Mike > Recent Status Updates

Finding this heavy going, because it's constantly alluding (I assume) to folktales and stories I'm not familiar with in ways that leave whole paragraphs only slightly comprehensible. I can glean the meaning of the untranslated Korean words from context, but maybe you need a different cultural background from me to follow this one.

Is it possible to do The Fall of the House of Usher without the house being gothic?

This may be what the author is attempting.

Or not. We shall see.

The voice is of a lawyer, verbose and self-conscious, even self-dramatizing, but not quite so much so that it's put me off yet.

This wild dragon knows what apothecaries, vacations and cathedrals are, but not writing?

A few odd vocabulary errors, including here/hear.

Promising start - the underqualified guard who has to solve a murder because there's nobody else. Editing good, apart from a couple of errors with singular noun/plural verb (in a pattern I've seen before: there's a plural noun between the subject and the verb).

Pig in a poke book; picked it off the Project Gutenberg feed knowing nothing about it and not much about the author. So far, it's promising. The interaction between bored elite university graduates who don't have a project in life, and starving and overworked (to death, in one case) people of humble origins who have made big sacrifices and managed to get to university in order to better themselves.

Painfully earnest in a specifically mid-2020s way, but otherwise good so far (even the editing).

I have a suspicion about who is behind the crisis. We will see if it's accurate.

This one's a complete pig in a poke. I don't know what genre it is, have never heard of the author, couldn't find a blurb. Just picked it up off the Project Gutenberg new books feed.

It's set in 1941, and features lawyers who're involved in politics in New York. Can't tell you much more than that yet.

Straight off to a roaring start. We're in noir territory from the first scene: fog and rain in New York City, detective in a slouch hat and long raincoat smoking a cigar while keeping watch on a suspect's house. Fancy car pulls up, beautiful woman invites him to get in, takes him to a meeting with mysterious figures who try to bribe and threaten him to give up the case. It's well written, too, genuinely suspenseful.

Sets out to be serious and profound; achieves serious. Not actually a detective story, despite the subtitle. Original premise, mediocre execution.

Cozy fantasy bingo card is filling rapidly, but the editing is mostly good (just a few missing past perfects and some vocabulary that's just slightly off), and the characters are appealing. Instalove + long-drawn-out will they/won't they for no particular articulated reason is probably the biggest flaw.

Cozy fantasy bingo card is filling rapidly, but the editing is mostly good (just a few missing past perfects and some vocabulary that's just slightly off), and the characters are appealing. Instalove + long-drawn-out will they/won't they for no particular articulated reason is probably the biggest flaw.

Cozy fantasy bingo card is filling rapidly, but the editing is mostly good (just a few missing past perfects and some vocabulary that's just slightly off), and the characters are appealing. Instalove + long-drawn-out will they/won't they for no particular articulated reason is probably the biggest flaw.

Terrific mysterious opening! Allingham knows how to do it.

This is a recommendation from someone on the Codex writers' forum, and it's really good. Not my usual fare - neither spec-fic nor mystery/thriller - but unusual in some really good ways. The main character isn't any kind of cliche, and is wonderful.

I'm not sure who wrote the blurb, but they substitute a raccoon for a stoat, and state that there are "no fights to the death" even though there's one right in the prolog.
So far, pleasantly cozy but with good stakes, relatively few editing issues (mostly typos and comma placement), and a likeable protagonist with a solid backstory.

Just had to switch off recommendations for my "casual-racism" shelf.

No, GR, I don't want more books like that.

(Not that the recommendations are usually all that accurate.)

My main issue so far is that everything seems far too close together - it only takes a few hours (at premodern transport speeds) to get to somewhere with a very different climate, and there are rebels extremely close to the city and yet important people leave the walls with no escort.

By a massively convenient coincidence, a British man who wants to get to Berlin during World War I (for reasons) happens to meet a man who looks a lot like him, has the right papers, and conveniently dies of natural causes with nobody else present. What are the odds?

No, seriously, what are they?

"The criminal is a person who makes the satisfaction of his own immediate personal wants the mainspring of his actions. You can't cure him of his egotism, but you can make the indulgence of it not worth his while. Or almost not worth his while."

"I stood aghast. Then tottering to the bed, I sat aghast."

This is really good, and feels thoroughly researched (the author started out as a nonfiction writer). Which makes it all the more odd that a family of aristocrats gets an impossible combination of styles: the father is a Sir, so probably a baronet, but the son is the Honourable and the daughter is Lady, indicating that the father must be an earl (the only rank where the daughters are Lady but the sons are not Lord).

I've bounced off this once before. It's a complex world, wordily described (which takes some of the zing out of the action scenes, at least so far). Let's see if I can get through it on a second attempt.

Obviously scanned from the 1993 print book; there are some clear OCR errors, like "docks" for "clocks".

Whisky is retconned to brandy, and the map doesn't match up in distances to the narrative, but there are few other flaws to find. The odd extra comma between adjectives, or, a couple of times, between adjective and noun. One misplaced apostrophe.

I think I may have guessed the murderer and how they did it, though not why. Let's see if I'm right.

Not completely missing the past perfect tense, just doesn't have it as often as it should. And a couple of common vocab errors. Otherwise, not badly edited. It's what could turn out to be an awkward mix of cosy and dystopian; we'll see.

Clearly set in the Harry Potter universe, without authorization (I assume), and risking an easily avoided lawyer's letter.

Multiple chapters should begin with the word "the," but oddly do not.

And the archivist has a big flashing neon sign above his head that says "Enemies to Lovers."

Well edited so far, but with one glaring exception: excess commas between adjectives. I counted 40 in the first 10% of the book. Most authors slip in a few, but this is just dire. "Single," for instance, never needs a comma after it.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to stick with the codependent emotional disaster zone that is the protagonist. She's still refusing the call, and totally surrounded by people who don't listen to her, which she treats as normal. It's heavy going.

Well, Grey Mask was disappointing. Multiple plot-essential coincidences, three Convenient Eavesdrops, villain both discovered and foiled without direct input from Miss Silver (though she was some use), and obvious cribbing from earlier writers. If The Case is Closed doesn't markedly improve on the first book, I'm out.