2026/047: The Blue, Beautiful World — Karen Lord

The entire planet was at a tipping point, ripe for salvation or destruction, angels of deliverance or barbarians. And, in the meantime, bread and circuses made life bearable and occasionally diverting. [loc. 354]

Earth is struggling with the effects of climate change. A disparate group of people -- rock star Owen, VR pioneer Peter Hendrix, Kanoa and his friends in a World Council Global Government workgroup, the mysterious Tariq -- are trying to prepare the world for first contact with various alien factions, some of whom are already present on Earth.

Listening to this novel did not work well for me: I lost track of who was who, and didn't appreciate the abrupt changes of focus (from Owen's gigs to Kanoa's studies to Peter's discussions of identity). The narrator's various accents jarred, and for much of the time I had no idea what was going on. 

This is a problem with me, rather than with the book: but I suspect it didn't help that this is actually the third in a trilogy, a fact I wasn't aware of from the book's page on Libro.fm. I didn't engage with most of the characters (though I did like Kanoa, and what little we saw of Owen's sister) and I kept wanting more detail, more background.

I'll definitely read another novel by Karen Lord, but I will read it in (e)print, rather than listen to an audiobook.

2026/046: Night Life — John Lewis-Stempel

I keep looking around the dark corridor for secret drinkers, then understand that the beeriness is the fermenting combination of all the midsummer scents, and it is old and original. A Neanderthal standing on the bank of the river, spear in hand, would have known it. [p.108]

Subtitled 'Walking Britain's Wild Landscapes After Dark', this is a short collection of pieces about Lewis-Stempel's thoughts and experiences of walking at night -- on the Welsh coast, in the Lake District, and on the Thames Path at Hammersmith (adjacent to the London Wetland Centre). He's a farmer, and in some of the essays there is a lovely sense of comfortable familiarity with his land. I realise that I miss having 'my' land, the places I'd walk every day, the places so familiar that I notice any change and every seasonal recurrence.

Lots of fascinating facts and observations here: I learnt that birds flying in a V formation can fly almost twice as far as one bird flying alone; that the word 'delirium' is rooted in the notion of going off track when ploughing; that brent geese are named for their dark colour, 'brent' being a corruption of the old Norse 'brantr', burnt.

I appreciated his unease when in London ('I'm fritted by the city at night') but could not help thinking that I would not be keen on walking alone, at night, along the darkest part of the Thames Path. (Men's fears are different from women's.) Overall, though, I really appreciated his observations and his sheer joy in existing as part of the natural world.

2026/045: The Casefile of Jay Moriarty — Kit Walker

"...since when do children’s authors incite hate crimes?”
“In this case, just within the last few years,” Jay said. “If Clay was a bigot before that, she at least kept it to herself.” [p. 139]

Collects the first five instalments of the 'Jay Moriarty and Sebastian Moran' series, in which Moriarty is a brilliant hacker (and trans man) and Moran is ex-SAS. Together, they fight crime... The setting is contemporary London: the crimes they fight range from a cover-up of lethally-faulty aviation software to -- as per quotation -- a transphobic children's author, Anya Clay, revealed to be appropriating money from her own charity.

I read the first of these novellas, which is available for free at Amazon, and promptly purchased the collection, because I like Moriarty (and his evolving relationship with Moran) so much. Fun, pacy, violent and cunning: highly enjoyable, though animal lovers may wish to skip 'Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger'.

2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculia

Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming. [loc. 2810]

Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)

Then, one night at a charity event -- where Tuesday encounters local tycoon Nathaniel Arches, and maybe flirts a little -- a flamboyant old man named Vincent Pryce drops dead in front of Boston's finest. And somehow Tuesday, Dex, Nathaniel and Dorry wind up playing Pryce's post-mortem game ('an adventure of intellect, intuition and imagination that begins now and will culminate on the night of my funeral'), with a prize that might be a share in Pryce's vast wealth ... or an item from his collection of haunted artifacts.

This is a multi-layered novel: the puzzles of the quest itself; a murder mystery; Tuesday's growing, and reluctant, attraction to 'Archie'; ghosts, Edgar Allan Poe, Goth culture, karaoke bars and urban exploration. I loved how centred Tuesday was, and related to her liking for solitude. I liked the ways in which the protagonists each had something haunting them (not literally) and how each of them confronted their past and their future. The descriptions of Boston made me want to go back. (It's been decades.) And the supernatural (or magic realist?) elements -- Amelia Earhart's goggles! -- were a delight. Plenty of humour, and a compassionate and hopeful vibe.

I've owned this for years, and only got around to it because it fitted one of the reading challenge prompts ('day of the week in the title'): I loved the novel, and I'm so grateful for that prompt! Looking forward to reading Racculia's other novels...

... when you gender-flip Indiana Jones, you don’t come up with Lara Croft—the last thing Lara Croft is is a fallible everywoman—but instead an independent, knowledgeable, determined…spinster. Indiana Jones is a spinster: self-supporting and self-contained, unmarried and unlikely to pair with any one partner.... Indy’s singleness, however—if it’s remarkable at all—is aspirational, not pejorative. So Tuesday Mooney was also inspired by an attempt to play with that double standard, to investigate ideas about independence and partnership, family and friendship, and all the other forms of love and human connection that make a life full. [Excellent interview with the author (which also explains why the title is Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts in the US]

2026/043: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef — Cassandra Khaw

Human is very similar to pork, after all. (I know, I know. Religious pundits say that cannibalism is forbidden in the Quran anyway. The ghouls say that this isn’t quite the same.) [loc. 61]

Despite the title, there's very little (if any) actual cannibalism in this novella. True, Rupert Wong (ex-mobster with a murky and karmically unpromising past) works as a chef for a wealthy ghoul family, serving up gourmet meals concocted from the bodies of hapless tourists: but that's only one of his jobs. He's also working off that karmic debt through community management: listening to baby ghosts who want to unionise, doing the accounts for the Hungry Ghost festivals, and -- the focus of this tale -- investigating the death of the Dragon King's daughter, slain by Furies. Yes, the Erinyes. Yes, they are Greek, but apparently there is a visa waiver scheme in place...

This is a fast-moving, vivid caper set in Kuala Lumpur and in the Ten Hells. Rupert is not a wholly sympathetic character (to put it mildly) but he has a degree of power (magical and mundane), and his role as seneschal gives him access to the most powerful players in the supernatural realm. I especially liked the God of Missing Persons. Khaw's scene-setting is packed with sensory detail, sometimes gruesome and sometimes revolting (nobody changes a corpse's underwear) and peppered with unfamiliar terms: I learnt kwee kia, bomoh, ang moh. There's plenty of dark humour and some tantalising hints about the wider supernatural world. And it's the first in a series, of which I own at least one more volume. 

2026/042: The Keeper — Tana French

Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen beneath the official enquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it'll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice. [loc. 1069]

Third in the trilogy that began with The Searcher and continued with The Hunter. Cal Hooper's life in the small village of Ardnakelty seems settled: he's more or less engaged to Lena, and Trey is finding friends and possibly even romance. Then a young woman -- Rachel, fiancee of local big-shot Tommy Moynihan's son Eugene -- is found dead in the river. Obviously suicide, is the consensus: but there's some doubt, because the coroner's report indicates that she drank antifreeze. And Lena may have been the last person to see Rachel alive...

The dark underside of Ardnakelty reveals itself, with its 'strange intricate weavings invisible or meaningless to any outsider', the 'webs that bind people to one another, to their land, and to their past'. There are old stories here: about the ownership and inheritance of land, about the power of rumour, about dirty deals and corruption, about loyalties, memories, and fiercely-held beliefs. Cal, Lena and Trey, all outsiders in some sense, find ways of belonging (and ways in which they can never belong) to Ardnakelty. 'This place is fucking lethal,' says Trey, who may have a chance to leave.

I still don't find this series as fascinating as the Dublin Murder Squad novels, with their hints of the supernatural and their close focus on a single character: but I am impressed by French's gift of dialogue -- the rhythm of it, the idioms and the Irish -- and by her ability to make the village as much a character as Mrs Duggan, or Mart, or Bobby who used to hunt UFOs but now has a girlfriend. And her writing has immense emotional weight. Sometimes I had to pause and reread a paragraph to appreciate the nuance and the layers.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 2nd April 2026.

Rumour is one of Ardnakelty's primary weapons, the glinting flipside of its dark silences. [loc. 3618]

2026/041: Temeraire — Naomi Novik

You may value their lives above your own; I cannot do so, for to me you are worth far more than all of them. I will not obey you in such a case, and as for duty, I do not care for the notion a great deal, the more I see of it. [p. 196]

Audiobook reread: I first read this as an arc in 2005, and reread in 2019. I still love this book a great deal, and had a better sense of the pacing when I listened to the familiar procession of events. Splendidly read by Simon Vance, who gives Temeraire a very slight 'foreign' accent, perhaps hinting at his mysterious origins. I'm so tempted to buy the audiobooks of the whole series...