Month: June 2022

Kate’s Review: “The Book of Cold Cases”

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Book: “The Book of Cold Cases” by Simone St. James

Publishing Info: Berkley, March 2022

Where Did I Get This Book: I own it.

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: In 1977, Claire Lake, Oregon, was shaken by the Lady Killer Murders: Two men, seemingly randomly, were murdered with the same gun, with strange notes left behind. Beth Greer was the perfect suspect–a rich, eccentric twenty-three-year-old woman, seen fleeing one of the crimes. But she was acquitted, and she retreated to the isolation of her mansion.

Oregon, 2017. Shea Collins is a receptionist, but by night, she runs a true crime website, the Book of Cold Cases–a passion fueled by the attempted abduction she escaped as a child. When she meets Beth by chance, Shea asks her for an interview. To Shea’s surprise, Beth says yes.

They meet regularly at Beth’s mansion, though Shea is never comfortable there. Items move when she’s not looking, and she could swear she’s seen a girl outside the window. The allure of learning the truth about the case from the smart, charming Beth is too much to resist, but even as they grow closer, Shea senses something isn’t right. Is she making friends with a manipulative murderer, or are there other dangers lurking in the darkness of the Greer house?

A true crime blogger gets more than she bargained for while interviewing the woman acquitted of two cold case slayings in this chilling new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Sun Down Motel.

Review: I am now at the point in my librarian and blogging career that I lose titles that I would normally be super into amongst the books that I want to read. Whether it’s for blog purposes or keeping my RA skills up, I am always looking for books to add to the pile, and then others tend to shuffle through long past their release date. This is what happened with “The Book of Cold Cases” by Simone St. James, and author that I generally like and would normally be putting on my radar earlier than a few months past the release date. Well thank you, Book of the Month Club, because had you not had this book as a selection of that month I probably would have ended up on a hold list and then not gotten to this book until much later. Which would have been a bummer, because “The Book of Cold Cases” combines true crime blogger themes with a 1970s murder case that scandalized a town, as well as a perhaps supernatural presence within the accused murderess’s house. All things that I’m super into.

The story is told through the perspectives of present day Shea, true crime obsessive due to her processing (or not processing) of her own traumatic incident in her past, and past Beth, an accused murderer who was acquitted and who is more than the media and the community sees her as. When Shea meets Beth randomly and asks to interview her for her armchair sleuthing blog, Beth surprises her with a ‘yes’, and then Shea starts to investigate the Lady Killer Murders that Beth seemingly got away with. I liked seeing Shea go on her own investigation and how it is supplemented by the slow reveals of Beth’s past as we see what she was going through during the scrutiny and police investigation/trial back in the 1970s. It’s a device we’ve seen before but St. James does it well. We slowly get more and more information about both women and what their motivations are, and they are both interesting and complex enough that I was invested in finding out what Beth was hiding, and if Shea was going to find herself in trouble as she starts to unravel it all. I found Shea especially fascinating as a character, as while it may have been easy to just paint her as a true crime weirdo, St. James instead brings her own victimization into the formula and makes it less a morbid hobby and more of a coping mechanism (and honestly, I think that for a number of true crime fans there is a bit of anxiety processing and trauma processing that goes into the fascination with the genre). And as for Beth, I liked how St. James picks apart misogyny of the media and society when it comes to the portrayals of women in crime cases like this.

Though there were some things that didn’t really work for me. The problem is, I can’t really talk too much about them here without going into serious spoiler territory. What I will say is that we get a device about half way through the story that made it a bit less interesting for me, as it makes Beth a little less interesting as a whole. And the other issue is that, like other Simone St. James books, there is an element of the supernatural here. I generally like how St. James incorporates ghost stories into her books, and it isn’t that I didn’t like it here, because I did. I think that the problem is that in this story it didn’t really feel like it was needed, and because of that it felt a bit forced into it. It doesn’t make it any less suspenseful, and I still tore through this book over the course of two days. But this time around it may not have been necessary to have that element to it.

At the end of the day, I was supremely entertained by “The Book of Cold Cases”! It’s summer now, and I do think that this would be a great beach or cabin read. It may even send a chill up your spine on a hot summer day.

Rating 7: Though some of the plot choices didn’t hit as hard for me, overall Simone St. James once again puts together a twisted and suspenseful horror-thriller story that I couldn’t put down!

Reader’s Advisory:

“The Book of Cold Cases” is included on the Goodreads lists “2022 Horror Novels Written By Women and Non-Binary Femmes”, and “The Most Anticipated Mysteries and Thrillers of 2022”.

Serena’s Review: “Clockwork Boys”

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Book: “Clockwork Boys” by T. Kingfisher

Publishing Info: Argyll Productions, November 2017

Where Did I Get this Book: from the library!

Where Can You Get this Book: Amazon | IndieBound | WorldCat

Book Description: A paladin, an assassin, a forger, and a scholar ride out of town. It’s not the start of a joke, but rather an espionage mission with deadly serious stakes. T. Kingfisher’s new novel begins the tale of a murderous band of criminals (and a scholar), thrown together in an attempt to unravel the secret of the Clockwork Boys, mechanical soldiers from a neighboring kingdom that promise ruin to the Dowager’s city.

If they succeed, rewards and pardons await, but that requires a long journey through enemy territory, directly into the capital. It also requires them to refrain from killing each other along the way! At turns darkly comic and touching, Clockwork Boys puts together a broken group of people trying to make the most of the rest of their lives as they drive forward on their suicide mission.

Review: Back again with another T. Kingfisher book! What can I say? When I find an author I enjoy, their back catalog is sure to show up for a decent amount of time going forward! I was particularly excited to start this book as not only is it the first in a duology but there appear to be several other books set in the same world. Up to this point, everything I’ve read by Kingfisher has been a stand-alone, so I was excited to see how she handled an ongoing story across two books.

In a classic fantasy version of “Suicide Squad,” a bunch of former criminals are set off on a suicide mission as a last ditch effort by a kingdom on the brink of destruction by mysterious magical forces. Nothing to be lost there, right? Nothing unless you happen to be one of the criminals sent out on said mission. And so we follow the story of a forger, an assassin, a disgraced (kind of possessed?) paladin, and a very sexist scholar. But as this group of oddballs march down certain death, they begin to discover they may have something worth living for after all.

There comes a point when I’ve read enough by an author that I know going in that, sparing some extreme aberration, I’m going to enjoy the book in hand. Mostly this comes down to a style of writing. A strong author is rarely going to put out a bad book when they have such a solid handle on the basics. Excellent characters? Check. Fun and snappy writing? Check. Unique world and magical systems? Check. Kingfisher has it all. All of that to spoil the end of the review and say I really enjoyed this book.

This was the first book from her I’ve read, however, that featured a multi-POV style of writing and a band of characters at the center. Of course, Kingfisher’s characters are one of the strongest things she has going for her as a writer, so I was confident she would handle it well. And indeed she does. It helps that we really only spend time in the head of Slate, the master forger, and Sir Caliban, the somewhat-demon-possessed paladin. They each have distinct arcs that they begin to travel along in this book (presumably to be concluded in the second book). And theirs is the focus of a brewing romance.

I really enjoyed them both, but their banter and interactions together is what really made them jump from the page. Slate’s eyerolling at Caliban’s seemingly uncontrollable chivalry; Caliban’s attempts to reconcile that same chivalry with the reality that a strong woman such as Slate might be more offended than pleased by some of his efforts. It’s also nice that they’re both full adult characters, well into their thirties and with the history and hang-ups that go with that. This isn’t love’s first blush for either of them, and it makes their slow-burn romance all the more appealing.

I also really liked the other characters, though we didn’t spend any time in their heads really. The sexist scholar, the one most would rightly be skeptical of enjoying, was quick to grow on me given the amused scoffing that Slate sends his way at his more ridiculous moments. The Learned Edmund also quickly grows to realize that his opinions don’t hold up outside his cloistered halls of learning. I also really liked the assassin. Can you have a more threatening ex staring down a newly forming relationship than an assassin?

The story itself was also fast-moving and interesting. The clockwork boys only showed up briefly, but it was easy to understand the threat they posed. There is also a mysterious plague that is….plaguing….the country. As well as several other mini adventures that our gang must work through on their journey.

As far as pacing goes, while it was a fast read, it did seem to end abruptly. It’s a shorter book, and ultimately it read almost like the first half of one book that was mysteriously broken into two volumes. I guess I’ll see how the second half works, but I do wonder why this decision was made? Fantasy novels are known to be long, so I can’t imagine the total page length of the two books would have been that bad. And I suspect that the story as a whole would have been better served presented in this way. As it is, while I enjoyed the heck out of this book, it did read like part of a story rather than a complete work on its own. Even books that are part of a series should read as individual pieces on their own, with beginnings, middles, and ends and with themes and completed arcs.

So, that being the case, I already have the second book in hand and will likely jump into that soon. Fans of Kingfisher’s work will likely enjoy this one, but make sure to have easy access to the second book as this one definitely ends in a way that doesn’t feel completely finished.

Rating 8: Fun and feisty, though perhaps a bit incomplete with out the second book attached with it.

Reader’s Advisory:

“Clockwork Boys” can be found on this Goodreads list: Books With ‘Boy’ in the Title