Aug 02 2026

Real Tigers by Mick Herron

The Slow Horses series is ostensibly about the fuck-ups and cast-offs of British intelligence, gathered together in Slough House and given make-work designed to push them into resigning, while they hope for redemption and a chance to re-join the regular Service. Nevermind that that plan has never worked for anyone; each hopes to be the first exception. In many ways, though, the series is really about what happens to an intelligence service when outside threats recede and internal jockeying for money and power becomes the greatest game. An external threat is no guarantee that intramural rivalries will recede — one of the CIA’s early and obviously non-public slogans was “bigger than State by ’48” — but the lack of one for the UK of the mid-2010s brings the jockeying front and center in Mick Herron’s books. Budgets are shrinking, and everyone wants to preserve theirs. Ministers want to show the civil service who’s boss; long-serving civil servants want to make clear that ministers come and go, their wisdom and experience are indispensable. Private ambitions or vendettas and the public interest are often difficult to distinguish for those on the inside. Everyone above a certain rank, it seems, wants to lay traps for their rivals while leaving no fingerprints or traceable files.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron

Catherine Standish’s mistake is not turning back into Slough House as soon as she has an inkling that she is being followed. Or maybe a little bit earlier when Sean Donovan, a man from her past, addressed her by name on the street not long after she left work. “Because Catherine Standish — never a [field agent] — knew this much too: that chance encounters might happen in some places, to some people, but they never happened here, to spooks.” (p. 11) Not to spoil the plot too much, but by the end of the first tenth of the book, Standish has been kidnapped, and she knows some of the people involved. The rest of Real Tigers is devoted to finding out who they really are, what they are up to, and trying to get her back in one piece.

One of the nice things about the series is that the Slow Horses are not secretly super-competent agents, relegated to internal exile by mistake. They make genuinely bad decisions all on their own and only sometimes manage to evade the consequences. River Cartwright, grandson of a Service legend, runs off impulsively at the first sign of information that might lead to Standish, and gets into far deeper trouble. Two of the other denizens decide that their hunt will be time wasted and go off for ice cream instead. The one with a gambling problem ducks out for a quick flyer on a horse race, gets lucky, and then spends a chunk of the afternoon losing the winnings and then some; meanwhile, his colleagues are counting on him to do things he is manifestly not doing.

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Aug 01 2026

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

In contrast to Cinder House, The Summer War is not a classic fairy tale re-told in a more modern idiom but a re-working of fairytale elements, a new story told entirely in the register of a fairy tale. Thus the kingdom that is the setting for a bit more than half of the story is called Prosper. The adored older brother is named Argent, and he shines like the silver that is his namesake, particularly when seen through the eyes of his younger sister Celia. “… Argent, whose mother had been the daughter of an earl, mattered in every way there was. He was Father’s heir and the best knight in the world, so everyone said. Argent was very handsome, too, with black hair that curled and blue-grey eyes, and he’d played with Celia ever since she’d been born. He’d been trained at home, instead of being sent to the king’s circle, and she’d run after him as soon as she could run.” (p. 3) Argent had been well disposed toward Celia, but fundamentally she had not registered, in that way that’s common among older siblings busy clearing a path into the world. Argent also has a burden that he has kept to himself since he was twelve, and his father, Grand Duke Veris, savior of the kingdom and cleverest of warriors, had shown him what happened to men who loved other men.

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

“I remember them begging you for mercy. You didn’t give it. You ordered them caned on the spot, right there in the court. I remember every blow, the screaming. And afterwards, you stripped them of their names, to spare their families the shame of them. And you ordered them taken to the border of your lands and thrown out, never to return, on pain of death.” …
“I was only twelve,” Argent went in. “I barely even knew, yet. I didn’t understand what you were trying to do. All I understood was that there was something wrong with me, the same thing that was wrong with them, and you were showing me what it meant. What you had to do about it. And I didn’t see anything I could to stop being wrong, because I hadn’t done anything to start. So afterwards, I was only waiting for you to come and take me, to do the same.” …
“I was so terrified,” Argent was saying, with an odd sound of wonder in his voice, as if he couldn’t believe the scale of his own fear even now. “Nothing has ever frightened me since. Everyone calls me brave, but it’s only that nothing else comes close enough to that fear. I lived with it for three days and three nights, waiting, until I couldn’t bear it any longer.” (pp. 8–9)

Argent tried to kill himself by taking nightshade. Celia has been eavesdropping on what Argent has returned from the Summer Wars to tell their father. “Yes, Celia wanted to whisper. Yes, I remember. It was a vague, half-forgotten terror in her mind: the time when Argent had almost died. She’d been five years old, and she’d already loved him more than anyone else in the world.” (p. 9) He was uppermost in her mind, but not vice versa. And so it is in the encounter between Argent and their father; Argent has planned the confrontation for a large part of his young life, and probably never once thought about how it would affect Celia. Having reminded his father of the past, Argent renounces his name and returns the sword that his father gave him. “And I will go now, away beyond the border of your lands, and never return again.” (p. 11)

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Jul 31 2026

Tantalizing Tales — July 2026 — Part Five

Hello, dear reader! It is the last day and last Tantalizing Titles column of July, and while the weather has gotten better around these parts, it still feels too hot to do anything but stay indoors and read a good book, like one of these upcoming titles!

First up is a guaranteed blockbuster sure to serve you chills alongside its thrills, Riley Sager’s The Unknown. I loved his Middle Of The Night so much that I forgave him for the desperately mid The House Across The Lake. Hopefully, this latest novel will be far more of the former than the latter.

The premise is extremely promising. Struggling actress Marin Keane can’t believe her luck when she lands a role in what’s sure to be a major motion picture. The plot of the film revolves around the mysterious disappearance of five women a century earlier from New Avalon, an island in the middle of Vermont’s Lake Faraday. The island was a commune for spirit mediums right up till 1926, when the women living there simply vanished, leaving behind five dresses hanging eerily from an oak tree in the island’s center.

Rumors have abounded ever since. Some of the locals think that the women simply up and left, while other people claim that they were murdered. Even darker rumors of a seance gone terribly wrong both haunt the popular imagination and serve as the basis for this upcoming film project. Marin is intrigued, especially when she, the rest of the cast and the director are sent there for a weeklong research trip before filming even begins.

Things get spooky fast. When the filmmakers become stranded there and people start vanishing, Marin will have to figure out a way to escape with her life. The way out could lie in the diary of Daisy Rue, one of the mediums who disappeared. If Marin solves the mystery of what happened back then, will she be able to stop history from repeating?

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Jul 30 2026

Murder On Vacation by Rosie A Point & Charles Timmerman

The latest installment of the Cranberry Creek Word Search mystery series is another winning combination of cozy mystery and related word search puzzles!

Abby Jones is thrilled to be going on a romantic vacation with her boyfriend Nathan and her pampered cat Reggie (short for Sir Reginald.) Sure they aren’t going very far from the center of their small town, but a long weekend at the Lakeside Gardens bed and breakfast located on the outskirts of Cranberry Creek is a charming escape from their everyday lives. While Abby loves her job running the town’s only bookstore, sheriff’s deputy Nathan could definitely use a break from his overbearing boss, Sheriff Swift.

There are only two other guests at the B&B which, despite its designation, has a full service if limited menu dining room. Tim Kowalski is a shy artist, while Hunter Ashford is a debonair traveler. The B&B owner Jenny Krueger seems to often be at odds with her chef Brenda Schulz, but that’s really the only wrinkle in the otherwise idyllic landscape of this lakeside inn.

That all changes when a mystifyingly locked dining room one morning is opened to reveal a very dead Jenny inside. She’s sitting at a table with a cup of tea and a suicide note. Nathan immediately calls the police, who put the inn on lockdown. Soon enough, it’s revealed that while Jenny did indeed die of poisoning, her suicide note is highly suspect. Worse, all signs point to Nathan as her killer, despite his seeming lack of motive.

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Jul 29 2026

Black Arsenal edited by Clive Chijioke Nwonka & Matthew Harle

Contrary to the “editors” stated intentions, I very much enjoyed this book as a celebration of Arsenal and how it intersects with global ideas of Blackness. I think it’s weird to assume that a celebration of the subject would necessarily negate a close examination of it: a concept isn’t a person, and it’s feelings won’t get hurt if you rightfully critique the parts it could improve upon. In fact, to celebrate Arsenal’s ties to the Black community without looking at the dark side of the relationship — which in this book is presented almost entirely as a handwringing over capitalism, on which more later — would be infantilizing, and not something the thoughtful reader would want.

Tho speaking of infantilizing, I spent a lot of time wondering exactly who this book is for. On the one hand, it caters to an audience so far removed from sport and popular culture that it feels the need to explain the concept of, for example, hype in boxing in the most pompous way I’ve ever encountered. These academic chapters are so tedious, and bookend the volume so comprehensively, that it almost feels like it’s trying to turn the average reader, whether Arsenal fan or otherwise, off of its very own contents.

Fortunately and on the other hand, you have an engaging oral history that not even the academics can wholly suck the joy out of. While Paul Gilroy’s opening essay has its moments, the book only really feels like it comes alive with Amy Lawrence’s reporting on Kevin Campbell’s reaction to the North Bank mural containing only white faces. The subsequent firsthand accounts of what it means to be Black and an Arsenal player, staff and/or supporter are almost uniformly compelling, as are the fascinating insights into the ways that the relationships between Blackness as a cultural entity and Arsenal as a brand continue to evolve. This is a book that both lives Arsenal and explores the lived experiences of Black people engaging with what Arsenal stands for. I do wish that Gail Lewis’ closing chapter on the intersectionality of being female, Black, gay and an Arsenal fan was more about that and less about her ability to self-regulate and prescribe the same to others based on inflated credentials, but the many references to Clive Chijioke Nwonka’s work in the piece are a likely reason for why it was chosen to cap the volume instead of, say, Baroness Lola Young’s less pedantic but equally lived-in entry.

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Jul 28 2026

Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Mattia de Iulis & Jordie Bellaire

Comic books, y’all. Ngl, I bailed from being a regular comics reader — I even had a box with a weekly pull list at my local comics store up till that point — around the time of Marvel’s House Of M fiasco in 2005, because I was so tired of reboots (and crossovers, but that’s another story altogether.)

So I kinda wish I’d known that Absolute Wonder Woman is a title that also comes from a rebooted line, DC Comics’ Absolute Universe. Aside: I can’t be the only person wanting to drop the silent e from the end of the adjective and chortle in a Russian accent, can I? Anyway, this Absolute Universe is a grimmer, darker world (yes, that sound you’re hearing is the audible rolling of my eyeballs) where superheroes are raised in hell instead of paradise. In Diana of Themyscira’s case, this is quite literal: instead of growing up as the beloved only child of a tribe of Amazons, she is given to the exiled witch Circe to be raised in the Underworld.

When a monstrous threat emerges to jeopardize the safety of Gateway City, a helmeted Diana emerges to save the city, first from Harbinger Prime and its minions, then from the greater threat of the Tetracide. Along the way, we learn more about Diana’s upbringing, her powers and how she escaped from Hell (tho not how she happened to show up in Gateway City just in time to save its residents. Maybe that’ll be explained in a future volume.) We’re also introduced to her supporting cast, including some well-loved names such as Steve Rogers, Etta Candy and Barbara Minerva.

As far as reboots go, I didn’t hate it, tho I did spend a lot of time thinking this would have been awesome as a story that was about another kickass Warrior Witch who had nothing to do with the Amazons. Wonder Woman has no monopoly on the cross-section of being female and powerful and kind, after all. This story would have been cool as hell were it about an original property, with kudos to Kelly Thompson for writing it so well.

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Jul 27 2026

The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo & John Picacio

When I opened the part of the Hugo 2026 voter’s packet for Best Professional Artist, I did not expect to find an entire kid’s book in there! I’m so glad I did tho, as this is a gorgeously illustrated, heartfelt book about grief, culture, and learning to mourn in a healthy way.

It’s Dia de los Muertos, and Cala’s family is busy preparing for their annual festivities, culminating in a visit to the graves of their dearly departed. Cala isn’t feeling it this year tho, as her beloved grandfather has recently died and she just can’t stop being sad about it. But she goes along with everyone else, who give her space in her sorrow even as they expect her to fulfil her familial responsibilities in helping to get things ready.

But by the time they get to the graveyard that night, Cala is feeling entirely dissociated from everything, so much so that she barely pays attention to her surroundings… until she realizes that she’s lost. The graveyard is dark and confusing, and she has no idea where her family is. And then a rider comes out of the shadows…

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Jul 25 2026

In the Time of Five Pumpkins by Alexander McCall Smith

At the beginning of In the Time of Five Pumpkins, Botswana is waiting for the rainy season to begin. The days are hot, the nights do not offer enough relief. People are on edge and prone to be short with each other. That tendency shows up in the novel’s first case, a husband who is worried that his wife is having an affair. That type of case is bread and butter for a private detective agency, but the man, Mr Excellence Modise, gets off on the wrong foot by presuming that Mma Makutsi is a secretary. She did train at the Botswana Secretarial College — and earned ninety-seven percent on her final exam — but she has long since having a role in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency with anything like a modest title. In fact, the first chapter contains another round of the long-running comedy in which Mma Makutsi gives herself another promotion in title, and Mma Ramotswe must take the change in stride. She also takes a moment to reflect on one of the most important reasons for her success.

In the Time of Five Pumpkins by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Ramotswe reminded herself of what she had learned from her father and of what she had picked up simply by being an engaged citizen. You could learn most things, she thought, by simply keeping your eyes open and listening. That’s where most people fell down — they would not listen. We spend a lot of time shouting at one another, Mma Ramotswe once observed. If we spent a fraction of that shouting time on listening, we would do far better. (p. 4)

The two detectives do not shout at Mr Modise, but they come closer to it than probably either of them would like to admit. They do listen to him, but he is very full of himself, and he compounds that by making sweeping statements, often wrong. But Mma Makutsi and Mma Ramotswe are professionals, and they agree to take his case, even if they decide afterward that they both have uneasy feelings about that man. Another brash man shows up soon in the story, this time in the company of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, Mma Ramotswe’s husband. This is Mr Freddie Mogorosi, a colleague in the motor trade. He owns a Mercedes dealership, but he has brought his own car in to Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors for a repair. He trusts Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s old-school skills. In the course of several conversations, he also seems to be cultivating Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as a friend, and furthermore wants to put his name forward for a position on a new board that will liaise between the government and the motor trade.

It is all a bit sudden for Mma Ramotswe, and more than a little suspect. She reminds herself that it is not easy for men to make new friends, especially established men with steady jobs and a family life that does not generally bring them into contact with new people. She further reminds herself that a spouse’s choice of friends is something that should be left entirely up to them, outside of extremely unusual circumstances. But when a fishing expedition unexpectedly involves a crocodile, Mma Ramotswe begins to wonder whether this might be one of those extremely unusual times.

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Jul 24 2026

Tantalizing Tales — July 2026 — Part Four

Hello, dear readers! This week we have a whole slew of exciting books to look forward to before and as August begins, and then a title I want to highlight from 2025.

First is a book I’m so eager to dive into. The late Victoria Thompson’s legacy lives on through her daughter Ellen, in the form of the latest Counterfeit Lady adventure City Of Promises. Excitingly, this title is also a crossover with her beloved Gaslight Mysteries series, bringing the main characters of both together for the very first time!

A pregnant Elizabeth Bates must pull out all the stops when detecting duo Frank and Sarah Malloy come to her husband Gideon looking for legal advice. The Malloys’ adopted daughter Catherine is a rising star of the stage. She also happens to be coming into her inheritance: a substantial trust fund that should set her up for life. But a man named Sebastian Talbot has recently turned her head, and seems extraordinarily eager to marry her as quickly as possible.

As a reformed con artist herself, Elizabeth smells a rat. She, Gideon and the Malloys are soon teaming up to get to the bottom of Sebastian’s plans and, more importantly, to ensure Catherine’s ongoing safety and well-being.

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Jul 23 2026

What Stalks The Deep by T Kingfisher

the title of what stalks the deep appears in white against an animal head on the coverAnd with this, I finish reading a very strong novella slate for this year’s Hugo Awards!

I actually haven’t read any of the other books in the Sworn Soldier series, a deficit I should rectify but definitely don’t have the time to at present. The Sworn Soldier of the series’ name is Alex Easton, a non-binary retired soldier from the fictional European country of Gallicia. In this novella, they and their aide de camp/best friend Angus have been asked to come to America to help a friend — and fellow survivor of the uncanny — figure out what’s happening in a West Virginia mine.

Since his misadventures with Easton in Ruravia, Dr James Denton has inherited a coal mine that his favorite cousin Oscar has undertaken the exploration of. Oscar has since gone missing, but not before sending a telegram asking for Denton not to come looking for him. Denton, ofc, has no intention of obeying, and rounds up some of the stoutest hearts he knows to come with him to investigate.

Easton swears that they’re not claustrophobic, but exploring the mine is the sort of thing that they have to keep challenging themself to do. As the party uncovers the place’s secrets, they’ll have to contend with cave-dwelling biological phenomena as well as threats from without… and within.

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