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The Sugared Game is the second book in this 1920's queer post-war romance trilogy. It continues the very hot and cold relationship between Will and Kim amidst the background of the investigation of criminal enterprises. My own bias is a reader is that I feel like complicated relationships where people by turns treat each other poorly need sufficient explanation of the glue that keeps them still together. This book does a good job of continuing to develop rationale for why each of them still finds the other appealing and also why the things that don't work really don't work.

Thematically I appreciated that in this book both Will and Kim got what for in their "Kim-ish" behaviors. In particular, there's a number of incidents where Will unconsciously ends up behaving like Kim, using others for his own ends and keeping secrets to protect others, and there's emotional repercussions for these choices. In some ways though, I feel like this helped create more understanding of Kim as well, to more directly see him through the parallels of Will's actions and to see the way that Will is indirectly influenced by him.

I appreciated that this book had even more Phoebe and Maisie, who are both delightful characters. I also said after the first book that I was hoping to learn more about Kim's past to understand him better, and this book definitely dug into some of his professional secrets (and the third book looks like it might get into more family things, based on its blurb).

I read this book for #QueerRomanceClub. It's a post-war 1920's queer romance with a bit of a mystery element to it.

This was a fun read, but the relationship between Kim and Will was definitely a little uncomfortable in parts for me, and perhaps not quite my cuppa. I think I was not expecting something so hot and cold and hot and cold with such (understandable)! trust issues. Without the meta-knowledge that this is a trilogy with these two as leads, I as the reader would have trusted Kim even less than I did.

That said, I appreciated the complication of their messy relationship; I feel like the book sold it well both why and what worked (and didn't). Given that these books are from Will's perspective and Kim is the one who keeps secrets and lies, my hope for the future is that we as readers get to see more into Kim's professional and personal life and understand better the choices he makes.

How to Keep House While Drowning felt like a distilled therapy session about cleaning. I saw this recommended on fedi somewhere, and felt like this was useful for me to read right now. It's less "here's my life hack productivity advice for folding shirts" and more "here's some better ways to think about and emotionally approach taking care of yourself and your space". (Honestly, this is probably the more valuable thing.)

A bunch of thoughts I enjoyed that stuck with me: * cleaning is morally neutral * your space exists to serve you (do you hang clothes on a chair? if that works for you, then that's awesome) * interrogating preconceived notions of what cleaning looks like * prioritizing health > comfort > happiness in care tasks (and cutting out perfectionism saying you have to do all of these things all of the time) * balance in care tasks between people being less "am I contributing enough?" and more "am I taking advantage of someone else?"

I heard about The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle because Stuart Turton has another mystery coming out this year that is on my book wishlist, and I thought I'd pick up an earlier book by him in the meantime.

The setup to this book is that Evelyn Hardcastle has been (and will be) murdered at 11pm, and the protagonist is living through the perspectives of various people at the manor house where it happens, and is tasked to figure out who is behind the murder. Oh, and there's also somebody trying to kill all of the various hosts he is seeing the world through.

It took me a little bit to get into this, as it's (understandably) a little bit disorienting with a lot of details. There were a number of "how did this weird thing happen" that got answered by "oh that was just ~time loop protagonist shenanigans", but in the end these felt like red herring decorations around other deeper, layered mysteries.

I had to suspend my disbelief a little bit about the meta plot here. Structurally, having the protagonist jump from person to person is a fascinating way tell a story, particularly a mystery. However, the mechanics behind and around this were not quite as satisfying to me as I wanted them to be. These feelings I don't think ruined the book, but in comparison everything else felt so intricately plotted that this didn't quite fit as neatly as I wanted.

Overall, a quite satisfying mystery with a novel hook.

Splinter in the Sky is an sf book about a tea-making political prisoner, caught between multiple factions all wanting to spy on each other. The book pitch here is "sapphically taking down an empire from within".

It's hard for me to not think of A Memory Called Empire while reading this. Mahit in that book felt very conflicted about the Teixcalaanli Empire; she both studied and dreamed about wanting to be a part of it (and knowing she couldn't ever truly be so), but also knew with eyes wide open how that empire consumed and absorbed everything it touched.

Here, it feels like Enitan has no such ambivalence. Her culture isn't appreciated; she's looked down on (at best); she certainly doesn't want to emulate said empire; her people aren't even seen as real people. She's traumatized by trying to find her sister, but I don't understand why she's not more angry, and can find forgiveness and trust so easily for her oppressors.

One major plot point is that the new imperator is seen as weak and so Enitan also tries to figure out who actually is in charge. It makes sense from a plot perspective why this is going on, but in practice it takes a lot of teeth away from the empire itself. Shouldn't meeting the god-imperator at the head of the empire be terrifying for a political hostage from a recently conquered planet? Why would said imperator trust Enitan so quickly?

It all just feels a bit thin. The political players are introduced often right before when they are needed for their plot points. People in the empire who have committed atrocities seem to be quickly forgiven because they feel bad about it. Trust feels like it happens far too quickly. The empire is told to be scary, historically and off page, but on page I only get brief glimpses of this, and few feelings.

Sorry for all the negative thoughts. I still thought this book was fun, but I just wish it was a bit deeper and had more of a bite.

The Tainted Cup is an amazing fantasy mystery novel (first in a new series) from Robert Jackson Bennett. For what it's worth, I love love loved The Founders trilogy and quite enjoyed The Divine Cities trilogy so I'm coming into this with some bias.

I've seen this pitched as "Sherlock with kaiju", but I think the Sherlock moniker sells it short for me. The Sherlock / Watson dynamic to me is defined by one where Sherlock is the expert observer, deducer, and dilettante and Watson is the bumbling stand-in for the reader (or at best a medical expert). In The Tainted Cup, I think the sleuthing expertise is split between Kol (the assistant investigator) and Ana (the investigator in charge) and this changes the dynamic entirely in a way that makes the mystery more satisfying structurally. Also, I think personality-wise, they are also quite distinct.

Kol, the point of view assistant investigator, has been biologically modified to have eidectic memory. As he can remember anything he sees, it's his job to be the eyes of the investigator (and also the reader)--viewing crime scenes, talking to witnesses, and poking around to try to dig up as much as he can. Ana, the investigator boss has Sherlockian deductive skill, but whose senses are overwhelmed by the world itself and so stays in her office, relying on Kol to see what's important and bring it back for her to synthesize. There's definitely a power and authority hierarchy here, but what works for me is that Kol's observational competence is strong, and it gives a perfect excuse for the reader to see all of the clues.

I felt like I had put together about half of the mystery myself by the end, but there were still quite a few surprises for me. The closure of the mystery is excellent, and is quite satisfying in the way it brings together every small detail that's been slowly spooled out over time (even, of course, the title). All of this places the book solidly in the mystery genre, rather than just "a fantasy with a murder mystery". It's even complete with a couple of "let me gather everybody to lay out my accusations" style scenes.

But it's the worldbuilding that adds color on top of the solid mystery. The fantasy here is that there this world has experts in biological augmentation, where people are changed to further their station in service of the Empire, often in ways that have negative consequences for them personally. Technologically, things feel like an industrial age that has pursued biological advances rather than gas, such as mushrooms for cooling or worms for lighting. The Empire itself comprises a series of ring walls, where every wet season gigantic titans attack from the sea and must be repelled.

I would have happily read either just a great mystery or a fantasy novel with such an interesting world, but having both together was a delight.

This book is a sequel to What Moves the Dead. It was a little unexpected (to me at least!) that there'd be a sequel to something that was a riff on the Fall of the House of Usher--where do you even go from there? Apparently, another mystery! This time it follows the same set of characters (Easton, Angus, and Eugenia Potter), but instead is set at Easton's childhood lodge in Gallacia.

What I liked about this book was the way it much more tightly wove together parallels of Easton's war-related PTSD and the horror of dreams. While What Moves the Dead felt more like several unrelated stories grafted together, this was a more cohesive novella.

(If I had any petty wishes, it would be to give Eugenia Potter more of a role here. She gets some good quotes, but is ultimately a background character that almost didn't need to be there. I also wish there had been a little bit more worldbuilding about Gallacia. Even for being set there, it felt like there was little elaboration on the fictional country past what we had already learned.)