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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Review: The List

The List by Steve Berry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Steve Berry said he trunked this early manuscript in the 90s after he began working on it in an attempt to meet the John Grisham moment of the time. Now that he’s far more seasoned a writer, and with historical as well as legal research aplenty under his belt, he brings this story of a secretly sinister Southern company town and paper mill to life with the sort of knowledge only an insider could. The plot takes its time to get going, but when it does…hoo boy, that letter to Brent alone is what bumps this up from 3 or 3.5 to 4 stars for me.

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Review: The Curse of Penryth Hall

The Curse of Penryth Hall by Jess Armstrong
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this one, with its gothic atmosphere at a stormy Cornish manse and our protagonist working in a bookstore with an old man proprietor and a lovely black cat. But the book very quickly managed to lose my interest despite the murder and mayhem that happens. I think I’m either in a reading slump, or I just couldn’t keep my mind on this one. Either way, it’s sadly an official DNF for me.

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