Maximum Shelf author interview: S. A. Cosby

Posted on March 13, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of All the Sinners Bleed, here’s S. A. Cosby: The Light in the End.

S.A. Cosby is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. His fourth novel, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron Books, June 6, 2023), introduces Sheriff Titus Crown, who has returned to his Southern hometown and is out to right some wrongs from the inside. When not writing, Cosby is an avid hiker and chess player.

Is Sheriff Titus Crown a hero?

S. A. Cosby

S. A. Cosby (Sam Sauter Photography)

He is, but like all heroes, he’s flawed. Flawless heroes are boring. It’s the reason they had to give Superman kryptonite. A perfect hero is aesthetically something to aspire to, but existentially it’s a bit of a dud. It makes the hero stronger that they’re able to overcome those flaws and still do the right thing.

How well does he fit the classic loner noir detective model?

He is a classic noir detective–even though he’s the elected sheriff, he has more in common with Philip Marlowe than with Wyatt Earp. But he has a strong support system that a lot of those classic heroes didn’t have. He has his dad, his brother–I really love their relationship–his girlfriend and some of his deputies. Even though he’s their boss, he does respect and lean on them. But at the end of the day, he is the lone man standing up for what’s right. He’s the one that has to face the devil, eventually, by himself, and that’s by design. I’m fascinated with what somebody does when they’re faced with a life-changing moment. How do they stand up? And it’s most interesting to me when they stand up in those moments alone. You know, character is what you do when no one is looking. I wanted to firmly put him in that situation.

How important is a character’s backstory?

Incredibly important. When I create characters, I do their full biographies, and a lot of the time none of that makes it into the book. I create long documents about their childhood, their past, their likes and dislikes, intrinsic quirks. Even things that will never be revealed completely still influence the character’s arc, their decisions, their decision-making process. You don’t need to know everything about Titus, but you need to know that the things that have happened to him have shaped him, have defined his morals and his idealism, and his small bit of nihilism.

Titus is part of that tradition of the lone wolf, but he’s also very much in the tradition of the local boy made good. Charon County is so much a part of who he is, whether he’s in the FBI or, now, the sheriff. There is a proprietary sense about him. He cares about this place, and he knows some of the people–most of the people–don’t particularly care for him because he’s the sheriff, but he still feels protective of this place. The roots of Charon are so deep in his psyche.

What makes for a compelling villain or protagonist?

Your protagonist is only as good as your villain. You need a villain that matches the protagonist in drive and intellectually, but also personality-wise. Eminem and Kid Rock were both coming up in Detroit at the same time as rappers, and people would ask him why he would never battle Kid Rock. And he said, because beating him wouldn’t have meant anything, because I don’t respect his skill. He didn’t see him as a worthy opponent. For Titus, I wanted the villain that he has to face to be a genuine threat, not just physically but intellectually, because I wanted his triumph to mean something.

When readers get to the end of the book, they’ll realize that Titus understands some of what the villain has gone through. That creates a pretty interesting dynamic, to show the differences between these two characters. There are elements in their background that are similar, but whereas Titus went the way of wanting to protect people and not giving in to the pain of his past, the villain chose another route.

How important is place to this narrative?

Place is important in all my stories, but I think it’s the most important aspect of this story. In my previous books I’ve written about place as a more general, macro idea. I’ve written about THE SOUTH, all capital letters, what that entails and what that means. I’ve spoken ad nauseum about how proud I am to be from the South but at the same time how much I recognize the flaws that are here. As an artist, I think it’s my duty to examine that. With this book I really wanted to delve into the micro of that, and what’s it’s like in a town like Charon, which has a deep history. It has this sort of mythic quality to it. The citizens experience it in totally different ways. The white citizens experience it differently than the Black citizens. The young citizens experience it differently than the older folks. This town can have a multiplicity of definitions based on who you are and what your background is. I think place gives the story its weight. Charon County is a secondary protagonist and antagonist in the book.

Is this a novel about race?

In Southern fiction four things will always come up: race, class, sex and religion. Those are the four pillars of Southern gothic fiction. All are represented to various degrees in All the Sinners Bleed. As an African American person, I’m always going to write about race, because race is always a part of the conversation for me. People ask, why do you have to bring up race? I didn’t bring it up. This country brought it up; my life brings it up. Race is important, because Titus is a Black man, the first Black sheriff in this town. But religion is also on the forefront, maybe even more so, because in the rural South, there is an incredible hypocrisy that comes up with religion. Small towns with 25, 30 churches talk about Christianity as a concept but not as a practice. Flannery O’Conner said she doesn’t believe the South is Christ-centered, but Christ-haunted. And I believe that’s emblematic of the hypocrisy of the modern Christian evangelical movement, that you purport to love your sisters and brothers in Christ, but you vote against helping people, you vote against empathy. You live in a world where you thump a Bible and worry about the lives of children, so to speak, but once those children are out of the womb you could not care less about them. I wanted to talk about all of that. Religion can be a hammer to break down doors or it can be a cudgel to beat you down, and I think it’s represented in both ways in the book.

Is it difficult or draining to write bleak stories? Or is there catharsis there?

It’s never as draining as you might think. I’m a pessimistic optimist; I write these bleak characters in these bleak situations, but my characters triumph in the end. Not without some difficulty, some wounds and some scars, but they triumph. I was raised Southern Baptist, and I have this Old Testament philosophy that “I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken,” to quote Titus’s father. I write these really dark, morally complex characters and situations because I want the good guys to win, because that doesn’t really happen in real life. If it’s going to happen anywhere, it should happen in my book; I’m the one writing it. So as dark as my characters and their situations can be, they come through with the light in the end.

This interview originally ran on February 13, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

Posted on March 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on February 13, 2023.

From S.A. Cosby, author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed is a lushly dark mystery set in fictional Charon County in Southeastern Virginia and starring a Black sheriff in a town that’s not at all sure it’s ready for one. Recently elected Sheriff Titus Crown is out to right some wrongs from the inside: police corruption, racism and profiling, law enforcers living above the law. He’s also dodging a few traumas of his own. Having come home to Charon County means he gets to live with and help his aging father, but it also means he’s reminded of his beloved late mother. His brother lives in town but rarely comes around. Titus has a local girlfriend who’s very sweet and good for him, but sort of unremarkable; he has a sense he should love her more. He’s haunted by the events that ended his FBI career in Indiana. Running a small staff of deputies in a small Southern town has its own challenges, mostly manageable ones; he hopes to redeem himself in this way from wrongs only hinted at.

But then there’s a call about an active gunman at the high school in town. In minutes, Titus is looking at a popular teacher of decades shot to death in his classroom, and a young Black man killed by deputies while the school–and via their cell phone videos, the entire Internet–watched. Before Latrell Macdonald died, “with a wolf’s snout in his left hand and cradling a .30-30 like a newborn in the crook of his right arm,” he spoke of crimes that make Titus’s blood run cold. The ensuing investigation will crack Charon County wide open, and challenge to the core Titus’s plans to clean up his hometown and make amends for things that happened in Indiana.

Titus is no investigative slouch. “His instructors at the Academy had their own version of String Theory. The way they explained it, there were invisible strings that vibrated unseen in the liminal spaces between sunrise and secrets, between rumor, shadows, and lies. Strings that pulled all this together. All you had to do was find the seam and unravel it. Or rip it apart.” His years with the Bureau and training under his friend and mentor there give him an edge on profiling and pursuing an enemy who seems determined to toy with him. He finds the remains of badly tortured and murdered Black boys and girls; as he investigates, the body count only rises. An old girlfriend from his FBI years appears, asking to interview him for her crime podcast; his father pleads with him to come back to church. The Sons of the Confederacy are planning a march at the upcoming Fall Fest, and a strange story surfaces about a reclusive fire-and-brimstone snake-handling preacher. Increasingly distressed at his inability to keep his county safe, Titus is plagued by memories and the present evil attacking his home. On less and less sleep, he doggedly puts in work. “He went over a few other emails, reviewed the gas expense reports, checked the arrest log from last night, updated the Sheriff department’s social media page…. It felt strange to attend to the mundane and the profane at the same time but that was a defining aspect of the job.”

All the Sinners Bleed is noir with a particular American Southern twist. Place figures heavily. “The soil of Charon County, like most towns and counties in the South, was sown with generations of tears…. Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built.” Cosby deals in timely themes: returning home and reckoning with old wounds and crimes; the unsavory histories of the places we love; the legacies of Confederate statues, of slavery and racism; the darkness within all of us, even those playing the good guys; the role of police and policing. His prose is gruff, poetic but stark: “The clouds gathered like young men on a corner getting ready for a fight.” Titus has a code like that of Michael Connelly’s Detective Harry Bosch: “Either we all matter or no one matters. Everyone deserves to have someone speak for them.” He believes that something hard and mean dwells in every heart–and in a few, true evil. What has beset Charon County is not supernatural. It is merely the wages of sin (as his churchgoing neighbors might say), or the county’s bloody past coming back around. There is something of the lone gunslinger–damaged but virtuous–in Titus Crown, who stands against the worst elements of human nature. Like Cosby’s previous novels, All the Sinners Bleed is often grim, but it lands on a surprisingly hopeful, even joyful ending.

For fans of gritty, dark mysteries with an interest in the very real and contemporary demons of United States culture and history, Cosby’s work offers a sinister but satisfying voyage into the best and worst of returning home and starting fresh.

Rating: 7 sheep.

Come back Monday for my interview with Cosby.

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What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez

Posted on March 6, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This debut novel about a family still searching for a long-missing daughter and sister brims with voice, attitude and yearning.

Claire Jimenez’s first novel, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, brings to life a close but troubled Puerto Rican family in Staten Island, N.Y., carrying on but rocked by loss. “The five of us seem normal for a while, up until Ruthy turns thirteen and disappears…. Draw my mother sixty-two pounds later. Give her diabetes. Kill my dad. Cut a hole in the middle of the timeline. Eliminate the canvas. Destroy any type of logic. There is no such thing now as a map.” No one ever figured out what happened on the day Ruthy didn’t come home from track practice on the S48 bus as expected.

More than a decade later, Nina, the baby, is “blessed with the brilliant luck of graduating [from college] into the 2008 recession,” the first in her family to attend college but now returned home to live with her mother and work at the mall selling lingerie. Jessica, the eldest, lives with her boyfriend and their baby; she works as a patient care technician at the hospital, harried and tired but proud of her work. Their mother, Dolores, depends on her relationship with God and the church. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez unfolds in alternating chapters, through the first-person perspectives of these four central characters: Nina, Jessica and Dolores in the late 2000s and the stormy, troubled 13-year-old Ruthy in 1996 when she disappeared. The latter is all attitude: You really want to know what happened to Ruthy Ramirez, she asks? Most people “think they got it all figured out, about who I am and what happened. Whatever, who cares? Not me, I promise you.” She describes the day it happened, the schoolgirl dramas and fights, whose pain appears superficial only from the outside. Years later, her sisters and mother struggle with everyday life and with moving on–until the day Jessica believes she sees Ruthy’s face on a sordid reality TV show: the woman shares the missing girl’s beauty mark, her laugh, the toss of her head, a couple of key phrases. And the remaining Ramirez family is off on a mission to recover their lost member.

One of Jimenez’s greatest achievements lies in the individual voices of her narrators, crackling with life, wit, humor, pain and personality. Jessica and Nina wrestle with the complicated love they feel for their family; Dolores rants in a well-meaning but frustrated one-sided conversation with her God; Ruthy oozes teenaged bravado and angst. Readers will be tugged by hope and despair alongside these true-to-life characters. In the end, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez offers observations about race, class, family and the fate of missing girls beyond its title character.

This review originally ran in the February 7, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 grilled cheese sandwiches from the school cafeteria.

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Deadly Deceit by Mari Hannah

Posted on March 3, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Micro-review today because it’s what I can spare for this title at this time, friends. Thanks for your patience.

On the one hand: I’m glad to be getting a bit deeper into DCI Kate Daniels’s personal (read: love) life. I find her a bit frustrating! but what else is new with our hardboiled detective types. She’s got baggage and lack of closure with an ex (who is also a coworker, remember), and a possible new beginning with a newer acquaintance who we met in an earlier book (who was, briefly, a person of interest in a case). I’m glad for this new sideplot, because that’s part of what I enjoy about mystery series in general: personalities and personal lives.

On the other hand, I found some frustrations this go-round with writing, specifically the overuse of ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ when more interesting nouns would have been appreciated. (This is something I get onto my students about. Maybe it’s just that I’m in-semester now.) I’m giving some grace because I think it was in part intended to be about voice – this was most noticeable in chapters in the close-third-person belonging to one or two characters in particular. Still bothered me a bit. If I’m paying attention to the writing, you’ve lost me for the story, however briefly.

I’m still committed to the series; I care about the people, and am looking forward to book four. But this one was not an unqualified success.

Rating: 7 wigs.

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Weyward by Emilia Hart

Posted on February 27, 2023 by pagesofjulia

The stories of three imperiled protagonists across centuries connect in this suspenseful, magical debut about the power of women and the natural world.

Emilia Hart’s first novel, Weyward, glows and glimmers with hidden powers, thrills and danger, a close connection with nature and between women across time. Three distinct stories eventually link to form a larger tale about strength, resilience and love.

Altha goes on trial for witchcraft in the English countryside in 1619. In 2019 London, Kate attempts to escape an abusive partner while harboring a significant secret. And at a grand estate in 1942, teenaged Violet struggles against the limitations of her father’s strict household rules, consumed by an unladylike love for trees, insects and other natural wonders. In alternating chapters, each of these stories deepens. Altha, the daughter of a healer, tries her best to follow in her beloved late mother’s footsteps, helping her neighbors and causing no harm, while dodging the increasingly avid witch-hunters of her time. Locked in a Lancaster dungeon, Altha does what she can to protect herself. Kate flees the city undetected, holing up in a cottage inherited from a great-aunt she hardly knew, but her safety there is tenuous as she plans for an uncertain future. Violet is a tenacious and spirited 16-year-old, but powerless as she is imprisoned in her father’s world; she dreams of becoming a biologist or an entomologist, but cannot even visit the local village. Men in the Weyward world, in all three timelines, are sources of power and abuse, not kindness, but Violet’s loyal brother forms a notable exception.

Each woman must learn about and come to terms with her powers and her connections to the natural world. Violet is passionately entwined with a particular beech tree, with damselflies and weasels, but no one will even tell her her mother’s name, let alone the family history that she senses casts a shadow on her life. Having lost her father at a young age in a curious accident, Kate lives in fear of the birds and insects that most call to her. Altha is reluctant to exercise her full powers, having promised her mother she would be careful. But, she says, “I had begun to suspect that nature, to us, was as much a life force as the very air we breathed.”

Hart expertly weaves together disparate but connected storylines, with leaves and butterfly cocoons and a mountain stream. Her protagonists are strong, but hard beset by the forces around them, even across centuries. Her prose sparkles with wonder and simmers with danger. Weyward‘s atmosphere is compelling, as each plot thread offers suspense. With a momentum of its own, this debut draws readers inexorably to a glorious conclusion that celebrates connectedness and the power of women and nature.

This review originally ran in the February 2, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 feathers.

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The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on February 24, 2023 by pagesofjulia

First in a duology by Jemisin who we know I love. Like the Broken Earth and Inheritance trilogies, this is set in a world that in some ways resembles our own and in some ways departs from it. We deal with a continent and, mostly, two city-states upon it. One is Gujaareh, where peace is the highest virtue and priority and the people worship the goddess Hananja above all; she is goddess of dreams, death and the afterlife. Gujaareen priests follow four paths, and we spend most of our time with one of them: the Gatherers, whose job it is to peacefully “gather” the final tithe of dreams from a person at the end of their life. (They share this dream tithe with their temple, and it is used by Sharers to heal and soothe other people in a sort of public health service.) In other cultures, it might also be said that Gatherers “kill” people. Ideally, this is done with consent, but not always. So, here is our first cultural relativism. Gatherers are pious, devout priests; they reject the idea that they are killers.

We also follow a woman from the city-state of Kisua. Sunandi is a Speaker, sort of an ambassador, in Gujaareh. She is not a big fan of the system nor of Gatherers, but finds herself thrown into awkward cooperation with some of Gujaareh’s most faithful when she uncovers a plot to drive their two powers into war against each other.

In this novel, I appreciated (as ever) Jemisin’s world-building: the details, like the special kind of stone that is used in dream magic, or the tethers to one’s soul; the pantheon of Sun, Dreaming Moon, Waking Moon, their children, the gods that are worshipped in various city-states, and the kinds of homage and behaviors demanded of Hananja’s followers. I loved that this land – Gujaareh, Kisua and the other powers in between – is multicultural, and their people treat each other with varying levels of respect and make assumptions based on appearance and clothing (etc.) in ways that felt familiar. In other words, Jemisin excels at creating a world that is different and inventive but also makes sense to a reader from this world. Although, I will also say: of all Jemisin’s novels, I think this is the one where the glossary may be most helpful in understanding the story as you go. I wish readers were more aware on page 1 that there is a glossary. Make use of it – it’s an excellent tool, if you find it.

I will head into book two as soon as I can make the time, because that’s how I feel about Jemisin and this world; but I’m also feeling good just now sitting with what I’ve learned. It’s a book with good closure, not merely a book-one-of-two. Strongly recommend.

Rating: 8 ornaments.

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Lookout by Christine Byl

Posted on February 20, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This astonishing novel of work, love, community and forgiveness in 20th-century rural Montana will leave readers forever changed for the better.

Christine Byl’s Lookout is an unforgettable novel, both stunning and subtle, written with nuance and compassion. With all the down-to-earth lyricism displayed in her memoir, Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods, Byl transports readers to rural Montana in the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s, where the Kinzler family lives, works and loves. These characters, whose bonds are gorgeously rendered and even inspirational in their imperfections, are deeply lovable.

Josiah Kinzler’s family history includes alcoholism and suicide; he is alone in the world before he is 20 but possesses land, skills, a work ethic and strong ties to his neighbors. He marries Margaret Blanchard. Together they eke out a living in her father’s hardware store and eventually through Josiah’s highly regarded furniture-making and woodworking. Their two daughters, Louisa and Cody, are remarkably different from one another but as fiercely loving as their parents. The family will grow into nontraditional shapes, but its members never lose their commitment to one another. Each is complicated, fully developed and sensitively drawn.

Chapters shift between a third-person perspective and the first-person voices of various characters–not only the central Kinzlers but also various members of their community. In this way, Byl offers triangulations on events and characters. These secondary characters’ perspectives enrich the story enormously, as when a neighbor who has known Josiah from childhood observes the latter’s marriage and fatherhood: “He loves those girls, and I can see his ease with them that I have not found with my own sons.” Montana in the 1980s and ’90s is not without its problems: gay characters struggle to find acceptance, and American Indians’ claims to the land are dismissed. Families and individuals struggle with mental illness and addiction. But Byl treats the people and their problems–even the shortsighted ones–with grace and frankness. Frequently, characters do the same for one another.

Lookout, which contains evocative expressions of love, is lush in its descriptions of relationships, the natural world and Josiah’s exquisite woodworking. Byl writes with an attention to the details of her characters and setting: “A heavy snow in early May buried pasqueflowers and daffodils and the barely rising shoots that would become the season’s crops, but by the end of the month, the sun lit up like a match.” Cody and her father are similarly laconic and watchful; they share a special bond, as displayed in a stunningly beautiful scene in which he proudly watches her run a chainsaw just as she was taught. Many of the relationships and family systems represented are unconventional–but sensitive and thoughtful. Lookout specializes in the quiet observation of transcendent truths about many facets of life.

This review originally ran in the January 26, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 10 dried pansy petals.

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The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz

Posted on February 17, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this shape-shifting tale, aspiring novelists come together at a possibly haunted estate with a famously reclusive writer–for what turns out to be as much horror as inspiration.

Alex, the glum protagonist of Julia Bartz’s The Writing Retreat, has recently crossed into her 30s. Stuck in long-term writer’s block, her dreams of making it as a novelist are just about dead; she holds a thankless and “bleakly underpaid” position in publishing; her sex life is equally bleak; and she still mourns her traumatic friend-breakup with the more successful Wren a year ago. So it feels like a shocking and undeserved honor to be accepted to a fantastically exclusive writing retreat hosted by Roza Vallo, the wildly successful novelist Alex has idolized since she was 12 years old. The catch is that Wren has been accepted, too.

Roza’s Blackbriar Estate in the Adirondacks in New York is grand, dramatic and supposedly haunted. Roza herself is famous, rather controversial and private: the five young women attending the retreat must sign NDAs. Alex’s adoration of her enigmatic hero is enormous, and she senses this is her big shot at turning her life around: “If I lived in a pocket of Roza Vallo’s brain, however small, I sensed it would bolster my own existence.” She is also nearly crippled by anxiety about being near Wren–but that concern is quickly overshadowed by the terms of Roza’s intensely competitive program for the retreat. The five writers in attendance must each complete a whole novel in just 28 days, and the best of their works will win a million-dollar advance on a publishing deal. Even as the high-speed writing race ramps up and the drama with Wren continues to smolder, it emerges that something still more sinister is going on behind the scenes at Blackbriar Estate. Inexorably, The Writing Retreat evolves into a locked-room mystery, as eight women–five young writers, two staff and Roza–find themselves snowed in at Blackbriar and beset by potentially fatal threats that may be supernatural or simply human evil.

Bartz imbues her writing with a shape-shifting momentum: the plot’s focus moves from the small, painful dramas of competition and jealousies in friendship into horror and psychological suspense. Blackbriar Estate is both magnetic, in its haunting history and narrative possibilities, and stifling. The world of writing and publishing can be, at turns, solitary, socially supportive, triumphant and backbiting, and The Writing Retreat encompasses all these possibilities and more, as it explores friendship and family traumas, artistic crises and human nature. Bartz’s debut subverts genre in the interest of entertainment, satire and chilling thrills.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 words.

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The Liar’s Crown by Abigail Owen

Posted on February 13, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Pretty sure I got this one from a Shelf Awareness review, and I found it quite enjoyable. It definitely has a YA flavor, but that’s okay: I was entertained, absorbed, transported. I also learned a new label: it’s marked upper YA/NA, and I had to look that up. NA is ‘new adult,’ so that upper YA/NA takes us through late teens and early twenties, I guess. As ever, your mileage may vary, but I think that rating, if you will, makes good sense. For one thing, there’s not only violence but sexual content. Not graphic, but clear enough.

A brief prologue gives us a few details of the alternate world in which The Liar’s Crown is set. Also, there’s a map! The world is Nova, and there are six continents/kingdoms or dominions with their own rulers. Their names give clues as to climate: Savanah, Tropikis, Mariana, Wildernyss, Tyndra, and Aryd. Following the prologue (the birth of twins, and a blessing and a curse), our narrator is Meren. Her twin sister Tabra is princess of Aryd and will be queen once their grandmother dies. Meren’s existence is a secret; she lives in a city distant from the capital city, visiting her sister in the palace only in stealth. She’s been raised by her grandmother’s twin – also a secret. By tradition and heredity, her family line is ruled by queens with secret twin-sister body doubles, who stand in as queen in times of danger. Meren’s life purpose is to serve and protect her sister; she can have no true life of her own. She’s lucky to have a single friend, Cain, heir to a minor authority figure among the desert’s Wanderers. He does not, of course, know her true identity.

Meren and Tabra are 18 when this story begins, with a quick series of events: their grandmother the queen dies. King Eidolon of Tyndra, whom the girls have been trained all their lives to fear, proposes marriage to Tabra, and sends her a unique gift. Meren goes to her sister’s side, to take her place for the coronation, and to reject Eidolon’s threatening proposal; but then she is kidnapped by a man of Shadows, swept across dominions and into a world she never dreamt existed. Her captor is both terrifying and magnetic. He has surely grabbed the wrong princess, thinking he’s got the true heir to the throne; Meren must continue to play the role of Tabra, but her kidnapper is keeping secrets too. They are each responsible for lives beyond their own. They are in awful danger, and they might be falling for each other.

The Liar’s Crown has mystery and intrigue, magical powers and amulets, strange beasts and frightening environments. Meren is navigating the beginnings of love, romance, and sex – her old friend Cain has just voiced his amorous intentions as the man of shadows comes along. She yearns for her own identity (like any eighteen-year-old) but also feels her responsibilities toward her sister, her family, her dominion, her people. She has her own individual desires and also wants the best for her society. She is caught up in the difficulties of friendships, filial and romantic love – as are we all.

Meren is an accurate teenager, and sometimes feels a bit juvenile, which I guess is where I get that YA flavor I mentioned earlier, but that all feels true-to-life; and these themes are certainly universal. The storyline offers suspense, plotting for good and for ill, unknown intentions, the puzzle of whom to trust… there are battles, new alliances and tragic losses, and there are a handful of brief but well-written and compelling scenes of kissing and one memorable sex scene. This book had me looking forward to when I could snuggle back up with it, and that’s always a win. I smell a sequel, and I’m looking forward to it.

Rating: 7 death worms.

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Settled Blood by Mari Hannah

Posted on February 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

As I said about book one, The Murder Wall, this is a solid mystery series. I like DCI Kate Daniels. The series seems inclined to paint her as your classic self-sabotaging detective: a loner, typically a hard drinker, soft-hearted but with a stony exterior and a tendency to violence. She’s rather sweeter than this, though. Despite points made about always putting the job first and not taking very good care of herself (eating & sleeping, for example), she has strong connections to the other members of her squad, and she’s not much of a drinker. The job itself can certainly be a killer, no pun intended (murder detectives do not have it easy), but as far as self-sabotage goes, she’s a pretty light version, I’d say. I like her habit of jumping on the motorcycle for stress relief, and I like even more her friendships: especially here with her second-in-command Hank Gormley, who has a pretty good feel for what she needs (to be questioned, to be left alone) and where she’s likely to be at a given moment. That is downright tender. Her relationship with her former (now promoted) boss, the prickly Phillip Bright, is a little less healthy, and he is not nearly such a sweetheart, but as character development and narrative complication I like it very much. There are other work relationships, too, that advance the characters and story in pleasing ways. As I said in the previous book, Daniels’s partner (now ex) is still a little under-developed, which I still regret. Will she continue to step forward into the light, or is she just a device? I will let you know, because I’ve already ordered books three and four in this series.

The whodunit itself was stimulating and kept me going through some late nights when I should have turned off the light. A murdered girl; a missing girl who is a lookalike to the murdered one but not in fact the same girl; and then more. Daniels is coming off a bit of a trauma herself – and in fact many members of her team are dealing with difficulties or losses, and I appreciate the way in which this mixes things up in a real-world way. Lots of questions about how much compassion and assistance is owed to people who are on the one hand jerks and on the other hand have suffered greatly. This ethical puzzle is one of my life’s fascinations, so I enjoy the angle.

Still true that Daniels’s identity as lesbian is a bit subtle as a framing element here. I appreciate the way in which that has a normalizing effect, but don’t come here looking for a big-deal LGBTQ headline; it’s more background. (Although Daniels is out to very few colleagues, which I find interesting. Her team seems practically warm-and-fuzzy in how well they support each other – unusually for the hard-boiled murder squad. On the other hand, her erstwhile partner being a distant member of the same work environment is a complication of its own, regardless of gender, and could justify secrecy.)

I am intrigued and interested to keep getting to know this group.

Rating: 7 headlamps.

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