Jan 02 2026

Tantalizing Tales — January 2026 — Part One

Happy New Year, readers! I hope you had a delightful celebration ringing in a year that is hopefully no worse than the last… tho given the state of the country I live in and the absolutely infuriating refusal of large swathes of it to take note of history’s lessons, who even knows any more.

Apologies for being so glum. Let’s cheer ourselves up not only by looking forward to some excellent books coming out soon, but also, ahem, going over some of the 2025 novels that I still haven’t had time to cover (I got SO MANY books last year, y’all, and feel like I only really figured out how to properly run this column a few months into it.)

First up is definitely my most anticipated read this introductory week of January, Maude Royer’s The Bloody Brick Road. Originally written in French by its Quebecois author, this installment of the Forbidden Tales series is a retelling of The Wizard Of Oz. And hey, did you know that Frank Baum’s original fairytale is often considered a subtle critique of the US politics of the time? Ms Royer switches the setting to turn-of-the-21st-century Montreal, for her impactful dystopian thriller.

1994: Dorothy Noroit is 19, pregnant and on top of the world. Her boyfriend is hard-working, her home is beautiful and she gets to work with her best friend. But a seemingly freak accident puts Dorothy — and five other mothers-to-be — in the hospital. When she leaves days later, she no longer has a boyfriend, job or golden path laid before her.

Twenty-four years later and Montreal is plagued by an extremist group called The Winged Monkeys. Lieutenant Henri Duhaime and his partner Detective Emilianne St. Gelais are investigating the gruesome murder of a young man when the killer strikes again, leaving desecrated corpses and organs scattered around their city. The investigators must race against time to find and stop a brutal serial killer, in this homage to an Oz that’s been twisted and soaked in blood.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/02/tantalizing-tales-january-2026-part-one/

Dec 31 2025

Vera Wong’s Guide To Snooping (On A Dead Man) by Jesse Q Sutanto

At the end of 2025, I hit pause on my overloaded schedule to try to get to books I’d been greatly anticipating this year that I just didn’t have the time for before this. So yeah, I basically used my industry-wide two-week end of year break to do more work but oh wow, was that worth it for this novel!

When I read the first book in this series back in 2023, it quickly became one of my favorite books of the year, and definitely my favorite book of Jesse Q Sutanto’s so far. Before then, she had two distinct writing sides when it came to her adult fiction: the zany fluff of her Aunties series, and the dark social commentary of her standalone psychological thrillers. She combined the best of both worlds in Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers, and is back for more of that winning formula in the sequel.

And look, when I say formula, I mean it, and not at all in a bad way. As in the first book, our title heroine falls into a mystery, collects the people around it, and mothers them with kindness and kepo (the Malay language equivalent for busybody) until she not only improves everybody’s lives, but solves the crime to boot. This time, however, Ms Sutanto adds a diabolical and highly relevant modern day twist, in the form of a criminal issue that desperately needs more coverage in media outside of the Southeast Asia beat.

Obviously, I’m not going to go into greater detail, because part of the impact of the story depends on the mystery at its heart. And that has to do with a young man named Xander Lin, an up-and-coming social media star, who apparently committed suicide. His roommate Milly refuses to believe it, but has to admit that she didn’t even know he was such a big deal online. In fact, she’d been torn as to whether to report him missing to the police at all… until Vera encounters the young woman outside the police station where Vera was bringing food to her future daughter-in-law. Vera immediately senses that Milly needs a friend, and proceeds to involve herself in both Milly’s life and the mystery of Xander’s death. And what a gut-wrenching mystery it is!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/31/vera-wongs-guide-to-snooping-on-a-dead-man-by-jesse-q-sutanto/

Dec 30 2025

Murder By Muffin by Rosie A Point & Charles Timmerman

The second book in the Cranberry Creek Word Search mystery series is just as delightful as the first, even if the solution to the mystery itself didn’t make the most sense this time.

But let’s be honest, if we’re talking cozy mysteries, a thoroughly logical conclusion is often secondary to cozy vibes, and this story has that latter in spades. Our heroine Abby has recently moved to the small town of Cranberry Creek after heartbreak in the big city. She’s opened a bookstore which is pretty much ruled by her cat Reggie. Her landlady Myrna is quirky but supportive, and her best friend Rose runs the local bakery. Abby’s also developing a tentative romance with cute deputy sheriff Nathan. Sure, she had to clear her name after being suspected of murder in the first book, but everything is looking much sunnier now.

And then, alas, it’s Rose’s turn to be prime suspect in a murder investigation. Local food critic Carson Pennington has recently given Rose’s bakery a scathing review. Fortunately, the bakery’s popularity ensured that business did not suffer as a result… until after Rose personally delivers a tray of blueberry muffins to the critic’s home. Next thing you know, Carson is dead and Rose is accused of having deliberately poisoned him with those muffins.

Abby knows that there’s no way that sweet, kind Rose would have even thought of killing a man who’d been, at worst, a minor irritation. But the official investigation is causing strain in Abby’s relationship with Nathan. Soon, she’ll have to take up the mantle of detective herself, to figure out who really murdered Carson before her best friend takes the fall.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/30/murder-by-muffin-by-rosie-a-point-charles-timmerman/

Dec 29 2025

Reading Resolutions Roundtable, 2026 edition

As 2025 fades around us, Frumious Consortiumists Doreen, Doug and Emily are thinking about our reading plans for 2026! Whether we make official resolutions or not, we all have some definite goals.

Emily: Okay, let’s chat new year! Do you make reading resolutions? Anything you’re planning or particularly looking forward to in 2026? Starting in January, I’m going to be doing a readalong of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series that I’m excited about. I’ve so far only ever read the first one, So You Want to Be a Wizard, and I hear they’re all great.

Doug: I am looking forward to reading the third book in Miklos Banffy’s Transylvania trilogy, They Were Divided. They aren’t exactly timely — the third was published in 1940, though it wasn’t translated into English until this century, and they are all about pre-WWI Hungarian nobility — but they are wonderful and extraordinary books. I want to enjoy it and find out what happens to everyone, but I will also be sad to come to the end because after that there isn’t any more.

Doug: There is a new Francis Spufford book coming in February (Nonesuch). I’m looking forward to Jo Walton and Ada Palmer writing about science fiction in their book Trace Elements, which comes out in March.

Emily: In 2025 I resolved to read fewer books than I read in 2024 and failed. I thought I might get by on a technicality and end up with fewer pages than 2024 and that … also failed. I am not bothering to resolve that again.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/29/reading-resolutions-roundtable-2026-edition/

Dec 28 2025

Two From the Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo

In the two most recent Singing Hills books — The Brides of High Hill and A Mouthful of Dust — Nghi Vo takes her protagonist, the historian Cleric Chih, to much darker places than in the three previous books of this series that I have read. (Those are, in order, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and the fourth, Mammoths at the Gate. I’ve not yet read the third, Into the Riverlands, but it’s on order so I hope to have read and written about it by the time the seventh, A Long and Speaking Silence is published in May 2026.) As a refresher, all of the novellas are set in the Anh Empire, which draws on the history, fantasy and folklore of East Asia. Singing Hills is an ancient cloister, devoted to preserving history. To that end, they dispatch their clerics throughout the known world to collect stories, not just of the famous and the powerful but also of the everyday. Their efforts are aided by neixin, memory spirits that take the form of talking hoopoe birds. Clerics from Singing Hills wear distinctive indigo robes, shave their heads and use the pronoun “they.” Vo’s novellas all follow Cleric Chih on their journeys, accompanied by their hoopoe, Almost Brilliant.

The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

The Brides of High Hill begins with Chih awakening from a dream. They are traveling on an ox cart that belongs to the Pham family, and Almost Brilliant is not present. Vo starts the story in media res, with no details of how they came to be traveling together, or whether Chih has had a particular set by the abbey. Master and Madame Pham are taking their daughter Nhung to be married to the Lord Guo, master of Doi Cao. The bride-to-be is young and nervous. Chih is quite taken by Nhung; maybe the feeling is reciprocated?

“I like stories,” said Nhung, and she took Chih’s hand in hers, smiling shyly.
“That’s good, I have a lot,” Chih said, momentarily enchanted by Nhung’s smile. She smiled close-lipped with one side higher than the other, and it was the prettiest thing Chih had ever seen.
The ox-cart swayed, and Nhung momentarily fell against Chih’s side. Her silk robes puffed with the scent of rosewood, and underneath that, Chih, blushing, could smell her skin and her sweat… (p. 3)

Nhung has been trained in how to run a household, and she hopes she will be a good wife. Chih says they hope her new husband will be worthy. The Phams are proud, and they have guards and retainers in more ox-carts behind them, but the family’s fortunes are not what they once were, as Madame Pham is quick to point out.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/28/two-from-the-singing-hills-cycle-by-nghi-vo/

Dec 27 2025

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I’m glad someone told me that nothing much happens in Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s novella that won the 2024 Booker Prize. If I had been expecting action — anything from a mechanical crisis as six astronauts in the ISS orbit the earth to an alien encounter – I might have been disappointed. The book relates one day on the station, broken into 16 orbits that the ISS makes in a 24-hour period. It begins just as the astronauts wake up to start their new “day,” and ends as they are well into their next period of sleep. Orbital captures the magnificence and mundanity of human life in low earth orbit.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The story is a little bit of an alternate history, in that Harvey mentions that some of the astronauts recall the Challenger explosion from childhood while late in the first orbit a crewed mission to land on the moon launches and passes the ISS. “You aren’t even the farthest-flung humans now, says ground control. How does that feel?” (p. 10) The first item places their birth years in the mid-1970s, which makes me think their ISS mission would be in the 2010s, while the Artemis program is still years away from a landing mission. The alternity frees Harvey up a bit to concentrate on the things that interest her, while the other mission gives the astronauts a reason to consider the position of the ISS in humanity’s exploration of space, along with the relative safety of low earth orbit versus anywhere else deeper into space.

There are six astronauts, or rather four astronauts and two cosmonauts to keep the traditional name for the two Russian space travelers. Four men, two women; in addition to the two Russians there are astronauts from Italy, Japan, the US and the UK. They begin their days at the same time, with a wake-up call from mission control, making their ways out of the floating sleeping bags that they strap themselves into each evening. The station’s routines shape their days, particularly the need for exercise to counter the effects of months of microgravity. They do the scientific work that is a major reason for keeping the ISS, in addition to the overall ongoing project of studying how humans react to extended periods living and working in space. They take care of the maintenance that keeps the station in decent repair through years and years in an environment that’s relentlessly hostile to human life. And in the midst of all of this, they experience the wonder of falling around the earth, hour after hour, days after day.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/27/orbital-by-samantha-harvey/

Dec 26 2025

Tantalizing Tales — December 2025 — Part Three

In our last Tantalizing Tales column of 2025, dear reader, let’s look back at some (more) of the books I wish I’d had time to read this year, as well as books publishing soon that sound super exciting!

First up is Nat Cassidy’s latest thrilling horror novel, When The Wolf Comes Home. Jess is a struggling actress whose life feels like it’s on a downward spiral. The last thing she expects to come across is a five year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment building one day. Worse, a violent encounter with his father soon sends both her and the boy running for their lives.

As she helps the boy evade his increasingly desperate father, Jess realizes that the trail of blood springing up in their wake is not coincidental. Their pursuer’s viciousness only seems to grow the longer the chase continues. Will Jess and her unexpected charge be able to make it to safety? Does a safe place even exist given the terrifying nature of what’s hunting them down?

All good horror stories take on seemingly incomprehensible social issues and help readers better understand them. The best of these often offer solutions either specific (don’t build houses on stolen sacred land) or general (be brave in standing up for what’s right.) This one is no different, as it explores themes of trauma, parenting and anger through a genre lens.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/26/tantalizing-tales-december-2025-part-three/

Dec 25 2025

Merry Christmas

Luke 2:1-14, Old English:

Soþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto, þæt eall ymbehwyrft wære tomearcod. Þeos tomearcodnes wæs æryst geworden fram þam deman Syrige Cirino. And ealle hig eodon, and syndrige ferdon on hyra ceastre. Ða ferde Iosep fram Galilea of þære ceastre Nazareth on Iudeisce ceastre Dauides, seo is genemned Beþleem, for þam þe he wæs of Dauides huse and hirede; þæt he ferde mid Marian þe him beweddod wæs, and wæs geeacnod. Soþlice wæs geworden þa hi þar wæron, hire dagas wæron gefyllede þæt heo cende. And heo cende hyre frumcennedan sunu, and hine mid cildclaþum bewand, and hine on binne alede, for þam þe hig næfdon rum on cumena huse. And hyrdas wæron on þam ylcan rice waciende, and nihtwæccan healdende ofer heora heorda. Þa stod Drihtnes engel wiþ hig, and Godes beorhtnes him ymbe scean; and hi him mycelum ege adredon. And se engel him to cwæð, Nelle ge eow adrædan; soþlice nu ic eow bodie mycelne gefean, se bið eallum folce; for þam to dæg eow ys Hælend acenned, se is Drihten Crist, on Dauides ceastre. And þis tacen eow byð: Ge gemetað an cild hræglum bewunden, and on binne aled. And þa wæs færinga geworden mid þam engle mycelnes heofenlices werydes, God heriendra and þus cweþendra, Gode sy wuldor on heahnesse, and on eorðan sybb mannum godes willan.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/25/merry-christmas-5/

Dec 24 2025

That’s Dickens with a C and a K, the Well-Known English Author

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

A Christmas Carol

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

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The rest.

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Why don’t you try W.H. Smith?

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/24/thats-dickens-with-a-c-and-a-k-the-well-known-english-author-5/

Dec 23 2025

Candy Corn Christmas! by Jonathan Fenske

Y’all, there’s nothing quite like blearily turning to the last book you plan to review before Christmas and discovering that it might truly be the weirdest thing you’ve read all year.

Picture this: it’s one in the morning on Christmas Eve Eve and you’ve made enough of a dent in your emails that you’ll only have a hundred or so more to go through in the daytime (in your Inbox, anyway. You shudder to think of the state of your Promotions folder.) You figure, “Hey, I have time to quickly read this kids’ book I’ve been saving for the occasion” and pick up the brightly illustrated volume, figuring it’ll be a fun mishmash of Halloween and Christmas traditions. After all, its title is Candy Corn Christmas! It should be short and sweet, right?

Well, it’s certainly short! And there are a lot of sweets in it, as a miniature army of candy corn languishes in the pantry, unloved and forgotten now that Halloween is over. But strange sounds and smells lure them out of their, ahem, resting place, and off to the living room, where they discover the most magical night of all: Christmas!

The living room is decked out with all sorts of Christmas lights and decorations and sweets. The candy corn swarm over it all, to the chagrin of the actual Christmas treats. The candy corn are loud and messy and disruptive in their excitement. Candy Cane finally has enough, yelling at them to go home. They’ve already had their holiday, now shoo! But a visitor shows up to remind everyone of the true meaning of Christmas, more or less.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/23/candy-corn-christmas-by-jonathan-fenske/