The Mimicking of Known Successes (Older)

The Mimicking of Known Successes
by Malka Older (2023)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book that I learned about at the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls back in October. Someone mentioned it at a panel and I made a note of it. (Actually, I may have reserved it from the library while the panel was still going on.)

It was mentioned as a Sherlock Holmes type book and it reads like one, but it isn't because Older creates her own characters, which is appreciated. I don't mind modern takes on Holmes and Watson but writers, or perhaps producers in the case of television, want to do Holmes as best they can but at the same time changing everything about the characters, their relationships, their environment and surroundings. In this case, the characters are both women and the sapphic love story and mystery are set in space. (I believe the proper term is just "sapphic mystery", but I'm not sure if my usage is correct or not.)

In the future, Earth isn't inhabited or inhabitable but researchers orbiting Jupiter are working on that. There are man-made rings (former satellites and other junk?) circling the planet. I was exactly sure how these rings were oriented at first because we are given a location that is a longitudial (degree and minute) designation, so I thought that the rings ran pole to pole with rail lines connecting them. Then I realized that they are likely concentric equitorial rings and some must be further out. It is possible that the multiple rings run parallel to each other but which connections at certain locations. (Curiously, some platforms are degrees and minutes but others have actual names.)

Most of humanity lives clustered around one side of Jupiter with no one on the other side. There are trains that run the rails that circle the planet but they over travel to the farthest stations, along several lines. The stations are huge platforms and seem to be connected to towns and cities in stable orbit around the gas giant. Note that these platforms are open to the atmosphere because of the psychological problems of living enlcosed in spaceships. This means people have to wear special atmo-scarfs, for example, when outdoors. It also means that someone can go to the farther stop on the line and either jump to their death from the edge of the platform or be pushed.

The prologue details Investigator Mossa traveling to the end of the rail line to investigate a missing person. It's a small community there where strangers would be noticed coming and then disappearing before the next train arrives. It's assumed to be a suicide but Mossa isn't entirely sure. And if it was, why pick this spot? After questioning the people, she decides to the academic Pleiti, her college ex-girlfriend.

The narrative shifts here, and I had to go back. While the prologue was third person, Mossa was the POV characters. Now, Pleiti becomes the narrator and the POV character. It was confusing when I read it and even a little when I first listened to it, but then I rolled with it.

More of the world is explored. We learned more about Earth and what academics are doing to restore the Earth. We find out more about the man who disappeared and his associates. There's a tiger attack (a big cat, I forget which kind) which hurts Mossa and Pleiti needs to take care of her. And you wonder if the two are getting back together again.

Not much more I can say without spoilers. I know this page is for notes for me, not as a review to others who find the page, but I think the above will refresh my memory. Mostly.

It was an enjoyable read, and I look forward to getting the second book sometime after I catch up with other books in the TBR pile and the book club selections.

This was an ebook and I listened to the audio after I'd started reading (if I recall correctly). I don't think I finished the audio as I finished the ebook first.

If you stumbled across my page via the Internet, please check out my short book series, Burke Lore Briefs.

A Terrible Fall of Angels (Hamilton)

A Terrible Fall of Angels
by Laurell K. Hamilton (2009)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book club pick. It received mixed reviews. I listened to it while walking, and then read the ebook when I was done with the previous one. This made the reading go a little faster. Reading it did clear up one point, a little.

I've previously read a single book in Hamiltion's Anita Blake series, which may or may not be in this blog. (There was a several year gap when I didn't maintain this page.) But I was game to start a new series.

The book started strong and introduced a lot of elements. Then it dropped the ball on most of them. I slogged through the middle to get to the end. If this book had been a ten-episode Netflix series, the beginning would've been two episodes, the ending would've been two episodes and the six episodes in between would've been a lot of world-building and filler.

Don't get me wrong: I liked the world-building, but it seem like much of it was presented for future use. Likewise, many of the characters we're introduced to in the beginning just fade into the background. Others we just wished had do soon. (In particular, no one in the book club liked his estranged wife. While we all appreciated the break in the action to have couples' counseling, the wife didn't come off as a likeable character after that.) Another problem with the worldbuilding (as pointed out but a book club member) is that she retconned the rules in the same book. She didn't wait until, say, book three or four to change the rules.

Personally, I thought it got a bit repetitive, sometimes repeating information within the same chapter. A couple of those chapters, with side characters out of nowhere, just dragged on too long.

One thing, I won't forget that the main character's name is Havelock, because I was reading the Expanse book where a different Det. Havelock made an appearance. (He's in books 1 and 4 of the Expanse, and that's as far as I've gotten there.) I wouldn't say the other characters aren't important enough to list, but I've fallen behind in posting these mini-reviews (it's September, but I'm backdating it to the month I read it in for my own personal records), and if I really needed to know, I'm sure I can find it on that wiki -- you know the one.

Would I read another one? Maybe, but I would hope it's a little tighter than this one was.

T is for Trespass (Grafton)

T is for Trespass
by Sue Grafton (2007)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

I freely admit that I'm backdating this review to June 30 because I read it last month, and I want it in my tally for the first six months of the year.

Back to this series for the first time in a while. It was so long that I checked out the wrong book first. I listened to the prologue and thought, I'd heard this before.

I listened for a bit and then I picked up the ebook and caught up to where I had listened to. I take walks, and I sometimes listen to books on tape during the walks, but I got to the point where I shot ahead with the text, so I abandoned the audiobook.

This was an interesting book because it has a lot of "pays the bills" work going on while there is a problem brewing right under Kinsey's nose. By the time she realizes it, it might be too late.

Kinsey's neighbor Gus takes a fall and winds up in the hospital. He needs home care. Kinsey finds a niece in New York who comes out to make arrangements. Kinsey's does an overview background check (nothing deep) and gives Solana Rojas a pass. The problem is that Solana Rojas is a fake who has assumed the identity of the real Solana Rojas who is also a nurse, but one with better qualifications, and who earns better pay because of it.

I was a little confused at first, because I thought that they were both named Solana Rojas before the identity assumption happened, but that was just an editorial way to not divulge her real name then. It also seems that there was another case where she scammed an elderly client, but it seems like she had had an assumed identity then as well, so Solana wasn't the first time she'd decided to do this. Maybe I heard it and read it wrong.

The other patient was mentioned early on, but later becomes a little "deus ex machina" for the story. Every time Kinsey thinks of something, Solana has outmaneuvered her. But then luck comes in the form of the former client's granddaughter (or daughter? I don't remember), seeing Solana at the mall. She pursues her and starts to investigate herself. After that, she runs into Kinsey and offers to help, which is vital to rescuing Gus.

One other thing that does happen: Solana Rojas gets a restraining order against Kinsey, but at no time does it come up that it isn't valid because she's not Solana Rojas. Granted, I don't know the law, and if that would invalidate a restraining order of one party against a second party.

Of the minor cases she's working to pay the bills, one is a couple that needs to be evicted for non-payment. Kinsey is supposed to do a walkthrough for the security deposit. The couple bails, destroying the apartment along the way. It will turn out that Solana Rojas lives in this complex later one.

And then there's a car accident where Kinsey is trying to locate a witness who could corroborate one driver's testimony. The car accident was definitely a setup with a car speeding up and crashing into another that pulled out in front of it. What was never mentioned was that Kinsey pulled a similar stunt in an earlier book, but not for the same reasons, and not with the same results. Again, a little bit of luck broke the case with the insurance fraud, but the kindly old gentleman turned out to not be a kind person after all.

I enjoyed this one because we get a sense of what else Kinsey does between books. And because this was another mystery that she investigated and solved that she wasn't getting paid for. If there was a downside, it was that she didn't contact Det. Nolan (or the police) because of her past relationship. She didn't want to go running to her ex-boyfriend, even though she should have. She knows this, because she mentions it in the text, basically hanging a lampshade on the mistake she made.

I have other things to read before I get to U. (As of this writing, I listened to the opening chapter, and that was about it before the audiobook went back to the library.)

The Crime Beat (Fuller)

The Crime Beat, Episode 1: New York, by A. C. Fuller (2019)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This popped up as a free ebook in a mailing list where most of the free ones look like some sort of paranormal or magic teen/young adult romance. Nothing wrong with that, but I've read a few of those and I have so many other things to read before I download another. Crime Beat at least sounded like it'd be different.

It was. First impressions, these were guesses based on the title and the blurb. The words "Episode 1" make it sound like it's a pilot for a TV show, and at times reads like that. In fact, I could see this as an episode of a network TV show (not basic cable or streaming). Second, the part that says "New York", as if later books will take place in other cities. Considering that one of the two parties involved -- note that the top of the page in the ebook says "A Cole-Warren Mystery" -- is a NYPD cop who's been sidelined, with pay, because of an investigation into striking a suspect. (He slammed the suspect's face into the metal grate that separates the front of the cop car from the back.) Obviously, if the action is going to move to other cities, he's not going to be reinstated any time soon, if at all.

At 192 pages, it was a short read, and it was also a quick read. This was literally 2 or 2 1/2 days for me, while I was also reading other stuff on the side. It's not that it was riveting and I couldn't put it down, but I sped through it and it kept my attention until I dropped the iPad when I was falling asleep.

The story is straight-forward for a police procedural or an investigative reporter, and this has both of those, except that the cop has to sneak around because he can't be connected to anything without possibly tainting the case. Not a lot of twists and turns. Just enough info is given about the characters to make them interesting, and that info is used later on in other ways.

The story opens with an old guy, old enough that Roger Marris autographed a baseball bat for him in 1961, while the story takes place in 2018, is a professional hit man. He kills a billionaire in front of the Met in NYC. Jane Cole, reporter for the New York Sun investigates. Cops don't like her because she's the reporter who ran the story about the brutal cop. Said cop meets Cole at the crime scene. They wind up involved in this together to find the guy that did it. Again, straightforward after that, but it's par of a bigger story.

This next paragraph is a SPOILER: so I knew in advance, just from the setup that the cop was going to get bounced over the allegation, even if a retraction was printed in the paper. He was going to be sacrificed to placate the mob calling for justice. This much made sense, but then there was the twist: the brass would likely say, "See, look, there are brutal black cops as well as white cops." NOPE! I don't buy that. First off, I wouldn't think that the brass would ever concede to brutal cops, even if there are a few bad apples, but the race thing screws it all up. The "mobs" in NYC would probably be more outraged that a black officer is thrown off the force while white officers remain. Moreover, and maybe I'm being cynical, but I believe that the groundswell against the cops would be lessened by the fact that it was a black cop using force against (I'm inferring, if this wasn't outright stated) a white criminal.

Checking online I see that it will be nine stories (novellas) altogether, each telling a piece of the story. The nine part was failry obvious from the mention of 9 weapons a number of times in the story. Honestly, I was surprised one of the two didn't jump to that conclusion earlier, even if they were primarily concerned with this murder.

Will I read more? I wouldn't say no. Will I buy any? Probably not. I'll check the library at some point. I have a lot of stuff to read. (A quick check of two libraries shows no results. Oh, well.)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

I wouldn't label this as a "reread" even though I read parts of it before. Back in high school, when I wasn't much of a reader, I thought a book of short stories would be a good choice. And what could be a better choice than Sherlock Holmes? I didn't read many of the stories, and the only one I remember anything about is "The Adventure of the Speckled Band". So that one is a reread, but the book itself is not.

I revisited this book several times over the past few months, reading inbetween other books.

First is "A Scandal in Bohemia" which finds Dr. Watson visiting his old friend Sherlock Holmes, who still resides at 221B Baker Street. It is the 20th of March, 1888. A man, who claims to be a Bohemian nobleman, wishes to hire Holmes, and it turns out that he is secretly Wilhem Gottsreich Sigicmond von Ormsein, Grand Duke of Cassle-Felsten and hereditary King of Bohemia. He's traveling incognito because of a delicate matter. He is being blackmailed over a photograph of him and a woman, Irene Adler, whom he had a liaison with. Holmes is on the case, but it takes an unusual twist.

Comments: The opening of the story reuniting the pair goes on for several pages. I was glad that I had a dictionary available at a touch of a word -- my high school English teacher, Mr. G., would have been proud that I looked up the words I didn't know. Most of these had to do with the different types of carriages or the clothing that they wore. I should go back and make notes of these for my writing.

Adventure II is "The Red-Headed League". A red-headed man, Jabez Wilson, who is a pawnbroker, comes to Holmes with a case. He respoded to an advertisement for the Red-Headed League, which was formed at the behest a woman's estate, to hire redheaded men. Wilson spends a few hours per day transcribing the Encyclopedia Britanica. But, of course, there's more to this.

Adventure III is "A Case of Identity", which starts with callbacks to earlier cases, such as A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and even, "A Scandal in Bohemia" for this very book. Then Miss Mary Sutherland comes in asking Holmes to help locate Mr. Hosmer Angel, who got into a stagecoach on the way to the wedding chapel and vanished. Holmes told her that he isn't likely to be found because he concludes that the man doesn't exist. He then unravels his identity.

I'll be briefer because I let some time pass been updates and I've already started to forget some of the details I might have noted.

Adventure IV is "The Boscombe Valley Mystery". Holmes becomes involved when a man is killed and his son is charged. Thanks to Holmes, the son is released because of the presence of a third man.

Adventure V is "The Five Orange Pips", which takes place in November 1891, less than 30 years after the end of the American Civil War. It involves a man who moved to the U.S. but who returned who dies shortly after getting a letter with five orange pips in it. The letter is inscribed K.K.K. Yes, that one. Holmes investigates the best he can and hopes for as good an outcome as can be expected.

Adventure VI is "The Man with the Twisted Lip", which involves the disappearance, and possible death, of a man at an opium den. He was seen their when his wife followed him into town. It had an interesting beginning in that Watson is at Holmes when a woman calls upon him to say that her husband was missing, except that she knew where he was. Watson goes to the den and finds the man and convinces him to go home. (He also convinces him that he has been there two days longer than he thinks he's been there.) While there, a man gets Watson's attention. It turns out to be Holmes in disguise, investigating a beggar who rents a room above the den.

Adventure VII is "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle". The object in the title is a gem which has recently been stolen. It comes into Holmes possession inside a Christmas goose, which along with a worn top hat, was left behind as an attempted mugging. Holmes investigates to find how the gem came to be in the goose before a likely innocent man is sentenced for it.

Adventure VIII is "The Adventure of the Speckled Band". This is one of the stories I remember reading when I took this book out of the library in high school. I probably picked it out becuase it was one of the shortest stories, but I remembered it because of the twist. And also because I wondered why anyone would call out, of all things, "the speckled band". I guess that's a 19th century British thing.

Adventure IX is "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb". Dr. Watson attends to Victor Hatherley, who had his thumb cut off. He is an engineer who hasn't gotten a lot of business who gets an extremely handsome offer to repair a machine that (he was told) compresses Earth. Everything is done in secret. He recounts the tale to Holmes, who investigates.

Adventure X is "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor". Lord Robert St. Simon approaches Holmes to report that his new American bride, Hatty Doran, has disappeared right after the wedding. The maid is a suspect, but Holmes believes it is not at all what it appears. (It never is, right?) Lestrade appears and unwittingly gives Holmes the last piece of the puzzle he needs.

Adventure XI is "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet". The coronet is a national treasure which is given to a banker to secure a short-term loan with much discretion. The beryls are precious gems which are irreplaceable, and there are 37 of them on the gold coronet. The banker awakens in the middle of the night to find the titular item in the hands of his ne'er-do-well son and a corner of it, along with 3 stones, is missing. If it's not the son, that it must be someone in the house.

Adventure XII is "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches". Violet Hunter consults Holmes about the situation that she has been approached for. She is a governess without a family (they moved away), and one possible employer will pay handsomely but has odd requests. (This is 100 years ago and a family book.) One of these is to cut her hair short. She initially objects to this. Holmes doesn't think she should take it, but she yields and cuts her hair. Soon enough, she contacts Holmes about mysterious goings-on and someone being kept a prisoner in that hosue.

Comparitively, I prefered Holmes to Poirot, although the latter was one story which introduced the characters whereas this is a collection of 12 stories. And any fall flat, they're likely to be forgotten.

Now I'll need another book between books. Of course, I still have the Pirate's Who's Who and several Tor "Best of" books. This was a free download.