Dec 21 2025

Two Short Reviews for December

I like seeing authors trying new things, and seeing Travis Baldree, who writes in a corner of fantasy that sometimes strikes me as authors and readers trying to connect over a menu of tags — “I’ll have a found-family, sapphic, friends-to-lovers tale with a side order of hidden magic, hold the prophecies and the Chosen One, please” — try something new is particularly welcome. Brigands & Breadknives is not entirely new, of course. He uses the same setting as in Legends & Lattes and Bookshops & Bonedust. The beginning of the book also features several of the same characters, although Baldree shifts his focus early on.

Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree

In Bookshops & Bonedust, Baldree introduced Fern, a ratkin who owned the titular bookshop. She and her shop played important roles in the growth and adventures of that book’s heroine, Viv. It looked like Fern’s happily-ever-after was the revival of her shop in her hometown of Murk. The opening of Brigands & Breadknives shows that ennui was an enemy at least as dangerous to Fern as the previous volume’s necromancer. In Murk, Fern developed a near terminal case of is-this-all-there-is and decided that the cure was to move her shop to the city where Viv is now running a thriving coffee shop. Unfortunately, as the first chapters of Brigands & Breadknives shows, she got the diagnosis all wrong. The wrong cure also meant a lot of work and support from her friends was at best misdirected.

One night, after failing again to tell her friends about her unease, Fern falls in a drunken stupor into the back of a wagon. When she awakens, she finds that she is a day and a half outside the city, foodless, and penniless. On the positive side of the ledger, the cart belongs to Astryx, a legendary elf warrior known as the Oathmaiden. She is transporting a goblin prisoner to points northward with the intent of collecting a large bounty. Fern speaks some goblin, which Astryx does not; the prisoner gives no appearance of speaking the common tongue. Astryx agrees to take Fern under her wing as something of an interpreter and something of an assistant. With each step, Fern gets further away from the people who wanted only to help her, and who have no idea what happened.

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Dec 19 2025

Tantalizing Tales — December 2025 — Part Two

Another round-up column for you, dear readers, catching up with books I still haven’t yet had the time to read this year but really want to! First up is a book co-authored by four amazing thriller writers. In Desperate Deadly Widows, Kimberly Belle, Layne Fargo, Cate Holahan and Vanessa Lillie join forces once more to tell the continuing story of four women linked through the deaths of their partners.

In 1985, a plane carrying four Mafia-affiliated lawyers exploded over the Atlantic. Their widows — all wildly different but all resourceful and determined — joined forces to figure out what really happened and how best to protect each other and themselves. Two years and several changed situations later, the widows reunite. Krystle is still trying to save the law firm, while former model Justine is training to be a lawyer herself. Meredith now owns and operates the strip club where she once danced. And Camille works on the shadier side of the law, orchestrating honey pot schemes for women seeking vengeance.

Worlds collide once more when Camille’s latest target turns up dead in the champagne room. That would be bad enough, but the deceased Mayor Tom was also a well-connected person of influence. And Camille isn’t the only one of the widows implicated in his murder. It’s going to be up to the foursome to untangle a conspiracy that depended on the death of one powerful man. Will their bonds be strong enough to withstand the pressures seeking to turn them against one another? Find out in this wild 80s romp of a suspense thriller!

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Dec 18 2025

The Heartwarming Love Coloring Book by Gaynor Carradice

I don’t ever remember being this overwhelmed in previous holiday seasons but y’all, this year has been a doozy. Between work, holiday events, shopping and unexpected medical emergencies, this has already been A Month. I’ve had to let so many non-essential things fall to the wayside this December, including my weekly art sessions, while I tried to prioritize the things that I do in community and not just for me.

So I was extremely relieved to be forced, after a fashion, to finally work on this delightful coloring book. Don’t get me wrong, I love coloring, and especially coloring Gaynor Carradice’s adorable line drawings. The forty-five pages here truly run the gamut of heartwarming love, presenting all sorts of scenarios in which the love of sweethearts, family and other people dear to us are depicted using cute woodland animals in the coziest scenes. There are pictures without characters, too, for when you just want to think of a comforting place or object (or, perhaps, you want to give yourself a little self-care because you deserve love, too.)

The lines are large and bold, helpful for those who don’t want to strain their eyes or cramp their hands, with the added benefit of leaving space for more intricate patternwork if you like to add your own flair to the drawings. Speaking of space, there are generous borders for each single-sided, oversized sheet, allowing you to cut out and frame any particular masterpieces you create.

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Dec 17 2025

True War Stories, Vol 1 edited by Alex de Campi and Khai Krumbhaar

Sometimes I feel like if people truly knew the reality of war (and pain and loss,) they’d be far less happy to embrace it. You’ve got all these weird macho cosplayers acting like war isn’t a big deal when they’ve never seen any action themselves. Then, ofc, you have the sociopaths happy to risk, if not outright take, the lives of others. Most of the military personnel I know, however, are thoughtful, responsible people with a clear-eyed view of what they’re involved in: something necessary and far more complicated than any glib slogan could encapsulate.

That is the tone, too, taken by the fifteen storytellers in this graphic volume, which will hopefully be the first of many. War is a lot of things to a lot of people, and this book seeks not to romanticize but to very much humanize the personnel who join the United States military. Some of our narrators are far more excited about the prospect of serving than others, but all have compelling stories of their times in active combat zones. Some of the stories go on to describe the aftermath of service, but all emphasize how military personnel are human beings just like us, with the same complex motivations and desires. Whether its a trans woman desperate to get out of the service and be reunited with her love, or a soldier in Vietnam who just wants a good night’s sleep, these are all deeply human stories.

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Dec 16 2025

Asylum Murders by Michael G Colburn (EXCERPT)

Hello, readers! We have a treat for you today with an excerpt from the second installment of Michael G Colburn’s twisty historical Lady Black mystery series.

Asylum Murders finds our heroine, London thief turned Australian high society widow Lady Edith “Edie” Black, in the midst of establishing her mostly secret career as a private investigator. She’s thus pleased to be hired for a case that requires the utmost discretion: the disappearance of the Parliament of Victoria’s ceremonial mace after a night of debauchery involving high-ranking officials. She’s looking forward to tracking down the missing mace and bringing it back to its rightful home… until her investigation leads her to a young woman brutally beaten and left for dead the very same night.

Meanwhile, Edie’s best friend Britina is serving as a novice nun tasked with caring for patients at the infamous Kew Asylum. After Britina notices that patients are disappearing with no explanation, she’s framed for murder, declared criminally insane and locked up behind the very walls she worked in. Edie will have to infiltrate the asylum in order to save her best friend, while solving more than one crime in the process.

Read on for an excerpt that gives further insight into Edie and Britina’s pasts:

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Dec 15 2025

The Snowman Code by Simon Stephenson

with incredibly charming illustrations by Reggie Brown.

Ooof, I should have known from the introductory note itself, with the line “Sometimes it can feel like winter because there is snow inside”, that this book would wring me out. Gosh, when was the last time I had an ugly cry like this, over something that didn’t touch directly on dark chapters of my own past? I genuinely can’t recall, which only speaks to the power of this astonishing middle grade novel.

Blessing is ten years old and enduring the longest winter of her lifetime. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t mind the cold and snow. Trouble is, winter weather affects her mother Margaret adversely. Blessing has already been sent away twice to live with foster parents while Margaret was voluntarily institutionalized for depression, so the last thing she wants to do is upset her mother by admitting that she’s being bullied at school. Unable to take the bullying any longer tho, she begins to skip classes, loitering around London and making up stories to tell her mother about what she’s done all day instead.

Everything changes when she sees a snowman come to life in a deserted park one afternoon. The two strike up a friendship that sees them doing their best to help each other out, and that had me absolutely blubbering by the end of this moving yet still hilarious book about friendship, love, sadness and grief.

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Dec 14 2025

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

Hemlock & Silver is T. Kingfisher’s latest novel, and the sixth of her works that I have read this year. I’ve already bought six more, and I have a list of which of works are being published or re-published in 2026, so I have a lot of Kingfisher to look forward to. I’m looking forward to how she hilariously applies common sense to fantastic situations. I’m looking forward to how her characters look at things slightly askance, questioning things that the world around them takes for granted. I’m looking forward to how her ordinary, or at least ordinary-ish, people have the capacity for heroics. I’m looking forward to how her heroes have unexpected vulnerabilities. Most of all, I’m looking forward to the surprises she draws out of situations and stories I thought I already knew well.

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

Kingfisher also has a knack for arresting opening lines, and Hemlock & Silver is no exception: “I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.” In short order, the scene becomes both more and less explicable than that beginning as Kingfisher slowly doles out explanations while adding complications. “The poison was a distillate of chime-adder venom, which burned my sinuses when I took it off my wrist the way some people take snuff.” So the as-yet-unnamed narrator is familiar with poisons, and apparently takes them on a regular basis. But why? “I hadn’t recognized [the king] at first when he stepped through the door of the stillroom. Well, why would I? The king was someone that I had seen far off, at the head of a long table or perched on a throne. Without context, he was simply a well-dressed man who had come in without even knocking.” So the narrator is placed highly enough in society to have seen the king indoors, though from a distance, and prosperous enough to have a separate room to work in. Work that involves taking poisons. “… I thought perhaps he was one of my father’s friends, so I simply said, ‘Wait a moment, please,’ and turned back to stripping rosemary leaves off thin wooden stems. (I always process rosemary after snorting adder venom. The fragrance of the rosemary helps to clear out the awful burnt smell of the venom.)” (all quotes p. 1) So the narrator’s father has friends who might be mistaken for royalty; the narrator also snorts adder venom often enough to have developed a routine for what to do afterward.

The scene only gets more arresting as it progresses. The first external detail of the narrator emerges when she says that when she realized the man she had just given an order to really was the king, she tried to curtsy and “when I clutched my skirts I dropped the rosemary, and the leaves went spilling down over my skirt and clung to the fabric, sticky with sap.” (pp. 1–2) The ordinary course of things, if a visit from a king can ever be ordinary, does not return.

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Dec 13 2025

An Unrelated Pair of Books by Emily Tesh and Lois McMaster Bujold

The thing about The Incandescent by Emily Tesh as a novel about a magic boarding school in England is that it’s told from the adults’ point of view, adults who take their responsibilities seriously, and who have real lives that are separate from what is happening to the students. Boarding-school stories often assign the teachers archetypical roles: antagonists, mentors, the clueless, the helpful, the well-meaning but bumbling, strict but with a heart of gold, and so on. In all of these coming-of-age stories, the teachers and staff are foils, there to play a role for the students to whom the tale really belongs. But in any school, the teachers are usually there long after any particular group of students has graduated and gone on with the rest of their lives. They have a different perspective on school life, and Tesh drew on her own experience as a teacher to write a magic boarding-school novel, but for grown-ups.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

As The Incandescent opens, Dr Sapphire Walden, Saffy to friends and most colleagues, has been Director of Magic at Chetwood School for three years, and she has brought a bit more order to the Faculty of Magic that has improved the incident statistics that she tracks. Much magic in the book’s world involves summoning demons, extradimensional beings that have capabilities in the mundane world, and that also want nothing more than to stay in the world and consume as much magic and life force as they can while here. Magicians are a constant source of danger; adolescent and partly trained magicians even more so. A school full of young and barely controlled magicians is a happy hunting ground, and a big part of Saffy’s job is to keep the kids safe. Tesh shows how much care teachers take in how they look after students, heightened by the magic.

Chetwood is what an English boarding school is meant to be: centuries of history, sometimes an awkward fit in modern society, plenty of tradition but enough adaptation to have kept going through the many many years. There are old stone chapels and a Brutalist building from the 1960s; there are multi-generation Chetwood families, and students from newly immigrated families there on scholarship; old money rubs along with new money; and everywhere teenagers and younger children growing up amid all the contradictions. Saffy herself is an alum of the school, with a complicated history. She’s happy to be back and to have found a role, but also unhappy not to have gone further in the world of magical research, the world where she earned her doctorate and where she expected to be breaking new ground.

Then of course things start to go wrong.

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Dec 12 2025

Tantalizing Tales — December 2025 — Part One

Very excited to have gotten away with not publishing my first round-up post of the month till today, the twelfth of December! We have three books that have only recently published for you this week, as well as three books from earlier in the year that I’ve been meaning very much to get to but likely won’t for the foreseeable future, alas.

We start with Peg Cochran’s Where The Bodies Are Berried, which has such a beautiful, seasonally appropriate cover. I actually picked up this latest Cranberry Cove mystery thinking that there’d be recipes included, due to several misleading reviews over on NetGalley as well as the fact that all her prior books featured yummy, cranberry-themed recipes. I was thus surprised to learn that this is the first book in which she’d omitted them, meaning that I couldn’t add this to my cooking column over at Criminal Element (and definitely not to my review schedule there, which is currently booked solid through May 12th!) This did mean, however, that I could feature this book and its gorgeous cover art right here at The Frumious Consortium!

Monica Albertson and her half-brother Jeff are happy to host a fundraiser for a local animal shelter at their cranberry farm. Sassamanash Farm provides the perfect wintry backdrop for people who want to take Santa photos with their pets, for a modest fee that goes directly to the charity, ofc. The event proves popular and goes off with barely a hitch. But Monica makes a gruesome discovery shortly afterwards: the corpse of one of the shelter’s biggest donors out by the barn. In order to clear the farm’s name, Monica will have to investigate a man who’s largesse was mostly for show, and who had far more people who benefited from his death than she’d ever imagined.

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Dec 11 2025

Rabbit’s Feat by Barney Saltzberg

It’s so unusual, and yet so sweet, to find a book where the title character may or may not actually be the main character, despite absolutely being the hero of the piece. I suppose one could argue semantics — Rabbit is the main active participant in the story, after all — but I’m really not that kind of book critic, lol.

What I can tell you is that this children’s picture book was tremendously entertaining, and reminded me of theatre in the best way, while also being a powerful example of how to be a good neighbor.

So Rabbit doesn’t actually get any dialog in these pages. That honor goes to the couple, after a fashion, at its heart: Boulder and Cactus. Cactus lives on the desert floor, and Boulder perches on a nearby cliff. The two often talk to one another longingly about being closer together — a seeming impossibility given their lack of mobility.

Rabbit and Butterfly can’t help but overhear these conversations during their own nocturnal peregrinations. And so, one day, Rabbit decides to make Boulder and Cactus’ wish come true.

Given how Rabbit and Butterfly have no dialog in this book, it’s unsurprising that Boulder and Cactus never know who their mysterious benefactors are. This makes the former duo’s actions especially moving, because it’s clear that they did it for no material gain to themselves, but merely for the pleasure of bringing joy to others. It’s kinda how people fulfill the requests of needy kids on those Angel Trees set up by the otherwise terrible Salvation Army. You give without expecting thanks in return: in other words, the true definition of charity.

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