Literacy 2025: Book 2: Curse of the Stag’s Eye

Glenn Quigley’s gay bear romance set in a possibly-haunted Welsh lighthouse

Book
Curse of the Stag’s Eye by Glenn Quigley

Synopsis
Skeptic Gaz joins a ghost-hunting tour of a historic Welsh lighthouse, along with an eager young couple and the tour’s handsome host Rhys. Over the course of an evening, they have a series of strange encounters which reveal more of the tragic history of the lighthouse. And as Gaz finds himself growing more attracted to Rhys, he worries how the charming true believer will react once he learns the real reason Gaz signed up for the tour.

Notes
Disclaimer that I’m an online acquaintance of the author, so I was predisposed to like this book, and I did. But then, it’s a gay bear ghost story, so I would’ve been predisposed to like it regardless! I hardly ever read gay stories, so this was a novelty. And I get the appeal of fantasy romances now, since it’s a hell of a lot of fun reading a story about the supernatural interrupted with first-hand accounts of two bear guys pointing out all of the physical features they found attractive. The ghost story was pretty creepy as well, which made for great bedtime reading.

This book is part of a series called Haunted Hearts, “an Own-Voices Paranormal Romance Series about love and the things that go boo in the night.” I love the idea of gay romance ghost stories enough that I’m tempted to try the others, although it’ll be difficult to make one more suited to me than one about nerdy ghost-hunting bears.

Verdict
A lot of fun! A romantic ghost story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but isn’t too shallow, either.

Literacy 2025: Book 1: Hi Honey, I’m Homo

Matt Baume’s collection of essays about queer representation in American TV sitcoms

Book
Hi Honey, I’m Homo: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture by Matt Baume

Synopsis
A collection of essays about American television sitcoms, from Bewitched to Modern Family, that were notable for their inclusion (or their conspicuous lack of inclusion) of queer representation.

Notes
Similar to Baume’s YouTube videos, each chapter takes a single sitcom and explains how its LGBT characters were significant in the history of representation on American television, putting them in context of what was going on in politics at the time, and giving details about the making of these series to explain the motivation behind the representation. And much like his videos, I find it comforting on some level to be reminded that resistance to LGBT equality is nothing new, that most of us have dealt with it all our lives, that we’ve had victories in the past, and we’ll have them again.

A side effect of the organization is that some of the same key events in the gay rights movement — like the Stonewall riots, or the lawsuits for marriage equality in Hawaii — are mentioned over and over again, as if each chapter were its own self-contained book.

Another side effect of the book’s focus is that it gives the impression that the options on American TV were gradually improving representation, or nothing at all. The series that are chosen for focus are, understandably, the ones who struggled for a benign or positive depiction of gay characters. As I was growing up, though, most of these series were considered too “adult” for me to watch, so I got whatever was left. A few of these are mentioned in the book — Three’s Company, WKRP in Cincinnati, and a gay panic episode of Cheers — and they made a clear impression on me that being gay was something weird and contemptible. On WKRP, simply a misunderstanding about being queer was bad enough to make Les Nesman consider suicide!

Verdict
In addition to the great title, this is a really solid survey of a segment of American TV history, praising the artists who went out of their way to improve the image of LGBT people in the media. It makes a strong argument about the value of representation, and at least I believe it’s a comforting reminder that equality tends to win out as long as people stand up for it.

Literacy 2024: Book 7: The Bullet That Missed

Book
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman

Series
Book 3 in the Thursday Murder Club series

Synopsis
The gang of retiree cold-case investigators is asked by a local news caster to investigate the death 16 years ago of his good friend, a woman who worked at the station. Meanwhile, an elusive money-laundering tech wizard known only as The Viking has threatened to kill one of the club unless they help him take out a rival.

Pros

  • Charming as ever
  • The book is much better at managing the tone, pulling back right at the point things are about to become too twee or silly
  • The poignant moments baked into the premise still have impact after three books, instead of feeling like iterations on the same idea
  • Does a remarkably good job of maintaining an ever-growing cast of characters, without losing any of them for too long

Cons

  • The ever-growing cast of characters means that the mystery itself has less weight
  • The resolution of the storyline with the Viking was too cutesy for me
  • The relationship at the center of the mystery never felt meaningful; we were told how much the victim meant to this character, but she never felt like a real person

Verdict
It’s impressive that even as these books turn into more of a “catch up and gossip with friends” running series instead of solid mystery stories, they’re getting better at being more grounded and less twee. It’s still often silly to the point of being absurd, but they’re charming in exactly the way you want a cozy murder mystery to be.

Note
Only 7 books read in 2024, which is low even by my standards. I think I’m actually going to skip the Goodreads challenge this year (instead of saying I’m going to skip it and then doing it anyway), since having a target number makes it feel more like a chore than a hobby.

Literacy 2024: Book 6: Poirot Investigates

A collection of short stories featuring Agatha Christie’s most famous detective.

Book
Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Synopsis
A collection of short stories about Hercule Poirot’s various cases, all narrated by his friend Captain Hastings.

Pros

  • The variety of stories shows that Christie was a master at finding variation in a shared formula.
  • The stories don’t feel particularly rushed, and still manage to capture most of the characterization and personality of the full-length mysteries.
  • Often feels as if Christie didn’t consider the mystery aspect much of a challenge, and she was far more interested in the personalities of Poirot and Hastings.
  • No one would mistake this for a feminist work, but it does subtly reinforce the intelligence and capabilities of women while still staying mostly within its boundaries as classist, sexist, early 20th century England.
  • I always like it when Christie introduces elements of Egyptology and ancient Egyptian history into her stories, because it’s clear she dearly loves the subject.
  • There’s a delightful couple of afterwards written by Christie, talking about her love/hate relationship with Poirot.

Cons

  • Jarringly racist, in particular against the Chinese.
  • The gimmick doesn’t always work; a couple of the stories are entirely in the form of Poirot telling Hastings a story that had happened years previously, and the lack of immediacy makes it difficult to follow.
  • Some of the stories end abruptly.

Verdict
Light and mostly fun, especially good for establishing Poirot as a long-running character, with more presence than the full novel-length mysteries.

Side Note
My modest goal was to read 12 books this year, and I’m clearly not going to make it. It’s not been a great year, and maybe reading challenges are dumb?

Literacy 2024: Book 5: The Man Who Died Twice

The second book in the Thursday Murder Club series

Book
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Series
Book 2 in the Thursday Murder Club series

Synopsis
Not long after finding the culprits behind a double homicide in the first book, retiree Elizabeth Best receives an intriguing note from someone in her past life as a spy. Following up on the note involves Elizabeth, along with the rest of the Thursday Murder Club and their new friends, in a case involving multiple murders, mobsters, and the disappearance of a fortune in diamonds.

Pros

  • Gets right into the story, now that the characters and their relationships have been established.
  • Doesn’t feel as aggressively cozy as its predecessor, treating its characters from the start not as “elderly people solving crimes,” but actual characters with a ton of life experience.
  • Light-hearted throughout, but one line in particular actually made me laugh out loud.
  • Does a pretty good job of capturing “the banality of evil.” We see into the minds of (some of) the villains, and are shown that even when we’re in their point of view, they’re not fascinating or even exciting, just willfully ignorant and selfish.
  • Often anticipates the reader’s main theories about what happened, and has a character explicitly call it out, to reassure the reader that they’re in sync.
  • The character of Elizabeth, which I didn’t like much in the first book since she was essentially a super-hero of plot convenience, is more fallible and relatable here.

Cons

  • One of the main clues was disappointingly obvious.
  • The tone overall is “light-hearted but poignant,” so the moments where it descends into outright comedy just feel weird and out of place.
  • Overuses the gimmick of building tension by having a character reflecting on how good their life is right now. (Although the last one was pretty sweet).
  • The climax strains credulity past the breaking point, insistent on tying up every loose end at once.
  • Although I do really like the character of Bogdan, he’s clearly become the infallible super-hero of plot convenience for this book.

Verdict
I think it’s better than the first book, more confident in its main characters and a little less eager to make them quirky and charming. The side characters still seem a little too try-hard, some of the jokes are extremely corny, and the gag of “old people so stubborn and seemingly harmless that they always get their way” has been over-used to its breaking point. But it is absolutely still a fun and light, character-driven mystery story that’s not so light that it evaporates.

Spoilers after the break

Continue reading “Literacy 2024: Book 5: The Man Who Died Twice”

Literacy 2024: Book 4: Killer, Come Back to Me

A collection of Ray Bradbury’s crime stories

Book
Killer, Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury

Synopsis
To commemorate what would have been Bradbury’s 100th birthday, a collection of his stories for pulp crime magazines throughout the 1940s and early 50s

Pros

  • Includes a forward to put the stories into context, as well as an afterword written by Bradbury himself for an earlier-published collection of several of the same stories, with his characteristically clear-headed assessment of his own work (and his work ethic)
  • Thoughtful organization of the stories, so that you can see Bradbury’s unique voice, along with his particular interests, become more and more pronounced over the course of the book
  • Fascinating pair of companion stories, originally published in different pulp magazines, that describe the day of a crime, one from the perspective of the victim, the other in the mind of the criminal
  • Another interesting pair of companion stories bring in Bradbury’s interest in science fiction, exploring two implications of a company called Marionettes, Inc. making lifelike android versions of humans
  • A highlight is a fascinating story of a man’s obsessive need to clean up the scene of a murder he’d committed
  • The stories incorporate Bradbury’s interest in horror, sci-fi, and fantasy-middle-America world-building
  • Once he sheds the pulp formula, the stories become fascinating psychological profiles that remain relatable across decades.

Cons

  • The bulk of the stories are fairly standard pulp fiction until Bradbury’s unique voice becomes apparent — they’re still well-written, but lack the spark of his best work
  • Horror and crime/suspense stories are a good match, but the inclusion of sci-fi stories feels a bit jarring and out of place
  • I would’ve appreciated an explicit date of first publication with each story, so that we could better place it in Bradbury’s overall body of work

Verdict
Interesting for fans of Ray Bradbury, who want to see a side of his writing that’s not quite like the stuff that he’s better known for. In his afterword, he acknowledges that his crime stories are fine, but don’t come from the same passion as his other stories, and they don’t really capture his unique voice. This shouldn’t be anybody’s first exposure to Bradbury’s writing, but it is an excellent demonstration of how the voice and style that we love actually developed.

Literacy 2024: Book 3: This Is How You Lose the Time War

A sci-fi fantasy love story across the multiverse

Book
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Synopsis
Red and Blue are elite agents on opposing factions working across the entirety of time and space to shape the multiverse to their own ends. At the end of a particularly epic battle, Red finds an enigmatic message from her adversary. This begins an increasingly elaborate correspondence between the two, with each message taking bizarre forms that require years or even centuries to compose.

Pros

  • Imaginative world-building without exposition. Each section describes fantastic futures or complete alternate histories in just a few pages.
  • Concepts like “upthread,” “downthread,” and “strands” become clear without ever needing explicit explanation.
  • The format is repeated without ever becoming too repetitive; you get the sense of anticipation that each character feels as they wait for the next message.
  • Gets the emotional beats right and reminds the reader of the universality of falling in love — the stages of wariness, excitement, infatuation, passion, comfort, and (sometimes) despair.
  • Many evocative passages that emphasize feeling more than description; you get a sense of apocalypse, cruelty, peace, nature, and so on without belaboring the scene setting.

Cons

  • Often feels over-written and florid, as the language often seems to dance around an idea instead of making it clear. I ended up skimming over much of the book, because the metaphors and abstractions failed to land more often than not.
  • The writing was so poetic, while the settings were often so fantastic, that it became impossible to tell what was metaphor and what was literal.
  • The attempts at jokes, references, and wordplay felt corny in the way of very, very smart people trying to be funny.
  • The characters are practically omnipotent, and the described worlds so fantastic and cataclysmic, that there’s no sense of stakes for the characters or boundaries to their universe. Stuff happens, but we can’t ever anticipate what the implications might be or how dire or permanent the situation is.
  • I never got the sense of why or how characters fall in love. The beats of a romantic relationship feel familiar and genuine, and I can see the characters reacting to each stage of the relationship, but they’re moments that feel dictated by the authors instead of motivated by genuine connection.

Synopsis
Overall, this feels like a very well-written and well-thought-out story that just isn’t for me. It’s excellent at establishing mood and conjuring images of fantastic alternate realities. The overall plot uses time travel effectively to give an idea of a romance that is so fundamental and so epic that it is both fated to happen and also threatened at every moment across multiple timelines. But these characters are archetypes more than genuine personalities, so the story on the whole seemed to be aimed at readers who love the idea of an epic, universe-shaking love, romance for romance’s sake, instead of one driven by the characters themselves.

Literacy 2024: Book 2: Everyone on This Train is a Suspect

The sequel to Benjamin Stevenson’s metatextual murder mystery Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

Book
Everyone on This Train is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

Synopsis
After the success of his memoir Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, Ernest Cunningham is invited on a book tour with other crime and mystery writers, on board a luxury train traveling from the north end of Australia to the south. While he’s struggling to write a fictional follow-up to his previous book, one of the passengers is murdered, forcing him into another true-crime memoir.

Pros

  • Fast-moving and engaging; I hadn’t intended to jump into the sequel immediately, but it was available on Libby and I finished it in just a few sittings.
  • A bit more even-handed with the “telling the rules of the story while the story is being told” gimmick
  • Commits to the “fair-play murder mystery” rule, with information given out around the same time the narrator figures it out, and never directly contradicted later on.
  • Genuinely funny and clever in places.
  • I loved the format of the epilogue and how it was delivered.
  • Makes good use of the setting and what’s unique about a train journey through Australia.
  • Used the title to add a bit of depth to the story, reconsidering his role as the narrator and turning it into something of a love story.
  • Introduced the clever idea of the other characters being aware that they’re characters in a murder mystery, and trying to control how their role in the story is presented.

Cons

  • The gag that I’d thought was genuinely funny and clever was reused a couple too many times, I said, disappointedly.
  • One of the few times I’ve had to say out loud while reading a book, “This is so corny.
  • A couple of what I assumed to be the standout puzzles or clues were insultingly obvious, in my opinion. I tend not to read murder mysteries very closely, but I figured out the solutions (if not the full implication) immediately, and the book kept referring to them over and over as if they were some intriguingly perplexing conundrum.
  • Even after I’d figured out the “shape” of the story and its subplots, I still felt that the actual details (and the identity of the guilty parties) required deductive leaps I couldn’t have made on my own.
  • Many of the characters are overly broad stereotypes — too cartoonish to seem real, but not funny enough to work as comic relief.

Verdict
One star, ghastly. But seriously, I thought this was better than the first book. I read part of an interview with Stevenson in which he said his goal was to counteract the tendency of crime fiction (especially Australian crime fiction) to be much too dark, and he wanted to bring back some levity and the fun of “golden age” murder mysteries. By that standard, it works: they’re fun, engaging stories to try and solve. But I can’t shake the sense that they’re writing down to the perceived level of the audience, especially since this book so aggressively takes down a literary fiction snob. There are some interesting things going on with a metatextual story in which the characters are aware they’re in a story, but it doesn’t do enough with the idea.

I feel like I might appreciate the gimmick more if I’d never read the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, but as it is, the book has the feeling of “We have Anthony Horowitz at home.” (Which seems mean of me to say, but Stevenson is doing very well with the books, by all accounts, and the first is going to be turned into a series. I can’t imagine he’s particularly heartbroken by a stranger on the internet saying it’s “fine but not great.”)

Literacy 2024: Book 1: Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

Benjamin Stevenson’s metatextual crime story

Book
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Synopsis
A writer begrudgingly travels to a ski lodge for a reunion with his estranged family. When the body of an unidentified stranger is discovered on the slopes, seemingly dead of exposure, it starts a process of dredging up decades’ worth of family secrets.

Pros

  • The heavily metatextual style of the book — where the narrator acknowledges that he’s writing a detective story in which he plays both Holmes and Dr Watson — gives plenty of opportunities for flashbacks and re-contextualization, with tons of foreshadowing.
  • Maintains a light, almost-but-not-quite comedic tone even as it touches on some serious or even horrific subjects.
  • Repeatedly insists that it’s “playing fair” as a murder mystery, drawing attention to details that will be important later on.
  • The format of the book, along with its chapter breaks and section headings, gives it room to stretch out the intrigue, as you’re subconsciously waiting for the event or revelation that will make the section heading make sense.
  • Gave enough information that I was able to figure out the likely suspects, even though I wasn’t reading carefully enough to piece together any of the details.
  • It never occurred to me that Australia had areas with high enough elevation for ski lodges, so I learned something.

Cons

  • Especially at the beginning of the book, all of the self-awareness comes across as try-hard, with hyperlinks to stuff that happens in later chapters before we’ve fully had a chance to be invested in the story.
  • All of the artifice in the style makes the whole thing seem artificial. Revelations of past tragedies end up feeling weightless and too lurid to be believable.
  • Apart from the narrator, none of the characters feel like real people with real motivations; they act the way the story needs them to act in the moment. People bounce back from the shocking deaths of loved ones unbelievably quickly.
  • The book acknowledges the “people trapped in a remote location with a murderer” cliche as in And Then There Were None, but seems to be so worried about falling into a cliche that it loses everything that makes the format special. In particular, nobody seems to be all that worried by the fact that there’s a killer in their midst.
  • For as much as the book signals the details to pay attention to, it still ends up with a lengthy detective-explains-the-entire-mystery chapter that makes all kinds of deductive leaps that feel unearned.
  • If you go back through the story and think about the events as they would’ve played out in chronological order, many of the character motivations make no sense.

Verdict
Despite my list of cons, this was a very entertaining crime story. I think its biggest weakness is that the self-awareness overwhelms everything else, coming across as lampshading the weaknesses in the story instead of actually addressing them. But the format is also essential for elevating what is frankly an over-the-top and not-entirely-plausible backstory into something that’s completely engaging moment to moment.

Literacy 2023: Recap

Another year of failing to hit my target number, but being pretty happy about it nonetheless

I picked up this whole series again when I discovered Goodreads and its annual reading challenges. But the real goal for me isn’t to hit some number of books read, but a) make more time for reading for pleasure, and b) get better at summarizing my thoughts on a book without its turning into an over-long book report to prove that “I got it.” By that metric, this year’s been a success. More about rediscovering familiar books and writers than taking on anything new, although I managed to do both.

Goal
20 books in 2023

Final
18 read

Favorite Book of Literacy 2023
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. I didn’t expect to enjoy this one as much as I did, but early on it deviated from the format I’d thought it was going to take, and it went off to surprise me over and over again. It’s an infuriating (and I hope exaggerated) account of racism in America perfectly balanced with pulp sci-fi.

MVP of Literacy 2023
Agatha Christie. Last year I started reading or re-reading the mysteries, most of which I hadn’t read since high school, and it was more like discovering a new author than getting re-acquainted with a familiar one. I never appreciated how innovative and experimental Christie could be, or how well some of her books situated themselves in “modern times” as opposed to being quaint relics of the early 20th century.

Runner-Up MVP of Literacy 2023
Mary Roach. I kind of worked my way up to her most well-known books (Stiff and Bonk), which was a great way to get familiar with her style before seeing how good it could be when she’s firing on all cylinders. I’m looking forward to reading more of her books in 2024.

Goal for Literacy 2024
12 Books in 2024. I like having an arbitrary number to encourage myself to keep reading — and I probably would’ve left Shadow of the Sith hanging had I not been driven to finish it before the end of the year — but “a book a month” is a perfectly reasonable goal. I’d rather end the year feeling happy that I exceeded one arbitrary target instead of disappointed that I didn’t hit an equally arbitrary one.

RIP to Goals of Past Years
I did try to resume The Starless Sea, as I’d pledged in previous years, but I finally had to abandon it as being just not for me. My biggest complaint was that it was so high on its own supply of magical realism that it felt twee, but I read so many positive reviews that I resolved to try again. And almost immediately, it hit me with a description of a merchant who collected stars and traded them for secrets. I mean come on.

Most Looking Forward To in 2024
The Destroyer of Worlds, the sequel to Lovecraft Country, which I got as a Christmas gift

Call to Action
I’ve still got a long backlog of books, but I’m always looking for new recommendations. If there’s anything you’ve read that made a particular impact on you, feel free to recommend it in the comments or on Mastodon!

Literacy 2023: Book 18: Shadow of the Sith

An interim Star Wars story in which Luke and Lando try to protect Rey’s family from a sinister Sith plot.

Book
Shadow of the Sith by Adam Christopher

Synopsis
Set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, the story begins with Luke Skywalker training the next generation of young Jedi while Lando Calrissian is searching the galaxy for his kidnapped daughter. Their paths cross when Lando overhears a plot from an evil bounty hunter assigned to track down a young couple and their daughter, which ties in with sinister plans from Sith cultists and Luke’s own nightmarish visions of a dark planet called Exegol.

Pros

  • A team-up of two characters I rarely see in Star Wars stories, during a time period that we haven’t yet seen much of.
  • Carefully connects the dots between ideas and events mentioned in the sequel trilogy, or shown briefly in flashback.
  • Gives more characterization of Rey’s parents, and offers an explanation of the events that led to her being left on a desolate planet at the start of The Force Awakens, as well as an explanation for how Emperor Palpatine had a son that no one knew about.
  • Some of the locations are as evocative and imaginative as Star Wars at its best, like a ghost planet bleached of color by radiation, and a world covered in diamond “frozen” over a treacherous ocean. Their descriptions suggest classic concept art from the films and TV series.

Cons

  • The dialogue is pretty clunky, even by Star Wars standards.
  • Trying to justify some of the decisions in The Rise of Skywalker is a thankless job, and I don’t think the book quite manages to live up to the challenge. In particular, the end of Rey’s family’s story to set up the first sequel is still unsatisfying.
  • The back stories for some of the characters are too complicated with a few too many names of characters involved, implying to me that they’re attempting to piece together threads from the comics or from other novelizations that I haven’t read.
  • Tries to split the difference between science fiction and Star Wars fantasy, which works sometimes, but often feels like unnecessary explanations for things the reader would otherwise just accept and run with.
  • Related to the above: because it’s essentially a chase story, so much of the story involves characters trying to track each other down across the Galaxy. The book tries to offer a pseudo-sci-fi justification, which just draws attention to how much of the plot is characters just knowing things “because reasons.”
  • An entire storyline of the book consists of characters trying to avoid a fate that we already know is unavoidable, and our main protagonists have no real agency in affecting it.
  • As it’s trying to fill in the gaps between existing stories, it’s obligated to leave most of its threads unresolved. This results in our main characters having no real arc; they end the story pretty much exactly how they began it.

Verdict
I didn’t enjoy this one, but honestly it’s as much my own fault as it is the fault of the book. It’s not my preferred “flavor” of Star Wars, but as it’s got “Sith” in the title, I should probably have predicted how much of it feels like “Star Wars For Goths.” (That still somehow manages to turn into a scene that reads like the goofy-but-horrifying-to-a-kid climax of Superman 3). I’m also realizing that I’m no longer the same kid who freaked out over Splinter of the Mind’s Eye; I just can’t get into the novelizations anymore, since they too often feel like trying to explore the inner minds of characters who, by design, are only just as deep as they need to be to drive pulp fiction.

It’s an unenviable job to have to connect the dots and provide depth and nuance to things that screenwriters only intended as Macguffins, or as puzzle boxes deliberately left for someone else to open and explore. Shadow of the Sith feels weighed down by too many franchise requirements to ever get the chance to go off on interesting tangents and tell its own story.

Literacy 2023: Book 17: The Thursday Murder Club

Richard Osman’s cozy crime story about a group of residents of a retirement community solving a “real” murder

Book
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Synopsis
Four residents of a retirement community formed The Thursday Murder Club, where they look over cold case files and try to find some kind of justice for victims of unsolved crimes. When someone close to their community is murdered, they’re compelled to investigate, in unofficial cooperation with the local police.

Pros

  • Compelling and more quick-moving than you might expect from the premise.
  • Cleverly structured to stay in sync with the reader — loose ends are tied up, and potential suspects are cleared away, right as they need to be.
  • Deftly walks the line between “ghoulish fascination with lurid details of murders” and “bringing a sense of justice,” which is one of the problems inherent in the whole idea of a “cozy” murder mystery.
  • Clear sense of good guys and bad guys, and more significantly, which characters deserve depth and which are left as caricatures.
  • Gives each of the main characters a history and a depth to their present.
  • Deeper themes run underneath the murder mystery, asserting the dignity of the elderly as complex human beings in a particular stage of their lives, instead of existing only as “old people.” Goes into the details of their relationships, their fears, and how their current lives overlap their previous ones.

Cons

  • Aggressively cozy. Obviously, “cozy murder story” is the whole pitch for this book, but it threatens to make everything feel too artificial.
  • Feels like a bit of a cheat to have a character who’s essentially a super-hero, but with the advantage of adding a Poirot-style character into a story that could’ve easily been just four Miss Marples.
  • Some of the revelations late in the book seem to come out of nowhere — they’re foreshadowed, but the reader gets no clues to deduce them.
  • Ends up being more of a “crime story” than “murder mystery,” as you’ve got a vague idea of suspects and red herrings, but not enough clues to solve the mystery yourself.

Verdict
I was prepared to write this one off as “quick but shallow,” but halfway through, I was completely won over. I’d expected it to be just a case of a successful celebrity taking a stab at writing, taking advantage of his name-recognition to launch it into best-seller status. But it’s charming and often moving, a solid read as a murder mystery story, with just enough edge to its characters to make them appealing. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m looking forward to the next three books in the series.