sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: mystery

This is a murder mystery novel set in space in the future, but among other things the sheer quantity of classic cocktails all the characters drink made me wonder what was going on with its vibes, and the answer appears to be that the book is based on a 1960's movie. Which explains a lot, tbh.

It felt to me like it was trying to have 1960's mystery vibes while also updating its general social consciousness, but for me personally, the way this particular book did the mashup did not work. It gave me the feeling that it simultaneously wanted to be like, "I understand about prejudice and oppression and intersectionality!" and also "this is an unexamined power fantasy about being rich!" and the two did not mesh nicely with each other.

also..... the heroine is a tech billionaire named Tesla travelling to Mars. I couldn't help being reminded of a certain other billionaire in the news a lot these days.

Anyway, I didn't feel the worldbuilding was strong, and I didn't particularly like or care about any of the characters, and I wasn't intrigued by the murder mystery, so all together there wasn't a lot for me in this book.

Some readers may appreciate though that the main character is someone who lives with disabling chronic pain and PTSD, which are regularly kept at the forefront of her experience of life. However, she also has a service dog for her PTSD and the sheer quantity of time she spent releasing the dog to say hi to other people and get petted.... I think the dog spent more of the book off-duty than on. Not at all, from my understanding, the usual priorities of people with service dogs.

Overall, I expected better from this author given the other things I've read from her, and I'm not sure what happened here. Hopefully this is just an off book and not the beginning of a trend for her!

Sequel to last year's A Marvellous Light, a book I enjoyed but felt rather like it wasn't focusing on the story I wanted it to focus on. This one.... unfortunately continues the trend, though in a slightly different way.

Maud and Violet are two young women on a trans-atlantic ship voyage, who get caught up in a mystery surrounding a murder and a missing magical object. Together, they work to solve the mystery, accomplish their various goals, and navigate their growing relationship with each other.

There are many things to like about this, and honestly it is executed very well. There's good stuff between Maud and Violet, and the amount of trust and vulnerability they're a) interested in sharing with each other or b) capable of; and there's a fun cast of secondary characters in the restricted environment of a ship at sea. Some of the food descriptions really stuck with me, and I don't usually notice food in books! And we get to find out more about the Forsythia Club, the group of old lady magicians who had fascinated me so much in the last book.

But the story being told here is really a lot more hijinks-heavy a story than I usually prefer, featuring two main characters who are both hijinks-generators in their own ways, so I just wasn't really into the vibe for the first, like.... at least half the book.

And then I was teased with an AMAZING idea that then didn't go anywhere near what I was hoping and expecting for such an idea!

( cut for spoilers )

At any rate, highly recommended for anyone more into hijinks than me. I really did like the characters and their relationship!

And the next book is going to feature my favourite secondary character from this book, apparently: Ross, the class-conscious pornography-smuggling reporter. I'll be interested to see where that goes! And I hope there'll be more of Mrs Vaughn in the next book.

I first heard of this book via a rec from

sineala, and I'm so glad, because ahhh I loved this book so much! It just really hit the spot perfectly, of feeling like a classic secondary-world fantasy of my childhood while also being well written and interesting and queer. So much of the sff I read these days is either historical fantasy or futuristic sci-fi, and though both are delicious, I'd forgotten how good it can be to sink your teeth into a nice well-built secondary world fantasy and immerse yourself in that created world.

And it's a book published in the 90's that's textually queer! This aspect isn't forefronted, but it's subtly-yet-clearly woven into the worldbuilding throughout the whole book, in a way that's probably possible for an oblivious het to not even notice, but is blatant to anyone else.

The worldbuilding in general though is all really good. It's doing things that are interesting and specific and well integrated, and clear about what it's doing without ever feeling infodumpy. And I love how the city where most of the story takes place feels lived in and full of real people living their various intersecting lives, and with enough references to other cultures (and the tensions of living in a multicultural city with Histories between the various cultures) that the city feels like part of a larger world too. And there are enough references to things that have changed or happened in the past, including the recent past, that it doesn't feel stagnant; it's a living city, a living world.

Anyway the actual plot/characters. Rathe is a pointsman (....sort of a policeman, but with enough specificity about their place in the culture that it doesn't feel to me at least like it carries with it all the burden of associations a modern reader brings to police) and Eslingen is a mercenary soldier temporarily between jobs; together, they fight crime! That is, the city has recently had a more than usual rash of children disappearing, ones who seem very unlikely to have simply run away from home, and no bodies have been found, so what could have happened to them?

The mystery doesn't have Shocking! Twists! but unfolds well and interestingly, and

spoilers

I was pleased that in the end all of the children were recovered safely.

Anyway it looks like there are 4 more books in the series, and I want to read all of them! Though my library only has 1 other, so we'll see how far I get.

Ohhhhhh boy. Where to start. Where to start with this. I suppose I'll start by saying that I think this is a very well-meaning book that is probably great for people who are looking for a specific kind of thing in their literature, but that person is emphatically not me and I am going to put a WHOLE lot of words of complaint after this.

( cut for a) significant spoilers, b) me being a grump, and c) discussion of rape )

Sigh, I don't know. Like, is Sayers a very good writer? She certainly is. Do Harriet and Peter play beautifully off each other, and is it fun to watch them? Absolutely! But somehow I don't love this as much as I did the first time I read it. I don't know, I just.... there's this moment where for the first time Harriet sees Peter as being masterful and she is very positively struck by this new vision and understanding of him and is clearly Into It, and it just presages all the complexity in Gaudy Night where the point is SUPPOSED to be about them finding a way to be on equal footing with each other but there's still this sort of uneasiness in the end with the idea that she could in fact be the complete equal of the male aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey (I've found aspects of this meta helpful for making clearer the ways this shows up in the book). Plus the scene reminded me of the way Georgette Heyer has an obvious kink for masterful men but she seems to think it's just normal, which is never a comparison you want to end up with, much though I also do enjoy a Heyer now and then.

And the book treats Mrs Weldon as ultimately ridiculous and off-putting, and ditto Paul's previous girl in different ways, and Paul's previous girl's new young man is depicted as basically contemptible, and on and on - and like, they're all just people, whose only real crime is to be of the wrong class, basically, and thus behaving in ways that are judged to be vulgar.

It just doesn't feel good-hearted about the diversity of humanity and the value that all people have in their different ways.

Also the timetables might not be as bad as in Five Red Herrings but there sure are entirely too many pages of code-breaking which you can skip RIGHT over to the end solution without missing a single bit of importance.

So it's a very enjoyable and readable book overall, but I'm not ultimately satisfied with it.

(one other, irrelevant complaint: my second-hand paperback copy from 1987 simply ABOUNDS in errors; seriously, did nobody look at the proofs for this edition??? This is the most errors I have ever seen in a published book in my entire life, by a wide margin.)

Important content note: the creation of child sexual abuse material is a significant feature in a major case in this book.

I'll put the rest of this review below a cut.

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I was so worried heading into this book, because I absolutely adored Addison's first book set in this world, The Goblin Emperor, but had irreconcilable differences with her most recently published book, The Angel of the Crows. And the books she's written that aren't under this pen-name are books that don't seem up my alley at all. What if Goblin Emperor was a fluke???

Well, this book might not speak to me on the same level as Goblin Emperor, but I'm pleased and relieved to report that I really enjoyed it nonetheless!

Goblin Emperor was a book that took place almost entirely among the upper-class, in the closed and formal environment of the Emperor's court. Witness for the Dead, by contrast, takes place in a cosmopolitan city with characters from a wide range of social classes and experiences, and I love how the author takes this opportunity to show the differences in the way that religion and culture are lived out in this extremely different sphere. You get a very different view of the world, in a way that makes you realize just how constricted Maia's world really was.

Thara Celehar, the main character of this book, like Maia is a traumatised person dealing with that trauma. But Celehar mainly deals with it by repressing like hell and throwing himself into overwork in his very stressful job of listening to dead people and telling the live ones what's what.

The book is sort of a murder mystery, but it doesn't have One Main Mystery the way genre mysteries tend to. There are three mysteries that are through-lines for the whole book (a drowned opera singer, a poisoned newlywed, and a family dispute over a will) but Celehar's life is just dealing with one dead person after another, so there's lots more cases interspersed among the big ones. And the book does give you answers to all the mysteries, which is good.

The thing is....the thing is the character arc, I guess. ( cut for spoilers )

EDIT: I thought I had read somewhere that there were going to be sequels to this but now I can't find any evidence of it. If you know anything about this please let me know!! Because if this is the actual end of Celehar's story I might riot.

This is the third book in a mystery series set in 1920's India, starring a woman who's the country's first female solicitor. I liked the first book, but the second book had enough issues that I was seriously doubting whether it would be worthwhile to continue with the third. But I gave it a chance, and I'm glad I did, because I really liked this one!

The prose continues to feel mildly awkward to me, but not to a degree that was a problem, and the kind of major issues that were present in the second book were not present here in the same way so I could just enjoy it for its strengths.

This book is set during the very specific historical time period of the British prince's royal visit to India in 1921, and the independence related riots it provoked. A fascinating time to be exploring, and this created a great context full of societal upheaval and the complexities of diverse viewpoints, as Perveen attempts to solve the latest mystery.

A love interest for Perveen was introduced in the previous book, and I'm not particularly interested in him, so I was disappointed to see him reappear in this book. I was a little eye-rolly about the ~forbidden romance between them. But it wasn't too big an element of the book so I could deal.

Seeing Perveen navigate all her various complex social and family relationships as well as her public reputation within Bombay was much more interesting than the isolated setting of the last book. This was really great! I love her relationship with her father particularly. He's unusually progressive, supporting his daughter in taking a career that has never previously been open for women, but still more conservative than Perveen in a number of ways. And they work together well, and Perveen loves and respects him, and also gets frustrated with him and disagrees with him but doesn't want that to get in the way of their good relationship.

I also love Perveen's best friendship with a lesbian schoolteacher! Glad to see her back from the first book. Alice is great.

The mystery.... I'm probably not qualified to judge, I am not a mystery aficionado, but it worked for me. I do feel like there were some questions that were brought up in the course of seeing various suspects as suspicious that were never addressed, once the actual perpetrator was determined, but you know, sometimes life is like that, you don't get to know everything you want to know. The things I pressingly wanted to know WERE addressed, so that's fine.

And I liked that even though Perveen clearly cared about the wellbeing of the victim's parents, and was working to help them, the parents were not interested in taking Perveen into their confidence, they had their own struggles and sorrows and supportive community. When you experience the devastating loss of your only remaining child, not everyone's ready to respond perfectly to outsiders butting in!

That's something I liked in general about the book; a lot of interconnections between various characters who do not always like each other even if they're all decent and reasonable people! And it's balanced out with enough of people who do like each other. Together it made the community it takes place in feel real.

So Martha Wells just tricked me into reading a murder mystery, didn't she. I don't read a lot of those! Well -- I read a lot of them by two specific authors and nothing else.

(...wait, were any of the previous murderbot books murder mysteries and I just failed to notice??)

Anyway this is the latest Murderbot novella and it is excellent as expected, I love Murderbot and this was a satisfying book to read, and is there anything else really to say? If you love Murderbot then this book is wonderful and it's probably something you've already read or are intending to read. If you haven't read Murderbot yet then start at the beginning because it's truly worth it, but this book is probably not the place to start.

Paladins aren't really my thing and paladin romances aren't really my thing, but T. Kingfisher's writing really is, so here I am again! I am riveted by her world, and her plot, and her characters, and her narrative voice, and this book delivers as always.

But the romance. Sigh. Kingfisher knows how to write one type of romance and it is getting old. Especially all the talk of very large breasts. Okay, we get it, you're distracted by how sexually attracted you are to the other person's body, including at inconvenient moments, let's move on to the actually interesting things, shall we?

But there's lots of interesting things in between all the inconvenient sexy thoughts, so you know, worth it! I just think the book would have been better if it were in a different genre than romance :P

I did really like though that the book featured a romance heroine who is Very Large And Tall And Strong, And Has A Hearty Appetite Commensurate With Her Size And Physical Activity. Not a body type that's often allowed to be a romance heroine! This was great.

Anyway, the plot point of the mysterious headless/head-only murder victims from the last book in the series is picked up again, plus extra plot from the Order of St Ursa, which results in our two leads (Clara and Istvhan) travelling together on a road trip (Kingfisher sure likes those! And I do too, so we're good there :D) as they pursue their quests.

The book is uh.....gorier and creepier than I usually go for, but it works for me when it's Kingfisher writing.

I do feel uncomfortable about one aspect of the book.

cut for spoilers

They discover the person who's been making the evil clay murder-heads, and it turns out he's neurodivergent in some way, and he didn't mean to be evil he just wanted someone to love him, and then he dies at the end. Do not love this as rep; it falls into some real unfortunate stereotypes. I'm certain this was something where the author just didn't think through the implications, as she's usually careful about representation, but still--do not like.

Honestly the part about this that got to me the most, though, even though it's really fairly minor, was that when Clara and Istvhan are talking to him to get information, they don't give him false names. Instead they use his brain problems and his perceptions of his own failings against him to just....never give him their names at all. Multiple times over the course of the conversation. I hated this SO much. It felt viscerally Bad.

At any rate though, I continue to be invested in the series and will definitely be reading whatever comes out next!

When this book was first announced, I was both excited and skeptical. Katherine Addison's previous book, The Goblin Emperor, is one of my top comfort-reads and a book I find an endless delight. (as evidenced by the fact that I've read it 5 times in the 6 years since it was published) So I was excited about the possibility of another Addison book! But on the other hand it's a Sherlock Holmes fanfic, featuring the Jack the Ripper murders, and I am a) a bit burned out on Sherlock Homes, and b) not interested in Jack the Ripper. But I figured I would give the book a try anyway, because I trusted Katherine Addison.

And unfortunately I found myself really disappointed in the book, and for unexpected reasons! (And now I'm feeling a lot more trepidatious about the Goblin Emperor sequel coming out next year...)

Usually when I write reviews of books I try to be fair, and acknowledge that books that don't work for me often do have their right readers out there even if I'm not one. But this book has enough stuff going on that I'm uncomfortable with that I don't think I can do that, even though it DOES have some genuinely good aspects too.

( cut for extensive spoilers and negativity )

Sequel to The Widows of Malabar Hill, this is another mystery novel starring Perveen, a woman lawyer in 1920's India. I didn't like this one as much as the first one -- it took SO LONG to get going. The main mystery took place in the palace of Satapur, and Perveen only even got to the palace more than a third of the way into the book! Once the mystery got properly going I became more drawn in, but wow that took a long time coming. By the time I got to the end of the book I was glad I read it, but I nearly gave up on it multiple times.

I think my biggest issue is that in my opinion books need to have some sort of emotional or character arc, not just a plot arc. Even mystery books. Yes, when a mystery series has a consistent detective character, the character arc can't always be for that lead character, because there's only so much growth one person can be expected to do. But there's plenty of scope in secondary characters! I think this is one of the things that made the first book work better for me; Perveen herself had an arc, it wasn't solely about the mystery she was solving. And that was well done and made me care a lot about her! But in this one she's just the vehicle for solving what's going on in Satapur.

And there are some secondary characters who could have had some really interesting stuff if the narrative chose to focus on their arc. I think the dancing woman especially (sorry, I forget her name). But the narrative didn't seem to be particularly interested in that kind of thing; the characters all felt pretty static to me.

Also. What was up with ( very minor spoiler )

Well, I'll give the next book in the series a try when it comes out, but if that one doesn't work for me then I'll be giving up on the series, I think.

Time for the Hugo nominated novelettes! As a whole, I ended up liking the options in this category much more than what was in the short stories this year.

Here's my thoughts on each of the 6 novelettes. I'm listing them in the order for which I will vote for them, top to bottom choices.

Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin

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Omphalos, by Ted Chiang

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The Archronology of Love, by Caroline M. Yoachim

( Read more... )

Away With the Wolves, by Sarah Gailey

( Read more... )

The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker

( Read more... )

For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll

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Not a perfect book but pretty much just what I wanted/needed to be reading right now. (thank you to

michelel72 for reccing this book to me like a month and a half ago!) Kingfisher is reliably compelling and entertaining and good-hearted, and writes the kind of book I can just disappear into instead of being constantly distracted from reading by my other thoughts.

This is a romance novel and also a murder mystery in multiple directions and also one of the lead characters is a paladin whose god died. It's got a lot going on! But Grace and Stephen are both people who have been through really awful traumatizing things and have survived and manage to go on to find happiness even if their past never really leaves them, and it's lovely. Also my favourite nonbinary lawyer-priest Zale shows up again in this one and I love them a lot. Kind of makes up for the enormous amount of earnest guilt all the paladins have going on which I had to wade through. (Paladins are not exactly my character type.) I got rewarded with Zale's presence!

And I really loved Grace's profession as a perfumer, and how throughout the book she is always, always noticing what things and people smell like. And how competent and dedicated she is at her craft. I also loved the strong bonds between the 7 paladins and how much they clearly cared about each other, and also the friendship between Marguerite and Grace. I want to know more about Marguerite's story and everything she clearly has going on!

Also I find it really interesting how very, like, specifically Kingfisher's romance leads are interested in each other's bodies, it's not like "oh they're so hot" or whatever, the narrative makes it very clear exactly what they each find compelling about each other's bodies--and as someone who has literally never found anyone sexy ever I find it really interesting. I appreciate Kingfisher spelling it out for me instead of just assuming I understand sexual attraction. And somehow she does it in a way where I'm like, ok, sure, that's weird but I believe you, whereas in some romance novels when characters are busy being physically attracted to each other I'm just like YOU'RE ALL ALIENS AND NOT THE INTERESTING KIND. I think it's because Kingfisher's writing is just so no-nonsense about everything all the time. And also, on balance, her focus in this tends to be more on how the viewpoint character feels upon seeing or interacting with the other character's body, rather than on the objective attractiveness of the part in question.

(Also Kingfisher makes her leads believably interested in each other as people, not just sex objects, which I really appreciate and which definitely helps too.)

Anyway the ending of this book wraps up many things nicely but there is one specific plot thread which is very definitely left unsolved and aaaaaa I just want to knowwwwwwww!!! ( Read more... )

A perfectly decent book for the kind of book it is, but unfortunately that doesn't happen to be my kind of book. Ghosts and an incubus and an undead werebear and a curse from beyond the grave and a lot of plotty focus on finding a murderer - ehhhhhhhhh, not my kind of romance. Sorry, book, it's not you, it's me!

Happy about how the secondary character Eirlys's part of the story ends though, not in the way I was expecting. And a queer central relationship is always nice. One of the protagonists is nonbinary!

A novella in the Rivers of London series, outside the main books because it's not focused on Peter Grant. Instead it's set in Germany and the MC is Peter's equivalent there -- the sole apprentice to the country's sole magic practitioner.

I don't feel like the death that kicked off the plot was sufficiently addressed, after other aspects of the plot kept developing and receiving more attention. So that feels like a hanging thread that kind of bugs me. I also don't feel like I got a great sense of the personalities of the main characters of this book, which is too bad.

It was a fun quick read with some interesting details and I definitely enjoyed it, but in the end I don't love it as much as the main novels in the series.

A mystery novel starring a female lawyer in 1920's India, the premise immediately intrigued me.

The book goes back and forth in between two times in the life of its main character, Perveen: 1916/1917 as a young student, featuring her difficulties in school and in her relationship, and then in 1921 as she gets caught up in a murder case featuring three widows who are observing purdah (exclusion from men).

The author was inspired by the two real-life first female lawyers in India, during the era she's writing about, which is really cool. And I loved how the author wove threads throughout the book about the issues of women's rights and how they were being addressed in India at the time. And it doesn't take too much of a didactic modern view; for example, the narrative is understanding of why women might voluntarily choose to observe purdah.

Also: Perveen's best friend is queer! NICE.

I liked Perveen a lot, and the complexities in her relationship between her and her father, and her and her white English friend during an era of British rule in India. And Perveen is believably both capable and really rather young and inexperienced.

And I loved being immersed in the setting, 1920's India is not a place I've read much about before!

The biggest negative about the book is that the prose felt kinda awkward to me, but as I got more into the story it stopped feeling as intrusive even though I never really stopped noticing. And overall I definitely enjoyed the book.

But also: sometimes you finish a book and then you're done, but sometimes a book won't leave you alone. This, unexpectedly, turned out to be one of the latter. For several days after I finished, all I wanted to do was spend more time in the world of the book and in Perveen's life! Both the period that was skipped while she was at school with Alice, and then whatever happens after the end of the book. And ao3 was no help. Alas.

Wooohooo I finally got my hands on the latest book in the Rivers of London series! I've been seeing conversations about the book going down in the fandom so I'm glad to have finally been able to read it myself.

Unfortunately pre-reading so much in the way of other people's discussions of the book leaves me feeling like there's not a lot to say in my own review, whoops. It was a really good book, an excellent addition to the series! I had a lot of feelings about a lot of things! I'm sorry I can't figure out how to be more explicit/descriptive in what I thought!

A Victorian-era book featuring a lady detective! Inspired by

calvinahobbes' long-ago list of recommendations of such. The books on Calvina's list are all among the earliest examples of female detectives written by female authors and I thought it would be fun to give one a try. The first one I tried is the one by Baroness Orczy as that's the only author on the list I recognized, but in retrospect that was the wrong choice because I already know how sexist and classist and antisemitic Orczy is. I gave up on that book by shortly into the second chapter the instant a character was compared to Orczy's usual idea of Jewish people. I don't need to put up with more of that crap. I might love Orczy's most famous book but it is rather in spite of the author, not because of...!

And then I just chose one of the other books on Calvina's public domain lady detective list at random, and came up with this one about Loveday Brooke. And it turned out to be genuinely worth the read. It's is a collection of short stories in which a professional lady detective inspects the details of a case, comes up with the solution much faster than anyone expects, and then explains everything about what was actually going on and how she figured it out when nobody else could.

Each story deliberately hides details from the reader in the first section, such that you wouldn't be able to solve the puzzles along with Loveday. Which I gather is against the rules of "fair play" in detective fiction, but also this book predates those so-called rules so you can't blame the author for it. And it makes for a pleasant read in my opinion because there's none of the stress on the forgetfully-inclined reader of being bothered with keeping track of a million different Clues to try to figure out what details are worth remembering. I also appreciate that most of the mysteries aren't murder mysteries, which also lowers the drama. (Can you tell that I am not the usual audience of mysteries?)

You don't get to see much of the actual character of who Loveday is, unfortunately - the stories are much more interested in showing how clever Loveday is for figuring everything out than portraying her as a well-rounded human, but you know, I can forgive the book that, because it's nice to see a book of its era where a woman's main character trait is Good At Her Job That's Usually Considered Men-Only.

The book does contain undertones of various unfortunate prejudices of the era (like the idea of it being most appropriate to marry within your class), but never in a way that feels actively hateful like Orczy can be, and this book even occasionally refutes certain prejudices, like the idea of a criminal physiognomy.

And the book does a nice job of setting out a collection of interesting characters for each story and a mystery I wanted to know the answer to.

Overall an enjoyable read and the right kind of detective book for a reader like me. Possibly not the sort of book that would be appealing to people whose main reading diet is modern-style mysteries though!

Suddenly and randomly got in the mood to reread this one a little while ago. I do like it, even if the author doesn't recognize that Peter's being a rather a boor to Harriet with his romantic interest since she's stuck and cannot escape him since she's in prison, and moreover needs him in order to not be convicted of murder. OH WELL. The best parts: everything involving Miss Climpson and Miss Murchison. I wish I could read a murder mystery novel actually starring one of these excellent women, instead of having them take second place to Lord Peter Wimsey. They did mosts of the hard work on this one anyway!