One by One by Ruth Ware

 

So this is a pretty standard issue crime novel, except that the author is playing all sorts of games as though she thinks she's Dame Agatha, and it's OK for her to cheat. Unfortunately for Ms. Ware, Dame Agatha made at least some forms of cheating pretty obvious to someone paying attention. I didn't twig right away, but I might have done so a few pages before Ms. Ware intended. Also, neither main character was particularly plausible or believable to me, so the novel overall failed some suspension-of-disbelief basics. I mean, a novel like this is going to be contrived, but this was just a bit much. I read another of Ms. Ware's novels and it was reasonably good, this was something less than that; I'll probably read one or two more at some point before coming to any overall conclusions.

Moon Lake by Joe R Lansdale

 

Lansdale is kinda a legend in genre circles--he's written in a lot of genres, and well--and this novel is a pretty good example of why. It's a gritty small-town/rural noirish novel, steeped in East Texas and Deep South history, culture, and sensibility, then woven into something both grotesque and beautiful. Hints of Horror, both in terms of grotesqueries and in terms of supernatural, but very grounded. His turns of phrase are delightful, and his characters are human all the way through--even many that are arguably villains. A noirish fashion, a bittersweet ending, but honest and earned. I'll have to see what else by Lansdale I can find, and read it.

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

 

The effects of some of the experiences from our trip to various Native American sites last summer--plus the recognition of the human history in the Badlands and the Black Hills, and in Big Bend--along with my relatively recent discovery that modern noir makes my soul sing made me pretty much a target market/audience for this novel: It's a noir, set in Cahokia, in the 1920s! Good thing is, it works; more than that, it's a symphony. The noir stuff works, and all the alternative-history-mongering plays a happy counterpoint; thematic concerns typical to noir (loyalty and its costs, privilege and its power) dance with all sorts of concerns about race and racism and all the nastiness in the heart of America connected to them. Beautiful, smart, honest, and empathetic.

Secret Identity by Alex Segura

 

This is a good book. The mystery is solid and well-told, and the setting--the comics industry in 1975, when it looked as if the whole thing was spiraling the drain, in New York, when it looked as if it were spiraling the drain--is well conveyed. It's a distinctly queer story, in addition to a starkly feminist one, both of which are cool and socially necessary. There's a fair amount of carefully-researched inside baseball comics history deployed, here, but you don't need to know it for the story to work (I don't, and it did). It's not perfect, but it's a good read.

On Earth as It Is on Television by Emily Jane

 

This seemed as though it was going to be an interesting novel, looking kinda askance at what life might be like if aliens showed up, then left without doing anything. What it turned out to be was 400 pages of characters slightly more annoying than nails on a chalkboard, random happenings with only the vaguest internal connections, and at the end a message about friendship and family and love.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

 

This is an intricate novel, probably overcomplicated for the story it tells, with antecedents ranging from Barker to Borges to folklore from all over. Lots of flashy non-linearity that works well enough but doesn't add as much to the telling as it might. Seems as though it wants to say things about how our identity ends up tangled in the stories we tell about ourselves, but comes across as unnecessarily meta, with the novel itself being one of the stories the library in the novel keeps. I am happy to see a relatively recent novel written in such heightened poetic language as this, but I wish the actual story had worked better for me.

There Will Be Stars by Billy Coffey

 

Well. If you crossed Groundhog Day with Jacob's Ladder in Pigknuckle, Virginia, where the mountains slump under their burden of time, and tried to make it a story about faith and redemption but didn't really have the chops to carry that off, and if you had a cop-out ending almost as bad as What Dreams May Come, you'd write this book. The story is coherent, and Coffey clearly knows the people of his small-town Virginia (may the gawds have mercy on his soul) but the novel has no redeeming graces past that.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

 

After really enjoying the hell out of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, I figured I'd read another book by Ms. Harrow--and while this book is not quite so superb as that one, it's an excellent book. Darkish kinda rural-folkish Fantasy (curses and ghosts and a house that's plausibly sapient) with a Romantic streak at least a mile wide. Yeah, there's a love story at the center of it, but that's not exactly what I mean by that Romantic streak. Also an open-ended ending that's arguably a happy one.

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

 

This is a pretty good novel, though I kinda wish it had made up its mind to be either Fantasy or SF--as it is the SF in it feels more like a thin glaze on the donut of Fantasy, which means it doesn't really hold enough weight to be the deus ex machina at the end. But the novel's not really about the aliens running the donut shop or the violin teacher dealing with the fallout of her deal with Hell: The novel's about finding or making family, and about how trans people often need to do that because the family they're born into are assholes. Ms. Aoki writes that story, painfully well.

Manitou Canyon by William Kent Kreuger

 

So after reading one of Kreuger's novels, I've grabbed another one. They stand alone just fine, but there's some pleasure in seeing the romance from that book pay off as a marriage in this one. The characters change book to book; it's a series where it's OK that the people in it grow. This is definitely something of a crime novel, though it's not exactly a murder mystery--it kinda plays more like an action novel. Also the biggest criminals in it are mostly not prosecutable, which is ... interesting. And the ancient, inscrutable, imperturbable medicine man remains ancient, inscrutable, and imperturbable.