Cold-Blooded Myrtle Elizabeth C. Bunce The title of the third  Mrytle HardCastle  mystery is, as usual, a pun exploiting the assonance of Myrtle and murder. (This HAS to be the reason  Elizabeth C. Bunce  chose the name Myrtle, right?) This one is odd, though, because "cold-blooded" is the one thing that our Myrtle is NOT! Our Myrtle is keen as a hound on a scent. She's a brilliant, nosy kid who can't be persuaded, ever, to mind her own business. She is not put off by blood and poison and viscera, which sounds like she might be cold-blooded, except that she's not -- she's positively enthusiastic about murder, even ghoulish. And we love it! Or at least, I do. For  Cold-Blooded Myrtle , we don't take any trips or go anywhere exotic. The action takes place entirely in Myrtle's home town of Swinburne and the neighboring Schofield College. Schofield College, it turns out, is where Myrtle's mother studied many years ago, before Myrtle herself was thought...

The Lie T.C. Boyle ** spoiler alert **  Two days ago I started a local community college course called "Writing Short Stories". As an example the first week's material had a video of author  T. Coraghessan Boyle  reading his story  The Lie  aloud. The story in summary is that the protagonist (certainly not a hero), who is a lazy guy, doesn't want to go to work one morning, so he calls his boss and tells him a really stupid lie. The next day he skips work again and he doubles down on the lie. Eventually he gets caught by his wife. There are a lot of stories of stupid people acting stupid. There are so many that I have to assume some people like these stories. I am not one of them. The Lie  on Amazon Goodreads review  

Witches Abroad Terry Pratchett Witches Abroad  is the twelfth novel in  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld  series, and the third in the  Witches  subseries, after  Equal Rites  and  Wyrd Sisters , which introduced Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and the unfortunate Magrat Garlick. They are the central figures of  Witches Abroad , but the first three witches we meet are not Magrat, Granny, and Nanny. One of these first three is Desiderata Hollow, who is about to die. but has unfinished business left. She needs to get Magrat, Granny, and Nanny to take care of it, so she uses headology. Got to be all three. And that ain’t easy, with people like them. Got to use headology. Got to make ’em send ’emselves. Tell Esme Weatherwax she’s got to go somewhere and she won’t go out of contrariness, so tell her she’s not to go and she’ll run there over broken glass. "There" is the distant city of Genua, where the third of the first three witches has cast hers...

Murder of Crows Anne Bishop Murder of Crows , the second novel in  Anne Bishop 's  The Others  series, begins with Meg kicking Simon out of her bed. That doesn't mean what you probably think it means. Simon wakes Meg up from a scary dream, and in her sudden fright, she literally kicks him. But what was Simon doing in Meg's bed? He was sleeping. Yes, Simon and Meg are sleeping with each other. But that, while literally true, doesn't mean what the phrase usually means. Near the end of  Written in Red , Meg was attacked by a team of kidnappers/murderers and almost killed. In  Murder of Crows  she's still working through some post-traumatic stress. Having a warm, friendly, scary-safe wolf in bed with her makes it easier for her to sleep. Simon and Meg are not romantically involved with each other, but their relationship was an important plot thread of  Written in Red , continues to be important in  Murder of Crows , and, I confidently predict, will be...

Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges The title of  Jorge Luis Borges 's  Ficciones  is both precise and accurate. It is indeed a book of fictions. What it is not, I was surprised to find, is a book of stories.  Ficciones  combines two short prose books by  Borges :  El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan  ( The Garden of Forking Paths ) , consisting of a prolog followed by seven works, and  Artificios  ( Artifices ) , consisting of a prolog and nine works.  Borges  is a creative genius and the imagination he shows in these pages is dazzling. But, with a few exceptions, they are not actually stories. They are scholarly expositions of splendidly creative ideas. For instance, the first work, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," is a description of some very strange fictional places. When I say "story," I mean something like what literary scholars mean by the word, a work of fiction with a plot and characters. By a plot I mean, roughly, a tale ...

Down on the Farm Charles Stross Sorcerers go mad. In  Charles Stross 's  LaundryVerse  they suffer from K-syndrome (Krantzberg-Godel Spongiform Encephalopathy), a disease that results from running invocations on the neural hardware in your brain, in contrast with the safe practices of modern computational demonologists such as Bob Howard, who use electronic computers. ("Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of." -- Arthur Dent.) Mad sorcerers are a problem. You can't just give them a pension, even with generous health care. Compared to a mad sorcerer, a thermonuclear warhead is no more than a minor annoyance. Mad sorcerers need to be protected from themselves, and we need to be protected from them. Unknown to Bob, the Laundry has a facility, "St Hilda of Grantham’s Home For Disgruntled Waifs And Strays" (as Bob eventually remarks, "most of them aren’t so much disgruntled as demonically posse...

A Red Death Walter Mosley I began reading  Walter Mosley 's  Easy Rawlins  mysteries because one of them appeared in the Marvel Netflix series  Luke Cage . (Sneer if you like, but I have read better books for much worse reasons.) I didn't much enjoy  Devil in a Blue Dress  -- in  my review , I wrote, ...it is not a terrible well-constructed novel. There's just too much going on: too many characters, too many locations, too much event. It held my interest, but I was lost much of the time. But  Blue Dress  was  Mosley 's debut novel, and I thought it could only get better. A Red Death  is the second book, and it is not measurably better. It still felt like work to read it. The plot doesn't just meander -- it careens drunkenly from one scene to another. And there are so many minor characters. Every time a name appeared, I found myself asking, "Who is this person, now?" Also, there was one specific thing I disliked. Easy Rawlins is one ...