Oct 17 2025

Tantalizing Tales — October 2025 — Part Three

I can’t believe we’re already most of the way through October! Before we get into the really spooky part of the season tho, let’s take a look at several books publishing next week, that definitely lean harder into other genres than horror.

First up is Peter James’ The Hawk Is Dead, a police procedural inspired by a suggestion from Queen Camilla. Her Majesty is both a literacy advocate and a huge fan of murder mysteries, particularly the thrillers featuring Mr James’ creation, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. She herself plays a significant role in this book, as DS Grace is challenged by the most daunting case of his career.

Queen Camilla is on her way to a scheduled visit to two Brighton hospices when her train is derailed inside a tunnel just north of the city. Just as she and her entourage are escorted out to daylight, a sniper assassinates a key member of her household. Was Sir Peregrine Greaves the actual target, or had the bullet been meant for the queen?

As DS Grace investigates, he must resist pressure from the Met Counter Terrorism Command to hand the case over to London. The more he uncovers, the more convinced he becomes that Sir Peregrine had indeed been the intended victim, and that the reason for his murder lies somewhere in the chaotic renovation of Buckingham Palace, involving hundreds of people. When another member of the Royal Household turns up dead, it looks like DS Grace is on the right track… even if it’s one that places him in gravest danger.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/17/tantalizing-tales-october-2025-part-three/

Oct 16 2025

Benny On The Case by Wesley King

I continue to stand by my claim that contemporary Middle Grade fiction is the most consistently affecting, life-affirming genre currently publishing, with this terrific mystery novel being only the latest excellent example.

Benny has Mosaic Down’s Syndrome, which for him manifests in physical appearance, but not in any intellectual or health issues. For the longest time, he was in special classes in his Newfoundland school. Now that he’s 11, there’s no denying the fact that he’s on the same educational level as his mainstream peers, so he’s about to be integrated into standard classes. He’s pretty nervous about this, as is his mother, who’s verged on the overprotective ever since the death of his father four years ago. His best friend Mr Tom is more encouraging, with plenty of life experience to back it up. Mr Tom is, after all, one of the elderly residents of the Starflower retirement home that Benny’s mother owns and operates, and where she and Benny live, too.

Fortunately, Benny finds an ally pretty quickly at school. Salma recently moved to the area from Seattle, as her dad found a great job in Newfoundland that allowed the whole family to be close to her grandmother Mrs Price, another Starflower resident. Salma is smart, athletic and just as much of an outsider as Benny due to the way she looks like the Tunisian side of her family. But she’s also funny and kind, and she and Benny quickly become fast friends despite his concerns that she’ll become way more popular than he is and not want to hang out with him any more.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/16/benny-on-the-case-by-wesley-king/

Oct 15 2025

League Of The Lexicon: US Edition by Two Brothers Games

Word nerds, rejoice! If you ever wanted something like Trivial Pursuit, only dedicated to linguistics and requiring slightly less table space, then this is the game for you!

Considering the amount of money I’ve thrown at tabletop games on Kickstarter, I’m genuinely baffled that I didn’t notice this when it first came out on the crowdfunding platform in 2023. I’m super glad that the lovely people at Adams Media reached out to me tho, with the publication of the US Edition of this game.

Here are the basic rules: you play a member of the League Of The Lexicon, who’s in search of several artefacts to complete their collection. You gain an opportunity at claiming one of those artefacts every time you correctly answer a question from the deck. Once you collect five artefacts, or the equivalent, you win!

There are actually two quiz decks in the box, to make the game more accessible to all players. The larger deck is the Tricksy deck, written with word nerds like myself in mind. There’s also a Ticklish deck for those less confident of their abilities. While playing with my 14 year-old, I answered questions from Tricksy while he opted for Ticklish.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/15/league-of-the-lexicon-us-edition-by-two-brothers-games/

Oct 14 2025

Snap! Crunch! Munch! by Diana Castillo

Oh, I shouldn’t have read this while I’m hungry, now I’m craving Cuban food!

This delightful picture book* tells the story of a young boy whose relatives come over for family dinner. As they all sit around the table and dig in to the various dishes that they’ve contributed, the narrator begins to imagine everyone as a kind of animal, based on their dining preferences a/o eating habits. As he himself loves all the food on the table, he imagines himself as an omnivore, and thus turns into the cutest fox as he tucks into his meal.

There’s really not much else to this story but there doesn’t need to be, as the point is just to talk about things that will engage beginning readers — in this instance, animals, family and food — in simple enough language that they’re encouraged to follow along, whether with a more seasoned reader or by themselves. It’s what goes unsaid and is, instead, depicted in the illustrations that really sets this lovely book apart from the crowd.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/14/snap-crunch-munch-by-diana-castillo/

Oct 12 2025

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

In deepest, darkest Kent, Coopers Chase is a retirement community built from what was once a convent. As part of its sale to private investors, the development has kept its original chapel and the burial ground where the sisters were laid to rest from the 1870s until the late twentieth century. Coopers Chase is bucolic, pleasant and apparently well run. It offers residents who are in reasonably good health a wide range of activities, one of which is solving murders.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

That’s not strictly true, in that the Thursday Murder Club is by invitation, and thus not provided by the community and its management. On the other hand, the club does have a fixed time in the official schedule of the Jigsaw Room, one of the community spaces where residents can get together outside of their own rooms or apartments. Mum’s the word about murder, though. “It was Thursday because there was a two-hour slot free in the Jigsaw Room, between Art History and Conversational French. It was booked, and still is booked, under the name Japanese Opera — A Discussion, which ensured they were always left in peace.” (p. 18)

The Club began with Penny, who had been an inspector in the Kent Police for many years and Elizabeth, whose professional background is never stated explicitly, but she is described at various points as “terrifying,” “effective,” “not likely to take no for an answer,” and “occasionally played fast and loose with the Official Secrets Act.” She reminisces about past times in East Berlin and Leipzig, knows people in Cyprus, and is capable of calling in all manner of favors. They went through files that Penny had, against regulations, kept following her retirement. They would comb through cold cases “line by line, study every photograph, read every witness statement, just looking for anything that had been missed.” (p. 18)

Ibrahim, a semi-retired psychiatrist, soon joined them, as did Ron, a firebrand labor leader who had his heyday before Thatcher did her various things. “[Elizabeth] soon spotted Ron’s key strength, namely, he never believes a single word anyone ever tells him. Elizabeth now says that reading police files in the certain knowledge that the police are lying to you is surprisingly effective.” (p. 19)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/12/the-thursday-murder-club-by-richard-osman/

Oct 10 2025

Tantalizing Tales — October 2025 — Part Two

It has finally gotten cold here in Maryland, which is making me rethink my daily outdoor walks for daily indoor spin sessions instead… which I admittedly also use to catch up with my reading via Kindle. Here are some great selections coming to bookstores soon, if you’re looking for some great books to keep you company while acclimatizing to the weather and hopefully getting a little more reading in!

First up is the latest installment in Kashiwai Hisashi’s deliciously cozy Kamogawa Food Detectives series, Menu Of Happiness. Looking at the cover alone is enough to give me the warm fuzzies, tbphwy.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives are Nagare and her father Koishi, who run the Kamogawa Diner together. Aside from cooking scrumptious daily meals, their forte lies in recreating the food that their clients describe to them but don’t know how to recreate on their own. By figuring out how to reconstitute the dishes that linger in their clients’ minds, the father-daughter duo help said clients reconnect with the past. Whether serving a formerly renowned pianist who longs to taste once more the yakisoba that she shared with the only man she ever loved, or the client who can’t forget the gyoza fed to him by the parents of the woman he jilted, the food detectives perform amazing feats in their quest to bring memories back to life through flavor.

If this book is anything like its predecessors, I highly recommend not going into it hungry, as the author is incredible at writing about food. Just thinking about my experience with the delightful first book in the series is making me crave sushi and ushiojiru so much rn.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/10/tantalizing-tales-october-2025-part-two/

Oct 09 2025

A Palace Near The Wind by Ai Jiang

One of these days, I’ll like a piece by Ai Jiang, but today is not that day.

I’m just so baffled by her writing, and in a way that doesn’t even make me want to lay the blame at her feet necessarily. This is actually one of the few, perhaps only, times that I’ve questioned the professional choices of a Titan editor, because (for a start) what is with the weird ass grammar in this? Maybe it’s just an effect of having an ARC — or maybe it’s an effect of the current allergy in genre writing towards the perfect tenses — but I was two pages in and already wanted to bring out the red pen to fix the most glaring errors.

Thankfully, the grammar gets less glaringly bad as the book progresses, which is one small mercy. Another is that the premise of this first novella in a duology remains as interesting as when I originally said yes to it. Our main character Lufeng is the Eldest Daughter of the Feng people. One by one, her mother and sisters have left their forests to marry into the Palace, as the realm of the Land Wanderers is known. The Palace is constantly encroaching on the Feng woods, uprooting plant life and sending the indigenous Feng away in search of a better life, often into the heart of the Palace itself (or something: the details are vague.)

Now it’s Lufeng’s turn to leave the forests and marry the King. She’s determined to find her family and bring them safely home. If she has to kill the king in order to do that, then so be it. But the more time she spends at the Palace, the more secrets she uncovers about what’s really going on between the Palace and Feng. Will she be able to save her family? Will they even want to be saved?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/09/a-palace-near-the-wind-by-ai-jiang/

Oct 08 2025

Night Light by Michael Emberley

I continue to be confused by the distinction between picture book and graphic novel in this line of I Like To Read comics, but when the results are as outstanding as they are here, it seems unusually pedantic (even for me!) to quibble.

Night Light is another beautiful book from Michael Emberley’s series featuring a caretaker and child of indeterminate species. They’re snuggling down for bedtime reading when the lights in their city suddenly go out. This is a problem because Child wants one more story, and the one flashlight that they have handy is running out of batteries. So what are a creative caretaker and child to do? Turn to the skies, ofc!

This is a sweet story about not only adapting to adversity but also being considerate and, perhaps most importantly, learning to find the beautiful in the unconventional. There is a bit of unspoken commentary regarding light pollution towards the end, tho it’s entirely likely that I’m reading a little too much into that.

What I can say for certain is that Mr Emberley’s art continues to charm as much as his story does. The colors are especially gorgeous as Caretaker and Child experience different permutations of light and darkness in their quest to get just one more bedtime story in. The palette of blues, purples and golds is rich and arresting.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/08/night-light-by-michael-emberley/

Oct 07 2025

The Betrayal by Heather Ogden (EXCERPT)

Hello, readers! Today we have a scene-setting excerpt for you from Heather Ogden’s debut Young Adult dystopian novel, The Betrayal.

This first book of the The Lies We Fear series centers on Angelette Arabella, the seventeen year-old daughter of the most powerful man in Libertis, a megalopolis large enough to be considered a nation.

From the publisher: “Angelette Arabella has spent her life in the shadow of the man the nation calls a hero—her father, Valerius, the revered leader of Libertis. To the world, he’s a savior. To her, he’s simply “Dad.” But when a staged kidnapping spirals into something far more dangerous, Angelette is forced to face the truth: her life, her family, and the world she’s always known are carefully crafted illusions. And the man who built them is hiding more than secrets—he’s hiding control.

“As betrayal bleeds from every corner of her life—her brothers vanished, her mother silenced, and her only friend not who she seems—Angelette must decide: remain the obedient daughter, or become the threat her father fears most.

“Because the truth isn’t just dangerous in Libertis, it’s treason.”

Read on for a peek into the book, and into the true heart of Valerius!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/07/the-betrayal-by-heather-ogden-excerpt/

Oct 06 2025

The Holy Roller: Volume One by Andy Samberg, Rick Remender, Joe Trohman, Roland Boschi & Moreno Dinisio

Yes, it is absolutely ludicrous to have a vigilante whose main weapon is a bowling ball, but he’s out there fighting neo-Nazis and we 100% need more of that nowadays!

And it isn’t just some cut-and-dried good guy vs generic white nationalists story either. There’s a lot of nuance in this book, as well as plenty of pointed allusions to the nightmare of governance currently in charge of the USA. The wild thing is that I’m sure Andy Samberg, Rick Remender and Joe Trohman were all “how far can we push the bounds of credulity in this book?”, saw The Holy Roller go to print, then turned on the TV or social media in recent days to discover that reality is even more ridiculous than half the stuff in here! There are no guardrails on this administration, which is partly why it’s so important that popular culture fights back, loudly and with both humor and integrity. And that’s exactly what this book does. Sure it gets violent and ugly — I mean, is there a pretty way to fight with a bowling ball? — but it’s an important reminder that sometimes you just gotta punch the Nazi.

Anyway, the story opens on young Levi Coen, a middle schooler whose dad is obsessed with bowling. Levi only goes to the bowling alley to play video games and crush on pretty Amy Henry, the owner’s daughter. Unfortunately, Amy’s brother Clyde is a huge jerk who taunts Levi, then bans him from the alley for life when Levi loses a bet.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/06/the-holy-roller-volume-one-by-andy-samberg-rick-remender-joe-trohman-roland-boschi-moreno-dinisio/