CAI EMMONS' PAGE: THE BELLS; two Bronwyn Artair cli-fics

THE BELLS
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: As The Bells opens, thirty-three-year-old Niall O'Malley has failed a five-year mission to live as a monk and is attempting to redefine himself as a high school teacher in New Jersey. The transition has been bumpy. He loves teaching history to inner city teens, but he hits a roadblock when a belligerent student, Colton, possibly a white-supremacist, behaves in ways that threaten Niall.

As troubles mount at school, Niall's girlfriend Lluvia pressures him into make a deeper commitment to their relationship. She wants them to move in together with Lluvia's pre-teen daughter and elderly mother. Haunted by his failure as a Cistercian monk and his troubles with one man in particular, the abusive Brother Thomas, Niall abandons Lluvia and heads back to his old monastery in Massachusetts for a final showdown with Thomas, now dying of ALS. Redemption for Niall is elusive as he strives to mend his faith.

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

My Review: Odd as it sounds, unsympathetic people deserve sympathy and understanding, no matter how hard it is to offer. Niall, one of life's least-lovable characters, is a passive abuse sponge. In this story, we hear him absorbing the pressures that the predators around him...his female companion, one of his students in the high-school history class he teaches...sense his vulnerability and mount their cruelty campaigns against him to...what? prove they can? get a desired result from him?...it's this that resulted in my rating being under four full stars.

I completely get why this is a story worth telling. I know others will not be able to invest in Niall because he feels so passive, yet clearly feels rage about his many instances of abuse. As a horror story for the spooky season, this (to me) makes it a perfect read: Finally acting against Lluvia's pressures and demands, going back to the escape-turned-hellscape of his early adult life in the monastery, it seems as though Niall might at last lift the fog of rage that hides his horizons.

Resolving a lifetime of trauma is very very hard. Closer to seventy than fifty, I'm still mid-process. Niall's not even fiftyish, so I'm right there with him, understanding his issues and his weirdly ineffectual...has life taught him nothing?...attempts to gain a handle on the reality of a lifetime spent being acted on, not acting. It is a big ask to spend 250pp with someone floundering in wreckage he does not see clearly, has no map to understand, and no sense of agency (though plenty of urgency propelling him hither thither and yon) in coping with. It is truly psychological horror.

I'm sorry to say I wasn't satisfied by the resolution *on a story level* not based on the result that occurred. If I'd simply wanted a different resolution I'd be giving the writing alone 4+ stars. What I'm referring to is the resolution to the story does not use the beats to build to something, to make the read a journey. It is very probable that this is intentional, as Author Emmons was capable of writing effective outrage fueling logical story resolution.

It feels very poignant that Author Emmons gave the abuser her own fatal affliction as a trigger to cause Niall to act at last. ALS is a terrible, terrifying condition. It is nightmare fodder to understand what is happening to you and still to know what is happening can not be altered.

I'm not interested in most "horror" because it relies on tropes I find deeply silly and utterly incredible. The psychological horror of this story might, had the author lived longer, have resolved itself in a more effective manner commensurate with the investment of time and attention required of the reader. As it is I got genuine frissons of horror from this resolutely reality-anchored story of psychological abuse and its consequences.

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SINKING ISLANDS
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended consequences of her actions, as well as about the ethics of operating solo. But circumstances call her to action again, and an idea takes shape: What if she could impart her skill to other people?

Gathering a few kindred souls from climate-troubled places around the world—Felipe from São Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas—she takes them to the wilds of Northern New Hampshire where she tries to teach them her skill. The novel, realistic but for the single fantastical element, explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.

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

My Review: Now that Bronwyn's "out of the closet," so to speak, as someone with a unique and effective ability to change the world's weather as climate change bites us ever harder, she's got qualms.

The men who want to use her powers do not.Retreating from the pressures of the desperate world witb a scoobygroup of others she will teach how to use her newly discovered powers, Bronwyn learns, tests, grows.

Should she simply use her abilities to effect local changes without ever knowing in advance what the global consequences are? Should the same behavior, in other words, that was used to get us into this mess be used to try getting us out? Unlike lesser writers' heroes, Bronwyn considers this ethical and practical conundrum seriously. She does it collaboratively, not solipsistically. She does it with all due haste because the world is changing fast and the consequences are dire (I'd argue condign, as well, but I'm sorta Savonarola-y on the subject.) “Death turns everything inside out. After death, nothing’s the same, for the living or the dead.”

Then, when she's determined what the course of action should be based on all the evidence she can accumulate and all the counsel she can trust, the world feels her scoobygroup's efforts. As climate catastrophes mount, as Bronwyn and her support staff take more and more drastic action, things do change.

Change, then, is possible. Change is necessary. Change can...must...come from inside you as you effect it wherever you are, as you model its reality to anyone who looks or even watches you effect it, and those few who study your efforts to reproduce them for themselves.

This 2021 title deserves our attention, with its prequel for multiple reasons. One is the men and women who surround, support, and assist Bronwyn to bring her vision and her power to reality. Another is the sheer idiocy of male-dominated power structures in their dismissal or outright rejection of ideas from women. A further idea that needs wider currency is the need for women to simply up and do stuff because it all needs doing. Waiting for validation attention or perish forbid permission is no longer an option. The world is very badly in need of all hands running to the pumps to do their own best.

Author Emmons left Bronwyn and company here. I think that's a good thing. I felt the message was delivered, the ideas explored in the depth that informed and encouraged but stopped before overwhelm set in. The books are a good set, a good length of time with these admirable people, and that counts for a lot in a world with too much and not enough always tipping, tipping, tipping....

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WEATHER WOMAN
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 30-year-old Bronwyn Artair, feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, drops out and takes a job as a TV meteorologist, much to the dismay of her mentor, Diane Fenwick. After a year of living alone in Southern New Hampshire, enduring the indignities of her job, dumped by her boyfriend, she discovers her deep connection to the natural world has given her an ability to affect natural forces.

When she finally accepts she really possesses this startling capability, she must then negotiate a new relationship to the world. Who will she tell? Who will believe her? Most importantly, how will she put this new skill of hers to use? As she seeks answers to these questions, she travels to Kansas to see the tornado maverick she worships; falls in love with Matt, the tabloid journalist who has come to investigate her; visits fires raging out of control in Los Angeles; and eventually voyages with Matt and Diane to the methane fields of Siberia.

A woman experiencing power for the first time in her life, she must figure out what she can do for the world without hurting it further. The story poses questions about science and intuition, women and power, and what the earth needs from humans.

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

My Review: What the heck are women supposed to do when they discover they have actual, utilizable power? Hide it, or course, because some man somewhere will feel threatened by it because he doesn't have it, or have a way to control it, or simply doesn't like that a woman can do something without needing to check it until a man approves of it.

Meet Bronwyn. She's an ordinary woman in an ordinary relationship with an ordinary man. It ends because he ends it. It ends, in other words, because someone not her has determined her worth is not sufficient to deserve his august attention.

So far this is realist fiction with the twist that the woman has Something Extra. But how she discovers that, what it is, and how extremely valuable it is...that's Cai Emmons' secret story sauce. In giving ordinary-everywoman Bronwyn the Something Extra, Author Emmons is sneaking into a realist-fiction piece the verity that all women have power through the metaphor of A Power. She does this as the world...hers of 2018, ours of 2025...faces unprecednted challenges to our future as a species. This passage in time is very reminiscent of the Black Death in its existential crisis. And here's unregarded Bronwyn discovering she could very well have the means to alter a seemingly inevitable death spiral.

Exploring that is, I think, the reason most reviews and ratings that ridicule and belittle the story are by men. Author Emmons dares to say, "what if a woman has the solution to our crisis? Not because a man worked on it, or because she earned it by studying under men, but in and of herself she possesses the answer, the solution, our collective way out?"

Watch the rats empty from the sinking ship to devour the rope tying us to reality.

That's why I'm offering a full four stars to this cli-fic story of how stupid it is to think you know everything thus shutting down possibly lifesaving ideas from outside your purview.

6:40 TO MONTREAL, solidly executed story with atmosphere to spare

6:40 TO MONTREAL
EVA JURCZYK
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: No WiFi, no distractions. No way out…

Agatha needs to get some serious work done on her new book. To help her, her husband bought her quiet time to concentrate: a train ticket for a six-hour ride from Toronto to Montreal. The time aboard sets the stage for a perfect writing retreat, with only a handful of other passengers, plenty of snacks and drinks, and beautiful views.

But Agatha has other plans for her day out… plans that are unexpectedly derailed when the train breaks down in the middle of the frigid Canadian woods, and one of Agatha's fellow passengers dies quietly in his seat. Soon, a pleasant morning in transit turns into a fight for survival against an unknown and unseen enemy. Will Agatha, or any of the passengers, make it out alive?

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

My Review: Nothing about the set-up, or even the execution, of this read is subtle. If you do not know already have prior reading congress with Murder on the Orient Express, I advise you to consider putting this read off for a time and read that classic first. Like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (by the same author), there is only one first time to encounter this plot...I argue you should save yourself for the original because each of these two is a rare flawless read. Christie was not a flawless writer, but those two are her closest to flawlessly executed stories.

Okay, seasoned veterans of the mystery wars, it's just us chickens now. We've read it, maybe more than once, and already know what's up. Does Author Jurczyk have the chops to ring a good change on the Dame's platonic ideal? I'll offer a "yes" vote. I know it's entirely, utterly impossible in today's world for this plot to occur. No part of it would hold up to 2025 reality's technology or its many many many social conventions flouted herein.

Since The Twist℠ isn't much of one for me, I was left to find reasons I was flying through the pages. I like neurotic overwound Agatha, her raggedness from writer's block and looming deadline and simmering suspicion of her husband's motives in gifting her this luxe train trip; she's relatably nutso. As events unfold her responses remain in character for her established neuroticicity (is that a word? I need it so it is now) while drawing on her theoretical expertise in problem solving IRL for the first time.

I also resonated to the Canadian author's evocation of the cold's presence, like it's another character in the story, strongly and positively. I think y'all hothouse fleurs will feel similarly to me on the negative side. That "presence"—the beingness of the cold—is a good narrative technique deployed well, much as in the original. It gives the entire story an agreeably menacing claustrophobia, the kind of containment that, IRL, I'd find intolerable, but feel fine reading about when it's well done. It's well done here.

I'm in the camp that the middle of the story does not maintain the beginning's smart pace; it is down to the exigencies of fair-play storytelling, though, so since I couldn't see a trim or an elision I thought would benefit the pace without snipping off something I could see a need for, I'll tell those carpers to try doing it better before just complaining. The ending was fine, didn't make me roll my eyes like the tidy-bow ending I was expecting would've done. I wonder if fifteen more pages before The Twist℠ might've helped....

Monday-morning quarterbacking at its "finest" which should make Author Jurczyk bask in the glow that she has made the kind of story that her readers really invest in. I'll recommend it for all y'all.

October 2025's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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Atlas of unknowable things by McCormick Templeman

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfect for fans of The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, with a modern gothic twist.

High in the Rocky Mountains on a secluded campus, sits Hildegard College, a celebrated institution known for its scientific innovation and its sprawling, botanical gardens. Historian Robin Quain has been awarded a residency to examine Hildegard’s impressive collection of ancient manuscripts, but she has a secret. She’s actually on the hunt for an artifact—one she must find before her former best friend turned professional rival gets his hands on it first.

But Hildegard has secrets of its own. Strange sounds echo across the alpine lake, lights flicker through the pines, and the faculty seem more like Jazz-age glitterati than academics. And then there’s the professor who holds the key to Robin’s research. She vanished suddenly last spring. What exactly did she do at the college, and why does no one want to talk about her?

As Robin searches for answers, an unknown source sends her a series of cryptic messages that makes her question whether she’s the one doing the hunting, or whether someone is hunting her. Drawing on historical, botanical, and occult research, and steeped in the gothic tradition, Atlas of Unknowable Things considers what it means to search for meaning in the scientific, only to come face to face with the sublime.

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

My Review: First, read this:

I began to understand. I had stepped through a veil of sorts. Hildegard wasn’t like other places. There were rules here I didn’t understand. There were puzzles and clues and mysteries, and even though I felt an almost immediate and palpable sense of danger, some part of me was excited. I’d spent my entire life waiting for something to feel real, to feel important. I’d always wanted to feel at the center of something truly grand. And though I couldn’t say definitively that what was happening to me was necessarily grand, at least it was something.

This is why the book only gets three and a half stars. Everything Robin, our PoV character, says here is exactly what I was thinking.

From beginning to end. That, my olds, is not great in a gothic story that's trading on dark academia vibes. If I'm *still* not clear on why I, or anyone else, follows her or allows her the access to the things she just...waltzes in and takes stuff...she has no right to, it'll take a lot more than a parade of only vaguely connected references meant to ground me. I'm afraid I never got invested enough to care.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $14.99 for the ebook.Read a sample first.

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And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1) by Joshua Moehling

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: They thought he was a helpless old man. They were wrong.

When two teenagers break into a house on a remote lake in search of prescription drugs, what starts as a simple burglary turns into a nightmare for all involved. Emmett Burr has secrets he's been keeping in his basement for more than two decades, and he'll do anything to keep his past from being revealed. As he gets the upper hand on his tormentors, the lines blur between victim, abuser, and protector.

Personal tragedy has sent former police officer Ben Packard back to the small Minnesota town of Sandy Lake in search of a fresh start. Now a sheriff's deputy, Packard is leading the investigation into the missing teens, motivated by a family connection. As clues dry up and time runs out to save them, Packard is forced to reveal his own secrets and dig deep to uncover the dark past of the place he now calls home.

Unrelentingly suspenseful and written with a piercing gaze into the dark depths of the human soul, And There He Kept Her is a thrilling page-turner that introduces readers to a complicated new hero and forces us to consider the true nature of evil.

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

My Review: Unsettling, prurient teen-girl grooming story investigated by a gay cop returning home to small-town Minnesota to work. Absolutely not one hint of salaciousness, nothing played for titillation, all my bugaboos avoided there.

Except the one about psychosexual harm to girls. I finished it, which tells you something important. YMMV depending on your squeamishness levels.

Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) needs $17.99 to let you read it.

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Where the Dead Sleep (Ben Packard #2) by Joshua Moehling

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A small town's dark secrets turn deadly...

When an early morning call brings Deputy Ben Packard to the scene of a home invasion, he finds Bill Sandersen shot in his bed. Bill was a well-liked local who chased easy money his whole life, leaving bad debts and broken hearts in his wake. Everyone Packard talks to has a story about Bill, but no one has a clear motive for wanting him dead. The business partner. The ex-wife. The current wife. The high-stakes poker buddies. Any of them—or none of them—could be guilty.

As the investigation begins, tragedy strikes the Sheriff's department, forcing Packard to make a difficult choice about his future: step down as acting Sheriff and pursue the quiet life he came to Sandy Lake in search of, or subject himself to the scrutiny of an election for the full-time role of Sheriff, a job he's not sure he wants.

There's a hidden history to Sandy Lake that Packard, ever the outsider, can't see. Bad blood and old secrets run deep. But an attempt on Packard's life means he's getting uncomfortably close to the dangerous legacy of the quiet Minnesota town. And someone will do anything to keep it hidden.

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

My Review: Caddish bro-dawggery getting a gladhanding con-man murdered in his bed? A boy can dream...and solved by sweet, seriously misplaced queer cinnamon bun acting sheriff (mulling a run for the real job, since the sheriff's got {terminal?} cancer) of a small Minnesota town? If it gets better I ain't found it yet.

Well...start work on your brother's thirty-year-old cold case or quit obsessing. Also not one soul has walked up and said, "we don't like your kind here f*ggot," so why keep worrying about them voting for a crime-solvin' hometown boy? Pull 'em up and grab the life you want!

Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requires $16.99 from you this time.

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Café Unfiltered by Jean-Philippe Blondel (tr. Alison Anderson)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An ode to the French café as a magical place, portrayed by a beloved author with humanity, insight, and tenderness.

At a classic café in the French provinces, anonymity, chance encounters, and traumatic pasts collide against the muted background of global instability. Jean-Philippe Blondel, author of the bestselling The 6:41 to Paris, presents a moving fresco of intertwined destinies. In the span of twenty-four hours, a medley of characters retrace the fading patterns of their lives after a long disruption from Covid.

A mother and son realize their vast differences, a man takes tea with a childhood friend he had once covertly fallen for, and a woman crosses paths with the ex who abandoned her in Australia. Amidst it all, the café swirls like a kaleidoscope, bringing together customers, waiters, and owners past and present. Within its walls and on its terrace, they examine the threads of their existence, laying bare their inner selves, their failed dreams, and their hopes for the uncertain future that awaits us all.

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

My Review: What I loved about this read was its episodic, character-sketch nature; its acceptance of the complexity of human love; and its just-post-COVID sense of reopening, opening up, becoming open to life.

What I was less excited by was the scattershot feeling of wanting more than I got about the people I was ready to love; the not-its-fault datedness of the planet-wide post-COVID intake of breath; and its more ornamental prose bits (not the whole book, I hasten to say).

New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests $17.95 for any edition you care to read. It's a lovely, peaceful, easy-to-love cafe I'd be a regular at.

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The 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Philippe Blondel (tr. Alison Anderson)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Cécile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation thirty years ago.

In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles towards the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face to face journey—In silence? What could they possibly say to one another?—with the reader gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts. This is a psychological thriller about past romance, with all its pain and promise.

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

My Review: Great loves that end badly don't, in my own experience, end. "The one that got away" and "the slime who broke my heart" and other such angry, wistful, and vaporous utterances are mainstays of entire genres of literature, romantic or suspenseful or violent as they need to be. Love needs an ending, not merely an end.

These two former lovers get a shocking amount of thinking (but nothing else) done on their trip to Paris; home, or not. Voyages are excellent mulling-over time. "Was it worth it?" A question that never offers one answer or even one foundation for an answer.

New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests $9.99 transfer itself to them before you may legally access the nebulous, intellectual jeu d'esprit of a story.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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Cackle by Rachel Harrison (68%)

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A darkly funny, frightening novel about a young woman learning how to take what she wants from a witch who may be too good to be true, from the author of The Return.

All her life, Annie has played it nice and safe. After being unceremoniously dumped by her longtime boyfriend, Annie seeks a fresh start. She accepts a teaching position that moves her from Manhattan to a small village upstate. She’s stunned by how perfect and picturesque the town is. The people are all friendly and warm. Her new apartment is dreamy too, minus the oddly persistent spider infestation.

Then Annie meets Sophie. Beautiful, charming, magnetic Sophie, who takes a special interest in Annie, who wants to be her friend. More importantly, she wants Annie to stop apologizing and start living for herself. That’s how Sophie lives. Annie can’t help but gravitate toward the self-possessed Sophie, wanting to spend more and more time with her, despite the fact that the rest of the townsfolk seem…a little afraid of her. And like, okay. There are some things. Sophie’s appearance is uncanny and ageless, her mansion in the middle of the woods feels a little unearthly, and she does seem to wield a certain power…but she couldn’t be…could she?

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

My Review: I craved a funny, fantastical story for #Deathtober. Maybe some suspense, maybe some spice, I was primed and ready for a scary, dark read.

Not remotely. Ralph is the scariest character (an absurd idea that will only make sense if you've read the story) in what I found to be a solidly YA tale about two misfit women becoming besties. I hit, "Some men are so foul you wouldn't even save their blood," {Sophie} says. "Sorry?" {this from Annie the PoV}...and realized I could barely distinguish them, didn't care to, and was imagining beige walls in this scary place they are.

Berkley (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) thinks it's worth $9.99 for an ebook. I don't, but I'm a long way from fifteen.

DEATH AT THE DOOR (Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries #2), just plain ol' fun!

DEATH AT THE DOOR (Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries #2)
OLIVIA BLACKE
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder for delivery tomorrow

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The odd couple of crime-solving returns in Olivia Blacke’s Death at the Door, where a ghost and her living roommate find another mystery on their doorstep.

Ruby Young is slowly adjusting to her new life in Boston. A big part of that is her unexpected roommate—the ghost of the woman who lived there before. For Cordelia Graves, she may no longer be breathing, but it’s still her apartment and Ruby is the somewhat unwanted houseguest. They’re both happy they’ve managed to become friends, which is a miracle considering they struggle to communicate with each other. Cordelia even set Ruby up with her old job.

When Ruby discovers the body of a delivery guy at work, the new life she’s been building hangs in the balance. The last time Cordelia dragged Ruby into a murder investigation, it was almost two ghosts living in the apartment, not one. Determined to protect Ruby, Cordelia tries to shield her from the investigation, but Ruby has other ideas. It will take both of them working together to navigate the fine line between the dead and the living to bring a killer to light.

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

My Review: I read the first one last #Deathtober and was amused and entertained. When this one swam past me, I gill-netted it for an amusing afternoon's reading.

Ghost partners make crime solving funny. How Ruby, a pretty naïve "breather" in the first place tries to explain how she knows things she shouldn't is kind of funny but often devolves into absurdity. Cordelia's taken the child under her, um, wing shall we say so keeps trying to get her up to Cordelia's speed. It's not going great, it does sometimes grate on my nerve, but really...don't pick up a comedy cozy and expect to solve a fair-play puzzle.

Ruby as comic relief seems too un-self aware to get away with the gag for another book. Holmes' Watson got the fact that Holmes was talking down to him. It doesn't feel to me like Ruby's got that in regard to her striking off on her own during the part of the investigation into Marty the dead guy's last hours...Cordelia's got a different idea, conveyed by their usual Etch-A-Sketch avenue of communication (one of the main reasons I come back, honestly, it just tickles me so hard!) and, as Ruby's learning, Cordelia will just up and leave if she's pissed off and "there's nothing worse than being ghosted by an actual ghost."

Don't put Denise Mina-level expectations on the story, stay light of accusatory-finger, twiddle your Etch-A-Sketch softly and this is fun. It's silly, it doesn't take it's premise either seriously enough to make it embarrassing or so condescendingly it's irritating...finding a pitch and singing in it is a rare enough gift it should be celebrated.

I needed chuckles and a grin or two. I'm really happy that I got them here. (Please...stop telling me breathers can't hear ghosts' chats. I got it.)

ZONE ROUGE, a novel fictionalizing a reality most of us haven't realized exists

ZONE ROUGE
MICHAEL JEROME PLUNKETT
The Unnamed Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: We are démineurs. We dismantle bombs.

Ferrand Martin and his team of démineurs spend their days in the ruined fields of Zone Rouge on the periphery of Verdun, France where they clean up the artillery and explosives used in World War I. One bullet, one bit of shrapnel, one bomb at a time. The work, they say, is not measured in days, months, or years, but in generations. It’s taken a century to get this far, and it will take many more centuries to complete.

One morning, a routine call to pick up a half-buried artillery shell turns out to be much more than just a single they discover a human skeleton, fully intact. Ferrand and his fellow démineurs dig deep into poisoned soil to reveal the past is rarely ever distant from the present.

This startling discovery kicks off a series of events that sees the usually desolate Zone Rouge teem with activity as academics, politicians, and locals all wrangle over the legacy of the War and what it means to remember. Zone Rouge is a brilliant reimagining of the Sisyphus myth suffused with our modern anxieties over war, climate, class, and the ghosts of our pasts.

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My Review: The real Red Zone, northeastern France, is still...107 years after the Armistice on 11/11/18...unavailable for human habitation, so damaged by and so dangerous from munitions and chemicals used during the battles of the day that it is still polluting the soil, the air, the water...there are areas where arsenic makes up 18% of the soil by weight in the 21st century.

The devastation has led to the abandonment of the area as a productive landscape. The démineurs ...this is a real job, there are hundreds of these men working the "Iron Harvest" from both the 20th century's great wars...have greater risks for some cancers, greater risk, obviously, of fatal accidents as is expected for those working with unexploded ordnance.

An expansion of the myth of Sisyphus, a kind of riposte to the great classic All Quiet on the Western Front, the idea of the story is the unending price paid for war. As long as most of us have never heard of le Zone Rouge, which..be honest...you hadn't before now, the consequences of stupid people wielding too much power are kept out of sight-out of mind. So reading the quotidian struggles of those who, for the sake of a job, clean up their grandparents' and great-grands' messes. To their own occasionally lethal detriment.

No matter the side, no matter the divide, no matter the outcome, the planet we depend on for our existence and are highly unlikely to stop needing for that suffers fro our greed and fecklessness. In the end we will pay for our actions, are beginning to pay for our actions even now. The author is (per his Goodreads bio) a former member of the "...Marine Corps and is a former EMT. He is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation and host of The LitWar Podcast. His writing has appeared in Wrath-Bearing Tree, The War Horse, Leatherneck Magazine, and other publications." With that CV, one can see why this is the subject he chose for his debut novel. A laser focus on the tangible costs of war has clearly guided the gentleman's course in adulthood. The reason the book is easy to read is in his ability to see the men, the actual uniform-wearing people, in the story. It gives the story its immediacy. The weakest part of this narrative is the man who runs a town in the Zone Rouge, who dreams of rebuilding it (in his own image of it, of course) in spite of hurdles both practical...aresenic-poisoned soil and unexploded ordnance do not say "bring the family to live here!"...and bureaucratic. The French government does not want the terrible optics of dead kids who played with a mine to go viral, nor does the rewilding of the areas most impacted strike them as a bad thing. Pripyat, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, is undergoing this process as well, and it's definitely having an impact on the natural world that the disaster seemed to preclude. We as a species need to learn from these terrible events, learn how best to fix the carnage we've wrought on the planet's other inhabitants. The reason Hugo, the "mayor," doesn't come off well is he is an archetype of end-stage capitalism's obscene valorization of greed, selfishness, and self-interest.

As I suspect that was the author's intent, I take no exception to Hugo's horribleness. I take mild exception to Ferrand, our main character's, Boy-Scouty, libertarian ways. That's a fast way to enable fascism's rise, as we're seeing now...so no, no fifth star on this story.

That does not mean I was not very pleased to read this book. I was engaged throughout, I was educated by the story's reason for existing...I'm one who hadn't clocked the existence of the titular zone...and I thoroughly appreciated the author's deftness at refining and re-presenting Sisyphus for this climate-changing, cleaning-up century.

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 PARADOX HOTEL, rollicking good time-travel story

THE PARADOX HOTEL
ROB HART
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$4.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake.

January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.

Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past.

Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls.

None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see.

On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims.

January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders.

There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once.

But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

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My Review: Witty, fun dialogue describing a very standard plot. I'm not complainig, I'm explaining. If you like our Unstuck heroine,January Cole, you'll like the whole effort. I liked her; I think most of y'all might as well. If you're not all lemon-puckered about SF, you might already know Author Rob's work from The Warehouse. (Plenty of subtext in that sentence if you know what you're looking for.)

"Unstuck"? Um, well, yeah...it's a time-travel book, featuring some yucky trillionaire types without morals or scruples, who can afford their very own access to time travel:

“There’s this saying, about people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple,” I tell him. “About the way people inherit wealth and power and think that not only did they earn it, but they deserve it. We deal with a different sort in this place. People who were born on third base and think they built the stadium.”

A consequence of developing time travel is that some people come "Unstuck" from their roots in...whatever Time is...hence are "Unstuck." Think The Time Traveler's Wife, or Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like all the best time-travel stories, those and this one are about bigger things, grief, the idea of inequality, the process of identity versus the certainties most of us crave for identity to provide...y'know, Life.

Author Rob digs in, plays it out, makes us care while taking our little teeny Stuck selves through a mad, whirling, loud maelstrom of voices and ideas. January lost Mena, grieves for her, but...what does loss really mean to someone Unstuck? Why is everything everywhere here and why is now all at once? With time crimes to solve, security professional January needs to track everyone and through the everywhere that is the Paradox Hotel...which is being sold in the process of the US Government privatizing the ability to time travel, just to add some more complexity.

And who's the dead guy in room 526 that no one else can see?

All of these are questions January needs to solve/resolve. It's the only focus she has that can override her desperate, raging grief for Mena. And it might keep her employed at the Paradox Hotel.

And alive. All because she's Unstuck, so the only one who *can* do it all.

I don't offer a fifth star because the humor is often bitter, sometimes forced, and always facetious. I resonate with most of it. I love Jodi Taylor's emotionally intense, very funny books; they're happy humor, laughing...sometimes mordantly...together with the story. In Author Rob's work, we stand outside and laugh at things with January. It can feel off-putting. So no fifth star for you.

It's still a really good time for the right mood, the right reader, the right moment. Look into it!