Jun 12 2026

Tantalizing Tales — June 2026 — Part Two

Happy Men’s World Cup season, dear readers! I do not, alas, have any books related to the beautiful game in this week’s tantalizing pile but I do have several that could tempt me to look away from my TV screen for a second… or more likely fill the empty time between these already wonderful and infuriating matches!

First up, we have C B Everett’s The Final Chapter, a metafictional book-within-a-book thriller that’s certain to delight fans of both puzzles and high concept mysteries like myself!

A decade ago, a bestselling, critically acclaimed author suddenly disappeared. Now, a manuscript purporting to be his final novel has unexpectedly resurfaced. Trouble is, it’s nothing like his other books. Instead of a moving work of literary genius, this new novel is an espionage thriller filled with seemingly stereotypical James-Bond-esque characters and situations.

Bewildered, his publisher calls in the author’s best friend for help contextualizing the novel in the missing writer’s larger oeuvre. C B Everett (!) is also an author, but he’s just as baffled by this strange book as everyone else is. The more he reads, however, the more he begins to recognize details from the life that he and his missing friend had actually shared. Could his friend have coded real world secrets into the manuscript before abruptly disappearing? Soon, C B will be wondering how well we can really know our friends — and even ourselves — as he’s plunged into a life-threatening web of intrigue.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/12/tantalizing-tales-june-2026-part-two/

Jun 11 2026

The Mystery Of The Stolen World Cup Trophy by Angela Cervantes

Men’s World Cup season has officially begun! Ever since 1998, this has been THE most exciting global sporting event for me, and even tho this year’s promises to be the worst run and most corrupt tournament of all time, not even that can dampen my love of the sport and the community who actually care about the beautiful game.

With that in mind, I was super happy to dive into Angela Cervantes’ The Mystery of The Stolen World Cup Trophy as part of my preparations/celebrations. I am very pro anything that spreads the joy of the tournament to as many people as possible, and am still a little bitter at all the years I missed out on of this in my youth. This middle grade mystery series definitely transmits that excitement and hopefully entices more than a few bookish kids into finding out more about the beautiful game. Conversely, I hope it also introduces some sports-mad kids to the joys of a good mystery novel, which this definitely is (tho not without certain reservations that I’ll discuss later in this review.)

The story itself revolves around sixth grader Diez Espada, who’s inherited his love of football — tho not, unfortunately, commensurate skill — from his dad and his love of detection from his recently deceased librarian mom. When he and his dad receive exclusive tickets to a party where the actual World Cup trophy will be displayed in Miami, ahead of the 2026 World Cup final, it feels like a dream come true.

Disaster strikes, however, when the trophy is stolen by the international thief known as La Lechuza. Diez is certain that he’ll be able to figure out whodunnit and get the trophy back, with the help of his crush Rio and the actual detective on the case, the world-famous Detective Enzo. But there’ll be more than one tricky conundrum in his path as he figures out how to navigate a surprisingly treacherous field.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/11/the-mystery-of-the-stolen-world-cup-trophy-by-angela-cervantes/

Jun 10 2026

Murder Summer!

Here in the northern hemisphere, as temperatures get hotter and hotter, and vacations get (hopefully) more and more imminent, don’t we all just want to relax with a cold beverage and a book in which people die at the hand of another? It can’t just be me. Luckily, publishers know we want this, and there is a delightful lineup of murder books this season, to help us while away the hot days of summer.

a hotel key is dipped in blood on the cover of Body Count by Codie CrowleyIf you’re in the mood for a politically progressive teen slasher, go for Body Count, by Codie Crowley. If you want a self-referential portal fantasy (with murders), Sarah Rees Brennan’s All Hail Chaos is perfect for you. And if your summer calls for a combo classic mystery and romance that takes place in the golden era of British mystery novels, The Cloak and Dagger Club by Jackie McMahon will satisfy that craving.

All of these books are genre-savvy, commenting enjoyably on the tropes and potential pitfalls of their respective genres, which is exactly my jam.

Body Count came out from Disney Hyperion on May 5th. Don’t let the Disney publisher lead you astray. There are no princesses with animal sidekicks here. I loved Codie Crowley’s first book, Here Lies a Vengeful Bitch, so I was extremely excited for Body Count. In Body Count, Sundae is a cheerleader prom queen on the Jersey Shore for Prom Weekend, when a supernatural entity starts targeting her and everyone around her. A classic set up for a teen slasher story, but this one upends several genre expectations.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/10/murder-summer/

Jun 09 2026

Hugo Awards 2026: Best Short Story Nominees

Getting a much earlier start with this year’s slate of Hugo nominees than I did last year’s, go me! And, as with last year’s short story slate, my favorite comes from Isabel J Kim, with her diabolical Wire Mother.

Perhaps diabolical isn’t the best description, but after reading the bland obviousness of most of the other nominees, it was nice to get into a story that’s messy and mean and thoroughly believable.

Our prickly young heroine Cassie has been diagnosed with Emotional Contagion Deficit, a condition where she has trouble bonding with digital people. This includes her digital mother Amy, to the chagrin of her fully biological father. As Cassie sometimes wants to tells him, while he could build Amy to love him and the things he loves, he couldn’t build Cassie to do the same, so stop trying to make them bond already.

I really don’t want to say too much else about this story because it’s full of sharp surprises, but I very much appreciated the skepticism with which Ms Kim addresses the idea of AI personhood under circumstances which are essentially a realistic extrapolation from where we are as a society today, both technologically and emotionally. I also appreciated how she underscores the complexity of the matter, in the persons of both Rina and Oliver. WM is both a clever interrogation of the happy clappy idea that chatbots are actually people and a warning against the trouble inherent in conflating the two.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/09/hugo-awards-2026-best-short-story-nominees/

Jun 08 2026

Mount Verity by Therese Bohman

translated from the original Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

I’m going to be so for real here and admit that the main reason I picked up this book off my TBR pile was because it’s Swedish like my beloved Viktor Gyokeres. When you’ve come out of Etsy Witch retirement to support a guy, it’s hard not to feel emotionally invested, if not outright entangled, in his fortunes and interests and background, especially when the rewards have been so enriching (or maybe that’s just my delulu talking again, lol.)

But yes, I felt energetically obligated to read this short novel, and would like to thank the cosmos for bringing it my way. Mount Verity is the story of Hanna Hallman, from her youth in the Kolmarden, through attempts to establish herself as an artist in Gothenburg, then to her forties in Stockholm. Her relationships with two men anchor the narrative, as she’s repeatedly drawn back to the village where she grew up. One is her best friend: calm, handsome Marcus, who can’t wait to leave Krokek for a big city like Malmo, where his absent father lives. The other is her older brother Erik, who abruptly disappears in the wee hours of Easter morning, after midnight mass.

According to Erik’s friends, they had decided to bike to mass together for one of their obligatory pre-confirmation attendances. They’d had a few beers beforehand, then changed their minds about going back to one of the boy’s houses to continue drinking. Instead, they went up to Mount Verity, a nearby peak with a spooky legend attached to one of its caves. Allegedly, the cave was used during seventeenth century witch trials to “test” suspected witches. The accused were lowered into the cave and asked if they were witches. If they admitted it, they were pulled back up and punished. If they denied it, they were left to be swallowed by a cave said to devour liars.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/08/mount-verity-by-therese-bohman/

Jun 07 2026

Hugo Awards 2026: Best Related Work

The 2026 Hugo Award for Best Related Work — which isn’t called the Hugo Award for Everything Else but at this stage in its evolution maybe should be — hews closer to its bookish roots this time around. Four of six finalists are books, or at least very book-like, with a podcast and a spreadsheet rounding out the list. This inverts the 2025 shares, which had two books, three reports in various formats and a Bingo Reading Challenge.

A thoroughly flagged copy of Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

I expect the back and forth to continue, as it speaks to a fundamental tension in the category: Will the non-fiction books for which the category was originally created get crowded out by more topical, more controversial and more glancingly engageable works? Hugo nominators and voters are having a multi-year conversation about what they, we, consider deserving of the field’s top honors. Inevitably, there will be proposals to split the category into book and non-book categories. Unless books somehow wind up getting crowded out year after year, I hope that the present inelegant compromise will be maintained. Category proliferation is a one-way ratchet, and as much as I have rolled my eyes at some nominations (and ranked them below No Award), establishing Best Related Non-Book Work would likely be the source of much more.

This year seems to have struck a good balance, though my views will become obvious as I make a few notes about each finalist in ascending order of preference.

“Ragnarök vs the Long Night” is an episode of the History of Westeros Podcast, released in August 2025. I presume that the whole project is close enough to a professional podcast that it was ineligible in the Fancast category. The episode concerns connections between apocalypses, especially from Nordic mythology, and “The Long Night,” the third episode of the final season of Game of Thrones, originally broadcast in May 2019, and the first episode that I didn’t watch. The production of the podcast, which I encountered as a YouTube video, is high quality, and obviously a labor of love. It’s also two and a half hours long about a show I had fallen out of love with and stopped watching at precisely the episode the hosts discuss in great detail. There’s obviously an appreciative audience for this sort of thing. I’m just not part of it.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/07/hugo-awards-2026-best-related-work/

Jun 06 2026

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

A detective on a generation starship is an interesting premise. Olivia Waite has taken the venerable concept of a slower-than-light spaceship, the Fairweather, taking humans to another star system and given it several new aspects. She has moved the launch date into a medium-distant future. The people on the ship are not desperate refugees fleeing any catastrophe recognizable to contemporary readers, nor are they intrepid explorers of the unknown. Humans of this future have mastered closed-circle ecology to the extent that they were capable of building a vessel designed for a voyage lasting more than a thousand years; indeed, as Murder by Memory they have been underway for more than 300 years. Biological sciences have advanced far enough that recording all of a person’s memories is a routine procedure. New human bodies can be produced in two days, rather than the customary nine months, and in this future it is done without requiring another human to do the producing. The ship’s computer is a genuine AI, though content to just run the ship and in fairness to Waite, she shows the computer mostly in the unusual circumstances produced by an interstellar magnetic storm. I think the story also implies that humans have mastered gravity sufficiently to generate it on the ship without a need for rotation or similar techniques.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

Waite is not interested in the workings of a generation ship generally, or even in the specifics that she has set up; she is interested in arranging them so that she can tell the story of a detective clearing up a mystery. The ship has no police as such. As Waite describes the background, “From launch, the Fairweather’s Community Charter had been very clear that police were considered largely unnecessary. We had a small security force Ferry could deploy as needed—glorified bouncers, really—and a wealth of social workers in various fields; these two groups managed most everyday crises that arose.” (p. 19) So the society that built the Fairweather has not only solved gravity, it has apparently solved all of the human problems that give rise to sudden violence or to slower forms of cruelty. That’s not entirely accurate; Waite gestures toward the situations that call for the presence of ship’s detectives. “For more complex situations—your elaborate hoaxes, your sudden deaths, your inexplicable accidents and incidents in which witness statements vastly differed—there were the ship’s detectives. We had no power to arrest or enforce: our duty was strictly to sort out the truth from the lies and report them to the Crime Committee, which would arrange for any necessary punishments or reparations.” (p. 19) The very list implies a society bereft of abusers, sadists and assholes.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/06/murder-by-memory-by-olivia-waite/

Jun 05 2026

Tantalizing Tales — June 2026 — Part One

Happy June, everybody! The English Premier league season is over and the World Cup is right around the corner, with plenty of other things to celebrate in a world grown increasingly malevolent for people just trying to live our lives (in other words, Happy Pride!)

In keeping with that thought, we have our first selection of upcoming reads for the month, with Mollyhall Seeley’s We Hexed The Moon. Four teenaged best friends are facing down the prospect of having to grow up and grow apart now that they’ve graduated high school. During a sleepover, they jokingly decide to hex the moon. Imagine their shock when the moon does leave the sky and shows up, in mostly person-shaped form, in one of their bedrooms instead.

Unfortunately for the girls, the moon has no intention of returning to her rightful place in the heavens. Planet Earth, however, still very much needs a satellite. The moon tells the four besties that since they had the audacity to try to cast a spell on her, they’re going to have to find her a replacement: someone who’ll essentially have to sacrifice their own humanity in order to take the moon’s place in the sky while she takes over their body in turn. The girls, who are so close that they’re practically one person, are forced to splinter further apart as they reckon with what they’ve done and what they must do to fix it.

I cannot be the only person getting Diana Wynne Jones’ The Time Of The Ghost vibes from this, which is one of the biggest compliments I can honestly give a book. Bonus: there’s explicitly queer representation here as the girls not only struggle with the moon’s demand but also with the reality of the swiftly changing world around them.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/05/tantalizing-tales-june-2026-part-one/

Jun 04 2026

Notre-Dame: The World’s Cathedral by Lynn Curlee

First of all, best wishes to the author, who has hopefully overcome the bout of ill health that affected the completion of this fabulous book!

I’m a huge fan of non-fiction for children, as it’s often the most elegant and efficient way of communicating a factual subject. Authors in this field, and especially the more popular/bestselling writers, know how to talk to kids in language that is informative without being overwhelming. Heck, one of my favorite and most recommended methods of studying for Jeopardy! is by going through children’s non-fiction, which I’ve found to be uniquely capable of helping build long-lasting neural pathways by placing facts in context (my highly successful J! bestie otoh prefers Wikipedia, but he is Gen Z.)

The rest of us old timers and the actual target audience alike will find much to admire in Lynn Curlee’s latest luxe picture book, that touches on so much regarding the cultural treasure that is Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral. He briefly discusses the history of Paris and the Ile de la Cite, before detailing the centuries-spanning original design and construction. He takes us through the architectural terms and innovations of the Gothic building, as well as its original and manifold purposes: not only as a place of worship and congregation but also as a picture book of religious images. Given that the building was first proposed early in the 12th century, when literacy was still rare in the populace, this last factor felt like a necessity for both religious and political advocacy. As the Church fell out of and back into favor in France, so too did the fortunes of Notre-Dame.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/04/notre-dame-the-worlds-cathedral-by-lynn-curlee/

Jun 03 2026

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

Deeeeeep siiiiiiigh.

I know I touted this as the seminal guide to understanding the Arsenal fan — as that’s how it’s long been sold to me — but after actually reading the book, I unhesitatingly recant my endorsement. This was the most excruciating nonsense I’ve read in a long time. And here’s the thing, as someone who’s been in love with the Arsenal since 1997 — admittedly, some years after this book is set — Fever Pitch should have been right up my alley. I, too, over-identify with my beloved team and treat them like a pillar of my personality. I have suffered through many lean years in which non-Arsenal fans greeted my declaration of allegiance with either polite bafflement or outright mockery. I have gotten up at nonsense hours countless times to watch games live via satellite TV, either alone on my parents’ living room couch in Malaysia or here with my friends in the Washington DC area, well before our sports bar’s regular opening hours. I’ve traveled absurd distances both up and down the East Coast of the USA and across the Atlantic to watch my lads (and lately my ladies) play. My work and social schedules are entirely and unapologetically at the mercy of the Arsenal fixture list. So I understand the devotion that drives the often miserable conditions of being a Gooner, as we Arsenal supporters have been called long before more recent usages of the term.

Imagine then my dismay when I had to endure this absolute bollocks of a book that I was entirely predisposed to liking! The experience of reading it felt like eagerly attending a family reunion only to have to grit my teeth when an obnoxious uncle loudly insists that everyone else present — and especially the women; the misogyny in this book is through the stadium roof while also oblivious as to how it contradicts itself — can’t be real fans because we’ve never had to tough it out like he did.

Guys like this, for real, are the reason no one likes football fans or wants to be one of them.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/03/fever-pitch-by-nick-hornby/