Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

I'm a HUGE fan of the Slow Horses book series and its TV adaptation. I recently discovered that author Mick Herron had a series that predates Slow Horses, and it was also getting a show on Apple TV. How could I not give it a try?

Down Cemetery Road was Herron's first book, and honestly, it shows. It's a good plot with good characters, and sprinkled throughout are his wonderful turns of phrase and literary magic tricks. The problem here is the pacing, which is terrible. At times, it felt like work reading it. I will say the end was satisfying, but it came at least 50 pages too late.

The Slow Horses seasons have been very faithful adaptations of the books. I hope the Down Cemetery Road series takes a few more liberties with the source material. Inside this book is a good story that needed a few more rounds of editing. Hopefully, the TV show fixes the pacing issues.

There are three more books in the Zoe Boehm series. Will I be back? Hard to say. For now, it's back to Slough House for me. This book gets a maybe generous three outta five stars from me.

I’ve reached the end of Brandon Sanderson’s original Mistborn trilogy! I’d like to give you a nice, comprehensive review of The Hero of Ages, but I can’t really say much of anything about it that won’t spoil the first two installments. So here are some broad thoughts. It’s a five-star, rounded up from four and a half. It’s my least favorite of the trilogy, but man does it stick the ending! Unlike the perfectly paced first book, this one is probably 150 pages too long, similar to the second. There’s a bit too much navel-gazing in both of them. Will I continue into the second era of the series that’s set three hundred years in the future? Most likely sometime next year. Having finished the trilogy, who would I recommend it to? Hunger Games fans for sure, and anyone who is looking to dip their toes into fantasy that isn’t too dense in lore. I think I’m overdue to get back to my staple of quirky detectives and dead Brits, but I did enjoy Vin’s story. Five outta five stars.

 The Well of Ascension

Brandon Sanderson

It's hard to discuss the second book in a series without revealing a few spoilers from the first, but I'll keep it mild. Sanderson's The Well of Ascension is the second piece of the original Mistborn trilogy. In the first book, our heroine Vin and her team defeated the god like Lord Emperor and ended his millennium-long reign. The second book asks a very interesting question I wish Star Wars would tackle head-on: What do you do after you take down the empire? How do you keep the people fed and the trains running on time? What if there was something even worse out there that your enemy was keeping at bay? This book was just as strong as the first in the series. It's just very different. It's a political potboiler. To get real nerdy, think of this one as the Deep Space Nine entry. Like I said about Mistborn, this is a perfect series for people who enjoyed The Hunger Games. Strong FMC, a little romance, and plenty of action. I'm excited to finish the trilogy later this year. Five outta five stars

 The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

So August was a bumpy month to say the least, but I did achieve my goal of finishing The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman before the movie adaptation hit Netflix. Earlier this year, I read his book We Solve Murders and really enjoyed it. Would I enjoy his most famous work? That was a mystery that didn’t take four senior citizens to solve.

There are three bodies and two murders vexing our Thursday Murder Club, but for me, it wasn’t the mysteries that hooked me. It was the character work. Frankly, I found pieces of the mystery plot lacking just a bit, including the resolution to one of the cases. In the end, it didn’t matter, though. I had so much fun hanging out with the four main characters that I would have read a book where they did almost anything. I’ll definitely be back for the next book in the series. Four and a half outta five stars.

(Fingers crossed the movie is good! The trailer has me a little nervous now that I’ve finished the book.)

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with what I'll call Life Events. It’s really thrown my writing and reading schedules off track. I finally managed to finish The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch last night. This is one of the most recommended fantasy books out there, and it lived up to the hype.

                  This is a very intricately plotted novel, and it feels daunting to try to do a summary. The setting is Camorr, a duchy in a fantasy world with roughly Renaissance level technology that seems lightly based on Venice. Our hero is Locke Lamora, leader of a band of good-hearted thieves who only target the rich nobles of the city-state.  We pick things up with the start of a new heist plot that would feel right at home in the Ocean’s 11 cinematic universe. There are also flashbacks sprinkled throughout the book that tell how Locke and his friends became a team. Just as we start feeling welcome and settled in his world, things in Lamora’s life quickly start to fall apart, and soon, instead of pulling off a long con, the group must save their own lives and perhaps those of Camorr’s citizens.

                  I’ll reach into my bag of cliches and pull out “heartfelt” and “rollicking” to best describe this one. It’s a long book, but it never feels like one. Lynch has the skill to write chapter endings that make you want to ignore the clock and keep reading. I wish I’d read this at a better time of year for me. It might have been an early contender for my book of the year. This can be read as a standalone even though it’s the first in a series, and I will definitely be back for the sequel. A solid five outta five stars.

Of Monsters and Mainframes

Are you a fan of Murderbot? The books or the show? First of all, you should be, and second of all, do I have a book for you! 

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove is a sci-fi action comedy that felt like Murderbot mixed with a healthy dose of Douglas Adams. Several characters get POV time, but mostly it’s told from the perspective of a self-aware AI that runs an interstellar passenger ship called Demeter. If that name sounds familiar, you can probably guess where we are headed. After a series of weird tragedies that befall her various passengers, Demeter assembles a team to hunt down the immortal villain Dracula. The team consists of a fussy medical AI named Steward, a werewolf named Agnus, a Frankenstein monster, and a mummy named Steve.

It's a comedy. It’s a found family story. Near the end, it weirdly becomes something of a romance. Most of all, it was fun, full of action, and laughs. If you are looking for something light to read by the pool this summer, this just might be the book for you. Four outta five stars. 

Hyperion, by author Dan Simmons, has just moved to the top of my 2025 book rankings, and may have cracked my top five all-time. The Hugo award-winning sci-fi novel tells the story of seven very different characters on a doomed pilgrimage to the title planet. In a nod to The Canterbury Tales, the book consists mainly of the pilgrims sharing the stories of how they became involved in this doomed enterprise. Oh, and we’re told right from the start that one of them is a spy and a traitor!

Humans escaped a destroyed Earth and spread across the universe in a web of planets united by a government called The Hegemony. It’s aided by a mostly friendly collection of AIs and opposed by a rogue group of humans known as The Ousters, who have completely evolved and adapted to life in zero-gravity conditions. The flashpoint of the conflict has settled above the skies of the backwater world of Hyperion.

This odd planet is mostly backwards and forgettable, with two notable exceptions. First, it’s home to the Time Tombs, a collection of seemingly empty burial structures situated in a pocket of space that appears to be moving backward in time. Perhaps tied to this is a malevolent creature known as the Shrike, which inhabits the vicinity of the tombs and kills without remorse. We are told, however, that the Shrike will grant a wish to those who make a pilgrimage to the planet, but these wishes may come at a high cost to the pilgrim's life. A web-wide cult has even grown up around this mysterious character. Our POV characters are making what may be the final Shrike pilgrimage, as the war between the Hegemony and the Outsiders threatens to destroy the entire planet.

The general setup of the book is interesting and well executed, but the real joy lies in the six tales we get to hear. Some verge on horror stories, others are heartbreaking tragedies, but all are beautifully written. This is a genre book that can be given the capital L label of Literature. I thought about this book and its characters constantly and couldn’t wait to steal more time to read about them. It ends without resolution to the overarching story, but I’m almost tempted not to read the sequel. It feels nearly perfect as is.

Near the end of my reading, I discovered that the author was a post-9/11 conservative. Maybe that’s unfair, and he leaned that way before, but it seems he drifted further in that direction after the attacks on New York. This surprised me because two of the messages I took away from this fantastic book were the evil of capitalism run amok and just how horrible colonization is. It also contains a remarkably timely warning about the dangers of AI, given that the book was published in 1989.

If you’re looking for a story that will challenge you as a reader, but make it well worth your while, I’d strongly recommend Hyperion. SIX outta five stars.