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While attending a tea party in Great Diddling, author Berit Gardner witnesses the murder of Reginald Trent in the manor of his aunt, Daphne Trent. Reginald Trent is pretty universally disliked in the village of Great Diddling. Everyone there dislikes him. Berit Gardner, wanting to avoid writing her next book, investigates instead. Meanwhile the townsfolk, lead by tourist board chair, decide to take advantage of their sudden notoriety by holding a books & murders literary festival on short notice. At the center of the crime is who controls the books of Tawny Hall, Daphne Trent's massive collection.

It's a cozy mystery. It's a bit of a police procedural. It's an homage to readers, though there precious little of the point of view of readers. All the town's characters have backstories. My main nitpick is the ultimate solution to the mystery of the murder follows a pretty standard pattern, so whodunnit won't be a surprise after a while. But the journey there is pretty entertaining.

The audiobook narrator, Helen Lloyd, does a great job in the audio version.

I often say that my favorite books are ones which provide a new way of thinking about things. An insightful explanation or an inspiring model, perhaps. This volume doesn't quite get there, but it is very very close. It's clean and tight and does exactly what it says on the tin. While my favorite pieces of non-fiction are lenses which bring things I've always been able to see into clearer focus, this is more like a well-tuned bell which rings true and clear.

We are treated to a roundup of pre-neoliberal philosophy, the development of neoliberal thought, its ascent into US politics, rise to major bipartisan force, and then stumbling in the 21st century. There's nothing to criticize here. We engage effectively with other schools of thought and other global regimes like Soviet communism and European social democracy. Neoliberalism is positioned relative to these other forces and philosophies. It's described in terms of its causes & effects, and I think I came away with a clear picture.

Great work. Going right back on the end of the reading list. I recommend this book to you, and to future me.

This is the first book in a new James SA Corey series, and I enjoyed it a bunch.

High stakes academia gets interrupted by alien invasion; their research then becomes even more high stakes while having to navigate trauma and powerful alien political currents. A pithy but unhelpful summary is that this book is about systems thinking vs the just-world fallacy.

The aliens are interesting in several fresh ways; one in particular is that they largely don't give a shit, emotionally speaking. They aren't angry or greedy or vengeful, which gives a much different flavor to an alien invasion. A lot of enjoyment in any book where humans encounter aliens is also about their relations and the slow reveal of who and what the aliens are, and so I'll hold back some more spoiler-y opinions.

(One side note about this book is just how straight it felt. Maybe I just read too much queer fiction on the regular, but this [like other books by these authors] felt subjectively in the vein of "old school heterosexual science fiction" that I might have read when I was younger. Not everything has to be everything, but it was just something that stood out to me.)

3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too

This is kind of a weird review because I feel like it was a different book than what I expected.

What it ended up being was a history of how femininity was socially constructed, in the context of social class, in Britain over the last few hundred years, and how the construction of modern femininity (as distinct from medieval femininity) was very closely intertwined with the construction of social classes as the middle class emerged. It did this largely through the lens of embroidery. It felt surprisingly modern in how it talked about gender as something changing and socially constructed and existing in the context of other socially constructed concepts, but it did feel very narrowly focused on Britain and Britain-adjacent areas.

Except for at the end in the more modern area, I don't think it really demonstrated embroidery being subversive. Embroidery was used to enforce norms of femininity. At the same time, women rejecting embroidery, in the context of the various feminist movements, often reinforced the idea that things associated with women were inherently inferior. It did talk about how people related to embroidery in different ways and how people could make a world of mandatory embroidery/mandatory femininity more tolerable and find some agency within it, about how embroidery could both trap women and offer them freedom, but it felt rather incongruous with its title. I feel like the book described the situation honestly and accurately, but if you were hoping for more subversion, there isn't a lot in this book.

Relentless Melt starts off with young Artie Quick attending their first investigation class at a night school for young men run by the Y.M.C.A. The teacher, an older policeman, observes that Artie appears to be a young woman wearing a young man's suit, making them ineligible for the class. Nevertheless, he seems inclined to keep Artie's secret.

Artie is taking the class to, as they later figure out, make sense of why their brother Zeb has abandoned the family for a life of crime. But at the outset Artie thinks they're intrigued by solving crimes. And so Artie and their best friend Theodore, a young adult with family money but living on his own, decide to practice solving crimes by investigating a scream heard in a local park late at night.

The book is a little bit coming of age, a little bit amateur sleuths solving a mystery, and a little bit of magical fantasy. When Artie's investigations instructor suddenly cancels class, Theodore convinces Artie to join him at his school where he's learning a bit of being a magician. Theodore's one spell he's working on allows him to quietly sneak quietly by casting a sphere spell around his feet.

You'll notice I use the they pronoun here. A lot of what makes this good is Artie feeling how their sense of self changes when they're wearing a men's suit. Neither Artie nor Theodore quite knows what to do with themselves, Theodore's attraction to Artie, and Artie's feelings of ambiguity to Theodore.

The character study is intertwined with a lovely mystery. The scream they heard leads them to a criminal enterprise that is abducting young women, including the daughter of Artie's teacher. The sleuthing led to something I was not expecting in the least, and yet it made for a great story.