Walking on the Moon

Havoc is a thriller with an interesting set-up. It is told in the first person from the point of view of an octogenarian agent of chaos. She’s on the leisurely lam from some earlier incident gone wrong after starting to travel after the death of her husband. It is set in the pandemic, but that’s basically not a real factor in the story. Christopher Bollen occasionally invokes it as a difficulty in managing travel or contact but in another time plenty of other causes could fill those plot holes.

Overall, Havoc is well crafted and diverting. Our narrator is interesting, but obviously untrustworthy. If nothing else her justifications of her casually sowing strife in others relationships smacks of self-deception. A lot of the fun is figuring out what is really driving her and why.

And on paper the answers are interesting and satisfying. The plot gears all mesh. There are dropped hints that slipped under the RADAR. All the things that make a psychological thriller work are there.

But for me, the big twist just rubbed me the wrong way. I know it is just me, but the reveal just took me out of the story in a way I could not recover from. Probably worth a try if you are not me.

This is a kind of high concept history book. Take the signers of the Declaration of Independence and do a capsule biography of each of them. It provides a way to take a slice of pro-revolution (well, mostly) Americans and dig into their lives. They are going to be relatively well documented and give some kind of a slice of life in the Colonies around 1776.

Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese do a good job running these folks down and telling their lives in pretty interesting capsules. There is a lot of variation in outlook and experience of these people. It’s a good reminder that America has never been monolithic. But the bios are necessarily short and if someone interests you, their chapter is over pretty quickly. As an invitation to reading more history, that can be effective, but I have already swallowed that pill.

More Martha Wells Murderbot. I do not have a ton to say about it beyond that earlier review. This continues to be fun and interesting. I see that there’s an overarching plot line going on, but I’m only barely paying attention to it. I am enjoying watching the Murderbot’s character develop and being engaged by the plots.

It’s fun. Recommended.

I was impressed by Mallory O’Meara’s earlier history on Milicent Patrick who designed the Creature From the Black Lagoon effects. This is a more straightforward history of women’s role in American drinking history and culture. It’s still very good.

O’Meara does an excellent job addressing what could be a pretty light topic. She tracks the history of people drinking alcohol from prehistory to modern America. That history, as most sources relate it, leaves women out of it, which she sets out to correct. It also reflects women’s role in society – because drinking is important to society – and O’Maera makes sure you know it.

Tone and style really matters here. The book has the citations one hopes for in a history, even though the documents for events in bars and distilleries can be dicey to find. Having the goods, O’Maera adopts a conversational tone in delivery. When she writes about the drama between the players at the center of the emerging Tiki Bar movement, it sounds like a story you might hear at a party. But when you get to that moment when you wonder “how does she know that?” or “is that really true,” well, there are citations.

Overall this is a well researched book about an interesting and fun topic that may just tell you about some bigger things, too.

Strongly Recommended.

I really enjoyed Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, but I feel like that says some bad things about me. I quite enjoyed hanging out with her antihero protagonist while watching her do things I despise. And this wasn’t the transgressive joy of watching a villain revel in getting back at the system or flaunting convention. She’s just going with the flow.

There’s a lot to chew on there. Nothing about the flow, or going with it, felt unreasonable. It doesn’t say much good about the world we live in and the people we are. I find myself with a lot of questions about the guilty pleasure of rooting for someone I should oppose in the abstract.

It would be easy to blame Kushner’s writing. It’s charming, witty, insightful, and completely believable. It would be hard not to be on her side. But I still think I shouldn’t be.

Recommended.

Steven Brust has a way of building a solid SF genre scenario, drawing readers into it, and then making the world real in ways that raise the stakes in way that should break it. It always works for me, but I see how it is a tightrope walk that won’t work for everyone.

Good Guys give the game away in its title. We’re in a modern Fantasy setting of shadowy magical societies with a group of folks working for the ends of their society. As we go on, they all start to question if they’re on the right side. And then they begin to consider if there is a right side. Or maybe if there are sides at all?

This is easy to do wrong. Too much realism breaks it as does too little. Or even the wrong elements of realism. This works for me. The structure of the adventure stays intact as the stakes evolve for the characters.

Recommended.

This was a fun SF novella with exactly the right amount of depth and character to be interesting without overwhelming me. Breezy, but with stakes that could be more later. I see that it’s becoming an Amazon series, and I can see how this makes a great setup for that. It also works as a novella. Very diverting.

Recommended.

I do like me some Carl Hiaasen. This is a sequel to Bad Monkey and I don’t have much different to say about Razon Girl. And that’s not bad.

Recommended.

This is an early Vonnegut novel which brought him a Hugo nomination and more attention from the community. It is full of ideas that Vonnegut would return to in later works. I liked it, because Vonnegut will always be enjoyable to me, but Sirens felt a little too jam-packed with ideas that are better explored in later work.

I kind of wandered into this rather than seeking it out. I grabbed a thriller to chew on while one of my holds came in, so I didn’t have expectations. I found it a pretty good thriller/procedural with some strange tonal shifts.

The lead investigator on the case is significantly defined by his abuse as a child in the foster care system and the first victim is similarly defined by abuse. I found the initial chapters that abuse and the investigator’s reactions to what he sees of it affecting in difficult ways. I was thinking that this was going to be more of an emotional exploration of the effect of abuse on people.

But as the book goes on, the depth of that exploration shallows out. The abuse is still there and a central driver of the plot, but Karin Slaughter lives less in the heads of the sufferers. And other colorful members of the investigation team appear who provide other viewpoints. As the book goes on it becomes more of a traditional whodunnit.

It’s a good whodunnit. The team is interesting. The mystery is twisty and engaging. And the abuse remains there, but it becomes more of a Law & Order: SVU level of intensity.

It’s also part of a series of books, so the investigators all have backstories and histories that I didn’t know about. I usually don’t jump into the middle of a series, but it wasn’t an impediment. I probably won’t jump back in to check on them though.

I enjoyed it.