This is book three in the Mercedes Thompson series, and now I have a dilemma. When the first two and three-quarters books of a series are basically fluff, and then the last bit of book three takes a hard left into Seriously Not Fluff, do you bother with book four? Spoilers ahead! Mercy Thompson is a mechanic and a shapeshifter. She turns into a coyote when she wants to. She’s got a Ranger/Joe Morelli thing going on with two werewolves who are in love with […]
Super-duper British lady attempts to solve crime
I’ve never read any of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, or any of his collaborations with Harriet Vane, but now I want to go back and read about their first encounter. It sounds pretty scandalous: dead lovers and possible death sentences and all that. This story had lower stakes, but was still pretty good. Harriet, an author of detective stories and amateur crime-solver, is summoned to her alma mater Oxford to help them deal with an irritation. Someone has been sending various members of […]
Move over, Dear Abby
My job has the super-fun combination of a lot of downtime and ridiculously strict internet blockages (no Pajiba – sob!). Newspaper sites are almost always allowed, but I try to avoid reality whenever possible, so I end up reading a lot of advice columns (the Carolyn Hax archives go on for eons). I had managed to miss Dear Sugar, though, until a friend sent me a copy of her book. Rather than a prim Dear Prudence approach of handing down advice from on high, Dear Sugar […]
Spare me from philosophizing twenty-year-olds
This started out as an interesting aerial view of a family and their dysfunctions, and then zoomed down into a closeup of the family’s self-absorbed, philosophizing, sex-hungry teenage son. I liked the set-up, but man, teens and early twenty-somethings having Deep Thoughts about the world gets old reaaaaal fast. Karim is growing up in 1970s England, in the suburbs outside London. His father Haroon is from India; his mother Margaret is British and white. Karim absorbs conflicting lessons about his heritage, exacerbated when Haroon is […]
Quiet but not unpleasant
Can it be a slice of life story if it spans six decades? I guess it really only covers the latter end of those decades, but the story starts with a group of children, friends from nearby neighborhoods, in 1940s England. The children play in some tunnels until they are chased away by Michael’s father, who is mean and scary. Many years later, that group of children is now in their 70s, and a pair of skeletal hands are found in a biscuit tin in […]
FINALLY a good book!
The problem with falling in love with a series about humanity encountering dangerous alien goo is that the odds of all your favorite characters continuing to survive seem like they should go down as the fight goes on. So there was some anxiety starting this book, worrying that the four members of the crew of the Rocinante would continue to muddle through whatever the universe threw at them this time. I’m not going to spoil anything, I’m just telling you I was anxious. The alien […]
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