This is the second novel in the Thursday Murder Club series. I enjoyed it well enough.
The Thursday Murder Club is up to their antics again. This time there’s diamonds, mafia, and an ex-husband spy involved. Elizabeth, the leader of the club, receives a visit from her ex-husband, who’s asking for her help. He stole some diamonds and is now in trouble with the mafia. When he turns up dead, Elizabeth must untangle the mystery with the help of her four closest friends and a whole host of secondary characters.
The novel is a reasonably quick and light read. It occurred to me quite late on that the book is mostly telling rather than showing, but it’s effective here with all the characters.
As a sequel, it didn’t disappoint. The characters are still interesting and there’s a bit of growth for some of them.
Mack is one of fourteen people chosen to participate in a game of hide and seek where the winner gets $50,000. Homeless and with nothing to lose, Mack agrees. What she doesn’t know is that to be found is to die.
The novel was engaging and kept my attention throughout. While the cast of characters is long, it was fairly easy to tell them apart and keep track of them all. The reason why these fourteen people were selected is revealed at a pace that was satisfactory. Overall, the book was okay. It was easy enough to follow and the story kept me entertained.
I did have two problems with the novel (and here we have some spoilers).
The amusement park has a monster inside and that monster is eating two people a day. Okay, I can get behind that. But the monster has to eat people who share a bloodline with the original fourteen people sacrificed. No problem, I can get behind that too. But the reward for sacrifice is prosperity. So the fourteen that sacrificed themselves ensured prosperity for their families for seven years. But Mack didn’t have prosperity, neither did any of the other participants in the hide and seek game. So, I guess I could assume that the more watered down the bloodline the less prosperity will be given, but then, after something like a hundred years, the bloodline would be pretty watered down naturally. Yeah, this is a nitpicky point, but it pulled me out of the story.
The second problem was the monster itself. It’s said late in the book that the monster isn’t something you can kill, it’s a covenant or an agreement made for prosperity. But, a bit earlier, one character said she and others sneaked into the monster’s lair while it was sleeping and cut out its eyes. But if it’s just a covenant, arguably one that kills people, the eyes shouldn’t be able to be removed.
Anyway, the novel was good, better than the first book I read by the same author.
This novel is a prequel to Legends & Lattes, where the reader gets to meet a young Viv who is just starting out in the mercenary business.
Viv is injured during a battle with her mercenary group Rackam’s Ravens and is tucked away in Murk to heal. With limited mobility due to her injury and frustrated at the slow process of healing, Viv sets out to check out Murk. She finds a cluttered bookshop run by a foulmouthed rattkin named Fern, and a bakery run by a dwarf named Maylee. Fern convinces Viv to try reading a book and while Viv is initially skeptical, she ends up devouring the words.
A tiny bit of adventure comes to town in the form of a figure wrapped in grey and smelling of necromancers, a whole lot of skeletons, and a summer fling with Maylee.
This novel could also be labelled “high fantasy, low stakes” like its predecessor. The tension is light, the descriptions are vivid and immersive, and the characters unique and delightful. The author did exactly what I was hoping for after the first novel: bulked up the narration with descriptions to help keep me in the world.
I wanted to live inside these pages. I adore the world that the author has created. The characters are delightful, the plot is simple, and the narrative voice is compelling. I’ll be buying a copy of this book and the previous just so I can revisit them whenever I please.
It’s been thirty years since the television show Mister Magic left the air under tragic circumstances. There are no recordings of the show and no record of any production company, directors, or actors, yet people remember watching the show avidly as children.
Val has spent thirty years in hiding with her dad. She didn’t attend school and barely left the farm where she and her dad lived. Instead, she worked with the farm’s owner, Gloria, and kept her life small.
When her dad dies, Gloria posts a message on social media about his passing. Old friends from Val’s childhood show up to the funeral and suddenly, Val has the opportunity to learn about a past she’s kept locked away from herself. Namely, that she and her friends were the last set of children on the show before it went off the air.
I was engrossed in this novel right away. The author writes horror well enough that I found myself glued to the pages to find out what was going on. I was strongly invested in Val learning about her past and what happened on the television show. However, at about the midpoint, I wasn’t as eager to pick the book up after putting it down. This was mostly because I was getting tired of Val not remembering things and her friends not answering her questions. I wanted to yell at Val to ask better questions and/or not let her friends change the subject.
The last fifth or so of the novel explains everything, but feels rushed. With the middle dragging out the question of what’s going on and the end supplying an answer that I couldn’t have guessed at, I felt a bit frustrated.
Overall though, the narrative voice was consistent and engaging enough for me to consider reading something else by this author.
Anisa is a translator and works at adding subtitles to movies. She feels her work is insignificant as she’s not translating great works of literature. Adam, her new boyfriend, tells her about the Centre, where one can go and absorb language in two weeks for a hefty sum of money. Only allowed to refer one person in your lifetime, he refers Anisa.
At first, Anisa thinks it’s impossible to absorb language in such a short time. She attends anyway, choosing German, where she has a strict schedule of meditation, meal times, and listening to a Storyteller speak in German. She’s astounded that the process works and opts to choose Russian next.
While at the Centre, she becomes attached to her supervisor Shiba. They form a bond that lasts outside the Centre and Anisa learns that Shiba’s dad is one of the inventors of the process. While staying at Shiba’s family’s place, Anisa learns some truly disturbing things about the Centre.
Written in a stream of consciousness style, the novel has a conversational tone that’s fairly easy to follow. The author includes a lot of non-English words, more than a simple peppering, which was a bit distracting. Authentic, though, as the character talking is from Pakistan and moved to Britain while in college.
I was disappointed with the ending. I’m not sure how I might have liked it to end, but felt like the story was a bit unfinished. All the loose ends are tied up nicely, but I was left thinking that the impact of the story was lost because of the ending.
This author is really good at writing exhausted characters, this novel is no different.
Jack is a pen tester – penetration tester; someone who breaks into a facility at the request of the owner/CEO – and is caught just as she’s leaving her latest job. After explaining everything to the police, going back to retrieve her car, then driving home, she arrives to find her husband has been murdered at his desk. At first she’s questioned as a grieving spouse, but much too quickly, the evidence points to Jack ordering a hit on him.
The moment she realizes she’s a suspect she leaves the police station to try to find evidence of who actually killed her husband. In the process, she injures herself badly enough to cause an infection. Now she has to race against time to find the evidence before the infection takes over, all while dodging CCTV cameras and not using anything to digitally ping her location.
The novel is paced exceptionally well. As a reader I felt Jack’s exhaustion and desperation to find the killer. All the crumbs are in place for the reader to follow and figure out who was responsible for the death, and Jack not figuring it out quickly enough is believable because of the high-stress situation, lack of food, and growing infection.
My only nitpick is that a fair bit of information is repeated unnecessarily in the last quarter of the book. By the fourth mention of not having any bandages left, I was frustrated and wanted to tell the author to trust the reader to remember. That and other repetitive bits made the last few chapters a bit tedious. Otherwise, this novel is just as engrossing as the author’s previous work.
Asuka barely made the cut to be one of the 80 people sent to Planet X; humanity’s last hope before collapse. As an Alternate, she has no specialty training and instead fills whatever role is needed. That role turns out to be solving the mystery of who built and set off a bomb on the outside of the ship.
While all 80 people were trained in a rigorous, elite training facility before launch, they are still by and large young adults. Having slept through the first decade of travel, they were awoken to become pregnant before arriving at their destination, a full decade ahead of them. These young adults have only their DAR (Digitally Augmented Reality) to help communicate with the ship’s AI and a quantum communicator to communicate with Earth.
A war breaks out on Earth, which muddies the hierarchy of who is in charge back home while Asuka investigates her shipmates – her friends – as best she can.
This novel is wonderfully constructed. It’s basically a Locked Room Mystery set in space, so the list of suspects really isn’t that long. But these 80 people are trained to rely on one another, so who would build a bomb, and why? The answer surprised me, but in a good way. Once I reached the end, I understood why bird species were mentioned often. Not only because Asuka is a lover of birds but because the ship’s AI tried to work around protocols by presenting birds in Asuka’s DAR. The author wove this information into the narrative in a way that felt so natural that I was unaware that I was receiving clues.
The author also presented the dangers of DAR in a manner I hadn’t considered: what if that DAR was corrupted? Could you believe what you saw? Could you believe what the ship’s AI was telling you? Also, by each person having a customized DAR, each person was basically working alone. Sure, other people could be invited to view someone’s DAR surroundings, but if not invited, each person lived in a different world and saw the ship differently. At first I thought this DAR would help stave off madness because it would give the illusion of space and scenery that the person found soothing. As I read on, the horror of not being able to trust your senses became evident.
I enjoyed this novel from start to finish and look forward to the author writing another novel.
This novel was one of the rare cases where I remembered why I’d put it on hold at the library. Usually I just open the book and start reading to see how fast I can pick up on the plot. For this one, I knew it was because the protagonist lived in a retirement village. I don’t run into many books where the main characters are older, perhaps my own fault for not seeking them out.
In this novel, Joyce gets invited to attend the Thursday Murder Club, where three other people discuss old, unsolved cases. Just as Joyce joins, a man is murdered. Now they have a fresh case to examine.
The storytelling was delightfully light. The author uses several characters’ points of view, including two detectives, each a different chapter. Joyce’s diary entries are sprinkled in between these short chapters, which is an interesting way of getting her point of view.
As the novel progresses, another man is murdered and an extra body is found in a grave. I thought things would get confusing but the author did a wonderful job in keeping everything tidy.
My only complaint was that for a mystery to be successful, the reader must have all the clues at hand and be able to come to the same conclusion as the characters. In this novel, the ending chapters revealed everything and tied up all the loose ends, but I doubt I’d have been able to know who the killers were based on the information given.
Still, this is a light read with quirky characters. I’ve already put the sequel on hold but there’s a lineup of people ahead of me.
Imagine if technology could inform billionaires about an impending apocalypse. Imagine if that technology could give those billionaires advanced notice so they may flee to luxurious bunkers to wait out the apocalypse.
In this novel, Lai Zhen is given access to this technology as a gift from her lover Martha Einkorn. Zhen, a coding genius, wants to know how this program works, so she takes it to a good friend where the two of them take their time untangling the code. When Zhen discovers the program has been shut off remotely, she goes to one of the billionaire’s bunkers to reactivate it.
The program informs her of an impending apocalypse and helps her flee to a lush island stocked with every supply imaginable. Three billionaires also occupy the island; their plane went down on its way to a luxury bunker.
Without the billionaires in charge of their companies, Martha and her three compatriots move to change the world.
This novel was a bit of a slog. There are excerpts from a fictional chatroom/message board for survivalists. The posts in the novel relate back to the Bible and what, exactly, ownership means. I felt, fully and truly, that these message boards could have been cut from the novel without losing anything of value. By the end of the novel, I felt like the author was a bit heavy-handed in the constant rabbit/fox stories presented.
The narrative style flowed well enough and the characters were wonderfully distinct throughout. The novel begins with the program pinging a billionaire, then dives into the life of another billionaire. They have their orders: to flee quickly and quietly. Then the novel falls into backstory. Sometimes backstory within backstory.
The information was good and relevant, but I was wondering when we were going to get back to the billionaires getting the message to leave. What prompted the message? Why are they leaving? What apocalypse has befallen the Earth? These questions are answered, but I got impatient waiting for it.
I was tempted to stop reading partway through because of this impatience, but the characters were well enough written that I kept on reading. The payoff was absolutely worth it. There isn’t a twist, not exactly, but there’s a double reveal that made the slog worth it.
The cover is particularly well done. It represents the message of the book beautifully. The image of the fox being prominent over the rabbit is apt, as is the use of gold, silver, and cream.
As a side note, I’m pretty sure we could take Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos and insert them into the three billionaires featured in the novel. The biggest question is; would things work out the same if we removed these three from their companies? I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.
Colony ship Voyager has been travelling for 250 years to get to the planet Promissa, where they plan to land and colonize. Except every probe that reaches the surface goes dead before it can transmit information. With roughly four and a half months until their journey is complete, scientists must work out the problem while being hindered by the Governor’s political desires and a growing faction of people that believe colonization is wrong.
The novel counts down to arrival date, detailling how the Governor skews information and manipulates media so the residents of the ship see only what he wants them to see. Pushing against him are the scientists who want more information from the surface of the planet before committing to sending large groups down. In addition, the ship’s Charter has a mandate of a death date: the person’s 75th birthday, which helps preserve resources. A small group begins to protest this mandate, since they’ll be colonizing soon anyway and so there shouldn’t be much strain on the resources. This protest evolves into not colonizing as it’s unethical.
Which presents a problem. As a reader, I understand that the ship has very limited resources, so people can’t live out their natural lives. New generations need to be born and with each birth there must be a death. Also, if the people decide not to colonize, how do they expect to be able to support a growing population if they get rid of the death mandate? This wasn’t answered in the novel, or if it was, I missed the explanation.
Other minor problems nagged at me as well. Landing was dangerous because they couldn’t get the probes to send information about microbes and whatnot. Political forces demanded landing parties go anyway and people were selected on the whims of the Governor. They were all tested for agoraphobia because they’d lived on a ship for something like five generations, therefore, people weren’t accustomed to open spaces. Some of the people who tested poorly were still sent down. That makes no sense. In addition, if the elders are slated to die anyway, why not send them down to the planet? They’d worked up until their 70th birthday, so work was a huge part of their lives anyway, and they could be useful in testing the atmospheric conditions and survivability of the planet.
Another minor issue that nagged at me was the media. The ship had televised news and entertainment. Why didn’t they have a science channel as well? As a reader, I’d expect that in the later generations, a timeslot would be allocated for information about the planet.
While the bulk of the novel takes place before arrival, there is just enough information at the end to explain why the probes weren’t sending information. But I felt like the author had a really good concept that was only explored at the tail end of the book. Yes, this novel is more about the struggle as they reach the planet, but in the end, the reader discovers that both the planet and the ship have gained a kind of cognizance. Now THAT would be an interesting book: how the ship behaves to protect the crew, how the planet behaves to protect itself, and how humans bung all that up. But I suppose that could all be written in a sequel.
Overall, the novel was all right. Good enough for me to finish it, but frustrating that (what I felt was) the best part was at the end and not really explored.
Should Be Writing 