Review: Murder Under a Red Moon

Murder Under a Red Moon by Harini Nagendra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Bangalore Detectives' Club returns to solve a murder on an inauspicious night, the night of a lunar eclipse, when the most traditional people of this time and place would otherwise be holed up inside to stay safe from ill omens. Like the first book in this series, it's a relatively short one, but it's loaded for bear with thematically important storylines all converging - storylines about increasing tension between the Indians and their English colonizers, a rising feminist movement or two, and a self-styled godman "Swamiji" whom anyone with sense (like Kaveri, of course) can sense as a charlatan at best and a predator at worst. This series is now becoming one of my new favorites, and I've already got the remaining two (so far) in my current stack from the library.)

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Review: Trust No One

Trust No One by James Rollins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mr. Rollins. You market this as a standalone thriller and you end it like that? Leaving us hanging? How dare you, sir. But you know what? Since this is the logical extension of the Sigma Force universe into dark academia - like Katabasis meets Map of Bones in particular - I'll accept this as the start of something new in that world, with potential for a future crossover with the mainline Sigma Force novels just like Tucker Wayne and his war dogs Kane and Marco get. But my favorite part was that Rollins was good enough to include Malta as a setting, because at this point I feel like he was about the only big-time thriller author not to do so yet.

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Review: The Bangalore Detectives Club

The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first in a series of period mystery novels set in 1920s Bangalore, this book introduces Kaveri and Ramu, a lovely lady and her doctor husband, who get involved in solving a strange case of a murdered gate-crasher at the white man's party. Kaveri is an interesting study in contrasts - she has no love lost for the British, and Ramu does encourage her to join an independence movement while he is unable to do so without losing his job, but she also loves Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and takes cues from the great fictional detective's methods to solve this murder. The resolution is one of the best twists I've seen in the genre - maybe a touch predictable, but not easily so, and yet it made nothing short of perfect sense.

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Review: Oxford Soju Club

Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this book out because it happened to have a character whose name is the same as someone I work with. While the Dr. Ryu I work with is a man and a spine surgeon, this book’s Dr. Ryu is a woman and a doctor to the spies, responsible for one of the most memorable conversations in this book. Other memorable conversations come about from the spies themselves - Koreans, North vs. South, and when we’re in the northern POV, the political commentary about the West becomes particularly gothic, in the sense that it’s using another country known for abominably treating its citizens to critique the West for using many of the same methods, just funhouse mirrored.

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Review: Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went into this one not knowing much about it, except that it was a spacefaring story set on a generation ship. It wound up surprising me immensely with how excellently readable it was, following a group of British teens training for years for a mission to be the first to set foot on a potentially habitable planet only a few solar systems away. It's an alternate history, too, similar to For All Mankind, where space exploration is significantly more advanced - the story begins in 2012, where by this time there are Americans on the Moon and Russians on Mars. As much as I flew through this book, however, its focus on characters meant that the story took a hell of a long time to reach a conclusion of sorts, and even then, it felt like there wasn't much closure. Also, while the vast majority of these teenagers were bogged down by drama and self destruction, there was one in particular who was so horrible as to deserve a particularly painful comeuppance that, sadly, never comes about. But the character focus leads to such strong and memorable chemistry between these teens - even if they make bad decision after bad decision - and helps boost this from a 3.5 to a 4 star rating easily.

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Review: Bitter Medicine

Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

About three years ago or so, I mentioned this book in an article I'd written about Sarah J. Maas's books being re-labeled for the adult sections of the bookstore and the library, and gave this book as an example of fantasy written by women being mistakenly labeled as YA. Somehow, the book slid under the radar for me after that, but when I found it again by chance on a library tabletop in Hillsboro, I found the time ripe to finally give this book a read. And it's really, really not YA. Not even close. And like Sarah J. Maas's books, I definitely shouldn't have been reading this one at work, but hey, that's a damn fine love story between Elle and Luc there. Far and away their chemistry is the book's best highlight.

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Review: The Devil's Bible

The Devil's Bible by Steve Berry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Steve Berry returns with the 20th novel in the Cotton Malone series, in which he and his cohorts get involved with a missing medieval codex, and also a missing Swedish princess, which may have possible connections to the fictional Konstantin Franko regime in Russia that stands in for Putin's imperialism in this universe. It also connects to the still-unsolved assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, with Berry going with the theory that it was a Soviet hit job. Ultimately, Berry goes somewhere he very rarely goes - killing off a major character who has been involved in the series since the very beginning, which explains why it begins with a prologue where Cotton reflects back on where this mission went so badly wrong and wonders if it was worth it.

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