It’s May, which means it is time for the April newsletter. I didn’t read quite as much as I meant to this month but alas, that is time for you. I also have a brand new laptop I’m about to take to the shop for the third time in two weeks later today so I’ve had other things on my mind.
I’ll talk more about how April went for me at the end of the newsletter. For now, let’s get on to the books!
Sandman Vol 1-4 - Neil Gaiman Et All
I’ve owned the first volume of Sandman for ten years, I’ve read bits and pieces of it and working in comics means that a lot of Sandman knowledge just seeps into you via osmosis but I’d never actually sat down and read it. When one of my favorite podcasts, Overdue, announced they were doing a read through of it, I knew I was finally going to read it.
Guys, it’s good. Surprise? Ahaha of course it’s good. It’s Neil Gaiman being let loose to write whatever he wants. It’s a little bit spooky, a little bit goofy, a little bit affecting. Of course, it was written in the 80s so it sometimes makes missteps that I would hope wouldn’t happen if it were written now. And honestly, I’m not a huge fan of either the art style (there are several artists on the books but they all keep a very similar style throughout) or the “80s goth” aesthetic but the writing makes up for it, for me. It’s iconic for a reason.
Ocean’s Echo - Everina Maxwell
Rich socialite, inveterate flirt, and walking disaster Tennalhin Halkana can read minds. Tennal, like all neuromodified “readers,” is a security threat on his own. But when controlled, readers are a rare asset. Not only can they read minds, but they can navigate chaotic space, the maelstroms surrounding the gateway to the wider universe. Conscripted into the military under dubious circumstances, Tennal is placed into the care of Lieutenant Surit Yeni, a duty-bound soldier, principled leader, and the son of a notorious traitor general. Whereas Tennal can read minds, Surit can influence them. Like all other neuromodified “architects,” he can impose his will onto others, and he’s under orders to control Tennal by merging their minds. Surit accepted a suspicious promotion-track request out of desperation, but he refuses to go through with his illegal orders to sync and control an unconsenting Tennal. So they lie: They fake a sync bond and plan Tennal's escape.
Their best chance arrives with a salvage-retrieval mission into chaotic space—to the very neuromodifcation lab that Surit's traitor mother destroyed twenty years ago. And among the rubble is a treasure both terrible and unimaginably powerful, one that upends a decades-old power struggle, and begins a war. Tennal and Surit can no longer abandon their unit or their world. The only way to avoid life under full military control is to complete the very sync they've been faking. Can two unwilling weapons of war bring about peace?
I’ve been meaning to read Winter’s Orbit for ages but got this one instead? Sorry? I got it because the plot sounded really interesting and honestly like a fanfic I would read and it was recommended in Word Suitcase, one of my favorite newsletters.
It’s definitely interesting. The world building is incredible, feels completely lived in, despite it being so drastically foreign. I really liked both Tennal and Surit, so different but so perfectly matched. The plot probably could have been stretched into a trilogy, as a lot happened in one book and I maybe would have preferred that because it also would have given the romance more time to breath but I still enjoyed it. I’ll definitely read more from Maxwell.
The Silver Shooter - Erin Lindsey
It's the spring of 1887, and Rose Gallagher is finally coming into her own. She's the proud owner of a lovely little home near Washington Square, where she lives with her mother and friend Pietro, and she's making a name for herself as a Pinkerton agent with a specialty in things . . . otherworldly. She and her partner Thomas are working together better than ever, and mostly managing to push aside romantic feelings for one another. Mostly. Things are almost too good to be true—so Rose is hardly surprised when Theodore Roosevelt descends on them like a storm cloud, hiring them for a mysterious job out west. A series of strange occurrences in the Badlands surrounding his ranch has Roosevelt convinced something supernatural is afoot.
It began with livestock disappearing from the range, their bodies later discovered torn apart by something monstrously powerful. Now people are dying, too. Meanwhile, a successful prospector has gone missing, and rumors about his lost stash of gold have attracted treasure hunters from far and wide – but they keep disappearing, too. To top it all off, this past winter, a mysterious weather phenomenon devastated the land, leaving the locals hungry, broke, and looking for someone to blame. With tensions mounting and the body count rising, Roosevelt fears a single spark will be all it takes to set the Badlands aflame. It’s up to Rose and Thomas to get to the bottom of it, but they’re against the clock and an unknown enemy, and the west will prove wilder than they could possibly imagine…
I love this series so much (this is book three) and I cannot wait for Book 4, especially as this one leaves off on a bit of a cliffhanger (the kind you know will be resolved happily but not quite how.) The world, how magic works, it being set in the 1910s, the characters? Everything in this series is *chef’s kiss*.
That being said, this is maybe my least favorite of the three? Just plot-wise, it was a lot of threads that didn’t quite come together the way I felt like they should have? But it was also very clearly more about character development and expanding the world than being a perfect mystery so I understand. It seems like Erin Lindsey had a bit of a bad time during Covid (relatable) so she’s behind on book four but I will be here whenever it comes because this series is great.
City of Lies - Victoria Thompson
Like most women, Elizabeth Miles assumes many roles; unlike most, hers have made her a woman on the run. Living on the edge of society, Elizabeth uses her guile to relieve so-called respectable men of their ill-gotten gains. But brutal and greedy entrepreneur Oscar Thornton is out for blood. He’s lost a great deal of money and is not going to forgive a woman for outwitting him. With his thugs hot on her trail, Elizabeth seizes the moment to blend in with a group of women who have an agenda of their own.
She never expects to like or understand these privileged women, but she soon comes to respect their intentions, forming an unlikely bond with the wealthy matriarch of the group whose son, Gideon, is the rarest of species—an honest man in a dishonest world. Elizabeth knows she’s playing a risky game, and her deception could be revealed at any moment, possibly even by sharp-eyed Gideon. Nor has she been forgotten by Thornton, who’s biding his time, waiting to strike. Elizabeth must draw on her wits and every last ounce of courage she possesses to keep her new life from being cut short by this vicious shadow from her past.
I don’t even remember how I found this book. I think I maybe checked it in and it looked fun? Either way, I picked it up randomly and adored it. So much of the opening, with our heroine stuck in jail with a bunch of high class suffragettes was based on a real thing that happened and while seeing the government being appalling to women and people protesting for their rights shouldn’t be new or surprising information, it still really got to me.
Watching Elizabeth constantly having to jump through hoops to keep up her pretend identity was fun and I’m looking forward to reading more in the series, especially as the first book wasn’t a mystery so much as a … heist? Long game of deception? So I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of the series has in store.
Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession - Ed. by Sarah Weinman
The appeal of true-crime stories has never been higher. With podcasts like My Favorite Murder and In the Dark, bestsellers like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Furious Hours, and TV hits like American Crime Story and Wild Wild Country, the cultural appetite for stories of real people doing terrible things is insatiable.
Acclaimed author ofThe Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today. Michelle Dean’s “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick” went viral when it first published and is the basis for the TV show The Act and Pamela Colloff’s “The Reckoning,” is the gold standard for forensic journalism. There are 13 pieces in all and as a collection, they showcase writing about true crime across the broadest possible spectrum, while also reflecting what makes crime stories so transfixing and irresistible to the modern reader.
I sat down to read this the other day (I’ve had it checked out for ages) and discovered that I’d already read about half the essays when they were originally published. But they were all incredible so I reread them anyway.
The book is separated into three sections: true crime writing, writing about true crime, and more intersectional work on crime solving. All are spectacular. I’ll be thinking about What Bullets do to Bodies by Jason Fagone for ages. The book is very much what it says on the tin and because each piece is its own thing, it’s easy to pick up and just read what interests you. But each piece was picked for a reason and it’s well worth a read if you enjoy true crime or the intersection of true crime and reform.
A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them - Neil Bradbury
As any reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring—and popular—weapons of choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into a drink, smeared onto the tip of an arrow or the handle of a door, even filtered through the air we breathe. But how exactly do these poisons work to break our bodies down, and what can we learn from the damage they inflict?
In a fascinating blend of popular science, medical history, and true crime, Dr. Neil Bradbury explores this most morbidly captivating method of murder from a cellular level. Alongside real-life accounts of murderers and their crimes—some notorious, some forgotten, some still unsolved—are the equally compelling stories of the poisons involved: eleven molecules of death that work their way through the human body and, paradoxically, illuminate the way in which our bodies function.
Drawn from historical records and current news headlines, A Taste for Poison weaves together the tales of spurned lovers, shady scientists, medical professionals and political assassins to show how the precise systems of the body can be impaired to lethal effect through the use of poison. From the deadly origins of the gin & tonic cocktail to the arsenic-laced wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom, A Taste for Poison leads readers on a riveting tour of the intricate, complex systems that keep us alive—or don’t.
What was fun about this book was that it was written by a scientist. A PhD, as you can see on that cover. So all the science facts on how different poisons affect the body? Technical enough you knew this dude knew what he was talking about but in layman’s terms so you could follow along.
But he got some well known true crime facts wrong. Bless. My man didn’t even know that it wasn’t Kool-Aid but Flavor Aid in Jonestown. This is 101 level stuff.
The book was still very interesting. I learned a lot that I didn’t know and his writing style was slightly over-dramatic at points that it made me giggle. I enjoyed it! But also …. come on, dude.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? - Séamas O’Reilly
Séamas O’Reilly’s mother died when he was five, leaving him, his ten (!) brothers and sisters, and their beloved father in their sprawling bungalow in rural Derry. It was the 1990s; the Troubles were a background rumble, but Séamas was more preoccupied with dinosaurs, Star Wars, and the actual location of heaven than the political climate.
An instant bestseller in Ireland, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is a book about a family of loud, argumentative, musical, sarcastic, grief-stricken siblings, shepherded into adulthood by a man whose foibles and reticence were matched only by his love for his children and his determination that they would flourish.
I don’t remember who recommended this to me but I adored it. O’Reilly’s voice is so incredibly charming, switching between laugh out loud funny and heartbreaking in a sentence. He’s roughly the same age as me so most of the cultural touchstones are the same but he’s living through the Troubles in Derry, his life was so different from mine, and yet he feels like a friend recounting all this over a cup of coffee. I felt such genuine love for everyone just emanating from every word. It made me laugh, it made me cry.
And then in the acknowledgements, he mentioned he was the guy who wrote the Twitter thread about meeting Mary McAleese while on Ketamine and I was like YES, OF COURSE YOU WERE. Cause I read that thread years ago and it was hilarious and also, as I can attest having lived there for library school, Ireland is small.
This book is beyond recommended. It’s very short, just over 200 pages, but every line is perfect.
When I got to this section in my draft, I had just written ‘WHAT YOU DID IN APRIL’ and I had to pause and go “…what did I do in April?” Which always says a lot.
I ended up having to take my computer in and leave it the other day. Although I got the laptop for Christmas, I also was sick over Christmas which lead me to procrastinate setting it up and I finally sat down to do that mid-April, only to promptly find the charger didn’t work out of the box. First we replaced the cable and it worked a day, then stopped. Then we replaced the cable and the power brick … which worked for about four days before stopping. The man at the shop the other day said he’d never seen a problem like it in the 12 years he’d worked there. So I have magical, charger eating laptop and hopefully I’ll get it back in a week magically fixed. Fingers crossed.
I’m also going to steal from myself a bit to describe the possible worst movie going experience of my life I had this month. I already wrote this up in a comment on Webworm but it gets the point across:
I'm a big horror movie fan and I usually go see any movie that comes out, regardless of supposed quality, with my father if he's free and Saturday I took him to see WHAT I THOUGHT was a new horror flick, Nefarious. Watch the trailer, it looks run of the mill psychological horror. And it was definitely scary, just not in the way I imagined. The premise is that a man on death row claims he's a demon and a psychiatrist has to evaluate him to prove he's not insane. The man says the psychiatrist will perform three murders before he leaves that day. Cool, I'm in. There WAS a weird trailer beforehand that was about people taking "our" guns and I was ready to complain after the film but I should have just left then. So, the first "murder" was that the psychiatrist's mom died via physician assisted suicide. I live in Oregon and someone I know was passing via that literally as I sat in the theater so that felt really bad but people can be weird about it so I let it pass. The second "murder" was that the psychiatrist's girlfriend was getting an abortion that day. And then he just started spouting untrue "facts" about abortions, "facts" I recognized from right wing Christian talking points. He then started going on about the liberal media and I turned to my dad and went "This movie is making me very uncomfortable and I would like to leave." So we did (my dad, in true dad fashion, was fine with leaving because 'it was very boring and I was falling asleep.') Googled it on the way home and it's by Christian filmmakers and we apparently walked out before the Glen Beck cameo. I'm still mad I spent money on this film and how the marketing felt like a trick. But that's how it all works, isn't it? They dress it up like it's normal, like it's a thing you know, and then they get under your skin.
As annoyed as I am that I got tricked, I am happy that I’ve been able to share with people who may have otherwise gone to see it what it actually is.
That’s it for this month, I’m afraid. May looms ahead of me with at least one trip planned up to Vancouver BC and hopefully other things on the way. A reminder that paying subscribers can choose a book for me to read and I’ll devote a whole newsletter to it! I am just waiting for someone to take me up on it! I’ll read trash, I promise! But until next time, have a great May and happy reading!