Posted February 14, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Hexmaker, Jordan L. Hawk
Back to Hexworld, and this second book is as fun as the first. I think I liked them a tiny bit less than Cicero and Tom from the first book, and I thought they needed to do a heck of a lot more communicating (including about their boundaries during sex, which they just kind of plunge into), but Malachi and Owen have a totally different and interesting dynamic, and it worked out well. The power differential between witches and familiars is present in all of these stories, but most of all here, where the personal relationship balances it.
I think overall I’d have liked a bit longer for Owen and Malachi’s relationship to develop; the compressed timescale didn’t quite work for me here, and I could’ve used seeing a little more trust starting to develop between them. The relationship crisis definitely echoed the one in the first book, but I’d felt more closely connected to the relationship in the first book.
I’m curious to see where the overarching plot is going, and I love the background of the world — Owen’s trans brother, because of course hexes can help with that; Egyptian archaeology being relevant for the history of hexes… It’s all pretty fascinating, and as always the book is pacy and fun.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: alternate history, book reviews, books, Jordan L. Hawk, queer fiction, romance, SF/F
Posted February 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Death of an Author, E.C.R. Lorac
Death of an Author is another really enjoyable mystery from E.C.R. Lorac — one slyly self-referential, given the stuff about it being impossible for a female author to write such a mystery, and an outlier as well, because it doesn’t feature her usual series detective. There’s also rather less of an “atmosphere”, though she does describe a couple of the locations very vividly.
The reason I’m losing my head and giving it five stars is that I found the mystery so genuinely intriguing to turn over in my mind. Often when I read mystery novels, I just wait for the author to lead me to the clues, pretty much ever since Sayers and that cheat of withholding the flake white clue (yes, I know, I do bang on about that). I don’t trust authors to give the clues, and also I cynically know how the twists and turns of a mystery novel go. But I didn’t anticipate every step of this one, and I didn’t spoiler myself for the end either: I wanted the full experience, and to give the puzzle a try myself.
In the end, I got there with the solution, though some things happened that I didn’t quite believe (and there was a bit that relied extremely heavily on luck), and I really enjoyed the process of getting there. Lorac was a good writer, and her wry wit in playing with the questions of authorship here offered some extra piquancy. (I wonder how people took it when they thought she was a guy, thanks to her pen-name?)
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, E.C.R. Lorac, mystery
Posted February 9, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Death on the Down Beat, Sebastian Farr
Death on the Down Beat was a bit of a surprise to me, to be honest. I hadn’t fully clocked the format: it’s an epistolary novel, based on the detective writing letters (and sending dossiers) home to his wife. (Amusingly, it’s very careful to make this feel a little more plausible, by the husband noting multiple times that he shouldn’t be doing this, but commenting on how helpful it is and asking his wife to file things for him in the usual way.) I knew that some extracts of a musical score were included — and an important clue — but not about the letters, and I think it helped this book feel a little different, even if the detective could barely be told apart from a host of other classic mystery detectives.
The letter format does mean that the reader is held at a bit of a distance from any action, and doesn’t get to know the characters directly. The suspects thus rather blur into each other, which makes it difficult to have any real suspicions — I went off on a completely wrong track, though I wasn’t really wrong about the motive. So that’s my main critique here: there’s a lot of superfluous stuff and a lot of suspects, and the information we need is rather camouflaged by all of that.
Which makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy it, when I definitely did: I think this format is a neat idea, and I enjoyed the fact that the detection process was complemented by an understanding of the music. Not that I did understand the music, but it was explained well enough to get the point, and like Sayers’ tube of flake white in Five Red Herrings, I bet a little prior knowledge really illuminates things, and that’s kinda neat too. (Maybe it’s not quite as… obscuring as the flake white that Sayers wouldn’t name, though.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery, Sebastian Farr
Posted February 7, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore, Emma Southon
I really enjoyed Emma Southon’s book on murder in Ancient Rome, so I was eager to pick this up. I didn’t know much about Agrippina to begin with, beyond the most common stories, so it took some work to orient myself to her family tree (and of course, with the way that Romans only had about two names available per family so it sometimes feels like everyone is called Julia or Agrippina). Once oriented (with the help of Southon’s explanations and supplementary material), it’s quite the story: Southon sees Agrippina as a very capable woman who tried to do things not considered suitable for a woman in her context, and nonetheless being fairly successful, on the whole.
Southon’s tone is irreverent, as in her other book, and that might put off people who are looking for “serious” history. Despite that, and the lack of direct sourcing, Southon makes it very clear when she’s speculating and what she thinks is possible, what she thinks is likely, and what she thinks is a certainty. Don’t let the tone fool you: she’s really quite careful about that, and many historians are not (or not always). Southon outright tells you that she’s imagining what Agrippina might have done, and based on what; other authors will look at the possibilities, pick their favourite, and present that as what happened because it’s what they think happened.
Southon’s book is pretty sympathetic to Agrippina, where generally I’ve seen her treated very critically, and she does good work in revealing where that came from and why. Overall, Agrippina was an enemy I wouldn’t have liked to make — and one who got the things she wanted from life, even if they then killed her. Southon’s interpretation is striking and refreshing.
I did actually find it a bit slow going at times, despite that, but I don’t think that’s the fault of Southon, or of the material. This just didn’t feel as fresh as A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum — despite Southon’s irreverent tone, it’s still a biography, and those can kinda drag for me.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Emma Southon, history, non-fiction
Posted February 5, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Murder: The Biography, Kate Morgan
Murder: The Biography is an interesting look at the history of murder, from the perspective of how different murder cases have changed the law (and how the law existing at the time impacted various murder cases). It’s written by a lawyer, but it’s accessible for the layperson, and Morgan remains keenly aware of how fascinating the topic of murder is to many. The details aren’t at all dry, but the back of the book contains details of how to find the relevant judgements, etc, for those who want to dig right into it.
For a reader of crime/mystery fiction, it has little to say about the fictional world (beyond a few comments that the bulk of murders are not like in books), just in case you were wondering — it focuses entirely on real-world cases, mostly things which helped to shape the law and other prosecutions. So we see things like the development of defences of diminished responsibility, and corporate manslaughter, through the lens of the events that prompted them. The latter law is still not really tested: the case of Grenfell, Morgan says, is a make-or-break moment for it, as you’d imagine.
I found it a really interesting read, and surprisingly quick. I wasn’t already aware of all of the murders, either. Just as a warning, there are a few really awful cases, such as the case of Dr Bateman’s negligence — skim that one if you’re a bit squeamish, and avoid the details.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, history, Kate Morgan, non-fiction
Posted February 2, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
A Master of Djinn, P. Djèlí Clark
A Master of Djinn takes the threads from the novellas in this world — primarily A Dead Djinn in Cairo, but also the world-building and some characters from The Haunting of Tram Car 015 — and pulls them together into a full-length novel, with Agent Fatma as the lead. If you haven’t read those novellas, I’d strongly suggest doing so first: I suspect there are enough details here to let you jump in, but the novellas provide a lot of context (e.g. the Clock of Worlds, what exactly Fatma does, why the world is the way it is).
Clark seems to love writing female characters who have strong opinions and their own way of approaching the world: the central three female characters are each quite different, though driven and capable. Hadia is not a carbon copy of Fatma, despite their shared profession, and nor is she the wilting flower that Fatma originally expects — and Siti’s something else entirely. I found the female characters a joy here, to be honest, though I’d like to see more of Hadia and her weak points as well as all her surprising strengths.
As far as the antagonist goes, I called it well before the characters did, though in part that’s being outside the narrative and knowing how mysteries are structured. I was glad that Fatma realised a particular aspect of it before the story actually revealed it, because it would’ve felt weird if she wasn’t sharp enough to see that when I had realised it.
I found it really satisfying that this book pulled together the threads from the novellas, while creating a whole new story that revealed more of the world. It’s a book I may well come back to, as I did the novellas.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, P. Djèlí Clark, SF/F
Posted January 30, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Nobody’s Princess, Erica Ridley
Nobody’s Princess gives Graham Wynchester a chance to really shine — something I’d been looking forward to for quite a while after his appearances in The Duke Heist and The Perks of Loving a Wallflower. Here he’s centre stage, romantic hero, and he finally has a chance to rescue a real princess (sort of).
Kunigunde is a visitor from the very kingdom the Wynchesters’ adoptive father Bean came from, and she’s on a mission to become a Royal Guardswoman, the very first. Her brothers have different ideas, and are trying pretty hard to chase her down, but Graham’s at hand to involve himself (whether she likes it or not) and save the day (whether or not she’d have come up with something for herself).
It was nice to see Graham front and centre, and maybe it’d just been a little while since I read the other books, but I was surprised by how silly he was at times. Not that I really should have been, given the Wynchesters’ banter amongst themselves — but I did have a touch of embarrassment squick about his quixotic attempts to be Kuni’s knight in shining armour.
I did love the way Kuni found herself falling in love with not just Graham, but the whole life of the Wynchester family. I wasn’t sure about how things were going to get figured out, but I found the end pretty satisfactory.
I didn’t love this as much as the first two books, and I had a bit of concern about the way Kuni was portrayed (in particular, the kind of language mistakes she made, which didn’t at all seem to fit with her proficiency with the language or my experience of people who speak English as a second language — I’m married to one, so you could say I’ve done extensive research on the subject). That said, I absolutely inhaled the book, and I had a lot of fun.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Erica Ridley, historical fiction, romance
Posted January 29, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Soldier’s Scoundrel, Cat Sebastian
Jack Turner is sort of a private detective, sort of an agent of poetic justice, handling messes that higher-class society folks want sweeping under the rug — an abusive husband, a case of blackmail, stolen items… He clashes with Oliver Rivington, a soldier in need of lawful stability after the war, after helping Oliver’s sister out with such a problem, and I honestly expected sparks to fly much more than they did. It’s such an easy source of conflict for a romantic relationship: their morals differ so much! They’re opposed on a fundamental level!
And indeed, it is part of the conflict — but part of the joy of the book is in fact that Oliver considers his errors, reconsiders his position, and unbends enough to listen to Jack’s point of view. It’s not his way or the highway; even when he briefly thinks it might has to be, he’s still open to communication.
Is their burgeoning relationship a heaven of perfect communication, the meeting of like minds? Nope. Oliver still balks at some of Jack’s opinions and methods, and Jack for his part has a lifetime of trauma that shapes how he sees Oliver’s thoughts and actions. Each has to bend a little, and make efforts, to make the thing work, but it all feels more gentle and more intimate because Oliver is prepared to bend, prepared to apologise, prepared to live at Jack’s level. I cared about their relationship all the more because the conflict wasn’t straight-forward, because Oliver wasn’t prepared to let it go too easily, and wasn’t too proud to apologise — and Jack wasn’t too proud to accept it.
Overall, I found this really enjoyable. Jack’s approach to justice isn’t mine, but it makes sense for his life, and Oliver’s acceptance of it makes sense as well, and their relationship genuinely feels built on more than just headlong attraction between two stubborn assholes who won’t talk to each other — which can be lacking in other romances, where I wonder how on earth they’ll get on in the long run given they spent a whole book refusing to bend only to have a dramatic rapprochement at the end.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Cat Sebastian, historical fiction, queer fiction, romance
Posted January 26, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Everybody Lies is an enthusiastic defence of the premise that “big data” — such as aggregate data from the kind of things people search in Google — might tell us things about humans that we wouldn’t admit even on an anonymous survey, and which things like implicit association tests hope to dig out. My main feeling going in was that I’d expect such a dataset to have its own drawbacks, and that I’d be very sceptical if the author pretended that it did not.
Well, though the author writes enthusiastically and persuasively about the subject, he does mention some cautionary tales and drawbacks, and he makes very good points about things like sexuality. Someone in the closet in a homophobic country doesn’t have much incentive to admit to being gay to an anonymous survey, but they might still search for gay porn (and indeed searches for gay porn match reasonably well across the world, showing that there’s a background rate of people who are at least interested in it in principle.
(His data actually just shows where men are interested in men having sex with men, not where men are gay, which is something he doesn’t really notice. Bisexual men don’t exist for the purposes of his discussion here, even though he’d be much better to just talk about same-sex attraction and include the possibility of both homosexuality and bisexuality.)
The book is full of interesting examples and applications, and a sprinkling of the author’s personality (as many pop-sci type books do). He’s excited about his work, but not too credulous, and it’s a reasonable introduction to the concept that has me… okay, not convinced that data science is actually necessarily going to produce the next great specialist in every subject (as he suggests), but hopeful that data from Google searches and other similar bodies of data can indeed teach us things about ourselves.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Posted January 24, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Hexbreaker, Jordan L. Hawk
Tom is a copper, a decent one who doesn’t take bribes and keeps his neighbourhood safe. He’s hiding a past of violence and betrayal, something he walked away from for everyone’s safety. Cicero is a familiar, a shapeshifter, who works with the local magical police for protection, but hasn’t yet agreed to bond with a witch. They’re thrown together to solve two murders — which stir up horrifying echoes for both of them, of pasts they’ve tried to put behind them — and at first it seems like they’re oil and water. Cicero constantly makes assumptions about Tom based on his job and appearance, but slowly, of course, sparks start to fly.
There is of course a wrenching part of the romance (as so often) where the secrets Tom is keeping come back to haunt him, leaving Cicero feeling lied to and abandoned. Obviously there were so many opportunities to do better and to communicate with Cicero — but at least it seems to make sense that he doesn’t. He doesn’t realise his past is relevant to the case, and he’s committed to a better future, one with Cicero in it; the smart thing would be to ‘fess up, of course, but… that’s difficult, and didn’t seem important. It makes sense.
A lot of people mention not loving this book as much as the Widdershins books, but I disagree. That’s partly down to my pet peeves: Whyborne’s obsessive lack of self-esteem over the course of several books drives me nuts, and the lack of communication between him and Griffin comes back again and again and again. For that reason, this clicked better for me (which is not to say that I find nothing to enjoy in the Widdershins books).
There are some gruesome bits of this story, just as a warning. There’s also some period typical homophobia, though not amongst the main characters or anyone who matters. I’m looking forward to glimpsing Cicero and Tom in the stories of the others…
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Jordan L. Hawk, mystery, queer fiction, romance, SF/F
