I finished The Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison. You know that burning question you’ve always had–“What if Sherlock Holmes had wings?”–but never had an answer to? Well, now you do: it’s this book.
If it were only a new set of Holmian mysteries, only with vampires and angels and werewolves and the like, I’d have enjoyed it pretty well. As it was, in places it was a straight-up retelling of the old Holmes mysteries. The plots–and, crucially, solutions to the mysteries–were so similar that I kept asking myself whether this book really needed to be written.
Addison is a great writer, and I really enjoyed The Goblin Emperor. This one was a little disappointing, but other folks may love it more than I did.
Then I started a new Wild Cards novel, Deuces Down. This is a series of suphero anthologies with a bunch of different contributors who I think are real-life friends doing this project as a lark/hustle thing. Daniel Abraham is a superlative author (half of the Expanse Series James SA Corey pseudonym), and I’ve enjoyed previous entries in this series. But the main author in this one writes in mindnumbing detail about baseball games, calling every pitch and out and error and ball and Christ almighty who cares, and the only saving grace of these passages is that they’re not passages where a boss is sexually harassing an employee and he’s the good guy who we’re supposed to be rooting for. Where it’s not tedious, it’s actively ugly. Not gonna finish this one.
I’ve started Jane Unlimited, at my 12yo daughter’s recommendation. It’s very good, and I have no idea where it’s going.