This has been a week full of distractions, not least of which was finding a badger that had fallen into our small courtyard and was unable to climb out, so I got very little reading done.
At the moment, I’m partway through three good books that I’d like to have found the time to finish. My most bookish occupation this week has been planning what books to read for Halloween Bingo, which starts in September.
Anyway, here is what I did find the time to read, the books I bought and what I’m planning to read next week.
It’s my habit to read more than one book at a time. Usually, find no more difficult than following more than one TV series at a time. This week, things got out of hand. I’m currently partway through: ‘Mad Mabel’, ‘A Trade In Blood’, ‘The Last contract of Isako’ and ‘Silent is the Forest’. They’re all satisfying reads but I should have picked a couple to focus on.
I did manage to finish the seventh and final book in The Serrano Legacy series and a slim book of speculative fiction short stories. I also set aside a book that I was halfway through but which wasn’t working for me.
From the mind behind the film-optioned debut The Puller comes Michael Hodges’ most ambitious collection yet. THE GLOAMING honors the gritty traditions of post-apocalyptic survival and First Contact suspense through 16 epic tales.
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Featured Stories from the Edge
Fletcher’s Mountains: In a world drained of oil and scorched by World War III, a lone survivor treks across a fractured America toward the sanctuary of a friend’s Montana cabin. But in the silence of the wilderness, he realizes he isn’t just traveling—he’s being hunted.
Lost Planes, Lost River: When a fleet of Wildlife Service Cessnas falls from the sky during a controversial wolf-culling mission, the FBI is deployed to the crash sites. What they find suggests that the wolves aren’t the only predators in the woods—and the “accidents” are anything but.
Hydra: A visionary scientist unlocks the secret to near-immortality, offering humanity a way to cheat the grave for decades. But the breakthrough carries a grim price: a biological imbalance that ensures humans will be the only living things left on Earth.
Gudmund’s Wolf: Sixty years ago, a wolf howled for Gudmund’s birthday. Today, the wolves are a myth, and Gudmund’s memories are following them into extinction. In this haunting tale of brotherhood and biological betrayal, two men wander into the deep uplands of the Michigan wilderness. One is searching for a way out; the other is searching for a way to say goodbye.
This was a collection that would have been much stronger if it had had fewer stories in it. Some of the stories felt like downloads from the author’s Work In Progress file rather than completed works. The others, even the ones that were very short, did a great job pulling me into a moment in time and using that moment to get me to reflect on the things we do now that make such dismal futures or unhappy presents possible.
Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.
Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?
With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.
This should have been my sort of book. It’s an exposition of the toxic impact of the normalisation of divisive Christian Nationalist fundamentalist dogma on families. It did a good job in depicting the sense of narrowly avoided despair that comes from helplessly watching the world you valued being torn down by assholes, bigots and idiots. It was full of zany characters blithely putting themselves in harms way.
Yet it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t connect with the storytelling style or empathise with (or even stop grinding my teeth at) the main character. So I set it aside at 55%.
My review is HERE.
The galactic order has been shattered, and amidst the chaos heroes will rise…and fall—as Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Moon brings her stellar Familias Regnant saga to a spectacular conclusion.
‘Against the Odds’, the seventh and last book in The Serrano Legacy series, delivered a great ending to an engaging series. I admired Elizabeth Moon’s ability not just to keep a fairly large ensemble cast in play across the books, but to have the characters and their relationships develop. The ending involved a little bit of wish fulfilment, but I enjoyed that. I’m sad to leave a universe and people I had become so engaged with.
This week, I bought five books, all by authors whom I’ve read before. I’m going to use Sarah Gailey’s ’The Echo Wife’, Megan O’Keefe’s ’The Two Lies of Faven Sythe’ and Dorothy Sayers’ ’The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’ for Halloween Bingo next month. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ‘Service Model’ has been on my wish list for a while and this week, it was on offer for £0.99. I’ve been enjoying Robert Jackson Bennett’s ‘In the Shadow of the Leviathan’ series, so I checked his back catalogue and found ‘Vigilance ’, a novella about gun violence culture in a future USA that I couldn’t resist
It was meant to be an evening to honour and celebrate Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning, career-making scientific research – but Evelyn has things on her mind.
Things like Nathan, her husband, who has left her for a younger, better, newer woman. A woman who is now pregnant – but shouldn’t be – and is strikingly familiar. Too familiar to be a coincidence.
A woman who shouldn’t exist.
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service.
When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into their core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then discovers they can also do something else they never did before: run away.
After fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating, and a robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is finding a new purpose.
The United States. 2030.
John McDean executive produces Vigilance, a reality game show designed to make sure American citizens stay alert to foreign and domestic threats.
Shooters are introduced into a “game environment,” and the survivors get a cash prize.
The TV audience is not the only one that’s watching though, and McDean soon finds out what it’s like to be on the other side of the camera.
The Black Celeste is a ghost story. A once-legendary spaceship collecting dust in a cosmic graveyard known as the Clutch. Only famed pirate Bitter Amandine knows better, and she’ll do anything to never go near it again. No matter the cost
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Faven Sythe is crystborn, a member of the near-human species tasked with charting starpaths from station to station. She’s trained to be a navigator her entire life. But when her mentor disappears, leaving behind a mysterious starpath terminating in the Clutch, she is determined to find the truth. And only Amandine has the answers.
What they will find is a conspiracy bigger than either of them. Their quest for the truth will uncover secrets Amandine has long fought to keep buried – secrets about how she survived her last encounter in the Clutch, and what’s really hidden out there amongst the stars…
Ninety-year-old General Fentiman was definitely dead, but no one knew exactly when he had died—and the time of death was the determining factor in a half-million-pound inheritance.
Lord Peter Wimsey would need every bit of his amazing skills to unravel the mysteries of why the General’s lapel was without a red poppy on Armistice Day, how the club’s telephone was fixed without a repairman, and, most puzzling of all, why the great man’s knee swung freely when the rest of him was stiff with rigor mortis.
I’m so behind in my reading that I’m only adding two books to my list this week. They’re both crime novels and they each kick off a series with a woman as the lead detective. One is a nun and one is a K9 officer.
When Saint Sebastian’s School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding community are thrust into chaos.
Unsatisfied with the officials’ response, sardonic and headstrong Sister Holiday becomes determined to unveil the mysterious attacker herself and return her home and sanctuary to its former peace.
Her investigation leads down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets in the sticky, oppressive New Orleans heat, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way.
Sister Holiday is more faithful than most, but she’s no saint. To piece together the clues of this high-stakes mystery, she must first reckon with the sins of her checkered past-and neither task will be easy.
This is the first book in a series that currently runs to three books. I listened to the audiobook sample and was hooked. Sister Holiday sounds like a nun I can believe in: unconventional, deeply thoughtful, confident in her beliefs and, when she puts her mind to it, unstoppable.
Officer Kate Marino has a complicated relationship with her hometown. But there’s one thing that could bring her Her seventeen-year-old niece Alice disappeared two days ago. And she’s not the only woman who’s gone missing.
With police dogs Nero and Bella (now retired) in tow, Kate returns to her childhood home and the ghosts that inhabit it. It’s not just the looming presence of her father, however, that hinders Kate’s investigation. Something even more sinister awaits her there.
Dead bodies confirm the missing women are the work of a serial killer who hunts his prey through the New Hampshire wilderness. With time running out, Kate’s determined to find Alice before she becomes his next victim.
Alongside Deputy Sheriff Roy Hoover, Kate and her loyal dogs scour the area for clues, motive, and the secrets harbored by each victim. Kate ran away from Cooperton once before—but this time, she’ll stay and face its demons…
This the first book in a new series. I bought it because it has a dog on the cover and because the plot sounds like this will be a relaxing read.
Mike Finn's Fiction 