The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 11-5-23

Did you remember to “fall back” last night? And just how badly do you end up wishing they’d just make up their damn minds and stick to one or the other? I wish we stayed on Daylight Saving Time all year round, but then I’d also enjoy the day more if it started later. People who have to put kids on school buses seem to prefer Standard Time because it’s dark in the morning when they have to get the kids on the bus. I honestly don’t care enough to even argue the point. I’d be thrilled if they’d just pick one and stick to it even if it’s not the one I’d personally prefer. You’d think this would be a popular enough thing that even Congress could pass something, but NOOOOOO.

Rant over until March 10, 2024.

This week ended with a “flail and bail” where I flailed over the last two books I intended to review this week and bailed on both of them. I just hit a wall of “I can’t even” after several days of horror and horror-adjacency in a row, Halloween was OVER and the new month just screamed for different books. So it goes.

A couple of Sunday Posts ago I mentioned that Tuna’s size is a bit hard to measure because he doesn’t seem to pose for pictures where a size comparison can be made. Galen caught the above picture earlier this week with both Luna and Tuna in the frame. Tuna looks huge and Luna looks tiny by comparison. It’s still not a great way of judging Tuna’s size, as Luna isn’t really a small cat. She’s pretty much an average sized cat – she only looks small in comparison to her brother. Which means that Tuna in photo is even larger than he appears!

Current Giveaways:

$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Thanks a Latte Giveaway Hop
$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Fall Seasons of Books 2023 Giveaway Hop

Winner Announcements:

The winner of the Silly Pumpkins Giveaway Hop is Will G.

Blog Recap:

A- Review: A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather
B+ Review: The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw
Thanks a Latte Giveaway Hop
A- Review: Warriorborn by Jim Butcher
B+ Review: Murder at the Royal Botanic Gardens by Andrea Penrose
Stacking the Shelves (573)

Coming This Week:

Twilight Falls by Juneau Black (review)
The Wishing Bridge by Viola Shipman (spotlight + excerpt)
Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty (review)
Super Stocking Stuffer Giveaway Hop
A Power Unbound by Freya Marske (audiobook review)

Stacking the Shelves (573)

This stack is EXACTLY what happens when the pickings get slim over at Edelweiss and NetGalley. The few books I pick up from them on a week like this look so LONELY in the stack that I start combing through friends’ recommendations and get more books.

With ‘falling back’ to go back to Standard Time this week, I’ll get an hour more to read tonight. C’est la reading vie!

For Review:
The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond
The Last Note of Warning (Nightingale Mysteries #3) by Katharine Schellman

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
A Coup of Tea (Tea Princess Chronicles #1) by Casey Blair
Deep Roots (Siobhan O’Brien #2) by Sung J. Woo
Mirabile by Janet Kagan
Royal Tea Service (Tea Princess Chronicles #3) by Casey Blair
Skin Deep (Siobhan O’Brien #1) by Sung J. Woo
Tea Set and Match (Tea Princess Chronicles #2) by Casey Blair


If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:

Review: Murder at the Royal Botanic Gardens by Andrea Penrose

Review: Murder at the Royal Botanic Gardens by Andrea PenroseMurder at the Royal Botanic Gardens (Wrexford & Sloane, #5) by Andrea Penrose
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Wrexford & Sloane #5
Pages: 353
Published by Kensington on September 28, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads


The upcoming marriage of the Earl of Wrexford and Lady Charlotte Sloane promises to be a highlight of the season, if they can first untangle--and survive--a web of intrigue and murder involving the most brilliant scientific minds in Regency London...

One advantage of being caught up in a whirl of dress fittings and decisions about flower arrangements and breakfast menus is that Charlotte Sloane has little time for any pre-wedding qualms. Her love for Wrexford isn't in question. But will being a wife--and a Countess--make it difficult for her to maintain her independence--not to mention, her secret identity as famed satirical artist A.J. Quill?
Despite those concerns, there are soon even more urgent matters to attend to during Charlotte and Wrexford's first public outing as an engaged couple. At a symposium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, a visiting botanist suffers a fatal collapse. The traces of white powder near his mouth reveal the dark truth--he was murdered. Drawn into the investigation, Charlotte and the Earl learn of the victim's involvement in a momentous medical discovery. With fame and immense fortune at stake, there's no shortage of suspects, including some whose ruthlessness is already known. But neither Charlotte nor her husband-to-be can realize how close the danger is about to get--or to what lengths this villain is prepared to go...

My Review:

This fifth book in the Wrexford & Sloane series represents a kind of an ending. Absolutely not the ending of the series, as there are two books in the series after this one, Murder at the Serpentine Bridge and this year’s Murder at the Merton Library. And I sincerely hope there will be more after that.

Nevertheless, Murder at the Royal Botanic Gardens, besides being at least one specific someone’s personal ending – after all, this is a murder mystery – still represents a kind of closure to the first part or cycle of the Wrexford & Sloane series, as so many of the chickens who were barely eggs in the first book, Murder on Black Swan Lane, come home to roost in this one.

It begins, as always, with a murder. A murder that we see – as we often do in this series – enough to be certain that it is foul play and not merely a natural death without being able to identify the perpetrator.

Who does a dastardly clever job of hiding their identity through most of the story. Meaning that this is one of those mysteries where I’m happy to say that I was every bit as confused about who really done what as Wrexford, Sloane and ALL of their friends and colleagues turned out to be.

It’s only the motive that’s clear from the very beginning. As they say, the love of money is the root of all evil, and this is a case where entirely too many someones are willing to do some very dastardly deeds in order to cultivate much deeper roots of the stuff.

This case is one that both Wrexford and Sloane had hoped to pass to their friend and colleague, Head Bow Street Runner Griffin, as they’re doing their damndest not to incite any more scandals in the final weeks before their wedding.

But once one of the many villains stirring this nefarious pot – or plot – directly threatens not just Charlotte Sloane but also her ‘weasels’ – her adopted sons Raven and Hawk – there is absolutely no way that Charlotte will let go of this case until her own personal nemesis is finally brought to justice.

One way or another.

Escape Rating B+: It’s probably not a surprise to anyone that I went looking for a comfort read to round out this week, BUT, perhaps I was just a bit too quick to pick this up as it’s been less than a month since I read the last Murder at Queen’s Landing. There are REASONS I try to keep them spaced apart.

Also, Charlotte has a lot of angsty thoughts in this one. Angst that is very real, completely understandable, and doesn’t come to pass in any of the worst ways that she fears, but still, a lot of angst. As she’s our point-of-view character, it meant that the story bogged down a bit when she got lost inside her head.

Still, there ARE reasons for that angst, and they all have to do with this book circling back to all the demons raised in Murder on Black Swan Lane and resolving them – one way or another. Charlotte’s whole, entire existence is about to change with her upcoming marriage to Wrexford and he’s the only part of that situation she’s certain about. She’s going to lose a lot of freedom when she becomes his Countess, not because he’ll clip her wings, but because society will be watching her every move. A position that she ran away from when she eloped with her first, entirely unsuitable husband and isn’t at all keen to return to.

Still, where a young, unmarried woman can ruin her reputation and her prospects all too easily, a wealthy, married, Countess will merely be considered eccentric – at least as long as no one susses out her secret identity as the satirical cartoonist A.J. Quill.

Charlotte began this series as an impoverished widow with two unofficially adopted guttersnipes, an ability to blend into the shadows as another guttersnipe right alongside them, a house on the edge of dilapidation and a secret identity barely keeping the not-nearly-well-enough-patched roof over their heads. But she was free. No one noticed her, either as a poor widow or in her masquerade as Magpie the dirty orphan boy.

Everything we learned about Charlotte has changed since that first story. She was disowned by her family, but her hoped-for reconciliation with her brother is in the offing. She was exiled from society, but her marriage to Wrexford will put her right back in the thick of it.

And one of the villains in that first adventure threatened her boys, nearly got her murdered, was responsible for the death of her husband – and got away scot-free. Now that villain is back and threatening Charlotte’s life and happiness yet again.

Before Charlotte can be truly happy, all of those swords hanging over her head have to be carefully taken down, while she and Wrexford are in the midst of solving a criminal conspiracy that turns out to have more heads than Hydra. That the sheer tangle of threats coming their way makes both of them realize just how many hostages to fortune they have gathered around themselves over the course of their investigations adds to Charlotte’s worry and angst.

But also to the relief when it all, finally manages to come round right.

While I may not have fallen head over heels into this entry in the series quite as much as I have the others, I still very much enjoyed the mystery, the way it tangled its roots in both the science AND the social issues of its day, and put paid to the ‘will they, won’t they’ question once and for all.

Which means I’ll be back, maybe not the very next time I need a comfort read but certainly the one after that, with the next book in the series, Murder at the Serpentine Bridge.

Review: Warriorborn by Jim Butcher

Review: Warriorborn by Jim ButcherWarriorborn: A Cinder Spires Novella (The Cinder Spires) by Jim Butcher
Narrator: Euan Morton
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, gaslamp, steampunk
Series: Cinder Spires #1.5
Pages: 146
Length: 3 hours and 1 minute
Published by Podium Audio on September 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster hasn’t even broken in his lieutenant’s insignia when he’s summoned to meet with the Spirearch of Spire Albion himself for a very special—and very secret—purpose. The Spirearch needs Benedict to retrieve a bag he’s “misplaced” on the Colony Spire known as Dependence, which has strangely cut off all contact with the outside world. It’s a delicate mission at best, a potential bloodbath at worst.

To this end, the Spirearch has supplied Benedict with backup in the form of three Warriorborn. But unlike the courageous lieutenant, this trio has formerly used its special gifts for crime, carnage, and outright bloody murder. And all of them were caught and imprisoned because of Benedict. Now, if they behave—and make it back alive—they’ll go free.

But when the odd squad reaches Dependence, they soon discover something waiting for a horrific weapon that could shatter the balance of power among the Spires. And Benedict will have to bring his own Warriorborn skills to bear if he, his team, and Spire Albion are to have any hope of survival . . .

My Review:

Warriorborn is the perfect method for readers who remember the first book in the Cinder Spires, The Aeronaut’s Windlass, fondly but may not remember the details of its vast array of political shenanigans all that clearly to get back into this series.

It’s perfect, not just because it’s much, much shorter than that first book, but mostly because it glosses over those major political shenanigans – although I’m sure they’ll be back in The Olympian Affair – in order to tell a sharp, compelling story about a military/espionage mission that goes FUBAR in every possible way that it can.

And keeps the reader on the edge of their seat for the entire wild ride.

Our hero in Warriorborn is one of the many point-of-view characters from Windlass, but the way that this story is told it doesn’t matter whether you remember that much or at all. I kind of vaguely did, but not in any detail. It doesn’t even matter if you know or remember the start of the current conflict between our protagonists from Albion and their enemies from Aurora.

This story is all about one singular encounter. One of the Spirearch’s (read as king) covert operatives in a far-flung province has communicated that there’s trouble brewing – but with no details. Guard Lieutenant Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster is being sent from the capital to said remote province to investigate the situation, not with a squad of his fellow guards but rather with a group of convicted criminals who have been promised a commutation of their sentences and a pardon for the rest if they get him there and back again in one piece WITH the information they’ve been sent to retrieve.

Benedict doesn’t expect the job to be easy. Neither he nor the reader are exactly surprised to discover enemy agents have infiltrated the tiny provincial town. But he doesn’t expect the acid slime monsters who have literally eaten all the townsfolk, the dragon parked on the only way out of town, or the tribe of sentient cats who save Benedict’s mission and his own clawed up ass – even as he saves theirs.

Just barely and with a whole lot of luck – all the way around. Even though most of that luck was worse than Benedict ever imagined.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up this week because I was having a “flail and bail” kind of day. Post Halloween, I was horror’ed out. Even at the horror-adjacency level I’m more comfortable in. I hit the “I can’t evens” and went looking for something a bit more comforting. This would not, I admit, normally have filled that bill, but the NetGalley app was having a flail of its own which is now fixed, but at the time was knocking me out of the book I’m listening to.

I had picked up Warriorborn in both text and audio for a couple of reasons. That it was short is the reason it’s being reviewed here and now, but the main reason was the upcoming publication of the second book in the author’s Cinder Spires series, The Olympian Affair. It’s been EIGHT whole years since the first book in the series, The Aeronaut’s Windlass, came out. That’s a long time in book years, and I was wondering more than a bit whether I’d remember enough of how this world is put together to be able to get stuck back in this series.

As Warriorborn is both rather short and takes place after The Aeronaut’s Windlass but before The Olympian Affair, it seemed like a good book to solve all three problems; both NetGalley and my own flailing, and that niggling question about whether I could jump back into the series without at least a serious skim of that once upon a time series opener.

There’s a bit in Warriorborn where Benedict tells the story of an uncle of his who claimed that “if you have one problem, you have a problem. If you have two problems, you might have a solution. And if you can’t craft a solution out of that, what are you even doing?”

I fell right back into this world. We get just the tiniest hint about Benedict’s role in the first book, just enough info to understand why the Spirearch trusts him with this mission, wrapped in a whole bunch of bantering misdirection between himself and his king. It’s a setup, he knows it’s a setup, the Spirearch knows it’s a setup, but everything has to seem above board until the ship lifts and Benedict and his crew are out of reach of meddling politicians.

The true story in Warriorborn is about the mission itself, and that is utterly FUBAR from the outset and EVERYONE knows it. We see just enough of Benedict’s internal perspective to be aware that as calm as he appears on the surface, he’s paddling as fast as he can under the roiling waters.

Which are roiling pretty damn hard as the whole thing becomes a series of out of the frying pan into the fire maneuvers that just keeping getting worse and worse as the mission goes to hell, his crew mostly falls apart and his own chances of survival get smaller with each passing moments.

At which point, just as in The Aeronaut’s Windlass, the mission is saved by sentient cats. I’d be tempted to read the whole damn series – possibly more than once – for more of Rowl of the Nine Claws, the one character I truly remember from the first book and hope to see more of in the second, and Saza and Fenli and the entire clan of Swift Slayers in this one.

One final note, one that is in danger of making this review longer than the actual book. I did have this both in audio and in text. I switched back and forth from one to the other as my circumstances shifted over the course of the day, and I enjoyed it both ways. The text moves compellingly, from one near-disaster to another, while the audio narrator, Euan Morton, did an excellent job of differentiating between a cast of several different characters and personalities to the point where I ended up playing solitaire for an hour just so I could finish the book listening to his narration.

A good reading – and listening – time was absolutely had by this reader no matter which way I absorbed this story!

Thanks a Latte Giveaway Hop

Welcome to the Thanks a Latte Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mama the Fox!

The names of a lot of giveaway hops are pretty cute, but this one is an especially important pun on no matter how you flavor it!

There’s the easy and obvious first interpretation – without which a lot of us, including moi, don’t have enough spoons to figure out the second meaning. That would be the thanks for the latte, or any form of caffeine that gets us through the day. My personal latte of choice is Chai Latte, yours may be something more coffee flavored.

But the more important message of this hop is that it provides an opportunity for me to thank you, my readers, not just a latte but absolutely a whole LOT for visiting Reading Reality and following along on my reading journey.

Thank you so very much for being here, reading my reviews, commenting when the mood strikes you, and for loving the Sunday cat pictures.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled giveaway. Answer the question in the rafflecopter about your favorite flavor of latte for a chance at the usual Reading Reality prize, the winner’s choice of a $10 Amazon Gift Card or up to $10 in books!

And THANKS!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For more terrific prizes, be sure to visit the other stops on this hop!

MamatheFox and all participating blogs are not held responsible for sponsors who fail to fulfill their prize obligations.

Review: The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw

Review: The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra KhawThe Dead Take the A Train (Carrion City, #1) by Cassandra Khaw, Richard Kadrey
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, horror, urban fantasy
Series: Carrion City #1
Pages: 391
Length: 12 hours and 59 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Nightfire on October 3, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Bestselling authors Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey have teamed up to deliver a dark new story with magic, monsters, and mayhem, perfect for fans of Neil Gaiman and Joe Hill.
Julie Crews is a coked-up, burnt-out thirty-something who packs a lot of magic into her small body. She’s been trying to establish herself in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs to claw her way to the top.
Julie is desperate for a quick career boost to break the dead-end grind, but her pleas draw the attention of an eldritch god who is hungry for revenge. Her power grab sets off a deadly chain of events that puts her closest friends – and the entire world – directly in the path of annihilation.
The first explosive adventure in the Carrion City Duology, The Dead Take the A Train fuses Khaw’s cosmic horror and Kadrey’s gritty fantasy into a full-throttle thrill ride straight into New York’s magical underbelly.

My Review:

If someone told me that the Miskatonic River had sent a tributary (or a tentacle) down from Innsmouth to Manhattan, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. At all. The eldritch horrors of this book are VERY eldritch indeed, but it’s the human monsters that really make this story scream.

Besides, as a couple of the book’s characters remark, if the eldritch monster had actually BEEN Cthulhu it would have been much easier to deal with. Instead, Julie Crews and her ‘Scooby gang’ are stuck between the rock of The Mother Who Eats and the hard place of a fake archangel who thinks they have the chops to eat Mother. And certainly plans to scoop up Julie and her friends to pave the way.

But that’s not where we start. Where we start is most definitely at the human dimensions. Julie Crews is a down-at-heels, down-on-her-luck magic worker with plenty of brass, always willing to deliver a kick in the ass, with a knack for surviving stuff that no one should even know about, let alone throw down with.

So we begin with Julie, taking a job she knows she shouldn’t touch with someone else’s bargepole, from her lying, cheating, stealing ex-boyfriend. The one who trashed her and her reputation, stole credit for jobs that she did, and used that credit to slither his way onto and up the corporate ladder at the primo magical legal firm, Thorne & Dirk. (I always wanted it to be ‘Thorne & Dick’ and you probably will too.)

But the job pays real cash money, albeit not enough and under the table, and Julie needs that money to make her rent and pay for her many illicit, illegal and expensive habits – like cheap booze, epic amounts of drugs and high-quality magical equipment.

Her life has already gone more pear-shaped than the average person would expect to survive – and Julie doesn’t. Expect to survive, that is. People who do the kind of work she does and take the kind of damage she regularly takes don’t live to see 40. Or even 35. She’s the last and ONLY survivor of her class from magical training. And Julie’s 30th birthday is coming up fast.

What she doesn’t expect is for her best friend Sarah to show up at her door with one packed bag, a whole bunch of new verbal and physical twitches and dark shadows under her eyes that deserve their own zip code.

What neither Julie nor Sarah ever admit is that they are each other’s ‘one that got away’, or would be if either of them had ever womanned up and actually asked. They’re better together, always have been and always will be, whether they define that together as besties or roommates or the love of each other’s lives.

Something that they’ll have to test ALL the limits of, to hell and back (literally), when Julie’s ex and Sarah’s ex decide to fuck with them in entirely different ways at the exact same time. Putting Julie, Sarah, their friends and ALL of New York City into the crosshairs between the claws of a creature straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos and the many, many mouths of the Mother Who Eats.

Escape Rating B+: First and most importantly, this is your trigger warning that The Dead Take the A Train is a bloody, gory, gruesome reminder that urban fantasy as a genre is the uncanny child of mystery and horror, much like the uncanny babies being born in yesterday’s book, A Season of Monstrous Conceptions.

Meaning that, yes, while there’s a mystery at the heart of this story, there’s a monster or two – or ten – chewing that heart with their fangs as blood drips down their chin. Or chins, however many they just happen to have.

To the point where the horror elements go so far over the top that they come down in a splat of blood and viscera on the other side.

Second, for the first half of the story, both Sarah’s ex-husband Dan and Julie’s ex-boyfriend Tyler were so full of smug, self-congratulatory, evil, white dudebro entitlement that I just couldn’t hack listening to their perspectives. They both exhibited the kind of asshattery that is all over the news and if I wanted to listen to that there are entirely too many real places for it these days.

Which means that I switched from audio to text at that halfway point. I was finding the story compelling – if sometimes gross to the max – but every time the narrator retched out one of their perspectives I wanted to scream. I’ll confess that I gave up too soon, because just as I switched to text the dudebros started getting what they deserved and that was awesome.

While I fully admit that the above may be a ‘me’ thing and not a ‘you’ thing, the relentless drumbeat of just what terrible excuses for human beings Dan and Tyler were nearly threw me out of the story entirely, and that’s absolutely the reason this is a B+ and not any higher. Your reading mileage may vary.

Howsomever, the narrator, Natalie Naudus, is one that I absolutely love, and she does a terrific job of voicing stories that feature last-chance, hard-done-by, bad luck and worse trouble heroines, just like Julie Crews, who would be able to stand, scarred but never broken, right alongside similar characters that Naudus has voiced, like Opal Starling in Starling House, as well as Emiko Soong in Ebony Gate, Zelda in Last Exit, and Vivian Liao in Empress of Forever. (Also Charlie Hall in Holly Black’s Book of Night, but I read that one entirely in text.)

As much as the first half of The Dead Take the A Train drove me around the twist, when the story hits that second half it hits the ground running hard towards a slam bang finish. Along the way we have Julie’s slightly otherworldly ‘Scooby gang’ coming together, with teasing clues to American Gods-type backstories to come, the set up of an almost impossibly compelling magical version of NYC with hints of The City We Became with even more blood and guts and eldritch horrors, and, to cap it off in a blaze of glory, a fulfillment of one of Shakespeare’s most famous sayings (from Henry VI, Part 2 if you’re looking for a hint.)

The Dead Take the A Train is the first book in the projected Carrion City series by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey. There’s certainly plenty of carrion to pin a horde of stories on. If this first book is a taste of what’s to come, I can’t wait to see what I’ll be reading next – absolutely with the lights on!

Review: A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather

Review: A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina RatherA Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, historical fantasy, horror
Pages: 161
Published by Tordotcom on October 31, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

In 17th-century London, unnatural babies are being born: some with eyes made for the dark, others with webbed fingers and toes better suited to the sea.
Sarah Davis is intimately familiar with such strangeness—she herself was born marked by uncanniness. Having hidden her nature all her life and fled to London under suspicious circumstances, Sarah starts over as a midwife’s apprentice, hoping to carve out for herself an independent life. As a member of the illegal Worshipful Company of Midwives, Sarah learns to reach across the thinning boundary between her world and another, drawing on its power to heal and protect the women she serves.
When the wealthy Lady Wren hires her to see her through her pregnancy, Sarah quickly becomes a favorite of her husband, the famous architect Lord Christopher Wren, whose interest in the uncanny borders on obsession. Sarah soon finds herself caught in a web of magic and intrigue created by those who would use the magic of the Other World to gain power for themselves, and whose pursuits threaten to unmake the earth itself.

My Review:

Sarah Davis, widow and apprentice midwife, knows all too well that some babies are born who are not meant to live in this world, because she was nearly one of them. But in London in the winter of 1675, when this story takes place, there has been a sudden epidemic of babies being born who are not meant to live in THIS particular world, but rather, a different one where their horns or tails or fur or fangs or even gills would not be the least bit strange or embarrassing for their families. Or otherwise instantly fatal.

It’s not really surprising that this sudden and vast increase in strange and frequently stillborn babies results in accusations of witchcraft and consorting with the devil. (The Salem Witch Trials are still 18 years in the future at this point.)

Actually, from the descriptions of some of the babies, I’m not sure we’d avoid bandying about accusations of witchcraft if it happened TODAY. Demonizing women for their pregnancies or the causes or the results thereof is just as pervasive today as it was in the late 17th century – or any other.

But Sarah is a midwife. She is also, herself, one of those strange children, but when she was born such children were not nearly so common, and her strangeness was one that could be easily snipped away. Literally. She was born with a tail, and an ability to touch on something that her fellow midwives refer to as the ‘Other Place’.

In other words, Sarah has magic. Many of the midwives have a bit, but Sarah has a lot – she just can’t consciously tap into it.

Sir Christopher Wren, very much on the other hand, has money and influence. He has an education and is a well-known scientist as well as an architect. And his wife Faith is very near to term with their second child. A child who was conceived for the sole purpose of opening a gate between this world and that ‘Other Place’ in order to fix the overlap or incursion between the worlds that is causing conditions in both this place and the ‘Other’ to go so very much askew.

Wren believes he’s using Sarah for her power. And he is because he can and he believes he’s right to do so because he knows best. He isn’t and he doesn’t.

Sarah, on the other hand, knows enough. Maybe. Hopefully. Just possibly. Enough.

Escape Rating A-: You remember that Year’s Best collection of Dark Fantasy and Horror that I reviewed last week? A Season of Monstrous Conceptions would have fit in perfectly because it sits right at the haunted crossroads between the two. I went into this book expecting it to be firmly on the Horror side of the fence, and that’s the way it started out, but it crawled over into that crossroads and just a little over to the Dark Fantasy side and planted itself there with its too many eyes and too sharp teeth and crashing worlds and glared at me until I felt sorry for it and realized that I liked it a whole lot more than I ever expected.

This ‘season’ takes place as alchemy was giving way to chemistry. Folk medicine and midwifery, both the practice of women, was being supplanted by trained doctors and surgeons, exclusively male provinces. Magic was fading and logic was taking its place.

This story sits at that juncture. On the one hand, the events taking place are utterly eldritch but clearly quite real. The evidence of babies born with compound eyes, gills and multiple limbs, sometimes all in the same poor creature, is hard to dispute, but it’s not the only thing going wrong in this winter of 1675.

What makes the story interesting revolves around the disparate potential solutions. The magical midwives know it’s happening, believe their magic can fix it, but don’t know quite enough of the science of how the multiverse works to get their fix quite right.

Wren has all the scientific knowledge necessary, as well as the flexibility of mind to accept otherwise unpalatable solutions, but the magic the midwives use is a trade secret he has no access to. His science is just enough to tell him that it’s not enough, either.

Sarah is our point of view character because she stands as the knife edge of balance between all the various factions and forces. She wants to believe that Wren sees her as an intelligent and capable person in her own right, instead of just someone he can use. She already knows that the midwives are using her. She’s caught between the magic she has and the training she gets that does not know how to help her access it. She sees that things are going horribly awry but can’t fix them on her own.

In the end, it’s Sarah’s choices that define both her course and her solution. Watching her use her power but not letting it or anyone around her use her, and her own personal why of it all, makes her a terrific perspective on this story and makes this story a surprising and creepy and often surprisingly creepy delight from beginning to end – just perfect for this Halloween week.

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 10-29-23

It turned out to be a FANTASTIC reading week. Everything I picked up was really, really, good, and an excellent reading time was definitely had by moi. That they all turned out to be “A-” reads makes it seem like they all fell short in one way or another, but I think that was mostly because all but one of the books was a continuation in a series that may not have risen above its predecessors but didn’t fall below them either. They were each just what I expected, no more but no less, either.

The problem, however, is that I usually chose which book cover to feature next to the recap based on which book got the highest grade – and that’s a bit of a conundrum this time around!

Howloween is the day after tomorrow, and after that we’ll all be falling towards the holidays at breakneck speed. And it’s going to start getting dark too damn early next Sunday – not that it hasn’t already been trending in that direction.

But there’s been a bit of a theme going on here at Reading Reality. I’ve been reviewing horror or at least horror-adjacent books for the last few days, and that trend will continue through Halloween. Then we’ll have a blog hop to get the month started right.

Of course, I have a cat picture for this spooky season. If you’ve ever seen the meme of the little black bat as the darkness who gives cuddles, at left (or above left) there’s a picture of Lucifer proudly sitting in front with Hecate hiding below. That little bat may be the darkness that GIVES cuddles, but Lucifer and Hecate are the darkness that DEMANDS cuddles.

Happy Halloween!

Current Giveaways:

$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Silly Pumpkins Giveaway Hop  
$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Fall Seasons of Books 2023 Giveaway Hop

Winner Announcements:

The winner of the Howl-O-Ween Giveaway Hop is Alisa

Blog Recap:

A- Review: Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah Baker
A- Review: A Duke’s Lesson in Charm by Sophie Barnes
A- Review: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: Volume Four edited by Paula Guran
A- Review: Phantom Pond by Juneau Black
A- Review: Night Train to Murder by Simon R. Green
Stacking the Shelves (572)

Coming This Week:

A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather (review)
The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw (audiobook review)
Thanks a Latte Giveaway Hop
Long Past Dues by James J. Butcher (review)
The Wolfe at the Door by Gene Wolfe (review)

Stacking the Shelves (572)

You can tell that winter is coming on by the size – or the lack thereof – of this stack. Not much is published in November, December and even January, so not much shows up on NetGalley and Edelweiss in the months preceding. Except for Spring! books, which have already begun. I always think I’m going to catch up a bit in November and December, at least as far as making a bit of a reduction in the size of the virtually towering TBR pile – but it never happens. So many books, so little time!

For Review:
The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko by Derek Tyler Attico
Relics of Ruin (Books of the Usurper #2) by Erin M. Evans
Remedial Magic (Course in Magic #1) by Melissa Marr
Rogue Sequence by Zac Topping
What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier #2) by T. Kingfisher

Borrowed from the Library:
Making it So by Patrick Stewart


If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:

Review: Night Train to Murder by Simon R. Green

Review: Night Train to Murder by Simon R. GreenNight Train to Murder (Ishmael Jones #8) by Simon R. Green
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Ishmael Jones #8
Pages: 192
Published by Severn House on March 3, 2020
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads


When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle on the late-night train to Bath, Ishmael Jones is faced with his most puzzling case to date.

When Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny are asked to escort a VIP on the late-night train to Bath, it would appear to be a routine case. The Organisation has acquired intelligence that an attempt is to be made on Sir Dennis Gregson's life as he travels to Bath to take up his new position as Head of the British Psychic Weapons Division. Ishmael's mission is to ensure that Sir Dennis arrives safely.
How could anyone orchestrate a murder in a crowded railway carriage without being noticed and with no obvious means of escape? When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle, Ishmael Jones has just 56 minutes to solve a seemingly impossible crime before the train reaches its destination.

My Review:

Reading Reality is having a bit of a theme going in the days leading up to Halloween, and this visit with Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny Belcourt is just horror-adjacent enough to be a part of it.

And I was having a hankering for some high-quality snarkitude and this author ALWAYS delivers!

Ishmael Jones is a fascinating character – to himself most of all at times. He’s an alien. Specifically, he’s a version of E.T. with no way to phone home because he doesn’t remember where it is. When he crash-landed his ship in 1963 the ship’s last act was to transform him into a human adult the best that it could – and erase all his memories of who and/or what he used to be.

It didn’t exactly do a BAD job at Ishmael’s transformation. He blends in just fine. But he doesn’t change or age, so he’s looked like a man in his mid-30s for almost 60 years at this point and has the same problem that vampires often do in paranormal stories. He has to move on every so often before too many people start to notice too much.

Ishmael’s solution has been to work for a series of agencies so black and so secret that they don’t even know what their own right and left hands are doing – let alone anyone else’s. They keep his secrets and in return he keeps theirs and does the kind of dirty work that actual humans aren’t capable of for very long – if at all.

His work and romantic partner, Penny Belcourt, knows as many of his secrets as Ishmael himself does. They met on a case, the first one in this series, The Dark Side of the Road, a story that began as a rather typical English country house mystery that went seriously far into the Dark Side of multiple Forces.

Ishmael and Penny are the coyly-named Organization’s best agents, so it’s not exactly a surprise for them to be ordered to report for a top secret, rush-rush and hush-hush job, not even to London’s St. Pancras Station. It’s just annoying and both of them are at least somewhat annoyed by being handed tickets to an express train to Bath with not nearly enough information about their instructions to guard a high-ranking politician who has just been promoted to an equally high-ranking top-secret job on said politician’s imminent journey to take up his new post via that London to Bath train.

The trip will take less than two hours. It shouldn’t be that difficult to keep the man alive for that length of time on a moving train that will not stop to take on anyone or anything until it reaches its destination.

But if it were an easy job the Organization wouldn’t be putting its best agents on the case. And they are, so it isn’t. It’s just that it’s even more clandestine and hush-hush than even Ishmael and Penny suspected. And they suspected a lot, and everyone, from the very beginning.

Escape Rating A-: There are two things I find pretty much endlessly fun about this particular series. One, of course and always, is the author’s trademark snarkitude. It’s a signature that follows him everywhere from urban fantasy like his Nightside series to science fiction such as his Deathstalker series to the genre-mashup that is the Ishmael Jones series.

The other thing is a particular feature of the Ishmael Jones series, and it’s that this series is a genre-mashup of pretty much everything. It’s a bit of SF in Ishmael’s alien origins, a bit of urban fantasy in that he often faces monsters that are believed at the outset to be things that go bump in the night, and there’s generally a bit of horror in that whatever he’s investigating leaves a thoroughly gruesome trail of dead bodies and parts thereof.

But ultimately – or at its heart or a bit of both – the Ishmael Jones series are mysteries. Someone gets dead early on in each book, if there isn’t already a corpse laying around at the start. It’s up to Ishmael and Penny to figure out whodunnit and put a stop to them one way or another before the story reaches its inevitably grisly end.

What makes the mystery so much creepy fun is that as the mystery deepens there’s always a sneaking suspicion that the perpetrator is paranormal in some way, and that in the end that suspicion is nearly always a very tasty red herring. This particular mystery takes that assumption one better, as there is, for once, something actually paranormal going on but it isn’t either the monster or even the victim.

Because one of the things that this series does so very well, and with so much high-quality snark and occasional sheer bloody-mindedness, is that the worst monsters in this or any other universe are inevitably human. And that’s what keeps me coming back to this series, over and over and over again.

If this series sounds like it might be your jam, or if you’ve ever wanted to see just how far a classic-type mystery like a country house mystery or a strangers on a train type mystery can be led very, very far astray, take a look at The Dark Side of the Road and see if you like the view from that side.

I’ll be continuing with my journey with Ishmael Jones and Penny Belcourt with the next book in the series, The House on Widows Hill, the next time I have a yen for either high-quality snark, horror-adjacent mystery, or a bit of both!