Marble Hall Murders

Anthony Horowitz

Literary chameleon Anthony Horowitz is back with Marble Hall Murders, the third and supposedly final installment in the Susan Ryeland/Atticus Pund series. If you, like me, are a fan of Golden Age mysteries ala Agatha Christie, this series is a must-read. Each of the three books is a novel within a novel. Book editor Ryeland is forced to solve present-day mysteries that have clues hidden in novels featuring the very Poirot-like detective Pund.

 

I can’t discuss the setup for this book too much without spoiling the first two. I will say that Horowitz again writes the throwback novel portion with such skill that you’d swear it was a real book from the 1930s. In fact, it was so good that for me this time it overshadowed the present-day mystery, which is grimier and more unpleasant. It’s my least favorite of the series, but it’s still a great read. If you’d like to dive in, Magpie Murders, the first in the series, is on eBook sale for $1.99 at Barnes & Noble and Amazon for the next week or so. 

 

I’ll give the current installment four outta five stars.

 

P.S. Horowitz has also written Sherlock Holmes and James Bond novels that do an amazing job of capturing the voices of the original creators. He ALSO has another ongoing series I enjoy where a fictionalized version of himself is the sidekick to a grumpy, eclectic detective!

 Once Was Willem

M.R. Carey

There was some real serendipity involved with this one! I finished a book last Thursday, and two I’m interested in are streeting tomorrow. That meant I needed something not too long to read. I went to the TBR pile and looked for the skinniest tome I could find, and it was Once Was Willem by M.R. Carey. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t even remember why I had purchased it.

 

I ended up reading over a hundred pages in the first sitting, and practically inhaled the rest over the next few days. It’s sort of a hard one to describe. It’s a relatively historically accurate story set in England in the 1100s. It’s also part dark fable, horror story, and found family tale. Willem is a perfectly happy and well-loved twelve-year-old who dies suddenly of a fever. His parents are desperate and turn to a mysterious magician to bring him back. He succeeds, sort of, but the Willem that comes back is a monstrous version of the boy who is soon shunned from his village.

 

Willem discovers he’s not the only monster in the world. He meets new and fantastical friends in the mountains he’s settled in and starts to build a new and contented life. Meanwhile, the magician who raised him from the grave has been up to no good, and soon the villagers who drove him from his home are seeking him out to save their children from a horrific fate. Despite his misgivings, Willem rallies his magical friends and sets out to save his former playmates and cousins.

 

The writing in this one is simply beautiful. There’s a lot of period-specific language, and I’ll admit I hit the dictionary more than once. It is lyrical and adds a great deal to the experience, without affecting the flow of the story. Sometimes the story feels like a fairy tale, other times a horror story, and finally like a proto-superhero team-up. It’s hard to see how a sequel would happen, but I’d be first in line to read it.

 

I’m thrilled I stumbled into this one. Five outta five, and one of the best reads of the year so far.

The Bible Says So: What we get right (and wrong) about scripture's most controversial issues.

So I’m a little wary about discussing this one! I’ve changed my mind three or four times about how to talk about it. Let’s start with the aerial view: I’d give it four out of five stars and recommend that everyone who calls themselves a Christian pick up a copy. In the book, Bible scholar Dan McClellan turns an academic lens on some of the scriptures and beliefs that have been used to weaponize the Bible and attack marginalized communities. 

McClellan is one of my favorite social media content creators, and I preordered this book as soon as he announced it. He works very hard, and mostly successfully, to take the deep academic discussion around the most influential book in human history and “dumb” it down into language more accessible to a casual audience. Oh, and he also manages to throw in Doctor Who and Metallica references, so of course, I love him for that!

His bottom line is that a lot of people, especially those in the evangelical fundamentalist community, have no idea what they are talking about and constantly misquote and misinterpret scripture to attack others while propping up misogynistic, homophobic white supremacy. He talks a lot about the MANY translations that have happened over the years, often for political reasons, and discusses what these stories would have meant to the people who originally wrote and heard them.

To be honest, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but I enjoyed this one even while it made me angry chapter by chapter. It made me mad not because it challenged what I was taught as a young person, but because we still give so much weight in our world to an Iron Age and Roman Empire set of manuscripts that often contradict themselves, and were reinterpreted to have new meanings sometimes centuries after the original writing.

While I’m ranting to the zero people who have read this far, let me finish by saying I don’t think I know many genuine Christians. Instead of followers of Christ and his message, I see a lot of people who want to worship the vengeful god of the Old Testament. I’d still oppose it, but I’d be way more impressed if fundies wanted to put The Beatitudes on school walls instead of the Ten Commandments. Here endeth the rant.