Tag: #CloakDaggerChal

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Miscellany

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

The Witness for the Dead
Series: The Goblin Emperor Series (but can be read as standalone)
Published: June 2021
Book Themes / Tropes: I can speak to the Dead, Judicial power politics, Court intrigue, A Good Person
Recommended if you like: Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, Chalion series by Lois McMaster Bujold, or generally any mythological fantasy work
Rating: 9 of 10

How many times do we come across truly good, kind people in fiction? People who do the right thing even if that doesn’t help them much politically, simply because it is the right thing to do? In Witness for the Dead, Addison has created a good person in the form of Celehar who works as a witness for the dead.

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Books Recommendations

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

About The Forgotten Garden
Published: 2008
Book Tropes: Foundlings, Time Hops, Family Secrets, Mysterious Houses, Australia
Recommended for fans of: Susanna Kearsley, Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, Possession by A. S. Byatt, The Thirteenth Tale by by Diane Setterfield

Forgotten Garden was the first book that I decided to read from my Fall 2021 Reading List — since that was the book most people recommended! It turned out to be a very engrossing read, and managed to get me out of my reader’s block.

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Books

Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

Leonie Swann Three Bags Full

August was supposed to be Women in Translation month. So I turned to Leonie Swann’s Three Bags Full, a book translated from German to English (thanks to BookWyrm Knits for telling me that).

Three Bags Full is apparently one of those books where nothing bad happens to our main characters — at least that’s what the commenters said on this Tor post by Jo Walton. The book happens to be about a flock of sheep playing detective. I was easy prey because I’m all for light, breezy reads right now (still going through a reading slump!).

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Books Recommendations

Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand

Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand
Published: 1950
Book Tropes: Unreliable characters, mysterious letters, remote houses
Recommended for fans of: Agatha Christie // Hitchcock movies // Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier // Gothic literature // Wales

Katinka Jones works with a women’s magazine and starts a correspondence with the lonely Mrs. Amista Carlyon. Amista lives in a very remote village in Wales. Tinka develops a fondness for her and decides to visit her. But surprise, surprise. There’s nobody called Amista living in that old house. So who was writing those letters? And who is this mysterious Mr. Carlyon who seems to hide a desperate secret of his own?

“And in Katinka Jones, the Welsh blood of her father’s family rose up and painted for her mind’s eye, a scene she loved: the grey valley where the brave green struggled through the earth’s scarred surface under the soft Welsh rain: an old house, clinging to its hard-won foothold on the stony breast of the mountain; the river lying like a silver sword between a young girl and the companionship of men — of all men but Carlyon. ”

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Books Starred Recommendations

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is fantasy fiction but at its heart, it is a mystery. And what a mind-boggling, thought-provoking mystery it is.

A house with at least 7000 halls, giant statues, sea tides and migratory birds has only 2 inhabitants: Piranesi and The Other. Where have all the other humans gone? Does the House leave secret messages for Piranesi, even as he struggles to record all that he sees there? And why is The Other searching for secrets of immortality and other occultist knowledge?

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Books

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

Evelyn Hardcastle
Cloak & Dagger 2021: Book #6

I really wanted to give this book a 10-rating, to put it in my Top 10 of 2021 list later in December. Unfortunately, while The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was interesting and certainly novel, I just couldn’t fall in love with this book.

The Plot:

Aiden Bishop finds himself trapped at Blackheath Manor, where he has been invited to attend the homecoming party for Evelyn Hardcastle. It should have been a happy occasion. But night after night, Aiden finds his “spirit” transmigrated to the body of a different guest at Blackheath — all on the same day. If Aiden can figure out who wants to kill Evelyn, he can escape this repetitive time-loop. Trouble is, Aiden has “competitors” in this game, and only one victor can escape Blackheath.

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Books Starred Recommendations

Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs

Wild Sign Gifts from Santa
Wild Sign is Book #5 for Cloak & Dagger 2021

Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs was like water after a reading drought! I was half afraid that the series would have lost its charm, but I needn’t have worried. Happy to report that this was an awesome read.

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Books Recommendations

One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus

It’s been a while since I read any contemporary YA, think the last one may have been Thirteen Reasons Why and Some Boys Do. So, I took up Karen M. McManu’s One of Us is Lying with some trepidation. It came highly recommended in last week’s Top 10 Tuesday posts. And it was actually quite good.

Simon’s been running a gossip app in high school, and has made a lot of enemies because most of that gossip is perfectly true. Ouch! Then Simon and 4 other classmates get called to detention over somebody else’s prank, and Simon ends up dead. Who killed Simon, and what secrets had Simon discovered that he needed silencing?

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Miscellany

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Read for the Cloak & Dagger 2021 Challenge: Book 3 & the Historical Fiction 2021 Challenge: Book 5

Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.

The Plot:

Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.

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Books

Behold, Here’s Poison by Georgette Heyer

Behold, Here’s Poison is a good example of how difficult it must have been to investigate back in the 1920s. There were no CCTVs, camera phones, voice recognition, or DNA analysis. Even fingerprinting really just started in 1901. All the police had: post-mortem (never as sophisticated as forensics today), witnesses (mostly unreliable), and criminal psychology (quite dodgy). There’s also a certain disdain towards police among the upper classes, which makes it difficult to make honest inquiries.

That’s why Inspector Hannasyde and his very-chatty Sergeant Hemingway are in a bit of a pickle. Old Mr. Matthews has been poisoned by nicotine overdose, and his entire remaining family is suspect. Then his sister dies, also by nicotine poisoning, and the police none the wiser. The Inspector knows that Randall, the extremely snarky dandy heir to Matthews, is hiding something. But Randall just won’t spill the beans.

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