Sep 15 2025

You Are the Detective and other mysteries to get excited about!

You Are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder, by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper comes out tomorrow! In celebration, here’s a roundup of mysteries to keep on your radar this Fall, including The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson, a futuristic tale full of twists; the very genre-aware The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder by Kate Emery, and Oblivion Bride, a haunting dystopian novella by Caitlin Starling.

These books run the gamut of mystery subgenres, and they all offer fast-paced engrossing good times!

the cover of the creeping hand murder shows a spooky hand in red surrounded by the title You Are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder

Maureen Johnson and illustrator Jay Cooper worked together on Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, which came out back in 2021, and have rejoined forces now to present The Creeping Hand Murder, a dossier in which both written and visual evidence is presented to the reader as documents, so that you, dear reader, can solve the murder yourself. Kind of like the premise of The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers or the collected emails and text messages in a Janice Hallett mystery, but with the added interactive features of the Cooper’s illustrations holding clues, and in the physical copy of the book, a “reveal” of the solution at the end.

In You are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder, which comes out September 16 from Clarkson Potter, it is 1933 in London and seven people – not precisely friends – have received a mysterious summons to a gathering where one of them is murdered. This is exactly my jam. I am ready to rewatch CLUE right now. To solve this mystery, you read over newspaper articles, interview transcripts, collected notes, and scrutinize snapshots of the scene, uncovering sordid histories of the characters as well as the truth of how the murder occurred.

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Sep 14 2025

Stone & Sky by Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant and Beverly Brook have survived the first two years as parents of twins, and unsurprisingly they are in need of a vacation. Peter’s family being what it is, and his job being what it is, the trip up to Scotland more closely resembled a circus caravan than a cozy family outing. To be fair, it didn’t start out as a family getaway, it started with a dead sheep. More accurately, as Aaronovitch begins Stone & Sky, “It all started when Dr Brian Robertson, retired GP, enthusiastic amateur ecologist and self-confessed cryptid aficionado, stumbled over a dead sheep a few kilometres west of the town of Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire.” (p. 1) The difference between this sheep and a more run-of-the-mill ex-ruminant is that “it looked to Brian as if something had take a bite out of its belly. Something with a mouth the size and cutting power of a bear trap.” (p. 1)

Stone & Sky by Ben Aaronovitch

Now it happened that Brian had been friends at medical school with Dr Abdul Haqq Walid, now of London, consulting pathologist to a special unit of the London’s Metropolitan Police Service. That unit, colloquially known as the Folly, was home to England’s last officially licensed magical practitioners, and were the police responsible for what less enthused members of the Met called “weird bollocks.” Cryptids fit right in, especially if they might conceivably pose a danger to the public, even the Scottish public.

Brian hadn’t heard back from Walid after sending him some photos and some samples,

So he was a little surprised when, late one evening in July, he looked out of his window to find a vintage Jag, a bright orange Ford Focus ST and a heavily customised VW California camper van unsuccessfully attempting to cram into his driveway. He flung open his front door to find Abdul standing on the step. Beside him was a young coloured girl wearing a fox stole.
“Good evening, Brian,” said Abdul “I’m sorry about dropping in so unexpectedly, but the decision to come up was made last minute.”
“It’s lovely to see you all the same,” said Brian, and was about to ask the girl’s name when he realised that the “stole” she was wearing was in fact a live fox — and a large one at that.
“This is Abigail,” said Abdul.
“Delighted to meet you, Abigail,” said Brian. “Would you like some tea?”
At that, the fox lifted its head and gave Brian an enthusiastic stare.
“Will there be cheese puffs?” it asked. (p. 2)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/14/stone-sky-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Sep 13 2025

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal

The fourth, and presumably final, Lady Astronauts of Mars novel begins with an echo of the opening of the first. “Do you remember where you were when the stars came out? I was with my husband, on Mars.” (p. 14) It’s 1970, and there hasn’t been a clear night sky on Earth since early March 1952, when a meteor the size of the dinosaur-killer plowed into Chesapeake Bay, changing everything.

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal

After one book with Nicole Wargin as first-person narrator, Kowal brings Elma York, the most famous Lady Astronaut, back to the hot seat in The Martian Contingency. Besides, Nicole is busy; she’s president of the United States. Bradbury Base is established on Mars, and Elma is part of the expedition that will expand the base with a second dome and a greenhouse plus additional scientific and work modules. The members of the second expedition are also expected to become permanent residents of the red planet. As happy and amazed as she is to be on Mars with her husband Nathaniel, she’s apprehensive about her imminent change from spaceship pilot to deputy commander of the mission.

While the people on Mars have escaped Earth’s gravity, they have not escaped the gravity of Earth’s situation. That means the expedition needs to keep building support on Earth for beginning the work of transplanting humanity. And that means

[t]he bean counters back on Earth had wanted me—no, they’d wanted the famous Lady Astronaut of Mars in a visible command position to lend credibility to the mission. That should have come from the actual mission commander, but Leonard Flannery was Black. He was also eminently more qualified to be mission commander than I was. He’d landed on the planet on the first mission. I hadn’t. But I was very good at being a pretty face for publicity.
Thank God we were past the days where we had to avoid mentioning that I was Jewish. Mostly past. (p. 15)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/13/the-martian-contingency-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Sep 12 2025

The Butcher And The Liar by S. L. Woeppel (EXCERPT)

Hello, dear readers! This is a banner week for excerpts, as today we’re featuring a selection from an upcoming psychological thriller, S L Woeppel’s The Butcher And The Liar.

Daisy Bellon is thirty-five years old, and hoping to live the rest of her life free from the shadows of her past. When she was only a child, her father made her an accomplice to his murders. While she’s definitely inherited his skill with a blade, she’s hoping to keep the rest of his legacy buried where it belongs.

Opening a butcher store in a quiet neighborhood of Chicago seems like the perfect way to keep body and soul together while staying, hopefully, under the radar. Never mind that the ghost of one of her dad’s victims has haunted her ever since the night she found her dad dismembering the woman in their basement. But when an anonymous letter arrives, mere days before someone else is killed in a chillingly familiar manner, Daisy knows that she’s finally going to have to confront the secrets she’s long turned away from, or risk becoming a monster herself.

Read on for a scene-setting excerpt of Daisy’s adult life before everything comes crashing down again:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/12/the-butcher-and-the-liar-by-s-l-woeppel/

Sep 11 2025

Game Face: Becoming A PR Detective by Curtis Sparrer

What a terrific idea, writing a middle grade novel about the career of public relations!

Sloan’s favorite computer game, Dungeon Quest, has just hit a weird glitch. Oh well, she figures, time to go to bed anyway… but then she hears her Uncle Curtis speaking urgently from her mom’s home office. She goes to peek in and finds him embroiled in a full-on work crisis.

Sloan figures it’s just grown-up stuff and is about to head back to bed when he says something that makes her realize that he’s actually working on Dungeon Quest. Specifically, he’s trying to figure out how to handle responses to the glitch that started de-aging every character, player or otherwise, in the game. Some shareholders are freaking out and the CEO is Not Happy.

When Sloan mentions that she’d been playing Dungeon Quest right when it all started, Uncle Curtis invites her to sit down and tell him what happened. He soon realizes that she gives him and his team — who are all in a virtual office together — much needed perspective on what’s going on with the game and its players. Together, they begin crafting a response for all the interested parties, and Sloan learns a very cool lesson about what good PR looks like and how PR professionals do their jobs.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/11/game-face-becoming-a-pr-detective-by-curtis-sparrer/

Sep 10 2025

Awake!: William Blake And The Power Of The Imagination by Mark Vernon (EXCERPT)

Hello, dear readers! As promised in my last Tantalizing Tales column, today we have an excerpt of the recently published examination of the life and works of the famed English poet and artist William Blake, and how relevant the lessons we can learn from those still are today.

Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon’s new book Awake! William Blake And The Power Of The Imagination meditates on his subject to come to what I felt were several surprising conclusions. While I certainly agreed with the author regarding the logical fallacies of suggested medical diagnoses to explain away Blake’s visions, I was less convinced by arguments which seemed to turn on the dismissal of words commonly associated with left-wing causes (e.g. progressivism, empathy.) There’s no denying, however, the lasting impact that Blake continues to have on the popular discourse. He may have been dead now for 200 years, but his legacy in poetry, art and thought is ongoing, and may be especially relevant for the turbulent times in which we find ourselves today.

Mr Vernon chooses to take Blake literally in this exploration of his works and life, interpreting his visions of angels as meaningful encounters with the divine. Like us, Blake “lived in a tumultuous era of war, discontent, rapid technological change, and human estrangement from nature. He exposed the dark sides of political fervour and social moralising, while unashamedly celebrating love and liberty. But he also conversed with prophets and angels, and was powerfully, if unconventionally, religious. If we take this seriously[,] then Blake can help us to unlock the transformative power of imagination.”

Read on for a particularly absorbing passage on Blake’s mythological characters and verse, especially as they relate to those of us in the USA and to those of us who love our Marvel movies!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/10/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination-by-mark-vernon-excerpt/

Sep 09 2025

Come Home, Indio by Jim Terry

So happy to celebrate five years of Street Noise’s dissident graphic novel publishing by featuring a review of this incredibly moving autobiographical tale!

I’m not gonna lie, the first four parts of Jim Terry’s deeply personal graphic memoir Come Home, Indio, are tough reading. Jim, or JT as he’s often called, was born to an Irish American jazz bassist dad and a feisty, book-loving Ho-Chunk mom, who met in California, fell in love and had babies. The paycheck of an itinerant musician struggled to feed four however, so the family eventually all moved back to Illinois to be closer to Bill Terry’s parents. There the marriage fell apart, as Bill and Debbie began to drink more heavily. The divorce was ugly, and Jim and his sister Elena bore the brunt of it.

As a kid, Jim swore never to drink, having seen what it had done to his parents. That lasted till his first illicit party in the woods, where he had his first beer and finally understood why some people took to it so eagerly. Alcohol pretty much defined his life from then on, through college and adulthood, even as his parents got sober and fell ill. It took decades before he finally hit rock bottom and began a committed attempt at sobriety himself (he takes great pains not to call the program he uses AA but it’s pretty obvious that that’s what it is.)

Getting sober gives him the opportunity to finally confront the demons that have undermined his sense of self for so long. Social media alerts him to the construction of a pipeline through Native lands and the protests against them. He, Elena and their cousin Wetha drive over to the Oceti camp with donations and to volunteer their help. In my opinion, this is where the book starts getting really good, as Jim discovers the transformative power of radical empathy, connection and kindness, both in changing the outer world and in finding his inner peace.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/09/come-home-indio-by-jim-terry/

Sep 08 2025

This Skin Was Once Mine and other disturbances by Eric LaRocca

I have recently remarked on how my reading brain seems to have pivoted away from classic/cozy murder mysteries to punchy short horror stories as a sort of mental palate cleanser between books, likely due to the shift of my literary consumption to a minimum of three mystery novels per week. So Eric LaRocca’s This Skin Was Once Mine came at the perfect time to help my brain reset, especially with the nip of fall entering the air as spooky season slinks into view.

First, I have to say how deeply grateful I am to the way this book is written. A collection of four stories of varying lengths, they almost all go by as smoothly and ominously as the serpent on the cover. Slick, absorbing page-turners with vivid imagery and weirdly recognizable — if sometimes more alluded to than spoken — emotions, these are bracing tales of madness and murder told in such a way that they seem outside the realm of the natural… even tho any student of the human condition knows that people can be exactly as damaged and depraved and awful as the characters that inhabit these pages.

The title story, which opens the book, is the strongest of the bunch, in my opinion. I was actually startled to realize how the stories are essentially ordered from my favorite to least. TSWOM tells the tale of Jillian, a young woman finally allowed to return home after the death of her father. Her exile has been unhappy, and one she blames entirely on her mother, who is now dying herself. But her homecoming unearths more than one secret, as she confronts the woman she believed sent her away out of hatred and fear.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/08/this-skin-was-once-mine-and-other-disturbances-by-eric-larocca/

Sep 07 2025

Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold

In Cetaganda Miles Vorkosigan, who is all of 22 years old, is sent to represent his home world of Barrayar at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress. Accompanying him is his cousin Ivan Vorpatril, who is not much older. Cetaganda possesses a sprawling empire, by the terms of the Vorkosigan series, “eight developed planets and an equal fringe of allied and puppet dependencies.” (3) In fact, Barrayar had been one of those Cetagandan dependencies with the time of occupation and the successful rebellion both well within living memory. With that in mind, I found it odd from the beginning that Barrayar would send such a young and inexperienced emissary to a crucial state function for one of its chief adversaries. When Soviet premiers started dropping off one after another, US President Reagan did not send his son Ron as a representative (even though he was older than Miles is in Cetaganda); he sent his Vice President. Sure, Barrayar is a feudal monarchy rather than a republic but I had difficulty believing that Miles’ high birth would outweigh state needs.

Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold

Of course Cetaganda is not a novel of the Barrayaran bureaucracy, it’s a novel in the career of Miles Vorkosigan. Going by the series’ internal chronology and counting from Miles’ birth, it’s the sixth novel or novella; going by publication order it’s the twelfth work in the saga, so there is a disconnect between what readers know about the overall story and what the characters themselves know. Bujold is filling in past bits of the saga, and that determines certain aspects of the set-up. Getting to the story at all requires overlooking, or at least accepting, any improbabilities that entails. (Beyond the impossibilities of any interstellar space opera, of course.)

The story itself is a fun one. When Miles was last on Barrayar, State Security Chief Ilyan admonished him to stay out of trouble, but that’s certainly not going to happen. In fact, trouble finds him. No sooner has the door of the docking pod that Miles and Ivan are taking to the Cetagandan orbital station opened than someone swings in and attacks the both of them. An older man in a generic uniform surprises the two young Barrayarans, who had been expecting a more diplomatic reception. They fend him off but he escapes. In the confused aftermath, Miles finds that the attacker has left behind some kind of rod and puts it away in an inner pocket of his uniform. Ivan does the same with a weapon the attacker also left. Soon redirected to a different docking bay, the two cousins agree not to say anything about the attack unless the Cetagandans ask them.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/07/cetaganda-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/

Sep 06 2025

Portrait with Keys by Ivan Vladislavić

Ivan Vladislavić paints his Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked in a pointillist style, dividing up not quite 200 pages of main text into 138 anecdotes and observations, each of which shows some aspect of his life in the city in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The sections are numbered, enabling the structural innovation that Vladislavić alludes to in his title. After the main text and some brief notes, Vladislavić has added a list of itineraries through the book and, by implication, through the city. He explains, “This index traces the order of the previously published cycles [of anecdotes] and suggests some other thematic pathways through the book.” (195) Just as there are many routes to discovering a city, there are many ways through the book other than the author’s initial arrangement, and each one lends a different emphasis and tone to the book.

Portrait with Keys by Ivan Vladislavić

The itineraries come in different lengths, and none of them encompass the whole book, just as one afternoon’s walk cannot encompass one person’s experience of living in a city, let alone the full character of the place. Still, they’re interesting ways to consider what Vladislavić has shown of Johannesburg. The first one, “An accidental island,” lends its name to the German translation where I first encountered the book as part of the Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s metropolitan series. (The German title is Johannesburg. Insel aus Zufall and the edition I have lists the English title as Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what, which I think is more interesting than the current English title, but it’s probably less marketable.) Other itineraries include “Branko” (the author’s brother), the obvious “City centre” and “Memorials,” the more enigmatic “Object lessons” and “Trade secrets,” “Old lives” and the corresponding “Young lives,” and a couple dozen more.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/06/portrait-with-keys-by-ivan-vladislavic/