lightreads

A Drop of Corruption

4/5. Sequel in this fantasy biopunk Holmes & Watson universe.

One of the more successful sequels I’ve read in a long time, in the sense that this accomplishes the task of really blowing up and blowing out the world. I continue to be only middling interested in these characters (and also continue to be puzzled about why this series is first person, aside from the obvious stylistic nod). But the construction of this empire, whose people’s bodies and minds are modified in ways beyond our understanding by methods beyond their understanding, all while the leviathans come ever closer to breaking down the sea walls, is incredibly interesting to me.

I think this book is not as successful in its project of talking about kings and power structures by blood in general. It does that, but our protagonist is not really clocking the implications for his own life as an imperial subject, so it doesn’t quite come together the way intended. The first person gets in the way there, specifically, given our protagonist is not, shall we say, a political or philosophical thinker.

Still, I am way more interested in this now than I was after the first book.

Content notes: Body modification and body horror, threats of infection/contamination.

Bonded in Death

3/5. Latest of these – if you don’t know what they are by now, I can’t help you. An okay series entry that, as usual recently, took the safe and boring route. Eve is a half step ahead of the killer through the whole book, and the safety of everyone you care about is pretty much a sure thing. Some unsubtle but nice reflections on the ways groups of people bond in adversity, or in hard collective work, both Eve’s police team and extended network and the team of old spies at the heart of the story.

I was more interested in the history dropped here than the case. I’ve always wondered what these “urban wars” were about. The explanation we get here is plausible in parts – a mass movement to ‘burn it all down’ – and very silly in the whole – a worldwide(?) coordinated(?) breakdown of order in urban centers? Which is resolved after years of fighting without apparently really changing the geopolitics of anything? Okay, Nora, carry on.

Content notes: Murder, child abduction/harm.

We Solve Murders

4/5. Start of another mystery series, this one about a bodyguard and her client and her father-in-law who get tangled up in international moneylaundering, for reasons.

This uses many of the same cards as his other books: a strong lean on platonic and nontraditional friendship bonds; short, punchy chapters; a mix of the zany and the serious. It did entertain me, but not as well as his other books did. Some of these short character sketches missed the mark on funny for me and came way too close to mean, for one. I’ll try the next one, because sometimes it takes a series a while to find its feet.

Content notes: Murder, grief, lost spouse.

A curious Beginning plus seven more books

3/5. Series of historical mysteries with a “slow burn” het romance subplot, featuring a naturalist and her partner in many senses.

I’m about to complain about these, but I feel in fairness I should also point out that I did read eight of them. They’re comfortable popcorn books with a growing cast of colorful secondary characters and a variety of mystery/suspense plots.

But they’re also pretty annoying. Veronica, our protagonist, has a case of not-like-other-girls-itis so bad, it really ought to be fatal. These books are just heavily overclocked in general; Raybourn has zero chill about anything ever, including some very delicate emotional things. Also, this is one of those “slow burns” that I don’t think earns the name. Sure it takes them like five books to hook up, but that’s more annoying than tantalizing when they got fake married and started having whoops-we-almost-kissed moments in the first hundred pages of the first book. It’s not slow burn, it’s just here’s a fire but we’re not going to do anything about it for a series of more or less stupid or arbitrary reasons for an annoying length of time.

I did read eight, though. Fun, quippy, frequently annoying, generally entertaining.

Content notes: Murder of all sorts, a lot of stuff that is blurring together now

Random in Death

3/5. In Death does an incel. It’s a good procedural as this series goes, and she had the sense to keep the incel POV out until late in the game because blech, who wants to spend a lot of time in there. More importantly, though, I didn’t buy the portrayal of this guy. You could sell me a loner, sure, but zero contact with a broader – I don’t want to call it a “community” so let’s assign incels the collective noun creep -- creep? That is missing the point. This book would have you that this kid invented the mindset from scratch with no input, all while he recites thesis statements from your basic incel internet rantings. It makes the mystery less interesting to solve because you can’t get at him through his contacts, but it also makes the whole thing way less sociopolitically relevant, which is what she’s grasping after with all these Nora-Roberts-thinks-about-the-topic-of-the-day books in the first place.

Content notes: Uh, incel. Attempted rape. Murder of teenagers.

The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet that Missed, and The Last Devil to Die

5/5. Series of mysteries set in and around a posh retirement village and the four residents who become (in some cases reluctant) friends as they solve crime.

Oh, I loved these. It took me a minute – this isn’t my genre, and it’s doing those punchy super short chapters that don’t always work for me. But I laughed. Out loud! More than once! And, even more rarely, I cried. Twice. Once just a little misting (book 3) and once full on weeping (book 4, if you know you know, I mean of course I saw it coming miles off, but that didn't matter a bit).

The thing about these is. Aside from being funny and also gently removing my heart from my chest. The thing about them is that their most important project is foregrounding unlikely friendship. Our four main protagonists, sure. But also the two cops of different races and generations and seniority who become the cutest BFF’s. And the crowning glory that is Bogdan falling into family with Stephen and Elizabeth over the chess board and dug up bodies. Friendship makes these books go in beautiful, wholesome, messy, complicated ways, and it sends multiple characters on arcs of deep self-fulfillment that they never expected. You don’t stop growing as a person just because you’re eighty. They all give me life.

Are these perfect? Far from it. Just the most obvious – there’s a health/weight loss plotline where I kept waiting for it to grow some nuance or interest, and it just doesn’t. And you have to suspend some more “but that’s not how that works” parts of your brain. But totally worth it.

I needed that.

Content notes: Dementia. Grief/loss. Assisted suicide.

Death in a Strange Country

3/5. Multiple people told me to skip book 1, so this is book 2 of a long-running and beloved series of mysteries about a cop in Venice. This one is about a murdered American soldier leading to a conspiracy about toxic chemical dumping.

Eh. I’m in the market for a long mystery series to have a good wallow in, but this isn’t going to be it, I think. It’s not that it’s bad. Quite the opposite – there’s a delicacy and depth to the portrayal of a marriage here, in particular, that I enjoyed. And the mystery itself is deliberately unsatisfying in an interesting way. And the setting is, of course, compelling. But despite all that . . . no thanks. I’ve had my fill of this guy after one book, let alone thirty plus, even if I assume he becomes less of a chauvinist over the course of the books. He would have to do that and get a lot more interesting as a person to keep me reading.

Nightwork

3/5. He is a self-taught international jewel thief who meets the love of his life in Shakespeare seminar, then quickly abandons her when his past comes calling. They meet again a decade later when he is taking a sabbatical as a high school English/drama teacher and she is writing a book, like you do?

I keep wondering why these Nora Roberts standalone modern romances are so compelling. It’s not the romances, we’ve established that. Those are always too heteronormative for me (not all het romances are, but hers…yeah). And it’s not the plots, those are window dressing and she knows it. So WTF is it? I think it’s that she gives good life writing. You know, here’s 50 pages in which someone lives a decade, with just the right amount of specificity and the right amount of blur. And I think, specifically, that she writes life studies rather than character studies. How they turn, how they change, where the road goes, where it doesn’t. All of that illuminates character, but that’s a result, not a cause. It’s not the sort of thing I would say I like, but she is damn good at it. I suppose she better be, at this point.

Content notes: Death of a parent to cancer, threats of violence, thieving made sexy.

Desperation in Death

3/5. Yet another big international evil organization book, in this case sex trafficking. Interesting to me not for that – these are my least favorite subtype In Death book, they make no god damn sense. But this one is about how much things have changed for Eve, how much she has integrated her trauma, to be able to work the case the way she does. It’s a bit of a victory lap, tbh. Fair.

Content notes: Captivity, grooming, sex trafficking

Encore in Death

3/5. A return to the twisty, personal, complicated murders. It’s kind of about the compromises you make in marriage – for love, specifically – and the sacrifices you don’t. But that part doesn’t have any real teeth as it is not really reflecting on Eve and Roarke. Also, the timeline of this series continues to be absolutely boggling – she’s been writing these for a quarter century, and they’ve only covered what, barely three years of story time? In sixty books? Nora Roberts These people really are workaholics.

Content notes: Murder

Flying Solo

4/5. Determinedly single woman comes back to her home town on the brink of turning forty to clear out her great aunt’s house. She runs into an old boyfriend and also a mystery involving a carved wooden duck and exactly what her “spinster” globetrotting great aunt was up to.

Ah, lovely. Lots of you are going to like this. It’s a big glug of cozy small New England town with a splash of mystery, a splish of mild revenge thriller, and a shake of romance. It’s about how hard you have to swim up current to choose, actively, to be single, but not alone. This book lives in that tension between intensely wanting your own space/solitude and also loving somebody very much. It also uncomfortably lives in that space where making an unconventional choice takes on a sort of political life beyond you, so that suddenly your choices all seem weighted and meaningful.

It's sweet and bantery and thoughtful, and there’s a lot of Linda Holmes in here. So if you like her, you will probably like this. Also, the heroine is fat and (mostly) unconcerned about it.

Abandoned in Death

3/5. A solid procedural entry with a lot of complicated backstory about child abandonment and amnesia and reinventing a self from scratch that was absorbing to read, but that tangles up badly in the end. This book is confused and conflicted about fault, and who can be blamed for the inception of violence. It's fine to be conflicted about that, but Roberts doesn't want to be, she wants her usual black-and-white view of fault. So she writes this ambiguous, tricky story of a parent abandoning a child through some fault and some horrible circumstance, and draws the obvious parallels to Eve and Roarke, both abandoned by their parents in different and terrible ways. And she could have let that breathe, and sit with everything else the series has done on the theme of hurt children constructing themselves into whole adults capable of love and happiness. But nope. She had to simplify it, had to say oh, well, this five-year-old child subjected to a horrible trauma, he was already a baby sociopath before that (what?), so – she doesn't actually have an end to that explanation, it's just really important that she cut through the knot to absolve and assign blame.

It all made me think, wincingly, about how mad Eve gets whenever she catches a killer who is actually mentally ill. Like it makes her furious whenever anyone suggests that maybe someone should be in a psych facility instead of one of these famed off-planet prisons. And Eve can always tell at a glance, you see, being an expert or something. A symptom of the same pathology – the overpowering need to center the fault for violence entirely within the person committing it, as if violence just springs out of no context.

Content notes: Child abandonment, captivity, murder.

Tribute

3/5. Classic Nora about the granddaughter of a famous Hollywood star returning to the country house her grandmother supposedly committed suicide in to restore it from the inside out, except someone doesn't want her digging into the house's secrets. Lots of home design and decorating talk, with that usual thing where the making of the home is a metaphor for the making of the self. Published exactly when you think it is for a book that really wants to sell you on how great it is to be a house flipper. Major bonus points for the heroine explicitly being super hot because she's good with power tools and the hero – who decidedly is not – being way into it. Minus points for the hero being a classic Nora Roberts boundary violator (he watches her through binoculars for two hours! For "work"! Christ.)

Content notes: Violence, bad parenting.