I've started saving all the creepy covers for Halloween. It's amazing how pretty the whole stack is once the really scary stuff gets removed. (OTOH this year's Halloween Edition of Stacking the Shelves may be a literal nightmare!) The prettiest cover - or at least the most beautiful in the artistic sense - has to be Edmonia. She was a sculptor, so it seems entirely fitting that the cover of even her fictional story would be beautiful. And it is. Although The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2026…

If pretty is as pretty does, most of these covers don't. There's not a lot of pretty here, but I think that's a sign that there's a lot of mystery/suspense in this stack. Although Wisdom Corner looks like the exception to that rule, as it is an adrenaline-fueled story and it does have a beautiful cover. At least as long as the drippy bits are paint and not blood.

You know what? This bunch of covers isn't really pretty at all. That's kind of weird, actually. They're just not. Some are pretty interesting, but not really pretty. Very weird. Also a lot of red. A lot of literally bloody red. OTOH, there are three in this stack I definitely picked up for their titles. Specifically The Dragon Has Some Complaints…

At least a couple of these are pretty.  Specifically, The Debtor's Game, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, and Love Galaxy. Strange Animals is certainly interesting - it also sounds interesting - but not quite pretty. The book I'm most curious about is Murder on the Champs-Élysées, after yesterday's In the Spirit of French Murder. It's kind of a prequel to that whole An American in Paris series, featuring some of the older characters when they were in their prime solving murders. The book I'm most looking forward to is the one I've already started, …

This one is big even for one of my stacks, but it's because there's a pile in the middle of the pile. I decided to read the Perveen Mistry historical mystery series, which means I needed to get them all first - because I'm a terrible completist - and the local library was happy to oblige. Certainly the 700th Stacking the Shelves…