7 minute read
A SUNLIT WEAPON by Jacqueline Winspear
MURDER WITH DARJEELING TEA
Smith, Karen Rose Kensington (352 pp.) $8.99 paper | May 24, 2022 978-1-4967-3398-6
A trip to buy a birthday present embroils a Pennsylvania tea shop owner in yet another puzzling mystery. Daisy Swanson wants nothing more than to support her family financially and emotionally, serve great food, and continue to develop her romantic relationship. So far, so good: Her shop in Willow Creek—part of Pennsylvania’s Amish Country—is doing fine, her daughter and son-in-law’s unplanned pregnancy has worked out well, her other daughter will soon be off to college, and her romance with former cop–turned-woodworker Jonas Groft is progressing nicely. When she visits the shop of oddly reclusive dog lover Wilhelm Rumple in search of a concrete dog statue for Jonas’ birthday, she overhears an argument between Rumple and wealthy Stanley King over money. Jonas and Rumple both volunteer at Four Paws Animal Shelter, which is run by a brother-sister team, and when Rumple is murdered in a dog run there, Daisy, who’s no stranger to investigations, feels compelled to see what she can discover. Although she turns everything she learns over to the police, who are struggling to pin down a motive, she still becomes a target for a killer who fears she knows too much.
The deepest joys in this cozy are the relationships between people you actually care about.
A SUNLIT WEAPON
Winspear, Jacqueline Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $27.99 | March 22, 2022 978-0-06-314226-8
In 1942, Maisie Dobbs gets embroiled in diverse cases that involve her own family. Jo Hardy, a pilot for Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary, is ferrying a plane across England when she’s shot at from the ground. When Jo and a friend return to the spot to investigate, they find a Black American soldier tied up in a barn who claims that his White soldier friend has been kidnapped. Later, Jo realizes that in the segregated American Army, Pvt. Matthias Crittenden is in deep trouble, and he’ll be held for the murder of the missing soldier. After Jo’s friend is killed during another plane delivery, Jo calls on Maisie, who’s living with her extended family in Kent, to investigate. Only the pull of Maisie’s highly placed American husband, Mark Scott, allows her to question Crittenden. Meanwhile, Maisie, who hates injustice of any sort, learns that her own adopted daughter is being bullied in school, another problem she resolves to straighten out. Maisie visits the barn and finds new evidence that may prove a connection between Charlie’s disappearance, whoever shot at Jo’s plane, and the impending visit of Eleanor Roosevelt, which worries Mark because of a credible threat to Maisie’s safety. Maisie’s ability to talk to all sorts of people and discern the truth helps her untangle a complicated mystery involving miscreants whose lives have been so warped that they’ve lost all empathy for others.
A superb combination of mystery, thriller, and psychological study with an emphasis on prejudice and hatred.
science fiction & fantasy
BOOK OF NIGHT
Black, Holly Tor (320 pp.) $19.59 | May 3, 2022 978-1-250-81219-3
A former thief who specialized in stealing magical documents is forced back into her old habits in Black’s adult debut. Charlie Hall used to work as a thief, stealing for and from magicians—or rather, “gloamists.” In this world, gloamists are people with magical shadows that are alive, gaining strength from the gloamists’ own blood. A gloamist can learn to manipulate the magic of their shadow, doing everything from changing how it looks to using it to steal, possess a person, or even murder. Gloamists hire nonmagical people like Charlie to steal precious and rare magical documents written by their kind throughout history and detailing their research and experiments in shadow magic. Gloamists can use onyx to keep each other from sending shadows to steal these treasures, but onyx won’t stop regular humans from old-fashioned breaking and entering. After Charlie’s talent for crime gets her into too much trouble, she swears off her old career and tries to settle down with her sensible boyfriend, Vince—but when she finds a dead man in an alley and notices that even his shadow has been ripped to pieces, she can’t help trying to figure out who he was and why he met such a gruesome end. Before she knows it, Charlie is forced back into a life of lies and danger, using her skills as a thief to find a book that could unleash the full and terrifying power of the shadow world. Black is a veteran fantasy writer, which shows in the opening pages as she neatly and easily guides the reader through the engrossing world of gloamists, magical shadows, and Charlie’s brand of criminality. There’s a lot of flipping back and forth between the past and the present, and though both timelines are well
the memory librarian
plotted and suspenseful, the story leans a touch too hard on the flashbacks. Still, the mystery elements are well executed, as is Charlie’s characterization, and the big twist at the end packs a satisfying punch.
Hits the marks for spooky thrills and mysterious chills.
THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN And Other Stories of Dirty Computer
Monáe, Janelle Harper Voyager (368 pp.) $28.99 | April 19, 2022 978-0-06-307087-5
In her debut collection, musician and actress Monáe collaborates with a different writer for every story to explore a world defined by some people’s resistance to a dangerous surveillance state in which memories are currency.
An introduction, “Breaking Dawn,” lays out the collection’s guiding thought experiment: In a world with cameras everywhere, most people have accepted the idea that “an eye in the sky might protect us from...ourselves, our world”—and soon, not content with seeing the surface of things, the New Dawn found ways “past the encrypted walls of our minds,” into people’s thoughts and memories. This constant surveillance divides the nation into those who are safe and clean and those who are “deviant, complex”—the dirty computers. The title story, written with Alaya Dawn Johnson, explores the life of Seshet, the Director Librarian of Little Delta, the New Dawn’s highest-ranking position. Interested in the contradictions of bureaucracy and the conflict within someone with the power to enforce rules who doesn’t abide by them, Seshet investigates the curious background of her new lover. “Nevermind” is both a memory-enhancing drug and a story (written with Danny Lore) set in an off-grid community where women and nonbinary people can exist free from “people trying to force so much on [them]. Capitalism for one; monogamy for another.” The theme of collective resistance continues in some of the other stories. In “Timebox,” written with Eve L. Ewing, a couple discovers extra time hidden in their pantry, pushing them to grapple with inequities in the way time is distributed. The last story, “Timebox Alta(red),” written with Sheree Renée Thomas, has a group of children create an altar that transports them through time and space, showing that you can’t build the future if you don’t dream it first. Studded with references to Monáe’s album Dirty Computer (2018), the book is a clever adaptation of music to a new form. Emotionally raw and with a wholehearted love for people, these stories will make readers long to forge deeper human connections by sharing and holding one another’s memories.
A celebration of queer and Afrofuturist science fiction saluting creativity in difference.
THE CITY OF DUSK
Sim, Tara Orbit (576 pp.) $17.99 paper | March 22, 2022 978-0-316-45889-4
As warring houses prepare for the death of an heirless king, a handful of young mages attempt to fix their world via forbidden magic. Taesia’s world is dying. Five hundred years after the Sealing divided the Four Realms, supplies in the hub city of Nexus have begun to dwindle, and the Cosmic Scale of magical energies that once flowed freely between the Realms is now dammed up. As a spate of magical crimes stokes the public’s fear of demon-summoning Conjuration magic, Taesia, the ne’er-do-well heir to House Lastrider, finds herself caught up in a conspiracy when her brother, Dante, devises a plan to use Conjuration to reverse the Sealing and restore order to their world. Dante’s unexpected arrest for the murder of a public official leaves Taesia without his guidance, however, and she must work to finish what he started. Of course, as readers might expect, neither Dante nor his sister has an adequate grasp on the ramifications of their choices. Also at work are a bevy of magic users from other Realms, some of whom are angling for a shot at the throne. Although fantasy readers will appreciate Sim’s attempt to create an expansive world in the vein of A Darker Shade of Magic or Gideon the Ninth, awkward infodumping crowds out any room that may have been left for character development. Perhaps more unsettling is the seemingly unending parade of names—from those of the unwieldy cast to the largely unexplained fantasy monsters— which will leave readers longing for an index. There’s a lot to love here, but the novel’s most interesting plot points and side characters get lost among the weeds.
An ambitious work of fantasy that unfortunately overcomplicates an intriguing world full of murder and mayhem.
romance
GO HEX YOURSELF
Clare, Jessica Berkley (384 pp.) $15.99 paper | April 19, 2022 978-0-593-33756-1
A woman who doesn’t believe in magic is hired by a witch.
When Reggie Johnson answers an advertisement to work at Spellcraft, she’s shocked to discover she’s been hired to be a familiar to an actual witch
