeted.

Enter Andy Mills to a missing persons case among these pioneering souls. Investigating the possible crime(s) Andy discovers things most extraordinarily awful happening to queer people simply because they were guilty of being Other. It was a time where moral panic among high-control lunatics was at fever pitch. At this same moment the Comics Code Authority was established along the lines of the Hays Code for the movies to forestall the government imposing censorship. This also neatly sidestepped the remedy of suing the government for unconstitutional infringement of free-speech rights, ensuring the abusive restrictions on representing queer people positively could continue.

Andy's case takes him deep into the consequences of this system's probably intended consequences. It was tough to read at times. It was worse to live, as is always the case in rougher-edged fiction. Shifting Andy's field of action, however reluctant he was to do so, to LA from San Francisco, allowed me to see him wrong-footed, still determined, and ultimately successful in resolving the case. How, I won't say because the Spoiler Stasi always lurk in readiness to shout their unhappiness at your disobedience to their iron whims.

It's book four in a series I've only read book one of, yet I got the development of Andy's character that's continued on the trajectory set in the first book. It would've been an even richer experience had I read two and three, but I'll get back to them soon enough. This series combines gay history's dark corners and one man's coming into his queerness more and more in an effective mélange of meddlesome meanness combatively counteracted.

TEMPORARY PALACES: A Novel, lovely reckoning with the past story

TEMPORARY PALACES: A Novel
JEFF MILLER
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the fevered summer of 2001, charismatic activist Rob and his collective set up a squat in an abandoned house. His bandmate and lover, Ben, watches anxiously as his own plans are threatened by Rob’s choice of radical politics over music. Meanwhile, photographer Alex finds herself torn between documenting the chaos of the scene and saving the friendship that binds them together. When the police break up the squat, Rob vanishes, and the dream dies.

Ten years later, Alex and Ben find each other again—she’s conquering Montreal’s contemporary art world, he’s running a thriving restaurant in Ottawa. But their success feels hollow. As they excavate their shared past, they must confront the ghost of Rob’s disappearance and the trauma that pushed them apart.

Pulsing with the raw energy of basement punk shows and DIY creativity, late-night manifestos and first heartbreaks, Temporary Palaces is a blazing debut that captures a generation caught between idealism and survival, art and activism, the dreams that define us and the compromises that save us.

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My Review: Youthful idealism and the irrepressible need to create meet, collide, intertwine, then break apart. After decades apart, two survivors of these intense youthful heartbreaks meet again and start sorting out the pieces of everyone's wreckage. They each have some from the other, and from vanished Rob, and both have used these bits and shrapnel to create the less volatile selves needed for settled adulthood.

They've each built a life that suits their ideas of themselves as developed in the nuclear reactor of Changing The World, but haven't seen each other as they've done that building. The mercurial, elusive Rob, on the other hand, left lots of shards in their souls. Coming to terms with wild, passionate love that explodes is probably one of the most relatable love stories ever written. Alex isn't sure she can sort out her feelings, Ben is sure he can't despite his now-grounded life doing the most nurturing, practical thing anyone can do: feeding people for a living.

Alternating PoVs per chapter kept the momentum of each character's story moving at a solid pace. I never lost sight of their personal or mutual struggles with the way the past-them blew stuff up, made their passionate connection into sharp flying pieces of toxic pain that flew into each other as well as shoved their greatly belovèd Rob away. Neither knew then that guys like Rob, men on a mission to tear shit down and burn the pieces, never stay in one place, never settle into the lovely mundanity of learning one other person's heart well enough to recite their tells. This story is the pair of them finding out what passion costs, how long you have to pay the interest on its loan of excitement, and what illusions sustained them that might still be viable.

Nostalgia for that time in life I can understand and share. I recall the Aughties very, very differently from these characters. Of course, the US is not Canada and a middle-aged man is not an idealistic young person embarking on life. My take on Author Miller's novel is one of seeing a story unspool, taking an interest in it, and remaining at a remove because it wasn't my past.

A pleasure to read all the same.

STAKEOUTS AND STROLLERS, award-winning debut cozy amateur-sleuth mystery

STAKEOUTS AND STROLLERS
ROB PHILLIPS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Amateur private investigator and new dad Charlie Shaw gets more than he bargained for when he agrees to track down a young girl’s missing father in Rob Phillips’ award-winning debut.

Charlie Shaw is low on sleep. And cash. Otherwise, life is going pretty well for the ex-crime reporter: He’s happily married to his college sweetheart, he’s a first-time dad to the most adorable baby girl in existence, and he’s making ends meet as a rookie PI. But when Charlie meets Friday Finley, a frightened sixteen-year-old runaway on a stakeout-gone-wrong, his world gets a little more complicated.

Friday is looking for her estranged father Shawn, an unreliable alcoholic who left when she was young—and who also happens to be her only shot at avoiding the foster care system since her mother’s death a few weeks earlier. At first, Charlie believes the man is simply hiding out somewhere, avoiding his responsibilities as usual, but the more he investigates, the more unsettling—and dangerous—Shawn’s disappearance becomes. When his own family is threatened, Charlie realizes he’s in over his head, but can he back out now that he’s begun to care for Friday as his own?

A perfect blend of humor and high stakes, Stakeouts and Strollers is a heartwarming story of fatherhood, family, and what it really means to be a “Girl Dad.”

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My Review: This story won the 2024 Minotaur Books/Malice Domestic Best First Mystery Novel...an "award-winning debut" just sounds odd, at least to me it does.

There's little doubt in my mind that it deserved the award, though. Charlie Shaw was a newspaper crime reporter who, when laid off as it seems all must be in pursuit of more for the ownership class, pivots to using his detecting skills as an actual detective. This is not quite as easy as it might sound, since in addition to losing his reporting job, he's just become a dad for the first time. It's important to the plot: he's so besotted with his baby girl, he has her crib monitor up on his phone at all times thus using up his battery; when he needs to use the camera to document the identity of cheating spouse's side piece, he's got no juice to make the shot. This leads to closer involvement in the perpetrator's life than is healthy...for lots of reasons, Charlie should not get deep into this divorce.

Yet here we are.

Red herrings abound. Ryan, Charlie's wife and co-parent, is in a high position in her company so Charlie's flexible PI schedule makes this job perfect for new parenting, but also means he's sleep-deprived at weird moments so Ryan's making adjustments too. It's a story that brings the stuff of real life into its fictional plot in well-judged ways. All the players in the story are embroiled in family dynamics that give them depth greater than surface level. They all move through life making themselves crazy over trifles, worrying about how to connect better with their families, thinking about what to do to face problems and fix mistakes. It's a very good enhancement to a pretty standard PI plot.

What really sold me on the read was Charlie himself. He's narrating the events with a constant self-deprecating edge of humor. When violent things occur, it's not minimized by his sardonic edge. It's a different register from most PI mysteries, so it comes across as...surprising? fresh?...not as expected, anyway, which is greatly to the story's benefit and Author Phillips' credit.

I can't offer a fifth star, however, due to some squicky stuff around sexism. It's always down to male-gazery isn't it? Noticing and complimenting other women on their appearance, barely avoiding openly comparing his new-mother/full-time executive wife's body and style changes to pretty young things. The "night nurse" Ryan and Charlie employ is more a housekeeper than a nurse, uncomplainingly cleaning, caring for Baby Callie, then taking on a new caretaking job for a teen thanks to Charlie's impulsiveness. It's a stylistic choice to make the story very talky by having dialogue function as exposition at times...why would a man's wife say out loud that his sister died when he was a kid?...which is a trap as often as a bonus chance for emotional resonance.

I'll skip past some stuff that's all on the editor, because the author needs to be able to trust the guidance he's given. Our villain ain't a mystery for long; there are enough red herrings to make it plausible the villain might just be a shitty human being but I pegged the identity early on. *tsk* on you, Editor! Not factored into my rating.

I'd recommend the read, flaws and all, because Charlie's a particular kind of Guy, not a dudebro, not a Cinnamon Roll, but a regular ol' Guy you'll meet on a barstool, at a barbecue, in a post-office line. He means well, he's got a good attitude, he isn't interested in ragey stupid testosterone-y 'tude. I like him, and I think you might too. Get it from the library, by all means, but it's worth getting.

ALMOST LIFE, the ghostly sound of unrung bells in unlived lives

ALMOST LIFE
KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Two young women meet in Paris in this decades-spanning tour de force about the enduring power of young love and the poignant heartbreak of missed chances—perfect for fans of One Day and Normal People.

Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, 1978. Erica is a student, relishing her first summer abroad before beginning university at home in England. Laure is studying for her PhD at the Sorbonne, drinking and smoking far too much, and sleeping with a married woman. The moment the two women meet, the spark is undeniable, but their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make…

Erica and Laure’s love story spans decades, marriage, children, secret trysts, and the agonizing changes—both personal and political—that might mean they can be together, after all. But when life brings them within touching distance again, will they be brave enough to seize a future together?

Beautifully capturing young love and all its complexities, Almost Life is a story of longing for the paths not taken, and the almost lives we live.

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My Review: Messy lives are so much more interesting than tidy, orderly ones. Messy for the right reasons...like being in love with two people for the usual complex, complicated reasons we humans fall in love...make for even better, more involving reading. Then there's the ultimate messiness of not being able to decide what to do about any of it. That is the most relatable thing of them all.

Of course, the emotional cost of being in two equally important relationships...well, grief and guilt and anger are spread around pretty thickly, pretty widely, and really heavily. Erica and Laure are connected but in ways that are demanding, requiring choices to be made. Erica is the one with A Plan (children, career as a novelist), so she chooses her Plan over the loose, freeing love of Laure (that will never get her one step closer to fulfilling her Plan).

Laure. Her plan for life is to love, to make love, to build around her loving chosen family of outsider misfit gay folk a nexus of happiness and support. As this story begins in 1978, I needn't tell older readers what was about to ram into the walls of the world...suffice, for those who were not there, to say that COVID was not the first deadly plague that came out of nowhere your elders faced. Laure being in the gay world of Paris feels it, bears it, as it scythes through her circle of loved ones. Erica, insulated in marriage and children, feels it less, but she feels love for Laure and the deeply conflicted happy delights and miserable lows of being a human in a family.

Author Hargrave is not going to trudge through the lives of Laure and Erica, taking us into bedrooms and kitchens and school meetings; we hop and bounce and move through their worlds, seldom seeing them together, but always connecting, and always dreaming of what might have been if....

It's a technique whose use means that a reader wanting a saga, a densely woven tapestry of emotional connections explored and explained, is not going to be satisfied. This story explores how the truly, intensely important loves in our lives crystallize us. Shaping the futire is not all that often a deliberate act, despite the mountains of books and stories that tell us we can take charge, we can direct our own life-movie. Erica meeting Laure awoke to her bisexuality, and I am here on this Earth to tell you that sexual awakening is not under the awakened's conscious control and is seldom a force for good until lots of painful lessons about emotions and plans gone awry are learned. Erica and Laure set in motion changes and processes of healing and cycles of misery and destruction in their lives. Lives lived, of course, but more interestingly roads not taken. These are the strands of Author Hargrave's story that sang and shimmered in my mind's eye.

I must say that this technique militates against deeper explorations of the women's relationship to each other. There is an inevitable sense of unsettledness, of being in motion without being headed in any particular direction, as a price exacted for seeing into the "almost lives" that pepper every person's experience—without most of us being aware of them, aware of their ghosts anyway.

I'm sure this story would ignite terrific book club discussions. It's tailor-made for the present moment of multiple inflection points converging on unknowable futures that preclude each other. Well worth your time and treasure.

THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR, aaarrrgh earworm earworm!!

THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR
WADE ROUSE
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this poignant and hilarious story inspired by TV’s beloved The Golden Girls, bestselling author Wade Rouse celebrates love, aging, finding your people, and the art of impeccably timed one-liners.

Theodore Copeland has created a fabulous life in the desert oasis of Palm Springs, where he shares a fabulous pink mid-century home with three fabulous friends: Barry, a former actor still clinging to his youth, his hair, and the memory of the dream role that killed his career; Ron, an uprooted Christian from the Midwest with a big heart but no one to give it to; Sid, who, after coming out late in life, has never found love. Teddy is the caustic, unspoken leader of “The Golden Gays”—the foursome’s monthly drag tribute to The Golden Girls. Despite their foibles and bickering, they have turned their golden years into a golden era.

But the harmony of their desert enclave becomes a carousel of emotional baggage when Teddy’s estranged sister, Trudy, shows up on their doorstep, her dramatic teenage granddaughter in tow. While Teddy keeps Trudy at arm’s length, she manages to wheedle her way into the lives of the Golden Gays, until the real reason for her visit is revealed and the secrets they’ve all been keeping from each other unravel faster than a hastily stitched hemline.

A novel that gives thanks to “old” friends, That's What Friends Are For proves that while family may be the tie that binds, it’s the chosen family that truly keeps us together.

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My Review: Four older...old, "of a certain age" is such an absurd weasel-wording...gay guys live in Zsa Zsa Gabor's Palm Springs home, in the absence of other places to be as they live out their invisibility, bond to each other the way the Golden Girls did, and perform as a drag troup reenacting episodes of the show.

You need to be charmed by the premise to enjoy the book. I was; I did.

It was more true to the spirit of the show than I expected. In novel form, that meant packing in a lot of trauma recall, a lot of wistful nostalgia, a lot of regrets for pasts "misspent" in all the ways people do that, in not a lot of space. The gestalt of these four charmers is just *chef's kiss* and the repartee flows like Veuve Cliquot from a marabou mule. (Zsa Zsa is, after all, the former owner of their house.)

If no one is currently in development talks for this book it will utterly stun me. Heartstopper for the teens, Heated Rivalry for the horny adults, That's What Friends Are For representing the generation that fought these stupid necessary battles for all y'all that seem to've been erased from the collective memory. *ahem* I meant to say "the seasoned citizens." Of course I did.

Celebrating found family, talking honestly about what life looks like as "The End" hoves into view without crowding you (yet), flexing the wicked-humor muscles developed from years of deflecting nastiness...it's a grown person's happy place, this. Drama arises because humans create drama the same way we breathe—automatically—but it never feels calculated, like Author Rouse said "let me rile these queens up now" while twirling his mustachios. I bought into the dynamics he built, accepted the moments when the men had trouble dealing with things as natural and inevitable. Author Rouse uses the conflicts the way a good therapist urges one to use them: get to know your friend better, get to know yourself better, apply kindness and acceptance like the balm it truly is, and move on.

A big issue in the story is staying stuck. It's a huge issue in almost everyone's life, from what I can tell. It's good to see it addressed openly, with candor, and in such a humorous setting. (I admit I want to bash Barry for chasing his long-past youth. Grow up!!) What Author Rouse has done is deliver a warm-hearted, clear-eyed, just sentimental enough look at the unforgiving terminal illness of Getting Old, in a relatable and enjoyable visible way denied to queer folk by our heteronormative culture.

Kudos! More soon? Please?

DETOUR: A Novel, first in a proposed series, ends on a cliffhanger

DETOUR: A Novel (Detour #1)
JEFF RAKE and ROB HART
Random House Worlds (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

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

My Review: I'd never heard of the Netflix show Manifest before I picked up this DRC. I'd never heard of the imprint that publishes it, either, and I'm old enough that imprints matter to me. I track them and their subject-matter focuses so I can ask for DRCs I'm happy to read and review. Surprise! There's an entire LitRPG-inspired publishing world, that now subsumes to old movie novelizations and TV-show expansions. This had escaped my attention until now because I've never played these games. I got hooked on Dark Shadows novels and Doctor Who novels back in the day, but found most Star Trek novels pretty hit-or-miss, and gave up on them. So this rediscovery was pleasant because now I've watched Manifest and really like it. I hasten to add that this novel is reminiscent of the TV show's premise but is not directly related to the show you can see on Netflix.

This story started out with a cool-to-me hook: six random people are lightly trained after being plucked from richly deserved obscurity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan. Terrible, tragic explosions on their craft occur; they're brought safely back to Earth but them isolated from each other very stringently, instructed not to attempt to contact each other or to discuss their experiences.

From here we're in the PoV of the six people separately as they experience...oddness, off-kilter alterations in what their memories of Earth tell them should be present in the world around them. It is unsettling to them. The...can't call them changes, that implies violated continuity, can't call them alterations because that implies known agency...discontinuities in their realty versus their memories of reality are strange, undirected by a moral compass, some make things better some worse yet the people are left with a sense that they're suffering from Capgras Syndrome. I suppose you're already assuming the characters ignore, and circumvent, the orders to stay out of contact with their fellow survivors of the trip. Of course this is the case.

The *real* story here is in the returnees' efforts to provide each other with support, you aren't crazy the world is-level support. It's not a space-sci fi story at all; it's a Sliders-meets-Sliding Doors narrative of roads not taken. This ties in to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the Hindu, and later Buddhist, concept of Indra's net. This is more fun for me as a reader but might very well cause some disappointment for others. Understanding going in that space travel and hard sci-fi are honored more in their absence as igniting events than bases for the continuing action will help you decide if this is the read for you.

As each character has unique struggles to adapt to their individual changed circumstances they're all, as a unit, required to look at the common underlying altered reality of the world they collectively remember. It's this facet of their experience that most recalls the earlier media franchises I reference in tge paragraph above. It creates among these six people, so randomly assorted and so very different in personality, training, and character, a found family with the most powerful ties imaginable. Their shared bedrock assumptions have been whisked out from under them.

It's in this that the authors choose to emphasize the shared nature of their trauma, and its developing coping mechanisms. The six PoVs are not dealt with chapter-by-chapter, which could easily lead to dilution and confusion among the characters, but with chapters that entertain similar attempts to cope by varying constellations of people. There are chat threads, emails, news articles, and other such media insertions into various parts of the narrative. This is a narrative technique as old as Tristram Shandy yet we still act as though this is somehow new and fresh and surprising. It worked beautifully in Stand on Zanzibar nearly sixty years ago. It still works now. Its worldbuilding is useful; the technique of said worldbuilding functions as commentary on both message and medium.

I was happy enough with the characters' varying arcs in this series-starting volume as they reached obviously temporary resolution points in some way. The story overall, of the gestalt formed by our six folks, ends on a cliffhanger. I'm now going to explain why, despite enjoying the read, I'm only giving it three and a half stars. Nowhere is it said that this is the first in a series of stories because publishers know how much many readers hate starting series that are not completed. Ask George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss why that might be the case; consult with Adam Christopher's novel publisher as to why amputating series before they conclude might result in blowback. (I want more Ray Electromatic stories!) So instead of learning the right lesson from this and publicly committing to the entire series in advance, greed rules and there's a tiny little detail omitted from the sales bunf in the hopes you will get hooked and buy them all as they come out. This is scummy.

I also detest cliffhangers because there is never a narrative reason for them. Ever. It's purely marketing. So, three and a half stars for those dickhead marketing-driven moves draining a lot of my pleasure in reading this iteration of a story whose bones I very much enjoy seeing fleshed out.

LITTLE F, On the Road for Queer youth

LITTLE F(aggot)
MICHELLE TEA
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new epic novel about a teenage queer runaway from cult classic author of Blackwave and Valencia Michelle Tea.

In Spencer’s fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown, MA, are utopia, a place where he can be free. Yet when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia can’t wait. And one night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it.

The cross-country road odyssey that follows brings Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houston’s Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of the French Quarter and beyond. This new novel from Michelle Tea tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.

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

My Review: Road novels lend themselves beautifully to the coming-of-age genre. In a road novel, the main character is by definition seeking some unknown, longed-for thing...adulthood is that thing, the long-dreamed-of delights of not being under someone else's thumb, making your own decisions....

I know, I know, it's as far from reality as a time-travel novel is. The traveler/comer-of-age doesn't know that (yet) so let it ride while the trip educates the youth into disillusionment's many pleasures. ...wait...pleasures? Spencer is, like so many of us formerly young queer lads going to run head-first into reality and find it pretty good.

Escaping homophobia is not possible, but getting out of a bully's sights is not a bad idea. As Spencer moves to other peoples' whims, aka hitchhikes, to get to Provincetown, the world shows him a bright face. He meets people who help him, in spite of taking him away from the direction he's set; lots of endearing, heartfelt chats; sleeping on couches (my back twinged just typing it); finding his first reciprocated love.

A lovely story, but not one we haven't read before (over thirty, anyway), so best really as a gift for your sweet young giftee. You know the one...not ready to come out; not ready for The Talk; but turning life over in their mind painfully loudly.

Give them this book to give those gears a bit of "others before you have been there, here's what they say about it" lubrication before you, their parents, and the rest of us go deaf.

EXQUISITE THINGS, time-travel immortality and True Love your thing? Here 'tis!

EXQUISITE THINGS
ABDI NAZEMIAN
HarperCollins (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Stonewall Award–winning author Abdi Nazemian (Only This Beautiful Moment) comes the epic queer love story of a lifetime. Perfect for fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Shahriar believes he was born in the wrong time. All he’s ever wanted is to love and be loved, but 1895 London doesn’t offer him the freedom to be his true self, and Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency has only reaffirmed that. But one night—and one writer—will grant Shahriar what he’s always wished for: the opportunity to live in a time and place where he can love freely. Rechristened as Shams and then as Bram, he finds what feels like eternal happiness. But can anything truly be eternal?

Oliver doesn’t feel that 1920s Boston gives him a lot of options to be his full self. He knows he could only ever love another boy, but that would break his beloved mother’s heart. Oliver finds freedom and acceptance in the secret queer community at Harvard that his cousin introduces him to. When he meets a mysterious boy with eyes as warm as a flame, his life is irrevocably changed, forever.

Spanning one hundred and thirty years of love and longing, this tale of immortal beloveds searching for their perfect place and time is a vibrant hymn to the beauty of being alive, a celebration of queer love and community, and a reminder that behind every tragic thing that ever existed, there is something exquisite.

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My Review: It's a tale as old as time: boy longs for True Love; the gods hear him, and grant his wish, with the catch that he can't have him; something, no specific Power attached, says "...but you will live to meet him," and Oscar's your uncle you're living out Dorian Gray's life!

Immortality seems a terrible curse to me, when plodding through another Thursday can feel like Hell or at least Purgatory. In this case, at least poor Shahriyar (I went to high school with a queer guy named Shahriyar, wonder whatever became of him?)...going by Shams makes a lot of sense to me with a name like that in Anglophone, Victorian London, better still Bram...gets rewarded by living through very, very interesting times indeed.

The central thesis of the immortality...thing...seemed to me to have a sharp cutting edge in freezing the boys at seventeen. How awful to have adult-strength emotions, unmitigated by adult perspective! The angsty solipsism of eternal youth sounds horrifying to my closer-to-70-than-50 self. We follow them through three timelines in their immortal journey, and spend enough time in each to know they *are* seventeen in them all. It presents the expected problems...remember your dating life at seventeen? *shudder*...but the basic truth of Bram/Shahriyar and Oliver's lives is that they are in love with each other. Men come, men go, but these boys come back into orbit around each other because they're each made the way the other needs a man to be.

It takes forever, it seems, but they own up to their own nonsense and discuss their love of each others' essence, so a lot of the silly acting out does get dealt with. It's thus not purely the angsty nonsense of trying to figure out what works. A lot of time spent doing it, though....

I had procedural questions like I always do in immortality stories...how'd they survive the 1980s with databases and licenses and passports and birth certificates? how'd they get bank accounts? credit cards?...but mostly this book is for the reader to enjoy True Love that withstands the fallibility and failings of human beings. The supporting cast is a hoot and a holler. I think any one of 'em would tentpole a novella at least! Still, my niggles lost a half-star off the read. I wasn't swept up enough not to notice them until I thought about it after the read; these were in-the-moment grumbles.

My reason for dropping the majority of fifth star, though, was the ending...cramming way too much into way too little space made me feel like the author saw someone over my shoulder he'd rather talk to and just dropped me. Either adding 50-60 more pages onto this book or splitting the story and make it two volumes would address that rushed, inelegant ending.

Good fun was had, a very satisfying evening of smiling nodding shouting at the pages...not perfect, but what is?

ONE OF US, solid well-crafted not-too-gory horror vibes read

ONE OF US
DAN CHAON
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival, from master of literary horror Dan Chaon.

It’s 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor—twins so close they can literally read each other’s minds—life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee.

Salvation arrives in the form of Mr. Jengling, founder of the Emporium of Wonders and father to its many members. He adopts Bolt and Eleanor, who travel by train across the vast, sometimes brutal American frontier with their new family, watching as the exhibitions spark amazement wherever they go. There’s Minnie, the three-legged lady, and Dr. Chui, who stands over seven feet tall; Thistle Britches, the clown with no nose, and Rosalie, who can foretell the death of anyone she meets.

After a lifetime of having only each other, Eleanor and Bolt are finally part of something bigger. But as Bolt falls in deeper with their new clan, he finds Eleanor pulling further away from him. And when Uncle Charlie picks up their trail, the twins find themselves facing a peril as strange as it is terrifying, one which will forever alter the trajectory of their lives. An ode to the misfits and the marginalized, One of Us is a riotous and singularly creepy celebration of the strange and the spectacular and of family in its many forms.

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My Review: The dinner-party scene of Tod Browning's super unsettling 1932 film Freaks, only literatured to a fare-thee-well. It feels a little like those Victorian table skirts meant to keep the ladies ladylike and not inflamed with lust by...no one's ever been able to explain to me why women were supposed to be inflamed by a lathe-turned leg not a well-turned calf or a muscular thigh.

What stands out to me in this read is the appalling nastiness of the carnival/family unit's audiences, gawking at people for being different. Those different, often very different, people are Author Chaon's focus to the exclusion of more than...I would say "desultory" but it's so pejorative...unhurried action for half or more of the book. What that allows for is the kind of horror I most enjoy to build. There are no Big Scary Monsters or weird, spooky Happenings...there are people, not ruled by logic, being unpredictable and unnervingly cruel; there are the twins at the heart of the tale learning about and deploying their own difference as defense against ugly human greed. The consequences of that ugly human greed are what ultimately drive them, in despairing desperation, to run from their lives.

Ironically they run into their lives, their purpose, by doing this. Their place, their home, their haven. Like all havens, though, there are shadows. These shadows menace everyone in their found family. Eleanor can't really settle in among the freaks, feels herself different even among the different; Bolt has found his place, made his home, aligned with these freakshow folk to stand against the uneasy-making shadow of...whatever. It is always hard to see someone who's been part of you since you've had memories move away from your perspective, so Eleanor's struggles felt real and immediate to me, even while Bolt's sinking-in to the seductive group embrace we call "family" made all the sense in the world. He can finally feel that someone has his six.

The ending scenes of this book resolve the tensions that need resolution, while never being unfaithful to the creeping dread, the human-driven horror (with violence as its salt and pepper) that pervades the read. "Uncle" Charlie is just not going away with all he represents in the twins' lives (and the world at large they must navigate as Others); the release from threat dissipates some tension, but the World is still there...for me this was more the strange and spooky Carnivàle than the broader, flatter American Horror Story.

I found the author's note particularly enjoyable to read. Author Chaon delves a bit into some details of the inspirations for his story. It's a pleasure to have because I was thinking as I read the tale, "is this...did he...am I seeing...?" a lot. It ended up taking me from "this is a mixtape" to "how wonderful to have a creative mind that's inspired by so much."

I can't fill out that fifth star because I felt "Uncle" Charlie was, ironically enough, underplayed. His villainy was so thoroughgoing, ham it up even more, add a po-mo touch of self-aware baroque Javert-ness. As it is, he takes a lot of emotional real estate up with rather a flat affect.

Also either make the book a little longer (my choice) or move up the twins' running away sooner. A little too unbalanced; therefore feels rushed in that last third. But folks, this pleasure of a read very much deserves a shot at your TBR for #Deathtober!

THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG, Author Leila Mottley's sophomore novel...worth the wait

THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG
LEILA MOTTLEY
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

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

My Review: A worthy follow-up to Mottley's debut novel...link to my 4.5* praise for it is at the top...and one that evokes a strong sense of a place both radically different (cosmetically) and exactly the same as Oakland in Nightcrawling. "No matter where you go, there you are" said Peter Weller in the cult movie with the long title I don't want to type.

Kiara's siblings in trappedness in this book are Adela, Simone, and Emory. Not one scintilla of good luck, or often enough good sense, between 'em. This is what really makes the read come alive for me. These three young women are all pregnant, one again, and teenagers. Their little Peyton-Place-y gossip factory, Padua Beach, has written them off. They gravitate together to give mutual aid and comfort, often as the only source of help for each of them. "Family" is usually best found in this story. They're there for each other because there's no one else willing to do what's needed, more than the minimum anyway.

Not one girl had an abortion; not one impregnator has done one damn helpful thing. Welcome to the world rapist Kavanaugh and christian nutball Coney Barrett were elevated far beyond their capabilities to enable.

You know you're not gettin' away from here without hearing about how stories can and should give the reader a dose of empathy expansion and exercise.

I think the most important reason to read *this* book at *this* moment is that the stories of each narrator are told from her PoV. It's all too frequent for a book on this kind of intimate scale, dealing with this intimate, very personal topic, to be narrated from the outside. Instead Author Mottley chose to tell us the stories of these young women in their own eyes, how it looks to them not someone standing aside, not involved with the necessary action of pregnancy. Of course there is a certain, if not penalty then effect on the narrative pacing. Very like pregnancy itself, the first two-thirds of the young mothers' tale is just slow, it sort of meanders and makes its way through their experiences; and then that last third is non-stop. I'm reluctant to quote lines out of their context because there are spoilers, but believe me: Author Mottley delivers on her literary promise.

If you go into the read forearmed, permaybehaps you won't experience the impatient, finger-tapping sense of "get on with it!" that marked me down as a four-star reader. The last ~125 pages will be well worth your time, I assure you.

We're sliding into some dark days. These three young women are your cicerones to a way out: They are the people we need to focus on helping. Knowing how they feel should make that easier. Anf you'll really enjoy a well-told story.

PALM MERIDIAN, Grace Flahive's satisfying lesbian-love in retirement set in 2067

PALM MERIDIAN
GRACE FLAHIVE
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A rollicking, big-hearted story of long-lost love, friendship, and a life well-lived, set at a Florida retirement resort for queer women, on the last day of resident Hannah Cardin’s life—for readers of Less and The Wedding People.

It’s 2067 and Florida is partially underwater, but even that can’t bring down the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for queer women who want to revel in their twilight years. Inside, Hula-Hoopers shimmy across the grass, fiercely competitive book clubs nearly come to blows, and the roller-ski team races up and down the winding paths. Everywhere you look, these women are living large.

Hannah Cardin has spent ten happy years under these tropical, technicolor skies, but after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, she has decided that tomorrow morning she will close her eyes for the very last time. Tonight, however, Hannah and her raucous band of friends are throwing one hell of an end-of-life party. And with less than twenty-four hours left, Hannah is holding out for one final, impossible thing…

Amongst the guest list is Sophie, the love of Hannah’s life. They haven’t spoken since their devastating breakup over forty years ago, but today, Hannah is hoping for the chance to give her greatest love one last try.

As Hannah anxiously awaits Sophie’s arrival, her mind casts back over the highs and lows of her kaleidoscopic life. But when a shocking secret from the past is revealed, Hannah must reconsider if she can say goodbye after all.

Spanning the course of a single day and seventy-odd years, and bursting with irresistible hope, humor, and wisdom, this one-of-a-kind novel celebrates the unexpected moments that make us feel the most alive.

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

My Review: The idea that people born in the 1990s will be retiring to (surviving) Florida in 2067 feels...exuberantly optimistic...but I'll go with it. More especially I'm thrilled at the notion of the right to die being well established in this future, and the existence of queer elder spaces is just ordinary, and hell! sign me up!

Of course I'd be well into supercentenarianhood in 2067, the year the book's set, which ya know what, maybe not so much, thanks anyway.

The point of this story is satisfying to me, the way at the end pf life one wants to take stock and to see what can be fixed among the innumerable errors we've made. Sophie, our PoV character's "one that got away," is invited to Hannah's end of life celebration. We see their relationship in flashbacks, which does not add suspense in the usual way...we know the relationship collapses...but does make Hannah's desire to see Sophie again before she chooses to escape the awfulness of her end-stage cancer more impactful.

It's really moving in a quiet, contemplative way. Wrenching losses remembered, not lived through in real time...choices muffed, but long ago...people loved and cherished for an entire lifetime who only know the event we're reading about and the actors in this present resolution as names, or as their survivor selves. It's poignant, it's moving, and I think it's done very well indeed.

It is not a Big! Dramatic! Finish!

I wouldn't've liked the read had it been so. I did very much wish I'd felt the flashbacks into Sophie and Hannah's early relationship in the 2020s had somehow sowed seeds for their world of 2067. I get just how spoiled a readerly reaction that is, yet as it is the flashbacks don't do more than tell me how awful the two people were in their youth. It isn't all that interesting, that point, and the net result is to take more away from the effect of the read than add to it.

I'm not at all trying to discourage you from reading the book. I hope you will because the imperfect future ahead of us is so hopefully presented in Hannah's story. It's got lots of problems, but when has the world not had problems? Have you not yet had enough of doomscrolling?

If so, come to Palm Meridian, settle in, and be told that the world will muddle through, that we will manage somehow to love and care for each other, and make it work as best we can.

ROB HART'S PAGE: The Assassins Anonymous series one and two

ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS (Assassins Anonymous #1)
ROB HART
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this clever, surprising, page-turner, the world’s most lethal assassin gives up the violent life only to find himself under siege by mysterious assailants. It’s a kill-or-be-killed situation, but the first option is off the table. What’s a reformed hit man to do?

Mark was the most dangerous killer-for-hire in the world. But after learning the hard way that his life’s work made him more monster than man, he left all of that behind, and joined a twelve-step group for reformed killers.

When Mark is viciously attacked by an unknown assailant, he is forced on the run. From New York to Singapore to London, he chases after clues while dodging attacks and trying to solve the puzzle of who’s after him. All without killing anyone. Or getting killed himself. For an assassin, Mark learns, nonviolence is a real hassle.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: A support group for assassins trying to get, and stay, clean. Self-consciously in the mold of pop-culture phenom John Wick, it goes into details that read as bloody, as twisty and twisted, as that franchise's visuals.

The idea of the reluctant assassin or killer is, it seems to me, evergreen and always uncomfortably celebratory of the killing part. Mark, our PoV recoveree, is the victim of his own former life's violence. It starts him on a journey that MUST be taken...no assassin leaves a job undone, so this attempt while unsuccessful heralds more to come...while he does his best to stay clean, not killing anyone on his way to both a resolution of the assassination contract on him and earning his one-year-clean chip. This time. Not his first try at going clean.

Harder now of course. The assassination must logically be connected to one of his past successes, so reliving those and thus reinforcing his skills and so his addiction to killing...well, the set-up is tailor made for twenty-first century storytelling tastes.

I tried to get into book two, The Medusa Protocol, but really kept losing the thread and the desire to keep hunting it. Clearly I needed to get this first book in the series. It was a good decision...Mark as the recoveree explains much about that story...and his trajectory is a great deal more satisfying in this read knowing what I know now. (Sorry, though, I'm too scared of the Spoiler Stasi's shrieking outrage to tell you why. The review is below. Read it at your own risk. I take no responsibility for your actions.)

It's like reading a native Kotaro Isaka writing a similar series. I enjoyed the bootstrapping recovery group gag enough to give this read a whole star more than the translated ones.

Maybe twenty years and a country change matter more than I thought.

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

THE MEDUSA PROTOCOL
ROB HART
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Welcome back to Assassins Anonymous, the only twelve-step group where joining can be deadly.

When Astrid, known in her assassin days as Azrael, stopped showing up to Assassins Anonymous, the group assumed her past had caught up with her. Only her sponsor Mark, formerly the deadliest killer in the world, holds out hope that she’s okay. Then, during a meeting, the group gets a sign, or rather, a pizza delivery. Is there another psychopath out there who actually likes olives on their pizza, or is Astrid trying to send Mark a message?

Meanwhile, Astrid wakes up in the cell of a black site prison, on a remote island. A doctor subjects her to mysterious experiments, plumbing the depths of her memory and looking for a vital clue from her past. She’ll do anything to escape, except…killing anyone. Hmm. Turns out it’s not easy to blow this joint without blowing anything, or anyone up.

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My Review: I too like olives on my pizza. Green ones. Go Astrid!

Again a story with lots of flashbacks to the triumphs of the assassin's past, only this time it's embedded in alternating PoVs of Astrid, and Mark from book one; it sounds like it should be confusing but Author Hart is very explicit about the changes between the varying frames of reference. Thank goodness for that! There are also a lot of spoilers for Assassins Anonymous, so don't read them out of order. Astrid's career as an assassin wasn't as interesting to me as Mark's was. I'm no longer fresh to the idea, so that was inevitable.

This read is a lot more about the sense of found family, of a genuine loving community, formed under these truly unique pressures and these impossible-to-share life experiences. I really found that facet of the story very relatable and quite moving. The family Astrid and Mark share is so powerfully bound that they risk everything to help one of their own out of a threatening situation...and redouble their efforts when they learn how bad it really is.

This statement is deeply profound, and both useful and insightful in this time of increasingly-prevalent found families:

“You know that saying, blood is thicker than water? It’s a misinterpretation. The full saying is: The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It means that the blood you choose is thicker than the blood you’re born with. The point is, family isn’t blood, it’s who you bleed for.”

Astrid, the character developed in the flashbacks and the one enduring a deeply unpleasant present, comes across as someone you'll believe the found family of Assassins Anonymous will risk this much to rescue. It could easily, absent those moments where she's really working her program, been very much otherwise.

Solid job, Author Hart. You've cemented this series on place on my "read soonest" list.

THE SLIP, debut novel that feels very assured and is very complex and involving

THE SLIP
LUCAS SCHAEFER
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2025 National Book Critics Circle Award/The John Leonard Prize finalist for debut work!

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER OF THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE for Fiction!

The Publisher Says: For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.

Austin, It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly-stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.

Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.

More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.

Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.

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

My Review: Does the publisher's synopsis sound like A Lot? That's down to the fact that it is. Don't fret, though, there's room for it all in close on five hundred pages. It's told in multiple layers of PoV, it's told across points in time, and it's told at an unfolding pace, not the heady adrenaline rush of a boxing match. (Y'all remember from May's Pearls & Burgoines how I feel about boxing.)

The truth is that "Boxing" isn't quite the same as what I see in the fights here. It's the reasons and techniques and substance of boxing, not the performative violence I'm so repelled by, that are on display. The way young Nathaniel is drawn in to the world of the gym, discovers himself, and makes such a stir as he and David, his Haitian boxing mentor, discover his natural abilities is what it means to be young and find your gift.

Then Nathaniel, all of sixteen, disappears.

To say this was upsetting to me is to understate its impact within the story. It is that dramatic pivot point that many books either lack, or squander the impact of. That almost happens here, which is why the fifth star is partial. There are a welter of viewpoints, some more impactful than others...what's the self-defense hen-class all about anyway?...but the fact is everything does tie in by the end. I think comparisons to Jonathan Franzen are appropriate; I'd say they're not quite all there is, though. Franzen's undeniable way of summing a character up in a phrase is here, but so is John Kennedy Toole's bitter, snarky, unkind edge. I'll say that I encountered these thoughts as I was shifted and rearranged in time, therefore was more than usually alert for new ways of seeing the characters. This is a read that repays your attention and will escape you if you just scan the pages looking for distraction from the world. Attentively read it will be a strong accent on many of the issues we face in the world today.

The gay subject matter in the book is not foregrounded, but foundational all the same. It is not accidental that absolutely nothing in the author's biography is in any way indicative of his own sexuality. He wrote this story well and treated the gay characters well; does that mean anything except he's a good observer, and a sensitive storyteller? ¿Quién sabe? And does it really matter? I'm of the opinion it does not.

The ultimate payoff of the story is down to the much-delayed and very tellingly told investigation into Nathaniel's disappearance that his uncle comes to launch, acting on a strange tip. It becomes a very different story, honestly, as Uncle Bob Alexander does not seem to get too far yet the police still seem to want to stand in the way...but the idea doesn't seem to be to stop him discovering something so much as preventing him from ruining their image.

Quite a lot happens in the last third of the book that tucks odd strands of character development into proper place in ways I wasn't expecting. The trans representation is excellent, sensitive, and as fearlessly written as the white author's Black characters are. In fact, if I were to pick one word to sum up the affect of this debut author's novel, "gonzo" would be my choice: He sees no obstacles in his difficult choices, only climbable walls.

It is hard to spend almost five hundred pages learning about these folks then leave them behind. A better recommendation to get yourself a copy is hard to imagine.

THE SECRET LIVES OF COUNTRY GENTLEMEN, first of a duology that could easily be longer (hint, hint)

THE SECRET LIVES OF COUNTRY GENTLEMEN
KJ CHARLES (The Doomsday Books #1)
Sourcebooks Casablanca (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Abandoned by his father, Gareth Inglis grew up lonely, prickly, and well-used to disappointment. Still, he longs for a connection. When he meets a charming stranger, he falls head over heels—until everything goes wrong and he's left alone again. Then Gareth's father dies, turning the shabby London clerk into Sir Gareth, with a grand house on the remote Romney Marsh and a family he doesn't know.

The Marsh is another world, a strange, empty place notorious for its ruthless gangs of smugglers. And one of them is dangerously familiar...

Joss Doomsday has run the Doomsday smuggling clan since he was a boy. When the new baronet—his old lover—agrees to testify against Joss's sister, Joss acts fast to stop him. Their reunion is anything but happy, yet after the dust settles, neither can stay away. Soon, all Joss and Gareth want is the chance to be together. But the bleak, bare Marsh holds deadly secrets. And when Gareth finds himself threatened from every side, the gentleman and the smuggler must trust one another not just with their hearts, but with their lives.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: The way I know I'm reading a KJ Charles story is when the men falling in love have their life's work established, are busy doing it, and do not need anything to make life more complicated for them. Then they meet/reconnect when they're just about out of strength. After that, they need the other to be able to do their work because strength supported is powerful in all new ways.

I love this story dynamic.

So I was sure to be a happy old reader, and mirabile dictu in light of recent disappointments, so I was. Joss made me smile with his assumption of the mantle of Head of Household. He clearly was born for the role. The ways in which his Head-ness manifested weren't always clear because he would use them in the interests of everyone, of the family he heads but also the community at large.

Gareth, the baronet "in charge" of the whole community, sees Joss's activities from a high-control perspective. He's expected to enforce The Law. He doesn't much like this burden because he isn't naturally assertive. In the course of doing his duty, he and Joss come into conflict. Nothing makes your feelings clearer than conflict. Gareth and Joss...well...there's a reason Author Charles writes romances. Their bond, as she depicts it, is powerful and undeniable. This cross-class pairing allows each to understand the nature of the social system they live and love within.

As is usual in the genre, the romance succeeds...more believably than a cross-class romance usually does because rhe men are each the head of their world; because the men are each the inadequately trained inheritors of their power; and because they are similarly happy to reform their youthful bond.

I think prospective readers should know going in that the story is told in a regional voice, a dialect of sorts that is rooted in a specific place and its people; others, outsiders within the story, comment on its peculiarity so this is very obviously meant to convey the social bonds that exist in the great mass of the people. I found it effective at that and, for my reader's ear, quite musical and engaging. Others might not. As part of the author's larger purpose of creating a world as a setting for her story, this works very well. As a facet of worldbuilding in general it's very hard to pull off. Author Charles's previous books have made it clear she is a Master of this art. The Marsh, a real place I'm told, is vivid in my mind's eye without feeling overdetailed.

Straight people are strongly cautioned. Not safe for "eww-ick" homophobes. I'd call the steam level moderate, but I can—and have—fallen asleep during a porn film. The sex in the story is not of prurient intent. It is there as an enhancement of the reader's understanding of the development of each man's connection to and acceptance of the other. It is also a clear signal of the characters' increasing awareness of the world outside their Marsh as different, as Other...and this Othering lets them gain space for their Forbidden Love to grow and nurture not only their partner but their fellow Marsh inhabitants.

Since I read these stories for fantasy fulfillment, I got what I wanted. I hope you'll try Author Charles's many terrific tales. Starting here is a good idea.