I was fortunate enough to have some great books to read, and a sunny Easher weekend to read them. Suddenly I’m looking forward to a summer spent reading in the sunshine.
So, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.
It’s been a more productive reading week than it looks. I have two very good but very long novels that I haven’t finished yet: Stephen Kings’s ‘Rose Madder’ which has far flipped between an empathetic look inside the head of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage and a scary portrayal of her violent, cop husband, and Ilona Andrews ’This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me’ which is orginal and immersive but much more violent than their other books.
I finished three books this week, and all of them were rewarding, even the book about a Canadian sports journalist and his hockey-playing father, which was well outside my normal reading choices. I gulped down the second book in Elizabeth Moon’s space opera and had to force myself not to dive straight into the next book. Best of all, I pulled a book from my TBR to listen to when I’d had enough of Stephen King and Ilona Andrews and discovered that I’ve had an exceptional thriller sitting on my shelves since 2019.
Adam Macallister’s sportswriting career is about to end before it begins, but he’s got one last shot: a Sports Illustrated profile about hockey’s most notorious goon, the reclusive Terry Punchout-who also happens to be Adam’s estranged father. Adam returns to Pennington, Nova Scotia, where Terry now lives in the local rink and drives the Zamboni.
Going home means drinking with old friends, revisiting neglected relationships, and dealing with lingering feelings about his father and dead mother-and discovering that his friends and family are kinder and more complicated than he ever gave them credit for.
Searching for Terry Punchouti s a charming and funny tale of hockey, small-town Maritime life, and how, despite our best efforts, we just can’t avoid turning into our parents.
I read ‘Searching For Terry Punchout’ (2018) because it’s on the 2026 Canada Reads shortlist. It’s a debut novel that brings a lot of subtlety to its storytelling. Although the story is about a down-on-his-luck (recently laid off) sportswriter trying to make money by writing a bio-piece on his estranged hockey-playing father, a retired NFL player famous for his time in the penalty box. It wasn’t really about hockey. Rather, it was about what hockey means to people who live their whole lives in small Canadian towns, and what it’s like to leave a small town and then come back.
The story is told from the son’s point of view, but with the father getting to tell his life story in a series of unscripted interviews, speaking to a tape recorder that were mostly monolgues. I was surprised to find that I liked the father more than the son. The more I knew about the son, the less I liked him. He struck me as a whiney, insecure, do-you-know-how-bad-I ’ve-had-it? man, who hasn’t grown up yet and doesn’t really want to. I think that it was a sign of the quality of the writing that he annoyed me so much, and yet I wanted to keep reading.
It’s easy to underestimate a novel like this because the writing doesn’t feel literary. There’s no purple prose, no epiphanic moments capped with perfectly formed epigrams; there’s just the kind of conversations that you’d hear in any bar where men who’ve known each other forever gather to get drunk and talk about sports, life and women. There’s also a beautifully low-key humour that prevents the book from becoming a pity party. I thought it was a fine description, a not-as-grown-as-he-ought-to-be man being forced to reassess what he knows about his father, the people he grew up with and ultimately, himself.
Eleven-year-old Polly McClusky is shy, too old for the teddy bear she carries with her everywhere, when she is unexpectedly reunited with her father, Nate, fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car.
He takes her from the front of her school into a world of robbery, violence, and the constant threat of death.
And he does it to save her life.
‘She Rides Shotgun’ (2017) is an outstanding novel. That it was also a debut novel boggles my mind. I’m not normally a fan of fiction about gangland violence, but this novel sits outside the conventions of ‘outlaw’ books I’ve read. Having a child as one of the central characters changes everything. It raises the stakes on the choices and makes the options more disturbing. I want to root for the girl’s survival, but the cost of that survival mounts with every page and is paid for in blood.
Violence is the currency of the novel, but this isn’t violence that’s meant to excite or be glamorous. This violence feels real, and it’s observed with as little judgment as if the characters were discussing a natural phenomenon, like the weather. The violence in the novel feels honest. It doesn’t shy away from the idea that administering violence can bring its own high, even to an eleven-year-old girl, nor from the terror, pain and grief that being on the receiving end of violence can bring.
It’s a novel of juxtapositions: fear and excitement, cuteness and violence, grief and joy, riotous freedom and inescapable doom. At the heart of it all, a little girl with gunslinger eyes,watermelon coloured hair, an emotional support teddy bear who gets braver and more excited by the day and the unspoken, undoubtable, unbreakable love between the girl and her marked-for-death outlaw father. It was a fresh, realistic, engaging and often disturbing thriller.
Ky Vatta was a military cadet destined for great things, until an act of kindness incurred her Academy’s wrath and ended her career.
Instead of the expected disgrace, her rich trader family gave her captaincy of a small ship, to sell for scrap. In flagrant disregard of orders, she saw the opportunity to make a profit and save the ship.
Several upgrades later, Ky is determined to retain the ship and her independence in the cut-throat world of interplanetary trading. But a threat emerges that challenges even her sharp wits and, if she survives, could leave the military forever in her debt . . .
Although ‘Moving Target’ (2004) was the second book in the Vatta’s War series and carried straight on from the events in ‘Trading in Danger’ (2003), it still caught me by surprise. I didn’t expect the large-scale violence and the loss of some key characters that started the novel. That violence changed everything, placing Ky Vatta and her crew at a greater risk, reducing the resources available to her.
er and setting her on a dangerous, seemingly impossible path to revenge. The rest of the novel was, in effect, a test of Ky’s character. I liked that what disturbed her most was her growing understanding that she enjoys high-risk conflict, and she gets a buzz from killing the people who are trying to kill her.
The novel was an action-packed adventure that had Ky starting to collect assets and allies so that she can plan to make her revenge happen.
I’m glad that I already have the rest of the books in this series on my shelves, as reading only one a week is about as much self-control as I’m going to be able to exert.
I bought seven books this week covering genres ranging from comedy to noir. Six of the authors are women. Two authors are Canadian, two are American, one is Irish, one is Norwegian and one is English:
- ‘I Hope This Finds You Well’ (2024) by Natalie Sue, is a contemporary comedy of deep anxieties and escalating
errors. It was the winner of the 2025 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and the Alberta Literary Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. - ’What Lies In the Woods’ (2023) by Kate Alice Marshall is a dangerous secret kept for decades and about to be revealed thriller;
- Amanda Peters’ ’The Berry Pickers’ (2023), a thriller about the abduction of very young Mi’kmaq girl from Nova Scotia while her family are picking fruit in Maine in the 1960s, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (2024);
- ’The Imaginary Friend’ (2025), is the latest twisty thriller from Michelle Dunne;
- ’Silenced by Snow’ is the first book in a new Nordic Noir series, set in Northern Norway;
- ‘Amazing Grace Adams’ (2023) is contemporary fiction about a woman in her fifties whose life is in crisis;
- ‘A Deadly Combo’ (2023), a debut novel by Karne A. Phillips, kicks off a cosy mystery series about an amateur sleuth in her fifties who uses her boxing skills (taught to her as an anger management technique by her seventy-eight-year-old father) to prove that her twin sister isn’t a murderer. How I could I pass that by?
Would you want to know what your colleagues say behind your back?
Jolene certainly doesn’t.
She’s riddled with anxiety, depressed, and hates her coworkers. The less she knows about them, the better.
So when a catastrophic IT f*ck up grants her access to all of their emails and private messages, she’s initially horrified. The last thing she wants is to be privy to their sad discussions about dying desk plants and marital troubles.
That’s until, with job cuts looming, she realises the power this new-found knowledge gives her.
But as she digs deeper and deeper into the private lives of her colleagues, Jolene uncovers a lot more than she bargained for… And the walls she’d so carefully built start crumbling down.
Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.
And they were liars.
For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.
On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been.
In an affluent suburb nearby, Norma is growing up as the only child of unhappy parents. She is smart, precocious, and bursting with questions she isn’t allowed to ask – questions about her missing baby photos; questions about her dark skin; questions about the strange, vivid dreams of campfires and warm embraces that return night after night. Norma senses there are things her parents aren’t telling her, but it will take decades to unravel the secrets they have kept buried since she was a little girl.
Growing up as foster kids at Raven’s Rock wasn’t easy, but it’s all Pennie and Eve have ever known. But now that they’re alone in the house, Eve vows that things are going to be different. She will love and protect her little sister as best she possibly can.
But Pennie isn’t like other ten-year-olds, and Eve struggles to balance her own fragile self-care with caring for Pennie. Soon it becomes clear that Pennie is playing to a different set of rules – Angel’s rules – and Eve is left wondering…
…how much harm can an imaginary friend possibly do?
Sander Solvang is done with life, or so he tells himself.
Prague offers beer, anonymity, and a way to disappear for good. That is, until a headline about a snowmobile accident back home in Northern Norway jolts something awake in him.
When Sander returns to Tromsø, nothing is as he remembers. His own body is failing him, his memories slip in and out of focus, and fragments of the accident start to circle in ways he can’t explain. The official story feels wrong. The people involved feel nervous. And the more Sander pays attention, the more it seems someone is desperate to keep the truth out of sight.
Soon he’s pulled into a web of fear, loyalty and silence in a small Arctic community where keeping secrets is a survival skill and asking questions is a threat.
For the first time in years, Sander finds himself with a purpose.
But following the truth means walking straight into the dark, and someone out there is willing to kill to keep it that way.
Once, Grace Adams was poised for great things. Now, she barely attracts a second glance as she strides down the street carrying her daughter’s sixteenth birthday cake.
But behind the scenes, Grace’s life is in freefall. Her husband is divorcing her. Her daughter has banned her from her birthday party. And Grace has just abandoned her car in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Because Grace Adams has finally had enough. She’s sick of being overlooked and underappreciated, and she’s particularly tired of being polite.
She’s about to set off on a journey to rediscover who she is, and confront the secret that has torn her family apart.
Sisters Rocky and Bridget are enjoying each other’s company at a vintage trailerfest until they stumble over a corpse.
The dead guy is none other than the local trailer restorer Bridget was overheard threatening to kill. Mounting evidence leads police to focus on Bridget as a person of interest.
Desperate to prove her sister innocent of murder, Rocky dons her own deerstalker cap and goes sleuthing until she runs into police detective Thompson who warns her off his case in no uncertain terms.
But Rocky is tenacious if not stubborn. Combined with a 78-year-old father who becomes her sidekick, Rocky uses her courage and skills learned in boxing lessons to protect her family and keep from becoming the killer’s next victim.
This week, I’m reading the first book in a trilogy about a repo-man in space, the third book in Elizabeth Moon’s Space Opera Vatta’s War, a just-published mystery thriller written by VE Schwab and Cat Clarke collaborating under the name Evelyn Clarke, and a humorous novel in which the Grim Reaper’s vacation is disrupted by some unscheduled killings.
Fergus Ferguson, repo-man, has one job: find the spacecraft Venetia’s Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. Finding Gilger in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a gas-giant harvesting colony called Cernee, was easy. The hard part will be getting past a field of space mines, hacking into the Sword‘s compromised AI, and fighting a crew of hostile enemies to take control of the ship.
But when a cable car explosion launches Cernee into a civil war, Fergus finds himself caught in the crosshairs. Repossessing the Sword requires him to side with Gilger’s enemies, risk death, and get abducted by aliens. Fergus must learn to set aside his pride – and confront a past he’s been running from his whole life – in order to take back the Sword and simultaneously save Cernee from destruction.
I bought this when it came out in 2019, but somehow it sank into the depths of my TBR pile and hasn’t seen the light of day since. Then, a reviewer I follow said she’d bought the rest of the series in an Audible sale. I thought the series sounded fun, looked it up and discovered I already owned the first book. Duh! Anyway, I’ve decided to make 2026 a Summer of Science Fiction, so I’m declaring it to be summer and dragging ‘Finder’ out of my TBR pile (which probably means that the next two books will be added to my TBR pile soon…)
Kylara Vatta has had to leave a glowing future as a military cadet far behind, and now carves out a living in the brutal cut-throat world of interplanetary trading. Her chosen way of life is tough but rewarding and she thinks she is more than capable of holding her own.
That is, until a threat emerges that nobody could have forseen . . .
By the end of the second book, ‘Moving Target’, it was clear that the five books in Vatta’s War are really episodes in a single story arc. Still, it’s a story arc that I’m enjoying, so here I am, ready for book three.
It’s the perfect plot. All it needs is a killer ending.
Six authors. One private island. Seventy-two hours to write the ending.
World-famous author Arthur Fletch is dead. His final novel, the most anticipated book in history, remains unfinished. But the ending won’t write itself.
When six struggling authors are invited to Fletch’s private Scottish island and presented with the opportunity of a lifetime, the plot thickens: whoever writes a worthy ending will receive a game-changing book deal and two million dollars.
Why have they been chosen to attend? Who is behind the invitation? And just how far would they go to secure a place on the bestseller list?
They have just seventy-two hours, a typewriter and a blank page. All they have to do is write…
Starting is often the hardest part. But getting to the end could be murder.
I bought ‘The Ending Writes Itself’ out of curiosity about how VE Schwab and Cat Clarke collaborate. The premise sounds fun, if a little high-concept (like a 1970s college rock band). The ARC reviews have been positive, but that’s to be expected with two well-known writers. Anyway, I’m hoping it will be fun.
People have a few ideas about Death, and the worst by far is a skeleton in a black potato sack. If she’s lucky, she gets a scythe. The truth: she’s just a woman doing a job and she’s very good at it.
Until she takes time off to live as a human and everything falls apart. Someone’s killing people not on her schedule (well, not yet anyway) and with no thanks to the Temp she left in charge, it’s up to her to make things right.
With the help of her oh-so-sanctimonious sister, Life, and a charming (sexy) parasitologist, Death must stop the killer before it’s too late. But that’s if she can defeat her greatest challenge yet: human bureaucracy.
This is a roll of the dice. I’ll be listening to it on a couple of long car journeys this week and hoping that it makes me smile.
Mike Finn's Fiction 