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This is the fourth of the Lady Darcy books I’ve read, and I’ll be nabbing the fifth once the quite long library wait list wends its way to me. It’s interesting to have read this one after my run with the Lady’s Guide books. Superficially they’re similar: an aristocratic widow, fresh off an unhappy marriage, turns to solving mysteries with the help of a handsome, mysterious detective turned love interest. But while the Lady’s Guide books are lively, frivolous, and entirely earn their title of “cozy”, Lady Darcy’s stories have a sharper, darker edge… from the backstory (while both have my sympathies, the former husband thoughtless and careless enough to die in his lover’s bed sets a different tone than the former husband who threatened to break his wife’s fingers so she will never paint again) to the crimes and the way they’re presented, to the ladies themselves. I enjoyed chewing through the Lady’s Guide books and they were a lot of fun, but Lady Darcy’s fierce intensity and cool, steel-coiled spine will forever win me over.

At any rate, I’m at an impasse with both right now because library waitlists, but “English Regency/Victorian murder mystery” is definitely a genre I’ve fallen hard for.

Ren has been many things in her short life: a fortuneteller’s daughter. An orphan. A liar. A lady’s maid. A thief. A traitor. A murderess. The thing she doesn’t intend to be any longer? Poor. With her sister Tess, she’s come back to her home city with one goal in mind: to lie, betray, and steal her way into a fortune no one can take away.

But a good con needs more than an audacious lie. A good con doesn’t start caring for her victims and fighting their battles. A good con doesn’t get distracted by quests for justice. A good con uses stacks her mother’s cards; she doesn’t read the fate of the city in them, and set out to do something about it.

Ren is an unparalleled liar. But as a con, she may not be good enough….

I’m not sure words can express how much I adored this book — in part because I’m pretty sure a lot of why I adored it went beyond words. It hit me right in all my soft spots: skilled but unobtrusive worldbuilding, a heist story that dodged right in that sweet spot between “too unrealistic” and “too cruel”, and most of all a cast of characters I fell for hook, line, and sinker. Throw in stylish swordfights, an outrageously clever con artist, and a Robin Hood style vigilante, and y’all. It’s just TOO MUCH GOODNESS.

I am so far restraining myself from going straight out and buying the sequel — mostly because I know the third book won’t be out until fall, so I have to, you know. Nurse things along. Suffice to say if you grew up loving Robin Hood* and Zorro and the Three Musketeers but kind of wished they had better women characters and a plot as tight as a heist film… this is your book.

*The Errol Flynn version, obviously. Sir Walter Scott and Disney versions also acceptable. No other Robin Hoods exist.

Full review probably tomorrow, but dang, this one really hooked me. Trying to convince myself that a person with a 100+ TBR pile who's already discovered she cannot really read during the workweek does not need to run right out and grab the next book but AUGH I want to...

I enjoy all the Nero Wolfe books, they are like candy, but I did find this one notable because Wolfe was legitimately befuddled for most of the story. A lot of the time Stout cheats a bit by keeping important clues from Archie (the narrator) but that didn’t really get pulled this time, apart from a fiddly bit about alibis. Very solid mystery and as usual filled with snark and dry wit (and some misogyny, but eh, written in the fifties.)

Rosemary and Aaron Harker are Huntsmen. A knock on the door in the winter of 1913, a summons to some unusual, uncomfortable death? That's normal. The uncanny and the human don't often mix, but when they do, it ends badly for the human.

But this hunt isn't going right. The uncanny beast killing folk in a little New England town doesn't match anything the brother and sister have ever fought or heard of. The locals think they're union agitators, the police want them out of town, and Rosemary and Aaron might be facing, not the uncanny they're trained for, but the thing that did in their own Huntsmen parents.

Magic.

-- I am a long-time Laura Anne Gilman fan and this delivers: a fun (if prickly) set of protagonists, an intriguing historic mystery, and just the right touch with the paranormal that binds it to the story without rendering it mundane. The time period isn't one I've read a lot about but Gilman does an excellent job rendering small details and large about the US before the First World War, just on the cusp of what we think of as modernity. That interacts really well with the tension in the story itself -- the Harkers are in many ways people of their times and concerned with normal people questions (like "why can't women bloody well wear trousers"), but they have fae blood and concerns outside the ken -- and for that matter, the desire to ken -- of their peers, concerns that date back to an older and wilder time that we never actually left behind.

Also: there is a dog, and I love him.

A really lovely, fun read for a dreary and rainy start to the new year.