A good reading week, and I managed to get some reviews written. I’ve also stumbled upon some good collections of short stories and novellas that should keep me engaged through the summer.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.
I’m a little behind on where I’d planned to be with my reading, but I’m enjoying myself, so I’m just going with the flow. This week, I read the second book in Robert Jackson Bennett’s ‘Shadow of the Leviathan’ series and was surprised and pleased to find that it was as good as the first book. I also indulged myself in a new collection of paranormal stories, which felt like eating my way through a luxury box of chocolates.
An impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air – abducted from his quarters in a building whose entrances and exits are all sealed.
The brilliant and mercurial investigator, Ana Dolabra, and her assistant Dinios Kol have been called in to crack the case.
Before long, Ana discovers that they’re actually investigating a murder. Worse, the adversary seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.
Ana’s solved impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and the investigators seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, has Ana finally met an enemy she can’t defeat?
‘The Tainted Cup’ (2024), the first book in this series, was one of my best reads of 2025. It was stunningly original, exotic, exciting and delivered a solid mystery. While I’d hoped that ‘A Drop Of Corruption’ (2025) would match it, I hadn’t really expected it to. After all, I knew a little of this world and the two investigators now, so I probably wouldn’t feel so strange and new. Remind me never to underestimate Roobert Jackson Bennett again.
He took me to a province outside the empire, described even stranger biochemical engineering than in the previous book and introduced new characters. The deeply textured complexity of the world-building was staggering. Add in diverse, engaging characters and a labyrinthine mystery that still felt accessible, and this book becomes another outstanding achievement. It’s shortlisted for the 2026 Hugo Best Novel award. I hope that it wins.
In this short story collection, our heroes get what’s due to them—with a supernatural flair.
But the injustices that have been holding them back might cost them more than they realized. . . .
Featuring stories by:
Jim Butcher, Holly Black, Kim Harrison, Faith Hunter, Jennifer Blackstream, Maurice Broaddus, Delilah S. Dawson, Kevin Hearne, Tanya Huff, Kerrie L. Hughes, R. L. King, R.R. Virdi
Narrated by:
Alexandra Potocka, Elizabeth Wiley, Graham Halstead, Hannah Curtis, James Marsters, JD Jackson, Khristine Hvam, Marguerite Gavin, Stella Hunter, Therese Plummer, Will Watt
I preordered’Paranormal Payback‘ (2026), edited by Jim Butcher and Kerrie Hughes, because I enjoyed the ‘Shadowed Souls’ anthology that they published ten years ago, and some of the same authors are in this collection.
Eight of the dozen stories in the collection worked well for me. I thought the stories by Holly Black, Faith Hunter and Maurice Broaddus were exceptional. I’d have bought the collection jusr to read Jim Butcher’s story. Jennifer Blackstream and Kerrie L. Hughes have pricked my interest in the paranormal worlds their stories were set in.
My review, with ratings and comments on each story is HERE
I bought seven books this week, half of them novellas or collections of short stories and with the rest being speculative fiction novels.
’The Fountain’ (2026) is a debut novel billed as being “…about eternity and mortality that asks what it would mean to live forever.”. I’m intrigued by the theme and by Casey Scieszka’s background. I have high hopes for this one.
’There’s Something Wrong With The Cata’ (2025) caught my eye because the tagline is so off the wall: “Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, it mutated it into a vigilante crime fighter”. How could I resist that? It’s also the first book in what is now a three-book series, so there could be a lot of fun ahead.
’Nobody’s Baby’ (2026) is the second ‘Dorothy Gentleman’ Science Fiction mystery novella. I’m hoping it’s going to be as much fun as ‘Murder By Memory’ (2025).
‘Angels On Fire’ (1998) is another quirky, trope-twisting speculative fiction novel by Nancy A Colins. I love the anarchic energy of her novels. In her Bram Stoker Award-winning ‘Sunglasses After Dark’ (1989), she introduced me to Sonja Blue, a vampire like no other. In ‘Wild Blood’ (1994), she showed me just how frenzied the life of a werewolf could be. I’m curious to see what she does with angels and demons.
I enjoyed ‘The Time Traveler’s Passport’ Amazon Original Short Stories collection (2025), so I went looking for more. I found ‘Out of Line – women on the verge of a breakthrough’ (2020), billed as “seven new funny, enraging, and hopeful short stories of women’s empowerment and escape from best-selling authors”, and ‘Deadly Ambition – too much is never enough’ (2026), a collection of stories about how ambition corrupts.
Finally, I bought ‘The Darkest Night’ (2024), a collection of twenty-three winter/Christmas horror stories edited by Lindy Ryan. That probably seems like an odd choice for the second week in May, but the Kindle version of the collection is on sale for £0.79 from Amazon. I’m hoping to use it as an Advent Calendar read in December.
Vera Van Valkenburgh hasn’t been home in one hundred and eighty-eight years. But now Vera, forever twenty-six and able to heal from any wound, has returned to the Catskills. Whatever made her family immortal happened here, and if she can uncover it, maybe she can reverse it. After nearly two centuries—an endless sequence of unnoticed, meaningless lives and a soul-shaking incident in the desert—she longs to be released.
Posing as a newly arrived forest ranger, she quickly blends into the upstate community and learns of something curious and disturbing. A mysterious, well-funded company is snapping up local property, no matter how high the asking price. But when her brother, a fellow immortal shows up, accompanied by a woman whose face is incredibly familiar to Vera, the purpose for her return gets clouded and Vera is in a race against time to find out what has caused her condition before someone else does.
Curiosity didn’t kill the cat; it mutated it into a vigilante crime fighter.
Dan’s cats are acting weird. One has grown into a strength powerhouse, the other wants to communicate… verbally. And now other kitties have begun to go missing from his quiet suburban street.
Could the man in the parka that haunts a nearby industrial estate have answers?
Or perhaps it’s something to do with the strange disappearing woman in the woods?
Can our hero figure out the conspiracy before it turns into a catastrophe?
What happens when women step out of line and take control of their own stories?
Big fears, small frustrations, and the power of hope collide as seven award-winning authors explore the possibilities….
What drives someone to keep reaching for all that glitters, no matter the price? It’s easy to believe that more is better: more acclaim, more control, more wealth.
But when dreams are fueled by greed, they can quickly twist into nightmares.
These six propulsive short stories explore what happens when the true cost of ambition comes due.
A struggling artist finds a lost angel has crash-landed atop her New York City apartment building, and she must help the angel become mortal or return to heaven before it turns into a daemon.
From some of the biggest names in horror comes an Advent calendar of short holiday horror stories perfect for the darkest nights of the year.
Edited by award-winning author and anthologist Lindy Ryan and with contributions from masters of horror like Josh Malerman, Eric LaRocca, and Clay McLeod Chapman, this horrific anthology will chill you to the bone.
This week, I’m reading a supernatural cozy mystery and the latest novels from Lee Goldberg and Martha Wells.
Peony Bellefleur runs Betwitching Blooms, the charming flower shop in a picture-perfect Cotswold village in England. Her flowers seem to make the sick improve, wedding days happier, and birthdays more special because she infuses her bouquets with a little magic.
Peony’s a witch in a village that seems too perfect to be true. Probably because it is. She’s got her hands full between running her flower shop, managing her mother—who’s a medium with a habit of conversing with the dead wherever she happens to be—and helping her protégé to embrace her newfound powers.
When someone dies, Peony suspects foul play. But can she solve the mystery before she’s the one pushing up daisies?
This sounds like a smile. I’m hoping it will enliven a long drive down to Cornwall later this week.
Edison Bixby is wealthy, handsome, and, due to a traumatic brain injury, impulsively rude. He’s also a brilliant insurance investigator who solves baffling crimes by figuring out how the design of the man-made world around us makes them possible. Enter Wally Nash: a struggling actor hired to keep Bixby from offending everyone he meets.
Their first case together looks like a simple accident. Caroline Crowley took a nasty fall down a staircase at a shopping mall in front of dozens of witnesses. Video clearly shows the deadly misstep. But Bixby is certain she was murdered by design, subtly manipulated into causing her own demise. The mall itself made the crime intentional, if not inevitable.
Now Bixby must prove his outrageous theory before a very cunning killer gets others on his hit list to murder themselves, too.
I’ve started this already. It’s a bizarre read. Over the top doesn’t begin to cover it. A self-deluding, fantasist wannabe actor as the sensitivity coach / assistant to a brain-damaged but still brilliant, rich, handsome, ex-homicide detective turned insurance investigator, romping through puzzles solved by an analysis of the built environment.
Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.
After volunteering to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realizes that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn’t know.
Including human children. Ugh.
This may well call for … eye contact!
(Emotion check: Oh, for f—)
It’s the latest Murdebot story. What more do I need to say?
Mike Finn's Fiction 