Book 23: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

After meaning to read the Rivers of London series for years, I have finally begun! Turns out it's good. 

It's very interesting what my brain retained about the series from what I had heard from others. I knew it was a detective series, essentially, about a guy named Peter (correct) who was training under an experienced detective (also correct, his superior is Thomas Nightingale). But I had forgotten that it was also a supernatural series, which made the first mention of a ghost pretty exciting, and I also went into expecting a standard white English copper character, and instead Peter Grant is biracial and from North London and quite young, all of which makes him (and the first book of the series) much more interesting than I expected. 

The book reads very much like the first in a series, setting up the world and the central figures in it, and I had been more in a traditional mystery structure mood than I realized when I started reading it and so it took me a bit to get into the rhythm of the book. But in the end I enjoyed it quite a bit, and Peter is a great character, with his at times almost Jim Butcher-level over the top lusting for every female character introduced in the book my only true complaint. It's the only element of the storytelling that felt at all dated to me, but it's worth putting up with for the rest of the narrative. 

Grade: B 

Book 22: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

The third book in the Wayward Children series! This was the one that made me realize that the second book wasn't a standalone, but was in fact a prequel/backstory sort of thing, because we returned to the school directly after the events of the first book. This story reintroduced my favorite character Kade, and added a new character named Cora who I absolutely loved. She's a fat girl who found her world as a mermaid, where her body did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it was just a really lovely depiction of what it is to be "special" and yet not fit the supposed mold of even that. These books have all been extremely thoughtful in how it approaches gender, and how children are unnecessarily shaped within a binary, and I liked how the author approached weight and appearance in a similar way.   

The plot of this one is essentially a journey through various other worlds, and it ends in a candy world with a baker at the center of it, and the whole thing felt like reading a video game in the best way, with all of them learning the logic (or nonsense) that governs the various places they traveled to. I'm excited to find out whether the fourth book in the series will return to the school, or if it will also take place primarily beyond the doors. 

Grade: A 

Book 21: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Another mystery, but this time a modern one! However, it's a modern one masquerading as a post-WWII one, all wrapped up in an enigma, you know how it goes. 

The framing device for this book is that Susan, a book editor in modern London, has received the manuscript for the ninth and final book in the Atticus Pund mystery series, which is set in a small English village in the 1950s and has all of the trappings you would expect from this. The first two hundred pages of the book are that novel, until suddenly it stops at the end of the penultimate chapter on the cliffhanger of who's responsible for the murders. Susan doesn't have the final chapter, and neither does the CEO of the publishing house. The author, Alan Conway, must have it, except he died by suicide over the weekend...or did he?

This is a book in which we get two mysteries for the price of one, a classic whodunit in the style of Christie, and a contemporary meta mystery in which a book editor must assume the role of the detective, to varying degrees of success. It leaves you with one heck of a cliffhanger midway through the book and forces you to both abandon the pretense of the mystery you first started to read as being 'real' and then introduces a new one, which parallels and echoes the first one in interesting ways. It's not easy to keep a reader invested in both of the mysteries at once, but the author definitely pulls it off. I'm very glad I read this particular book after spending a month or two reading a number of the classic mysteries so I had a better grounding in the tropes this books swims around in. Horowitz has written a number of other books (as well as Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War and Poirot, this is a man who knows what genre he wants to write) and I'm afraid my TBR pile is about to get unexpectedly bigger once again. 

Grade: A 

Book 20: The Geek Who Saved Christmas by Annabeth Albert

Look, sometimes you just need to read a Christmas m/m romance novel right after Easter. 

This one was...fine? The set up was great: a cute guy named Gideon who's obsessed with decorating for Christmas (but is secretly sad!) and a gruff guy named Paul who doesn't have time or space in his heart for such things but then needs to convince his younger brother that he's okay when he comes to visit for Christmas, and what better way to do that than with tons of Christmas lights! It's full of Christmas planning and discussions of traditions and all of that, and the two leads have decent chemistry, but there's not nearly enough actual conflict in their romance or in the overall story to sustain a full-length novel, so by the end I was bored. Would be a great 20K fic, but it doesn't hold up to a 250+ page book. 

Grade: C 

Book 19: Death in a White Tie by Ngaio Marsh

My foray into classic English society mysteries continue! I was recommended this book at some point, by...someone (possibly my sister-in-law? Who can say), and unlike Christie, I was entirely unfamiliar with this author culturally. She was also a woman writing mysteries in the first half of the twentieth century, although she was from New Zealand rather than England. The focus of her books (at least based on this one) feels quite similar to Christie's - there was a blackmailer in the upper crust of 1930's English society, one man learns too much, and he ends up dead. 

There's also an inspector named Roderick Alleyn who knew the dead man quite well and feels responsible, but he holds it together long enough to piece together both the blackmail scheme and the murder. It was a quite pleasant mystery with interesting characters and a number of unexpected secrets and so forth. I was also very pleased that while there is a touch of the standard English mystery racism present, it wasn't too bad...at least not until the very short epilogue which takes place in China, and well. The less said about that the better. That caveat aside, a lovely book to read on the couch under the blankets while waiting for spring to actually start. 

Grade: B

Book 18: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

I have finally returned to Wayward Children series! And frankly, I probably should have reread Every Heart a Doorway before I picked up this one, because I read that novella in November 2019 and it turns out I retained practically nothing from that time, can't imagine why, etc. As a result, I didn't remember the roles that Jack and Jill played in that book when I read this one, which tells the story of what they experienced in the world they found through their door. This book still works without that knowledge, which is to its credit, but I am sure there are parts of the story that I would have appreciated more had I recognized the connection before reading the third book in the series shortly after. I do like the structure, though, of switching between stories taking place after the children have returned to earth and the direct stories of how they found their doors - the backstories, if you will. I expect that once I read through the next three books I'm going to feel the need to finally reread the first one, and I'm excited to find out what exactly that looks like. 

Grade: B