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.