Death in the Spires, K.J. Charles. An excellent historical mystery, straddling the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Years ago, an Oxford student was murdered in his room; thanks to one small detail of this case, the surviving members of his group of friends know that one of their number must have done it. But no one has ever been convicted.

The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what’s become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who’s going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the “Seven Wonders,” and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say “basically” because it’s deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it’s one of them.)

I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who’s responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there’s a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation — for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.

Voyage of the Damned, Frances White. The writing in this book had me at the first paragraph. The protagonist of this book, for a little while at the beginning, almost put me off it.

I did come around to liking him, don’t worry. But when your protagonist’s firm goal is to make everybody around him hate him so much he’ll never have to attend an event like this one again, it’s hard for that not to grate somewhat on the reader as well. Fortunately, the plot steers him toward one person he’s less deliberately offensive toward, and from there things improve a great deal.

The setup of the story is bonkers, and the kind of worldbuilding that is unabashedly aiming for “vivid” rather than “realistic.” It feels reminiscent of L5R with the saturation turned up high: the land is divided into geographically and ecologically distinct regions (this one’s a desert! this one’s a swamp! this one consists entirely of frigid mountains!) ruled by animal-themed clans, with a wall closing them off from not only the monsters to the south but the clan that betrayed them all, the Crab. Each clan is ruled by a Blessed, the single person who has inherited a magical power from their founder; the rules around how that inheritance works are tailor-made to be the worst possible version of bloodline-based magic. Now the next generation of Blessed have been put on a giant magical sailing ship to go conduct a special ritual . . . but Ganymedes, heir to the scorned Fish Clan, is hiding a secret: he doesn’t have a Blessing. It went instead to one of the many unknown bastards his father sired in direct contravention of the rules for the Blessed. Hence Ganymedes needing to convince everyone to stop (reluctantly) including him in their reindeer games; his best hope is to get himself disinvited from any future events, then cross his fingers that he can live out his life without anyone ever realizing the truth.

Mind you, his life may be shorter than he expects. Because on board this ship where the only passengers are the twelve Blessed and the magical servitors assigned to each one, somebody has started murdering the Blessed. Be prepared for a ton of people to get whacked — but also, many of those people are extremely terrible, because wow is this society dysfunctional from top to bottom. The ending of the novel promises change in that regard, but don’t look for deep exploration of what that’s going to look like; the focus here is almost entirely on the narrowing pool of possible murderers and why all of this has been set in motion. Quite enjoyable, if you like the voice and aren’t put off by Ganymedes being a deliberate asshole!

A Thousand Li: The Third Realm, Tao Wong. The abrupt cessation of my fiction reading last year in favor of a face-first dive into research put a big pause on my progress through this series, a self-published cultivation saga. I’m not sure if this was a good point at which to pick it back up or not — I think so? This book (as the author himself notes) is much more episodic in structure, being loosely organized around Wei Ying wandering the land as a Core cultivator, i.e. someone powerful enough that he has to learn to be more thoughtful around when and how he intervenes in other people’s conflicts. Dunno what to say beyond that; if you’ve read up to this point, you already know what to expect from the writing. If you haven’t read up to this point, for the love of little fishes, do not start here.

The Kings in Winter, Cecelia Holland. I’ve known about Holland’s historical fiction for ages, but this is the first time I’ve picked it up. The story here leads up to the Battle of Clontarf, which pitted one Irish king and his Viking allies against other Irish kings, but the actual vector of the narrative is the chief of an invented clan that nearly got wiped out some years ago, who cannot seem to convince anybody that all he wants is for his people to be left in peace in the new territory they’re occupying. He has a very clear-eyed understanding that pursuing vengeance for past slaughter will only result in more slaughter going forward, and he would very much rather stay out of the impending war. Unfortunately for him, this is a society in which social ties and the actions of others may drag you into conflict whether you want it or not. The book is short and the narration is fairly sparse; it is, overall, not a very happy book. It’s good, though, and I’ll certainly look up more of Holland’s work.

A Crane Among Wolves, June Hur, narr. Greg Chun and Michelle H. Lee. In general I like Hur’s Korean historical novels, but for some reason this one didn’t work as well for me as the others I’ve read. Some of it was that I felt like the side characters latched onto and helped the protagonist a little too readily, but mostly I think it comes down to the elements of the plot not cohering well enough.

Hur seems to have a fondness for setting her novels during the eras of Korea’s worst royalty; in this case, that’s Yeonsangun, during the period when he’s become a murderous tyrant. The protagonist, Iseul, has come in search of her sister, one of the countless women taken by force to be a concubine. Her first plan for rescue is to figure out the identity of a mysterious killer, called Nameless Flower, who’s targeting royal officials, since Yeonsangun has promised a boon to anybody who solves that puzzle. Everybody else assures her, though, that the king will never actually let her sister go, so Iseul instead winds up joining forces with a rebellion that seeks to overthrow him, by way of a prince (a fictional one, I think) with whom there is of course a romance.

The problem here is that the focus is all over the place. The Jungjong coup, while a real event, is mostly being driven by historical personages, so while Iseul and Prince Daehyun do things, that part of the plot ultimately doesn’t hinge on them. Meanwhile, Iseul remains determined to identify Nameless Flower, even though that’s . . . kind of irrelevant? He kills one sympathetic character, but in general it’s hard to be invested in unmasking a guy who’s targeting royal officials — until eventually he targets Iseul and Daehyun, but he only does that because Iseul has figured out who he is. So I felt zero urgency around the resolution of that mystery. Possibly I would have cared more if I’d been better able to follow the backstory behind who the killer is and why he’s doing this, and possibly I would have followed it better in print rather than in audiobook, but overall my reaction that plot — which takes up a significant portion of the book — was “meh.”

I recommend Hur’s books overall, but I wouldn’t start with this one. It felt much more YA in its tropes (Iseul and Daehyun start off very tsundere) and much less well-knit than the others.

The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri. That big hiatus in my fiction reading put a more significant dent in this series than A Thousand Li, because this story is far more politically and culturally intricate, and I’d forgotten quite a bit since reading The Jasmine Throne. I persevered, though, and I’m glad I did, because I do enjoy this trilogy. The romance dynamic between Priya and Malini doesn’t quite hook me (the emphasis on “I’m not a nice person”), but I am absolutely here for the rest of it, especially everything going on in Ahiranya. A shallower series would say, look at these oppressed people and their religion which the empire has tried to stamp out of existence; now they get their religion back, yay! This series says, yay, they got their religion baOH CRAP THIS ISN’T GOOD. You get vibes in the first book that the yaksha are not warm fuzzy nice nice: well, here those vibes become very in-your-face plot. I am keenly interested to see how the various religions of this setting shake out in the finale, and what path the characters manage to chart through the threats they face.

Forget the Sleepless Shores, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend.

This is not a collection I could zoom through; the prose is too dense with imagery for that. The pieces collected here are less intensely sea-focused than As the Tide Came Flowing In, but that’s still very much present. Some of them I’d read before, like “The Dybbuk in Love” and “The Trinitite Golem,” but many were new to me. There’s a lot of folklore and mythology woven in here, too; I wouldn’t have minded author notes to unpack the references I didn’t catch on my own, as I’m sure there were some.

The Novice’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Historical mystery, and the good news is that the series is seventeen books long! I can keep reading about Sister Frevisse for quite some time, if I choose to — and I probably will for a good long while, because I quite enjoyed this.

These are set in the fifteenth century, with a Benedictine nun as the protagonist. (The internet tells me about a third of the books actually take place at her convent; the rest find reasons for her to be out in the world at large.) As with Death in the Spires, this is not a mystery you read for the mechanics of the crime and its investigation. Instead you’re here for other things, like the exploration of life in medieval England, especially but not limited to religious life, and the ways in which the specifics of the culture at the time shape both what kind of investigation you can conduct and why someone might commit murder in the first place. I was mildly frustrated with how long it took the characters to ask a couple of fairly obvious questions, but I will accept that as the price for scenes like the nuns holding the line against a bunch of armed men by singing the “Dies Irae” at them until half of them slink away in shame.

Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn, narr. Jane Oppenheimer and Christina Delaine. This was not as fun as I was hoping it would be.

It must be admitted up front that I’m always iffy on assassins as protagonists, even when they’re assassins for a good cause. In this case, the “Museum” — that being the euphemistic name for the organization our murderous protagonists belong to — was founded to hunt down Nazis who had gone into hiding after World War II; when the supply of surviving Nazis began to dry up, they shifted their attentions to arms dealers, sex traffickers, and the like. But, y’know, history and (unfortunately) the present moment are full of people who were convinced they were killing for a good and righteous cause, hence me being iffy on the whole thing.

However, when you tell me the assassins in question are a bunch of women in their sixties about to retire from their careers, I do perk up and decide to give it a try.

Things I liked: the continual attention to the fact that, while these characters are in good shape, aging is leaving an increasing number of marks on them. (The touch of the central character, Billie, taking a moment for some repair stretching after winding up in an unexpected bout of hand-to-hand combat was very nice.) The tour of interestingly scenic locations in which to kill people. The fact that the women all had distinct personalities, and they didn’t always get along despite generally being friends.

But although the review where I heard about this book led me to believe there was going to be a good amount of “get revenge at last for all the sexism you’ve battled throughout your career,” that featured much less than I expected. The events that led to the Museum suddenly deciding to off the protagonists on their retirement cruise turned out to hinge not on them, but on internal Museum politics that — because they’ve largely been offstage — I didn’t much care about. I thought the story would show the characters attempting to clear their names as they dodge assassins sent to take them out; instead they pivot very quickly to “I guess we have to kill all the people in charge of the Museum” and only after several murders do they attempt to make a bid for exoneration, at which point it rings rather hollow. And I think I got wrong-footed with the book when two of the characters stand around complaining that their target (who can hear them) is taking too long to die, because that tipped it way too far over into unsympathetic territory for me, rather than fun murder caper times. By the time I got to the final act — wherein the change of audiobook narrator meant a character who’d had a nice voice in the flashback segments suddenly acquired a bad cockney accent and vocal fry — I was willing to finish it out, but not much more than that. I wanted this to be lighter on its feet than it was, and more ferocious on the topic of feminism, and I didn’t quite get either.