While I’m annoyed/upset/put out that my struggle to read these past few months means that it’s only now, almost half-way through 2025, that I’m hitting my 200 NetGalley ARC review…

My Review: This follow-up to last year’s delightful Murder by Memory is, well, a bit more grounded than that series opener. That grounding being more than a bit ironic, as ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman, along with the HMS Fairweather, the ship that she is one of the detectives both for and on, is three centuries out from Earth, headed for an unknown planet that still seems to be nowhere in sight.

My Review: Some versions of the opening line for the blurb are way, way off. A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple is so far off as to be misleading. (The Becky Chambers version of the blurb is somewhat better.) I’m going to do my damndest to correct that misdirection as Murder By Memory is just a terrific cozy mystery that just so happens to be set on a spaceship.

I was so happy that my request for this ARC was approved by the publisher, as I liked the first novel in the series so much. Unfortunately, as much as 2023 was marked by a reading frenzy, 2024 has see...

My Review: When a mysterious tower appears over the English countryside, huge and dark and literally floating in the clouds, it seems pretty ominous to just about everyone. And that’s definitely EVERYONE, as the thing is filmed and photographed from every angle, 24/7, as it's a fantastic - and possibly also fantastical - news story. But the human attention span is short, so when the tower just floats there portentously but doesn’t actually DO anything, people stop watching.

My Review: It begins as a straight-up police procedural. It just doesn’t end there. Or, quite possibly, at all. At first, things seem fairly ordinary, for select values of ordinary. A man is dead, shot in the middle of his office. It does go pear-shaped from there, but in ways that are also, well, sort of ordinary. Or at least ordinary if the dead man is one of the richest men in the world.

My Review: Kellieth ReinAraneinth is caught between multiple rocks and abundant hard places, as when the story begins they can barely catch their breath. Literally. They may not be human but their breathing and sense of smell are both compromised by on-the-job chemical exposure resulting in a condition that may not quite BE chronic asthma, but is close enough as to make no difference.

Before the cover art had a chance to catch my eye, my brain caught the title, and it was all over from there: a play on one of Dame Christie's most iconic tales? Sold! And so I rushed to request an AR...

My Review: This is a caper story. It says so right there on the label, doesn’t it? And it does not disappoint - even though this isn’t quite the caper that the reader thinks it will be. It’s not even the caper that the crew participating in it think it will be. Which, of course, is part of the caper itself, because they are the ones being conned and defrauded along with pretty much everyone else.

My Review: The first two Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, both began with missing persons cases rather than the corpse that kicks off most mysteries. This third entry ALSO begins with a missing person, but not in the same way - at all. In the earlier books, the missing persons WERE the mystery, where this time the missing person is the person who usually investigates the mystery.

My Review: Lake Michigan is a freshwater lake. There are no bodies of saltwater closer than the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles away. Unless you’re counting the gigantic saltwater tank and the Shedd Aquarium, which Chicago Police Detective Ethan Krol is forced to think about in this puzzle of a case. The double homicide that he’s been called to utterly defies explanation.