The Night Bell, Inger Ash Wolfe

Brilliantly written: the type of mystery where there's so much going on that, at the end, you have to sit around, thinking, to figure out how all of the strands connect and resolve. Smart, with biting humor, "The Night Bell" involves a cold case series of murders from fifty years before, and the book zigzags between 2007 and 1957, involving the detective's own past. There's also her mother, a firecracker of an old lady, who is having periods of dementia in which past and present flow together, which was also brilliant. I can't recommend highly enough - I'm afraid to say more because I don't want to spoil anything in the book!

I stumbled across "The Night Bell" because I've been reading cold case mysteries, but the first book of the Detective Hazel Micallef series (which I instantly requested from the library), is "The Calling."

For some reason, the following was one of my favorite bits from "The Night Bell" (although the prologue is nothing short of phenomenal). Hazel, as a local detective, has a combative relationship with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has swooped in and taken over one of her cases, effectively blocking her investigation on everything else. She's sitting in the command trailer with the CO, Superintendent Martin Scott:

     "God. I've always found you guys inscrutable, you know?"
     "Us guys? We are also women and dogs and horses."
     "Sometimes I wonder if you're just pretending in those shiny uniforms of yours."
     He looked at her steadily for a long count. It made her feel she shouldn't blink. "I assure you," he said, "we are not pretending."
     She rose and pushed her chair away. Its feet bumped awkwardly backward over the red, tight-pile carpet. She reached out, a little stiffly she though, to shake his hand.
     "It's true you have to watch out for the horses," he said to her at the exit. "They are both inscrutable and mischievous. Come back if you like. Command is lonesome." 

The Restless Sleep, Stacy Horn

Non-fiction. Horn's account from inside the NYPD Cold Case Squad, published in 2005. Four cases are covered in-depth, with side-ventures into Property, DNA, the prison system, finances and internal politics, the history of the squad, etc., as well as the personality of the detectives and leadership. It's fascinating and largely depressing - well, I think you would have to be someone able to see the glass '1/4 full' - at least there is a squad, and committed detectives, out there, but the task is Sisyphean and desperately underfunded.

'Success,' when it comes, takes months, years, and is by no means guaranteed. Not all of the cases Horn chooses get resolved. Worse, one really grasps how illusory and deceptive the concept of 'closure' is: If the detective is lucky enough to solve the case the perpetrator may or may not be already dead, or in prison for another crime, or the ADA may simply have no interest in prosecuting an old, possibly shaky, case. If the perpetrator is prosecuted, he or she may not end up in prison, or end up serving a ridiculously short time. Even when 'justice' is served, the families realize - after an initial euphoria - that nothing essential has changed: their loved one is still just as gone, the tragedy that has warped their lives continues.

Horn has a keen sense of the permanent, destructive tragedy of murder that gives the book tremendous poignancy, an emotion many of the detectives themselves are not able to openly feel because it would cripple their functionality. They roll their eyes at the idea of themselves as heroes - most of the job involves endless paperwork and hours on the phone, interviews and re-interviews - but in some cases they do remove a previously unknown killer from the streets, and sometimes the heroism is just that someone cares enough to make an effort on behalf of a victim everyone else seems willing to forget.

One of the unexpected things I got from reading this was a sense of the peripheral damage of 9/11, how much of a wrecking ball it was because everything else got put on hold, or lost, while they dealt with the immediate problems of a mass casualty event. It also skewed funds and attention toward counter-terrorism, which means less manpower and resources for all the other departments in this zero sum situation.

One Damned Thing After Another, Jodi Taylor

The title comes from Arnold Toynbee's famous quote "History is just one damned thing after another." A self-described blend of "history, adventure, comedy, romance, tragedy, and anything else the author could think of," this is the first book in the Chronicles of St. Mary's series involving a group of eccentric Brit time-travelling historians - if you liked (or wanted to like) the TV series "Timeless," this is all that and miles better. It is hilariously funny, although there are moments of tragedy as well, but you read it for the comedy. Taylor hooked me in the first chapter when she described the time travelling device:

"The tiny space smelled of stale people, cabbage, chemicals, hot electrics, and damp carpet, with an underlying whiff from the toilet. I would discover that all pods smelt the same and that historians joke that techies take the smell then build the pods around it."

I had downloaded the second book in the series before I finished reading the first because I knew I just wanted to keep going. You either like the St. Mary's crowd or you don't, but they reminded me of Pink's lyrics:

So raise your glass if you are wrong,
In all the right ways,
All my underdogs,
We will never be never be, anything but loud
And nitty gritty, dirty little freaks

They all do seem to be in one non-stop, zany house party that occasionally spills over into history in which anything goes.

My one complaint, and I feel a bit guilty making an issue of it, but it grates on me, is that these are not, truly, historians - I mean in the sense that they don't really care about history. History is the backdrop against which the story plays out, but it is window dressing, in a way, for example, that Connie Willis' "Blackout" never is, and the characters have a shocking lack of interest or reverence for anything in it. If you can overlook that, it's just a fun book.

     Peterson rushed past. "Come on, Max! Swans in the library!"
     "What? How?"
     "Who cares?" Good point.
     In the distance, I could hear shouting. And screaming. Familiar sounds. St. Mary's thundered past on their way to make a crisis considerably worse.
     It was nice to be home.

The Shadow Child, Joseph A. Citro

This gothic mystery started slow, grew on me in the middle, and then went in a direction I didn't care for. Citro specializes in Vermont/New England and tall tales involving horror and the supernatural, both in his fiction and non-fiction.

I'm not, generally speaking, into horror. I prefer justice. But what I found most interesting was a statement in his bio at the end in which he describes his early fascination, growing up, with the woods and mountains of Vermont as both rustic comfort and the Unknown, so there's this sort of mesmerizing blend throughout of L.L. Bean Catalog and creepy horror. You get the feeling of people living on the edge of something amoral or downright evil: something out of the control of humanity.

The Fifth Queen, Ford Madox Ford

I bogged in "The Benefactor" (FMF's chronologically previous work) and skipped ahead to "Fifth Queen," hoping for the Tudor version of Tietjens. Ford's Henry VIII does bear a physical resemblance (heavy, slow-moving, with immense personal dignity and a sense of tragic disillusionment), but misses Teitjens' facile brilliance and principled integrity.

The real focus of the book is Katharine Howard (FMF's spelling of her name), the future fifth wife of the king. It is a highly romanticized view of her, which has more in common with Valentine Wannop in "Parade's End" than actual history, but she's a spunky, passionate, interesting character to follow. For Ford, being able to correct mistakes in Latin on the fly is one of a woman's sexiest qualities!

Where the book succeeds is in creating an atmosphere of dread and Machiavellian intrigue. It's also worth reading for the unique (in my experience) style and language - 1540 mediated through 1905 (roughly). Where else are you likely to run across the word "goosetherumfoodle" in a line of dialogue? There are fascinating, tricky characters, like Lady Mary (the future Queen Mary), and a lady in waiting nicknamed "The Magpie," or the evil but persuasive Throckmorton, and the king himself, who moves through this world with ultimate power and yet seems hopeless thwarted and heart-sick.

One of the things Ford does very well is indirection: a character will demand an answer to a question and not receive it for pages, or in such an ambiguous fashion it creates more questions. It makes the scenes and exchanges of dialogue more intense, but does add to the meandering quality of the book - it's rarely clear to me what Ford's characters want or where the plot is headed. I adore the (brilliant) winding, chronologically nonlinear zig-zag of "Parade's End," but in this novel where the narrative is straight-forward the wandering bothered me.

But one wades through Ford's archaic language and seemingly-directionless plot because there are moments of such psychological astuteness.

"Being young, she felt that God and the saints alike fought on her side."

And in a line that feels especially resonant in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo:
"Nevertheless, she made no comment. For she knew that it is the nature of men calmly to ask hateful sacrifices of women. But her throat ached with rage."

There is a stunning conversation between Throckmorton and Katharine in which he accuses her of looking at the world as black and white where it is grey - this is not the days of Plutarch that she venerates in which right and wrong seem so clearly delineated - and then he suggests that even this is a mistaken impression - the world has always been grey and no man, or woman, is completely good or evil.

Beyond Physicalism, Edward F. Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Paul Marshall (Eds.)

Beyond Physicalism is the companion book that follows Irreducible Mind. Both are massive collections of jargon-heavy, scholarly essays that map out the fringes of the science and philosophy of mind and then survey various attempts to provide the outlines of a Grand Unified Theory for it.

Kelly writes in the opening chapter: "Our a priori commitment to conventional physicalist accounts of the mind has rendered us systematically incapable of dealing adequately with the mind's most central properties. We need to rethink that commitment." He draws comparisons with the field of classical physics, which had to be substantially rethought to make room for the more fundamental realities of quantum mechanics.

One of the things I like very much about these essays is that they show that the word 'science' describes a method, not a subject. These are intellectually serious people grappling with outlying data rather than dismissing it as 'impossible' and therefore not worth study.

The fringes interest me. I also find, from what previously I've read, physicalist accounts (perhaps I should say 'attempts to account') for consciousness deeply unconvincing. Personally, I lean toward what Beyond Physicalism describes as panentheism, and a view expressed, rather poetically, by Williams James in his last published essay:

. . . we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and pine may whisper to each other with their leaves . . . But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences . . .

• "Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher' in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589

Omega to Alpha: Love with the Perfect Robot, Cai Marshall & Tom Cayler

I'm a sucker for robot stories, particularly the--what would you call it, coming of age?--variety where they contemplate and evolve. Probably the lingering remnants of my philosophy background. This was a fun read about a spunky search-and-rescue robot who gets loose and doesn't want to go back to the lab and the violence-driven scientist who built her.

The concept is there, and the chapter endings have punch that keeps the story moving. I feel like it needed to travel--more locations--one of the things I learned from George Lucas. And the end felt a bit abrupt to me because it doesn't resolve the robot's situation and doesn't give you a final scene to the romance: we know he's there, but she's--how will she react?

There are two particular issues that interest me about robots-on-the-loose stories:

The first is the need for secrecy: People can't know this is a robot. It's a problem of integration, in a way, and not unique to robots (monsters like Frankenstein, aliens like E.T., occasionally superheroes). There's a strong sense throughout that if people knew this 'other' was among them they would capture/study/weaponize/kill it. But how does anything conscious function satisfactorily in isolation or perpetually in disguise? So that's one problem for the story like this to tackle.

The second is the Pinocchio problem: Does the 'other' try to become human? How well does it succeed? Can it succeed? More interestingly, should it?

Brain Dead, Ellen Dreyer

This is a mystery that grew on me and I ended up really enjoying it. I loved Timmie and Murphy, who are smart, fast-talking, joke cracking can-do people who reminded me of Julia Spencer-Fleming's Clare and Russ, even though the romance ends up being secondary to the main story. Dreyer has a background (if I remember correctly) as an ER trauma nurse, and the novel is chock-full of medical thriller detail. The complexity of the main relationships, particularly between Timmie and her aging father with Alzheimer's, was handled with deep insight and sensitivity. I also thought it was brilliant that Timmie (an alcoholic's daughter) and Murphy (a recovering alcoholic himself) walk a fine line: attracted to one another, but wary, and with good cause, of getting involved.

Transience, Stevan Mena

A dying detective tracks a serial killer following a series of clues from a 9-year-old girl who seems to be remembering a past life in which she was murdered. Really enjoyed this. There were several well-placed red herrings and I was surprised by the reveal of the killer. I thought the ending was fantastic. Mena's previous work has been in film, but I hope he'll write more. I've added him to my Amazon Author follow list.

The Forgetting Time, Sharon Guskin

Absolutely searing. That's not a word I use frequently, but the emotion here is SO intense. I've been comparison reading along with the new mystery I'm writing: the topic of reincarnation and children remembering past lives is one that has intrigued me since reading Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker (whom Guskin quotes throughout the book), and I loved how Guskin handles the concept here. The mystery is secondary to the human drama, but all the characters were handled with such sensitivity--well worth reading.

A Watery Grave, Joan Druett

Read this recently for a mystery book club - I thought the premise was brilliant: the protagonist is a half-Maori, half-American linguist named Wiki Coffin aboard an 1836 exploratory mission, trying to solve a series of murders. This is the first in the series.

I loved the setting and concept. Most of Druett's previous work is history, and I felt the book still bore the stamp, which is great if you're into the historical details, but occasionally felt disconnected from the plot. What didn't work for me in the end, besides this question of balance, was that the 'detective' figures out the key to unraveling the initial murder after his side-kick (but in time to rescue him, although the rescue itself was exciting).

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, Matthew Sullivan

I thought this was quite a find. The author, Matthew Sullivan (no relation to my character, also a novelist, with the same name in The Adulteries of Rachel), has an eye and appreciation for the ways in which human weakness and vulnerability can draw our hearts.

I felt for all of his characters deeply, and I thought the story was told brilliantly. Particularly striking was his account of a murder from the perspective of a child: how unfamiliar things might sound like familiar things out of context. He has a real sense of how trauma can impact and stay with people - children and adults - for years and years, something that's often missing from thriller & cozy murder mysteries.

Additionally, Sullivan's writing is fun: he uses surprising verbs and adjectives, or uses them in surprising ways. Many sentences have this delightful, lively quality. I'll be looking for more of Sullivan's work.

The Night Strangers, Chris Bohjalian

Contemporary paranormal mystery/suspense. A family in the wake of trauma moves to a creepy house in small town New England where the eccentric residents are way too friendly.

What is probably most striking is that the multiple POV narration includes extensive 2nd person present ("You do this; you remember that," etc.), which I found distracting rather than engaging. It also seems to me that there are two main story lines, and while you'd expect cross-over points, they really feel independent of each other. The book starts with a fantastic description of the house and a small door nailed shut with 39 iron bolts, but this ultimately felt under-utilized.

I did get more into the book as I kept reading. At its best, I felt the book worked as a metaphor for a family dealing with trauma.

Dead Simple, Peter James

Happiness is reading a fantastically well-written murder mystery and discovering it's the first of 13.

Contemporary Brit. procedural.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

I read this as part of a mystery book club and was seriously underwhelmed: NYT bestseller? Really? Although possibly I'm simply the wrong audience. Sloan's 30-something 1st person (present tense) narrator is a techie hipster with a deep love of fantasy and "the smell of old books." There's a kind of weird (to me) affection and fascination with the idea of books, which has nothing to do with the content of them. There's also a serious Harry Potter-for-adults vibe that passes straight over my head, up to an including "mysterious" words which are really just Latin.

I was hoping for a dead body, but the plot is an "unravel the code" quest: The goal is overblown, and the ultimate answer yawn-inducing. The climax relies on similes. There is no character arc to speak of.

Most of the fun of the book is a series of intriguing environments. Some of these, like the description of the Google campus, I found interesting; some I just found implausible (people in underground caverns wearing black robes under the streets of New York). Maybe someone in my book club will be able to explain the appeal of this book to me. Then again, maybe we're all too old :)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick

I recently reread Philip K. Dick's classic novella. There was a lot in it I didn't remember, and a lot that struck me differently this time around. I found the descriptions of the 'post-World War Terminus' world - it's desolation and crumbling decay - particularly vivid and compelling. Also the emphasis on compassion and the value of life. The scene in which the android Pris systematically snips the legs off a spider in order to see how many it really needs in order to walk was . . . ghastly.

The whole Mercerism plot-line still confuses me, especially where it weaves in and out of normal reality, and I continue to be confused by what, exactly, Deckard, has learned or gained from the entire experience, particularly when the toad turns out to be electronic. I find Deckard's, well, let's call them 'romantic' relationships for lack of a better word, stilted. At least, they feel forced and don't ring true for me.

Do Androids Dream is, of course, the inspiration behind the 1982 "Blade Runner." It's quite possibly been 20 years since I've seen the movie, and man, the tech does not age well :), so I'm glad Ridley Scott's team has rebooted the concept in the new "Blade Runner 2049" coming out in October.

I don't want to offend anyone, because I know the original was HUGE (iconic, groundbreaking, and so on). I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of noir as a genre - I am frequently and deeply cynical about life, but it's too easy to wallow there - and if you cut out all the establishing seedy city shots and Harrison Ford drinking, that's possibly a third of the Director's Cut. What struck me this time, oddly, was the pervasive scent of middle-aged white man's fear: tenuously employed in a city that looks more like Shanghai than Los Angeles, in danger of having his neck crushed in the grip of a woman's thighs/crotch, etc.

And then there's the violence, toward women in particular, although Ford and Hauer exchange a lot male-male in the end. The, again I'll use quotes, 'romance' between Deckard and Rachel has an ugly quality (She's saying no, but I know she wants me) that I had forgotten. It's even more ugly, I think, because they've realized she's an android, and so there's an element of her being a machine, less than a person, something he can do whatever he wants to. I think, incidentally, there was a missed opportunity to double-cast Rachel and Pris (although I'd hate to miss Daryl Hannah in this role), because in the book they're the same model, and I liked Deckard's ethical dilemma of being on a mission to kill a copy of the one he's realized he has feeling for.

Mercerism, naturally, is gone from the movie version, as is any sense of reverence for life. If anything, Deckard's world is packed with (ethnically non-white) people. There is no equivalent to the 'spider' scene, and with that, I think we lose what's wrong with these androids and why they might need to be killed, even if it looks a lot like murder.

This is actually something that bothers me about both the book and the movie. The androids, mostly, attack when threatened, but people do that too. Some of them are cruel and violent, but then, some people are too. They've committed murders, but then, lots of humans have done that as well. I'm not sure what it is about being an android that justifies destroying them.

Mindscan, Robert J. Sawyer

BRILLIANT concept. If "Self/Less" is a 2 body problem, this is a 2 mind problem. I loved the opening chapters setting up the split. Particularly insightful was Jake's "oh crap" moment when he realizes that copying is not the same as transferring, and the new I quickly becomes 'he' in Jake's mind, whereas the new I quickly slips into thinking of his previous, original self as 'it.' I thought the narrative split into two separate I's was absolute genius.

And then I expected more of a plot (because of this, XYZ happens). The main event, however, is really a long legal trial. I give Sawyer enormous credit because it's a thought-provoking extended legal, philosophical, cutting edge scientific, meditation on the definition of personhood. Overall, however, the book feels . . . curiously heartless to me, lacking the kind of character change and emotional arc I look for.

"De-Mystifying Mindfulness" Coursera.org

Wanted to put in a recommendation for this FREE online Coursera course I'm currently taking, led by Chris Goto-Jones of Leiden University.

Coursera page

It's got a great combination of short video lessons with practical exercises. If you've thought about meditating, or the stress-reduction benefits of meditation, it's worth checking out. Love it!

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindfulness/home/info

The Plutonium Blonde, John Zakour & Lawrence Ganem

Best kind of campy, tongue-in-cheek, private investigator-saves-the-world adventure story with a SF twist. Absolutely HILARIOUS. I kept laughing out loud when I read it. I only regret I didn't stumble across this series sooner!

     BB-2 suddenly dove to the ground and rolled, lightning quick, away from the weapon-fire. The attackers tried to keep up. They sprayed the area wide with energy blasts and explosive shells .... But it was like trying to catch a quicksilver bullet with a butterfly net. They were four steps behind from the start and in three heartbeats' time, BB2 was upon them .... 
      HARV's face replaced the video images on the screen. "The encampment was protected by three dozen heavily armed guerrilla soldiers. It took BB-2 less than six minutes to raze the entire compound ...."
     "And it's our job to stop her," I said. "Well, I guess we're going to have to outsmart her."
     "I hope my next human has your sense of humor," HARV sighed.

"Self/Less" (2015)

The science of the premise is a bit of a stretch, but the story is just SO terrific. Worth remembering the only thing worse than death is trying to cheat it ....

"Legend of the Black Scorpion" | "Royal Deceit"

Click for imdb link

(2006) Chinese movie, also known as "The Banquet" or "The Night Banquet" starring Ziyi Zhang ("Crouching Tiger"), You Ge, and Daniel Wu ("Into the Badlands").

I don't usually review movies on my blog, but this is an extremely interesting version of Hamlet, and worth mulling over. Many of the Hamlet elements are there: the prince who comes back to find his uncle has killed his father and seized the throne, a nod to the ghost, a nod to Ophelia and Polonius and Laertes, the play-within-a-play, a nod to being sent off to death, the poisoned cup, and final showdown in which almost everyone ends up dead. Lots of martial arts swordplay and gorgeous cinematography.

Then there are the innovations (this is the exciting part!). The knockout is the Empress Wan who is established in the opening narration as having been a young woman in love with Prince Wu Luan (Hamlet), until Wu Luan's father took her as a wife for himself. The uncle kills Wu Luan's father and inherits the Empress Wan, so that the "Gertrude" in this case is four years younger than "Hamlet," and is, in a sense, both lover and step-mother. Who needs an Oedipal complex? On top of this, the Empress Wan is a brilliantly enigmatic, tricky character--a survivor, and a Romantic--one has the sense she does not entirely know herself, and her actions are driven by conflicting motivations. She completely steals the show.

I was also very impressed by the handling of the Emperor Li (Claudius). He is controlled, brutal, and yet you can see he's utterly smitten by the foxy Empress Wan, and gradually over the course of the movie lets down his guard to her, only to be devastated by her betrayal. Much more human and heart-breaking than one usually sees a Claudius. He's also dangerous, established early on by his treatment of the Empress and dissenters in the court, which is important because so often Hamlet (in Hamlet) can come off as too comfortable, too secure, too in control, in which case the audience is left wondering why Hamlet doesn't just get a move on with things. By the middle of this movie, it looks nigh impossible for Prince Wu Luan to get anywhere close to the Emperor, let alone kill him, which ups the intensity of the drama immensely and adds an element of "How on earth is he going to do this??"

Add I should mention Xun Zhou ("Cloud Atlas") who plays Qing Nu, the Ophelia character, who formed an interesting love triangle with Wu Luan and the Empress. I wish I could see all Ophelias like this, but unfortunately, we are left with Shakespeare's flower-strewing neurotic.

Click for imdb link

If you are interested in versions of Hamlet that shed light on Hamlet, I also recommend (1994) "Royal Deceit" with Gabriel Byrne, Helen Mirren, Christian Bale, and Kate Beckinsale. The attempt here was to go back to the original Danish source story for Hamlet, and the setting feels like Beowulf, but it is fascinating to compare--this is essentially what Hamlet would be if Hamlet were not philosophizing and overly burdened with conscience or thought, so essentially a straight revenge story. The Ophelia story line makes way more sense, the trip to England makes way more sense, and the ending satisfies the premise: Amled returns from exile, kills the bad king, marries the English princess he picked up, and lives happily ever after. Typical Hollywood revenge/action blockbuster for Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson or Liam Neeson. So what's interesting is how flat that feels. By omission, you realize how complex a character Hamlet is, how complex Shakespeare has made what started as a straight "kill the bad guy" revenge story.

Beyond Trans, Heath Fogg Davis

B&N link

Eye-opening and fascinating. I don't usually review the non-fiction I read, but this is one of those books that's too important to pass up.

There are many things in Davis' book to think about. What struck me most was: 1) becoming aware of the prevalence of sex-classification - all of the forms and sources of identification which ask or label us as M or F - which there really isn't a good reason to collect; 2) how we have historically compressed a range of human sexual identity down to an either/or choice which is not always applicable; 3) that "separate and equal" rarely is, and that the strategy of accommodation continues to reinforce binary sexual identity and sexism; 4) that we all suffer when we force people into boxes.

Cerex XIV, David Gallagher

Novella-length SF robot-human love story riff on The Twilight Zone's "The Lonely" (but this is much, much better). It also reminds me of one of my favorite films, (2009) Moon with Sam Rockwell, which is another quiet, SF, psychological thriller.

The narration in Ceres XIV alternates first person between "Him" and "Her." The highlight of the piece for me is the clinical, dawning awareness of what it's like to experience passion: liking, attachment, love, jealousy. And then there's a nice "ticking clock" and mystery to unravel - which I won't spoil! Brilliant.

Liberation's Kiss | The Mad Scientist's Daughter

I'm comparison reading a lot of robot-human love stories these days, and they really run the gamut. I tend to like robots more like Asimov's than (2004-9) Battlestar Galactica humanoid cylons which are really for all intents and purposes just more human characters with the occasional cyborg/mechanical oddity. (There are other things I liked about BG. Well, up through Season 2.)

Liberation's Kiss is squarely in the SF Romance camp: light on science, heavy on two young, beautiful characters finding wholeness & happiness by coming together. Worth reading as an example of the genre. My favorite scene was where she crawls inside his form fitting yet expandable suit which he then zips up to hide her. The feeling (safe, protected, skin-to-skin) was the emphasis, but the ungainly bizarreness of the image appealed to me.

I think that's indicative of what I was missing throughout: Philip K. Dick-style ungainliness, oddity, complication. But I respect that readers have different tastes, and I think there's more than enough room in the universe for a wide variety of SF.

The polar opposite is one of my new favorite books, Cassandra Rose Clarke's The Mad Scientist's Daughter, in which the setting is near future, realistic, and you never forget the robot is mechanical. Even when you're rooting for Cat and Finn, it's deeply disturbing, and the relationship they evolve is anything but straightforward. In fact, the times when Cat thinks it's uncomplicated are the moments she later matures to realize reflected her selfishness and how she too has denigrated his personhood, even while claiming to be a champion for his right to be a "he" instead of an "it." The style is lyrical; the emotion is gut-wrenchingly intense. I couldn't put it down.

Hearts Akilter, Catherine E. McLean

I thoroughly enjoyed this novella-length tech-heavy sci-fi rom-com. There's a great beginning; it feels like it could easily have been expanded into a full-length with a few more plot-twists. The romance felt a little compressed, but I liked the main characters and the quirky style so much I didn't mind. Henry, the one convinced he's having a heart-attack, is quite possibly my favorite robot ever. I would love to read more SF by McClean.

Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Judd Trichter

I thought this story about a man on a quest to reassemble the robot/woman he loves was fascinating. There were moments along the way I found shocking, thought-provoking, touching, and laugh-out-loud funny. One of the things I found most intriguing was that many of the parts he's searching for have been incorporated into other or new robots, with their own personalities and goals, which often don't include giving back the pieces he's after.

Late Victorian/Edwardian Romance novellas for $0.99 or free

Absolutely splendid - found myself unconsciously smiling while reading. Shaw's best lines are here, but with different resonance given the gender switch, which makes them fresh and surprising. The gender reversal worked brilliantly from my perspective: Higgins (as a man) is insufferably patronizing, and the power dynamic (gender, class, wealth, education, even age) is so extremely tilted in his favor that I have trouble enjoying the original, but Moss ingeniously upends the apple cart, resetting the balance to something closer to a tug-of-war, and the result is completely delightful.

A sweet story about a spunky, socially conscious late Victorian heroine and her romance with the troubled but good-hearted Mr. Beaumont.

Racy version of a "North & South" relationship between a young upperclass woman and a factory owner gentleman/not a gentleman she can't help but be attracted to. It was a fun, quick read with snappy banter. I liked "Swept Away" enough that I picked up her full-length "Unlaced," which is Book 1 of her Ashton/Rosemoor series, although I'm less taken with this and have stalled in the middle.

The explicit scenes, rather than the relationship, are the focus here, but if you like big hats and tea parties, the setting is fun.

Sweet "Jane Eyre"-like romance about an orphan who takes a post as a governess to an earl.

Sylvester, Georgette Hayer

Audiobook read by Richard Armitage ("North & South," BBC 2004). This was my first encounter with Hayer and smashing good fun - thank you to Linnet Moss' excellent blog for putting the word out about this audiobook. If you have been missing Mr. Thorton, you will enjoy the proud, stiffly formal, cold & hot Sylvester.

Union Street Boarding House, Jamie Michele & Mary Rinehart

Practically perfect in every way. I thoroughly enjoyed this well-written, 1907 Pittsburgh murder mystery--the kind where there's an obvious suspect and the complications cast doubt, culminating in a courtroom drama (I love these). The characters, especially the slippery narrator, are intriguing, and the dialogue rang true for me, which is iffy in a lot of historical fiction I come across.

Here's the catch--and maybe it's only me. The book is 'co-authored,' and not in the sense that I'd expect. Jamie Michele specializes in rewriting little-known texts, so this is her rewrite of Mary Rinehart's original "The Case of Jennie Brice." (You can find the text on Project Gutenberg here.) There is A LOT of overlap. Without going line-by-line, I'm not confident how much is Michele and how much is Rinehart. I suppose the good thing is that Michele is bringing texts back into circulation--I stumbled across "Union Street Boarding House" and only found out about Rinehart when I read the book's  Acknowledgements page. And it is worth noting that Michele gives Rinehart credit on the cover and in her acknowledgements, but this idea of 'rewriting' still makes me twitchy.

Regardless - it's a fantastic, novella-length read and a darn fine mystery!

A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

Recently rewatched and then promptly reread A Room with a View, which is one of my Very Favorite Books in the universe. It is not as sophisticated or subtle as Forster's later Howard's End or A Passage to India, which are objectively better, but how can one not love it?

There's so much to like: the spunky yet painfully muddled and vulnerable Lucy, George with his Note of Interrogation and the Eternal Yes, the kind Mr. Beebe and irrepressibly middle-class-and-loving-it Honeychurchs, and my favorite character, expansive, forward-thinking, gentle Mr. Emerson senior.

The older I get, the more I appreciate Forster's handling of the two priggish "villains" of the piece: Cecil and Charlotte, and the fact that I feel I need to put the word "villains" in scare quotes is a huge part of it. He handles what could have been stock characters with enormous humanity, so that one sees and feels their limitations, and even their redeeming qualities. One ends up feeling sorry for them, but realizing that while they need our compassion, they (and their beliefs) should not be allowed to squelch the life and passion out of others.

I love both the book and the 1985 movie (NOT the 2007 remake, which was a travesty). One of the things rereading the book did was impress me with how brilliant Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is (the third member of the Merchant-Ivory team). It is faithful in all the right ways--most of the screenplay is line-for-line dialogue from the book, at times intelligently compressed--and she dramatically improved the end. Forster has a very long, torturous scene for Mr. Emerson and Lucy, which I think Jhabvala cleverly distilled, and for Forster, Charlotte's role in bringing about the resolution is a sort of surprise-twist-ending, whereas in the screenplay it's a more organic piece of the narrative that wraps up the character and respectfully shades away to leave the final focus on the two lovers.

Above all, I admire Forster for his emphasis on kindness. He has a horror of artificiality and snobbery, although again, he is able to have compassion for even the characters whose lives are dominated by them.

The Mind-Body Problem, Linnet Moss

I haven't been in academia for years, but it still feels like home to me, and Moss captures it perfectly in her three stories set in her made up Parnell State University. One of the things that's fun about Moss is that her Parnell State U. characters weave in and out of each other's stories. She writes sensually--about food, about clothes, about sex--in a way that is sensitive rather than aimed at titillation, and there is a huge difference. These are thoughtful, nuanced, grown up stories about middle-aged couples trying to understand themselves and form relationships with an emphasis on healing.

Moss changed forever how I think about sex in books with a post in her blog in which she writes:

"Authors of “literary fiction” usually avoid writing sex scenes, thereby banishing from the lives of their characters a key aspect of human experience. I suppose one could argue that the mechanics are the same every time, so there is no need to describe it. But that shows a distinct lack of imagination, does it not? If there is something to be learned about the characters by looking in more detail at their sexual selves, it seems to me that to drop a veil of discretion over a sex scene (“Afterwards…”) is a failure of nerve. People vary greatly with regard to their physical, emotional, and moral responses as sexual beings. Admittedly, in many stories this information may be irrelevant. But if the story deals with the mystery of two people’s attraction to each other, it is (or can be) a key to character."

If you are a fan of Alain de Botton's work, in particular his "Course of Love," Moss is a great choice. You can find her books on Amazon.

Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty

I am so excited about this book I'm posting even before I finish it, which I usually don't do, but this is EXACTLY what I love in SF: a mystery to be solved, a complex narrative that incorporates non-linear elements, an ethical/philosophical exploration of cloning. Brilliant! I can't wait to read more of Lafferty's work!

A Colony in a Nation, Chris Hayes

Tremendous. Eye-opening. I want to be a better human being after reading this.

Swallowcliffe Hall 1890: Polly's Story, Jennie Walters

I absolutely, thoroughly, totally enjoyed this YA novel about a young maid servant coming to work at a country manor. Walters knows her stuff inside and out and vividly recreates the world and a servant's experience. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the Swallowcliffe Hall series.

A Crimson Dawn, Janet MacLeod Trotter

This is one of those stories where the main characters endure so much that it starts to feel as if no happy ending can possibly make up for what they've been through. Possibly a bit melodramatic in places for my taste--I prefer mysteries--but I read it straight through and enjoyed it. I particularly liked that the story focuses on the domestic experience of World War I, which interests me. I'm simultaneously reading Catherine Bailey's Black Diamonds, and it was fascinating to get a fiction & non-fiction view of the (harrowing) turn-of-the-century experience of being part of a coal mining family.

A Loss of Angels and The Intrusion, John Linwood Grant

Free on Smashwords

I really, REALLY enjoy Grant's work. He captures the sights and smells of a seedy, late-Victorian/Edwardian world in which disturbing, mysterious things can happen and frequently do that reminds me of the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

These two novella-length mysteries follow the assassin Mr. Dry and introduce memorable additional characters: Dr. Alice Urquhart, Abigail Jessop, and Henry Dodgson. A Loss of Angels is a brilliant piece of writing, with a twist so satisfying I can't reveal it. The Intrusion includes supernatural elements which shade the mystery into horror. Everything's on the table: You can't be sure what will happen next.

If you like period mysteries, please go to Smashwords and download these books - THEY'RE FREE!

Free on Smashwords

Grant on the series:
"Tales of the Last Edwardian is a series of connected and stand-alone stories which will eventually include at least two novels. Most of the stories include aspects of spiritualism, the occult or other psychic phenomena, especially at their late Victorian and Edwardian height. They reflect the work of the early psychic detectives and psychiatrists, and do cross into crime fiction in the process. A world of gas-light and lobotomies, electric pentacles and the garotte. They are, discounting any whimsical touches I might use in writing them, fairly dark tales of murder, possession, fanaticism, abuse and suchlike. More flowing blood than flimsy ectoplasm, let's put it that way. The timeline runs from around the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902), through the Edwardian age and into the horrors of the Great War and its aftermath. It continues in and after World War Two, until it reaches the present day. The phrase The Last Edwardian will explain itself in the later stories. For those of a geographical disposition, the stories are set in London, parts of Yorkshire and various other nooks and crannies around Great Britain."

Date Night at Union Station, E.M. Foner

I picked this up hoping for that rare blend of sci-fi and romantic comedy. It's not bizarre enough to be Douglas Addams, and it's not Connie Willis by a long shot, although this is clearly a popular series - there are rave reviews on Amazon and the author has published 11 books (as of this date).

The world Foner creates is charming, with likeable characters in comic situations: the plot essentially follows two main characters going through a string of bad blind dates until they find each other in the last chapter at which point, they seem like the last two normal people in the galaxy, and perhaps that explains why they connect--? 'Fall in love' would be too generous.

Romance, Ford Madox Ford & Joseph Conrad

This is the second book Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad collaborated on, and I was excited to see, particularly in the first 1/4, the beginnings of what I would recognize as Ford's style: delayed decoding, impressionistic flashes. It works especially well in events where the narrator himself is overwhelmed, unfamiliar - there's a capture in which he has a bag over his head, or a scene later in which he witnesses a hanging. The second half of the book proceeds in a straight-forward manner.

My main issue with Romance and the reason I wouldn't recommend it unless one is especially curious and fond of either writer, is that it is a very long and rambling book. I had no sense of shape: where we were going, was this the middle, or near the end? In some ways this is an unfair judgment, because the expectations of books were different.

But then there are the brilliant bits:

...as if the oar had been a stalk of straw, as if the water of the bay had been the film of a glass bubble an unguarded movement could have shivered to atoms. I hardly breathed, for the feeling that a deeper breath would have blown away the mist that was our sole protection now. It was not blown away. On the contrary, it clung closer to us, with the enveloping chill of a cloud wreathing a mountain crag. The vague shadows and dim outlines that had hung around us began, at last, to vanish utterly in an impenetrable and luminous whiteness. We seemed to breathe at the bottom of a shallow sea, white as snow, shining like silver, and impenetrably opaque everywhere, except overhead, where the yellow disc of the moon glittered through a thin cloud of steam.

I never connected deeply with either the narrator/protagonist or his love interest, Seraphina, but there is a minor--very minor--character of a sailor's wife whom I found fascinating and really shows Ford and/or Conrad's genius: 

She is upset by the fact that Kemp (the protagonist) is traveling alone with the young woman, and takes it on herself to lecture both of them (especially him). Fine and good. So far, she's a pretty stock character. But, Kemp realizes "she had been, in reality, tremendously excited by this adventure. This was the secret of her audacity." She's wringing her hands, full of righteous indignation, but the truth is she's excited - the whole situation produces a sort of vicarious thrill in her. It is, in a way, her brush with 'romance.'

The Man Who Knew Infinity, Robert Kanigel

I usually don't review the non-fiction I read, but this is too extraordinary to pass up. S. Ramanujan was an Indian autodidact and mathematical genius who came to England in 1913 to work with the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy. Ramanujan's story is astounding, and the partnership between the two is a friendship complicated by the differences in their age, religion, and culture.

Kanigel's book is beautifully written. He manages to work in some of the math in a way that sparks the curiosity of a non-mathematical reader, and the book is crammed with enchanting 'you-are-there' detail as it moves from Madras to Cambridge.

If you don't have time for the book, I hope you'll see the 2015 movie staring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons because Ramanujan was a phenomenal genius. You can view the trailer on YouTube.

A Study in Grey, John Linwood Grant

Number 4 from "The Science of Deduction" series my "Curious Case of the Clockwork Doll" appeared in.

I absolutely loved reading John Linwood Grant's Edwardian era mystery centering on Grant's own characters - Military Intelligence agent Captain Redvers Blake, Henry Dodgson, and Abigail Jessop - with Sherlock Holmes weaving in and out. There were clever, witty exchanges that made me laugh out loud, plot twists that surprised me, and a horrifying ending, with lots of great historical detail throughout - perfect!

I didn't want it to end because I liked these characters and this world so much with its Pendulum Club, London War Office, and creepy seance scenes.

I'm looking forward to reading more by this author.

A Most Extraordinary Pursuit, Juliana Gray (Beatriz Williams)

Many of my friends who are writers think "genre" is a dirty word, code for dashing off something "crowd-pleasing" without any creativity to it. I am very fond of genre fiction: to me it's an implicit promise to the reader and the creative challenge lies in delivering it better than well.

I suppose in all fairness I was warned: the back of A Most Extraordinary Pursuit concludes "piecing together the strange events of the days before his disappearance, Truelove will discover the folly of her misconceptions--about the whims of the heart, the motives of men, and the nature of time itself...," which I took as the sort of hyperbolic drivel one is apt to find on the backs of novels. I was wrong. I love mysteries, I love science fiction, but when the time-traveling villains showed up 3/4 into what I had taken to be historical fiction I just got mad. That, as it turned out, was just the beginning in a series of increasingly improbable plot-unfoldings, and a casual reference to Einstein and 'more things in Heaven and Earth' and lines like "You will possibly not believe me, when I tell you what came next. I should not have believed it myself, if I encountered the incident in a book or play..." or, worse, "Science and religion both rose up and forbade the very idea; such a brazen act had no place in a logical universe," did not help.

All the other ingredients were right where they belonged, of course: the unattached spunky first-person narrator, the charming cad with whom she trades zingers in their game of Romantic ping pong, an adventure-mystery to exotic locations in a period setting. I even went cheerfully along with the ghosts, which I thought were brilliant, and the out-of-body experience, which was daring. When I squinted, I could imagine Elizabeth Bennet, and sometimes Peter Wimsey.

What Williams does well, I think, is world-building - she writes highly detailed, sensorial fiction with sights and sounds and smells - occasionally too obtrusive for my taste, but it is a matter of taste, and I respect that it takes a lot of research and is hard to do.

A Dangerous Deceit, Marjorie Eccles

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I had read Eccles' The Firebird's Feather previously without falling in love with it, but I really enjoyed A Dangerous Deceit. The plot of the book takes place in 1927, and concerns lingering secrets from 1900.

I find Eccles' style very heavy on description, which seems like it would be a good thing--it made me realize where the T.E. Kinsey book felt thin--but there is so much detail and backstory that scenes become labyrinthine. It can be hard to follow the dialogue or action of a scene with so many detours, and the next thing I know I'm preoccupied with trying to remember whether it's the sergeant or the captain who has a scar, or orange hair, or both, and I have no idea what they're talking about. Still, given a choice, I'll take more period detail over less.

Having fought my way past the halfway point, however, I picked up speed. Possibly because by then I finally had a grasp of who everybody was and how they were related or unrelated to each other. The last chapters were downright page turners, although I was feeling very happy that I had "solved" the 3rd murder ahead of time, only to discover no conclusive answer is ever given (bodies #1 and #2 do get explained). Serves me right, I suppose, for being smug. I was a bit put out. Always a risk when you guess the mystery: I still prefer my solution to Tana French's In the Woods.