Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang

 

This novel looks on the surface very like a pretty classic English-country-village murder mystery, but you don't need to look very hard to see that it's a novel with very modern things to say. There are a lot of things about classism and eugenics and a marital situation that'd make Charlotte Perkins Gilman nod in recognition, and probably some interesting subtextual stuff about colonialism (though that's getting deeply granular and might not be entirely intended). Alas, it starts really, really slowly: The novel is well past halfway before the various elements and gears start to mesh and the story starts to move. The resolution is reasonably well-thought-through, and frankly less aggravating than many of the classics of the genre; I was able to put most of the bits together before they were revealed, and at least most of the larger plot, as well. The prose is reasonably solid, with some nifty chuckle-worthy turns of phrase popping up, the characters are mostly reasonably well-distinguished, the villain of the piece is truly abominable. Not great, but never really so bad I seriously thought about stopping.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

(Super-shiny library binding in weird light.) I've mentioned before that Book One of a long/indefinite series--not like a planned trilogy or anything--is often a really good read, all sort of introducing people and things that sorta become the status quo for later books, the situation that leads to the continuing story tends to be a good one. Sometimes, if an author decides to wrap up a series, that book is at least as good an idea to track down--it's all the resolutions that have been spinning like plates finally falling to the ground. I don't know the rest of Lehane's detective stories, this is the only one of these I've seen in the libraries I've been in, but there's something like a detective career's worth of stuff coming down, here. Clearly a finale, and kinda a grand one. Lehane's prose in this novel sparkles with wit and life, the characters are all remarkably well-defined, the story is clear and well-paced. Really good.
 

Nowhere by Allison Gunn

 

This was for a book club that I will not be going to. It's not often that one reads a book that is so boring and so unsubtle at the same time--the thematic stuff was making noise like a chainsaw early on. I don't need to read another horror novel about conformity, let alone one with no interesting characters that (I'd be willing to bet) get picked off and assimilated one by miserable one. So I noped out after just over a hundred pages.

Enemy of My Enemy by Alex Segura

 

So Marvel has started using Disney's money to pay successful novelists to write novels centered around Marvel's characters. Sure, I'll bite: There are some good stories in comic books, and Segura's a good mystery novelist. This novel is laden with all kinds of stuff people who are more into Marvel generally and Daredevil specifically will be utterly gaga for, but it's mostly just color; this is at its core a novel about a lawyer dealing with the conflicts between his morals and his ethics, across several threads. It does that really well, though the various comic-book-style fight scenes play a little weird in a text-only format, and all the various vaguely parenthetical references to events from the comic books read like some of the least attractive authorial tics one finds in series novels. The characters manage to come across as themselves--and at least mostly true to their various comic book versions--and the prose and pacing are both very solid. If you like Daredevil or Segura, the book seems like a no-brainer; if you have serious doubts about either (or especially both) you might want to give it a pass.

Trust Me by Hank Philippi Ryan

 

DNF. I was reading along fine, the main seemed a little overwrought about stuff, but she'd been through some shit and I was giving her as much room for grief as she needed so she could tell her story. Then around page 175 the novel did a thing so stupid and so implausible that I just stopped. What had come before sort of made some sense, though it took some rerouting of power to the disbelief suspenders; that move just broke me, if the author's going to do that sort of dumb shit I'll just stop now.

If She Wakes by Michael Koryta

 

After last night's damp fart, it seemed worthwhile to grab a book I was confident I was going to enjoy, and I chose exceedingly well. Yeah, Koryta's really good at thriller stuff, and here he has a witness with locked-in syndrome which makes for some interesting complications (Koryta seems to have done a little research on that). He also I guess got a lot of positive feedback on the sociopathic brothers from 

Those Who Wish Me Dead because one of them left a son behind and he shows up. He's scary, but in a lot of ways less scary than his dad and uncle. There's some car focus here, since one of the mains is a professional aggressive driver type, and she gets some resolution. There's a character here whose motivations are not as they present them, and this isn't the first time Koryta's done this; it's third-person narration so it's not total hack shit, but it's just a bit of a rugpull (I kinda twigged that something was up from the beginning, but still.) The prose is solid, the characters are mostly clear and clearly themselves, the pacing is spot-on. Koryta knows his shit.

Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

 

Tapped out after 125 pages in which absolutely nothing of any interest happened. There are whiffs on the air like sewage of tensions between moneyed and not, plausibly between school and townies. Some sense that the main character is--for whatever reason/s--not up for graduate school, now or maybe ever. Definitely people acting of their own free will against their better interests. This is the second very bad novel I've seen Harrow blurb, it's time to start ignoring her on that score.