A Darker Shade of Magic (V. E. Schwab)

The story started slow: it wasn't until nearly 1/3 of the way through that the two main characters met and the main problem was engaged. Until then there was a lot of world-building, with parallel London joined by magical doors only a select few can cross. There was also a rather stereotypical Feisty Female character, fun but a bit one-dimensional. By the middle, though, the action, and my interest, picked up, and it was satisfying enough in the end.

Maisie Dobbs (Jacqueline Winspear)

Just after WWI, Maisie Dobbs sets herself up in London as a private detective. She is a terrific character: former downstairs maid, university student, wartime nurse, and now solver of mysteries, someone who cares a lot about people and is stunningly brilliant. In this first story of the series she is drawn into an investigation of a secluded farm called The Retreat where soldiers disfigured in the war can find comfort and acceptance, but her instinct that something is amiss there proves appallingly true. Masie's weapons include a near-telepathic ability to tell what people are feeling and the ability to blend in and play many roles, but mostly she is brave and smart and compassionate. I expect to read more in this series.

A Red Herring Without Mustard (Alan Bradley)

Another delightful English cozy mystery featuring Flavia de Luce, 11-year-old chemist and sleuth. She invites an old Gypsy woman to stay on her family's property, and the woman is savagely attacked, so Flavia digs in to investigate the mystery. Along the way she encounters dead bodies, the enigmatic granddaughter of the injured woman, an eccentric religion, a long-vanished child, and some faux antiques, all weaving together into a satisfying conclusion. Flavia's voice as she narrates her experiences in her off-kilter household and eccentric village is delightful, despite a few unresolved loose ends. [Minor spoiler: When Flavia first meets Porcelain she "couldn't rub two shillings together if my life depended on it," but later hands Flavia a five-pound banknote (a lot of money in post-war England) to pay for her horse's care. Flavia never notices the contradiction, and I kept expecting it to mean something, but it just slid by. Unsatisfying, and not the only such glitch.]

The Fuller Memorandum (Charles Stross)

I'm reading the Laundry Files series out of order, which is a little confusing, but I love them anyway. The mixture of humor, pop culture, computers, science geekery, Lovecraftian horror, James Bond, and soul-deadening bureaucracy really works for me. In this one, we learn a little about Angleton, Bob Howard's very scary boss, and find out why he's even scarier than we thought. Along the way Bob's wife Mo proves her badassery with the demon-killing violin and Bob has to face an army of cultists bent on sacrificing him to the ultimate dark lord, armed with nothing but his knowledge of computational demonology. Great stuff.

An Impartial Witness (Charles Todd)

This second story of the intrepid WWI nurse Bess Crawford is as gentle and as strong as she is. Gentle, not in the sense that nothing bad ever happens, for there are murder and mayhem and life-and-death knife fights, but in the sense that Bess herself is a good soul, struggling to see that right triumphs in a dark world. There is an interesting mystery beginning with the murder of a young woman, where Bess is an impartial witness to some of her last hours. From there, the mystery spirals, taking in additional people and additional crimes. There were a few spots where I was annoyed at how much she pushed other people to accept her view of things because she knew she was right, only to have her view overturned moments later, and now she knows her new view is right. In the end she did wind up solving the mystery, so it all came to a satisfactory conclusion. I enjoyed the feeling of England during this bloody, heart-tearing war and the stoicism of the people determined to keep finding the best in life despite everything.

Case Histories (Kate Atkinson)

This mystery has an unusual structure. It starts by describing three crimes that took place over a 30-year period (a little girl vanishes, an overwhelmed new mother murders her husband, a teen is killed in a random workplace attack). It then jumps to a present-day detective who winds up looking into all three cases, while dealing with the divorce-drinking-angst difficulties that fictional detectives often seem to deal with. I expected that the three cases would wind up linked somehow, but that's not what happens; their only real link is that the detective is investigating them. I enjoyed figuring out what was happening or had happened, and there were some surprising twists and turns along the way, but I can't say that I loved this book. Some of the threads remain too loose for me, and some of the events too coincidental to be convincing. So while the characters and settings were generally well drawn, and the mysteries mysterious, I didn't quite click with this book.

The Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross)

Another Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross. These stories are always a mind-twisting blend of horror (many-tentacled creatures from the murky deeps), police procedure (griping about pencil-neck desk-jockeys who don't know what it's really like out here in the field), and geekery (what else from someone who writes sidekicks named Pinky and Brains?). Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence agency but he's no James Bond. As a computational demonologist, his specialty is understanding how mathematical formulae and computer programs breach the walls between worlds and let those horrors through, forcing the good guys to stop them and clean up the mess according to the proper bureaucratic rules, in triplicate. In this story, Howard starts out attending an international meeting of similar organizations, expecting a boring weekend of conference rooms and PowerPoint, but winds up soul-linked with a demon assassin and dragged to a Caribbean island to stop a megalomaniacal billionaire from stealing a deep-sea artifact that can destroy the world. Of course.  Stross scatters every page with gems that are as smart as they are funny. I have to love an author whose narrator describes the experience of driving a rented Smart Car on the German autobahn "while a jerk is shooting at me from behind with a cannon loaded with Porches and Mercedes."

Elfland (Freda Warrington)

There is a magical Otherworld called the Spiral, inhabited by beings known as Aetherials. There is a Gateway that allows these beings to visit modern-day Earth and even to live here, undetected, for generations, raising their Aetherial children. Rosie is one of these Aetherial children, born here to Aetherial parents who love Earth and have set up lives here. Every seven years there is a ceremony in which the great Gateway is thrown wide and all the Aetherials who live on Earth go into the Otherworld to recoonect with their magical roots--only something is wrong, and the stony, unlikable Gatemaster refuses to open the Gateway, claiming that there is a danger on the other side and he must protect everyone. Cut off from their source, Aetherials begin to fade. As Rosie grows up she faces the usual angst and issues of young people, amplified by the internal turmoil of the Aetherial community over whether the Gatemaster's decision is justified or not. As rebellion brews, Rosie is torn over her relationships with various others: the Aetherial boy she is hopelessly in love with who doesn't acknowledge her, his brother who is impulsive and scary, her brother's human friend who adores Rosie, her brother's human wife who hides a frightening secret, and another brother who is not what they think him to be. If this all sounds like a soap opera, that's my only complaint about the book. I love the magical worlds and the sense of mystery and power they build. I didn't love the whole I'm-in-love-and-there's-nothing-I-can-do-about-it mythos; that's a view of life I find misleading and dull. Why is everyone so helpless in the face of their impulses? But overall I can recommend the story; I was caught up in what will happen next and how everything is going to be resolved.

The Girl With All the Gifts (M. R. Carey)

If I'm not careful, I'll develop a theme of reading zombie stories where the protagonist is a good zombie, bent on protecting the humans from the bad zombies. That was the theme in Raising Stony Mayhall (Daryl Gregory), and it's the theme here. It has all the usual zombie tropes (relentless, mindless creatures hunting human flesh, humans huddling in enclaves, fleeing across a world of decay and ruin) even though it never actually uses the word zombie. The main character is a child who, despite being infected with the zombie parasite, still has a mind and a strong sense of morality. How can she live with the humans who increasingly learn to care about her? How can she learn to live with herself? Is there any future for humanity, and what could that look like? This book doesn't have the depth of Stony, but it was engaging, thrilling, and moving. I completely enjoyed it.

The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)

This story was all the rage when it was released, in serial form, back in 1859, and it's easy to see why. Sometimes described as the first mystery novel, there is a lot of mystery here, with mistaken identities, secret assignations, brooding mansions on bleak hills, dastardly villains, and impossible love. A drawing instructor falls in love with one of his pupils, who is engaged to another man, though a mysterious woman in white warns that the marriage will come to a bad end. The plot has enough twists and turns for anyone's taste, and most of the characters are fascinating, larger-than-life individuals, both good and bad. From our modern perspective, though, the central love interest is a nobody: she is lovely, and plays the piano well, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be anyone there. We much preferred her mannish, resourceful sister, and wish he had fallen in love with her instead. Still, this old book holds up well, and I can recommend it.

The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross)

Stross writes intelligent, funny, surprising science fiction, and his Laundry series is all of the above. This recent example lives up to the others. Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence service, defending Queen, country, and universe against many-tentacled horrors from beyond the veil, through diligent application of the principles of government bureaucracies everywhere: paperwork, committee meetings, organizational hierarchies, and very bad coffee. The current crisis begins with a group of math whizzes working on algorithms that will allow their investment bank to anticipate market trends more effectively than their competition, and unwittingly trigger an outbreak of V-syndrome (you know, the one where you burst into flame in direct sunlight, develop a craving for human blood, are stronger than normal humans, and can exercise control over other people's minds). What is behind this new nest? Is there an enemy planted within the Laundry itself? And what does Bob's malevolent, unstable ex have to do with things? It's a fun ride from start to finish.

The Rook (Daniel O'Malley)

The tag line reads, "On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service," which is a pretty good indication as to the subject of the book. There's a super-secret organization in England (with counterparts in a few anglo-centric areas of the world) dedicated to using people with supernatural powers to fight problems generated by other entities with supernatural powers. The special conceit of this story is that it centers on one member of the organization, the Rook of the title (most of the organizational structure is inspired by chess, for unclear reasons) who starts the story by coming to standing in the rain surrounded by unconscious bodies, and she has no memory of her past self whatsoever. She finds a set of extremely chatty letters left for her by her former self and uses them to orient herself, identify the enemy who took her memory, and pretty much generally save the day. The story is fun enough, and I was never really tempted to abandon it, but belief just wouldn't suspend very well. The superpowers were an inexplicable mishmosh - this one can shape any metal with his fingers like putty, that one seems compelled to twist his otherwise-human body into pretzel shapes, this one oozes various toxic chemicals at will from his pores - they seemed arbitrary and nonsensical. I also had trouble with a really super-secret organization having such poor security, so that someone with no memory and just a few poorly-organized notes to go on could fake her way in without anyone suspecting she was a mole. Too may things seemed to happen just for the plot. To take an example from early in the story, no-memory girl is offered a choice by her former self: open one safe-deposit box at the bank and learn what she needs to know to function in the life she's stepped into, or open a different one and get everything she needs to start a new life elsewhere in the world. It apparently never occurs to her that she could open both before deciding. As I said, pleasant enough, but not much "there" there.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachel Joyce)

This is a charming, gentle, life-affirming book, though there is a lot of dark material there.  Harold and Maureen are living in a cold, empty marriage in a cold, empty house, when Harold gets a letter saying that an old friend is facing death on the other side of England, and it shakes him. He heads out to mail her a letter of sympathy, but simply keeps walking, heading north to be with her in her last days. His walk takes on mythic dimensions, and helps him and Maureen work separately on the issues that keep them apart. The big reveal toward the end is not actually much of a surprise, but it all fits together. I found it moving and engaging, and felt that I got to know the characters well.

The Kindred of Darkness (Barbara Hambly)

I love how Hambly writes: the lush, sensuous language, the strong sense of place and character, the intensity of emotion. I have enjoyed all the stories in this vampire series, though non as much as the first one, Those Who Hunt the Night. This story fits well into the series and is better, in my mind, than the last one. Here it gets personal, when Lydia and Jamie's daughter is kidnapped by the vampire master of London to force their cooperation in his battle with an interloper. Lydia and Jamie are, of course, nearly superhuman in their determination and cleverness, and so is tiny Miranda, but others are a too-human mix of good and evil, anchored firmly in a world you can touch and smell. Highly recommended for action and adventure.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman)

The main events in this very small novel involve a seven-year-old boy, but this is not a children's book. As a child, the narrator became involved in increasingly bizarre and dangerous supernatural events, centering on the inhabitants of a neighboring farm. It is framed in a flashback from the man's middle age, but even the framing story has a surprise. The tale is magical, literally and literarily, and captured my spirit and my imagination. This is not a weighty book; it floats. I loved it.

Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)

I enjoyed this rather odd story, but left it unsatisfied. Ursula Todd is born on a snowy morning in 1910, but dies in childbirth. She is born, and is saved by her doctor, but falls from the roof when she tries to rescue a doll that was tossed out the window. She drowns at the seashore; she is rescued by a stranger. Over and over again, she lives, and dies. It is fascinating to see the events in the world, and in her life, from so many different perspectives, and all the settings and people are beautifully drawn.. Eventually she begins to remember her past lives, and starts trying to manipulate what happens. I really enjoyed it all, but at the end it didn't seem to have gone anywhere. She set herself a specific goal, and I can't even tell whether she accomplished it or not. Aside from this letdown at the end, it is a good story.

The Forgotten Garden (Kate Morton)

This story sprawls over more than 100 years to unravel the mystery of a 4-year-old girl found abandoned on the docks in Australia in 1913. She could tell no one her name or how she came to be there, and nobody ever came to claim her; all she had was a small suitcase with some clothes and a book of fairy tales. A local family took her in, but she spent most of her life trying to discover her past. The mystery was passed down to her granddaughter, who was finally able to uncover the whole story. It was engrossing, moving, horrifying and touching, all at once. I very much enjoyed it.

The House at Riverton (Kate Morton)

A sprawling and complex story, mostly told in flashbacks, of a woman's life starting from when she started as a maidservant at a manor house in England in 1914 until her death in 1999. The house is full of interesting people, from the lord of the manor to the lowly scullery maid, and is even more full of secrets. Her mother served there until she got pregnant, and is remembered fondly by the staff and the mistress, so she is able to secure the position for her daughter, who progresses through the ranks to upstairs maid and finally ladies maid, before leaving service all together. We know from the first that there were momentous events, tragedies, at the house during her time there, but we don't actually find out what happened until the very end. A few of the secrets are rather obvious, but mostly I was kept guessing and turning pages rapidly wanting to find out what's next. I especially liked its view of the changes in the English view of class and standing.  The settings and the people were beautifully drawn, and it was interesting to see her life from the inside as she grew from a timid 14-year-old to an elderly woman facing death.

The Baker Street Letters (Michael Robertson)

This mystery has a charming premise - that anyone who has a lease at 221B Baker Street in London is required by the lease agreement to receive and respond to letters people send there addressed to Sherlock Holmes. This story is about a young lawyer who has taken such a lease. His brother, a rather flighty ne'er-do-well, is in charge of answering these letters, and he discovers one that makes him concerned. The brother winds up traveling to the US to follow up, leaving behind a murder victim, and the lawyer and his actress girl friend follow him in an attempt to clear him of murder charges. There are other murders, a young woman with a missing father and a large dog, a subway being built under LA where explosions are happening, and it all is tied to that original letter to Holmes. There is a lot here that's charming, but it didn't work for me. I'm not one of those who prides myself on figuring out the mystery before the reveal - I'd rather just enjoy the ride - but several times I got there ahead of the author. The story was slight and the occasional inconsistencies annoyed me (like the English cell phone that doesn't work in the US, except when it does). I don't plan to read the rest of the series.

Lost (Michael Robotham)

This exciting mystery-thriller opens with a police detective pulled from the Thames with a bullet hole in his leg. He spends 8 days in a coma and wakes up with no memory of the days before his injury. The rest of the story outlines his fight to remember what happened, starting only from his belief that it has something to do with the kidnapping and apparent murder of a 9-year-old girl three years before. I liked the main character, a flawed but determined fighter for lost children, and the supporting characters were also interesting and well drawn. The action, with its many twists, held me, and I liked the dimension of his amnesia (as someone with an interest in memory, it felt real to me). I'll read more by this author.