Halfway through this week, I travelled to the northern coast of Croatia, so I’ve had the pleasure of reading my books in a warm, sunny climate next to a calm, stunningly blue sea. I’m here for another week, so I’m hoping to get a lot of reading done.

This was the view from the lounger I was reading on today:

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This week, I’ve read a Canadian small-town crime novel, an Urban Fantasy set in an atlernate Edinburgh and a horror novel about rage-driven violence set in suburban Leicestershire. I love the variety that Halloween Bingo brings to me.

Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef is making her way towards retirement after keeping the peace in the sleepy town of Port Dundas for many years. But when a local woman is found murdered – her mouth gruesomely shaped into a silent cry – Hazel and her department are faced with their biggest case yet. 
They soon discover that this is not the first time a body has been found in this way, and it is unlikely to be the last.

‘The Calling‘ (2008) is the first of series of four Canadian crime novels featuring Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef, The book is set mostly in the fictional small town of Port Dundas in Ontario. It’s a serial killer story with some ununsuals twists in motivation and victimology but what makes the book is the character of Hazel Micallef.

I liked and believed in Hazel. She felt real to me. She’s an older woman, who has spent her entire career policing the small town she grew up in. She is a strong, determined woman used to being undervalued by her chain of command but comfortable in her role in the community. The murder of someone in her town feels personal to her. Instead of handing the case to the RCMP, she becomes determined to find the killer. When her investigations start to uncover a previously unnoticed patter of killings, she becomes obsesed with the case and pushes hersellf and her colleagues beyond their normal limits.

I’ll be reading more of this series

My review is HERE

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.

”Our Lady OF Mysterious Ailments’ (2022) is the second book, set in an alternative Edinburgh where magic is part of the establishment culture and following the adventure of Ropa Mayo, a tworking class teenager with talent for talking to the dead.

I though this book in the series was fun but flawed. It had good ideas and nteresting people. I loved being in Ropa’s head. Unfortunately, the storytelling meandered a bit around an overly complex plot. The book was energetic and original but not focused enough. I recommend the text rather than the audibook version of the novel.

My review is HERE

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

‘A Press Of Feathers‘ is a horror about rage-fueled violence. It’s a sort of minestrone of horror tropes. There’s an ancient goddess of chaos, tentacled Cthulhulian monstrosities, menacing murders of crows, a Victorian mental asylum run by sadists, a dodgy self-made millionaire who likes to manipulate people and series of brutal killings.

It’s a rich mixture but, for the most part, it works. The fear and the rage in the novel were made much more powerful by how grounded the people and places are in the everyday reality of life in the suburbs of Leicestershire.

The key scenes are intense and well-realised but some of the plot disclosure felt a little clumsy.

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The three books I bought this week are very different from one another. One is fantasy that spans centuries and continents. One is a quirky Japanese thriller. One is a fantasy set in an analog of Imperial China where magic is integrarted into the power structures.

This is a story about hunger.
1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.
This is a story about love.
1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow—but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.
This is a story about rage.
2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.
This is a story about life—
how it ends, and how it starts.

My experience with V. E. Schwab has been mixed. I set ‘A Darker Shade Of Magic‘ aside but I enjoyed ‘Vicious‘. ‘Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil‘(2025) is her latest novel and it’s been receiving excellent reviews so I have high hopes for it. Plus, it’s about vampires, so there’s that.

Fierce, mixed-race fighter Shindo has been kidnapped by the yakuza. After brutally beating most of them in an attempt to escape, she is forced to work as a bodyguard to protect the gang boss’s sheltered daughter Shoko, a strange, friendless eighteen-year-old who could order Shindo’s death in a moment.
At first Shindo derides Shoko’s naïvete, but as the men around them grow ever more bloodthirsty and controlling, she becomes ferociously devoted to her charge. However, she knows that if things continue as they are, neither woman can expect to survive much longer.
But could there ever be a different life for two people like them?

To my Western eyes, Japanese versions of genres tend to feel alien and strange. I suspect ‘The Night Of Baba Yaga‘ is going to feel stranger than most but I couldn’t resist it. I’m going to fold it into Halloween Bingo somehow.

The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover – a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty – and discover how truth can survive becoming history.

‘The Empress Of Salt And Fortune’, the first book in this series, is one of my best reads for 2025, so I decided to pick up the next book and look for an opportunity to slip a novella into my reading schedule later this year.

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Next week’s reading covers three genres: a contemporary British spy novel, a classic Nordic Noir mystery and an award-winning science fiction novel. One of them was published two days ago. The other two are from my TBR pile and were published in 1965 and 1996.

Spies lie. They betray. It’s what they do.
Slow horse River Cartwright is waiting to be passed fit for work. With time to kill, and with his grandfather – a legendary former spy – long dead, River investigates the secrets of the old man’s library, and a mysteriously missing book.
Regent’s Park’s First Desk, Diana Taverner, doesn’t appreciate threats. So when those involved in a covert operation during the height of the Troubles threaten to expose the ugly side of state security, Taverner turns blackmail into opportunity.
Over at Slough House, the repository for failed spies, Catherine Standish just wants everyone to play nice. But as far as Jackson Lamb is concerned, the slow horses should all be at their desks.
Because when Taverner starts plotting mischief people get hurt, and Lamb has no plans to send in the clowns. On the other hand, if the clowns ignore his instructions and fool around, any harm that befalls them is hardly his fault.
But they’re his clowns. And if they don’t all come home, there’ll be a reckoning.

Mick Herron’s Slough House books are an automatic buy for me. I like how he writes and what he writes about. I enjoy his unblinkered and well-informed take on the contemporary British political landscape as much as I do his plots but it’s his ability to make me empathise with slightly off-centre characters that keeps me coming back to the series.

I was delighted that my Bingo Card has Spies and Assassins on it so I could fold ‘Clown Town‘ into the game as soon as it was published.

On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from a lake in southern Sweden. Raped and murdered, she is naked, unmarked and carries no sign of her identity. As Detective Inspector Martin Beck slowly begins to make the connections that will bring her identity to light, he uncovers a series of crimes further reaching than he ever would have imagined and a killer far more dangerous. How much will Beck be prepared to risk to catch him?

‘Roseanna‘ (1965) is the first book in the ten-book Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the writing team who played a major part in inventing Nordic Noir. It’s been on my shelve for a couple of years now so I’m using the Halloween Bingo Noir square to pull it to the top of the TBR pile.

For forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia’s home. On this planet far away in space and time from the world of her youth, she has lived and loved, weathered the death of her husband, raised her one surviving child, lovingly tended her garden, and grown placidly old. And it is here that she fully expects to finish out her days—until the shifting corporate fortunes of the Sims Bancorp Company dictates that Colony 3245.12 is to be disbanded, its residents shipped off, deep in cryo-sleep, to somewhere new and strange and not of their choosing. But while her fellow colonists grudgingly anticipate a difficult readjustment on some distant world, Ofelia savors the promise of a golden opportunity. Not starting over in the hurly-burly of a new community . . . but closing out her life in blissful solitude, in the place she has no intention of leaving. A population of one.
With everything she needs to sustain her, and her independent spirit to buoy her, Ofelia actually does start life over–for the first time on her own terms: free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others. But when a reconnaissance ship returns to her idyllic domain, and its crew is mysteriously slaughtered, Ofelia realizes she is not the sole inhabitant of her paradise after all. And, when the inevitable time of first contact finally arrives, she will find her life changed yet again—in ways she could never have imagined. . . .

‘Abandoned‘ is new Halloween Bingo square, I was pleased that it showed up on my card as I think it’s a fascinating idea, When I combed through my TBR pile and came across ‘Remenant Population’ (1996) I realised it was a perfect match.. I’ve already started it and I’m entranced by Elizabeth Moon’s calm but powerful storytelling.

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We’ve 20% through Halloween Bingo now and 20% of the squares on my card have been called. So far, only one of the books that I’ve read has been called but three of the books I’ll be reading next week have already been called.

Anyway, here’s the status of my card:

Reading: 4, Called: 5, Read: 5, Read and Called: 1