This week started with an unusual carol concert in front of one of the Georgian Crescents one dark, wet evening. The music was provided by kids from the local guitar school and regulars at the Open Mic music club. It was cheerful, with tiny kids running around, dogs waiting patiently and adults being bright and sociable as we all ignored the rain and sang along.

It was a fun reading week with two exceptional books, three engaging ones and one that I set aside. It was also a week where my appetite for speculative fiction reasserted itself.

Anyway, heere’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.

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Novellas and short stories were the stars of this week’s reading. I had a great time with Reginald Hill’s short story collection. Sarah Gailey’s Weird West with Hippos novella was a blast, and Seanan McGuire’s first Wayward Children novella was astonishingly good. The novels from crime series that I’m following both lived up to my expectations. The only blip was a horror novel that turned out to be too gory for me. 

As the mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, shakes off a long, hard winter, famous photographer Rudolph Steiner arrives to do a feature on mountain tourism. Steiner is accompanied by his assistant and sexy young wife, but he has another reason for the visit: to reconnect with the woman who left him 25 years ago to marry another man. 
Twenty five years ago she was young, beautiful, naïve, and an internationally known supermodel. Today Eliza Winters is no longer young, and definitely not naïve, but still beautiful and married to Trafalgar City police sergeant John Winters. 
When Steiner is found dead in his luxury hotel room, shot once in the back of the head, suspicion falls upon Eliza. John Winters is forced into the most difficult decision of his life: loyalty to his job or to his wife. As the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dig into the secrets of both Steiner and Eliza, John Winters slowly comes to realize that he doesn’t know the woman to whom he has been married for 25 years as well as he thought he did. 
Unable to help the sergeant, Constable Molly Smith has her own troubles: a series of breaking-and-enterings has the peaceful town in an uproar, her overprotective Mountie boyfriend is fighting with her colleagues, and a vengeful stalker is watching her every move. When tragedy strikes at the heart of her own family, Molly can’t even turn to her mother, Lucky, for help. 

My second visit to the small mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, was a entertaining as the first.I struggle to explain to myself why I enjoy these low-key small town criime stories so much. To my surprise, they keep me engaged, make me laugh from time to time and help me to relax in the evenings.

In the early 20th century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true. 
Other true things about hippos: They are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. This was a terrible plan. 
Contained within this volume is an 1890s America that might have been: a bayou overrun by feral hippos and mercenary hippo wranglers from around the globe. It is the story of Winslow Houndstooth and his crew. It is the story of their fortunes. It is the story of his revenge.

This was such fun. A stylish, vigorously playful, shamelessly over-the-top trope-twisting Alternative history Western that was as vivid as a graphic novel. 

All of the characters were larger than life. Only three of them were white Cismales (and two of them are not at all nice). The rest are a colourful collection of talented misfits who make the Magnificent Seven seem like Frat boys. 

Best of all, there are Hippos. Hippos you can ride like horses, Hippos you can eat like cows and feral Hippos that will eat you. 

The plot is full of betrayals, old and new, violent confrontations, and slowly smouldering relationships. All of which builds to an explosive climax. 

Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere… else.
But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.
Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced… they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.
But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of things.
No matter the cost.

‘Every Heart A Doorway‘ is a truly exceptional novella, beautifully written and narrated with skill. It has a profound understanding of what it means to know who you are and to live in a world where even those who love you are incapable of accepting what you know about yourself.

There’s a whole world of magic and a serial killer mystery but the focus remains firmly on the emotional and social challenges faced by young people who have found the one place where they can be themselves, only to be exiled from it.

This was a book that I found myself deeply engaged with and which delivered even more than I expected from it.

He review is HERE.

Two murders, twenty years apart, with eerie similarities: a woman in a party dress murdered with no obvious cause of death. The last known suspect? Russ Van Alstyne, never convicted but never completely cleared either.
Now, decades later, a third young woman is found under similar circumstances. It’s a new case that opens old wounds for Russ, now a police chief himself.
With three crimes spanning generations, and Russ himself under suspicion, the pressure is on for him to solve the murder or risk losing everything he loves.

Tragic events in the author’s life meant that therea six year gap between this novel and its predecessor in the series, I was glad to have the opportunity to visit Clare and Russ again and pleased to see that the story continued from where it left off in the excellent ‘Through The Evil Days‘.

Unusually, this story was told on dual timelines, twenty years apart. I’m enjoyed the present day timeline but the past one often felt like an interruption. It was interesting to see the young Russ Van Alystyne, just back from war but Istruggled to imagine how one killer would span such a long gap in time between kills.

In the end, the explanation of the two timelines worked but I was still happier in the present-day timeline.

I’ll be reading the next book in the series this week.

From his well-loved detective duo, DCI Dalziel and DI Pascoe to his own reimagining of Sherlock Holmes, Reginald Hill’s unforgettable characters and unique blend of humour and suspense make him one of Britain’s greatest crime writers. Complete with a foreword by Mick Herron, this collection of short stories showcases the very best of this iconic mystery writer.

Reginald Hill is a great storyteller. I love his dark imagination, his gruff Yorkshire humour, and his skill at misdirecting my attention so that most stories end with a surprise. Most of all, I admire his ability to bring his characters to life.

The tales in this collection range from police procedural to historical fiction. The Christmas stories that bookend this collection were a delight. The stories in between ranged from the disturbing to the amusing. Each of them was beautifully put together.

I foresee a lot more Reginal Hill in my reading future.

My review is HERE

When a down-on-his-luck shopping mall Santa is abruptly fired just days before Christmas, he decides to unleash holiday hell on the staff who wronged him. As the body count rises, shoppers at Merryvale will soon discover that this Santa’s got a bag full of wicked surprises – and he’s ready to deliver!

‘The Very Naughty LIst’ was a misbuy on my part. It was too much of a gorefest for me. I enjoyed the start of the novel when the situation and the characters were being established. I thought the Santa’s origin story and his relationship with Mrs Claus were inspired. Once the novel became a succession of bloody slaughter scenes, I lost interest.

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This week, I’ve been buying books that will help me escape from the gloomy political landscape into strange worlds. One book takes me on a light-hearted visit to Patricia Briggs’ werewolves. One transports me to Tokyo to solve murder. One takes me back to Manchester to explore all the supernatural goings on that I failed to see when I lived there many years ago. One is a British Dark Academia book that I’m hoping has at least as much humour as darkness. My most nostalgic buy is an all-cast performance of a plot set in the Buffyverse.

When the deadly werewolf Asil is gifted five blind dates by some anonymous “friends,” his reclusive life will never be the same, in this enthralling novel-in-stories.
Includes two all-new stories as well as three previously published stories.

Patricia Briggs’ next Alpha & Omega novel isn’t due until next year. In the meantime, she’s offered her fans a novel stitched together around short stories about one of the oldest and most dangerous werewolves in the Pack. I’m hoping it will be a smile.

In Tokyo, murder’s easy to hide. Detective Hiroshi Shimizu investigates white-collar crime in Tokyo. When an American businessman turns up dead, his mentor Takamatsu calls him out to the site of a grisly murder. A glimpse from a security camera video suggests the killer might be a woman. Hiroshi quickly learns how close homicide and suicide can appear in a city full of high-speed trains just a step – or a push – away. 
Takamatsu drags Hiroshi out to the hostess clubs and skyscraper offices of Tokyo in search of the killer. Hiroshi goes deeper and deeper into Tokyo’s intricate, perilous market for buying and selling the most expensive land in the world. He teams up with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi to scour Tokyo’s sacred temples, corporate offices, and industrial wastelands to find out why one woman was driven to murder. 
After years in America and lost in neat, clean spreadsheets, Hiroshi confronts the stark realities of the biggest city in the world, where inside information can travel in a flash from the insiders at top investment firms to street-level punks and teenage hostesses, everyone scrambling for their cut of Tokyo’s lucrative land deals. Hiroshi’s determined to cut through Japan’s ambiguities – and dangers – to find the murdering ex-hostess before she extracts her final revenge – which just might be him.

Japanese crime novels have the advantage of being familiar enough to be accessible and alien enough to be surprising. This one is the first in a series of police procedurals featuring tokyo-based Detective Hiroshi Shimizu.

Michael Pronko is an American who has lived in Tokyo for over twenty years. He’s a professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University. I’m looking forward to seeing how he depicts the city and its people.

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable.

At least that’s their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door – and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who’s got problems of her own.

When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they’d previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.

I passed on this series when ‘The Stranger Times‘ came out in 2021, partly because I couldn’t imagine Manchester as a hotspot for supernatural activity. When I was looking for Christmas-themed books this year, I came across ‘Ring The Bells’ (2025), the fifth book in the series, and decided to go back to the beginning and see what all the fuss is about. 

Dr Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings and securing the school’s boundaries from demonic incursions.
Walden is good at her job – no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. But it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from . . . is herself.

As a subgenre,, Dark Academia had been hit or miss for me. I’m hoping that this one will amuse me because: it’s British, it seems light-hearted or at least not desperate to be Literary Fiction in disguise, and magic is involved.

Original cast members from the beloved TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, reunite for an all-new adventure about connections that never die—even if you bury them.
A decade has passed since the epic final battle that concluded Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV). The game-changing spell that gave power to all potential Slayers persists. With new Slayers constantly emerging, things are looking grim for the bad guys. Rebellious vampire Spike (James Marsters) is working undercover in Los Angeles with his old pal Clem (James Charles Leary) when he meets feisty, rookie Slayer, Indira (Laya DeLeon Hayes), who wants Spike to be her mentor. Stakes intensify as Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) emerges from an alternate reality where she alone is the Slayer, and Buffy Summers doesn’t exist. Cordelia enlists Spike’s help with a classic big bad terrorizing her world…his ex, Drusilla (Juliet Landau). Giles (Anthony Head), Anya (Emma Caulfield Ford), Jonathan (Danny Strong), and Tara (Amber Benson) also return, but through the years and the vastness of the multiverse, not everyone is who they used to be…

My wife and I were big Buffy fans back in the days when it was only available once a week on terrestrial television way back in the last century. We watched all seven series and the ‘Angel‘spinoff.

I’m not always a fan of all-cast productions but when the production is a new Buffyverse story and the cast includes original cast members, nostalgia alone should make it worth a listen.

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This week’s reading list has a clever reworking of Sherlock Holmes set in a near future London and two Christmas-themed mysteries and a Christmas-themed audioplay.

From international bestselling author Anthony Horowitz (Midsummer murders, Foyles war, Alex Rider, Hawthorne) comes 3 new books about one of literatures most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes, like you have never heard him before. The Red Circle, first installment in the upcoming 3 book series “Becoming Sherlock” is a story set in a dystopian London in the near future. At the same time a passenger plane goes down in central London, Dr. Watson finds a man naked and beaten in the street. The man has no memory, no past but seem to inhabit exceptional gifts of detection. This is the start of a mystery that unravels rapidly with one burning question at the center of it, who is Sherlock Holmes?

Anthony Horowitz has come up with a great idea here. It’s Sherlock Holmes reinvented in a near-future London. You’ll recognise the names of many of the characters but in decaying near-future London, they’re all a little different. The most different of all is Sherlock Holmes, a man who has no memory of his own identity.

I’ve started this and it’s fun. It’s designed to be listened to rather than read. It’s an ambitious project that currently stands at three books.

When true crime podcaster Harley Granger drifts into Madeline Martin’s bookshop days before Christmas, he seems intent on digging up a past that Madeline would much rather forget.
Granger’s work has earned him fame and wealth – and some serious criticism for his various unethical practices. Granger also has a lot of questions about the night Madeline was left for dead, the only surviving victim of killer Evan Handy.
Handy, who also murdered Madeline’s best friend and is suspected in the disappearance of two local sisters, has been in jail for a decade. Since then, though, three other young women have gone missing in similar circumstances. Is the true predator still out there somewhere?
As Christmas approaches and a blizzard bears down, Madeline must confront the past to answer questions that have haunted her since that day. Is the truth more terrible than she ever imagined?

I enjoyed Lisa Unger’s short story, ‘The Kill Clause‘ so I decided to add her Christmas-themed thriller to my read-my-way-into-Christmas list.

It’s Christmas time in Millers Kill, and Reverend Clare Fergusson and her husband Russ van Alstyne – newly resigned from his position as chief of police – plan to enjoy it with their baby boy. On their list: visiting Santa, decorating the tree, and attending the church Christmas pageant. But when a beloved holiday parade is crashed by white supremacists, Clare and Russ find themselves sucked into a parallel world of militias, machinations and murder.

Meanwhile, single mom and officer Hadley Knox has her hands full juggling her kids and her police work. She doesn’t want to worry about her former partner – and sometimes lover – Kevin Flynn, but when he takes leave from the Syracuse PD and disappears, she can’t help her growing panic that something has gone very wrong.

Novice lawyer Joy Zhào is keeping secrets from her superiors at the state Attorney General’s Office. She knows they wouldn’t condone her off-the-books investigation, but she’s convinced a threatening alt-right conspiracy is brewing – and catching the perpetrators could jump start her career.

NYS Forest Ranger Paul Terrance is looking for his uncle, a veteran of the park service gone inexplicably missing. He doesn’t think much of an ex-cop and out-of-town officer showing up in his patch of the woods, but he’s heard the disturbing rumors of dangerous men in the mountains.

I’m making another trip to Millers Kill just in time for Christmas. This one is hot off the press. It’s not available in the UK yet but I was able to get hold of a US copy.

It’s Christmas Eve, and Lara anxiously anticipates the arrival of her sister, Cleo, so she can reveal a shocking family secret that has been haunting Lara since their mother’s death. By confronting revelations about their grandfather’s shameful past, Lara is hopeful that she and Cleo can make reparations and exorcise this ghost from their lives. The ghost, however, won’t be appeased so easily….
Alexandra Wood’s new play – twisty, suspenseful, and written exclusively for audio – will convince you that you really can’t escape your past.

‘Descent’ is an Audible Orignal play set at Christmas. Sometimes these are great. Sometimes I find them too noisy, The mystery in this one sounds intriguing so I’m hoping it will be an hour well-spent.

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I’ve read all six of the books for my SPELL IT OUT challenge. Most of these aren’t the books that wee on my original list but they’re books I’ve ended up reading recently.

I’ve picked up on the suggestion to collect the first letter of book titles for books I read during the challenge and see if I can make some SCRABBLE type words from them. I have five letters so far but none of them are vowels.