Last Call by Daniel Okrent

 Spent a couple of days reading this, it's a kinda long, kinda dense book, and my life took a turn toward the weird. It's an informative book, laden with all kinds of juicy ironies about the rise and almost immediate fall of Prohibition. There are hypocrisies galore. Also some of the ideas people had about how to enforce the 18th Amendment remind me of the last czars, who couldn't have done more to ensure the coming of the Revolution to Russia if they'd tried--some of the ideas that floated around in the Hoover presidency were similarly working against their own stated aims. As with any more or less pop history book, it's kinda a collection of vignettes and short arcs tied together like beads on parallel strings; this is not snark or complaint. I don't know how much is going to stick, it's not a field I have a ton of prior focus on, but it held my interest more than well enough while I was reading it.

Horseman by Christina Henry

 

It has been too long since I've read a good horror novel. (April, and it was another book by Christina Henry. I might need to dig more into horror and try to find more authors I enjoy.) I don't know if the author and/or publisher would exactly call this "horror," but I'm content in the judgement, even if I just just dropped this book into the to-read pile of someone who's pretty explicitly not a horror fan, because I'm sure she'll see the beauty in it, most horror doesn't make my eyes burn the way this novel did. Ms. Henry writes with strength and grace, her world (all her worlds, really) feels real and lived in, her characters feel like people; the bad things that happen to them feel like fate or bad luck or sometimes justice. This book reminded me why I love horror so.

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.