This may not have been as ambitious a novel as last night's, spinning pulp mystery with queerness elevated from subtext to text isn't something wild and new (Christopher Moore did it with a touch less queerness and truckloads of humor in *Noir* and *Razzmatazz*) but this is a more enjoyable, and I think better, novel. It kinda reads like mostly a riff on the Nero Wolfe books, but I suspect there are others in the mix (the fact the narrator never mentions Rex Stout among the novelist she enjoys reading seems like a bit of an authorial ... choice, maybe an attempt to avoid direct comparisons to the closest inspiration, I dunno) though the primary detective--the narrator's employer--is more active in a getting out and getting things done way than Wolfe is, in spite of her multiple sclerosis. This is Book One of the series, and it's enjoyable enough that I can see it plausibly leading to more, but it's not so charming that I'm going to read them.
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The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Um. Wow. This is like an anarchist-Orwellian body horror novel, with undertones of like aging and/or other inevitable death, and how the a...

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Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with no...
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This is a surprisingly good thrillerish crime novel--there are elements of twisty whodunit mystery at play, and interesting layers of inno...
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A grim novel about crime and corruption, and the past catching up to the present, with more than a little in the subtext about it infiltra...
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