HE WASN'T THERE AGAIN TODAY: An Epitome Apartments Mystery, third in a series I plan to catch up on stat

HE WASN'T THERE AGAIN TODAY: An Epitome Apartments Mystery
CANDAS JANE DORSEY
ECW Press
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The witty, queer accidental detective of the Epitome Apartments is back. While helping to solve a community murder, she also needs to convince police that she didn’t revenge-kill the man who took everything from her

The nameless amateur sleuth of The Adventures of Isabel and What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? has often said that death is too good for Lockwood Chiles—who is in prison for killing her beloved partner, Nathan, and her close friend Pris—and makes no secret that she hates the man who massacred her shot at happiness. So when Chiles ends up dead in his cell, it’s no wonder she becomes a prime suspect. Meanwhile, an aggressive band of men in military-adjacent garb turn a string of assaults against nameless’s unhoused neighbors into full-bore murder right behind the Epitome Apartments, and she rashly promises to help bring them to law. As if that’s not enough, unscrupulous parties are scheming to strip her of her inheritance, money she and Nathan had intended would address the city’s lack of harm-reduction services and low-income housing. Now it is nameless’s mission to clear her name and to hold her tattered community together, all while she’s coming apart herself.

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

My Review: Canadian SFF monadnock Dorsey is operating in a new field so y'all sit up and hit the one-click. As one would expect from the author of Black Wine, sex and its coevals gender and sexuality get a workout here. Reading the third of what I devoutly hope will be an ongoing series first, I thought permaybehaps I'd be a bit lost, without the deeper background that makes series mysteries such good reads for me.

I forgot whose work I was reading.

Feeling lost and a little at sea is Author Dorsey's calling card. That said, I was never wondering where someone came from, or how anyone fits into the schema of the story being told. It probably helps that the way events unfold is as stochastic as real life is itself...it felt to me as though I was genuinely following our nameless detective around, learning things alongside them. In any truly immersive read I hope that I will be investing in the characters along with the main character, and that was indeed the case here. What might not work quite so well was the book's use of **COPIOUS** footnotes...over two hundred!...and huge numbers of acronyms. It took me some time to find a reading rhythm in this story, but I was so ready to trust the author, from past acquaintance in her SFF days, that I kept my hopes up. I felt rewarded. Again, as one would expect from Author Dorsey, there are little SFnal grace notes relatively unobtrusively scattered about.

As in all series reads, though, it's the characters that make the reader invest or decline to invest in the story at hand. Our nameless protagonist, sharp-eyed and -tongued, is a big draw for me. The other characters are literally kaleidoscopic, forming startling and unusual conjunctions with the narrator, each other, and the story unfolding. This is, to me, a net positive because as unusual as the juxtapositions can be, they're never gratuitous or exploitively deployed. I do sometimes feel as though some authors have, in their heads or on their editors' checklists, a set of identities that they feel the need to dot around to be "inclusive." This is absolutely never the way this read came across to me. In part that's because I've read the author's earlier work; in part it's down to the way the characters are included in the sleuth's life and thus this narrative.

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the evident pro-environment, anti-capitalist thrust of the story. That won't work for some readers, because it's intrinsic to every element of the series' world-building. You know who you are, so you should seek elsewhere for your own ma'at needs to be met.

For me, it went down like a truly excellent, complex, single-malt whisky. I heartily recommend the read.

OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA, historical thriller of 17th century America

OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA
LEAH ANGSTMAN
Regal House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Out Front the Following Sea is a historical epic of one woman’s survival in a time when the wilderness is still wild, heresy is publicly punishable, and being independent is worse than scorned — it is a death sentence. At the onset of King William’s War between French and English settlers in 1689 New England, Ruth Miner is accused of witchcraft for the murder of her parents and must flee the brutality of her town. She stows away on the ship of the only other person who knows her innocence: an audacious sailor — Owen — bound to her by years of attraction, friendship, and shared secrets. But when Owen’s French ancestry finds him at odds with a violent English commander, the turmoil becomes life-or-death for the sailor, the headstrong Ruth, and the cast of Quakers, Pequot Indians, soldiers, highwaymen, and townsfolk dragged into the fray. Now Ruth must choose between sending Owen to the gallows or keeping her own neck from the noose.

Steeped in historical events and culminating in a little-known war on pre-American soil, Out Front the Following Sea is a story of early feminism, misogyny, arbitrary rulings, and the treatment of outcasts, with parallels still mirrored and echoed in today’s society.

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

My Review: I've been acquainted with, and even published by, Leah Angstman for the past decade. I am absolutely sure that I'd've rated this book even more highly if I hadn't been...such are the wages of sin, I'm afraid. I'm extra sure that nothing I've read in this COVID year has affected me as much as the tale of Ruth, a child of sixteen!, suffering under the sheer violent rage of an entire community of religious nuts. Regulars will recall my affection for the comic book Prophet Against Slavery, which trod similar outcast-for-being-honest ground. At least the Quaker prophet Lay was outcast, cruelly treated, with more than one slender reed of lovingkindness to support him...and I think Ruth's belovèd Owen, his oft-professed love for her notwithstanding, was a slender reed indeed...while being *actually*guilty* of what they accused him of.

That is not the case in this story.

Ruth's powerful mind, her greatest curse in a society that mistrusts women whole and entire but smart women most of all, also leads her to the only possible solution to her impossible conditions (given that the local Pequots aren't going to risk a world of trouble to take her in although they do offer her more honorable assitance than she had a right to expect)...and straight into a situation where she's in the path of life-storms and STORMS!!

It is as breathless a ride of a read as I'm able to take at my advanced age.

What made me invest myself so deeply in this unflattering depiction of theocratic society from the outside was my antipathy towards That Kind of Person. What kept the pages turning was my need to know: Are Ruth and Owen going to make it to the last page? will their love be rewarded with togetherness? And, this being a romantic novel not a category romance, there is no way to be sure. And I'll not spoil that for you.

(That was me being very cruel, but only to be kind...you need to read this book.)

THE MURDERS OF MOLLY SOUTHBOURNE, novella-length novel-strength postapocalyptic horror story

THE MURDERS OF MOLLY SOUTHBOURNE
TADE THOMPSON
Tor.com Publishing
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Every time she bleeds a murderer is born. Experience the horror of Tade Thompson's The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

The rule is simple: don't bleed.

For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

My Review: A near-enough future novella that blends the horror inherent in a mutating, collapsing Earth and the human response to it with the species-level will to live no matter what.

I was utterly sucked into the narrative early on:

An example has aspects of a thing, but is that the thing itself? The mollys have aspects of Molly, but that doesn't make them Molly, does it?

I'm not going to tell you what Molly's relationship with the mollys is because this is a very difficult concept to get across. I want the whole reading experience to be as full and rich for you as it was for me. And I want to encourage you to spend $3.99 on a novella of surpassing strangeness, violence, and transcendent oddness.

What isn't odd, though sometimes is transcendent, is Author Tade's writing. He finds angles and corners where others don't look, or if they look don't see.

Her shoes wait in formation for her feet to quicken them.
***
Alarms are going off like the mating calls of robotic insects.
***
As she cuts the cadavers on the slabs, she realizes there is no sense to be made out of life.

With the exception of one, and only one, hideous and disfiguring instance of the w-bomb, the text is chillingly, even eerily, smooth and flawless. It resembles in its affect the narrative monologues of Rod Serling. You know the point is there, you can see it rising like the number Pi is said to do over all knowledge, glimpses above foggy lowlands of text, but it shifts as your gaze has to slip away from it for you to negotiate the steps of the ziggurat.


Climb, I urge you; the view is fine and the journey's toll is just the beginning of a quest.