It was an unusual week for me; I had the energy to lose myself in my books but not the energy to write about them. Still, the books were worth the read, so the week wasn’t wasted.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.
This wasn’t exactly the reading week I had planned. When I got to the end of the fourth Vatta’s War book, which I’d started the week before, I realised that I didn’t want to wait another week to find out what happened next, so I pushed ‘A Drop of Corruption’ aside and finished off the series. I was surprised at how liberating it was to deviate from my own plan. The other two books were in my plan and were just as good as I’d hoped they’d be, while not being exactly what I’d expected, which is a pleasant combination.
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.
‘The Incandescent’ (2025) was an odd read – in the sense that it was hard to label – but it worked.
It was strongly grounded in the realities of teaching in a Public School and was driven by the protagonist’s personality. It felt like a mainstream novel except that it had demons, an elaborate system of magic, and some scary violence. The story isn’t just an action thriller with magic-weilding heroes, although it has those. It’s a story that invites the reader to think about what it means to have a self, how many of them we have, whether all of them are true and why and how they change. It stress tests these concepts by having our heroine rethink who she wants to be while facing off with powerful demons who, in addition to being hungry for power, yearn to reify in our world and who, as they gain complexity, also develop a sense of self.
I’m going to think about it some more before I write a proper review, but I can see why this is a finalist for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Nove, and I’ve already bought Emily Tesh’s debut novel, ‘Some Desperate Glory’ (2023)
There’s a dead body in my living room.
I’ve not called the police because it was I who stabbed him. Seven times in all. The truth is, it’s surprisingly difficult to dispatch someone with a vegetable knife.
In case you’re wondering, the dead man is not my husband. I do resent our pitiful sex life and his woeful lack of ambition, but I wouldn’t murder him for it. Not yet, anyway.
Right now, I have far more pressing concerns: scheming to get my daughter into the perfect school; buying my dream home in Hampstead; and disposing of a corpse.
A woman’s work is never done. I’ve created the perfect life – and I’ll kill to keep it.
I’d expected ‘A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage’ (2025) to be a witty dark comedy, to be enjoyed for its anti-patriarchy antics, but not to be taken too seriously. It turned out to be something quite different and much more interesting. It was a good thriller with a truly original protagonist who, to my surprise, I wanted to succeed.
One of the novel’s main strengths was that the protagonist’s sociopathy was played straight rather than for laughs. Seeing the world from her point of view was quietly disturbing and pleasantly unpredictable. This was not a satire. Lala was sincere in her desire to build and keep a successful marriage and to secure her family’s future. Her goals were simple: get her husband to make Partner, buy a house in Hampstead, and get her almost certainly sociopathic daughter into prep school. Lala is goal-oriented. She plans. She puts in the work, even when the work involves killing someone who is threatening her family’s future. The longer I lived in Lala’s head, the more reasonable she seemed, which was a little alarming, actually.
The other strength of the novel was its intricate plot. It pulled me along by my curiosity, using layers of secrets and hidden agendas and constantly confronting Lala with apparently insurmountable obstacles to achieving her goals. The plot kept me turning the pages eagerly. By the time I was a third of the way through the book, I was cheering Lala on every time she came up with a clever way of getting her way, even when her solutions were ruthless.
I read ‘Trading In Danger’ (2003) at the beginning of April and was excited to have found a solid, original, Space Opera / Military SF series that I’d been unaware of. I read the remaining five books in the Vatta’s War series at the rate of one a week. I read the last two ‘Command Decision’ (2007) and ‘Victory Conditions’ (2008) back to back. In effect, the six books form a single, exciting, complicated, action-packed story that I became happily engaged with. I was very glad that I hadn’t had to wait a year in between each book as the first readers had to do. I’m going to review the series as a whole, but in brief, it’s an exciting, engaging, original adventure in space, with a whole bunch of strong female protagonists.
I bought four books this week: an award-winning crime thriller with an unusual teen at its heart, a cosy mystery featuring an American amateur sleuth in England’s Peak District, an award-winning debut Science Fiction novel and an ingenious Time Travel novel.
‘Deadly Animals’ (2024) won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel and the McDermid Debut Award for Crime Fiction. It’s set in a Birmingham suburb in the 1980s and features a thirteen-year-old girl with an obsessive interest in the forensics of post-mortem decay.
’Welcome To Murder Week’ (2025) sounds like the kind of cosy mystery that will keep me entertained on a long car journey sometime soon.
‘Some Desperate Glory’ (2023) won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel, was a finalist for the 2024 Locus Award for Best First Novel, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. It sounds like a hard-edged, original piece of Science Fiction. I’m looking forward to it.
I bought ’The Third Rule of Time Travel’ (2025) because it has an intriguing premise, a killer in-your-face opening page, and I enjoyed Philip Fracassi’s ‘The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre’ (2025) horror novel. I’m hoping this will be a fast-paced and intriguing read.
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is different.
While her friends play, Ava searches for roadkill. She knows studying animal decomposition is an unusual hobby, but Ava doesn’t care what other people think.
Then, one night, when Ava sneaks out to find a fox, she instead stumbles upon the body of Mickey Grant.
Despite his many years in the police, Detective Seth Delahaye has never seen a murder case like this one – as though the victim was set upon by a wild animal.
Nor has he met anyone quite like Ava: so determined, resourceful and . . . unusual.
And when another boy goes missing, Delahaye has no idea that Ava will become his secret weapon in the hunt for a killer.
Rule One: Travel can only occur to a point within your lifetime.
Rule Two: You can only travel for ninety seconds.
Rule Three: You can only observe.
The rules cannot be broken.
This is not the story you think you know. And the rules are only the beginning.
When thirty-four-year-old Cath loses her mostly absentee mother, she is ambivalent. With days of quiet, unassuming routine in Buffalo, New York, Cath consciously avoids the impulsive, thrill-seeking lifestyle that her mother once led. But when she’s forced to go through her mother’s things one afternoon, Cath is perplexed to find tickets for an upcoming “murder week” in England’s Peak District: a whole town has come together to stage a fake murder mystery to attract tourism to their quaint hamlet. Baffled but helplessly intrigued by her mother’s secret purchase, Cath decides to go on the trip herself—and begins a journey she never could have anticipated.
Teaming up with her two cottage-mates, both ardent mystery lovers—Wyatt Green, forty, who works unhappily in his husband’s birding store, and Amity Clark, fifty, a divorced romance writer struggling with her novels—Cath sets about solving the “crime” and begins to unravel shocking truths about her mother along the way. Amidst a fling—or something more—with the handsome local maker of artisanal gin, Cath and her irresistibly charming fellow sleuths will find this week of fake murder may help them face up to a very real crossroads in their own lives.
All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of planet Earth. Raised on Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet.
Then Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons, and she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr must escape from everything she’s ever known. If she succeeds, she will find a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could ever have imagined
This week, I’m reading a thriller that has been on my TBR since 2017, a romance that was a finalist for CBC’s Canada Reads, and a horror/mystery novel that’s just been released.
It’s an evening like any other when an explosion rips through the leafy Oxford suburb Sarah Tucker calls home.
In the aftermath, a house now stands devastated, with two adults dead and a young girl missing.
With the police more interested in keeping the neighbours from rubbernecking than in searching for the missing child, Sarah becomes obsessed with finding her.
She enlists the help of Zoë Boehm’s investigation agency, but Sarah’s and Zoë’s search reveals more secrets than answers, taking them from Oxford’s cobbled streets to the rugged outer reaches of the British Isles. As Zoë and Sarah draw closer to the truth, they are caught in a web of conspiracy and come up against government forces, cold-blooded mercenaries and vengeful loners.
‘Down Cemetery Road’ (2003) was Mick Herron’s CWA Gold Dagger winninng debut novel. I bought it in 2017, after I’d bought the first three books in his Slough House series. For some reason, it never made it to the top of my TBR pile, even though I read his other books as they were published. I was reminded of it when I saw that Apple had made the book into a TV series starring Emma Thompson. I thought, “That looks good”, and then, “Don’t I already own that?” Then I found that there are another three books in the Oxford Investigations series. So, I’ve dragged this overlooked for too long book out of my TBR pile to read this week.
June Wood has nothing left to lose.
With her hit TV show cancelled, and no acting jobs lined up, being lured back to New York by a mysterious email was easy. Thanks to a clause in her former landlord’s will, June and her old roommate, Adam Harper, now own the multimillion-dollar property-or they will in a month, once the paperwork is signed.
June and Adam are stuck together for four weeks. Which would be fine, if it wasn’t for the fact that they haven’t spoken in five years. But this is the opportunity of a lifetime, and once it’s over, she can return to LA and forget all about Adam, New York and everything that went wrong in their friendship.
Through shared meals and late-night conversations, old wounds and long-buried sparks resurface. It soon becomes strikingly clear that June and Adam have unfinished business. Second chances are always a risk, but maybe, if they are finally honest with each other and themselves, it could be different this time.
I don’t normally read Romance novels. I picked this one up because it was a finalist on CBC’s 2026 Canada Reads. I’ve already started it and am pleased to have found that it’s well written and engaging.
2026
Lee can’t remember exactly where he hid the body, but he can remember the blood. Hiding out at his father’s centuries-old home in Japan, Lee knows something is wrong with him, and he knows it has something to do with his mother’s disappearance almost a decade ago.
1877
A female samurai, Sen, stalks the borders of her home to protect her family from slaughter after the abolition of the samurai class. She’s not sure how they’ll ever survive, not without her father, who has returned from war with a different soul behind his eyes.
When Lee and Sen find one another through a door between their worlds, they’re both looking for answers. But what they find in the creaking old house they share is beyond what either of them could imagine…
I’ve been waiting for ‘Japanese Gothic’ since I read Kylie Lee Baker’s ‘Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng’(2025) back in March. It was published this week, and I’m keen to get started with it. I mean, it’s a story about a female Samurai and a haunted house in Japan, told with characters from 1827 and 2026, and it’s by a writer who I know writes well. How could I resist that?
Mike Finn's Fiction 