LibraryThing, X, GoodReads, Amazon, B&N...Do you post to any of these?

Let's try something a little different. I suspect that many, if not most, of us, don't post reviews only to our own book blogs. I have spotted a number of familiar bloggers on other sites such as Twitter (X), GoodReads, LibraryThing, Amazon, and B&N, for instance. 

I think it would be fun to run into more familiar faces on those sites, so if anyone wants to share their links to any of those sites, just drop them into a comment to this post. I don't use any of the other popular book promotion tools such as those offered on  BookTok, Instagram, or YouTube, but if you use them, include those user links in your comment, too. 

I'll start us off with links to the sites I post to: 

LibraryThing

Twitter / X

GoodReads

The first site that I ever reviewed a book on was Amazon, but I don't share reviews there much anymore because I think it's the least trustworthy of all sites when it comes to review authenticity. My go-to site for years (other than Book Chase, of course) was LibraryThing, but that site has been struggling for a while now, and I got out of the habit of posting reviews there on a regular basis. I haven't given up on them, but it's gotten kind of quiet there. 

Then I discovered Twitter and used it as a place to post book review links back to the blog, and as a way to meet new bookish people. I suppose GoodReads is the place to be now, but that site seems really slow lately. I think that may be a function of GoodReads becoming the dominant book review site on the internet and the massive number of active members that results from that level of success...but it's frustrating.

Anyway, please do post your own links in the comments below because otherwise finding someone on any of the sites is kind of a looking-for-the-needle-in-a-haystack experience. 

The Secret Hours - Mick Herron

 

Mick Herron's The Secret Hours is a novel that can be read and enjoyed on multiple levels. For some it will serve as a standalone novel, possibly even an introduction to Herron's work and his take on the world of espionage. For others, those readers who have already read all or most of Herron's Slough House series, The Secret Hours will read as the prequel to the series that they've been hoping for for a while now. 

Spies and politicians have always been closely linked, and they do not always agree on exactly which of them should be calling the shots - especially when it comes to means and methods. That's why one disgruntled prime minister decided to form the Monochrome inquiry, a small group tasked with uncovering any "historical over-reaching" by the British spy agencies. And now, just when it seems that the inquiry will come to nothing, the committee learns of something that happened in Berlin in 1994, something that fits the definition of over-reach perfectly.

Herron's story alternates between flashbacks to 1994 that are seen through the eyes of a young agent on her very first assignment and that same agent's witness testimony in the present. What the witness tells the committee will reveal the details of an operation that went so badly that its repercussions were felt at the highest levels of MI5 both then and now. 

But as I say, readers are certain to experience The Secret Hours differently. The novel's premise has all the makings of a standalone spy thriller, and it certainly works well as one, especially for readers who make the effort to keep up with all the character names right from the beginning. But longtime Slough House series readers are going to quickly figure out that there's a lot more there for them than for standalone readers. They will start to recognize characters from the series despite the fact that those characters are working in Berlin under aliases. They will begin to smile to themselves when they realize, that their favorite series characters have not changed a whole lot since this 1994 career-defining fiasco - and they will laugh out loud at the caustic wit and sarcasm they have become so accustomed to in Mick Herron's prose style. 

Personally, I'm grateful that I am caught up on the Slough House series, including novellas and short stories, because The Secret Hours answers so many questions I had about incidents only alluded to to one degree or another in the series books. This is most definitely the series prequel I've been wishing for.

Mick Herron jacket photo

Mick Herron's Sense of Humor

 

Mick Herron jacket photo

I'm nearing the end of Mick Herron's The Secret Hours and the book is fast approaching its climax. But Mick Herron being Mick Herron, suddenly out of nowhere come's this little zinger on the world we live in today - and it made me laugh out loud when I least expected it:

"De Vries is a well-connected man. Rich, party donor, friend of prime ministers. Meaning virtually untouchable, unless he did something stupid like disrespecting Trans people on Twitter."

Keep in mind that this bit occurred in the middle of a very serious and confrontational discussion between two key players in the story. This is exactly the kind of sense of humor that makes me laugh, and it's a big reason I read every Mick Herron book I can get my hands on.  

 Of course, I do concede the point that I might just have a very warped sense of humor.

A Town Called Solace - Mary Lawson

 

A Town Called Solace is only Canadian author Mary Lawson's fourth novel. She has published novels only in 2002, 2006, 2013, and 2021, and that's kind of a shame considering the critical success she's always enjoyed and how well her books have sold around the world. Lawson, now 77 years of age, lives in England but is said to be a frequent visitor to Canada where she grew up in a small Ontario farming community. 

The author set A Town Called Solace in one such northern Ontario 1972 farming community where everyone knows everyone else, something that has probably not changed in generations. It's the kind of place that depends on one shared law enforcement officer mainly because something criminally serious rarely ever happens there. Even so, Solace is lucky enough to have a cop who is smart and completely dedicated to keeping the town's citizens safe. 

The novel has three distinct narrators: a little girl whose teenaged sister ran away from home one night and has not been seen or heard from since, the elderly lady who lives next door to the little girl and her anxious family, and the stranger who comes to town to claim the old lady's home after she gifts it to him. Of course, in such a small town, readers will expect that the stories overlap in ways both subtle and not so subtle, and that is certainly the case in Solace, Ontario. In the present, the little girl has come to depend on whomever is living in the house - and the cat that lives there - for emotional support. The old woman is suffering a personal grief of her own, and she spends much of her time reliving the one tragic mistake she made as a younger woman. And the stranger who has come to town to claim her home is struggling with a personal crisis all his on, one he brought to town with him.

All the while, the local cop is doing everything in his power to locate and bring the missing teen home before it is too late to save her. 

A Town Called Solace is not my favorite Mary Lawson novel, but of the four, this is the one I found to be easiest to engage with quickly. Too, the limited number of characters, along with the distinct narrators, makes the novel generally read rather faster than those that preceded it. Mary Lawson is a truly wonderful literary novelist in my estimation, and I'm pleased to hear that she is still writing; I just hope it doesn't all take so long next time around.

What I'm Reading This Week (September 4)

 I finished three of the seven books I was reading at the beginning of last week (The Librarianist, Dickens and Prince, and Cleveland Noir), and I'm less than 100 pages from completion of both A Town Called Solace and The Secret Hours, so it was a nice week with not a clunker among them. I'm particularly pleased with one of the ones still in progress, Mick Herron's The Secret Hours, because it has really started to click with me now that I finally have its premise and all the characters figured out. I'm going to save the details for a formal review, but that one is exceptionally clever.

So this is how the reading-week is shaping up, beginning with the books already started:

This one has already joined the stack, but is not yet started:

I'm really looking forward to this 2022 novel from Loren D. Estleman. I'm a big fan of the old pulp magazines and the noir paperbacks that ended up replacing those after WWII, so this cover was screaming at me to take it home for a while. It's about a war veteran who comes home to resume his writing career only to find that the market has completely changed on him. His research for what he hopes will be a breakthrough novel leads him to a crowd that doesn't appreciate his snooping. 

And these are the ones most likely to be among those added during the week:

Half-Life of a Stolen Sister is a "reimagining" of the short lives of the Brontë siblings. From the back cover: "Chapter by chapter, the novel brings together diaries, letters, home movies, television and radio interviews, deathbed monologues, and fragments from the sprawling invented worlds of the siblings' childhood..." I'm not at all sure what the reference to home movies and media interviews is all about, but there's only one way to find out. Anything about the Brontës always gets a second look from me, so I'm hopeful.

I Hear You're Rich is a collection of flash fiction from Diane Williams, a writer dubbed "Godmother of Flash Fiction" by The Paris Review. Thirty-three stories in just 111 pages is most definitely a collection of flash fiction, a genre I haven't explored for a few years now. I've enjoyed some really good...and really short...flash fiction in the past, but I don't seem to run across much of it anymore. At three to four pages per story, these stories are actually a bit longer than some of the ones I've previously read and enjoyed. 

This one is about a form of cancel-culture that belongs on the old Twilight Zone TV series, and in fact, I remember an episode very similar in plot to Woman with a Blue Pencil. It seems that an amateur PI suddenly finds himself unrecognizable to friends and sources and "all signs of his existence" start disappearing one by one. As it turns out, our PI friend is a fictional character in a novel, and he's being steadily erased by a book editor who is trying to improve the novel he is/was part of. 

I was excited to learn about this new (scheduled for January 2024 publication) collection of short stories from James Lee Burke. Burke wrote a lot of short stories early in his career, but not all that many since those early years. This collection, from what I can tell, continues to explore the themes Burke uses so well in his novels: flawed people struggling to do the right thing while caught up in situations they cannot always control. Eight stories and one novella are collected here. This is one I'm really looking forward to, but I may decide to wait another month on it...this is money in the bank.

This Jerry Lee Lewis biography caught my attention mainly because it is written by Rick Bragg, a writer I've always enjoyed. I'm a lifetime fan of Jerry Lee's music, too, ever since seeing him drunkenly perform at a bowling alley when his career was obviously not going real well. I love his style and I was fascinated by his utterly reckless determination to live life on his own terms, bar the consequences. Rick Bragg's writing...Jerry Lee Lewis's story. How could this not turn out to be great?

I'll probably only add two or three of these five, but the ones not added are destined for a try next week. I've been reading a couple of complicated books, especially The Secret Hours, that demand a little more concentration than most novels, so I've cut back to five books going at once instead of trying to keep up with eight of them. That seems to be working really well, so I may stay on that approach for a while.

Have a great reading week, y'all. I can't wait to hear all about it.

Cleveland Noir - Edited by Michael Ruhlman & Miesha Wilson Headen

 

Cleveland Noir, edited by Michael Ruhlman and Miesha Wilson Headen, is the latest in the long line of dark short story collections from Akashic Books. As in past collections, the selected authors are all from the title city, and they still live in, or have close connections, there. What makes Cleveland Noir a little different is that eleven of the collection's fifteen stories are written by women, only four by men. Women have been writing in the noire genre as long as it has existed, of course, but their work completely dominates this particular collection. A bigger surprise here is that the darkest and most violent stories, especially those about female victims, are stories authored by women.

Among my favorite stories in Cleveland Noir are Susan Petrone's "The Silent Partner," Dana McSwain's "Bus Stop," D.M. Pulley's "Tremonster," and  Daniel Stashower's "Lenny, but Not Corky." The Petrone story uses the real life 1920 death on the baseball field of Ray Chapman to explore what might still happen today if some enterprising reporter were to delve too deeply into the tragedy. Was it an accidental beaning or was it murder? One reporter is determined to find out.

McSwain's "Bus Stop" is about a man who sees dead people, specifically young women who meet with him on the anniversary of their deaths to offer a little more information about what happened to them. Is there a serial killer still out there, and is it all starting to make too much sense to ignore?

Pulley's "Tremonster" is about a neighborhood monster who preys on young women without much concern that the Cleveland police will spend a lot of time trying to solve the murders of the young women he chooses. The suspense builds slowly but steadily all the way up to the story's climactic ending.

"Lenny, but Not Corky" by Daniel Stashower is a fun story about ego and how it affects a 73-year-old man who still believes that he earned a bigger reputation than the one Cleveland music fans grant him. What happens when a reporter interviews him almost fifty years after his limited impact on the Cleveland music scene has largely been forgotten, surprises both of them.

Cleveland Noir is one of the most consistently good collection of short stories I've read in the Akashic series, and I've read near twenty of them now. Fans of really dark crime fiction will enjoy it, and it will serve as a good introduction to readers not overly familiar with the noir genre already.