A three-fer for you today of my #20booksofsummer24 hosted by Cathy, I’m now up to 17 read, 3 to go. Here are the three reviews: one OK, one great fun and one very very different and wonderful – in that order.
Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight
Naturally, I was attracted to this book by the conical flask on the cover and, when you open it up and see the endpapers with skulls, test tubes, and now obviously toxic plants, that just reinforced me wanting to read it.
Nell was a PhD candidate at Columbia, working on a project investigating toxicology and antidotes for poisonous plants, but was expelled after one of the other post-grads in her lab died of thallium poisoning.
The disciplinary committee stood in choral formation and issued what sounded like whale tones run through a vocoder. Be-gone, be-gone they groaned. Our experiment in toxicology had taken the life of a valued undergraduate student and would no longer be institutionally condoned. I wore a hazmat suit to the hearing, to promise future caution. the chairman found this disrespectful and I could hardly see his apoplectiv face through the scratched plastic front of my secondhand helmet.
Nell is obsessed with two things. Firstly, ricin – the deadly poison from the castor oil plant seeds, she wants to grow plants to develop an antidote. Secondly, she is obsessed with her former supervisor Dr Joan Kallas. She hangs around the university to see her, despite not being there any more, and dedicates her notebooks to her. Most of the novel is directly written to Joan. In a complex web of relationships, Nell involves her ex-boyfriend Tom, her best friend, Joan and her husband Barry (their marriage is disintegrating) into a tangle of obsession and affairs which can only lead to heartbreak. Meanwhile, if only her castor oil seeds would germinate…
You can sense what’ll happen, can’t you, if not to which of them exactly. While I learned more about the toxicology of poisonous plants from this novel, I can’t say the style resonated with me, and Nell is profoundly irritating as a narrator. Of course, she is classically unreliable too in her obsessions. So this campus (or rather off-campus) novel wasn’t exactly a hit for me, though an interesting and short read.
Source: Own copy. Bloomsbury hardback, 2020, 215 pages. BUY in paperback from Blackwell’s (affiliate link)
The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman
It was a pleasure to be back with the Thursday Murder Club in their third outing, and all our favourite characters are present and correct, with the added frisson generated by PC Donna De Freitas falling for Polish builder Bogdan. As the novel opens, Joyce, has persuaded the team to investigate the cold case of Bethany Waites, a journalist and presenter on the local news programme hosted by Mike Waghorn, who went missing, presumed dead, when her car went over a cliff a decade ago. Joyce is a big fan of Waghorn, and they’ve managed to lure him to Cooper’s Chase retirement village to do a piece on their community. Meanwhile ex-spy Elizabeth’s husband Stephen is slowly succumbing to the memory lapses of dementia, but benefits from playing chess with Bogdan and regular walks with his wife.
Bethany had been on the cusp of a breakthrough in a notorious case of fraud when she disappeared; a woman was jailed for the fraud but stayed schtum. She’s in the same prison as Connie Johnson, from the previous book, so Ibrahim goes in to tempt Connie into befriending the fraudster Heather. Ron gets the task of targeting the man they think was in on the scheme with Heather. This leaves Elizabeth, but she has problems of her own – she’s received a threat – she must kill old Russian spy (and possibly erstwhile lover) Viktor, else Joyce will be murdered.
So we have a cold case and a warm one, plenty for our intrepid quartet (and their friends) to get their teeth stuck into. As you might guess there are a load of twists along the way, and everyone will have their part to play in this huge fun caper, and the quartet’s extended support group grows ever bigger. I particularly loved that Stephen plays a good part and we get to see another side of Bogdan’s character. Viktor and Mike are brilliant additions too – I hope they might recur. As you’d expect, it’s all done with a great deal of tongue in cheek and was so easy to read. In my Waterstones exclusive copy with its ‘foxy’ spredges, there was the bonus of a short story written by Joyce as an entry to a competition – which was cringe-makingly funny in its use of every cliché Osman could shoehorn in. This was the most fun yet.
Source: Own copy. Viking hardback, 2022, 422 pages. BUY in paperback at Blackwell’s (affiliate link)
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This novella wasn’t what I expected at all, in fact I had no idea what to expect! A prizewinning SF&F novella that is an epistolary time travelling love story written by a pair of authors, one a Canadian poet and author of spec fiction, the other an American fantasy author.
Red and Blue are agents of warring empires. They are able to travel through time to change history in multiple timelines. They’ve been becoming aware of each other for some time, they should be enemies, but start leaving each other hidden messages. At first they tease, but as they get to know each other, it turns to flirting and then love. But keeping it secret gets harder and harder. When Red’s Commander find out she is ordered to send Blue a letter that will end it by killing her, but there where there’s time travel, there’s a way…
I wondered how the two authors divided up the writing, and Wikipedia confirms that they wrote one agent each and reacted to each letter having developed an outline together. Gladstone wrote Red and El-Mohtar wrote Blue, which makes sense, although I’d initially thought it was the other way around.
The nearest comparison I can make is to Doctor Who’s time-travelling – from ancient to modern times to the future – the scenarios are many, the most touching being a Waltons (‘Goodnight John-Boy’) like one that was sustained for longer. The methods they use to hide their letters for each other are increasingly ingenious. I liked that it didn’t matter about the two agents’ genders – they were both female as it turns out, but that was irrelevant. The quality of the writing in this novella is superb, not your usual SF&F at all. Just under 200 pages of fantastic storytelling and character development set against an ever-changing backdrop. One of my reads of the year so far.
Source: Own copy. Jo Fletcher flapped paperback, 198 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s or Amazon (cheaper) via affiliate links.
What an interesting trio of books, Annabel. That last one sounds very intriguing, particularly the way the authors wrote it!
It was very different, and rather brilliant.
I’ve only read the first of Richard Osman’s Thursday Club novels, but I did enjoy it. I think I’ve got the second on audible – I must get to it! The SF & F sounds intriguing but I am just not really an SF reader. Perhaps this would be the novella to change that?
The Osmans are great – I know some people don’t like them, but I do! On the Time War, if you treated it as star-crossed lovers rather than out and out SF&F, it might work for you, perhaps?
Interesting combination of stories; I can imagine each working in a different reading mood. This Is How has been lingering on my stack for years now, even though I have the feeling that I will love it. And perhaps that’s why it continues to linger…I do like the idea of a Really Good One being there, in case of a reading emergency. Congrats on making good progress with your challenge!
Marcie – you have a treat in store for you the moment you decide This is How…’s time has come to be read. I know what you mean though – I have been rationing myself with various series/author’s outputs over the years, not wanting to get the end of them.
Three very different ones there! The joy of a 20Books list. We have the fourth Osman to read and have decided to take it on holiday in October – I’ll read it on the plane then hand it over to Matthew!