The Midnight Feast

The Midnight Feast

By Lucy Foley

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests’ healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule” cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.

But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.

 I suppose I have a weakness for thrillers. I tend to find even the bad ones readable.  I relish the experience of trying to figure out the twists (there are always twists in today's thrillers. I remember when thrillers could earn the name by atmosphere and plot alone but those aren't nearly as fun) and usually have no trouble putting on the blinders required to overlook plot holes. I'm not generally reading these trying to look too closely at how it all hangs together, I enjoy the thin facades. All that is to say, I have no complaints about The Midnight Feast. It fulfilled all expectations, which is that it required very little in the way of concentration, verily zipped by, and contained enough outlandish shenanigans, both criminal and revenge-oriented, to satisfy anyone's thirst for skullduggery. 

To be fair, the plot does involve both past murder and present arson and there's a fair number of people who all have duplicate aliases in each timeline, so there are some who complain about trying to remember everyone. I didn't find it that hard though, everything gets repeated and then spelled out in detail, just in case you're very slow. Everyone has a secret and everyone is keeping tabs on everyone else. 

I did find the way it all tied together to be gratifying, and no plot holes were so glaring that they intruded on the afterglow. Does it make any sense how often people were both lost and yet constantly finding other groups of people and/or mysterious scenes in the woods? No!  Was I confused about how Eddie managed to jump on his bike after it specifically mentions that he lost it in the woods the previous day?  Yes! Does it make sense that Eddie was able to duck back into the Manor, get a costume on and catch up to Francesca on said bicycle while she's driving a car?  No! Did I enjoy the discovery that the explanation for one character's mysterious and oddly-timed disappearances was "playing fortnite at a local club"? Yes!

Read this one if you're in the mood for escapist thriller fun, where all the bad guys get their comeuppance and the good guys all make it out intact.  Read it if you're in the mood for cow-butchering secret societies who "right the wrongs" and you like hearing about rich people losing their investments.  Read it if you don't take yourself too seriously and have some spare time to wallow on the coast of Dorset in the fictional town of Tome (pronounced "Tomb" because of course!) enjoying the summer solstice.

27: A Book Set At A Luxury Resort

 

The Running Grave

The Running Grave

By Robert Galbraith  (J.K. Rowling)

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. 

The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. 

In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her. . . 

I'm not even entirely sure how this happened, but I was randomly browsing books that might fit the prompt. I haven't read any earlier books in the series, but just decided to read the preview on a whim, and 10% of the book later (which turned out to be a sizable chunk, this book is over 900 pages long), I ended up checking it out. One of the biggest persuaders was "Jayson's" review on GoodReads which took multi-chapter chunks and reviewed them in turn, giving their own thoughts and predictions on the mysteries. It was just the right amount of intrigue without the dramatics. 

[Sidenote: I absolutely cannot stand the number of reviews on GoodReads which seem to exist solely to demonstrate the reviewer's library of gifs, reaction images, and emojis and describe the books only by superlatives. The YA ones are the worst, here's one I found after just three minutes of idle searching:

WHAT A GREAT BOOK!!! 🌷💖🎀

A BEAUTIFUL READ, JUST LIKE ITS BEAUTIFUL COVER! 💍🌹😼

If you’re a fan of Stephanie Garber and Holly Black, then read it IMMEDIATELY…😘
FINALLY, a lovely fantasy read after so long! 🤗

This person writes reviews like they have a brain injury. Anyway, the nicely organized review by Jayson  - and this seems to be Jayson's M.O. - was a nice surprise.]

So I was somewhat forewarned and forearmed against the potential problem of diving into a series halfway and not knowing who anyone is. I also had the bare bones of the relationship between Robin and Cormoran - apparently full of Unresolved Sexual Tension - and the nice thing about this book is that since they're separated for a good chunk of it while Robin is undercover, we spend a minimal amount of time on their interactions which, for someone like me who is only reading this because of a macabre interest in modern day cults rather than an interest in seeing whether Robin and Comoran smooch (Spoiler: they don't), bettered my reading experience.

I assume most people who read about cults assume that they themselves would never fall prey to one, which is exactly what I would assume about myself. I have enough confidence in my cynicism and venality to feel that I wouldn't be tempted by ideas of grandeur and hidden secrets to the meaning of life - if only I give up all my creature comforts.

Now, I absolutely think that anyone who doesn't have the choice to leave would be indoctrinated like anyone else - it's basically torture with a side of brainwashing. But the question is why people who have an opportunity to leave, like the retreat members, after one week, would ever stay. The Running Grave answers this question somewhat indirectly. Obviously Robin would leave, were she not investigating the cult, but we get to interact with Will Edensor, a cultist who is "questioning" - we can easily understand why would find himself trapped, as he comes across as someone who is trying to understand everything and, when given no rational explanation, finds he must believe the supernatural. He also seems to think he's smarter than he is. And people who have no experience with normal loving relationships could easily be taken in by the ersatz strings-attached kind of love that the cult provides. 

But as unpopular as Rowling is among the liberal faction these days, you have to give her credit where credit is due: she can write a doorstopper of a book that doesn't feel long at all. Little did I know that I would be gulping up a 960 page book in a matter of days (when I had other books to finish first). The sense of dread that permeates the chapters, particularly Robin's, as she gets further and further entangled, is a masterclass in keeping suspense up. And we're able to see how Robin's weeks and then months slowly begin to break her down, and the process doesn't feel rushed or unnatural.  Now I will say that with the length, I did find myself forgetting or confusing people. I had trouble keeping the Dougherty and the Pirbright families separate, even though the children were fairly distinct, since both involved young kids in the early days of the cult.

I congratulated myself on figuring out very early on that Daiyu, the Drowned Prophet, did not actually drown at the beach (and didn't even actually go), but I assumed for most of the book that she'd been drowned at the farm instead, possibly accidentally while her parents were trying to set her up as a cult icon.  I did not guess the actual mystery, or the explanation of the cult-within-the-cult. Humorously enough, the cult's actual crimes (which include concealment of corpses, medical maltreatment, rape, and baby snatching!) are basically footnotes by the time we progress to the climax. It all seemed to hang together although I can't say that I love the "detective confronts the killer by themselves in a long monologue tying it all together" which may be a hallmark of the series? I dunno, I ended up reading the first book in the series after this one, and Cormoran does the same thing in that one, so either I'm unlucky or it's a pattern. And, like the personal relationship stuff that I mostly skimmed since I care not a whit about Cormoran's exes or his and Robin's agony about whether to get together or not, the agency's other cases and shenanigans about their employees seemed like so much filler to me, but presumably for those who have been following the series from the beginning, it is more satisfying. For my part, I would have been fine with merely a 700 page book about going undercover at cults.

7: A Book About A Cult

 

 

When No One is Watching

When No One is Watching

By Alyssa Cole

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?

I struggled with this one - I'm not sure where exactly it's lacking, but it did feel lacking to me.  I didn't warm up the characters right away, or even at all.  They switch off viewpoints between Theo and Sydney and we're introduced to both as they're drunk/hungover and aimless.  Sydney is admittedly paranoid and kind of belligerent, Theo is a weird passive aggressive doormat.  Both have "secrets," which are kind of out of left field, albeit nothing too outre for the genre.  They're not really people I like spending time with, or feel empathetic towards.  So that's strike one.

Strike two is maybe the concept itself.  It's basically a "what if gentrification was actually a legit conspiracy to eliminate black people from a community (instead of simply being a convenient byproduct) and people were being murdered and experimented on" kind of concept.  Not a bad idea, per se, but... I don't know, there were thriller-ish elements - the weird cabbie, the drugged man, the fake meter reader - but we also spent a lot of time just rehashing basic history, i.e., the seizure of land from anyone non-white, if the land was valuable at that time, the racial policing, yada yada yada.  Like yeah, it's important for background, but it also slows down the pace a loooooot.

It's compared to Get Out in the description, but I feel like it's a less successful take on the genre. Maybe the idea just lends itself better to a theatrical presentation. Maybe it's because there's never really a point at which any white person (other than Theo and possibly Jenn/Jen) is even marginally suspected to be a good person? Like, forget microaggressions, it's pretty much just straight up aggression.  I think it loses some of the thriller feel here too, because we're not second guessing whether this is actually happening - it's actually happening, and it's not that subtle. Maybe if we spent all the narration with Sydney? Then Theo could have been a wild card, and added more uncertainty to the story. 

I liked the incorporation of the old folks into the "actually onto the villains' game the whole time" role, but feel like they were underused - again, with main characters like Sydney and Theo, I think bringing the old people in (and potentially putting them at risk, raising the stakes) would make you care more about the characters.  

I also appreciated how all of the MANY people Sydney and Theo killed (at least, like 5-10, right? I lost track at the rejuvenation meeting) were just elided over since the corporation took care of everything.  Really? How convenient. And convenient that both Sydney and Theo were like, cold blooded shooters. We spend all this time really laying the groundwork for how realistic a conspiracy this could be, and then blow it all up with the dumb-enough-to-use-a-neighborhood-chatroom-to-lay-bare-their-plots, plus don't get me started on all the Wild West shooting goin' on in them thar hospital.

What's weird to me is how many people downvoted it solely because of the language.  I mean, there were a lot of other issues besides the cursing, for sure.  It felt kind of messy.  I'm not big into Cole's other romance novels, so it might just be her style, but it fell flat to me.  Again, because the reader knows the corporation is behind all of it, but it takes so long for Sydney and Theo to catch up that we don't have a lot of time for unfolding the conspiracy.  It's pretty much: hey, everyone we interacted with in the book is a bad guy and they're having a meeting this Tuesday. Literally, even the lawyer for her mother is not merely lazy and uncaring (which would have still been fine for drama too! We need those uncaring bystanders and again - uncertainty builds tension!) but actively involved.  Sometimes it can be frustrating to get done with "the bad guy" only to find out they're only a small part of the bigger picture, and here's an even bigger and badder guy we never suspected, but this was frustrating too.  We never even catch a glimpse of the snake's head.

33: A Social-Horror Book

The Cartographers

The Cartographers

By Peng Shephard

Nell Young’s whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field and Nell’s personal hero. But she hasn’t seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map.

But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can’t resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map is incredibly valuable and exceedingly rare. In fact, she may now have the only copy left in existence . . . because a mysterious collector has been hunting down and destroying every last one—along with anyone who gets in the way.

But why?

To answer that question, Nell embarks on a dangerous journey to reveal a dark family secret and discovers the true power that lies in maps . . .

I was super pumped by the first few chapters, by about halfway, I was getting very doubtful about the possibilities of the book, and when it ended, I spent at least a good ten minutes righteously racking up all the plot holes and things that I thought were dumb.  First on the list was the hinge of the book, that two parents decided that the MOST REASONABLE thing to do, when presented with a somewhat out of order friend, was that one of them WOULD STAY HIDDEN FOR THIRTY YEARS, while she DREW A MAP, and the other would tell their three year old daughter that her MOTHER HAD DIED IN A FIRE.  Yes! YES!! This is what two (I assume) sane people thought was a good solution to the fact that one of their friends had gone gonzo and burned a bunch of gas station maps.  Let's back up though.

Nell is Dr. Young's daughter. Her mother died when Nell was young, saving Nell from a fire. Dr. Young is a preeminent cartographer at the New York Public Library. Although Nell used to work there too, the fulfillment of all her childhood dreams, her father got her fired one day after she opened up a old donation box in the museum and found a gas station map.  Since then, seven years ago, she's worked at a second rate art map place and has not spoken with her father.

She gets a call that her father died in his office, and she finds the gas station map in a secret compartment of his desk (nifty, right?).  She begins showing it to various people, trying to understand why he kept it.  Someone else we don't really care about is murdered.  No wait, two people! (that's how little we care about them).  She learns about a secret group called the Cartographers (silly name, but okay, still with you), and finds out that long ago in grad school (danger!) her parents and five other people formed a group who really liked maps.  Eventually they graduate and, with one thing and another, find an old gas station map from the 1930s with a "phantom settlement" on it, i.e., a deliberate error that was designed in order to ferret out copyright infringement of their map.  However, they realize that when actually using the map, they can see the settlement, and enter into this "town", which is basically a shell, like that fake place Indiana Jones found himself in for the nuclear test during Indiana Jones 4: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

So naturally, they get super into the town, and some of them try and map it, and some of them cheat on their partners, and some of them go crazy and decide to beg, borrow, or steal all the maps in existence that show this town.  

When things unravel, as naturally they do, paranoia reigns, the cheating partners get caught, in revenge one of them steals a map from the crazy dude (Wally) and then tries to sell it back to him for money, and he finds out and goes crazier and he burns all the spare maps.  Except woah! Nell, the three year old afterthought who was being raised in a map lunatics commune is somewhere in the fire, so her mother runs in to get her, and then hands her off to Dr. Young. Meanwhile, as the maps go up in smoke, everyone, sans mother, wakes up in a field, since they no longer have the secret map.  They decide, hey, have to explain mother's disappearance and child's burns somehow, so they burn their own house down, and then never talk to each other for the next thirty years. Except! Dr. Young discovers that Nell's mother hid a last copy of the gas station map on her child as she rescued her from a burning building, her final act of caring about a map more than her own child (or is it?).  So he hides it in a box of old junk at the public library (as you do).

Nell discovers all this over the course of her investigation and (crucially) that all maps with these "phantom settlements" - which can be as small as a fake door, or a fake room - have this super power.  She and her old lover Felix, who is now working for the mysterious William Habberson - a man who is rarely seen in person, and incredibly focused on some sort of technological map thing that requires every input ever made and then it... answers all questions? Unclear - tootle around discovering things and wind up back at the original site of the phantom settlement with the map and none other than William Habberson, who turns out to be crazy Wally (Surprise! But also, duh), who was searching for another copy of the map for the last thirty years, and then they go in, and find Nell's mother, and realize this was part of some scheme cooked up by Nell's mother and father in which (and this made bonkers sense to me, so forgive me if I'm not explaining this correctly) they decide that in order to protect... themselves? from Wally, the mother will stay in town and make a map, and the father will pretend he doesn't have the map.  And then, when the mother's map is finished, she can come back out because... there'll be another map and that will make it okay???

No, seriously, ?????????????

 Anyway, in the midst of all this, yet another person is murdered by Wally, and they find out that the mother did create a map (so sick of typing the word map) and Wally tries to make her scan it into his super MacGuffin digital database and Nell does... something, I don't know, moves it by writing on it (??) and the settlement disappears for everyone else, again, and then six months later Nell sends out invitations to everyone to come see the secret town. And then the book ends.  

And no, I am not leaving out huge chunks of the book, and no, I am not making anything up. So now that you're caught up, and in no particular order:

1. Was there ever any doubt that the mysterious Wally would in fact be the William Habberson that only Felix has met in person? 

2. Is there any point to the fact that Nell is dodging the police detective's phone calls and in-person conversations (and is he following her and assuming she murdered her father? If so: why on earth?).

3. If her father had a secret compartment in his desk, why (a) tell her about it and (b) not hide the map there? Or, and here's a radical idea, tell your daughter it's the last map her mother ever gave you, and it's sentimental, so she doesn't tear it up or throw it out or anything?

4. How on EARTH did her parents spend more than two minutes thinking their plan made any damn sense? As soon as he found the map, why not immediately use the map to get back to the town, rescue the mother and give Wally the damn map.  At that point in time, no one knew he murdered people.  They just knew he was bonkers for maps, and in love with the mother.  Save her, give him the other and voila! No more obsession!

5. Man, if I found out my mother abandoned me when I was three to sit and draw a town map for thirty years, I would be pissed.

6. How did it take thirty fricking years for her to come up with a reasonable map of this place?

7.  How did Wally manage to find ALL THE MAPS of this place in a single summer in 1990, without the benefit of the internet? Somehow, magically, all the people going through their old attics never found another old map after that point in time? Because if so, you'd think Wally would have snapped it up and visited the town a long time ago, revealing this stupid plan for the master piece in idiocy that it was.

8. How come the mother was stuck in town, but no one else? Sure, she had a spare map, but then, so did Nell (and Dr. Young, who was holding her after the fire).  Was the mother looking at the spare map when all the other ones burned? And how come no one else, after several people realized that Wally was stashing all the other copies, thought maybe it would be useful if all seven people didn't rely on a single map to get in/out of this place.  Just take one for each person.  Like hotel room keys.  I get annoyed if there's only one key for two people. As soon as any of the others realized that more copies could be found, the most natural thing to do would have been to stash a spare copy for all the other cartographers.

9. The better plan, obviously, even if they went along with the absurd hiding thing, would have been for Dr. Young to anonymously tip off the police that Wally was in the same place as all these people who got murdered and that he's obsessed with this map.  Then, when he's in jail, spring your wife from map-purgatory. Mapurgatory.

10. For that matter, the whole point of this map was that it was used to catch out copyright infringement, which apparently Rand McNally and the other mapper were doing.  So shouldn't all the maps from 1930, not just the ones from this particular company, have the settlement and can be used to find the town?

11. And how come no one experimented with the idea that making a map of a real place with a fake place on it makes the fake place real? That would have been the first thing they should have done.  How realistic of a map does the drawing have to be? Does the intent of the phantom settlement have to be pure, or can anyone who wants to have an ice cream parlor down the street add it onto a map and bango presto!  We find out later that doodles really do create things - the mother adds a restaurant and hospital to the town, and Nell moves (still have no idea how she did this using a ball point pen, but whatever) the town by drawing it. Seriously, no one tries re-drawing the map?

12.Wally has spent thirty years going through all the maps at the New York Public Library, but Nell finds it in one afternoon looking at a box of junk on her day off?

13. Once he knows that Wally knows he has the gas station map, (a) it still takes Dr. Young seven years to decide he needs another map with a backdoor exit and (b) he says nothing to Nell about this whole thing.

14. Wally keeps murdering people without actually getting the last map.  Poor strategy. You'd think after murdering Dr. Young and still not finding the map, he'd actually have like, waited to murder the director of the library until after having map in hand. Unless he just likes murdering people, which is assuming facts not in evidence.

15. Wouldn't it have made so much more sense for Wally to use Felix to get close to Nell and get the map??? Instead of like, infiltrating the library, why not just tell Felix, "Hey, there's this map Dr. Young had of mine, and if Nell ever mentions it, can you let me know?"

16. NONE OF THE PLOT ABOUT HOW THE TOWN DISAPPEARS FOR SOME PEOPLE IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE MAP MAKE SENSE. EITHER SEVEN PEOPLE WERE USING A SINGLE MAP TO GET IN AND OUT OR THE MAP ONLY WORKS IF YOU'RE LOOKING AT IT, BUT NOT BOTH.

17. Haha, eight people. I keep forgetting they had a toddler with them.  As they do themselves, it seems.

18. Why not just print tens of thousands of your map, Dr. Young, and send them to all the people who had their maps stolen or sold to Wally? It'll take him a while to track them all down, and at lease one person will hang onto their map, thinking it'll make even more money when the other copies are mostly sold.  This plan has the side benefit of tempting Wally to murder more people, giving them more opportunities to TELL THE POLICE WALLY IS MURDERING PEOPLE.

19. Seriously, Wally is not some criminal mastermind here. I'm pretty sure he still has DNA, even if he can get in and out of places using maps with secret exits.

20. I can't even.

21.WAIT, I forgot a big one.  WHEN YOU BURN DOWN A HOUSE, THEY DON'T FORGIVE YOUR DEBT, THEY ARREST YOU FOR ARSON. I'm pretty sure they knew what "arson" was in the 1990s.

01: A Book Published in 2022

One By One

One by One

By Ruth Ware

 

Getting snowed in at a luxurious, rustic ski chalet high in the French Alps doesn’t sound like the worst problem in the world. Especially when there’s a breathtaking vista, a full-service chef and housekeeper, a cozy fire to keep you warm, and others to keep you company. Unless that company happens to be eight coworkers…each with something to gain, something to lose, and something to hide.

When the cofounder of Snoop, a trendy London-based tech startup, organizes a weeklong trip for the team in the French Alps, it starts out as a corporate retreat like any other: PowerPoint presentations and strategy sessions broken up by mandatory bonding on the slopes. But as soon as one shareholder upends the agenda by pushing a lucrative but contentious buyout offer, tensions simmer and loyalties are tested. The storm brewing inside the chalet is no match for the one outside, however, and a devastating avalanche leaves the group cut off from all access to the outside world. Even worse, one Snooper hadn’t made it back from the slopes when the avalanche hit.

As each hour passes without any sign of rescue, panic mounts, the chalet grows colder, and the group dwindles further…one by one.

I've read a few Ruth Ware books now, and not been incredibly impressed (The Woman in Cabin 10 was okay, although had a weird anti-climax ending, and the last one, The Turn of the Key, I really didn't like the ending just because I thought it boggled all rational thought that a person would go to jail and get the death penalty rather than simply admit the death was an accident caused by a young child) but they're so popular, I can't resist checking them out.  And this one I really had a good time with!

We get two perspectives, Liz, the reluctant minority shareholder, dragged along on a corporate "retreat" that's actually a week-long presentation about whether or not to accept a buyout, and Erin, the ski chalet Girl Friday, who has a secret of her own.  The book moves at a pretty good clip, I think I finished it in about two hours or so, and there really isn't any slow point.  Yes, we find out who the murderer is about two-thirds of the way in, and yes, it's pretty clear who it is even before that, but the last third is basically a cat and mouse game which is thrilling in and of itself.  Ha, I was just going back over reviews for another of Ware's books, In a Dark, Dark Wood, and all the reviews on the first page of Amazon are all about how ridiculous that this woman drinks tea with a murderer - I wonder if the tea drinking scene in One by One is a reaction to that, which would be amusing. 

It was certainly surprising to me how much of the crime(s) were planned - since at lot of it depended on circumstances/opportunities the murderer wouldn't have been able to predict.  I guess if the first go-round wouldn't have worked, they'd have just kept (SPOILER ALERT) carrying around a red jacket and faking their skiing the bunny slopes while hoping to run into their victim on the black trails, while other people are conveniently posted in the ski-lift to witness the faux Eva go by?? Hmmm, that seems... complicated.

Are the characters in One by One more than just two-dimensional? Eh, not really.  I mean, it's a thriller? A lot of people have secrets (although really, just our two main characters are hiding anything particular) and people start dying and there's not a lot of time to take stock and think about your hopes and dreams. I did think the little sections before each chapter about Liz and Erin's "Snoop" followers was dumb though, we get all that information from the narrative itself, we don't really need it there, plus it barely changes throughout the book. 

I will say that it was compulsively readable, and probably my favorite of all Ware's books (though again, not as high a compliment as it might be) and just the kind of thing you want to read when curled up with a warm blanket on a cold winter day. 

Ten Second Reviews

Semiosis

By Sue Burke

Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but they’ll have to survive on the one they found. They don’t realize another life form watches...and waits...

Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that humans are more than tools.

Ooo, I liked this one a lot, especially in the beginning, which is when it was really out there.  Towards the end I felt like it became more conventional sci-fi-y with a struggle against another colony, but the beginning, where you just don't know what it going to happen next??? Fabulous!  It felt really fresh too, like a whole new idea (although I'm sure that something somewhere had the same germ (haha, no pun intended) of an idea) and even when we do get to the point where they're in constant communication together and they're pretty clear that there isn't going to be another betrayal, it's a well written story.   I'm waffling on reading the second, mostly because the reviews are iffy and frankly, this doesn't need a sequel.  But on the other hand, it was a fun, fascinating world to spend time in, and even just reading about their day-to-day survival was entertaining in Burke's hands. 

The Witches Are Coming

By Lindy West

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one.

Hmm, what to say on this one? It's undeniably funny, well-written, and passionate.  But so GODDAMN DEPRESSING. Not unrelentingly depressing, or I would have stopped reading.  But notice that West had to end the book on a couple of chapters whose throughline is basically "Don't give up! The world is not a complete dumpster fire yet! There are still some nice things (trees) even though we are rapidly killing them and everyone else and heading towards total annihilation of all that we currently enjoy - oh wait, this is depressing again."  I don't know if the intent was to energize and electrify, but all it did was depress and demoralize.  It was a funny depression though.  Okay, I'm gonna be real here: I am hungover and mentally checked out on this review.  What is my review? That I liked the writing but the message was sad and I would read something else by her, and it had nice short chapters.  Honestly what I should have done was pull quotes because they're all hilarious nuggets, but obviously, I ain't doing that.  I really liked the Adam Sandler chapter, because IT IS VERY TRUE.  WHY IS HE ALWAYS SO MAGICALLY GIFTED?? HE IS AVERAGE, MAKE HIM AVERAGE.

I'll Never Tell

I'll Never Tell

By Catherine McKenzie

Twenty years ago, seventeen year-old Amanda Holmes was found bludgeoned in a rowboat at the MacAllister family’s Camp Macaw. No one was ever charged with the crime.

Now, after their parents’ sudden deaths, the MacAllister siblings return to camp to read the will and decide what to do with the prime real estate the camp occupies. Ryan needs to sell. Margaux hasn’t made up her mind. Mary believes in leaving well enough alone. Kate and Liddie—the twins—have opposing views. And Sean Booth, the groundskeeper, just hopes he still has a home when all is said and done.

But it’s more complicated than a simple vote. The will stipulates that until they unravel the mystery of what happened to Amanda, they can’t settle the estate. Any one of them could have done it, and each one is holding a piece of the puzzle. Will they work together to finally discover the truth, or will their secrets finally tear the family apart?

This one had an interesting premise and structure (I particularly appreciated the table of everyone's locations, especially when you realize that the characters themselves filled it out) but for me it fell apart a bit at the end.  We had like three "false alarms" of seeming to identify the attempted murderer and then realizing that no, it was actually someone else! At least twice (that I can remember off the top of my head), someone goes to confront the person they think is the murderer by themselves, and I mean, everyone's family is weird, but like, if my newly-realized half-brother was accused of murder and then suspiciously fled the scene, I would not then paddle out towards the deserted island where he decamped to have a heart-to-heart with him.  Although, to be fair, without any actual evidence, how are you going to call the police on that?

And to be honest, the whole half-brother thing didn't do much for me, I mean, they allude to the fact that their parents didn't seem to want any kids, so after having five of their own, they discover that Mr. MacAllister had a baby with a prostitute who is now like eight years old, and they just... act as surrogate family together?  Without any of the other kids (including the incredibly nosy one) finding out? Okay, Jan.  

I think there could have been a whole book on how creepy and dysfunctional Mr. MacAllister was: first with the secret baby having, and then the whole, "treat you like my son, and you are my son, but I won't acknowledge that and when I die, you'll get to fight over who inherits with my other son and all of my daughters, one of whom you want to bone" thing, and the the double whammy of both spying on all his children (with actual surveillance!) and enlisting his pseudo-son but actually his actual son to do the spying.  Phew.  Like, is Mr. MacAllister a psychopath?  I also didn't really follow the whole thing about how he assumed his son (Ryan) did it, and then the police did a DNA test, and somehow that cleared Ryan, but Mr. MacAllister didn't see the DNA test, so he still thought Ryan did it, but then somehow the DNA test was in his spy file after his death, so he had to have seen it at some point, but yadda yadda yadda.  

Finally, I hated the identity of the murderer.  You going to tell me that a fifteen year old girl bludgeoned a seventeen year old girl with a canoe paddle and then just like, sat on it for twenty years?  Clearly got her genes from the Mr. MacAllister side of the family.  I mean, they didn't even add that she was incredibly jacked or anything, to make it more realistic, although maybe the fact that she walked away from a horse-car crash that killed the driver of the car was supposed to be a clue that she was superhuman.  

I kid, I kid.  I did enjoy the lead-up to the denouement, it was a fun setting, and the number of characters was good - I didn't have any difficulty trying to keep anyone straight.  They were all easily distinguishable from the others, and each had their own little quirks.  It also got me thinking about what I'd do if, for example, I had five siblings and one of them murdered someone and then twenty years later committed suicide.  Like, do you say anything to the grieving family and tell them who did it?  Obviously here, the MacAllisters just... didn't say anything.  I mean, it is going to be hard to explain why you didn't say anything EARLIER about seeing a blonde girl whacking another, but that's sort of on you.  Amanda's parents deserve the same closure you all got. 

Bad Blood

Bad Blood

By John Carreyou

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

I finally finally finally got back into reading again (you may have noticed that recent reviews were lackluster, if I even finished the book at all) thanks to Bad Blood.  This one was re-energizing, and you kinda spend the whole thing doing that, "What. the. fuck??" look that I always reference from Chris Rock in Nurse Betty when he sees his dad, played by Morgan Freeman, dancing with no one on the side of the Grand Canyon. Just that sense, you know, that someone very close to you has lost all of their marbles. In this case, that WTF applies to all the people who fell for the cult of Holmes.  For years!  For years they went along with this, although to be fair, it was both a very desirable and beneficial pitch, and also it wasn't immediately apparent that it was rotten to the core.  Although it seems like even a slightly more than cursory look would have taken care of that...?

In retrospect you go, how did they sucker this many people for this long? And the answer apparently is, a combination of complete intimidation of those over whom they held power, and complete ingratiation of those who could have destroyed them.  It's incredible!  When I first heard about it, I definitely gave it a brush off:  pfft, who cares about whether another start-up is toxic and also lied to consumers.  Same shit, different day.  But no!  This was an incredible and incredibly engrossing tale of malignantly bad behavior.  Props to Carreyou for his work, he takes an almost ten year long journey about medical devices and makes it captivating from beginning to end.

For all I've complained in the past, I feel like I have to praise Carreyou's organization of his book, which is both chronological (thank you for an easy to follow and logical progression!) and, because he knows you forget people who only pop in and out occasionally, heavy on the "John-who-ran-the-Edison-room" reminders about who the various people are.  Thank you, Carreyou, for recognizing that I can only retain so much at one time, and minor characters' names and identities in books is not one of them.

Like Five Days at Memorial you kinda leave the book doubting that the villains of the piece even realize that they are in fact the bad guys.  As in that case, Elizabeth and Sunny seem to have kind of doubled down on the position that they've done nothing wrong, although I suppose anyone who has the brazen confidence to do it in the first place doesn't have a lot of room for self-doubt or even second thoughts.

The one thing I wish we'd gotten in this is a bit more wrap up of where the key players stood, particularly (for me) George Shultz, who practically disowned his grandson for whistleblowing this whole house of cards to the ground.  I can't say for sure that I'd have the wherewithal to do what he and Erika did in reporting the misdeeds, but to be personally punished for doing right strikes me as so unfair.   So much collateral damage done.  And for what!  A miracle product that didn't work? Such dishonesty in professing to care about people's health while actually causing harm indiscriminately.  Not to mention poor Ian Gibbons, who carried the shame of it to his death.  It makes you mad, it gets your (forgive the pun) blood up!  And this, for god's sake, explains why regulatory bodies, while annoying, are absolutely and completely necessary. 

Ten Second Reviews

Witchmark

By C. L. Polk

In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own. When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.

I was really excited about a magical Edwardian murder mystery and the reviews were good, but this disappointed.  I will be real honest: I skipped most of the middle of this book, from like, page 100 to page 200, and then I read the last like, thirty pages, because I wanted to know how it ended, but I didn't care about the journey.  That's a summation of my feelings on the book: I liked parts of it, but the writing didn't pull me in, and it felt oddly tense between world-building and character-building.  Each oth got short shrift - for example, Miles' reaction to seeing his sister, from whom he's been estranged for years, and who thought he was dead, was more of a toddlers Do I have to talk to her now? It felt hurky-jerky, the way things were revealed, or switching between scenes.  Interesting setting, but 100 pages in, I still didn't have a feel for the different magical classes, or anything that had happened in the war, two crucial plot lines.   Not quite a DNF, but close enough for government work.

The Woman in Cabin 10

By Ruth Ware

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

Mmm, so the trend of alcoholic women narrators in thrillers is alive and well! To be fair, I think this predates some of them (but postdates, for example, The Girl on the Train, which is sort of the ur-text for these modern thrillers). This one is a doozy: not only is Lo depressed, alcoholic, and claustrophobic, she's also got PTSD from a recent burglary.   She's so skittish the biggest mystery of all isn't the murder but how she manages to hold down a day job.  It was also interesting seeing how much of this was ganked by The Woman in the Window: unreliable narrator, suffering from trauma, disappearing women, the solution involving a woman pretending to be the wife (aside from the actual wife). I was particularly interested because I too, went on a boating cruise in the far northern hemisphere recently, but alas, even leaving aside the midnight murder, our experiences were not at all similar.  For example, if one had wanted to hide a woman on the boat I was on for more than one day, she'd have to be dead already, and preferably in small pieces, since we didn't have even empty cupboards, let alone empty rooms conveniently two floors below the crew. I was reading a little quickly, but did they ever explain whether Richard was behind Lo's burglary too, or was that supposed to be a coincidence? And whoever it was who took the mascara? What I found really a neat twist in this one though, funnily enough, is that there is no big "confrontation" scene - Lo never meets Richard after she finds out what he's done, just keeps on the lam, and I did find that a bit refreshing.  Sometimes these get so formulaic you go, "Well, she's not going to be safe here, she still needs to meet up with the villain in person" - something that The Woman in the Window definitely suffered from, by the way.  I've read a couple of Ware now, and they're not bad, but the glut of lady-led thrillers on the market means you've got to work a lot harder to stand out in a good way.