troisoiseaux

Read Wet Grave by Barbara Hambly, another of her Benjamin January mysteries and actually the second time I've read a historical mystery set in early 19th century New Orleans that featured the rumored treasure of, and a cameo from, IRL pirate Jean Lafitte. (The other was The Smuggler's Treasure, one of American Girl's History Mysteries, circa elementary school.) This one follows Die Upon A Kiss and wraps up a few outstanding story arcs— Ben's romance with Rose; his sister Dominique's future as a placée in light of her boyfriend's impending marriage— alongside its main plotline, in which connecting the dots between a number of seemingly unconnected murders— some of which the police are more interested in solving than others— leads to an absolutely BONKERS denouement: ( spoilers )

Read Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, which happens to be the second mystery/thriller about a biracial Native American protagonist taking down a drug ring preying on their community that I've read in a month. When a Lakota vigilante-for-hire raising his orphaned nephew on a reservation in South Dakota is hired to scare off a local drug dealer, the assignment quickly becomes more complicated - and personal - than he had imagined.

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Read Graveyard Dust, the third book in Barbara Hambly's series starring Benjamin January, a free man of color in 1830s New Orleans who is a doctor by training, musician by profession, and detective by circumstance. In this book, the circumstances are that January's sister - a voodoo practitioner - is accused of murder. (In my admittedly uninformed outsider's perspective, I think Hambly does a good job of writing about voodoo as a religion in a respectful and nuanced way.) It also features a side plot about the New Orleans business elite aggressively denying a spreading epidemic, which, lolsob.

Read The Alington Inheritance, a curious little novel by Golden Age crime writer Patricia Wentworth. It's not a whodunnit: once the murder occurs, the reader is told immediately who did it, and why. The twist is that 1. the murderer didn't kill the person they intended to, 2. the circumstances, by sheer accident, make it look like someone else did it, and 3. various members of the fairly disconnected cast of characters each hold different, individual clues. It's an interesting premise to see play out, but I quickly soured on the narrative thread of, like— the (accidental) victim would be the type of person to get themselves murdered, and one mustn't speak ill of the dead but they were a little so-and-so, and just, generally, how it was better that the accidental victim was killed instead of the intended one.

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Listened to High Noon Over Camelot, a sci-fi Western retelling of Arthurian myth in the form of... a cross between a radio play and musical concept album? I found the actual songs a bit hit or miss, but as a retelling, it's so cool, and plays with the concepts and characters of the source material in really interesting ways. There were, like, four moments in particular that I audibly reacted to: ( Read more... )