Books shelved under “Mystery”

Having watched many of the Agatha Christie’s Poirot adaptations of these mysteries, sometimes it’s hard to tell if I’m figuring out the ending or just remembering it from the TV show. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Peril at End House. That didn’t diminish my enjoyment of this Poirot mystery, of course. With the weather finally verging on warm, I was yearning to curl up on my deck with a blanket and some tea and…

Time loops. An English country house murder mystery. Shifting identities and allegiances. Yes please. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has so many things that attract me to a novel. For the most part, Stuart Turton’s execution kept me riveted: I inhaled this book over the course of two days, stopping only because I really did need to sleep.

A man comes to consciousness in the middle of a forest. All he remembers is the…

Sherlock Holmes was, unsurprisingly, my jam when I was a kid. I preferred Poirot, even then (just something about Christie’s writing or the Belgian detective’s emphasis on his “little grey cells”), but Sherlock was cool too. I love reading stories that try to put a new spin on the Conan Doyle adventures, whether it’s transposing them to the 22nd century, hiring Ian McKellen to play a dementia-ridden Holmes, or gender-swapping Holmes and sending her to…

Mmm mmm mmm, yes indeed. I like superhero novels, but they don’t always work for me, and often I find myself more disappointed and critical of them than I want to be considering how avidly I seek them out. I was nervous starting After the Golden Age finally after having it on my to-read list for years. What if I didn’t like it? Should I even bother? I’m glad I did, though, because I thoroughly…

A long time ago I read The Dervish House and commented that it hacked my brain, and that’s what I feel like Hannu Rajaniemi is trying to do with The Quantum Thief. This is posthumanist SF that reimagines the limitations and extent of a human’s personal narrative in a very extreme, mind-bending way. I don’t entirely understand what’s happening here, and that is kind of the point. Rajaniemi walks an extremely fine line between…

I picked this up from my library on a whim because it was on a display and I liked the description of the premise. I know nothing about Pretty Little Liars or Sara Shepard. The Amateurs has a great premise! Unfortunately, the writing, characterization, and even the plot fail to live up to the expectations I had.

Seneca Frazier has spent most of her first year of college on a message board called Case Not…

I learned about Hope Never Dies from Twitter, and am I ever glad I did. I don’t read a lot of spoofs and parodies, but when I do, I like to read ones like Andrew Shaffer’s. It is delightful.

Joe Biden has been out of office for a while now, and while his former friend Barack is living the high celeb life, old Joe is … well, feeling his age. His life gets shaken up…

Dr. Miles Singer is a military psychiatrist treating veterans of Aeland’s war with Laneer. He himself is hiding from his noble family, who would drag him back to use his magical talents as a mere battery and help prop up their power in Aeland. But when a stranger dies in Miles’ arms and begs Miles to find his killer, Miles’ two worlds collide. Soon there won’t be any secrets … but will the price be…

The Woken Gods has a wicked premise: what if the deities of various ancient mythologies were real entities, but at some point in time, for reasons lost to us, they were put asleep or fell asleep? What happens, then, if they wake up and return with a vengeance, and the only people who can stand against them are a shadowy secret society called the Society of the Sun that just happens to have made it…

A pleasure, as always, to revisit The SPI Files. Lisa Shearin always brings it—and by it I mean that combination of humour and serious situations in need of ass-kicking that results in delightful urban fantasy stories. The tone might be light, but the stakes are often high. This the kind of series you can easily devour over a week or two yet keep coming back to time and again.

Mac and Ian are back…

Yes, Gnomon is a behemoth of a book, one I am glad I saved for the beginning of March Break. Even then it took me several days to get through it. Nick Harkaway’s story is intricately layered and nested, and while I wasn’t sure about it at first, the more time I spent with it, the more I came to appreciate and enjoy its construction. Gnomon is a lot of things, and a simple summary…

Jim C. Hines has been on my radar for a long time, but I haven’t actually read any of his books until now! When I saw this on NetGalley, I was intrigued. I know Hines mostly as a fantasy writer, so I was curious to see how his science fiction would be. Turns out Hines’ Terminal Alliance reminds me a lot of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe.

Side note: This book was published in…

Returning to the Vorkosigan universe is always a delight. Miles in particular is such a lovely protagonist. Part mystery, part spy-thriller, all fun, Cetaganda just reminds me how much I adore Lois McMaster Bujold’s writing. Her space opera game is strong; her political intrigue is delicious.

Cetaganda takes place relatively early in Miles’ personal chronology, when he is still a bratty young officer instead of a bratty more experienced right-hand man for Gregor. He…

Company Town, while a book I definitely wanted to read, is not a book I had intended to read right now. This is how it came to me:

Me: spots book on living room table, evidently purchased by Dad You read this yet? Dad: No. Me: takes book Let me know when you want it back. drops smoke screen

100% accurate retelling.

I’m quite surprised this is a selection for Canada Reads. It’s very…

It has been over a year since I last reviewed a volume of Supernormal Step, the fantastic webcomic by Michael Lee Lunsford about Fiona, a girl with blue hair who has been sucked into a strange, parallel universe where magic is real and that’s really freaky. Fiona has long been on a search for a way home, and while she doesn’t get much closer in this one, she does learn more about the mysterious…

So my review for the first book in this series begins, “It took me forever to read Servant of the Underworld, and I don’t know why. It’s great.”

That was two years ago.

Yeah.

I’ve had Harbinger of the Storm all that time, thanks to my wonderful subscription to Angry Robot Books … I’ve just been very, very, very negligent in actually reading these books! And I don’t know why, because they are great! Aliette…

Full disclosure: I received this book for free because I won a Twitter contest run by Courtney Summers. But wait! If you want to send me free books, you don’t have to get me to retweet anything at all. You can just do it! Contact me for more details.

Fuller disclosure: Michelle Krys is from Thunder Bay, my hometown and place of residence, so that does give her bonus points.

Fullest disclosure: (I actually have…

Guys, this book is legitimately terrible.

I knew, given Agatha Christie’s prolific output, that not all of her books, not even all of her Poirot mysteries, could be good. There was bound to be a few stinkers in there. But The Big Four is to Poirot what “Threshold” is to Star Trek: Voyager—which is to say, it is a well-intentioned attempt that might have once held interesting ideas but, when executed, became a shambles…

Maybe it’s just because I picked this up after a long day of failing to strip wallpaper from my bathroom, but White Cat was really gripping. Aside from a Supernatural-infused dinner break with my dad, I didn’t put it down and ripped through it in a single night. That’s not a feat—it’s YA and not particularly long—but it’s a mark of how much Holly Black made me want to stay in her world and…

Oh my god give me more of these books right damn now.

I don’t normally do this, but can we just stop for a moment and look at this utterly gorgeous cover by Mike Heath? I was going to read Steeplejack from the description alone, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the cover that caught my eye while I was browsing the New Books shelf. Everything about this cover is amazing. The…