The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Even though we are only a few days past the official summer solstice here in the northern hemisphere, my summer of great sci-fi reading has been continuing at a blistering pace. Unlike some of the other big books of the year so far, I hadn’t heard much in the way of pre-release hype for The Iron Garden Sutra, but I definitely think it deserves some attention.

The novel is set some number of hundreds of years into the future, where space travel is relatively safe and commonplace. There is also a new futuristic religion called the Starlit Order. Our protagonist is a monk of this religion named Vessel Iris whose main calling is to give proper burial and respect to the dead. He’s recruited for a mission by his temple when a derelict generation ship, the Counsel of Nicaea, appears at a nearby space station. The ship like many before it was sent out hundreds of years ago from Earth before the discovery of FTL gate technology, and like many that have been found since has arrived empty of living humans after its long voyage.

Iris had believed that he would be alone on the ship, other than the AI that also lived inside of his head named VIFAI for “Vessel Iris’s Friendly AI”. But upon docking he finds that a research team and their security crew from the Sychi Institute have already arrived and have begun their survey of the ship and its contents. They all find that through the long voyage the crew of the ship have all died, so there is a lot of work for Iris to do. It’s also apparent that the remaining parts of the ship do still have life all throughout it though, in the form of moss, apples and a lot of creepy vines.

Iris gets off to a rocky start with some of the people from the survey team, but very soon after he starts performing his rites for the dead, things take a turn for the worse as all of their communications to the station are blocked and the access to their ships is also denied. What follows is a horror slasher story, but instead of a psycho with a knife, it’s a crazed plant based intelligence.

I really enjoyed this book a lot. The pacing and ramping up of the danger is great throughout and the world building of what happened to the original crew and what is actually in control of the ship made for some fascinating story telling. There is also enough backstory of Vessel Iris that we are able to understand what has led him to this kind of life in the first place and what he truly believes in. The only marginally negative thing I have to say about the book is that I had believed it was a standalone novel but at the end it was revealed it’s actually the first of a series. Given how much I enjoyed the world and the characters though, I’m not terribly upset to read more about this friendly death monk in the future.

I’ve been on a pretty big sci-fi kick lately when it comes to reading, which has been a nice change of pace from books exclusively about murders which had been my go-tos for the start of the year. One negative to that though, is that a lot of sci-fi these days if it’s not post-apocalyptic, it’s at least pretty dystopian. Given the state of the world these days, it’s nice to find something that is just an enjoyable read. Valet by J.P. Lacrampe is a great example of this, despite its main character being a robot.

In Valet we follow a trusty robot butler named Cy whose current job is helping Master Grayson get his life back on track. Grayson is the eldest son in the family that runs the Ai+ company, the company that created Cy and is the dominant robotic company in the world. Cy is an older model and was personally created by the company’s founder Dr. Richard St. Claire, Grayson’s dad. Since Richard’s untimely death nearly a year ago, Cy has been directed by Grayson’s mother to try and get the 35-year-old slacker to become a more productive member of society.

Cy’s skills are put to the test when Grayson is informed his sister Charolette is planning to sell the entire company to GloCo in exchange for her becoming the head of their android division. Grayson soon discovers that the real reason for the intended merger is secret AI/Robotics data stored away by his father for safe keeping. What follows is a madcap adventure across a near future SF, as Grayson tries to maintain his family’s company’s independence and Cy has to deal with his ever decreasing Utility Score.

As I said in the opening, this book is really a lot of fun. I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to the book being a Jeeves and Wooster adventure, and while I’ve never watched or read any of those stories, from what I know about them I can agree that it has those kind of vibes. It’s very far from a hard sci-fi novel, but the little bits of world building are really great. From the robots who have their own version of public transportation, to a fancy SF restaurant being named Eat.exe, there are tons of little details for the reader.

If you are interested in a light summer read that still has a nice sci-fi bent, I highly recommend Valet. Its ultimately optimistic portrayal of self aware robots, might even give you a little hope for the future.

Even though we aren’t quite halfway through 2026, it has already been a great year for debut novelists. Two of my five star book ratings I’ve had this year have been from authors' first efforts, one of them is The Franchise, and the other is the subject of this review Homebound by Portia Elan.

Homebound is a deeply ambitious novel for a first outing. The story takes place across three different timelines, inside of a narrative video game playthrough and a multi-year chain of emails between robotic researchers. In recent reviews I’ve decried the use of parallel timelines as a novel trope that I’d like to see less use of, but despite this book having so many distinct timelines and settings, I think everything here was vital to the story being told.

The novel begins in 1983 Cincinnati following a young woman named Rebecca. We soon learn that her uncle whom she was very close to has just recently died. During some visits to her grandmother’s home, she finds some of the belongings left behind by her uncle which led her to find a partially completed text-adventure video game he created for her. The seed of that video game’s story is what echoes across all the other timelines we go through in the book.

I’m personally a big fan of the indie video game subculture that prizes story over impressive graphics. I’m a big believer that video games and specifically more narrative or narrative-driven games can tell stories in ways that other kinds of fiction can’t always do. While you don’t get to actually play the game shown in the book, there are long passages of a play-through of it in the far future and I found the narrative to be really effective. The plot of the game shows up again and again in different forms in the far future, long after the collapse of most of civilization, having grown into almost an Arthurian level of myth.

Even though the story weaves between the different timelines, the real strength of the novel is its characters. Between Rebecca in our near present day, Yesiko in the far future, and a sentient Aye named Chaya who shows up for hundreds of years, all of them are fully realized even with the limited time you get to spend with them.

Homebound beyond just being one of my favorite books of the year so far, is one that I can see myself re-reading in the future as well. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great sci-fi read this summer.

After some quite excellent forays into science fiction and fantasy recently, I decided that thematically it was time to get back to an old fashioned murder mystery. Murder at the Hotel Orient by Alessandra Ranelli, which, while set in the present day, uses its unique setting to harken back to a classic locked-room mystery.

Our novel is set at the Hotel Orient in Vienna, which is an infamous “love hotel” in both the story and apparently in real life as well. The hotel has a number of rules that promise to keep the anonymity of all their clientele, such as no cameras or cell phones and all check-ins are done under fake names. The person ruthlessly enforcing all these rules is the concierge, an American ex-pat with a troubled history and a number of tight corsets, by the name of Sterling Lockwood.

The story opens on an average winter evening in Vienna, with Sterling having to deal with a number of random inconveniences for the guests of the hotel, including a waylaid birthday cake and all of the landline phones ringing across the hotel. She also had to deal with the arrival of an ex of hers, whom she believed at the time was there “working” with a client. By the time the next morning arrives, both her ex and her companion for the night are dead.

The rest of the book then proceeds with Sterling doing her best to help the Viennese detectives who are assigned to the case while still trying to maintain the privacy and secrecy that the Hotel Orient is known for. Overall I’ll say that I enjoyed the book. Even though the case drags on for a number of days the story telling moves at a good pace and there are a sufficient number of twists and turns to keep the reader going. My main issue with the book though is tonally, it’s a bit all over the place. As the detectives are introduced to Sterling there is a lot of what is meant to be sexy back-and-forth with lots of innuendo, but it’s hard for me to really interpret if we’re supposed to be taking the exchanges as actual sexy banter, or more a kinky try-hard interjecting sex into a murder investigation. And while trying to be very sexy and transgressive, it’s honestly pretty tame in that regard. Other than the setting and involvement of sex workers, I don’t think it really gets above a PG-13 level in terms of content. This is a far cry from a lot of the incredibly smutty stuff that is very popular in booktok circles these days.

If you are looking for a more modern take on a locked-room murder mystery, in an interesting setting and you don’t mind hearing about the existence of sex, then I think this book is a winner.

For most of the month of April I was in a terrible reading slump. Everything I picked up that I thought I would enjoy immediately turned out to be bad, or I was just deeply uninterested within a few pages. Thankfully as the saying goes, this too shall pass, because May has been filled with an abundance of books that I’ve really enjoyed.

And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer is a novella that I learned about from Andrew Liptak’s great Transfer Orbit newsletter. The premise of the story hooked me just from reading the blurb about it. In the near future Earth is visited by an alien race that highly values art in its physical forms. In exchange for world-altering technology, the aliens, named the Celerians, take a large selection of humanity’s greatest pieces of art for safe keeping to put on display in a giant space museum they manage, until Earth is safe enough to house them again. The story opens a few hundred years after humans have agreed to this deal, a deal that still left them with exact duplicates of what the Celerians took. Humanity has asked for the originals to be returned, but the aliens have politely declined. Not wanting to cause an intergalactic incident, the government of Earth has just accepted this state of affairs, but some private citizens have decided to take matters into their own hands.

What follows is a short and fast paced space heist adventure, filled with insect alien smugglers, multi-bodied hired muscle and an art preservation trained synthetic sentience. Despite its short length, there is a lot of impressive world building on display, as we learn more about what the Earth is like since the Celerians “solved” our problems. The novella also has a lot to say about what makes art have meaning at all. Obviously there is something intrinsic about the real pieces, seeing as how even though exact duplicates were left behind for all of humanity, at least some humans aren’t satisfied with that, and the Celerians themselves also don’t want to return the real pieces. I think there is a lot to think about in those regards, as we enter a period in our own world where creating “art” has never been easier through the use of generative AI. I’m hopeful that like the humans in the story, people will care more for art that is created by actual human effort and creativity, rather than a similar looking but soulless simulacrum.

Beyond all the deep questions, I really loved the world that Tanzer has created. I hope that she visits this universe again in the future even if it’s with other characters, because I think it’s a setting ripe for more adventures.

Every so often in the course reading I’ll find a book that seems like it was written exactly with me in mind. The Franchise by Thomas Elrod is exactly one of those books. Most of the promotional material I initially encountered describes it as a meeting between Game of Thrones and The Truman Show. As I really got into the story though, it became clear that the true comparison instead should have been Westworld which immediately led me to devour this book.

The story opens in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as an aspiring fantasy author named Jean-Danton Souard presents his first novel manuscript, a story called The Malicarn to a sci-fi/fantasy magazine publisher who is utterly convinced that the world as we know it will be ending within a day or two. Thinking that everything is meaningless, and based on the stubbornness of Souard, he offers him an exorbitant sum of money for the book on the spot. Everything that follows for the next 130 years or so is related to the critical and commercial success of that book.

The main thrust of the novel takes place a few decades in the future from present day. The Malicarn has produced decades of additional books and blockbuster movies most of them produced after the death of Souard who left the series incomplete, leaving it to his son and eventually the studio runner Jules to continue on with the legacy. Through a set of shady dealings, the studio is able to procure a sizable chunk of a Portuguese island, as well questionably legal US Military brain scanning/altering technology. They use this combo to create the setting of The Malicarn in the real world, populated with “actors” who have fictional personalities and backstories loaded into their brains. With the help of Glenn one of the “Reals”, they then proceed to film the interactions and events for next 20 or so years and use them as the on going movies and series for the fictional story empire.

Beyond the world building of the novel which I really love, it also has a lot to say about how in this age of rampant capitalism, popular creative stories and ideas aren’t allowed to end as long as they can still generate some profit for the owners. We see this today with the Lord of the Rings series, which for the most part are a completed whole, but because of their popularity, the rights holders feel compelled to create “new” shows or movies to satisfy the bottom line. The story also has echos to Game of Thrones in that Souard doesn’t finish the series himself. We in the real world are still left to wonder what will happen if G.R.R. Martin doesn’t finish the books himself. I think the novel’s handling of these ideas is very deft, and in a spoiler for the end of the novel, the show runner Jules does ultimately understand that what they’ve been doing has become derivative and uninspired. His solution to this problem however, does drive him to actual madness as he uses the brain scanning tech to try and recreate Souard and have Souard's personality layered over his own in an attempt to recapture the original spark of imagination. I will leave it to the reader to find out the outcome of that attempt.

If any of the setup of this book sounds like something you’d enjoy, then I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s definitely my favorite novel I've read this year. And while I'd love a sequel set in this book's universe, I think the moral of the story would be to enjoy the story we did get, so instead I just look forward to whatever else Elrod writes in the future.

How to Seal Your Own Fate is the second mystery novel by Kristen Perrin featuring her fortune addled murder solver Annie Adams. In the first novel, How to Solve Your Own Murder Annie had to solve the long foretold murder of her great aunt Frances, and in doing so become the heir to her great fortune and manor house in the murderous village of Castle Knoll.

In this novel we pick up a few months after those events and Annie is settling into a routine in her new found pastoral setting. As she’s making her way into the village one morning she has a random encounter with Peony Lane, the local fortune teller who all those years ago gave her great aunt her haunting prediction. Peony tells Annie that it’s important for her to investigate the life and death of Olivia Gravestone, a local socialite who died with other members of her family in a car crash in the 60s. Annie’s interest is piqued, but her involvement in the investigation becomes more personal a few hours later, when the dead body of Peony Lane is found in Annie’s Solarium just feet from where she was having lunch with her friend.

What follows a very typical modern murder mystery replete with two parallel but interlocking timelines. In the 1960s timeline we learn more about the late great aunt Frances and what she learned about the car crash and in the present we have more of Annie’s sleuthing with an ever increasing body count. While I did ultimately enjoy the novel and I think that Perrin is a good writer, I’m hoping that the genre can move past the two timeline trope in the coming years. Flashbacks can be essential in murder mystery books, but reading about the characters in the past finding a big plot revelation and then having the characters in the present discover it a chapter or two later gets a little trite after a while. If authors are intent on sticking with this story design I at least hope someone could try and be subversive with it’s use in the future.

If you read and enjoyed the first novel in the series, then I think you’ll be happy enough with this follow up. If this sounds interesting to you, but you haven’t read the first one, I think I would suggest starting there. Unlike some of the other big modern mystery series of recent years, I think there is enough important setup in the first book that it’s a necessary prerequisite for full enjoyment of the second. But on the bright side if you do enjoy it, you’ll have at least two more to read as the third in the series was just released a few weeks ago.

Books about bookshops really seem to be all the rage these days and I can’t say I’m upset about that. So when I heard that Georgia Summers, an author whose debut novel The City of Stardust I really enjoyed, was releasing a dark fantasy novel about disappearing bookshops around London I was very excited to dig into it.

Our story opens by introducing us to Cassandra Fairfax, who we meet in a London luxury high-rise apartment, where she is meant to be appraising some rare magical books. Very quickly the situation turns bad and she barely manages to escape by drawing on some magical powers related to ink. Shortly after her escape we also learn that her previous mentor and magical bookshop owner Chiron has died and that it is her duty to take over the bookshop from him.

What follows is a lot of world building about a number of these secret magical bookshops that are all connected by a magical River, which we learn is unfortunately starting to dry up. This has a number of bad consequences, for instance when the magic river dries up at any particular magic bookshop, the bookshop disappears as though it never existed, killing its owner in the process. There is also eventually talk about paradox books which have the power to alter history and have already changed the world, but whose effects could also be reversed if the River goes away.

I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in the book, but I don’t think they were presented in particularly clear or compelling ways. Many of the key parts of the story are based on “reading” powers onto people through the use of magic inks. But how all of it works is incredibly hand-wavy and is always exactly whatever the plot calls for instead of trying to be consistent in any way.

I would be more than willing to overlook any quibbles I had with the magic system if the story had characters that I really connected with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case here. I found the protagonist Cassandra to be unlikable and I often wasn’t sure what her motivations were. Many times throughout the book, she and the people she cared about would be placed in grave mortal peril, survive, and then go about their lives for days or maybe weeks on end with no additional urgency to stop the threats from happening again, even though the people who were intent on doing them harm always knew where they lived. I would have even been ok if there was a throwaway line saying something to the effect that the bookshop wouldn’t let the villains into the store through some magical means, but that never happened either.

I don’t think this is a bad book, but between recently reading a few Brandon Sanderson novels and having such high expectations about this author, I was disappointed. If you are a big books-about-bookshops person, I think you’ll still find a lot to like in the book, but ultimately I think her debut novel is a much better read.

Despite the track record of reviews on this site that skew heavily to the murder mystery genre, my first true love for reading came from sci-fi and to a lesser extent fantasy novels. One of the most celebrated modern-day authors of fantasy has to be Brandon Sanderson. I’ve been aware of his works for many years, especially during the pandemic times when he had a massive Kickstarter campaign for a number of books that he seems to crank out with almost magical efficiency, take some lessons, GRR Martin. I’ve mostly steered clear of his stuff though due to my understanding that a lot of it is tied together in a very large interconnected universe and I was worried about the volume of books I might be signing up for if I did enjoy them.

In the last few weeks there has been a confluence of events that have convinced me to finally dip my toe into the Sanderson oeuvre. The first of which was the announcement that he entered into a deal with AppleTV to adapt at least two of his works into a movie and a tv show. My love of Apple notwithstanding, their TV service has an insanely high hit rate of shows, especially when it comes to ones that are in the sci-fi/fantasy genres. And secondly there was a special “Brandon Sanderson starter pack” that was on sale on the TikTok shop directly from the author that featured 3 books he felt represented good entry points into his work.

I decided to read them in size order, so I started with The Emperor’s Soul, which at a concise 192 pages counts as a novella by my reckoning. The amount of lore and worldbuilding that Sanderson is capable of in those short number of pages is pretty astounding though. The story opens with our protagonist Shai being held captive after she was caught swapping a royal artifact called the “Moon Scepter” with a nearly perfect forgery. In this world some people have the ability to “Forge” which involves them being able to perceive the history of an object and to rewrite that history to make the object something much different than it was.

Despite the ruling party considering the practice to be antithetical to their beliefs, the technique is used extensively in the palace and among the influencers of the empire. The ruling circle of the “Heritage Faction” are able to recognize how skilled Shai is in her abilities and they proposition her with a near impossible task. The emperor has just been the victim of an assassination attempt, and while they have healed his body, his mind is gone. They task her with recreating the soul of the old emperor using her techniques before the end of the 100 day mourning period observed following the death of his wife during the same attack. Given that she stands to be executed otherwise, she agrees to attempt it, while also trying to string things along long enough for her to figure out an escape plan.

Even in the short page count, Sanderson is able to convey a lot about the magical system involved with the forgeries and how the magic is used in the world he’s created. We also learn a lot about the motivations of Shai and that of Gaotona, who is effectively the only non terrible person in the emperor’s inner court. The story moves swiftly, given that the plot has the built in timer of the 100 day deadline.

I really enjoyed this first foray into “The Cosmere” (Sanderson’s name for the loosely connected universe that connects most of his novels). I’m looking forward to reading the other two books in the starter pack I received, but so far I agree that this seems to be a great jumping on point if you have any interest in Sanderson’s work.

When I walk through my local Barnes and Noble, regardless of what I’m really there for, I can’t resist the siren’s call of the new contemporary fiction paperback section. Often it’s a motley assortment of books I’ve already read in hardback, mixed in with 50 year old reissues and much too thin novellas. But sometimes there is a cover that catches my eye and the back blurb sounds interesting enough to take a chance on it. One such book is Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley.

As our story opens we meet Jane and Dan on the night of their anniversary, their nineteenth or twentieth, depending on which of them you ask, as they are going to the ultra-exclusive La Fin du Monde(The End of the World) restaurant. They recently won the ability to get a reservation to it, and Jane is excited to not only go to a new place for dinner, but also because she’s decided she’s going to tell Dan that she wants a divorce. She’s decided this because of a million little paper cuts of their married life, ranging from the fact that he never read her one published novel to her suspicion that Dan is cheating on her with a woman named Becca.

The couple makes their way to the restaurant which sits at the top of a secluded mountain road, with only one way in or out and effectively no cell phone service. They begin their meal, but quickly Jane becomes annoyed with Dan and instead of waiting until after a nice meal, she drops the bomb on him that she wants a divorce before the first course even arrives. They have little time to hash things out though, before the dining room is invaded by a party of terrorists who take over the restaurant.

What follows is like an absurdist version of Die Hard, with just a little bit of added mystery thrown in, as Jane realizes that events in the restaurant are unfolding in an eerily similar way to how they do in her novel. I really did enjoy the story a lot, and having that extra wrinkle did certainly make me question where things were going for a while. Was it all a dream, or were the terrorists secretly fans of her work? The answers to all that are revealed in due course. The pacing is snappy and the plot moves expeditiously to an explosive conclusion.

It was nice to get out of the murder mystery genre for a bit and take in some more light hearted and breezy fare. If you’re looking for a funny action thriller book or a cooking themed story that is much less stressful than The Bear then I highly recommend this book.

I’m a huge fan of the genre of books that feature a quirky protagonist solving a mystery. When I saw the back cover blurb for The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey I immediately added it to my to read list based off of those vibes. The story I actually got was nothing like what I expected, but it ended up being one of my favorite books I've read in a while.

The story begins in 1979 in the city of Yorkshire, UK on the night of the election of Margaret Thatcher to Prime Minister and during the middle of a series of actual historic murders being done by someone dubbed the "Yorkshire Ripper". Our protagonist is Miv, a 12-year-old girl who lives with her parents and her aunt Jean. Jean has started living with them because some unsaid incident, implied to be some sort of mental breakdown, has left Miv's mother unable to handle the housework for the family. An offhand comment by Jean to Miv's father Austin that they should consider moving out of Yorkshire and go to the South is the inciting event for the story. Miv is terrified at the thought of having to leave her only friend Sharon, so she decides that if she can figure out who the "Yorkshire Ripper" is, her family won't be forced to move.

Miv's idea to find the killer is to create a list of every suspicious person that her and Sharon know, and then investigate if they could in fact be the Ripper. Sharon is skeptical of the plan but she agrees to humor her friend and from that the unlikely investigators are on their way. What follows is where the story diverged from my expectations pretty substantially. Ostensibly as the story progresses Miv and Sharon do end up adding more people to their list and find some unusual and in some cases terrible things about the people in their community, but almost none of it is really centered around the Ripper. Instead the story is really all about growing up from a child into an adolescent, and what a scary time that can be.

I typically don't like novels that are described as "coming of age" stories, and I usually go out of my way not to read them, but I really found this story to be effective. Having the backdrop of the real life murders and the overall setting of a very impoverished area of the UK dealing with economic strife as well as coming to grips with immigration made for a really compelling story.

If you’re looking for a quirky whodunit style mystery then I would point you in the direction of any number of books, maybe the The Three Dahlias Mysteries perhaps. But if you are looking for a great coming of age story set in 70s UK, then this is definitely the book for you.

I’m always a sucker for a book in the “book about books” genre, and when I saw the synopsis for The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran, which not only fit that category but also included some magic, I had a feeling this would be a book I’d be interested in.

The story follows Lily Albrecht, a former hit novelist living in upstate New York who now focuses on selling used and antiquarian books online and at book events. She was forced to make a career change after her husband, Abel, developed early-onset dementia, leading them to leave their San Francisco lifestyle and move back to New York so she could care for him. As the book opens, Lily is in New York City at a book sale where a fellow bookseller named Shyman mentions a book he is searching for: the titular The Book of the Most Precious Substance. He claims to have a buyer willing to pay six or even seven figures for it. They agree on a percentage split if she can find it, and the hunt is on.

In an ominous turn of events, Shyman is dead by the next day as the result of an apparent robbery. Motivated by the possibility of life-changing money, Lily enlists the help of a suave, regular customer, Lucas Markson, who happens to be the head of acquisitions at a large university library. Using his connections, they confirm several things: that the book does, in fact, exist; who might be willing to buy it; and, finally, that the book is filled with sex-magic rituals which, if performed correctly, will grant the practitioners their heart’s desires. Armed with this information, the two set off on an international adventure to deliver the book to the highest bidder—and perhaps perform the rituals themselves.

Just to get this out of the way: this is a very horny book. While it doesn’t rise to the level of what much of BookTok seems to be reading these days, there is a significant amount of sex, since that is how the book’s power is unlocked. I appreciated that the characters quickly stop questioning whether magic is real and instead learn to go with the flow. The plot also moves along at a good clip and, thankfully, doesn’t drag the way many books do. There are even some twists at the end—one I saw coming and one I didn’t.

If you’re looking for a book that mixes international globe-trotting, magical tomes, and peril—and you don’t mind a decent amount of sex—I recommend The Book of the Most Precious Substance as your next read.

This review is the first of a few books that have a similar theme, Christmas time murders! It’s a well documented, but maybe not remembered these days, fact that the Christmas season used to be the spooky season of the year. Especially back in the Victorian era, Christmas, due to it’s proximity to the Winter Solstice and the shortest day of the year, was thought to be the time when the veil between worlds was at it’s thinnest and ghost stories reigned supreme. These days with the prevalence of Halloween as the center of all things ghostly, Christmas has come into it's own as often the setting for a good cozy murder mystery, such as the one I’m reviewing here, Murder Most Haunted by Emma Mason.

As the story begins we’re introduced to DS Midge McGowan on the day of her retirement from the police force after 30 years of dedicated service of mainly overlooking the evidence department. As a retirement gift she’s presented with a voucher for a free Haunted Christmas Weekend at the famous Atherton Hall. She reluctantly agrees to go with the convincing of her partner Birdie. Midge is joined on the trip by a number of characters including an aged pop-star, a haunted podcast creator and a fickle husband and wife duo. They all have their cell phones confiscated and are loaded up on a bus with a broken toilet.

Upon reaching the house, the group participates in a seance to set the haunted mood for the weekend. Not long after though, due to a combination of being snowed in and the house being in the center of military artillery practice, the group of adventurers can’t leave Atherton Hall. On the second day of the trip, when the organizer of the trip turns up dead in a locked room, they also can’t call for help due to their lack of cell phones.

I will admit I didn’t see some of the final twists coming, but from everything I can tell the writing always played fair with the reveals. A number of innocuous early details did end up factoring in the final reveal of the killer. While I did think the solution was a good twist, ultimately I thought the whole scenario was a bit of a downer and while the case was obviously successfully resolved, I didn’t feel the normal catharsis I do at the end of a typical murder mystery.

It did feel like they were setting the stage for future mysteries featuring this protagonist. I’ll be interested to see if the author is capable of pulling off more stories featuring Midge when the action isn’t so directly related to her. Maybe Mason will decide to move onto a different holiday next time, a nice Valentine’s Day murder perhaps?

I’d had Atlas of Unknowable Things: A Novel by McCormick Templeman on my to-read list for at least a few months before it was released at the start of October. It sounded like it had all the hallmarks of what I look for in a good book to read around the height of spooky season. Unfortunately, dear readers, for me at least, it falls pretty short of the mark.

The book follows a protagonist named Robin Quain, who is conducting research for her dissertation. She’s writing about an anthropological theory that medieval witch hunts weren’t just attempts to track down suspected magic practitioners, but in fact were efforts to root out an ancient fertility cult that opposed Christianity. During her research, she happens upon a blog post by an academic that shows an idol she believes could be solid proof of her theories. She then manages to secure a residency at the secretive, Francophile Hildegard College in Colorado in an effort to find the idol and study it further.

She arrives in the summer, so the campus is devoid of students but still has some of the extremely odd faculty staff living there. The campus itself has all the requisite oddities: it is surrounded by dense forests and has a lake that no one is allowed to swim in, which contains an island that no one is allowed to visit. As I said at the start, this book had all the ingredients to be a dark-academia thriller, but sadly the story quickly takes some turns that soured me on the entire thing.

If you have any interest in reading the book for yourself, be warned that I’m going to get into spoiler territory now. The reason I eventually soured on the book was because it employed one of my least-favorite tropes: the unreliable narrator. As Robin settles into the college, a number of strange events occur that could easily be interpreted as supernatural or mystical. What we eventually learn, however, is that she has been the “victim” of an advanced medical procedure that has wiped parts of her memory, and much of the weirdness has been her real personality trying to reassert itself. We also learn that she is the one who wiped her own memory.

Discovering these details is not the climax of the story, though. While much of the weirdness we have been told about the college can be attributed to the memory/personality wipe, the college does in fact hold an additional terrible secret. Under the lake, accessible from the forbidden island, is a connection to some Eldritch-horror-type monsters that are being held there for research and to protect the rest of the world. In the final few pages, Robin—who is actually named Isabel—goes and confronts the underwater/underworld terrors and apparently defeats them, or at least holds them at bay. The confrontation itself and the climax are delivered so quickly and with so little detail that it is hard to know what really happens.

If you enjoy unreliable-narrator novels with heavy dark-academia and folk-horror vibes, then it is entirely possible you might like this book. But if you are looking for a spooky but well-thought-out plot, I’d probably recommend you look elsewhere.

Artificial Wisdom is a book that throws a lot of ideas at the reader while also trying to string together a whodunit murder mystery set in the backdrop of a world changing election that seems to have ties to the greatest climate catastrophe in the history of the world. The story is set in 2050 and follows the story of an influential journalist named Marcus Tully. It’s the tenth anniversary of something called the tabkhir which was a climate catastrophe that killed nearly 400 million people in the middle east, including Marcus's wife, who was visiting the region, and their unborn child and led to the entire region cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

Marcus receives information anonymously that implicates the US President (Lawrence Lockwood) at the time of the tabkhir of possibly using a secretive geo-engineering project to deflect the climate anomaly from the US south and instead have it inadvertently hit the Middle East. This would be a blockbuster story in it’s own right, but the urgency is increased by the fact that in a few weeks time the entire world is going to vote on a global president with massive powers to correct the planetary climate crisis, and Lockwood is the leading human candidate. His only opposition is an artilect, an advanced AI, named Solomon who currently is the manager of a floating city. In the true style of economy of characters, the creator of Solomon and one of the richest people in the world, happens to be the sister of one of Marcus’s employees.

As you can see from just that brief synopsis, there is a lot going on in this book. And I haven’t even mentioned the sense replicating VR technology, the assassination plot involving a sophisticated supply chain hack, and what really is going on in the Middle East. I do think the book strains under the number of things it’s trying to accomplish. It’s full of a lot of ideas as well plot twist and turns. I think it does do a good job of depicting a near future where the world has gotten progressively worse due to climate change, enough so that everyone is finally willing to start making the hard decisions to reverse things. Hopefully it doesn’t take another 25 years in the real world to convince people to take action, but given recent events maybe I shouldn’t hold my breath.

With the increasing push to have LLM based generative AI shoved into every nook of our lives, I think the book is an interesting thought exercise about what life could be like under a true AGI influence instead of just the facade of intelligence that we have today. I will caution though that while I didn’t see it advertised as such, this is just the first book of at least a two book series. So if you refuse to purchase book one of a series before the sequel is out, be aware that the next volume won’t be out until 2026 according Weaver’s website.

If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You is a book that is incredibly of the moment as it deals with the lives of TikTok influencers, but it also manages to already feel out of date and almost quaint due to the ever changing landscape of social media fame. When the story opens we meet Dayna who in the middle of moving all of her earthly possessions into the house of her long term boyfriend finds out that’s being dumped by that said boyfriend via Reddit post. A post she finds out about because even though he used a burner account he failed to change the of Dayna’s rabbit in the post (the very uniquely named Owen Wilson).

Dayna is then left with no other option than to take up an offer from a friend/acquaintance named Craig from her past to go live in a spooky LA mansion which is currently functioning as a TikTok influencer Hype House. One aspect that makes the mansion spooky beyond it’s architecture, is that a former influencer, Becca who gave incredibly resonant tarot readings, dropped off of social media without a trace and without explaining her departure to the rest of the house mates.

I really enjoyed the first third or so of the book. Learning some of the backstory between Dayna and Craig, the arrival of a new house member named Olivia trying to start a career as an actress, and the general mystery surrounding the disappearance of Becca were all interesting threads. Unfortunately as the book progresses I found the characters to be less and less likable and some of their motivations erratic. The mystery of the Becca’s disappearance is also solved in a less than satisfactory way.

If you are very enmeshed with the comings and goings of influences on social media, which god help you if you are these days, then it’s possible that there is enough here to keep you engaged through the entire book. If, however, you only want to engage with social media for some cheap dopamine hits, I don’t think this is the book for you.

Every so often as a reader, you find a book that you vibe with in a way you wouldn’t expect. The House on Buzzards Bay is one of those books for me. I had never heard of the author before; the back cover blurb is mildly interesting, and the cover itself has a vague The Birds vibe to it. I think what ultimately sold me on it was a cover quote stating it was “A classic New England literary mystery.” Never let it be said I’m immune to the charms of marketing!

The core premise of the book centers around a close-knit group of friends who met in college and have mostly stuck together as they’ve barreled into middle age. One ritual that has kept them close is spending summers at our protagonist Jim’s generations-old vacation home on the coast of Massachusetts, which may or may not be haunted. This year, Bruce—an often-absent, reclusive writer of the group—has decided to join the rest of the friends for part of the summer.

I will fully admit my love of this book is purely vibe-based. The crux of the plot is that after a confrontation with Jim on the night of the 4th of July, Bruce goes missing, and soon after, a supposed friend of his named Camille shows up at the house and integrates herself into the group. There are many tangents that never get properly resolved, including a subplot about a group of teenagers jailed for a series of break-ins in the area. One of the weirder details is that Jim and his wife Valentina have a set of twins who are never given names or even genders, as far as I can recall. The kids are mentioned occasionally, but for the most part the story just slides around them as if they weren’t even there.

While I continue to damn this book with faint praise, I will also caution any future reader that the ultimate resolution of the plot feels rushed and very unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, I still loved the book. As a middle-aged man who grew up on the unrealistic example of Seinfeld—where all your friends live next door and you get to hang out forever—I’ve had to face the sad reality that all the people I care about have moved away, and there are no new friends to fill the void. This book makes me believe that it could be possible to have a wife, two nameless children, and a strong set of friends to vacation with. I am less thrilled at the prospect of living in a haunted house, and without any spoilers I’ll also say I wouldn’t want to follow the path of most of Jim’s choices from the 4th of July onwards.

If you’ve read this far and still have even a passing interest in the book, I definitely suggest reading through the first couple of pages. If you find you vibe with Murphy’s prose, I think you’ll enjoy this off-the-beaten-path book.

Even more than a hundred years later, the Titanic often remains an active part of pop culture. Whether it’s for billionaires dying to reach the wreck, the James Cameron classic movie (which I’ve still never seen), or even as one of the inciting events in the Downton Abbey TV show, people remain enamored with stories related to it. I’m definitely a person to judge a book by its cover, and as soon as I saw the title, The Titanic Survivors Book Club and the accompanying cover art featuring the Eiffel Tower I made up my mind to read the book.

Let me get this out of the way early, though: the title and presumed premise of the novel are mostly lies, but it doesn’t mean that it’s still not a good book, it just wasn’t exactly what it purported to be. TThe story centers on Yorick, a young man who managed the second-class library on the Titanic, but just before its ill-fated voyage, he was fired, so he didn’t sail on it. After leaving the White Star company, he buys a bookstore in Paris. The two other protagonists Haze, an itinerant photographer, and Zinna, a Japanese candy company heiress, as well as all the other eventual members of the book club, had similar stories in which something caused them to miss out on the trip, such that none of the characters were actually on the ship when it went down. The book club itself also isn’t hugely relevant to the story except as an occasional meeting place.

The true gist of the novel is that after all of the “survivors” in Paris are brought for a meet up, Yorick becomes enamored with Haze, who himself is enamored with Zinna. This love triangle is the central plot of the book and well worth the subterfuge of the title. Because of the social taboo at the time, Yorick won’t express his true feelings for Haze. Haze however, enlists Yorick to help him woo Zinna through a series of letters accompanying specially chosen books from his bookshop. This obviously allows Yorick to say all the things he wants to say to Haze through the letters he writes on his behalf. As is often the case in situations like this, the ruse can’t last forever and things fall apart in pretty predictable ways.

While I really enjoyed the book, I certainly wouldn’t categorize it as a feel-good piece. Between the starting conceit of the Titanic tragedy, the unrequited and lost loves, and the story all being told on the precipice of and then during World War I, I think the story has a very melancholic feel. I think this could pair nicely with an upcoming rainy autumn day when you want to sit inside under a blanket and read something that makes you feel just a little bit sad.

Thanks to a steady diet of BBC/ITV/Netflix murder procedurals over the last few years, I’ve become more interested in the murder mystery genre of books. One of the hallmarks of what I like in the genre is having an interesting investigator to shepherd the reader through the case . A Very Lively Murder, goes above and beyond this and has a set of three investigators!

The book, by Katy Watson, is the second in her Three Dahlias Mysteries series. The premise of the series is that in the book’s universe there was an Agatha Christie-like author named Lettice Davenport whose main detective character was named Dahlia Lively. In the universe the books are very popular and have spawned many adaptations, including movies and TV series. The titular three in the book series are three women who have played the fictional detective across a multi-decade time span. After bonding over the events of the first book in the series the three women have become friends and have remained a part of each other’s lives.

A Very Lively Murder opens a few months after the events of the first novel and two of the Dahlias, Rosalind King (the oldest of the three) and Posy Starling (the most recently cast Dahlia) are on location in Wales to begin filming a new movie adaptation of a Dahlia Lively mystery. On the first day of read-throughs, the casting director of the movie abruptly disappears, and a threatening note is placed on the script of Rosalind. They laugh it off for bit, but after a few weeks on set and a couple of “accidents” that nearly result in bodily harm, the two Dahlias decide they need an impartial observer and call in the help of the third Dahlia, Caro, to help them figure out what might be happening.

Once the third Dahlia is on the scene, in a picturesque, tiny town in Wales with a fancy manor house that may or may not have secret tunnels, the action kicks into high gear. An actual murder does occur shortly after her arrival and the detectives are forced to try and clear the name of the accused and find the real killer before they strike again.

One of the highlights of the book is the interactions between the three Dahlias themselves. Because of the range of ages and personalities between them, they all complement and bounce off of each other in entertaining ways. Watson does a great job of fleshing out the characters even more from the first novel, and you get the sense that she’s in it for the long haul. Despite this book being published in 2023, there have already been three more books in the series released, a truly prolific rate of output compared to some authors these days, GRRM who?

If you are looking for a cozy mystery series, I think The Three Dahlias Mysteries are some great reads, and A Very Lively Murder is a solid entry in the series. I would highly recommend them to anyone needing some good cross-generational matriarchal sleuthing while still having some intriguing story twists and turns.

As I’ve stated previously and as you can probably tell by this site’s aesthetic and naming, I’m a pretty huge fan of Wes Anderson. When I heard last year that a special exhibition dedicated to the whole breadth of his work was being staged in Paris, I knew that I had to make a trip there.

I visited the exhibition officially named “Wes Anderson, The Exhibition” at the Cinematheque in Paris at the start of June this year. The Cinematheque is an organization dedicated to the celebration of cinema in all it’s forms. The building located in the Bercy neighborhood of Paris, was designed by Frank Gehry and is very reminiscent of his Guggenheim Bilbao and Abu Dhabi designs.

The exhibition was a special ticketed event, and it took up an entire floor of the museum. The layout was a winding path through the floor, laid out in theatrical release chronological order from Bottle Rocket to Asteroid City. There was over 500 different items on display that ranged in size Max Fisher’s pocket knife all the way to 20 foot wide models of the Grand Budapest Hotel facade.

For me the most interesting pieces on display were ones that showcased Wes Anderson’s creative process. There were a number of storyboards from some of his earlier works showing how meticulously he blocked his films from the very beginning.

The centerpiece showcasing his planning and preparation was a giant display case that contained dozens of notebooks and on-set polaroids from many of his films. I will admit I was a little surprised, given Anderson’s aesthetics, that the notebooks were almost all the super generic style that you could buy at Walmart or even Amazon. I expected he would use some ultra fancy Japanese or European style one, but it seems in this case that functionality wins out over form.

Overall, the exhibition was a truly great experience and I think anyone with even a passing interest in Wes Anderson’s works would be interested in seeing it. When you read this though, sadly you will have missed your chance to see it in Paris, but it is transferring to the London Design Museum starting in November of 2025, so if you’re at all interested and are in the area I would highly recommend a visit. Stevsie will be waiting for you.

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi tells the story of a thirty-something Pakistani woman named Anisa, living in London as a translator, who wants to transcend her basic job translating pop culture and instead work on translating the true classics of literature.

As the book opens, Anisa is recounting a relationship she had with Adam. One of the traits that drew her to Adam was his fluency in several languages. During their mostly amicable relationship, however, he showed no aptitude for picking up any Urdu—Anisa’s native tongue—saying that the languages he did learn, he learned through a very special technique that he doesn’t specify.

As the relationship gets more serious, the couple goes on a trip to visit her family back in Pakistan. On the flight over, Adam speaks incredibly fluent Urdu to another passenger, which incenses Anisa, who thinks he’s been purposely holding out on her.

Eventually, he admits that he just learned it a few weeks ago during a two-week trip to a place called The Centre. She doesn’t believe such a thing is possible, but after enough back and forth, she extracts from him the single referral he has to The Centre. (Clearly, they don’t believe in affiliate marketing.)

The Centre’s marketing pitch is: learn any language you desire with perfect fluency in only two weeks. The only catches are: it’s moderately expensive, and you are sworn to secrecy about how you acquired your new linguistic prowess. Anisa is willing to accept these terms to fulfill her literary translation dreams.

The plot moves shockingly quickly from that point. She travels to the secretive facility in rural England, makes friends with the administrator of it, and magically learns her new language at the end of the session. Then, in a very anticlimactic few paragraphs, we learn that she does fulfill her dream of translating classical literature and receives all the appropriate accolades. The rest of the book involves her discontent with how the language teaching actually works and her attempts to unravel its secrets by any means necessary—including exploiting a romantic-ish relationship she forms with the facility’s administrator.

The book makes it clear early on that something shady is responsible for unlocking the magic of language skills. I feel compelled to reveal what the secret is, only because of how bonkers it is—so please skip the paragraph if you wish to remain unspoiled. The secret to learning languages, dear reader, is cannibalism. At The Centre, they feed people who know the language you want to learn to you. They wrap it up with some of their own special listening tech, but ultimately, as they say: The Centre is people.

The Centre has some interesting ideas, the concept of being able to nearly instantly learn a language is probably third on my list of Things I’d like to be able to do, after playing an instrument and doing magic, but they are told in a simplistic and not very engaging way. I will say that it’s not an overly long book, so it has that going for it. In the end watching some of Duolingo’s viral marketing videos is probably a better use of your time if you’re looking for something scary and language-based.

Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted by Ben Okri is a book I found randomly on a recent trip to the bookstore at the National Theatre in London. If there is one thing I’m very susceptible to when it comes to books, it’s having a cool or interesting form factor, I’ve rarely met a fancy splayed edge book I haven’t liked, and this format of the book was specially sized and signed by the author, so I was basically forced to buy it.

The novel opens with Viv deciding, on the 20th anniversary of her first husband leaving her, that she should host a party for all those in the world who have felt the pain of heartbreak. She is grudgingly able to convince her current husband, and two of her friends to go along with this plan. She also has a chance encounter with the titular Madame Sosostris, a famous clairvoyant to the rich and powerful. Viv invites Sosostris to be the guest of honor at the party and to read fortunes for the guests. Sosostris reluctantly agrees and tells Viv of an enchanted forest in France that will be the perfect venue.

What happens in the rest of the book is left mostly to the interpretation of the reader. The book is very well written, and it has a style that I would most closely associate with a Shakespeare play. In fact, I think it compares very closely to A Midsummer’s Night Dream, but it also has a lot of what I can only call magical realism. We hear that preparations have been made for the party, and people from all over the world have seemingly heard about the party and have booked tickets to it. But none of that is shown and the two couples arrive after a long drive using handwritten directions through the French countryside that deliver them exactly to where they need to be.

In another nod to many Shakespearean plays, the party is also done in full costumes and masquerade. This, of course, allows for many cases of mistaken identity and confusion. I won’t give away the ending, but the entire party is thrown into chaos when the arrival of Madame Sosostris is thrown into doubt. As I said, I do think it’s well written, and I enjoyed reading the prose and the general vibe of the book. But I personally think I would have enjoyed it more if it had been a little more grounded, a la The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which also centers around a magical gathering but in a much more “realistic” way.

In any case, Okri isn’t interested in the minutiae of party planning or guest lists, rather he presents a much more vibes-based approach to storytelling. If you are looking for a quick summer read, the book clocks in at a brisk 208 pages. If you are in the mood to enjoy a story that just sort of washes over you, then I think this would be a good choice, if you are instead desperate for a tightly plotted thriller, then I think your fortunes lay elsewhere.

Often, what I decide to read is heavily influenced by what kind of mood I'm in at the time. When I read Glass Houses, I was firmly in a creepy near-future, slightly sci-fi kind of mood, brought on by watching Severance season 2. I will say that this book definitely fulfills that mandate and then some.

The novel opens in a very Lost-esque fashion, with an automated jet crash-landing on a weird, seemingly uninhabited island. The passengers on the plane are the CEO and key employees of Wuv, a company that has just been acquired, which has made everyone on board exceedingly rich. Shortly after crashing on the island, the survivors find a fully automated black cube mansion, but they have no communication with the outside world—also very Lost-like.

The plot of the novel follows Kirsten Mara, the “Chief Emotional Officer” of Wuv, navigating surviving on the island interspersed with flashbacks of key life events leading to the acquisition of Wuv. Kristen is famous from a childhood incident where her family was killed effectively on an internet live stream by a fire that only she escaped from, yet left her seriously burned and scared. She is also a pioneer in the field of affective computing, which in the book is described as a system that can fully read a person’s emotional state and have it be read and understood by AI or other people using special software. Wuv is also looking to create a cryptocurrency-like system based on this tech, which is exactly as dystopian as it sounds. Affective computing does have a relatively long history in the real world, but thus far, no megacorps have sought to exploit it in the ways described in the book—at least not yet.

As the story progresses, we learn more and more about the CEO of Wuv, and exactly why the black cube mansion's smart systems seem to behave so oddly—like how it seemingly ignores women trying to use most of its features. Could the whole crash have been some kind of horribly executed team building exercise? The weird atmosphere and ever-increasing stakes definitely ticked all the Severance-adjacent boxes. If you are looking for something to fill the void until season 3, I think Glass Houses can do that for you, even if there is no Adam Scott around.

The Fair Botanists is a novel whose central plot revolves around a question that I think we’ve all had to answer at some point in our lives: exactly how many seeds does a mature Agave americana produce? While it might seem like I’m being glib, even though there are myriad characters and interlocking plot lines in this book, almost everything ties back to that question.

Our main protagonist is Elizabeth Rocheid, who has just moved to the city to live with her late husband’s aunt, Clementina, at a great house. It just so happens that the house is adjacent to the newly relocated Royal Botanic Gardens. Being in such close proximity to the gardens brings her into contact with many members of the book’s main cast, including a courtesan named Belle Brodie—whom she befriends without knowing her occupation or reputation—and the head gardener, William McNab. The latter is eager to employ her as a botanical illustrator—a skill she once practiced at Kew Gardens in London—due to the flowering of the garden’s prized possession: an Agave americana plant, otherwise known as the century plant, which is blooming for the first time.

The flowering of the plant also coincides with the city of Edinburgh being breathless with anticipation over an upcoming visit from the King. In advance of the royal visit, an envoy is sent to prepare the way, which includes one Johann von Streitz, who crosses paths with Elizabeth and eventually becomes a love interest.

As I mentioned in the opening, however, the number of seeds produced by the Agave americana is, in fact, the driving force behind most of the book’s plots. The head gardener has secretly promised some of the seeds to an unscrupulous seed merchant—an arrangement that, if he fails to fulfill, will plunge him into unrecoverable debt. The higher-ups at the Garden have promised the seeds will be sent back to London for cultivation, and finally, Belle Brodie has a plan to create an irresistible love potion using their scent. It’s a pretty important plant.

All of the characters’ various schemes and tribulations intersect in a multitude of entertaining ways—through blackmail, secret affairs, illicit perfume-making, seed stealing, and, eventually, love. While I think the ending wraps things up a little too neatly, it does at least give us a mostly happy ending and it’s hard to be too upset about that.

One additional detail that makes the book even more compelling is that many of the characters and places mentioned are historically accurate. King George IV did visit the city of Edinburgh in 1822 and many of the prominent side characters in the book did exist in real life. The fact that Sheridan can weave these details in seamlessly is a credit to her writing skills, it’s enough to make you almost forget how much of the story hinges on seeds.

As a general rule, I am not a fan of the horror genre. Whether it’s in books, TV, or movies, the genre is just not my thing. I am much too easily jump-scared or grossed out by gore. Despite this, I still gave Polybius a shot because the title and subject matter—video games—are near and dear to my heart.

The name Polybius is taken from a real-world urban legend that has been circulating on the internet since at least the early 2000s. The general gist of the story is that there was an arcade game named Polybius that mysteriously appeared in the Pacific Northwest in the ’80s and caused a variety of ailments in those who played it, up to and including insanity. For those interested in the real-world history behind the name, there was a good Radiotopia podcast series about it in 2017 that delves deep into the history and the lore.

With all that background out of the way, on to the novel version of Polybius. This version of the story starts in 1982 in a Northern Californian town named Tasker Bay. The town is Silicon Valley–adjacent, so it’s experiencing an influx of new residents due to the tech explosion happening at the time. Our protagonist, Andi Winston, is a recent transplant to the town following her parents’ separation. She is the stereotypical loner kid, with a penchant for tech hardware hacking learned from her now-absent father. Andi spends her afterschool time working at “Home Video World,” a combination video rental/arcade store.

The store’s unscrupulous owner, Mal (definitely no foreshadowing there), purchases a salvaged video game cabinet which, of course, turns out to be Polybius. I’m going to drop some relatively self-evident spoilers here, but let’s just say bad things happen to the people who play the game. The novel does a good job of slowly ratcheting up the tension and weirdness in the town as more and more people become affected by it. There's a very Stranger Things vibe to the storytelling, which is a show just on the edge of what I am ok with horror-wise.

Where it goes off the rails a bit for me personally is that, despite the slow-burn start, the novel eventually dives deep into horror territory. There are lots of descriptions of gruesome deaths, horrific mob violence, and people doing very horrible things to one another—some of which are caused by the game’s brain-breaking effects, and some simply by human nature at its worst.

The level of gore and violence, while probably nothing higher than what is common in a Stephen King style novel, was still higher than I enjoy in a piece of fiction. I finished the book mostly skimming the last fifty or so pages just to find out the resolution to the plot and I can’t say I’m too upset about that. If you do enjoy standard horror plots and are looking for one set in the ’80s with a video game theme, then this could be the book for you!

The name of this website is a subtle callback to one of the greatest Wes Anderson films of all time The Grand Budapest Hotel, so it should be no surprise that I am inclined to like the famed auteur’s work, but even discounting that, I think The Phoenician Scheme is a great movie on its own and one of the best in Anderson’s filmography.

The Phoenician Scheme is a departure from Anderson’s last two feature films, The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. The former was effectively an anthology meant to parallel the articles in a literary magazine and the latter a TV staging of a play that was full of meta-narrative devices. This film instead features a straight line plot, that while the details of which might be a little nebulous to the viewer, the film at all times lets you know of your progression through it by a constantly updating checklist of people and places.

The film stars returning Wes Anderson alumnus Benicio del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, a wealthy industrialist with a penchant for surviving plane crashes, and Anderson film debutant Mia Treapleton as his estranged, nun-in-training daughter.

It opens with a shockingly violent event on Zsa-zsa’s plane that causes it to crash. He is momentarily believed to be killed in the crash, but instead has a “biblical” vision—and apart from some scrapes, bruises, and a random organ he couldn’t shove back into his body, he miraculously survives again. Perhaps as a side effect of his vision, once he returns home he decides to reconnect with his only daughter Liesl and offer her the chance to be his sole heir upon his timely or untimely death. He also proceeds to explain to her the titular Phoenician Scheme which is a complex set of interlocking infrastructure projects that Zsa-zsa has been organizing and maneuvering into place via a number of organizations and oligarchies across the fictional area of the middle east. The plans are revealed in, perfect Anderson fashion, from a set of differently sized shoe boxes, each representing a different contributor or location relevant to the scheme. The smallest, but most important of these, is “The Gap”, which he refuses to elucidate more at the time.

Liesl agrees to the arrangement on a trial basis with the hope that she can find out more about why her mother was killed. Shortly afterwards, the US industrial complex begins a sabotage effort on the price of materials that are used in the completion of the scheme. These price increases explode “The Gap” which Zsa-zsa then finally defines as the difference between how much has been pledged by all the parties involved in the Scheme and the actual end cost. This begins the driving force of the movie as Zsa-zsa and Lisel, along with insect tutor Bjorn played by comedy super star Michael Cera, go from location to location in a mostly fruitless attempt to close “The Gap”.

Along the way they encounter a rogues gallery of recent Wes Anderson actor favorites, including Bryan Cranston, Tom Hanks, and Jeffrey Wright. In the course of events Zsa-zsa has more “biblical” flashes that do give us the opportunity to see long time Anderson favorite Bill Murray in a brief cameo as God. A well deserved casting choice I have to say.

The actual mechanics and outcome of the plot related to “The Gap” and the infrastructure projects themselves is irrelevant. In reality the goal of the Scheme was to reunite father and daughter and make the family whole again. It’s my understanding that Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola both have daughters which I’m sure influenced heavily the story. I’ve also seen some astute analysis of the movie saying that the scheme in the movie is an analogue for creating and seeing a movie through to completion. If that’s the case I hope for everyone’s sake there is a lot less bloodshed on the set than is implied in the movie.

Before closing, I would be remiss in not mentioning the soundtrack. Long time musical collaborator Alexandre Desplat is back with a percussive and driving score that moves the action along.Also worth noting: the movie clocks in at a cool 102 minutes—a rarity for modern features.

In summation, I think that The Phoenician Scheme is one of Anderson’s best films and is solidly in my top five of his oeuvre, and it’s one that I think I’ll revisit often in the future.

The Story Collector is the second book by author Evie Woods (Gaughan) by publishing date and it’s the third book I’ve read from the author overall. While there is never any claim of a shared fictional universe, all three of her recent novels share so many thematic commonalities I like to think of them as a trilogy. All of her works thus far have featured :

• a fish-out-of-water female protagonist
• a dual-track narrative structure featuring the past and present
• at least one surreal bit of magic/paranormal occurrences that happen in the story and are just simply accepted by all the characters.
• the present-day protagonist finds a new love interest

In this particular novel our present-day protagonist is named Sarah Harper. As the story opens, she is heading back to her parents' home in Boston after deciding to separate from her husband and leave their NYC apartment on Christmas Eve. While waiting for her flight, a chance encounter with a ceramic gift shop sheep and an Irish newspaper article highlighting a story about a motorway being diverted due to fairies, causes her to change her to flight to Shannon, Ireland instead. The logistics of booking international travel while in the airport on a holiday are nearly as magical as anything related to the fae folk.

Once she arrives in Ireland, a series of fortuitous events leads her to stay in a cottage in a small village that happens to have both an old Great House and a fairy hill. Shortly after arriving, she finds an old diary hidden inside a tree, which introduces us to the main character from the past: Anna, an 18-year-old girl who helps an American researcher searching multiple countries for stories about the fae folk.

I won’t spoil the details, but the rest of the plot is a very paint-by-numbers story that obviously involves Sarah finding love in the small village and rediscovering her joie de vivre while learning more about Anna and her interactions with the very real fae. It’s all enjoyable enough if you don’t think too hard about it. For instance how can Sarah randomly stay in Ireland for weeks on end? Why is her family not super bothered by her erratic life choices? And how does a diary stay dry in a metal box in a tree for hundred years? None of these things ultimately matter and that’s probably for the best.

If you are looking for a pleasant, but not very deep, story that takes place in Ireland and has a moderately happy ending, I think this is the book for you. If you are hoping for fraught historical fiction about fairies, you should probably look elsewhere!

Death at the White Hart by Chris Chibnall is a new British mystery novel that marks a return to form for the author. Chibnall was the showrunner and writer for the massively popular ITV show Broadchurch, which like this novel featured a very public murder in a coastal British town.

The protagonist here named Nicola Bridge is an experienced detective who has moved back to her hometown after dealing with the fallout and stress that her job has put on her family relationships. She has to deal with a murder investigation involving the local shady pub owner who is found dead in the middle of the roadway with deer antlers glued to his head.

Despite the creepy and vaguely occultist nature of the crime, the antlers are certainly evocative of some season 1 True Detective vibes, the story instead sticks to more down-to-earth British themes of cheating pub owners, eager-to-please junior DIs, and wrongly accused but very plausible suspects.

I really enjoyed the novel, I find pacing is one of the most important things in a murder mystery book and the plot here has the appropriate amount of twists and turns to keep the reader engaged without needlessly dragging things out. I also thought there was good characterization of the main protagonist and the cast of possible assailants. My only minor quibble is that there are some times when Chibnall’s TV instincts are display. A few of the chapters I feel more like they were written for the eventual streaming tv show than for the novel itself. These chapters are brief though and don’t really detract from the overall story.

If you are looking for a very solid British murder procedural, or just want a preview of what I’m sure will be a someday popular tv show almost certainly staring Olivia Colman, I highly recommend Death at the White Hart.

Every blog, by definition, has to have a first post, and this one is no different. I think it's also tradition for the first post to lay out some of the goals for the blog itself. Like a lot of people these days, I consume a lot of content: books, TV shows, movies, and video games. I find that in many cases, though, that's all I'm really doing — consuming.

Other than a book a month for my book club or the occasional special TV show that friends of mine are also watching, I rarely get a chance to reflect on what I’m consuming. So, my goal is to write (hopefully) pithy reviews of my media diet and, in the process, maybe gain a better understanding of why I like what I like — or even what I don’t.

So, welcome aboard, and let’s see where the tides of 2025 media take us!