Reviews and Comments

Quality writing, but this book piles hopelessness on top of hopelessness.

Finished creating a list of books from Reactor Magazine Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2025. There's some pretty good stuff here, including this book.

On SFBA.club, the list can be found here, and I made sure the books have high-res covers and descriptions. YMMV on other servers. However, a lot of the books hadn't been added anywhere yet, so there's a decent chance the data I entered is copied to servers where accounts follow me.

Another book that I put in Calibre over a decade ago that I'm finally getting to now.

Hatcher & Rogan investigate the killing of a man in a Manhattan penthouse, probably something to do with the tryst that a leftover condom indicates happened. And then they also get the cases of the murder of the roommate of a prostitute and the murder of a different prostitute. Because this is a crime novel, we know all the cases will eventually be connected.

While I found the book better than the second Ellie Hatcher novel, Angel's Tip, 212 falls firmly in the category of average. Nothing is really a surprise here, and nothing is super interesting or particularly bothersome.

The premise is that with some crimes, the best way to catch the original perpetrator is to decant a clone with their memories and tell the clone they have 4 days to find the original or they die. This seems like an odd backdoor method, but after that it's a decent action story. Oh and everyone also is infused with nanites that heal them and "theme" what they see. "Theme" being the term for altering perception to make everything perfect. Despite lots of words focusing on the main character (the clone) being motivated the the original killed their husband (this was the crime) that emotional aspect never really landed for me.

I've already forgotten the name of the protagonist, but the gist is: prominent noble in standard fare fantasy world is jailed for killing his wife. Son doesn't know what happened, but vows to get father out of jail except he's first being sent to the front lines of an unwinnable war. He draws up plans like a Pepe Silvia meme, wins the war in hours, then high-tails it back to the homeland for poorly written Machiavellian political intrigue to get his dad out of jail. Dad is mad at getting out, confesses to killing wife because she nagged, and then father & son are on opposite sides of more political intrigue.

Poor poor execution on a half-assed idea.

Once the story gets past the beginning chapters and gets into the criminal element in New York, Red Bailey being lined up as a murder suspect there, and then on the run in the Sierra Nevada, it's all fun twists and turns and deception upon deception packed into a mere 153 pages.

The entire setup feels flimsy & convoluted to me. I don't understand what's so special about Mumsie McGonigle that he'd let her go or change his life for her or murder for her, but also not so special that when they split up it's no big deal. Or that he'd not take steps to get rid of evidence that she knows about so that associates of hers can blackmail Red Bailey a decade after the split. But hey, women are mysterious and wiley creatures who magically make men do dumb things, am I right?

Been on my TBR since 2013. Clearing it off now.

Lot's of interesting pop psychology on why people fall for scams. There's lots of techniques that scammers can use to prime people for scams. For example, that most people don't want to be the impolite person who asks hard questions especially in front of others.

As for what we can do about it, most of the sections have a technique or two designed to slow down a person's slide into the scam. However, they're all variations on "be vigilant enough to think about X". For example, "ask yourself why an offer is being made to you." The techniques will work best for someone who is already cranky and vigilant like me, and probably less so without training for others. And I really really wish all these techniques were put together in one section at the end, to provide a coherent overall thinking process.

But it's still pretty interesting.

Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous is starting off so damn well! Romance with smart women (even the minor characters are smart). They use their words. They're setting up the stakes as "is minor TikTok influencer willing to blow up her life for famous Hollywood star". Stakes that make me believe in the characters rather than get frustrated by them.