WISDOM CORNER, second Virgil Wounded Horse thriller

WISDOM CORNER
DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Ecco (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Winter Counts comes a new thriller about life—and death—on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

Virgil Wounded Horse is desperately trying to escape his past as a hired vigilante on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. But when a legendary figure from the reservation is murdered, he’s forced to return to the job. Making matters more complicated, threats are coming from the Pine Ridge 705—a street gang from a neighboring reservation who want to expand their reach into Rosebud—and Mitch Gagnon, a shady politician who will stop at nothing to gain more power.

With a heated tribal council election looming, as well as new revelations regarding past injustices at the local Native boarding school, the stakes grow even higher. Will Virgil find the justice he’s seeking before it’s too late?

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My Review: Coming to terms with harms and wrongs you've done, even when you thought you were right to do them, is a tough passage of adulthood. It's necessary to face up, and if necessary 'fess up, in order to move past your own guilt and self-trauma. Of course, that leaves all the nightmares of trauma caused from without...but starting within is always sound policy and strategy.

Picking up where Winter Counts left off is this story of Virgil Wounded Horse doing his damnedest to keep his homeplace from succumbing to the depredations of the worst, most amoral forces from without and those within who care little for humane results and lots for power and the money that flows along side it. Virgil knows from the inside the seductive nature of power, enforcing criminals' will isn't a lot different from enforcing The Law℠ in its particulars only in its motivations (hopefully its results too). Challenging Virgil's sense of rightness is the death by murder of Jerome Iron Shell. Beloved by many for his warmth and wisdom and stock of lore, whatever led someone to kill him makes Virgil angry as well as woriied for his inamorata Marie Little Bear. Her deepening involvement in politics on Rosebud Reservation is clearly not safe sonve politics is almost certainly what got Jerome killed...how to make your former-gang-enforcer boyfried edgy and worried for you was never easier for Marie. She's the one whose request for him to staighten up, work the sunny side of the street, thus not add to her hurdles getting into government to start cleaning up generations of greed and indifference, has Virgil in knots. To her credit, Marie Little Bear is very much on the side of Justice and Fairness so as Virgil discovers corruption and greed, Marie stands shoulder-to-shoulder damn the consequences.

I really like the couple dynamic between Virgil and Marie. As the vileness and ugliness that Jerome was aware of, and trying to get acknowledged, intertwines with the appalling greed that land development supports and rewards, Virgil...and Marie...learn even the lowest acts they know happen now aren't a patch on those committed in the not-distant past. It serves to make them both, together and individually, more determined to be forces for improvement and restoration.

The series is definitely one I recommend to y'all who're needing more than polite white ladies looking into polite little family deaths. Cozies are like pineapple: tasty, tangy, but not healthy when they're the only thing on the dessert menu. Switch it up with a trip to South Dakota.

A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE, an apt (if too mild) title

A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE
JORDAN HARPER
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

One of Maris Kreizman’s Best of Books of 2026 So Far

Rating: 4.4* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic crime novel tells a story of Los Angeles power brokers and those at the edge—and a single shattering incident that threatens to bring it all crashing down.

Los Angeles, right now. America with its back up against the wall. This Frankenstein's monster of crimes and lurid dreams sewn together into something like a city.

A city ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested, and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A young woman goes missing—and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime...

JAKE DEAL is a gonzo live-streaming nightcrawler, beaming the city's chaos straight to his audience of blood-hungry subscribers, giving them the view from the top of the mushroom cloud—until a job he can't refuse drags him back into his old life of Hollywood glamour, drugs, sex and sleaze. Armed with cameras and hidden mics, he'll infiltrate private clubs, gather high-class dirt—and stumble onto a conspiracy woven into the center of LA's most powerful men, who call themselves "The Kids in the Candy Store."

DOUG GIBSON is a street lawyer, who fights for his clients against the army of cops, prosecutors and judges - he is the knife they bring to the gunfight. But when he's hired by a Hollywood pedophile ready to sell out his friends for a chance for freedom, he'll take on a fight bigger than he could have imagined. And when his client "commits suicide" in prison, Gibson will have to stop being a weapon—and become a warrior.

KARA DELGADO works for an underground private concierge company—a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich. She scores drugs, makes connections, and plans multi-million dollar sex parties. She has learned the secret truth of this world: there are no rules, only prices. Her best friend Phoebe has gone missing, and Kara's the only person who knows that Phoebe's place was wiped clean of evidence by men in black rubber gloves. But when she begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to Phoebe, and its connection to the killer known as the LA Ripper, it will drag her into the dark heart of the city.

As Jake, Doug and Kara all investigate these crimes, they'll encounter ketamine-addled sitcom stars, bloody riots, homeless gangsters, a killer cop on death row, secret vaults in Beverly Hills, tech-bro orgies, medical cannibals, true crime junkies, private security wet-work teams, reality shows, street takeovers, car chases, coyotes, a sadistic Tarzan, and a three day, fifty million dollar wedding, before everything is revealed and they must each make their choice about how to fight back in this violent world before the bloody, blazing conclusion.

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My Review: A violent fever dream of a novel ripped from the fact-fueled fantasies of the next cult leader who will go about preying on bewildered, enraged, left-behind stooges. Nothing in this awful tale of those who serve the dreadful scum that has risen to the top of LA's heap as threats to their lives, their power, their money mount is ever clear. And each is more obviously from within their "charmed circle" than the last.

Author Harper's triumvirate of Jake, Doug and Kara each work on a corner of the to-them invisible puzzle of who threatens the elite, why, and work out what to do about it, they all draw more and more into one another's direct orbits. By the time Jordan Harper brings them together, the reader thinks "I am ready for the end to come."

No you are not.

If you have a trigger, you are warned. If you want to be ignorant of how very much misery the powerful feel entitled to inflict on others purely for their own amusement, you are warned. If you aren't willing to sit, slack-jawed and glassy eyed with horror, while brutality is described to you, you are warned.

Let the tumbrils roll.

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY, stalking is a real, dangerous crime with consequences

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY
KAT HAUSLER
Meerkat Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Simon Kemper is on the up and up–he’s out of rehab, and his band is gaining moderate success around Berlin. But out of the corner of his eye and over his shoulder, he’s always aware of her. The stalker. She’s at every show, no matter what city. She sends hundreds of postcards to his label. Worst of all, she acts like she knows him. Like she owns him.

When the stalker disappears at one of his shows, Simon is the prime suspect. Initially an effort to clear his name, his search for July quickly becomes a deeper psychological quest: to prove that his fears were warranted? That she couldn’t have given up her obsession that easily? The threads of July’s disappearance turn out to be tangled into every corner of Simon’s life: a trusted band member, a tenuous new love interest, a resentful ex, and the self he’s supposedly left behind.

Narcissistic, insecure, and consummately relatable, Simon is the anti-hero of his own life—trying to want to be better; hoping that’s enough.

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My Review: Enjoyable story of a guy, pretty average musician, pretty average addict, making an effort to clean himself and his life up. Then there's the small issue of a woman obsessed with him, called July. There's a weirdness in her obsession: how does she know so much about him?

I really wouldn't like this oft-told tale much at all...why do men without much going for them seem to attract women so easily and then get them obsessed?...because it feels like fantasy fulfillment. Ever since Fatal Attraction it's been peopling the landscape of thrillerdom.

What caught my attention was the vanishing of July. I've been stalked online, I know the worst of it is the sheer absurdity of a person's unsought, unencouraged, obsession causing the object real consequences. But this story adds a different layer in the stalker vanishing and leaving a void that must be filled by some sort of legal resolution. This is Germany, after all, and there must always be a resolution or whatever rent on the social fabric it is remains open and actively pursued. July was always going to get a period at the end of her sentence in Simon's story.

That it proved to be a weirdly condign chapter, not sentence, in his story, one that involved unexpected other players and motives, was the reason I didn't dismiss the read. The reason thrillers satisfy me is they offer more...open-ended...solutions to the the grosser insults to Ma'at's order. In this story the results of the crime committed were equitably meted out. That they were also unorthodox felt much more satisfying than milder law-n-order solutions available to the author.

I was not initially drawn into the read. What happened was I had put the story down, thinking it would be another male-fantasy tropefest; I couldn't quite shake it though, kept processing it behind the noise of Life, because the author's a woman. Why would she choose to write that?

She didn't. I came back and finished the story thinking I'd at least get an answer to why one character felt...wrong...and, well, yes indeed that was the point. It wasn't clear to me why the ending was heading in a direction that seemed very much at odds with what I thought it was going to be. That was a satisfying twist, Author Hausler. I enjoyed it.

So, lesson learned: attend to the still, small voice that suggests you're not quite seeing what you think you are. A solidly crafted thriller about a dangerous crime that never gets the belief the victim deserves unless they're very lucky.

TEQUILA: A Story of Success, Love & Violence, a story of family, business, and love

TEQUILA: A Story of Success, Love & Violence
TIM REUBEN
Meridian Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Tequila is the gripping saga of three generations of the Ramirez family. From Sotero Ramirez's humble beginnings to his struggle for success, he and his family must overcome a harsh environment plus the frequent deadly encounters with Mexican drug cartels.

Still, the family's tequila business blossoms into a multi-billion-dollar international conglomerate, and his granddaughter Maria is chosen to manage the company, which relocates from Mexico to downtown Manhattan. But she is plagued by the peccadillos of her L.A.-based brother Tomaso, and the evil scheming of her other brother, Miami-based Miguel, who bring their family business to the brink of ruin and even threaten the lives of Maria and the adversary she falls in love with, Los Angeles lawyer Brian Youngman.

This fascinating intrigue spans the globe, from the farms of Tequila, Mexico, to the skyscrapers of New York, from bayside mansions in Miami to law courts in Los Angeles, jet-setting to the Cayman Islands, the moors of Scotland, Jamaica's beaches, and financial centers in Paris. The story unfolds in unpredictable and at times tragic ways.

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My Review: I did not want to like this story as much as I did. The prose is not excellent, nor is it incompetent; instead, it leaves little to no impression of itself after consuming it.

So why rate it this high? I got wrapped up in the many characters' intertwining lives, their very shady-but-legal wranglings as they determinedly, doggedly built a business of consequence out of an agricultural product. It's quite a fascinating feat to create a "brand" out of a commodity. We live in the time of brands, and mostly we're not examining the ide behind them.

Tim Reuben examines that feat, using as his lens the drive of a family's natural desire to make more for themselves, their people, than simply surviving on doing basic-to-existence work. I had a task to keep the dramatis personae straight. I honestly put a lot of that on Tim, because it's not always clear who's speaking...no one really has A Voice in the literary sense. Some catchphrases, but that's the sitcom version of A Voice.

Resolving María, our root-for character's, dilemma, and seeing her wrestling with the eternal "is family more important than morality?" dilemma, makes this a very worthwhile read. Do not expect to be thrilled by the writing and it becomes a much more exciting story. I just wish it was a better novel. Maybe his next one will be.

THE JAGUAR MASK, a beautiful tale of working with people not like you to accomplish things that need doing

THE JAGUAR MASK
MICHAEL J. DeLUCA
Stelliform Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Felipe K’icab doesn’t know who he is. He only knows he was born different than his human family, and he can’t relax unless he’s blasting reggaeton in his cab weaving through the streets of Guatemala City. The jaguar mask and his other human faces keep him safe–until El Bufo, a corrupt ex-cop, commandeers his cab and drags Felipe into a murder conspiracy investigation, trying to expose the foreign-backed regime’s ecocidal and genocidal past.

Cristina Ramos knows who her mother’s killers are. After witnessing the murder in a vision, she struggles to keep her grieving family from falling apart. When El Bufo’s relentless vendetta throws Felipe into her life amid increasing civil unrest, Felipe and Cristina must overcome generations of institutionalized silence, uncover the secrets of their powers, and forge a path to justice, or else be swept away by another wave of violence.

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My Review: A werejaguar and a corrupt ex-cop drive a revenge/vengeance plot that cuts the nonsense out of criminally culpable ecocide. Different agendas make them extremely effective in cooperation. Cristina adds a psychic flair to a deeply unlikely scoobygroup, all with very different...even conflicting...agendas for their actions.

But those actions are all in immediate harmony, so they go well. Proof that people with different agendas are well-advised to focus on an immediate goal that suits each. Let the longer-term issues go; make common cause with anyone who can help you get urgent business done; keep your ears open for what those you're working with do not know they are telling you because all information is useful.

Ki'cab, our werejaguar, is the most immediately appealing and relatable character for me. He feels unsafe in his home, so goes to the big city and flourishes in his own patchwork piecemeal way. His human mask is the one that fits least well, perfectly understandably given how awful Humanity is, how poorly the weres fare at their hands. I'm with ya all the way, soul sibling. He has many masks, though, and wears them to accomplish different tasks for which he needs to be a slightly different guy. It's fascinating! I love that Ki'cab lives with a woman who loves and commits to life with Aníbal, her transmasc boyfriend. I love that he cares more for the needs and dignity of his friends than for abstractions like Morality and Legality. Felipe Ki'cab, you're the human in this book that I want to grow up to be.

El Bufo and Cristina are decent enough characters, each is presented as a human being with motivations and reasons for their lives and actions; it's no fault of writing or characterization that I'm less interested in either of them. Cristina's got the grief of knowing the truth, seeing it clearly in front of her eyes, and not being able to alter its happening (Cassandra deserves a better rep in our culture); El Bufo ("The Toad") is presented such that empathizing with him is hard.

Hard for monoglot readers will be contextually-clued-in words from Spanish; I hear this, but it's so incomprehensible to me y'all find it troublesome to read "foreign" words when this amazing tool the internet will tell you what anything you don't know means in English. I'm more empathetic with those unfamiliar with Guatemala, as my own acquaintance is nodding at best, relying on a friend who lived there ages ago. I find learning about places dimly familiar or utterly unfamiliar fun; if you don't treat them like Mordor or Arrakis, places impossible and unreal, and just get on with reading.

I'll say that the beginning say 15% will challenge you. It is not entirely in medias res, but gets really close to it. If that's just intolerable to you as a reader, this might not be the read for you. I can't offer an all-5 rating because of that, but can say I think you'd do well to give the sample a read. Maybe the prose will woo you in....

ESPERANCE, alt-hist/many-worlds Chicago noir thriller

ESPERANCE
ADAM OYEBANJI
DAW Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science Fiction!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The history-bending speculative fiction from Adam Oyebanji, award-winning author of BRAKING DAY.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.

An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn’t want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she’s not telling the whole truth.

An incredible quest: As Ethan’s investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie’s fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won’t be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents… and centuries.

An extraordinary speculative thriller about the scars left by the Atlantic slave-trade, by a master of the genre.

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My Review: Why you're reading this story will largely color your response to it. SFF readers might not vibe with the very significant police-procedural elements narrated by noirish Ethan the cop. Mystery readers might not love the time-travel, in the many-worlds sense, done by Abi the morally grey alternating PoV.

I'm the reader with a foot and nine toes in each of those camps, plus another entire foot in the alternate-history camp. (There are so three feet! Where? In between worlds where the vibrational body exists and has access to all body parts. Quit quibbling, this has two guys who drowned in the ocean discovered dead in their Chicago apartment!)

I'm so glad to read a thriller inflected with quantum reality, which I am all about in my reading. It felt a bit like Author Oyebanji decided this would be his book, and spent his time plotting the story to the detriment of developing either Abi or Ethan more fully. I'm okay with that because the resolution to the crime we're here to read about was so exactly aimed at me and my personal hobbyhorses. I disliked the detective Ethan's racism being foregrounded. It didn't cause any stars to disappear, but it did make me squirm. As I think that was the point of including it, I mention the fact of it for reader guidance.

Abi's intriguing back/foreground was something I'd read a whole book about all by itself. Hollie, the sidekick, was so pathetically enamored of Abi that it got a little uncomfortable. I mean, I totally get it, and I was a little bit there, too. /but really cringe, Author Oyebanji, in that last bit about gbese.

What the gestalt of the book did not have, as I mentioned above, feels as though it was designed out by the author to leave the fundamental rocks under the story...not revenge, not even forgiveness can leach sin clean...in brightest contrast. It worked for me, I think it might work for all y'all who like your stories sleek, clear, and propulsively paced.

Four and a half shiny, happy stars.

AND WHAT CAN WE OFFER YOU TONIGHT, multi-award-winning novella and damning takedown of a hypercapitalist hellscape

AND WHAT CAN WE OFFER YOU TONIGHT
PREMEE MOHAMED
Neon Hemlock Press
$12.99 all formats, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.

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My Review: Self-esteem, self-love, class solidarity, friendship, Love...big, big themes to tackle in under a hundred pages. Yet as one expects from Premee Mohamed, tackled they are, and indeed pinned to the mat of argument.

There are those who say they have no patience for future-set stories, yet who will gobble the stories that center amateur sleuths who are not arrested and abused by police and courts who do not approve of this behavior...inconsistent much? Each is unbelievable in its own way, and this story’s amateur sleuths have some *very* powerful motives for their far higher stakes poking around. I know others whose taste in storytelling excludes tales that begin in medias res. That being a taste that can not be argued with, I warn those folk that this is not one for them.

The authorial voice here, Jewel’s stream of consciouness and self-aware of its floridity, would wear on my nerve if it lasted more than the eightyish pages that it does. In this size of a dose, it counterpoints the horrifying, bleak dystopia that these young people are...existing is a better fit than living...within. The brothel where they work is a reputaable one, yet a client murders one of them and no one in power cares, or pursues justice.

Sound familiar, y’all?

Unlike boring old twenty-first century reality, though, the murdered party returns for revenge, not as a zombie or vampire but simply undead. Go with it. As the co-sex-worker Winfield sets about getting the revenge that I myownself feel is richly deserved, the story meditates on the larger, darker themes of living in a hypercapitalist hellscape. The ending is, as expected, satisfying. The truths Author Mohamed tells us in the course of this bleak vision of a future where money = justice, where might = rights, where even the meagerest of existences is contingent on selling one’s own body for the gratification of others, are readily applicable to the world around us.

That horrifying truth is how this very short, sharp shock to the reader’s system won the very high-powered awards that it did. Very highly recommended.

THE WITCHES AT THE END OF THE WORLD, supernatural novel set in wintry, beautiful Norway

THE WITCHES AT THE END OF THE WORLD
CHELSEA IVERSEN
Sourcebooks Landmark
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rage burns brighter than any spellfire...Deep in the birchwoods of Norway, magic courses through the veins of two sisters. For years they've been alone, but sweet-tempered Kaija is tired of living in shadows and longs for a life filled with community, even if it means stifling her magic. But Minna is a witch through and through, with wrath always simmering just below the surface.

Different as they may be, both will never forget the day they were driven from their village. The day their mother burned. When Kaija leaves to pursue a new life, Minna is left alone in the darkness of the forest.

Devastated and outraged at the betrayal, Minna casts a curse to punish those who took everything from her. What she doesn't realize is that this act will incite a deadly chain of events. Soon it will destroy everything, including the life Kaija has lovingly built. But once a witch's rage boils, regret means nothing—she can't take back what's already done.

Someone will have to burn.

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

My Review: The nicest surprise of Deathtober's reading. I hadn't read anything by Author Iversen before this, and was expecting a more horror-tinged read...what I got was a revenge story, featuring sisters whose lives were upended by small-minded christian hatemongers. There is definitely a supernatural element to the story. It isn't, however, the kind of all-in horror that ends up with your psyche splattered in gore.

A big part of the reason for that is this is a story that unspools slowly, and in a very interior way. It is almost a récit à deux, a double recit, though such a beast doesn't exist (that I know of). Minna is angry, bitter, and filled with the inexhaustable fuel of contempt for those not as smart as she is. Kaija, on the other hand, is genuinely kind if extremely Other by virtue of who she is and whom she knows best. She is the sister whose path is always set by her desire to see, and be, the best it's possible to, in herself and others. Her decision to return to their home village where their mother was burned alive as a witch causes Minna to react violently She casts a curse on the whole village. Her rage can never be extinguished, but can be thrust outward to burn others.

The reason the book appealed to me is probably the reason some found it frustrating. I liked the slower pace that the author chose, as it left more time for me to get to feel the sisters' differences of character. The third-person narration, told in short chapters alternating between the sisters, was spangled with lovely sentences that use Norwegian terms, that unfold into images of the birch woods and the village, in three mental dimensions. Shadows and light are lovely almost characters.

The Norse "pagan" craft is wonderfully used, with figures from the Norse mythos making their presences known without coming across as intrusions into Reality by pagan gods...they feel like characters whose names we happen to know. The worldbuilding is thus made that much more enjoyable for a twenty-first century atheist. The way that Kaija, the elder sister, yearns for life in the village as a christian wife and a mother did not sit well with me...selling herself short and out to be average, when she could be a Power? Not the kind of message I'd choose to send. But Minna's rageful reponse to her sister's absconding, while understandable, skates perilously close to Evil. The author was very wise to be sure we know that Minna's curse is not the cause of Kaija's different life challenges. That made what could've been unpleasant horror into not-entirely-pleasant, deeply thought through, supernatural fiction.

Set at the crossroads where Norway had to choose between its old, established supernatural beliefs and the newfangled ways of the christian church in a lasting, final way, this story of sisters whose choices define the stakes, and the costs, of each course is one I think is ideal for anyone on your Yule list who loves immersive reads. Investing the time to be in this world with Kaija and Minna is easiest to make happen now that the nights are long and the winds are cold. It was a pleasure to meet Author Iversen. I would commend Minna, and Kaija (though less so), to your long nights of deep reading.

OUTSIDE, Ragnar Jónasson's non-Dark Iceland thriller & DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST, 1920s London noir about lost innocence

OUTSIDE
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Four friends. One night. Not everyone will come out alive . . .

When a deadly snowstorm strikes the Icelandic highlands, four friends seek shelter in a small, abandoned hunting lodge.

It is in the middle of nowhere and there's no way of communicating with the outside world.

They are isolated, but they are not alone . . .

As the night darkens, and fears intensify, an old tragedy gradually surfaces - one that forever changed the course of their friendship.

Those dark memories could hold the key to the mystery the friends now find themselves in.

And whether they will survive until morning . . .

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

My Review: Short, intense, and darkly atmospheric novella by one of Iceland's most valuable exports.

This honestly feels like a climactic scene from a longer novel that Ragnar didn't think was working, but it was just too darn good to let go to waste. We join the dramatis personae in medias res, we experience the building tension of a climax, and then...that was it...? Abrupt ending that doesn't do a lot of explaining, at least to me. It makes the whole exercise of reading the book just a bit frustrating to invest in the idea of this kind of pressure-cooker plot and then...stop.

I think everyone over 21 knows that we're defined by our worst moments, our biggest lapses of judgment. (If there are kids in your life, you *really* know this!) And we all know there are people in our lives whose place is more theirs by habit than by any desire on your, often nor their, part. People change and when we're young we think that won't matter. It's only as the weight of coping with our own lives becomes more and more demanding that we realize the weight of carrying someone whose place in our life is no longer a good investment of our energy.

The problem for me, in reading this chilling short take, is that these emotions are so common to all adults that to see them turned into a justification for chillingly, cruelly premeditated murder is asking me to go a bit farther than I'm generally prepared to go. The murderer in this piece is so coldly obsessed with a terrible event that no other thing can be allowed to enter their mental sphere.

Sociopaths aren't delightful company, and the ugliness of the murderer's interior is too much the focus of the story for me to get anything I wanted in the way of understanding out of the read. I left as revolted as I entered, and that's not a good reult for me.

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

DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST
MARTIN CATHCART FRODEN
Freight Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.59 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping historical noir set during the amphetamine-fuelled craze for velodrome racing which took London by storm in the late 1920s.

Into this world stumbles Paul, a bewildered Scottish farmboy running away from home. Powerfully built with a fierce passion for cycling, he is taken under the wing of Silas, a local loan shark, and from there enters a world he is ill-equipped to survive.

As the races get harder, the bets get larger, and the terrifying Mr Morton starts to take an interest in Paul's career. For fans of Peaky Blinders and Brighton Rock, Devil Take the Hindmost is a thrilling ride through a historical London that is rarely visited.

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My Review: So, you've read the synopsis. You've seen the way the parade's headed. And, you clever thing, you've seen my rating. Why isn't it up to a four?

Because it was a very good story that didn't need to make Silas, the intermediary between the owner and the athlete, have a queer passion for the athlete to make its point.

It's not like it never happens. There's an entire subsection of M/M romances based around this plot. But those are *reciprocated* queer feelings. These, with the best will in the world, are not. I hasten to say this isn't ever promised to us. It's never even said out loud in the story's description. It's still there, though, one gets the little tickle behind the eyeballs that means either excess pollen or gay subtext is in the blurb's air.

Then we get to the story itself. To the author's credit there isn't a lot of dishonesty in the presentation of the gay subtext. It's there, it's known...just nothing comes of it. So, though I found this oft-told tale well done, and the author's gift for dialogue pretty darn decent, this story suffers from the same thing that My Policeman suffered from: Yes, in the 2010s; not so much in the 2020s.

What led to a whole star-and-a-half going back onto the rating is the way the athlete, a raw innocent from the nowhere that was Scotland in the 1920s, simply doesn't care about the man who's in love with him being a man. I mean, it's not for him, but it's also not a problem because they're really good friends and that's what he values the most. The ending, which did not surprise me one bit, did satisfy me. I was completely comfortable with the way Author Froden sent these characters off into the world to meet their destinies. Why? Because, in every case, there was a powerful sense of each one grabbing the power to *create* that ending. Win, lose, or draw, each characted earned their destiny.

Nothing whatever wrong with a revenge story, in my book at least.

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY, new direction for award-winning Aussie novelist

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY
SULARI GENTILL
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link since their storefront is such a mess to use)
$26.99 hardcover, available today

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In every person's story, there is something to hide...

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.

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

My Review: Hannah Tigone, successful Sydney author, is writing a new book. She's set it in Boston, Massachusetts, and that being an almost literal antipode to Sydney, she needs some help with the local color. Traveling there is out; this is the time of COVID. Google Street View is something you're not quite going to get the "feel" of a place from; the look, yes. Maybe if it were a refresher for a previously visited place...but no. Enter Leo Johnson, Boston-based novelist and strangely excited research/local-color assistant to Hannah. His take, which becomes an intake, on the story is a framing device for a strange (and not entirely successful) hybrid epistolary/story-within-story tale of murders, criminality, race, and reconciliation.

The manner of the story's introduction:

I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim...no framework...just bricks interlocked...no idea what I'm building or if it will stand...no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic unplotted bustle of human life.

It's all there from the get-go...the beautiful, elegant phrase-making, the sheer bravado of owning up to feeling confused and not being quite up to the task in hand...well! Okay, I know where my money's going on the craps table. We're heading for Misdirection City by way of The Long and Winding Road.

What follows is largely that, only it's split into segments by the nature of its authors-collaborating (increasingly Leo inserts his personal take on the story Hannah sends him, and he doesn't hold back from the get-go). My best example of this is very early in the book, when the dreaded "separated by a common language" issue rears its confusing head.

Australian/Commonwealth-usage note: The word "jumper" does not exist in the US. It appears to mean "sweater" or "sweatshirt" more often than not as used in this book. But believe your local-colorist...it is not extant in US contexts. At all. If you say it to a street-American they will stare at you...a few might ask, in mild bewilderment, if you mean "jumpsuit" which you most emphatically do not:

NOT a normal, unobtrusive street-wear item like a sweater or sweatshirt. Like our Hannah means it to be. It's at this point that I began to trust the framing device, about which review-readers have heard, to deliver on its often overlooked promise: Can authors working together be translated into a satisfying reading experience?

It can. It does. It's going to require a little bit more effort from you, I will be honest; you'll need to use your own little grey cells to make the connections you need to make. I won't go into why that is, because it's not just a spoiler but because it's a feature of the story. If anyone reading this hasn't read The Fan, it's a great next stop on the epistolary-novel-as-suspense trip. There are some very interesting similarities in the framing device...epistolary novels aren't all that often the choice authors make for suspense stories, and that accounts for a lot of it.

What keeps me from running down my street shoving the book into the hands of strangers (I live on the boardwalk in a beach town, so that's not as counterproductive as it first sounds) is the fact that the framing device keeps the pace of the action down. It's a feature of thrillers, which is what this is, to move quickly from scene to scene. In this case that does not happen. It's not a *fatal* flaw, but it's a real one.

It's all the rest of the features of Winifred/Freddie the Aussie in Boston as stand-in for Hannah the Sydney author creating her that kept me going when the pace flagged. It's the intricacies of the story-world (and the sneaky, weird ending!) that caused the most scalp-scratching moments and the most grin-producing realizations.

I'd say that four stars should shine on your path to the bookery of your choice to procure your own copy.

WINTER COUNTS, Native American #OwnVoices thriller

WINTER COUNTS
DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Ecco
$16.99 trade paper, available now

WINNER OF THE BEST FIRST NOVEL ANTHONY AWARD FOR 2021! Virtual Bouchercon award ceremonies linked to at the above.

WINNER OF THE BEST INDIGENOUS WRITER at the 2021 High Plains Book Awards.

On The Guardian’s Best Thrillers of 2021 list

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx.

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

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

My Review: This is a Brulé Lakota Winter Count:

This cultural tradition, extremely briefly summarized in a Wikipedia article, organizes this novel’s ideas. Virgil Wounded Horse, our aptly and prophetically named vigilante-cum-enforcer hero in this thriller, touches on this fascinating piece of (half) his ancestry’s sense of time and place often enough to make the title of the book emerge organically in the reader’s mind. Virgil muses at one point, “Winter counts were the calendar system used by the Lakota, but they weren't like modern ones. I'd loved the little pictures in the calendars, each image showing the most significant event from the past year.” He muses again, at a later point, “Winter counts. This was the winter of my sorrow, one I had tried to elude but which had come for me with a terrible cruelty.” I think both are ideas of how he, his world, and his sense of self, are in motion at all times. It makes his entire life spent in action make sense…he’s not a Lakota insider, like ex-girlfriend Marie Short Bear, whose ancestry is flawlessly pureblood and perfectly in tune with the power structure within the Rosebud Reservation. He’s not an insider in the white world, either, being a mixed-race outcast from its racist system. It’s been a blessing in that any curse can be turned into an advantage if you’re looking for a way to do it. He’s got a place enforcing justice outside white and Native American legal systems, as required.

What this means is that the character is perfect for a thriller that needs telling to get people to care about the problems heaped on Outsiders, Othered people, by all systems of government. The tribal justice system (arguably distorted by its necessary accommodation to white codes) as much as any other. Virgil is outside, and that is the perfect place to be when the upper echelon needs something done that won’t “look good.” The value of face, of taking things at face value, is something white people with our media obsession have raised to virtual apotheosis; it’s far from untrue of other cultures, however. Marie Little Bear’s tribal leadership position means he can’t directly do the effective thing against the drug cartels hooking Native kids on heroin, with the well-known tragic consequences.

Had the plague not touched Virgil’s nephew, hard, he wouldn’t have agreed to take on the violent and greedy and frankly evil people. But when it’s family, things look different, don’t they. What happens on the reservation has its roots in the not-distant city of Denver. Marie and Virgil set out to confront the ills of their corner of the world by going outside that corner, by bearding the lion in his den, and they are not surprisingly at some disadvantages there. It is as revealing to consider their troubles and issues within the white world of Denver as to examine the world of the reservation in promotion, tolerance, and perpetuation of toxic social maladjustment.

I’m impressed by the way this thriller uses its author’s straddled worlds…he’s Lakota and teaches Native American Studies at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, so clearly he’s quite adept at code-switching…as a full and integrated world for Virgil Wounded Horse. We’re not expected to see Virgil as a man out of place in two worlds, we’re expected to see a man discovering his place in his own world. It is a fine distinction, but an important one. Virgil is an outsider in each of those large, obvious social constructs. He is making his own world, one in which he is the norm, as in the end that is what we all must do to “fit in.” Where the world doesn’t have a place for you, make one.

That is the gift of this read to the reader. Join Virgil Wounded Horse in his thrilling world.
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This post is the 1,000th on my blog! I’ve written many thousands of book reviews over the years of many truly enjoyable books. I’m very happy that, after eight and a half years, I’ve reached this milestone blog post with a review of a book I’m happy to recommend that you read as a Booksgiving treat to yourself.