This has been the first full week of Halloween Bingo. I’ve had fun working my way through the card and picking my squares for next week.
This week, I read two novels and set two novels aside. The two novels I completed were both published in the 1990s but they had nothing else in common. One was a Canadian mystery and one was about American werewolves.
Andy Boychuk is a successful Saskatchewan politician – until one sweltering August afternoon when the party faithful gather at a picnic. All of the key people in Boychuk’s life – family, friends, enemies – are there. Boychuk steps up to the podium to make a speech, takes a sip of water, and drops dead.
Joanne Kilbourn, in her début as Canada’s leading amateur sleuth, is soon on the case, delving into Boychuk’s history. What she finds are a Bible college that’s too good to be true, a woman with a horrifying and secret past, and a murderer who’s about to strike again.
Read any book where a mystery is a significant plot component.
I’ve delayed writing my review of ‘Deadly Appearances‘ (1990) because I’m still working out why I liked it so much.
It’s the first book in a series featuring Joanne Kilbourne, a well-established campaigner and speechwriter at the regional level of her local party. This story starts with the charismatic candidate she’s promoting being murdered on the hustings. Joanne becomes more and more involved in trying to find out who killed him.
This may make it sound like a typical clever-amateur-sleuth-solves-the-murder-that-baffles-the-police novel. It isn’t. It’s a much more intimate account than that. It’s a story that focuses more on Joanne, her history and her future than it does on solving the murder. In a way, the murder being solved is just a by-product of Joanne working through her guilt and reshaping her view of the world and her role in it.
I liked the events unfolded over months rather than days, and that I got a solid sense of who Joanne is along the way.
Following the death of his beloved mother, young Skinner Cade discovers he was adopted. Determined to find his true origins, he travels westward from the Mississippi Delta to the deserts of Arizona. There, Skinner learns of Changing Woman, the mysterious leader of the Coyotero who might be his biological mother.
When a misunderstanding with the cops lands him behind bars, Skinner discovers a dark and brutal aspect of himself that he believed existed only in his nightmares: He is not truly human but a werewolf. After escaping during a prison riot of his own creation, Skinner crosses paths with a pack of young werewolves posing as a punk band who draw him even deeper into a terrifying, monstrous world of bloodlust, murder, and depravity. Will Skinner Cade fight to maintain his humanity, or will he fully embrace his wild blood?
Read any book featuring werewolves, skin-walkers, and all other therianthropes; OR any book with a full moon on the cover; OR where the full moon or other celestial alignment is important to the plot.
‘Wild Blood’ (1994) is a vivid, violent, original, fast-moving werewolf novel that reads like a gory graphic novel. It was a lot of fun
My review is HERE
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy’s father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.
As they attempt to evade the boy’s increasingly desperate father, horrifying incidents of butchery follow them. At first Jess thinks she understands what they’re up against, but she’s about to learn there’s more to these surreal and grisly events than she could’ve ever imagined.
And that when the wolf finally comes home, none will be spared.
Jenny Kennedy appears to have it all. She’s the perfect daughter, the popular girl at school and a successful beauty queen. But then Jenny is found dead in a murder that rocks the small town she grew up in to the core.
Her estranged half-sister Virginia finds herself thrust into the spotlight as the case dominates the news and is desperate to uncover who killed Jenny. But she soon realises that maybe Jenny’s life wasn’t so
The truth is that Jenny has more than a few secrets of her own, and so do her neighbours… What really happened that night?
The two books that I set aside this week, ‘When The Wolf Comes Home‘ (2025) and ‘The Prized Girl‘ (2020) were both well-written and well-crafted books. Setting them aside was an ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ response that I almost feel I should apologise for. Each book took me somewhere that I didn’t want to be, but that’s about where my head was rather than what was in the books.
My review of them is HERE
I didn’t buy any books this week. It’s been years since this last happened and even then it was part of a trial self-imposed three month book buying ban.
I think the explanation is that I’m well stocked with the books that I intend to read for Halloween Bingo and nothing on my Buy As Soon As It’s Published list was released this week.
Next week’s reading is driven by my Halloween Bingo card. The selection reminds me of why I like playing this game. One of the books I’ve picked is revisiting a series that I’ve been away from for two long. The other two are books that take me outside of my normal reading habit and push me to look at something new.
Anger… it can eat you alive.
Bea’s angry – more than ever, since her husband left her.
Lou’s angry – especially since she lost her job and her flat and had to move back in with her parents.
And whoever’s been murdering and mutilating the men whose bodies keep mounting up in Bea and Lou’s city – they’re angry, too.
But when Bea moves to The Gates, an exclusive new estate with a strange and troubled history, and Lou’s interest in the murders leads her right to Bea’s door, the two women find the lines between nightmare and reality, history and myth and sanity and madness blurring around them – and a primeval entity born from the chaos of creation with her own appetite for rage rising up to meet them from the ground below.
She sees them. And she’s hungry.
Read a portal fantasy (parallel universes, time travel and worm holes apply, as do wardrobes and mirrors), OR a book where things aren’t as they seem, such as an alternative reality (physical or mental – litRPGmay work for this); OR a book that features something that appears in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
I bought ‘A Press Of Feathers’ after reading T. C. Parkers ‘Saltblood‘ a novel about evil both human and otherwise. Somehow, it’s ended up sitting in my TBR pile for four years. The road to my TBR is paved with good intentions. Anyway, as ‘A Press Of Feathers‘ has a portal in it, I’m going to read it for my Alice In Wonderland square.
When Ropa Moyo discovered an occult underground library, she expected great things. She’s really into Edinburgh’s secret societies – but turns out they are less into her. So instead of getting paid to work magic, she’s had to accept a crummy unpaid internship. And her with bills to pay and a pet fox to feed.
Then her friend Priya offers her a job on the side. Priya works at Our Lady of Mysterious Maladies, a very specialized hospital, where a new illness is resisting magical and medical remedies alike. The first patient was a teenage boy, Max Wu, and his healers are baffled. If Ropa can solve the case, she might earn as she learns – and impress her mentor, Sir Callander.
Her sleuthing will lead her to a lost fortune, an avenging spirit and a secret buried deep in Scotland’s past. But how are they connected? Lives are at stake and Ropa is running out of time.
Read any book involving Celtic myths or customs, and/or set in the greater Celtic world of Ireland, Britain, northern France, or even involving the Celtic diaspora.
‘Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments‘ is another book that I’m rescuing from my a four-year stint in my TBR pile. I read and enjoyed ‘The Library of The Dead‘, the first book in this series, in 2021 and I’ve been meaning to get to back to it ever since. The good news is that the delay means that fitth and last book in this series will be available this year, so I can read them at the rate of one a month if I like this one.
As this book is all about magic in Scotland, I’m using it for the Samhain square.
It’s Halloween, and the carnival has come to town.
The gates open at sunset, and the attractions are all one of a kind. Faery illusions caper under the big top while a demon hunts monsters on the midway. A psychic delivers actual messages from the dead and a real ghost lurks and laughs inside the haunted house. A werewolf plays Halloween tricks, a succubus learns the delights of a human Halloween, and a vampire hypnotizes his future prey.
Those who go to the carnival and come back have tales to tell long after the tents are gone. Those who go and never come back… well. There are stories that linger about them, too.
Monsters, magic and mischief abound in these thirteen short stories about the Midnight Carnival
Read any book set in or concerning a carnival, amusement park, theatre, or other party/festival, or their participants, e.g., actors, clowns, playwrights, critics, etc.
‘The Midnight Carnival: one night only’ is a roll of the dice. It’s a book of thirteen loosely linked short stories set in The Midnight Carnival. If it works (or even half of the stories work) than this should be fun.
We’ve had the first six of the sixty-one Halloween Bingo calls and one of the squares on my card has been called. This year, I’m trying not to dart around the board, pecking at squares as they’re called, like a hungry chicken. For the first few weeks at least, I’m picking squares based on what I’m in the mood to read.
Anyway, here’s the status of the card:
Reading: 4, Called: 1, Read: 3, Read and Called: 0
Mike Finn's Fiction 