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Buy LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE WORLD
Read the review of Book One: Full Speed to a Crash Landing

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Beth Revis grew up in the Appalachian Mountains with a cemetery in her backyard, which is probably why she prefers her stories to be dark and full of twists. She’s the New York Times bestselling author of the Across the Universe trilogy, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. Beth lives in a house full of boys—her husband, son, and two massive dogs—and she forces them all to watch reruns of Firefly and Doctor Who. Visit her at bethrevis.com.

FORMAT/INFO: Last Chance to Save the World will be published on April 8th, 2025 from DAW Books. It is 133 pages and available in hardcover and ebook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: It's a race against time as con artist Ada pulls off her most daring escapade yet. The target: the launching facility of a fleet of nanodrones during one of the most publicized (and secured) events in the galaxy. The mission: upload a code that will delete the secret planned obsolescence code in the nanobots planted by the company that built them, ensuring the bots fulfill their mission to clean the environmental damage on Earth. Ada's convinced government agent Rian to help her, but can she count on him not to betray her at the last minute?

Last Chance to Save the World is a fun and frenetic finale, even if it does lose a bit of the chemistry between its leads along the way. While all the books in this novella series revolve around individual capers, they've all been part of one overarching arc that we see play out in this last adventure. Once again, we're treated to the unreliable narrator of Ada, who doesn't always tell the reader everything that's going on. Is everything going according to her plan? Only Ada knows until the final chapter plays out.

I do love seeing a well-executed plan, and there's plenty of that here. Seeds planted in previous books blossom into fruition for the finale and there's always one more ace up Ada's sleeve. It's a slick Hollywood heist film ending where the real bad guys get their just desserts.

But I also love seeing evenly matched opponents in these kinds of stories, and that's where Last Chance to Save the World fell a bit flat. In the first book, Rian was a worthy foil to Ada, with his own counter-moves that she had to outfox. Here, he's little more than helpless eye-candy. Sure, we're teased that he has a plan of his own, but he never surprises Ada or has the upper hand. She's always one step ahead and we know it, which takes away the chemistry between the two characters. The heat in the romance came from the danger of knowing that Rian COULD outsmart Ada if she's not careful, and that's just not showcased here.

CONCLUSION: From start to finish, the Chaotic Orbits novellas are a rollicking fun time that will leave you grinning. Now that the trilogy is complete, readers can watch Ada's plans unfold from start to finish in just a few sittings. I will always be a fan of Ada's chaotic energy, her constant shifting of conversational topics and goals designed to put her opponents on their back feet. If you're looking for a quick and easy entertaining adventure, these are just the reading snack to bite into.

 

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

Once Was Willem by M.R. Carey

Mogsy’s Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Genre: Horror, Historical Fiction

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Orbit (March 4, 2025)

Length: 320 pages

Author Information: Website | Twitter

I think I may be in the minority on this one, but while I generally love the dark, thought-provoking works of M.R. Carey, I struggled to get into Once Was Willem. Granted, the novel was another testament to the author’s storytelling abilities, tackling a medieval horror fantasy told in a unique narrative voice. However, the style and structure of the book also made it difficult to parse at times, and this is something you have to get used to, or—if you’re like me—you just can’t.

Set in the mid-12th century, the story begins in a poor peasant village where the untimely death of a young boy named Willem leads his parents on a misguided attempt to bring him back. They turn to a powerful sorcerer named Cain Caradoc, who promises that he can help resurrect their son. However, what he failed to mention is that he will also be taking a piece of Willem’s soul as his price, and that the boy will come back as a grotesque shell of who he once was, becoming a monstrosity lingering between life and undeath. Horrified by the creature that once was their beloved son, his mother and father are joined by the rest of the villagers in driving Willem out.

Exiled, Willem makes his home in the surrounding woods, but he finds he is not alone. Others like him have taken refuge in the wilderness, among them individuals deemed oddities who have also been cast out—shapeshifters, elemental creatures, monsters, and spirits. Together, they form a band of seven to keep each other safe, eventually bringing the fight to Caradoc, whose nefarious plans have led him to set his sights on more than the souls of dead children. As the sorcerer’s magic threatens the villages and the residents turn to those they’ve cast out for assistance, Willem and his companions must confront the enemy in a final battle that not only determines the fates of the villagers but of the afterlife itself.

To be honest, although I appreciated the folklore and found family themes of Once of Willem, the book starts off slowly, and its ponderous pacing is further exacerbated by the archaic writing style. Indeed, the novel’s distinct narrative style is a double-edged sword, at once its greatest strength and greatest weakness. The story reads like a memoir told by Willem himself, but much like his physical body, his mind is also neither here nor there. He jumps around, meanders, inserting fragments of memory or asides at seemingly random places. Like the old-timey, period-appropriate prose, Willem’s voice makes this story feel authentic and immersive, but it is also very demanding on readers.

That said, Willem’s character arc is deeply moving, driven by his relatable need for acceptance and purpose. Afterall, everyone understands what it means to belong and to be accepted. It is universal, and it is human. Brought back to life only to be discarded by his own people, Willem also struggles with the meaning of his existence. Later, he finds solace in his group of companions that he meets in the wilderness. Bound not by blood but by a shared understanding, their camaraderie is truly the heart and soul of the story, bringing warmth and depth to an otherwise bleak tale. These characters shine whenever they are on the page, and unfortunately, their togetherness feels underused, making me wish we saw more of those connections.

In various reviews, I’ve seen Once Was Willem described as medieval Frankenstein meets The Magnificent Seven. Given its elements, I have to say these are good comparisons, and you should definitely check it out if you are interested in a unique blend of horror, folklore, and adventure. However, it can also be a frustrating read, especially if you prefer your stories to be more structured and organized. The dense prose can also present a challenge, and in fact, I found it more enjoyable after a while to switch to the audiobook, which made it easier to get into the story. Ultimately, I was glad I finished this, but it doesn’t quite reach the heights of M.R. Carey’s more readable books.

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https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Storybundle-Fantasy-Bundle.mp4

 

LitStack is excited to present Allie Coker’s review of A Tiny Piece of Blue, Charlotte…

The post The Impact of Fortitude in Charlotte Whitney’s “A Tiny Piece of Blue” appeared first on LitStack.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joaquín Baldwin writes epic fantasy with a queer touch. As a multidisciplinary artist, he’s been recognized for his work in cinematography, photography, 3D design, and illustration, and his animated shorts have won over 100 awards. He unadvisedly decided that writing novels was the next thing on his list. While at Disney, he worked on films such as Zootopia, Encanto, Frozen and Moana. He spends an inordinate amount of time crafting the complex world of the Noss Saga. Visit him at joaquinbaldwin.com.

Wolf of Withervale links: Amazon, Goodreads
ESMAY

Wolf of Withervale is pitched as “An ambitious, sweeping saga—as epic as it is queer.”, and I honestly think that sums it up more perfectly than I ever could. It’s got ancient relics, mystifying magic, shape-shifting powers, diverse races and rich cultures, wholesome found family vibes, epic quests, all the queer love, and more mystery, intrigue and heart than you ever knew you needed.
As with any good start to an epic fantasy series, Wolf of Withervale is quite the slow-burn set-up book, but not in the boring way. From the moment I met Lago, I found him to be an extremely likeable and compelling protagonist, and I absolutely loved exploring all the mysteries and intricacies of the world together with him. I mean, I always love me a good morally grey anti-hero, but sometimes you just want to follow genuinely good people doing their best to do good things for the world and the people around them, and that is exactly what Baldwin offers.

Don’t get me wrong, Wolf of Withervale definitely has some dark aspects and there is no lack of conflict and stakes, but somehow I found this entire story to just be inexplicably cozy (which the wonderfully narrated audiobook probably also contributed to). For me, the nuanced interpersonal relationships and authentic personal inner journeys just kept me quite engaged, and I loved the found family vibes that started to develop between these loveable misfits. I mean, Alaia truly deserves the award for best friend in the world, and Bear is just the goodest boy ever.
I really enjoyed that they each have such a different background, because that allowed us to naturally get to learn all about this fascinating world as they share their own experiences and knowledge. And what a world it is! To me, the world of Noss is up there with The Wheel of Time or Stormlight Archive in both the breadth and depth of the world building, and I found myself fascinated by all the post-cataclysmic mysteries, the intricacies of the tense political landscape, and the level of rich diversity, be that on a racial, cultural or sexual level.

I mean, there is absolutely no denying that there were quite a few overwhelming info-dumps that went in one ear and out the other for me, but for the most part I think Baldwin actually did a pretty good job of balancing and interweaving the world building with the characters’ personal journeys. Especially the mysterious influence that the ancient wolf-like mask relic had on Lago kept me glued to the page, and I loved how his new-found shape-shifting powers and his transformative journey highlighted the story’s core themes of human connection, nature, empathy, belonging, and queerness.
And speaking of queerness, Wolf of Withervale is just hella gay, and I was mostly all here for it. That said, although I enjoyed the soul-deep connection between Banook and Lago, I am personally not the biggest fan of age-gap romances, and especially the whole ‘cub’ as a term of endearment made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Moreover, while I really liked Baldwin’s lush and descriptive prose in most sections of the story, I personally found the blunt and graphic way that most of the explicit scenes were written to be a bit off-putting.
Still, those quibbles didn’t end up hindering my enjoyment all that much, and I was just happily plodding along on this epic adventure. Sure, the pacing is quite wobbly, and I can’t sit here and pretend that I was really invested in the macro plot with the escalating war, but somehow I was just along for the ride (which the audiobook once again probably also helped with). And between the occasional intriguing non-Lago POV chapters and the ominously enticing (if slightly abrupt) ending, I am quite curious to see what Baldwin has in store in the rest of the Noss saga.
If you are sick and tired of all the bleak worlds filled with morally gray anti-heroes, then Wolf of Withervale will be a wonderful breath of fresh air. It’s somehow both comfortingly familiar and refreshingly diverse, and I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who likes their fantasy epic, slow, indulgent, character-driven, and unapologetically queer.
ŁUKASZ
The Wolf of Withervale is a curious beast. On one hand, it’s a dazzling display of creativity, worldbuilding, and queerness. On the other, it can feel like a bit of a slog if you don't have patience for dense storytelling, detailed romances, and some eyebrow-raising narrative choices.  
The story follows Lago Vaari, a young outcast who gets a magical wolf mask that changes the course of his life and his very identity. Others want it too, so Lago has to run from an empire hungry for mask's power. The setup is fantastic,  and aetheric magic system is a standout feature (well thought-out, combines science and magic, nerdy in the best way.) 
But here’s the rub: while the first half moves briskly, the story slams the brakes about midway through. The focus shifts to a romance between Lago (now going by his wolf-form name, Sterjall) and Banook, a bear shapeshifter and literal “bear” in gay culture. Now, I'm sure some readers will be here for this relationship and graphic sex scenes, but to me it dragged the pace down and sidelined the main plot. 
Still, there’s plenty to appreciate here: Baldwin’s passion, detailed world, the stunning illustrations, and the depth of thought behind every detail. The Wolf of Withervale is queer, nerdy, and unapologetically itself. It’s not perfect but it’s undeniably memorable. 
A subjective opinion: with the help of a berserker editor and some merciless tightening, this could be a true standout. As for today, I would say it's 100 -150 pages too long. 
Anyway, give it a try if you’re in the mood for something ambitious and out of the ordinary.  
OFFICIAL SPFBO SCORE

 

Live ladybugs and squashed dead ones tumbled to the floor.

(Okay, I admit it, even as a dedicated insect aficionado, this was wavering between alarming and gross.)

(page 80, A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher)
---------
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, previously hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: - Grab your current read - Open to a random page - Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!) - Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their  TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Hi, everyone

This is just a short update – things are likely to get hectic over the next few weeks, so I’m just publishing it now.

I’ve had two releases recently, the long-awaited sequel to Sufficiently Advanced Technology – Sufficiently Analysed Magic – and The Princess Exile, which I hope will be the first in a series of stand-alone novels set in the Schooled In Magic universe. I have several ideas for other stories, from a exiled Prince hiring mercenaries to recover his kingdom (occupied and destroyed by the necromancers), to a story featuring the gentleman thieves (who first appeared in The Princess Exile) and an expansion of The Blademaster’s Tale, which is currently published in Fantastic Schools War. Let me know which one you would Like to see first.

As always, reviews, feedback, and suchlike are very welcome.

I’ve also finished the first draft of The Counterfactual War, which is the direct sequel to Conquistadors. It is being edited now, and I have hopes of getting it out in a month or so. I’ve also written Caleb’s Tale, a short novella set in the Heart’s Eye University between Mirror Image and The Cunning Man, which will be included in Fantastic Schools Universities. We are still looking for more submissions for both Universities and Familiars, so if any of you want to contribute a story please feel free to do so. Guidelines on the page.

My current project is The King’s Secret, which is more or less a direct sequel to The Alchemist’s Secret. Like I said, things have got rather hectic, but I am hopeful of finishing the first draft by the end of April.

This raises an obvious question. What do you want to see next?

There are two options. Tarnished Glory, which is the next Morningstar book, and Wolf in the Fold, which is the next Schooled In Magic book. Which one do you want to see?

As always, I would like to take advantage of this moment to remind you of my mailing list. It is used to let you know when I have a new book and nothing else. (And it also avoids the problem of Facebook et al. hiding posts.) You can also follow me through any of the links here.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy reading the new books.

Chris

Interesting, quite a lot of expertise & ‘facilities’ needed to get the most out of unwanted sigls. I was wondering what the Best Case would be when reshaping a Sigl into a replacement one (Same sigl just adapted to a different person). Perhaps to drop down one ‘level’? (eg From a ‘C’ to a ‘D’)

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joaquín Baldwin writes epic fantasy with a queer touch. As a multidisciplinary artist, he’s been recognized for his work in cinematography, photography, 3D design, and illustration, and his animated shorts have won over 100 awards. He unadvisedly decided that writing novels was the next thing on his list. While at Disney, he worked on films such as Zootopia, Encanto, Frozen and Moana. He spends an inordinate amount of time crafting the complex world of the Noss Saga. Visit him at joaquinbaldwin.com.

Wolf of Withervale links: Amazon, Goodreads


Thank you for agreeing to this interview. Before we start, tell us a little about yourself.
I was born in Paraguay and came to the USA to study art right after finishing high school. I’ve always been obsessed with nature, with light, and with story. The Noss Saga became this single big project where I could dump all my skills and passions, from the storytelling side, to creating maps, sculptures, photographs, illustrations, conlangs, and a whole bunch of other nerdy things. I’ve always spent my free time doing art anyway, but I was bouncing around without a particular focus, and this is bringing it all into something cohesive.
Do you have a day job? If so, what is it?
I’m an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios (well, I’m a layout artist, sometimes director of cinematography, focusing on the camera work for animated features, which involves animating as well as other things). That’s been the day job for over a decade. I got that job thanks to my animated shorts, which were quite popular for a time and got lots of attention in the industry. As much as I love animation though, I do enough of it daily, so in my free time I want to do anything but that.

Who are some of your favorite writers, and why is their work important to you?
This list always changes depending on mood, but I draw inspiration from fiction and non-fiction.
On the fiction side, the obvious is Tolkien, but also Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, N.K. Jemisin, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Pullman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, and Patrick Rothfuss. I enjoy personal stories that dig into deeper meanings but also that transport us into well thought-out worlds, into magical places that are imperfect but beautiful.
On the non-fiction side, my biggest inspiration is Carl Sagan, but also Richand Feynman, Douglas Hofstadter, John Muir, and Robert Macfarlane. Anyone reading the Noss Saga might pick up on these influences—the entirety of it is filled with a sense of wonder toward nature, with a yearning to understand the universe.
What do you like most about the act of writing?
I enjoy the unexpected when I have a perfect plan, and then suddenly a character decides to do something different from what I intended, and they become their own living being that evolves into something unique, uncontrollable. The same goes with story itself, how the plot and even themes end up shifting as you write, and you find more depth and just let it happen. Letting it happen and entering that state of flow is amazing (if I remember to eat, at least, otherwise I realize it’s late at night already and I’m hangry).
Can you lead us through your creative process? What works and doesn’t work for you? How long do you need to finish a book?
I’m a bit obsessive, so I ended up writing 2,000 words average for the first year, till I reached a million words for the six books of the saga. To me (and this is just to me, everyone has their own way), making sure I wrote every day was important, even if it was just a few hundred words. Otherwise I could lapse into an undefined break and lose the flow. But at the same time, I do not like setting limits such as a specific word count limit, otherwise I’d be writing trash just to match an abstract number.
Another thing that was important to me was to write just to myself. I could not sustain writing this much while thinking of what people might like or not like, what would sell, what’s marketable. Fuck that. This is my passion project. I’ll make it the best thing I can, but it has to come from my heart.

What made you decide to self-publish Wolf of Withervale as opposed to traditional publishing?
I actually sent queries out to agents! But this was way before the manuscript was ready, way before I learned how to write a proper query, and before I learned how vicious the publishing industry can be. I was brand new to all this. In hindsight, I am so glad that I didn’t get any responses. If Wolf of Withervale had been published back then, it would not have been polished enough, it would’ve had some plot holes I could no longer fix, and it would’ve likely changed too much in the editing process in order to make it marketable to wider audiences, to the point it would not be the kind of book I wanted it to be. I’m much happier self-publishing. I get so much more control, I get to deal with the fans in a more personal way, and I can plan ahead a lot better, with my own timeline. I’m also publishing these quite fast (about every 8 months), while with trad pub I likely would’ve had to wait a decade to see the entire series out, and they could’ve always canceled it right in the middle and ruin it all. Self-pub forever <3
Contrary to many self-published authors, you went wide instead of being kindle exclusive. Why? Did it pay off?
I know my door-stopper books would do well in KU, but I despise Amazon and everything it stands for, and I have a huge respect for my readers no matter what platform or device they use to read or listen. I am probably losing a big chunk of money by not being in KU right now, but in the long run, it is about training the readers to buy direct, and once that scales up, it will compensate for the loss of income. Right now I’m still building the audience so it hasn’t reached that point, but it’s a long-term plan.
Another reason is that I never planned this project as a commercial one. I know it has commercial potential, but I will not focus my efforts that way or I’ll be trying to make money instead of making art. This way I have more control and I can deliver exactly what I want, and I’m not caged by an evil monopoly.
Your book is available in audiobook format. Can you share your experience producing it and a reflection if it was worth it?
Totally worth it! It’s been the most fun experience. Audiobooks are expensive, and it takes a while to make that investment back, but it’s something I always wanted to do. Not only did I get a killer narrator (Magnus Carlssen, who I love working with and who totally gets the mood and level of detail this world requires), but I also worked with a composer, Iain James Armour, who wrote the melodies that Magnus sings in a few spots of the book, and he also wrote the intro/outro for the audiobook as well, and is even working on a full album trilogy based on the books. This is a big project, and I wanted the audiobook to feel like its own complete piece of art, not just an additional format for consumption.
One thing I did not expect is how time-consuming the audiobook would be for me. I have to listen to so many recordings, provide notes, and use a tracking system we developed with Magnus to track the extensive amount of notes and rerecordings. But every time I get to sit down and listen to a new recording is wonderful.
Why did you enter SPFBO?
I currently have a passionate but small fan base. I need to branch out, and awards that are not exclusive to self-published books are nearly impossible to compete in since most of them are about popularity/visibility, something a publisher can handle with enough of a budget, but a single author could not. SPFBO was an award that came to my attention as soon as I got into this self-pub world, and I saw how some titles that won in previous years ended up reaching a much wider audience right away. To me, it’s about exposure, about finding people beyond my current circles that will enjoy this vast project. It’s also cool to keep track of the finalists and find new books to love.
How would you describe the plot of Wolf of Withervale if you had to do so in just one or two sentences?
When the wolf-like mask fell into the hands of young Lago, he could not guess at its powers. Now that the empire has scented the relic’s trail, Lago’s only hope of escape is to learn to wield the mask, uncover its secrets, and accept the change it brings.That’s the pre-written short blurb though. If I had to pitch it myself in an elevator I’d totally butcher it into something like, “It’s, um, about this kid who gets this cool mask, and like, magic and transformation, and like sexuality and all kinds of cool epic stuff. I made lots of maps! Did you see my maps?!?”
What was your initial inspiration for Wolf of Withervale? How long have you been working on it? Has it evolved from its original idea?
There are many ideas that coalesced into it, but the core that holds it all together came on October 3rd, 2020. I wrote a tweet that morning, which said, “Woke up at 4am with a breakthrough story idea, and makes me excited to start writing. It feels big, world-building big. I've never written anything long form, this could be it. Sending this tweet in the hopes I'll find it again a few years from now, when the story has taken form.”
I cannot tell you what that core idea was because it is massively spoilery, but it is what got me so obsessed. One month later, for NaNoWriMo (RIP, fuck AI “writers”), I began writing daily (I took that whole month to prep, outline, etc). My first draft was shit. My second one was decent. My eight or so was ready.

If you had to describe it in 3 adjectives, which would you choose?
Queer. Epic. Nerdy.
Is it part of the series or a standalone? If series, how many books have you planned for it?
It is a six-book series, all of which are written already, but in different stages of editing. Books 1 and 2 are out already (Wolf of Withervale and Masks of the Miscam). Book 3, titled Relinquished Realms, will be out early 2025 (we are working on the final edit/proofread now). Book 4 just went through all the beta readers (I need to sit with their notes and do an extensive edit) and books 5 and 6 are still with the beta readers and will require lots of work to clean up.
I published the first book only after I had already written all six. This allowed me to do retroactive edits to fit things better and to add lots of callbacks, setups, and payoffs that work through all six books. Each book averages around 190,000 words.
Who are the key players in this story? Could you introduce us to Wolf of Withervale’s protagonists/antagonists?
Lago Vaari is the protagonist, a young man who inherits the magical mask that kickstarts the adventure. He is passionate, studious, but also impulsive and a bit hot-headed.
Alaia is Lago’s best friend. She is an optimistic and opportunistic mine worker who keeps Lago in check, making sure his heart is in the right place.
The Red Stag is the main antagonist. Not really a spoiler, but there is more than one magical mask, and the Red Stag (a half human, half elk) has control of the mask of cervids, and wants control of the other masks.
There is also Ockam, a scout who comes to Lago’s aid when the empire finally catches up to him, and who becomes a kind of father figure.
And there’s a M/M love interest, a character whose name I won’t mention due to spoilers, who is my favorite character in the entire saga :)

Does your book feature a magic/magic system? If yes, can you describe it?
The magic system is tightly grounded in scientific concepts. I needed it to feel believable, particularly since we are already dealing with some impossible things like transformation. The system relies on the aetheric elements:
Imagine that some elements (Or perhaps all? Who knows?) have an “aetheric” variant, a kind that chemically reacts to other elements in the same way as expected, but they also have one particular extraordinary property. So, for iron you would have magnium (or “aetheric iron”), which provides magnetic properties to the metals it alloys with. For carbon you have soot, which is a sort of hallucinogen that allows you a glimpse into the connections between carbon-based lifeforms. Sulphur has a variant called brime, which constantly expels heat. To silver there is galvanum, which has electrical properties. And there are many more, including aether (the aetheric variant of hydrogen), which is [REDACTED, TOP SECRET]. Now imagine what it would be like to combine these precious and rare elements together, and you have an entire world of non-magical magic to explore.

Have you written the book with a particular audience in mind?
Yes. Me! But also any other queer nerds. I love geology, paleontology, chemistry, zoology, and I’m dropping all these passions into this series. It’s already finding a lot of fans among scientists and sci-artists. Furries are also a core audience, with the anthro/transformation themes being so prevalent, and with the themes of gender and sexuality being so intrinsic to the story. But overall, I first had to write it for myself.

What’s new or unique about your book that we don’t see much in speculative fiction these days?
The way sexuality is woven into the plot is rare, and one of the main reasons I wanted to write this story. Yes, there are a ton of books out there now with queer casts, but sexuality as part of the worldbuilding and development of the core plot is not common. The magical masks in the Noss Saga are a medium through which to express ideas of gender, of change, of finding one’s true self or selves. The sexuality of the characters is not merely incidental, it’s extremely consequential with how the plot flows and how the major themes develop.
There is also an exceedingly large number of illustrations and behind-the-scenes worldbuilding, all available for free in the extras pages for each of the books. This is not so uncommon, but I think the Noss Saga goes way beyond what one would expect to find for extras in how extensive and polished they are.(Łukasz, feel free to add any of the images from that extras page to your post. I think readers might enjoy seeing the world map in particular)

Cover art is always an important factor in book sales. Can you tell us about the idea behind the cover of Wolf of Withervale and the artist?
The artist is the wonderful Ilse Gort, who is just fantastic. I had her in mind since the very start, and I’m so happy she was willing to read the books and do such amazing art for the covers. I actually just happen to have written a detailed post showcasing the process of the book’s cover, including Ilse’s many sketches, so you can check those sketches out here.
Although I love doing the interior illustrations for my books, I think leaving the cover to someone like Ilse really paid off. She’s the best, I love how the covers turned out, and how the clean illustrations stand on their own as their unique pieces of art.




What are you currently working on that readers might be interested in learning more about, and when can we expect to see it released?
I’m working on the final edit of Relinquished Realms, Book 3 of the Noss Saga. I’m not naming dates yet, since I want the print, audio, and ebook versions released all at the same time, and planning that is tricky, but I’m aiming for early 2025. I’m also starting work in Zootopia 2 at Disney, which also comes out in 2025 :)

Thank you for taking the time to answer all the questions. In closing, do you have any parting thoughts or comments you would like to share with our readers?
Thank you!
I’d ask your readers to check out the other finalists in SPFBOX! I’m just getting to know some of the authors now, and just placed their books in my to-be-read list. Check them all out, and if you like their books, tell your friends about it—word of mouth is how indie authors find new readers.

Image by Gaertringen from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn!

Let’s talk self-publishing. Particularly, print on demand options.

In this particular climate, I know a number of book buyers and independent and self publishers looking to make an impact by being more mindful of where they spend their money and with whom they do business. It is, however, incredibly difficult to do any kind of individual action, given the absolute chokehold Amazon has in the book space. Those of us who are self-published know it well. Amazon is where most book buyers go when shopping online. And it’s where a large number of independent publishers go to have their books printed and shipped. Print on demand is a great technology, especially for those of us who do not have the funds to do an entire print run, and no space to store the books in any case.

It’s perfect, too, because no book is wasted. Only the exact number of books sold are printed. There is no pulping of piles of unsold books. Paper is not wasted. I really like print on demand for that reason alone.

There are, of course, many other print on demand options. Nowhere is it written that one must use Kindle Direct (the print on demand arm of Amazon). However, Amazon has been such a behemoth for so long, it does seem like that if one has any hope of making a living from their self-publishing efforts, you must be on Amazon. Plenty of self-published writers make a very decent living on there, thank you very much.

Image by Gerald Friedrich from Pixabay

However, I, like many others (both buyers and publishers) do not like the way Amazon operates. We don’t like the way they treat their employees. We don’t like the way they treat their authors. We don’t like how they bully the little guy. Or what they do with the money we make for them. It has had me searching for alternatives for a long while now.

Draft2Digital is one. It operates the usual way; you upload the book and cover, decide which channels you wish to sell on, and Draft2Digital will print and ship off your books to all those markets. You can order author copies should you ever need a bunch for an event.They operate as both a printer and distributor, which is quite nice. They pay for this by taking a cut of the proceeds of each sale, in much the same way Amazon, and other options do.

Lulu and Ingram Sparks are a couple of others that are names with recognition. But there are a bunch of print on demand services. They all operate in more or less the same way. As a bonus, there aren’t any issues with the manner in which they treat their workers, near as I know. So they’re not a bad option if you’re looking for a print on demand option.

Image by Dmitriy from Pixabay

Recently, I’ve seen another player jump on the scene. This is a new print on demand option that operates a little differently. Books.by is a print on demand service and online shopfront that works on a subscription model. Essentially, the author/publisher pays a yearly fee, and they get print on demand services as well as a shopfront for their physical books.

If used as the author’s online store, it could help in reducing website costs, which can get quite costly. Books.by has printers on practically every continent, making printing and shipping very quick and very easy. The website also boasts marketing tools available to booksellers, though I haven’t yet explored those and so don’t know if there’s the value in them the site claims.

The store fronts look nice and clean. It’s very easy to set up; extremely user friendly on the backend. Added bonus for some of us, the company, like myself, is Australian.

There are some pretty significant drawbacks, however. The first and most immediate is upfront costs. Part of the attraction of Amazon, Draft2Digital, Lulu, Ingram Spark and others is that you don’t require any money upfront. You can just upload the files and start selling. Sure, they tend to take a hefty cut, but the barrier to entry is incredibly low. With books.by, you must have the money upfront, and pay it yearly. However, the amount does not change. It’s not a percentage of your sales. It’s a flat fee (plus printing costs). The author gets to keep 100% of the profits. That can be very attractive; especially for those writers who sell at volume. Still, it’s very rare for anyone to be able to sell those kinds of numbers, especially if one is just starting out.

This may be something a publisher is willing to factor into the cost of doing business, and in the hopes that they grow large enough on the platform to justify that fee.

It will have to be noted that, as of the writing of this, books.by does not offer digital downloads. Less expensive to purchase, digital books are a great way for new readers to discover a new favorite author. The cost isn’t high, comparatively, making it an attractive option for buyers. It would be a really nice feature if they would offer downloads in multiple formats for buyers for those publishers who wish to offer them.

Perhaps that’s a feature that’s in the works for later. The company is relatively new, after all.

Discoverability is also a problem. Each subscriber gets a dedicated shopfront (with a pretty clever URL, actually: books.by/[publisher name]). But there isn’t really a buyer-facing site at all. Which means that someone can’t come to books.by and do a search for a title, author or publisher they way they can with Amazon. People coming to shop at books.by must have the publishers URL, or they’re just out of luck. Alas.

It is my hope that books.by will add that kind of front-end search function in the future so they can better compete with sites like Amazon. As of now, however, this is a considerable failing in my opinion.

Image by Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay

Do I have a books.by shop? I do! There is only one book on it at the moment, as I’m going through my back catalogue and updating the books before releasing them under my new-ish imprint. Of course, because I’m such an unknown outside of family and friends, I have sold all of one copy; nowhere near the volume required to justify the expense. I am one of those who is running at a loss, hoping that sales pick up enough eventually to justify the cost.

For all of my physical copies, I’ll be using books.by, as they’re a great alternative to Amazon, and I want to be more ethical about where I’m spending my money.

But I’m not one to put all of my eggs in one basket. I also use Draft2Digital for most of my distribution needs, and, yes, my books are still up on Amazon, available through KDP (one of the business practices I detest is the sneaky way Amazon tends to throttle sales that are distributed to them from another provider). Some people haven’t a choice and must use that market. I don’t want to deprive them of their options. I will, however, be directing people to buy from my ko-fi shop or my books.by shop when they can.

It’s not much. I’m just one writer/publisher. Amazon won’t miss my business, I’m sure. Particularly since I hardly sell at all. What I do won’t really matter. Still, it’s better than nothing, and I’m enjoying having options.

I would suggest for new self-publishers to (always) do their research and choose a platform that best suits your and your situation. It might not be the best idea to jump into books.by when you’re first starting out; not least of all because of those upfront costs and lack of discoverability. That might be something to consider more when thinking of opening your own online store… and even then, consider the lack of ebook options (which will hopefully change).

I do think books.by has potential, but they’re too young a company yet to put all one’s stock into.

Are there any new and excited self-publishing options out there that you’ve heard of? I’m sure folks at the start of their journey would love to hear about it. Sound off below!

When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and cuddling her cat. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and a cuddling furry murderer. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. Her serial The New Haven Incident is free and goes up every Friday on her blog.

 Sitrep:

So, all of the betas are done with J9 and I sent it off to Rea Saturday. So, here is the first snippet!

 

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Antigua

Chief Warrant Officer 5 Jethro McClintock noted the flutter of the wind, picked up on the heat rising and ran mental calculations even as Bast fed him the data. What he saw matched her data roughly so he fed it to the sniper.

The sniper was a new recruit to the Cadre, Sergeant Manoox. The sergeant had sniper qualifications from the army but seemed to struggle with accepting data from his AI.

“Target at two-five-six-one meters. Up one point five. Wind at nine o’clock six clicks.”

“Two-five-six-one up one point five, winds… got it,” the sergeant replied in a text through their implants. The duo was side by side so their respective AI had established a wired nanite link between them. That facilitated conversation so they could not be picked up or overheard.

“Send it,” Jethro growled.

The sergeant gently squeezed the trigger. As always it came as a surprise to them.

The round went down range and slammed into the target.

“High point two,” Jethro observed. “To the right point four.”

“Roger,” the sergeant said as he made adjustments.

Another sniper fired a shot off to their left. A target plinked.

“Send it,” Jethro ordered.

This time the round hit dead center as expected.

“Good shot. New target…” Jethro moved on across their zone as the first target reset.

<<(O)>>

Sergeant Suqi McClintock noted the target hit and smiled. She was dialed in. She quickly made it through the qualifications and then rose when her spotter cleared her. Half muscle memory, half training she cleared her weapon and looked around. Sabu was finishing up his quals to the far left of her. Their father Jethro was in playing spotter for another student.

She glanced to her right to see Hurranna wrapping up her quals. The lynx sat up when she finished and stretched and then scratched at her back.

“Getting old?” Suqi texted.

Hurranna turned to her, stuck out her tongue and then stretched again. Suqi chuckled.

Chief Warrant Officer 1 Hurranna was their ‘aunt’. She had grown up with their father and others on Antigua Prime. She had served with them in Sigma Sector hunting pirates, though she had done so in a fighter as a Marine pilot while Sabu and Suqi had been sergeants in the Marines.

All 3 had been tapped to join the Cadre. They had done a bit of soul searching and then had agreed much to the chagrin of their respective commands. It was that or get rotated home to serve in a training force or standing guard duty at some building somewhere. None of them wanted that.

Hurranna had been threatened with a commission a few times. She had considered it but hadn’t liked dealing with the paperwork and the headaches involved with being a commissioned officer. As a warrant she could get to the rank of a CAG but not much further. She had said that she hadn’t considered getting out of the pilot seat until she had found out that the Cadre also used pilots.

Since she had finished her integration she had taken up duties with the shuttles that occasionally moved the Cadre to distant exercise locations.

Hurranna joined Suqi at the table where the weapons were laid out. “It took a little bit to get my eye back in I admit. But it’s like riding a bicycle.”

“If you don’t practice regularly you forget the tricks,” Suqi retorted.

“Like I said, like riding a bike. Once I had a refresher it all came back,” Hurranna replied.

Suqi flicked her ears.

“So, what’s next?” Hurranna asked.

“The finals for camouflage for the second half of the class. Since you already passed it, you lot can head in and pack it in,” Chief Humble stated. He was a big albino Neogorilla.

“Take your weapons with you,” the chief growled as the duo turned to leave. “Turn them in to the armory and clean them. You know the drill.”

The girls sighed. “I hate getting my nails dirty,” Hurranna mock whined.

“I hate chipping a nail,” Suqi said, pretending to look at her nails. Her claws came out as she examined them.

“My heart bleeds,” the chief said gruffly, rolling his eyes at them.

The girls smirked at each other. “Want to get our nails done after this?” Hurranna suggested.

“Sure,” Suqi answered. She turned to the chief. “What do you say chief? I think hot pink is your color,” she teased.

“Pass,” he growled. “Get out of here before I throw you two out. And you two are small enough that I can do it too,” he said eyeing them.

“I think he means it,” Hurranna chuckled as the duo put their sniper rifles into their carrying cases and then headed off.

“I’m sure he’s just a softy at heart,” Suqi said. The chief roared and both girls startled and turned back to him. He was growling at another student.

“On the other hand…” Suqi drawled.

“Yeah, maybe we should tease him later,” Hurranna agreed with a nod.

<<(O)>>

Hard choices in a place where space travel can accidentally steal your entire life away…

An investigator can look backwards to discover secrets lost to time. But one investigator discovers secrets lost in her own past, dangerous secrets that give names to the dead strewn across the universe.

Winner of the Asimov’s Readers Choice Award.

“The Nameless Dead” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Nameless Dead By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

I like to think I was kidnapped. I like to think that some thugs grabbed me, and tossed me into their ship, and I ended up here six months later, through no fault of my own.

I like to think that, but the records show something else entirely, and my memory always, always gives the records an assist.

That night, thirty-five years ago, I’d had enough. If we’re being 100% honest here, I wasn’t really cut out for marriage or motherhood. I was twenty-five and figured I could handle all of the emotional fallout, but of course, I couldn’t.

I get that night in snatches: the stench of sour milk and poopy diapers, the sound of voices screeching at each other over the wail of an unhappy baby, the scratch in my throat because this was the fifth night in a row of that kind of yelling—and worse, Austin, clutched in his father’s arms, waving his little fists.

I blamed Austin that night: I said, “Well, he wants me to go bye-bye, so I think I will.”

And my husband Tom, all sympathy and warmth, said, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

The door didn’t hit me. Nothing did, even though I was sore and tired and angrier than I should have been. I picked up a bottle of what I then thought was good beer, and carried it, wondering if I should drink it since I was breast-feeding and then deciding, ah fuck it, and downing it like I was dying of thirst.

The beer glugged, and the bottle emptied, and I bought another, and another, and another as I staggered across what we called the Holy Trinity—a series of blocks that contained nothing but bars, usually catering to spacers, not people like me.

By the time I ended up in the last one, wearing a smelly sweater that someone had given me to hide stains from my leaking breasts, I was ready to give up.

Deep down, I knew Tom was right: I sucked as a parent. I didn’t want to feed the kid on the kid’s schedule. I didn’t want to pump my breasts. I didn’t want to spend half my life tied to those two people, even if one of them was too small to talk and needed me more than I needed him.

If I left, I rationalized drunkenly, then they would have a better life. If I left, Tom could remarry and Austin would reach his potential and I—I would be free.

Maybe I actually had that conversation out loud. Maybe I just thought it.

Next thing I knew, I was at the space rings, staring at what wasn’t quite a luxury cruiser. It was one of those ships that took executives to their postings so far away they could never return.

I ended up in a small antechamber in the docking rings with a man who wrinkled his nose as he talked. At the time, I thought he was fussy. Looking back, I realized that he thought something smelled bad—and that something was me.

He warned me, and warned me again, and then warned me a third time.

“You do this,” he said, “and you won’t see anyone you ever love again.”

“You assume I love someone,” I muttered drunkenly.

He looked pointedly at my leaking breasts, and said, “Someone clearly loved you.”

“You’re confusing love and sex,” I answered and thought I was witty.

“Yeah,” he said. “Where’s the baby?”

“With his dad,” I said.

“You mind if I check that?” the man said.

I waved one hand at him. “Be my guest.”

So he vanished. For how long, I don’t know. But he came back armed with vids and tablets and more information than I wanted. And then he said, “You got an hour to consider this. Maybe by then, you’ll be sober enough to change your mind.”

I got a little more sober in that hour. I’d like to say I didn’t understand what I learned from those tablets and vids, but maybe I had even understood it more than I let on.

I wasn’t making an accidental mistake, no matter what I used to tell folks years later when I was drunk and alone and confessed that I had once been a parent.

Now, I’m never drunk, although I’m still alone, and I really don’t think that anything I did in those few months after Austin’s birth counted as parenting, not even the haphazard breastfeeding which I mostly did on a dare.

After that hour, I hadn’t changed my mind. I cashed out the money in our savings to buy a berth on a lower level that turned out to be barely bigger than the width of a single bed. I was allowed to leave the berth, thank heavens, because the journey lasted six months. Six months in that tiny space would have made me crazier than I already was.

The food was included in the price, but little else, and because I hadn’t planned, I had to pay for new clothes and some expert to help my body past its hormone overload.

Three months in, I woke up and realized that I wasn’t cut out to be a spacer, and I really didn’t want to be somewhere new, and so I got some initiative and found the man who’d tried to talk me out of the trip.

Turns out, that was his job, to make sure everyone who got on the transport knew it was a one-way trip.

I, of course, didn’t believe him. I rarely believed anyone in those days, and when they challenged me, I doubled down on whatever fool thing I had in my head.

“I want to go back,” I said.

“We’re not going back,” he said.

“So drop me somewhere,” I said. “Someone can take me back.”

“You saw the vids,” he said. “You signed waivers. You said you understood time dilation.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It works the same going back, right?”

He stared at me like I was the dumbest person he’d ever seen.

“Time never goes backwards,” he said. “No matter how much we want it to.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Meaning that if we drop you ‘somewhere’ and you magically find enough money to fund your return trip, you will arrive fifty years after you left, give or take.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, my heart sinking. “I’ve got a baby back there.”

“Not anymore you don’t.” He punched a button on a nearby console and doublechecked it. “Your baby is at least twenty years old right now. I suspect he’s probably pissed at the mother who abandoned him, and he doesn’t want to see you.”

I crossed my arms. “You lie.”

He shook his head. “I don’t get paid enough to lie. You go back immediately after we arrive at our destination, and your kid might very well be dead. He’ll be pushing 100 at least, and he certainly won’t forgive you for missing his entire existence.”

Talking to that man was the first time my memory wouldn’t let me off the hook. Even though I’d been drunk when I boarded the executive travel vessel, I had heard all the talk about time dilation and loss and not being able to return to the place you’d left, not really.

I’d thought that was a good thing, at least that night, with my sore and leaking breasts, my scratchy throat, and Tom’s vicious but true words about what an awful person I was still stuck in my ear.

Then, somehow, I’d twisted the memory as I tossed and turned in that single bed, thinking that time dilation somehow worked in reverse—you got farther away and lost time and regained it when you returned.

I knew better. I wasn’t really a scientific illiterate. I was just really good at dismissal and denial, two reasons why I’d had a baby in the first place.

And here’s the sad part—at least to me—the part I usually don’t confess to anyone: I don’t miss the baby. I don’t miss the idea of the baby either. When I think about the sleepless nights, the way his baby nails scratched at my hand whenever he grabbed my finger, the way his sleepy eyes made me want to shake him awake, I knew we were not meant for each other.

Maybe Tom wasn’t the best parent. Maybe Austin would’ve been better off with some adoptive parents or with his paternal grandparents, or maybe just with someone else.

But Austin was certainly better off without me.

That thought, which I’ve had repeatedly over the years, is not a justification for what I’ve done. Just the plain cold truth about who I am.

I’m better off alone. I’m better without being responsible for anyone.

I can barely be responsible for me.

But that’s another story.

***

It is not without some small irony that I’m the go-to woman for all things time dilation. I hadn’t planned it. But I may be emotionally cold, but I’m intellectually hot. If there’s research to be done or information to be gathered or thinking about things that have nothing to do with my emotions, I’m the person for the job.

And here, on the very first large port where the executive “shuttles” stop, my services are in great demand.

First, let me explain the situation here. This is a large port city, the Gateway to the Future, as some wag named it.

The city itself spreads over half a continent, and the space ports are built above the city proper. So, when you’re on the ground and look up, what you see is the scaffolding that holds all those docking ports in place.

No one docks in orbit here. They all come down, and then the executives who don’t have a transfer to some other part of this sector stay for a few days or a month, or sometimes even a year just to get their footing.

They can’t go back any more than I can, but a few of them routinely sue, claiming they haven’t understood their contract.

Most of their contracts are the same. It doesn’t matter what industry they’re involved in. The contracts give them a hefty upfront fee if they choose to take it. The ones who usually sue take the hefty upfront fee and give it to their families.

Why execs? I have no idea. I’d think skilled people who can grow plants and lovely food in a hydroponics garden or folks who make life nicer and prettier would be better. Those skill sets are always in vogue.

But execs? All they have is the ability to manage other people in a controlled environment. And maybe a willingness to work hard on things that no one really cares about. Weirdly enough, that’s a particular skill set too, and it doesn’t matter what kind of job they’re supposed to do. These execs will do it with competence, even if they hate it.

They’re about as alien to me as human beings can get. So I don’t even try to understand them. I particularly don’t understand why they take these crappy deals, but they do.

They sign the contracts and board the executive cruisers, thinking they’re going to go off and work for maybe five years max—which is what their contract says—and then they’ll come home to the same family they left, albeit five years older.

These execs don’t understand time dilation or maybe hadn’t realized that it would have an impact on them. Most of these prizewinners never read the contract at all. They just looked at that hefty upfront fee, figured it would set their family for life, and took the deal.

Then they went very far away. The farther reaches of the sector had a lot of resources and a lot of tech, but not enough human beings to manage it all. Managers are, by nature, cautious types, and they don’t want adventure. So they had to be paid a lot to go far away because recruiting through the ranks when there are very few ranks really doesn’t work.

By the time these execs found me, they would be all but broken, devastated by a decision they’d made for financial reasons without really understanding the emotional underpinnings.

They didn’t even have the same excuse I had: they weren’t drunk when they made the decision. Most of them had weeks—sometimes months—to consider what they were about to do.

I have no idea how these people still missed the time dilation part or misunderstood it or didn’t think it would be a factor for them.

Many told the same lie I considered telling: that they’d been taken against their will. Being a victim was apparently better than being a stupid greedy idiot.

Some of the folks here think it’s an anti-science thread that’s been part of our culture from the get-go. Others think that it’s a failure of education—most of these execs aren’t the brightest lasers in the toolbox. Most of the folks here agree with me though: this was all about greed and money and execs thinking they’d be set for life, not realizing that their family would be set for life, but these poor losers would have to work for the better part of theirs just to repay that upfront fee.

Still, they managed to reach deep into their pockets and find enough resources to pay me—and my services don’t come cheap.

I also take payment upfront, no refunds. Most people don’t like what they hear when I’m done, and a few stiffed me early on. That’s when I inaugurated the no-refund policy and that’s when I tried to warn off potential clients.

Because all I do is gather information for them, but it really isn’t information they can use. They can’t change what they find out, they can’t help, and they can’t do much more than muddle.

In that opening meeting, before I take their money, I warn them that they’re not going to like what they learn. But they make the same mistake they made getting to this place: they think they know better than the person with the experience, the person giving them the advice.

This is where it helps to be emotionally cold. Because I really don’t care if the information hurts them. I really don’t care if they tear up or get angry at me—unless they try to trash my place. I don’t even care if they sue me, because they always lose.

The only time I ever lie to them is when they ask me if I’ve ever researched someone from my past.

“Yeah,” I say, with an air of sadness. That way, they think we’re kindred spirits. That way, I have the credibility to convince a few of them to turn away.

I suppose it’s not a complete lie. The reason I know how to research what happens to relatively anonymous families on a completely different planet so far from here that time bends is because I started to research my own family.

Got far enough to realize that Tom raised Austin and never remarried. Didn’t look any further, though. Didn’t bother with the things I’d do later, like arrest reports and rehab files. Didn’t look at school records or bank accounts. Didn’t examine the genealogy and figure out if I had any grandchildren or great-grandchildren or if the line died out with the kid who waved bye-bye that fateful night.

My rationale? If I did know, it would make no difference in my life. And since it would make no difference, why expend the energy in the search?

I am an enclosed being of one, a person who is completely different than the messy and sloppy drunk who started on this journey.

I really don’t like her, and I don’t like to think about her.

So I don’t.

***

The second big change in my life came when Astra Lin-Wonle paid for an hour of my time to explain the death situation.

I hadn’t known who she was when she sent me the hefty upfront fee. Just another name—and, I assumed—just another executive. I didn’t research her—she hadn’t paid enough yet—and I forgot about her.

She just became a name on my automated calendar, a name that got attached to a person the moment she arrived at my door.

She was small and dark-haired, with black eyes and high cheekbones, and a nose that didn’t fit her face. Her chin was narrow and made her look slightly feral, accenting the intelligence that I would later learn was as formidable as mine.

She wore a black cape over black slacks. The entire outfit looked dramatic and yet professional. Her small feet were encased in small black shoes that seemed impractical for life in this city. Every part of her clothing glistened and shined and seemed like she hadn’t just put it on, she had also dusted it with something to make it seem like it was newer than new.

The automated door to my office let her in at the appropriate time, about fifteen minutes before the appointment. She waited in the tiny antechamber, which allowed me to do a full body scan for weapons and a current background check to make sure there were no outstanding warrants or other criminal details in her history.

When the check came back, listing her as the head coroner for the entire city, I froze, all kinds of possibilities running through my mind. I had no idea why she wanted to hire me, but she’d been in that job for nearly twenty-five years, so she wasn’t one of those bamboozled execs. Maybe one of them did something bad, and they had my information on them.

Her position made it impossible to turn her away. If I did, I’d be ruminating over what she wanted for months, maybe years, afterward. Yes, sometimes I could be obsessive. That was also part of my makeup.

Since she was an official, though, and I was leery of officials (mostly because of some of my drunken adventures), I gave my office a quick once over. It was clean enough. Two chairs, about four feet apart. Mine had wide arms so that I could activate all kinds of recording and emergency backup systems with the touch of a finger.

The systems were a bit old-fashioned, mostly because I wasn’t born here. I could’ve had implants put in that would have attached me to all kinds of systems, but when the implants were offered, I was still drinking and thought maybe the government wanted to control me.

Now, I know the government is too busy to control anyone, and I vaguely regret the decision. Not enough to get the implants, mind you, but enough to consider it from time to time.

I unlocked the door between the antechamber and my office without getting out of my chair. The door swung open, and she entered in a wave of perfume that seemed to cover something sharper, another earthier scent.

She looked at me oddly, maybe expecting some kind of nicety. I don’t traffic in niceties. I waved a hand at the chair.

“Sit,” I said.

She hesitated, apparently not used to being ordered about.

I didn’t move. Nor did I speak again. Either she would sit or she would ask a question. I hoped for sitting, because the questioners were always trouble.

Finally, she squared her shoulders and eased into the chair.

I waited.

When she realized I wasn’t going to speak, she said, “I understand you can dig through a massive amount of information in a very short time.”

Whatever I had expected her to say, it wasn’t that.

I didn’t nod or encourage her, though. I continued to wait.

“I have a project—if you can call it that—which needs someone like you. The city will pay you at your going rates, which,” she said, as if she couldn’t trust me (and maybe she couldn’t), “I have already investigated.”

“I don’t work for governments,” I said.

“Well, this really isn’t a government job so much as a government favor,” she said.

Despite myself, I was interested. “I’m willing to listen,” I said.

She looked at me oddly, but I wasn’t about to agree to listen, only to find out that there was some kind of confidential nightmare thing I had agreed to just by opening my ears.

“Okay.” She sighed. “Forgive me if I tell you something you already know.”

I nodded just once, hoping that encouraged her to continue.

“We have a lot of transients in this city, and they are unusual.” It felt like she was beginning a settled speech.

That I did know, clearly. I built my business on them.

“A number of people manage to forge their identity before they get on the shuttles that bring them here.” She watched me, maybe thinking I would be surprised.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew that almost as well as I knew my own name. A few of those unfortunates had come to me, trying to figure out a way to recapture the life they had abandoned. They couldn’t, of course. And I really had no inclination to help them.

“A lot of them die here,” she said, her gaze on mine.

I started. That I did not expect, although it made sense.

“Suicide?” I asked because that makes sense to me, too. The despair I’ve seen in my work has often been deep and dark.

I’ve often suggested that those who go to an even darker place after hearing news of their family get some kind of professional help. I mean, after all, they can afford me, so they should be able to afford a therapist, counsellor, religious leader, or someone who can assist them in figuring out how to deal with the situation they find themselves in.

I might be emotionally cold, but I know that having a lot of clients die on my watch is bad for business. Besides, people need help. I got some, finally, when I realized that drinking yourself to death wasn’t as much fun as it was cracked up to be.

“Some commit suicide, yes,” she said, “but most of the suicides identify themselves for us. It’s part of putting their affairs in order.”

That made sense to me. I met a lot of those people. Finding out what happened to their family was part of putting their affairs in order as well.

She seemed frustrated that I wasn’t asking follow-up questions. Apparently, she was usually as tight-lipped as I was.

She folded her hands on her lap. Her hands were not manicured, which made sense now. She was one of the few people in this city who actually used those hands for some kind of labor. Hers involved bodies and chemicals and investigations. Even if she used some kind of device to peek under the skin, she still had to handle that skin. Move it, change it, shove it into some kind of bag. The city didn’t let robots do that—some bad public thing happened a while ago that made people believe they were not respected after death—and the city made the wrong kind of change: the kind that made work harder for the actual humans without really solving the problem.

“We need your help with some categories of unsolved,” Lin-Wonle said primly.

Maybe she was being deliberately vague. Maybe she was trying to force me to ask questions. If that was the case, then it was working.

“What do you mean, categories of unsolved?”

She inclined her head a little, as if she didn’t want to elucidate. But I waited again, and this time it took her only a fraction of a second to say,

“Some deaths,” she said. “They’re haunting.”

Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t that.

“I’m retiring soon,” she said. “And, I would like…”

She gave me an odd smile, one that was uncomfortable and didn’t quite reach her eyes. It made her feral little face softer and sadder, if that was possible.

“I would like,” she said a bit more firmly, “to know who they were and why this happened to them.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” I said. I wasn’t complaining. But if she was trying to resolve an entire career in a few months, and she had hundreds of names for me, what she was asking wasn’t possible—no matter how much she paid me.

“It might be,” she said. “But you wouldn’t do all of it.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“We don’t have the resources to research the names,” she said.

“Don’t have the resources?” I asked. “And yet you’re going to pay me?”

“I’m not referring to financial resources,” she said. “I’m talking about systemic resources. We’d have to set up a system to do the work that you already do. We don’t have the resources for that.”

That made sense to me. It took me a long time to figure out how to find information across years and distance.

“Once you find out the person’s real name,” she said, “we might be able to take the investigation from there. If it’s worthwhile.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you have me research the name, doesn’t that automatically make it worthwhile? After all, you will have invested my time and your money into this.”

She gave me a small smile. I couldn’t tell if it was condescending or not. “I’ve already invested time into these people. There’s something about each one of them that has caught me, held me. I want to find out who they are.”

I stared at her, the lines in her face that time and stress had created, the dark wedge of exhaustion under her eyes that looked permanent, the way she held herself as if her shoulders were so tense that they hadn’t relaxed in more than a decade.

I usually did not understand my clients. I never figured out why anyone who abandoned friends and family wanted to find out what had happened to them, across time and distance, impossible to resolve.

There was no logic in it, and the emotion often felt false. They couldn’t have cared, could they? Hadn’t they felt the relief that I had when I realized I never had to look in Tom’s face again or feel that thread of revulsion at Austin’s grasping hands against my skin?

If they cared, they wouldn’t have left. That was the logic. The human logic, the one that the man on the ship had tried to appeal to when he looked at drunk me and told me that I was about to make a decision I couldn’t take back.

I lacked that small human element. I never really cared about anyone except maybe myself, and even that was in doubt. After all, I hadn’t treated myself well.

Some would argue that I still wasn’t treating myself well. I had a small apartment, an interesting job, but I stayed away from people, I did not do much beyond the basic self care. I knew no one would care if I disappeared again. I wasn’t even sure I cared. I certainly didn’t care about my future past that day, that night, and maybe the following week.

But this woman, this Astra Lin-Wonle, she cared. The deaths, the bodies she had found, the bodies she couldn’t identify, they haunted her. Haunted was a word that interested me. It suggested so much more than a need-to-know.

This was an obsession to know, and I almost asked her why she had elevated these people, this group of nameless dead, into something that caught her attention and wouldn’t let her go.

But I didn’t ask. Instead, I said, “How many are there?”

“Two hundred,” she said.

The number startled me. For some reason, I expected it to be smaller. Yet she had said categories. As if people could be placed into neat groups, groups that she expected to file away in neat spaces.

These people, this group of nameless dead, had not fit at all.

“I have had hundreds,” she said. “Hundreds of false names, people who aren’t who they say they are. But they are usually easy to resolve. They make mistakes. They booked passage with their real name, or they kept their real identification from wherever they arrived from. Or a holo of family, with time, date, and location built in.”

I’d seen all of those things when I researched for clients. Sometimes they would come into this office and sit down and slide an artifact at me.

This is all I have left of that life, they would say, as if the item—the holo, the identification, a ring, a necklace, a bit of fabric—was the most precious thing in the universe.

Now, after hearing her, the number—the two hundred—surprised me in a different way. It was larger than expected. If she had categories of dead, and most came with false names but real artifacts, then she should only have a tiny few who had nothing at all.

“These ‘categories,’” I said. “They arrived with nothing then?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “Some had artifacts, but not their artifacts. Others had names, and the names were a tangled maze of connections that, at the root, had nothing to do with the person at all. And some had nothing. No clothes, no identification, no identifying marks, and nothing that made them recognizable to anyone.”

She shook her head, the lines around her eyes growing deeper.

“You’d think,” she said, “that someone would have seen them. Someone would have wondered about them. Someone would have cared.”

“People don’t care,” I blurted, and she looked at me, seeing me for the first time.

Her head tilted. “Is this why you do the job? Because you care?”

I barked out a laugh. It was the opposite.

I did this job because I didn’t care. Because it didn’t break my heart to see another woman sob when she realized her abandoned children had suffered after her disappearance. It didn’t break my heart to watch a man look at the holo of his so-called beloved marrying another person.

I had begun to suspect there was no heart to break.

“No,” I said. “I don’t really care.”

“Except for the money,” she said, nodding.

That probably made sense to her, considering the question I had asked. I just didn’t like doing work for no pay. Money was how I kept score, nothing more.

Score for what—in what game—I wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. The money mattered only as a number, not as something avaricious. If I had found a way to keep score with shoes, I would have used shoes.

“Not the money,” I said. For some reason, I felt the need to correct the record with her.

But I did not know how to explain more. How do you tell someone who cares too much that you care too little? I wasn’t sure she could even understand.

“The knowledge, then,” she said, trying to categorize me.

“The challenge,” I said, giving her a category. It wasn’t the correct category, but it would do for now.

She grunted, the kind of response people gave when they had no idea what someone else was talking about, but they had to make some kind of noise in acknowledgement. The sideways glance she gave me was measuring as if she couldn’t quite figure me out.

“You said someone would have cared,” I said. “Someone should have remembered them. And that is probably true. But not necessarily here. A person can stay anonymous forever here.”

Her eyes narrowed. She was still taking my measure.

“These cases of yours,” I said, “they’re all suicides?”

“Very few,” she said. “And even those I’m not certain of. They seem like suicides. Suicides make sense, until you understand that suicides follow a pattern. Unless they accidentally overdose or do something that kills them suddenly, suicides prepare. Many of them even practice.”

Something I didn’t know, then.

“Very few of these people prepared and almost none of them practiced.” She ran a hand along the seam of her black slacks, smoothing them out, even though they didn’t need it. Precision and just a bit of nerves.

These cases meant even more to her than she was saying.

“What if I’m not able to help you?” I asked.

“You’ll get paid,” she said. “We don’t pay by the job. We’ll pay by the time you invest. We’ll buy a set number of hours each week. We will, of course, want to see evidence that you worked those hours.”

“I work for myself for a reason,” I said. “It is so no one keeps track of me or my time.”

“Then how would you like us to pay you?” she asked. “There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to find out anything that can help us.”

“I don’t give that kind of guarantee anyway,” I said. “You’ll pay me like any other client. I will try until I find something or until you decide you’ve invested enough money. As my contact information says, I want a retainer upfront per case, and then I will work on that case until I see it through.”

“We have two hundred,” she said. “You can’t do them all at once.”

That was true. I couldn’t. If I did, the government would be my only client.

“When do you retire?” I asked.

“In five years,” she said.

She was a planner, a woman who knew what she wanted and knew it took time to get whatever it was. For her, five years was “soon.”

“Give me five per month,” I said. “Oldest cases first, since those are the ones that might take more time than the others.”

“All right,” she said. “What if you can do more per month?”

“Then I’ll take work from my other clients.” I didn’t quite smile at her, but I tried to soften my words. “I’m not going to work solely for you.”

She let out a shaky breath. That was the second sign I’d seen of nerves, the first being that movement along the seam of her perfectly creased pants.

“I can’t give you the ones that frustrate me the most?” she asked.

“No.” I wasn’t being cruel. I needed an order that I could understand, not some vague emotional reaction that she was having. “Oldest to newest. I will report to you as each case closes or at the end of every month if I can’t find anything.”

“What if I don’t want to work that way?” she asked.

I opened my hands just a little. “You’re free to find someone else.”

There was no one else. I was the only person that I knew of who did this kind of work—in this city, anyway. En route to the so-called Gateway of the Future, maybe there were other people like me, but I doubted it.

I would have heard, or tripped over their work. Because, as far as I was concerned, their work was always in the past.

She sighed softly. Then she nodded.

“You’re going to be a contractor with the city,” she said. “That means there will be a lot of documentation up front. I’ll do as much of it as I can and give you the rest to fill out.”

“I’ve worked for the city before,” I said. “I’m on file.”

She looked surprised. “I thought you were a lone wolf.”

“A handful of people used city funds to make sure that new hires were who they said they were. Those investigations couldn’t go through the usual channels.” Because they had been politically sensitive. One of them had even involved the mayor.

Lin-Wonle frowned.

“Put my name into your system,” I said. “My personal name, not the business name. You’ll find all you need. Then give me the first five names.”

“How about ten, and you can move on if you—”

“Five,” I said. “I have rules. You’ll need to follow them, or I’ll cancel our agreement.”

City work tended to creep into other things until it took over your life. That had happened to me once.

It was never happening again.

“You drive a hard bargain,” she said.

I almost said, Especially when I don’t want to do the work. But that statement wasn’t really true. I was curious. Lin-Wonle seemed competent enough to do everything on her own.

Cases that stymied her would challenge me.

I hadn’t lied to her about that.

I hadn’t lied to her about anything.

And that in itself was unusual.

***

The work wasn’t as hard as Astra Lin-Wonle made it sound. The first five cases took me less than a week. The second five only a few days. I wasn’t really investigating so much as organizing information, discovering identities, tracing journeys, things I normally did.

All ten of the cases had been execs who had come here on similar transports to the one that had brought me. Once I had a real name, I was to turn that over to Lin-Wonle, which I did.

She seemed happy enough.

We worked that way for six months before I hit my first wall. One of the cases she sent me involved a body found outside a dive bar near the port, a dive bar that no longer existed.

The body was male and badly beaten. He had no identifying marks that Lin-Wonle could find, and nothing in the area around him gave any clue as to his identity.

He had been dumped.

Lin-Wonle did give me his DNA, though. She had processed it through her usual databases and had come up dry.

I had several other databases that she couldn’t use. The city had deals to share information with other governments all over the planet, but couldn’t afford deals with various sector governments. I didn’t have to participate in that kind of cross-agency cooperation. I was a single operator who was trying to help people.

When I approached agencies that way, most of them allowed me access or gave me assistance that they wouldn’t give Lin-Wonle, not without some interagency b.s.

Then there were the databases that I had found over the years, the ones that had been abandoned as their organizations failed or moved to a new system or simply disappeared. I was working from the present to the past as measured by one long trip of an executive space cruiser. I had a lot of touchpoints because over the years, I had had a lot of clients.

The DNA was a great starting point, but it required a methodical search, one that took more time than the kinds of searches I was usually doing for Lin-Wonle. I had to peer into distant family connections, trying to find something that this body had in common somewhere within range of this particular space port.

I was making an assumption: I assumed he had arrived through the port. I had to, at least at first, because my databases all focused on the past.

I figured if his trip was supposed to originate here, then he’d be a local and Lin-Wonle would have information on him, somewhere. But she didn’t either.

Just the body, dumped, behind a no-longer existent dive bar.

I remembered the bar. I went there shortly after I arrived. It was a filthy cubby in a row of even dirtier storefronts, the kind that people expected near the port. Most of the goods sold there had been familiar ones to the folks who just got off the ships, items that couldn’t be found as easily away from the port.

Of course, anyone who went into one of those places paid a premium for whatever it was that their heart desired.

Me, I desired whiskey, which was available elsewhere in the city. I just didn’t know it yet.

When I squeezed myself inside, saw the sad customers sitting at the five round tables, and the even sadder customers sitting at the bar itself, I almost stopped and left.

But I didn’t. I went to the bar, startled to discover a human behind it, a hard-faced woman with even harder eyes.

I ordered a whiskey and she said, “We don’t got that here.”

I knew she was lying. The guy next to me had a glassful and wasn’t really nursing it.

I eyed it, then looked at her and she shook her head just a little.

“Look, honey. I’ve seen you around just enough to know you’re living nearby. So lemme give you a tip.” She leaned in front of the bottles of booze on the wall, either to block them or so that I could see them. I wasn’t sure which. “What we got here—what anyone has down at the docks—you can’t afford. You want to drink yourself into oblivion, drink downtown or in the comfort of your own home. Here, you get all the crazies who just got off the boat and you get to pay extra to watch them tear up the place. A lot extra.”

I didn’t move. I wanted a drink badly enough that I was going to ignore her. And she knew it.

So she waved a hand at me. “Get outta here. Because I ain’t serving you.”

And the drunk guy next to me slurred, “And I ain’t sharing.”

I’d never been denied service in any kind of bar before. It felt odd. It caught my attention the way that not much else had. Maybe because it didn’t feel personal. Or maybe because a woman I hadn’t known had shown me a kindness.

A lot of people had shown me a kindness since I left the family, kindnesses I didn’t deserve.

She was busy with another customer—talking and pretending to laugh—by the time I finally managed to move. I left that bar, and thought about that incident every single time I passed it over the years, until the bar vanished entirely, to be replaced by some automated hair-cutting service.

I wondered where she had gone, I wondered where the new drinkers went to drown their sorrows, and I wondered how the hell I had gone from craving whiskey late at night to not having a drink in more than thirty years.

The bar was a turning point. Not of the and I will never drink again kind, but of the finally noticing that other people still existed kind.

Somehow, I went from there to here, investigating part of a death that occurred behind that bar long before it closed. A death that, truth be told, could have been just as empty and meaningless as my own would have been.

I wondered if the bar was a clue. I wondered if the neighborhood was a clue.

I wondered if the cops had even bothered to look at all of the clues.

I didn’t really want to do the local investigatory work, not yet anyway, so I put it off. I didn’t have to finish this job to get the next five. Lin-Wonle wanted the work finished before she quit, so she continued to hand me cases whether I’d helped her with the others or not.

I kept investigating Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, as I had privately taken to calling him, as I fulfilled my contract with the other new cases.

Just because Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy ended up at the port didn’t mean that he had come through on any ship, and certainly didn’t mean that he had come via one of the longer distance ships.

But I was making that assumption. I figured Lin-Wonle had looked at the local angle. (If not, she should have.) I had one investigatory problem that I didn’t confess to her.

My databases all came from worlds that fed the executive tract here, not from other worlds that ships still traveled to. Some of those worlds sent people back here on various ships after they had worked through their contracts.

By then, those people understood time dilation, and they knew they would lose years again. But they usually didn’t care.

I didn’t have information from those places. I didn’t have databases to tap or agreements with the current governments of those places. Nor had I ever investigated their historical databases.

I didn’t want to make an agreement with those governments and/or the corporations that sent their executives into a bright, unknown future. Communication over long distances was a pain in the butt, and, quite frankly, the coroner’s office wasn’t paying me enough to volunteer to have my butt pained.

After six months, I set Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy aside, figuring I’d come back to that investigation.

And then I tripped on another of the files that Lin-Wonle had given me. It came—as they all did—complete with holographic images of the deceased.

I had looked at the first three images, back when she started giving me the cases, and I had decided that holographic life-sized images of corpses did not belong anywhere in my office.

I had switched off the automation in the files that Lin-Wonle had given me, so bruised and bloodied dead people weren’t prone across my workspace. But I discovered that I needed to see their faces.

And just as with Lin-Wonle, the nameless ones—the ones it seemed like I couldn’t solve—bothered me.

The second one wasn’t a guy. It was a woman, older like me. No real identifying marks.

Like me.

The image had risen from the file—her lined face, her cloudy sunken eyes, and her body, from the armpits upward. She was naked, of course, because the image I saw had been developed just before the autopsy.

Lin-Wonle had edited those images, because they were part of her reports. The images were actually vids that showed the entire autopsy, from the external examination of the corpse to the internal, should it be necessary.

She had accidentally left one of those once, and I managed to shut it down before it got too gruesome. The things she did for her job made me appreciate mine all the more.

I dug into the file she sent me about this woman. It said precisely nothing. One of the attending officers thought maybe the dead woman worked at the same dive bar as Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, confirming what I knew about the place. It actually had human employees.

But I also knew that she had not been the woman I had seen.

Most of the bars in this city didn’t have human employees. Just robots and automated serving procedures. It kept the pour counts accurate in the mixed drinks, but did add a certain blandness to the alcoholic offerings all over the city.

Before I dug into her file, I looked up the bar.

It was called, unoriginally, The Watering Hole. There were places in every single city all over the sector with a similar name, although if I were naming businesses—particularly dive bars—I would never voluntarily use the word “hole” in conjunction with them.

Or maybe that was a marketing tool. Because dive bars really weren’t for the casual drinker. They were for the down-on-their-luck sad sacks who wanted a safe place to drink, no questions asked.

I paused in my reminiscences, thinking about the handful of places I’d visited as I fled my family so very long ago.

Twice I had gotten off the ship and twice I had reboarded it. I took one look around whatever port city we had landed in and I figured I didn’t want to stay there.

I hadn’t wanted to stay here either, but I had because that was the trip I had paid for, not because I liked the location.

But I vividly recalled two other Watering Holes at both ports. Same kind of place—narrow slice of real estate with only one obvious door. In one case, the door had been so grimy, I hadn’t wanted to touch it. In the other, I had paused, remembering that I didn’t have a lot of money and the booze was free on the ship.

In fact, it was the familiarity of the look and name of the Watering Hole that had brought me to it here, all those years ago.

I sat back down, shoved both files aside with the swipe of a hand, and started digging.

There were a lot of businesses—and I mean a lot—that operated on all the executive cruiser stops along the way. I had never given those businesses a lot of thought, but I did now.

Because something was itching at me.

I’d never dug into the companies before. I hadn’t even investigated the personnel files, because my clients were known. They wanted to know about their families, and their families clearly didn’t work on these ships.

I almost asked Lin-Wonle about the companies, and then decided not to. I had no idea how much money these companies brought into the city, but I would have wagered it was a fair amount.

Maybe that was why she had come to me. Maybe the nameless dead weren’t as nameless as they appeared. Maybe she needed someone outside her system to investigate the other dead.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have put more of those cases into my pile? So far, I’d only had two that were even remotely difficult.

I did not know, and didn’t want to guess. Her motives mattered less to me than the work itself.

I actually did like challenges. And I had found one here.

***

Forty-seven starship corporations carried passengers across the sector, along the route that I had happened into one drunk night. Forty-seven starship corporations, none of which shared the same corporate DNA.

I checked.

The company that had ferried me from one life to another had no complaints lodged against it, except for the obvious fold-ins. Those were usually easily dismissed because the company had been folded into other suits, usually against some bigger corporation. That corporation was the one that the person who had lost their entire life in exchange for a crapload of money often got sued for misrepresenting the work.

I examined a few of the lawsuits. The corporations always had the proper documentation. The starship company’s part in the case always got tossed out. Several judges—different ones in different jurisdictions—all informed the poor, hapless executive that courts did not have to protect someone against signing a bad contract unless the contract was egregious, which this wasn’t.

There was plenty of evidence that these executive schlubs were supposed to get educated about their journeys long before travel commenced.

Most of them simply chose not to take advantage of the opportunities.

I lost several days to deep-diving into about thirty of the forty-seven corporations. Those were easy to investigate. Corporate documents all properly filed. Information at the ready. Lawsuits mostly won, and those that weren’t required them to pay another crapload of money.

After every single crapload, those thirty companies would alter their practices, their contracts, and their behaviors to make sure that whoever climbed onto one of the ships did so fully educated—or at least, had every opportunity to become fully educated.

The remaining seventeen? That was where it all got interesting.

Seven of them were as old as time itself—or so it seemed. They were the granddaddies of all the corporations, and many of their practices were grandfathered in.

I had to investigate them because some of the oldest cases that Lin-Wonle had given me had involved those seven corporations.

They were either out of business now or sold and absorbed by one of the legit corporations that were easy to investigate.

The remaining ten presented me with a small mountain of issues.  I found more corporate name changes than someone escaping a criminal past. Each corporation took me down more dead ends than I expected. They seemed to be hiding something, but what I couldn’t tell.

I got very wrapped up in the overall investigation of the corporations. I like research. I like information. I like finding things out.

It frustrates me when information gets hidden from me, as someone was doing here. So I searched even more, taking the time out to investigate each group of names Lin-Wonle sent me.

Truth be told, I was hoping I’d find another difficult-to-identify nameless. Because I figured if I had three points of a triangle, I would have enough information to make a difference. That wasn’t exactly true, but it felt true.

I figured it might open a few more doors, at any rate.

Instead, I spent weeks on the corporations, until I realized that one of them ran more than star cruisers. One of them rented out properties in the ports of various cities, ports where the star cruisers stopped.

Several of those rental sites rented to Watering Holes in the various cities. Not here any longer, though. Not for years.

I felt like I was onto something now. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was searching.

I stopped everything else I was doing and dug into the history of the Watering Hole here.

Not that there was much. Twenty years ago, the city changed its policy regarding businesses around the port.

The city decided to take over the entire area. Instead of buying out the businesses at the going rates, the city used some of its eminent domain laws to offer a token fee and take over the entire area.

Except for the block with the Watering Hole.

There, the city simply reclaimed all of the businesses and replaced them with tiny automated shops like the hairstyling salon.

And for the life of me, I couldn’t find out why.

***

Lin-Wonle never sent me the latest files. She always insisted on dropping them off. Sometimes she told me her history with the deceased, not that I cared, and sometimes she stepped in as if she was checking on my progress, as if she was my boss.

I never answered her questions on those occasions. I was always too annoyed to say much more than hello or thanks.

But the drop-off after I had used all of my tricks to find out what was going on with that block, I invited her into my office.

She came wearing a gray version of the cape and slacks that she had worn at that very first meeting more than a year before.

I waved a hand at one of my chairs, sat down in the other, and said without any kind of greeting to soften my words, “I need you to look through city records for me. I can’t access the information that I need.”

She looked surprised. Of the sixty-plus names she had sent me so far, I’d only delayed on two. She had told me the month before that she was pleased with my work.

She had even implied that some names would be impossible to find.

I knew she was heading toward her retirement, and from her perspective, getting answers on most of these cases was better than no answers at all.

But that wasn’t my perspective at all.

“What do you need?” she asked in a tone I’d never heard from her before. It was carefully neutral.

“The Watering Hole,” I said. “Two of the bodies you sent me were found behind it.”

“Yes, one of the portside bars that the city closed down years ago. That area was a lot scarier thirty years ago. If anyone went down there, they had a good chance of being mugged or beaten or worse.” She folded her hands over her lap. “I don’t remember this particular bar. It wasn’t even the worst offender. That was—”

“I don’t care,” I said. I hated chatty people. I thought she had known that. “I’m interested in this bar and the block it was on. The city reclaimed that block but didn’t pay the corporation for taking the property. The city just took it, and I want to know why.”

“I’ll look it up for you to be sure,” she said, “but if I remember correctly, the city seized a lot of businesses known for illicit activity.”

“What kind of illicit activity?” I asked.

“The kind you would expect near the port,” she said. “Mostly selling banned and illegal substances.”

“Mostly,” I said. “What else?”

“That I don’t recall,” she said. “I do remember the Clean Up The Port campaign went on for nearly a decade.”

Then she squinted at me.

“I thought you were in business at that point,” she said. “Surely, you remember this.”

“I usually don’t care what happens in the city,” I said.

“But you do now,” she said.

“You want all the names or not?” I asked, maybe a little more sharply than I should have.

“I do,” she said, sounding surprised. “This will get them for me?”

How the hell should I know? I almost said, but I had enough common sense not to alienate her too badly.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m wondering why the information wasn’t easily available in the first place.”

The smile she gave me was condescending. It made me regret refraining from snapping at her a moment ago.

“We’re a port city, Gateway to the Future, as they like to call us. The port shuttles people off-planet on business, yes, but many just come here to visit our attractions, see the various resorts and natural wonders. That’s a good 75% of our income.” She added that in her didactic tone as if I should’ve known all of that as well.

I’d seen the ads, of course, and wondered what kind of idiot came to a place just to see something that could be easily recreated with a full virtual experience. Hell, some of those experiences came with sense impressions—water droplets pelting the viewer (or seeming to) while they were looking at a waterfall.

Something in my look must have caught her because she gave me one of those derisive smiles.

“Oh,” she said. “Such things are beneath you.”

“You’re telling me that the city believes if someone found out that the port was a hotbed of criminal activity, they wouldn’t come here?” I asked, trying to keep the incredulousness from my tone. “Even though that’s been how port cities have operated since time immemorial?”

She shrugged. “I don’t run the city government. I just work for it.”

“So the information was buried, lost, hidden,” I said. “Pretty well, too.”

Although I probably could have found it if I had been willing to break into the city’s systems. I had figured talking to Lin-Wonle was easier.

I was beginning to regret that decision.

“Do you still want the specific information?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

***

She brought me the information a week later on a small protected network device. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to share any of this stuff, not that it mattered.

What she had were city records of the decision to buy out the area, along with the properties to be confiscated because the illegal activities there rose above the 50% level, whatever that meant.

The city was good at hiding its sins, and I didn’t care enough to ferret them out.

Instead, I pursued another path.

I looked at arrest records going back half a century. At first, I didn’t find a lot. Exactly what Lin-Wonle had told me. Illegal substances, history of muggings, beatings, and the occasional homicide—with an easily identified victim.

Then, from a handful of records, forty years old, I found a criminal code listing that had no corresponding description to the current criminal code.

Just a series of numbers and letters that looked like they referred to some law or another, but nothing I could find.

And the hell of it was, a lot of them came from the block around the Watering Hole. A handful originated at The Watering Hole itself.

Finally, something I could easily research. Laws that were on the books but either got scrubbed or changed never really went away.

I had to dig to find the code, but I did.

And it made my non-existent heart hurt.

***

Two cases hogged all of the attention. These cases occurred nearly 100 years ago when the Gateway to the Future sounded more like the Gateway to Hell. The city was smaller then, the port even more dangerous than it was now.

Andries Schweinzinger, scion of the Schweinzinger clan, one of the city’s founding families, was found staggering down the street near the Watering Hole. He was naked, his hands bound behind his back, his hair nearly gone, his tongue black.

He was shouting that he’d been a victim and some local bypasser, someone who didn’t stick around, used one of the kiosks (now gone) to contact the police. They arrived surprisingly quickly and one of them was conscientious enough to film the entire encounter, maybe because she recognized Schweinzinger.

He was clearly on something. Eyes crazed, drool on the side of his mouth. He kept repeating that he’d been kidnapped and they were going to sell him to the highest bidder.

Because he was rich, he got some special treatment and some vilification in the local media. The media thought, like the police, that he was hallucinating. The substance he had taken should have rendered him unconscious, but one of the doctors who treated him claimed that Schweinzinger had built up a tolerance to the drug over the past year or two. Apparently, it was highly available at the time and was being used by the inevitable partiers.

Schweinzinger found himself the butt of jokes, but he hired a good attorney who was fighting the case everywhere, from the legal side to the publicity nightmare.

It looked like Schweinzinger had made up the accusation until a woman screamed her way out of the Watering Hole, naked, terrible bruises on her wrists where—she said—she managed to collapse her hands enough to get them out of restraints.

She was at the opposite end of the social strata from Schweinzinger, and her name would never have appeared anywhere if it wasn’t for the bizarre history she shared with him.

Lilly Wright was young and pretty and exceptionally smart. Graduated at the top of her class three days before and had spent the post-graduation ceremony partying. Her friends claimed she left them somewhere near the ports, but no one thought much about it.

Until she screamed as she fled the Watering Hole, claiming they were going to sell her to the highest bidder.

The city had no trouble finding people to blame. The names meant nothing to me, and I really didn’t care about them at all. The charging documents didn’t use the codes that I had found, and I wanted to know why these cases appeared when I dug for the numbers.

It took time, but I found my answer.

The cases changed the laws here. Turned out that there was a kidnapping ring working the docks. They’d take a young, bright, competent person, drug them, and sell their “contract” to someone on one of the many ships going through, taking the victim to places far from here, places from which—someone ominously said—there was no way to return.

When I saw that, I sat down. Hard. I’d been pacing my office, listening, looking, reading, and watching until that point. But places from which there was no return. That was anywhere in this sector, provided the ship traveled far enough fast enough.

Hell, my business was based on people being unable to return. The fact that I could answer their questions simply meant that the answers they sought were some part of some historical record somewhere. That was it.

I never vouched for accuracy. I just did what I could, and usually people left thinking they knew what was what.

The kidnapping laws had to change to accommodate the nightmares taking place at the port. Because if the kidnappings had been successful, there would have been nothing to charge. Schweinzinger and Wright would have been off-planet, and nothing could have brought them back.

No one would have known what had happened to them.

So the law changed to incorporate attempted kidnapping with some involuntary servitude laws to ratchet up the crimes from serious to so damn serious that whoever tried it would get life in prison, which was, for here, ironically, off-planet, just not far enough away to cause any time ripples.

Schweinzinger became the poster child for the law, but Wright was the one who wrestled it into being. It became her life’s work, making sure that no one was ever trafficked out of this city again.

She managed to clean up the port more or less, except for one aspect.

A lot of people arrived here, fully dressed and not drugged in any way, but impoverished and terrified, claiming they had been kidnapped at the beginning of their journey, lightyears and decades from where they had started.

They’d been drinking or partying or in the wrong bar at the wrong time, and somehow, they woke up on a ship days later when they were too far out to return home.

The city found enough evidence of a crime to use that code to charge ship owners and ship workers with enhanced kidnapping. But the kidnapping ring was larger than ships and ship workers. They all claimed they were doing it at the behest of one faraway corporation or another.

But there was a major legal issue.

The actual kidnappings occurred off-world, decades ago in real time. The original kidnappers might even have been dead since most of them never traveled on the ships. Those folks just got paid by the able bodies they’d provided to the underhanded shipping companies who brought workers to far-flung places.

Turned out that some of the faraway corporations believed it was easier to buy people than it was to pay lifetime contracts. The difference in upfront money was staggering. People could be sold illegally much more cheaply than entire families could be bought off.

The legal issues got more complicated the deeper I looked. There were the jurisdictional suits, the claims that the law sought to regulate behavior that the city had no right to regulate. They could prevent suspected criminal enterprises from using the port, but they couldn’t legislate behavior on other planets, behavior that had often happened before any of the attorneys, juries, or judges had been born.

The law was quietly abandoned. The city used the old kidnapping statutes on the books to handle cases like Schweinzinger’s—of which there were fewer and fewer as the area around the port got cleaned up. As for people who claimed they’d been kidnapped elsewhere and brought here, there were informal inquiries, halfway houses, places they could go, often getting protected refugee status if they wanted to go that route.

Most, though, just abandoned ship here and fled. The people running the ships never did pursue them, or rather, never pursued them once they got here.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, feeling pieces fall into place. I finally understood why some of the people who came to me seemed so very desperate to find out about their families.

Those people hadn’t stupidly signed some contract without reading it. They’d been taken, brought here, and knew they couldn’t go back.

They had not only come to me for answers, they had probably come to me for comfort as well.

Whoops.

But this was something Lin-Wonle should have known. Except that the codes had vanished from the record.

Unless Lin-Wonle had been a student of history, she wouldn’t have known about the law. It was quietly buried as a mistake.

If I was a different kind of person, I would have figured out why the law had been abandoned and information about it buried rather than some activists retooling it so that it would work better.

Very few people alive were old enough to know about this law. Very few.

But it caught me. I shut down all of my systems, stood, and went to the private part of my office.

I was shaking.

I trusted my memory. I had evidence of my own choice. I remembered how I felt around Austin and Tom. I remember how hard that ship employee had worked to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake.

But…

That moment at the Watering Hole bothered me. Both moments, at both Watering Holes, the other far from here.

The drinks are cheaper on the ship.

I had been easy—at least at that first port stop. It hadn’t taken much to force me to return to the ship.

But what about others? People who really wanted to escape? How had they been treated?

I would never know, but I could guess.

I let out a small breath of air and realized that I felt something. I felt something strongly enough that it actually filtered through every protection I had set up within myself.

I was furious.

I knew how hard the damn trip was for someone like me, someone who had no regrets.

I couldn’t quite imagine how hard it would be for someone who hadn’t wanted to come in the first place.

No wonder Lin-Wonle had seen so many suicides. No wonder people’s behaviors made no sense.

Particularly since most of them had no recourse.

I didn’t know, and I didn’t check, but I would wager that there was no real way to sue those shipping companies either for intentional harm. Since the crews rotated out, they could profess ignorance of what happened, and probably had.

I paced for a few minutes, wishing the unaccustomed emotion would go away.

It was staying. It made me want to punch something.

It made me want to go to the port and yell at someone.

It made me want to find a local bar and have a drink to calm down all the messy feelings.

I stopped.

I had been looking in the wrong databases.

I had been looking at people who had voluntarily taken ships away from their cushy homes.

I’d been looking at port records.

I needed to search missing person databases. Not here, but at the various points of origin.

I needed to find out who, if anyone, had disappeared from their homes.

***

Missing person databases are messy things. Most places keep them up for a few years, but if the missing person had been gone for a decade or more, the record got lost in the chum that was all crime for a location. Sure, they remained in the missing person database or whatever some place called that database, but no one looked, no one cared, no one really figured out what was going on.

It took me weeks to find the proper databases. I had to trace most of the ships, where they originated and where they were heading. The oldest records were extremely old, and in systems even my high-end research center couldn’t easily access.

It took me weeks to get more than 1,000 new databases into my system. By then, Lin-Wonle had given me more bodies. I solved those, but I did something I hadn’t thought of before.

I cross-referenced them.

Then I wished I hadn’t.

I cross-referenced most of the cases she had given me, and found a good half of them included people on the missing persons database.

But then, to give myself a foundation, I looked myself up.

And found that Tom had reported me missing as well.

What was worse was that he was one of those sad sacks who checked every few months to see if someone—anyone—was still following up on the case.

When I saw that, I actually left my office. I walked down two miles to the entertainment district and stopped just outside it.

I had been heading to get drunk.

There were two filthy benches near one of the venues. Bright lights flashed, the cobblestone sidewalk was littered with empties, some of them old enough to be encrusted in dirt.

No one cleaned up down here. The air even smelled foul—rotted food, sour beer, and a miasma of rancid smells that I couldn’t quite identify.

I still sat down.

I had to. My legs wouldn’t hold me.

The stupid son of a bitch had never remarried. He had raised our child, but he had never remarried.

Instead, he had tried to get the local authorities to search for me for years.

That stupid son of a bitch had actually loved me. Just like he said he had.

The problem was me. The problem had always been me. The problem would forever be me.

My lack of feeling, my unwillingness to learn how to be inside a family. My unwillingness to do the difficult things.

A drink would help. A drink at that very moment would put the feelings back where they belonged.

The messy anger. The even messier regret.

And the sorrow. Oh, dear god. There was sorrow underneath it all.

A sorrow I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying for most of my adult life.

***

I have no idea how long I ended up sitting there. I eventually stood up. I did not go into the entertainment district.

I did not buy a drink, then or ever.

I returned to the life I had built. The life I had chosen one drunken night so long ago. The life I said I preferred.

Two days later, when I felt as much like my old self as I probably ever would, I contacted Lin-Wonle. I invited her to my office.

When she came, I explained what I found.

The color drained from her skin, leaving it an ash-gray. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and didn’t move for the longest moment.

Then she squared her shoulders, sat up, and thanked me.

“We’re done now,” she said.

“But,” I said, “you said you had two hundred cases. We’re not there yet.”

“I know.” Her mouth moved in an attempt to smile. “Thank you. Thank you for answering my questions. I’ll put in for payment for the full two hundred cases.”

“I told you,” I said tightly, “it’s not about the money. It’s never been about the money.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s the challenge. And you rose to it.”

She left without saying good-bye. I received the overpayment a day later. I contacted the office to ask for a proper payment, one for the work I’d actually done, and I was told that she had retired, more abruptly than planned.

The acting coroner asked me if there was anything she could do for me. I said no, and severed the contact.

Then I sat for a long time in my single little office.

I could start a campaign. I could be the one to figure out who was coming in on these ships, who didn’t want to be on them, and who needed help adjusting. I could start some kind of program or reinstate one. I could see if I could get the city to designate them as something—not a refugee, but some category like that, so that they could get assistance.

But what good would it do? They’d had everything of value stolen from them. Their families, their futures, the world they had known. Nothing could repay that. Nothing could really help them.

Either they survived it, or they didn’t.

I survived it.

But I’m not sure my husband did. And I’m not going to look, not again. Looking back is what causes all the pain.

So I’m going to stay in the now. The ever-present now. That’s all we have, when it comes down to it. The moments. Passing, fleeting, wrapping in memories if we choose, or lost in what might happen, again if we choose.

Or we can stay here, doing what we do. Thinking only of the way the universe is, not the way it can be.

Changing things is for dreamers, and I most definitely am not one.

I used to like to think I was kidnapped. I don’t like to think that any longer.

Being kidnapped is worse. Much worse.

I chose to be here.

And I would choose it again, even knowing what I know.

No matter how much it breaks my non-existent heart.

 

___________________________________________

“The Nameless Dead” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Nameless Dead

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Canva

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

 

Some Thoughts On Building A Better World

I will never ever be allowed to lead a DEI session.

I am disqualified on several counts. I have common sense. I have a pragmatic understanding of the practical limitations of DEI initiatives (and thus won’t overstep those limits in a manner that destroys the credibility of the whole concept). And finally, I do not stand to benefit from prolonging the problem in any way.

These are fundamental problems with most DEI initiatives. The people offering them rarely have common sense, let alone understanding of just how far they can go and staying firmly on the right side of those limits. And I have a strong suspicion, which is shared by many on both sides of the political aisle, that most of the DEI change agents don’t want to actually solve the problem, if only because it would mean their funding drying up. You may be arguing that this is a very cynical and deeply unfair take, but the sheer pointlessness and counter-productivity of most DEI initiatives suggest that such programs are the province of academic dreamers rather than practical men.

But if I had to lead a DEI session, I would focus on three basic principles:

First, don’t be a jerk.

Second, give some grace.

Third, be a mature adult.

The first principle is a two-edged sword. On one side, it is perfectly fine to disapprove, for example, of homosexuality. It is not fine to harass homosexuals (or people you believe to be homosexual, which is not always the same thing) and doing so makes you a jerk. On the other side, you should not be pushing your beliefs, sexualities, or anything else into someone else’s face. A vegan who not only preaches the benefits of a vegan diet at every opportunity, but actively harasses people for eating meat is being a jerk – and in doing so, that person is poisoning their minds against vegans.

This sword actually has a third edge. When you make a fuss about something which is fundamentally irrelevant to your situation, very few people will take you seriously when you are making a fuss about something which genuinely is relevant. This sometimes leads to some very nasty situations. The person who pushes vegan beliefs on everyone they encounter will not be taken seriously when they complain there are meat products in the food, because they have already convinced their audience that they are a jerk. Worse, perhaps, having annoyed people to the point of total exasperation and/or murderous rage, their audience might be quite delighted at watching the vegan unwittingly eat meat, even though it is pretty cruel.

Being a jerk is not a good thing. Being on the right side of history does not excuse being a jerk.

(Don’t be this guy. Really.)

The second principle is a little more subtle. We live in a society where there are many differences of opinions, and mistakes, from minor misunderstandings like using the wrong names or pronouns to situations that could easily be (or not) sexual harassment/actual threats. If you assume that everyone who makes an error in pronunciation, as George RR Martin did at the 2020 Hugo Awards, did so out of deliberate malice, racism, some kind of phobia or anything else that didn’t involve a simple accident, you will not only come across as a jerk but also make it harder for people to take it seriously when there is a real problem. If you act on the assumption that there may have been a mistake, and don’t treat it as a de facto war crime, the good guys will be grateful for your understanding and the bad guys will realise they have been called out without being pushed into a corner that will force them to either fight to the death or surrender.

When you blast someone who makes a mistake, they get angry. The angrier they get, the harder it is for them to accept you have a point. If you batter them into submission, they will hate your guts – and that hatred will provide cover for people who are genuinely malicious.

Seriously. Give some grace to people who make mistakes. Turning the other cheek sometimes mean getting slapped there too, to mutilate a metaphor, but it does remove all doubt that you are dealing with actual malice.

Third, be mature.

An immature mind seeks to dominate its surroundings. It cannot tolerate different opinions, from the minor (which Star Trek is best) to the major (which presidential candidate of 2024 was a nanometre better than the other). It is not enough to carve out a space for itself; the immature mind must seek to destroy all other minds, to punish anyone who dares to disagree. Or even to argue that the current tactics used by activists are dangerously counter-productive (such as the university professor who was cancelled for daring to suggest the BLM riots and ‘defund the police’ would actually harm the cause). At base, the immature mind is incapable of comprehending not only that it might be wrong, but dissenters have a legitimate right to raise concerns even if those concerns are not in of themselves illegitimate.

The immature mind is also incapable of comprehending the long-term effects of its actions. In the short term, cancel culture – a common tool of the immature mind, which is incapable of comprehending the wisdom of the observation that the master’s tools will never dismantle be master’s house – successfully scattered opposition and terrorised dissenters into pretending to agree (preference falsification). In the long term, cancel culture not only fuelled unreasoning hatred of cancel mobs and convinced many observers that it was about power and control rather than handing out deserve consequences, but it also made it harder for other observers to point to issues that deserve cancellation and even to call out their allies for terrible behaviour because it was important to hang together or be cancelled separately. As Richard Hanania put it:

“As the Overton window in debates within elite institutions narrowed, so that even people who said unquestionably true things were smeared as bigots, the opposition’s Overton window widened, allowing offenses useful to trolls to gain mainstream currency. Those who were canceled—or the millions who observed with disgust as others were—lost all trust in mainstream institutions like academia and the press. The more one side pretended that innocuous things were harmful, the more the other side pretended that harmful things were innocuous.

After Trump’s 2016 victory, left-leaning elites blamed the result on hate and misinformation. It was at that point that Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook began to censor more aggressively. This spurred further entrenchment on the right, which became tolerant of most forms of open bigotry. In their eagerness to form a united front against leftist attempts to police speech, conservatives, particularly those who were online or leaned toward MAGA, made expressions of bigotry a banner the way some on the left had once used pornography as a First Amendment standard.

People who were actually racists loved these developments and helped push them along. After all, if any offensive thing you say can be brushed off as a joke, then ironic trolls and actual Nazis begin to look a lot alike, and a movement inclined to defend only the former will begin to have a knee-jerk positive reaction to the latter.”

The mature mind, by contrast, accepts the limits on what it can and cannot do. It does not penalise people for having different opinions, even when it disagrees strongly with those opinions. It does not overreach, nor does it infringe on freedom of thought and even freedom of speech. A mature mind is content to accept that it may be disliked, that there are people who think that their actions are inherently sinful, as long as they do nothing to interfere with their life. A mature homosexual, for example, may not enjoy knowing that the people who regard homosexuality is inherently wrong, but they accept that as long as the doubters don’t actually try to stop it.

Being mature means saving your energies for what are real problems. It is reasonable to disapprove of a co-worker who has a bumper sticker on his car leading KAMALA KUM-LA or TRUMP THE RUMP, but that does not give you the right to demand he removes his sticker or remove it yourself. A mature mind would understand that the car was his, and that he feels that he is the sole determinant of what sort of bumper stickers he should have, and therefore not waste energy trying to change him when he would regard such attempt as an attack on his freedom to decorate his car as well as his freedom of speech. (This obviously doesn’t apply if the car actually belongs to the company, in which case the company would actually have the final say.)

If you scream like a banshee at the slightest problem, while refusing to discuss the problem in a serious manner, your co-workers will not take you seriously. And why should they?

A mature mind acknowledges that it has to convince, rather than force, people to agree with it. A mature mind therefore puts together a coherent argument, which it can then defend against challengers, and achieves far more than it’s immature counterpart. A mature mind, therefore, outlines the problem, points to very real effects this has on the surrounding population, and proposes solutions. For example, it is easy to point out the harm when a homophobic co-worker abuses his homosexual colleagues. It is also easy to argue that this is not infringing on a person’s right to have whatever opinions they please, but confronting extremely unpleasant behaviour.

A mature mind is also very aware of the effect it has on others. It understands that its behaviour can be seen as threatening, fairly or otherwise, and takes steps to counter it. It also understands that it takes time for real social change, and trying to push faster than society will bear will likely provoke pushback. It may feel that this is unfair, but it recognises the fundamental reality that acceptance takes time.

Put simply, the mature mind recognises that:

1. someone has the right to an opinion and,
2. they do not have to listen to it.

Why did I write all this?

We live in a world plagued by people who feel that they have the right to push others around, that their causes justify their actions, and that any dissent, no matter how minor, cannot be tolerated. Worse, we live in an age of unprecedented intrusion into our lives. We are no longer granted, in many ways, the privacy of our own homes, or even our own heads. It is no longer possible to remain silent, or to maintain a silence. Silence is complicity, we are told, and we are no longer even able to discuss the problems. If you don’t have the right opinions, you get attacked.

This has provoked vicious pushback, from the tolerance of people who genuinely should not be tolerated to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of many other right-wing populists. The concept of DEI now provokes such loathing that there are far too many people who are willing to throw out the baby as well as the bathwater, and far too many others unwilling to admit that the whole concept went too far and needs to be dialled back sharply before it is too late. (As The Atlantic put it, If Liberals Do Not Enforce Borders Fascists Will.) Worse, this has fed a bitter cynicism amongst the Right (expressed in such statements as “oh look, the thing that never happens just happened again” or “the longer they take to show a picture of the suspect, the greater the chance he is from a favoured minority”) and destroyed trust in everything from the government to the media, teachers, and just about everything else.

In short, we suffer from a problem caused by immature minds. I like to think that the three principles I outlined will make things better. But I am probably being too hopeful.

This past weekend marked my Gram’s birthday. I won’t tell you how old she would have been because, well, I’m not sure I can do the math. Old. Really old. She passed away in 1983, and at the time she was just shy of her 92nd birthday. I think. I’m pretty sure she would be, like, 134 now. I am also pretty sure she would be ticked at me for telling you how old she would be . . . .

Gram was a wonderful grandmother. She adored all of her grandkids and she doted on us in all the grandmotherly ways. She made a huge fuss over every achievement, she always wanted to hear all about our lives, our friends, our classes at school. I never knew my mother’s parents, and my grandfather on my father’s side was not really part of our lives growing up. But it didn’t matter, because Gram showered us with enough love for four grandparents.

Clara Bartels was born in Amsterdam and came to the United States as a small child. Her father was a diamond cutter, and diamond cutters were in great demand in the diamond district of New York City. She grew up around the block from Jacques Cohen, who later in life changed the family’s last name to Coe, and whose father also was a diamond cutter who emigrated from Amsterdam. They would marry, have three kids, and then divorce, bitterly, at a time when divorce was not really something people were supposed to do.

Gram endured a lot in those years. She raised three children by herself, when single mothers with children were expected to remarry with alacrity. She nearly lost my father to meningitis when he was a sophomore in college. The youngest of her kids, my Uncle Bill, died in France during World War II. But she was a survivor and much tougher than anyone would have thought just looking at her.

Clara was maybe — MAYBE — five feet tall. With shoes on. In a stiff tail wind . . . . She had dark hair early in life. When I knew her, she had beautiful, silky white hair. Her smile could power entire cities. Her laugh, which we heard frequently, sounded like a car engine struggling to turn over. She had a terrific sense of humor and loved to laugh when she wasn’t supposed to. Each year, we would go to my Aunt Jean’s house for Passover, and my Uncle Bud would lead the Seder. He was more religious than the rest of us, and he took the Passover rites fairly seriously. And so when Gram would laugh at one thing or another in the Haggadah (which she did every year), he would grow annoyed. Which only served to make her laugh more. Which annoyed him a little more. Which increased her laughter yet again, making the rest of us laugh. Etc. Etc. I loved my uncle. He was a sweet, generous man. And for most of the year, he adored Gram. He always tried to be a good sport during Passover, but Gram didn’t make it easy . . . .

Staying with Gram was a treat. When I was young, whenever my parents went away, I would stay with her in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan. 245 East 63rd Street. The address is seared into my brain. So is her apartment number: 1104. It was a beautiful apartment — I shudder to think what it would cost today — and yet it was a pale substitute for the apartment my older siblings and cousins remember from when they stayed with her. That one was near Central Park and was huge and gorgeous. But no matter where she lived, when we stayed with her we had her all to ourselves. She would make the foods we liked, would take us to Atlantic Beach during the summer, or during the colder months, would take us FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store (the Tom Hanks-Robert Loggia floor-piano scene from Big was filmed there). We would walk with her there, and would be allowed to pick out any (reasonably priced) toy we wanted. After, we would get an ice cream at Schraffts.

I still have this Corgi Car, which I bought with Gram on one of those expeditions to the toy store.

Gram wasn’t always the easiest personality. She could be stubborn and even prickly on occasion. The summer after my senior year in college, my folks went away for a couple of weeks, and I stayed alone at our house. (At this point, I hadn’t stayed overnight at Gram’s for several years.) But my dad asked me to call Gram while they were away and I forgot. My high school girlfriend and I were going through a rough patch, and I had friends I wanted to see, and, well, I was a teenager . . . . It was entirely my fault. I know that.

But Gram was really angry with me. So angry that one night, when she and I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house, she wouldn’t speak to me. Literally. She directed all her questions and comments to me through my Aunt Jean, who reluctantly served as intermediary, and who later offered her heartfelt sympathy.

Lesson learned. When I went off to college, I made a point of calling Gram every Sunday, no matter what. And at the end of my freshman year, she commented to my father that Brown was a very good place for me. It had taught me responsibility. You can’t make this stuff up.

But episodes of that sort were the exceptions. Most of the time, Gram was fun, loving, silly, and totally engaged in all of our lives. She was, as I have said, a wonderful grandmother. To this day, I miss her laugh, and can hear it in my head when something funny happens.

Happy Birthday, Gram. I love you.

This past weekend marked my Gram’s birthday. I won’t tell you how old she would have been because, well, I’m not sure I can do the math. Old. Really old. She passed away in 1983, and at the time she was just shy of her 92nd birthday. I think. I’m pretty sure she would be, like, 134 now. I am also pretty sure she would be ticked at me for telling you how old she would be . . . .

Gram was a wonderful grandmother. She adored all of her grandkids and she doted on us in all the grandmotherly ways. She made a huge fuss over every achievement, she always wanted to hear all about our lives, our friends, our classes at school. I never knew my mother’s parents, and my grandfather on my father’s side was not really part of our lives growing up. But it didn’t matter, because Gram showered us with enough love for four grandparents.

Clara Bartels was born in Amsterdam and came to the United States as a small child. Her father was a diamond cutter, and diamond cutters were in great demand in the diamond district of New York City. She grew up around the block from Jacques Cohen, who later in life changed the family’s last name to Coe, and whose father also was a diamond cutter who emigrated from Amsterdam. They would marry, have three kids, and then divorce, bitterly, at a time when divorce was not really something people were supposed to do.

Gram endured a lot in those years. She raised three children by herself, when single mothers with children were expected to remarry with alacrity. She nearly lost my father to meningitis when he was a sophomore in college. The youngest of her kids, my Uncle Bill, died in France during World War II. But she was a survivor and much tougher than anyone would have thought just looking at her.

Clara was maybe — MAYBE — five feet tall. With shoes on. In a stiff tail wind . . . . She had dark hair early in life. When I knew her, she had beautiful, silky white hair. Her smile could power entire cities. Her laugh, which we heard frequently, sounded like a car engine struggling to turn over. She had a terrific sense of humor and loved to laugh when she wasn’t supposed to. Each year, we would go to my Aunt Jean’s house for Passover, and my Uncle Bud would lead the Seder. He was more religious than the rest of us, and he took the Passover rites fairly seriously. And so when Gram would laugh at one thing or another in the Haggadah (which she did every year), he would grow annoyed. Which only served to make her laugh more. Which annoyed him a little more. Which increased her laughter yet again, making the rest of us laugh. Etc. Etc. I loved my uncle. He was a sweet, generous man. And for most of the year, he adored Gram. He always tried to be a good sport during Passover, but Gram didn’t make it easy . . . .

Staying with Gram was a treat. When I was young, whenever my parents went away, I would stay with her in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan. 245 East 63rd Street. The address is seared into my brain. So is her apartment number: 1104. It was a beautiful apartment — I shudder to think what it would cost today — and yet it was a pale substitute for the apartment my older siblings and cousins remember from when they stayed with her. That one was near Central Park and was huge and gorgeous. But no matter where she lived, when we stayed with her we had her all to ourselves. She would make the foods we liked, would take us to Atlantic Beach during the summer, or during the colder months, would take us FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store (the Tom Hanks-Robert Loggia floor-piano scene from Big was filmed there). We would walk with her there, and would be allowed to pick out any (reasonably priced) toy we wanted. After, we would get an ice cream at Schraffts.

Gram wasn’t always the easiest personality. She could be stubborn and even prickly on occasion. The summer after my senior year in college, my folks went away for a couple of weeks, and I stayed alone at our house. (At this point, I hadn’t stayed overnight at Gram’s for several years.) But my dad asked me to call Gram while they were away and I forgot. My high school girlfriend and I were going through a rough patch, and I had friends I wanted to see, and, well, I was a teenager . . . . It was entirely my fault. I know that.

But Gram was really angry with me. So angry that one night, when she and I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house, she wouldn’t speak to me. Literally. She directed all her questions and comments to me through my Aunt Jean, who reluctantly served as intermediary, and who later offered her heartfelt sympathy.

Lesson learned. When I went off to college, I made a point of calling Gram every Sunday, no matter what. And at the end of my freshman year, she commented to my father that Brown was a very good place for me. It had taught me responsibility. You can’t make this stuff up.

But episodes of that sort were the exceptions. Most of the time, Gram was fun, loving, silly, and totally engaged in all of our lives. She was, as I have said, a wonderful grandmother. To this day, I miss her laugh, and can hear it in my head when something funny happens.

Happy Birthday, Gram. I love you.

In Dearly Beloved Pamela Ayo Yetunde “has done the work to inspire us.”* Mark your…

The post Spotlight on “Dearly Beloved | Prince, Spirituality, and This Thing Called Life” appeared first on LitStack.

Stalking the wild martini, shhhhhh!

Dude, you know you don’t drink.

Cat. Some assembly required.

What is it with tuxedo-boys? I’m so embarrassed.

You think you’re embarrassed, try wearing the same suit as…that.

We’ve been thinking of dying this one black and white to match the set.

What flummery is this? I have not written about Nero Wolfe since last Summer? There has not been a 3 Good Reasons in four years? What kind of mystery blogger is this Bryne fellow? Most unsatisfactory. So…

Welcome to another installment of 3 Good Reasons. With a goal of eventually tackling every tale of the Corpus, I’ll give three reasons why the particular story at hand is the best Nero Wolfe of them all. Since I’m writing over seventy ‘Best Story’ essays, the point isn’t actually to pick one – just to point out some of what is good in every adventure featuring Wolfe and Archie. And I’ll toss in one reason it’s not the best story. Now – These essays will contain SPOILERS. You have been warned!

The Story

Today’s story is “Black Orchids,” it’s the first of two in a collection of the same name. Lewis Hewitt has three unique black orchids on display at the annual NYC Flower Show. Wolfe’s envy rivals his desire for Millard Bynoe’s flamingo-colored Vanda in “Easter Parade.”

Wolfe orders Archie to scout the enclosed-in-a-case black orchids, over multiple days. It’s not surprising that Archie is smitten by Anne Tracy; a young woman working in a display at the show. Naturally, he finds a murdered body, which is right out in plain sight. Wolfe spends part of this story ‘in the wild,’ as his covetousness leads him to the show.

3 GOOD REASONS

ONE – The Green-Eyed Monster

Nero Wolfe is not a person who can enjoy someone else’s success – certainly not in the orchid-growing world. He reaches one of his low points in “Easter Parade,” when he has Archie hire someone to steal an orchid right off of a woman’s chest, in public. That’s a pretty slimy thing to do.

But his envy of Lewis Hewitt is something to enjoy in this story. Hewitt appears in three cases, and is mentioned in more than double that. He makes his Corpus debut here. ‘Friends’ is not a word often used with Wolfe. If you take away work associates (like Inspector Cramer) and employees, it’s a very small circle. As the Corpus goes on, I think Hewitt does become a friend. Wolfe uses him to aid him on a case. He respects Hewitt’s flower-growing skills, going to great length to hire a

“I knew that the sound of that name would churn his beer for him. Lewis Hewitt was the millionaire in whose greenhouse in whose Long Island estate the black orchids had been produced. Thereby creating an agony of envy in him that surpassed any of his previous childish performances.”

Wolfe stands with his face only five inches from the glass case, staring at the orchids:

“For a quarter of an hour, His emotions didn’t show, but from the twitching of a muscle in his neck, I knew he was boiling inside.”

He even let himself be bumped by women trying to get a look at them. Wolfe very much dislikes being touched by anyone.

Wolfe sucks up to Hewitt so much, Archie can’t bear to watch. He actually turns his head away to conceal his feelings.

‘He flattered him, and yessed him, and smiled at him until I expected any minute to hear him offer to dust off his shoes.’

Hewitt gives Wolfe a couple lesser plants Wolfe doesn’t want, but accepts, thanking him as if they were ‘just what he asked Santa Clause for.’

Wolfe carries them himself, which tells you the extremes of sucking up which he’s going to. It’s funny when later Wolfe wants to dump them on Archie, but the latter evades the task and Wolfe is stuck carrying them. Physical exertion is not an activity he enjoys.

Archie says he’d like to give Wolfe a kick in the fundament, which would be an amazing thing to see actually happen. He certainly couldn’t miss!

Hewitt misplaces his walking stick, which Archie says makes Wolfe’s best Malacca one look like a fishing pole. When it’s found, Wolfe tells Archie to pick it up for Hewitt. Archie doesn’t want to cause a scene, so he resists the urge to resign on the spot. Archie picking up the cane is germane to the story.

This just isn’t Wolfe being pleasant, hoping for the best. He is in full-blown sycophant mode. Archie rarely conveys so much disgust and derision with Wolfe. It’s usually an observation -here it’s an ongoing feeling of disgust, which he expresses openly in his narration.

‘And Wolfe following him like an orderly following a colonel, his hands full of potted plants. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been disgusting.’ Archie has to lead, rather than follow, so he doesn’t have to see it.

Archie discusses the body after this, and the story shifts gears. Wolfe goes from toady to (sort of) blackmailer, with a crime to be solved. But it’s fun reading Archie’s open disgust with Wolfe sucking up (poorly) to Hewitt, to try and secure one of the black orchids.

 

TWO – Archie Goads Wolfe

I really enjoy chapter one of this story. It starts with Archie recounting that Wolfe has sent him to the Flower Show the past three days, to scout out the black orchids. Returning to the office late on day three, he drops “I’m thinking of getting married.”

He talks about the woman in the display, and Wolfe reveals info he has about her, from a story in the newspaper. Archie fatuously argues her virtues with Wolfe (you know Wolfe is unengaged in this discussion), creating a non-discussion discussion.

Having started with this tactic, he elevates it by telling Wolfe that Lewis Hewitt takes her out to dinner. Archie has scored a hit. Wolfe opens his eyes and scowls (See number One).

Wolfe had said that Anne’s legs are too long (in the newspaper picture). Archie, going over the top, puts his leg foot on the desk, lifts his trouser leg up, and tells Wolfe to imagine the result of his cross-pollinating with Anne’s leg. This is silly, but it’s funny. Wolfe tells him not to scar the desk and instructs him to return for a fourth consecutive day.

However, Archie has ratcheted up Wolfe’s desire for the orchids. At lunch, he instructs Archie to get the car – he must “look at those confounded freaks myself.”

Archie had fun goading Wolfe, and he even convinced him to make a sojourn out among a crowd of flower-lovers. If you’ve read “Disguise for Murder”, you know Wolfe’s opinion of the common flower person, as opposed to serious growers like himself.

Chapter one is only six percent of the story’s length, but the reader immediately likes Archie. Wolfe isn’t despicable, like he is in chapter one of “Easter Parade.” But we can see that envy is one of his vices. I think that the best stories often have a strong first chapter. Stout engages us with Archie and Wolfe, right from the start. Of course, middles and endings matter. But I am always happen when I really like the opening chapter, and I’m ready to dive into the rest of the story. I think that the opening in “Black Orchids” shines.

 

THREE – What Wolfe Wants, Wolfe Gets

Now, I think Wolfe is a jerk to Hewitt in this, and I often find him to be an unlikable person. Not someone I want my son to emulate. I’d like to see Wolfe lose sometimes, based on how he acts.

But he sure knows how to get what he wants. His continual sucking up to Hewitt failed miserably. Hewitt is not going to sell him one of the orchids. He’s certainly not going to just give him one. His kowtowing so repulses Archie, that he can’t even stand to look at Wolfe.

But the moment he has leverage over Hewitt, he sticks the knife in. Hewitt abhors the publicity that he might receive if it becomes known his cane was used for the murder. He could even be a suspect. And Wolfe has him right where he wants him.

For a friend like Marko Vukcic, he would help out for free. He might just soak a normal client – his fees are high. But Hewitt has something he wants. Desperately. It’s a douche move to demand ALL three black orchids, to solve the case. One, or even two, would be more appropriate. But Wolfe is brutal and greedy. Hewitt would have none to develop more from.

Hewitt pretty much goes through the five stages of grief. Wolfe is content to toss Hewitt to Inspector Cramer (there’s no proof that Hewitt did it – it’s an image issue for the rich man). Wolfe refuses to haggle, demands all three. He even insists on taking them immediately before even working on the case.

The Corpus is replete with Wolfe holding out on the police, and using his position and skills to maximize his return. And, as in Easter Parade, being not-admirable, to get what he wants. The recipe for

As I said, I wish he had gotten his nose pushed in a few times. But in this case, he went from a completely losing position, with no standing at all, to getting what he wanted, with payment in advance. Wolfe is tough to beat, in multiple ways.

ONE BAD REASON

Like a Hole in Your Head…

This section was going to be titled ‘With Friends Like These…’ and I was going to talk about what a jerk Wolfe is to Hewitt, to get him out of potential trouble. But as I mentioned above, it’s not clear yet that the two are friends. They are fellow flower growers, and as acquaintances, they get along. But if they had been friends at this point, then Wolfe would have been a miserable one, because of the price he demanded to solve the case. Not how you treat a friend.

However, since they aren’t obviously friends yet, I’ll go with Archie’s discovery of the body. It’s a short bit, but I’d NEVER do what he did. And after I did it, no way I could be so blase and low key about it. I’d quite possibly vomit on the spot.

‘On account of the shrubs and rocks, I couldn’t get around to see the top of his head. So I reached a hand to feel of it. And the end of my finger went right through into a hole in his skull. A way in. And it was like sticking your finger into a warm apple pie. I pulled away and started wiping my finger off on the grass.’

Man, I don’t even wanna eat apple pie (which I love) after reading this! I’m squeamish. I hate watching autopsy stuff in crime shows. The thought of (even unexpectedly) sticking my finger in a hole in somebody’s skull and going down into their brain? I’m squirming, just typing it right now.

And to calmly pull it out and begin wiping blood and brain off on the grass, showing no trace of what was going on? NO WAY!

“Black Orchids” is one of my favorite novellas, but I hate this part. I’m glad it’s so short, as it is an abrupt chapter end.

MISCELLANEA

The story originally appeared – abridged – in the August, 1941 issue of The American Magazine under the title, “Death Wears an Orchid.” Which is not an accurate title for this story…

It would be published with “Cordially Invited to Meet Death” (which was originally called “Invitation to Murder”) in hardcover by Farr & Rinehart the following year.

Stout had written eight Wolfe novels, published over the previous seven years. Black Orchid was the first novella or short story.

There are no definitive definitions, and the acceptable length of a novel has grown over the years (look at the length of early books in some of your favorite series’, and see them get longer. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder is a good example). We’ll go with:

Short Story – Up to 15,000 words

Novella – 15,000 – 50,000 words

Novel – Over 50,000 words

At around 34,000 words, Black Orchids was much shorter than his earlier novels. However it is about twice as long as “Cordially Invited to Meet Death”, which followed eight months later. I much prefer the shorter form for Wolfe and Archie, and am glad Stout began writing novellas, instead of novels. This allowed him to sell the stories to magazines (including better paying ‘Slicks), and then bundle two or three together for a hardcover book.

This story features a rare, two-paragraph intro by Archie: Archie does not introduce his recountings. He mentions speculation on how ‘Nero Wolfe got hold of the three black orchids.’ The first tale in this book explains how that happened as a result of a murder. The second explains how some black orchids appeared at a funeral: and it involves a mystery that is still biting Archie.

Archie comments that the women who attend flower shows are not very attractive. He would repeat this thought nine years later at the Brownstone, in “Disguise for Murder.”

Archie being Archie, he manages to find one rose in a field of weeds. But it is clear he will not be attending flower shows to look for dates.

The Bantam intro is written by Lawrence Block. Block relates how, trying to figure out where to go with his third Chip Harrison novel. As he puts it, ‘Inspiration struck’ and he converted Harrison into an Archie Goodwin, working for Leo Haig – a poor man’s Nero Wolfe. Haig is a low-end private eye whose life goal is to be invited to dinner at Wolfe’s table – Wolfe being a real person. I enjoy the two Haig novels, and wrote an essay titled The R-Rated Nero Wolfe for award-winning website, BlackGate.com.

YOU DON’T SAY

Archie – “Will you kindly tell me,” I requested, “why the females you see at a flower show, are the kinds of females who go to a flower show? 90% of them. Especially their legs. Does it have to be like that? Is it because, never having any flowers sent to them, they have to go to see any? Or is it because -”

Wolfe – “Shut up. I don’t know.”

 

Wolfe – “Where are you going?”

Hewitt – “The water nymph. The pool episode. I thought you might-”

Wolfe – “Bosch. That bedlam.”

Hewitt – “It’s really worth seeing. Charming. Perfectly Charming. Really delightful.”

Wolfe – “I’ll come too.”

 

Hewittt – “I see” – he hissed. “So that’s it. To put it plainly, blackmail. Blackmail. No, I won’t do it.”

Wolfe – He sighed. “You won’t?”

Hewitt – “No.”
Wolfe – “Very well. Then I won’t get the orchids. But I’ll be saved a lot of trouble. Archie, get Mr. Cramer in here. Tell him it’s urgent.”

More From the Brownstone

Stay at Home

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 1 and 2
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 3 and 4
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 5, 6, and 7
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 8, 9, and 10
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 11, 12, and 13
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home Days 14 and 15
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home Days 16 and 17
Nero Wolfe’s Browsnstone: Stay at Home – Days 18 and 19
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 20 and 21
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 22 and 23
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 24 and 25
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 26
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 27
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 28 and 29
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 30
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 31
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 32 and 33
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 34 and 35
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 36
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 37
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 38
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 39
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 40 & 41
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 42 & 43
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 45 & 46
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 50 and 52
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 55

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone

Meet Nero Wolfe
The R-Rated Nero Wolfe
Radio & Screen Wolfe
A&E’s ‘A Nero Wolfe Mystery’
The Lost 1959 Pilot
The Mets in “Please Pass the Guilt”
A Matter of Identity (original story)
Death of a Doxy; and Koufax or Mays?
Hercule Poirot Visits Nero Wolfe
I Know that Actor!
The Big Store (Wolf J. Flywheel)
Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend
A Toast To Nero Wolfe – From the Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend

3 Good Reasons

3 Good Reasons – ‘Not Quite Dead Enough’
3 Good Reasons – ‘Murder is Corny’
3 Good Reasons – ‘Immune to Murder’
3 Good Reason – ‘Booby Trap’

The Greenstreet Chronicles (Pastiches based on the Radio Show)

Stamped for Murder

The Careworn Cuff – Part One
The Careworn Cuff – Part Two
The Careworn Cuff – Part Three

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika T. Wurth

Mogsy’s Rating (Overall): 1.5 of 5 stars

Genre: Horror, Mystery

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Macmillan Audio (March 18, 2025)

Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins

Author Information: Website

At first, I was very excited to pick up The Haunting of Room 904. I mean, come on! Even the title sounded awesome. What could possibly go wrong with the promise of a haunted hotel story? Well, apparently, quite a whole lot. And when I looked up the author’s information, I was actually surprised to find out that this was not Erika T. Wurth’s first novel, because both the writing and plotting felt amateurish in a disjointed, sloppy way, which unfortunately kept the novel from ever fully realizing its ambitious premise.

The story follows Olivia Becente, a struggling academic who has turned to capitalizing on her clairvoyant gifts to make ends meet. Now a paranormal investigator, she works with clients who hire her to commune with the dead and occasionally takes on cases that involve neutralizing the dangerous effects of haunted or possessed items. But the truth is, Olivia has a pretty haunted history herself. Ever since the unexpected suicide of her sister Naiche, Olivia can’t stop thinking about her or any of unexplainable circumstances around how she died.

This is why, years later, when she is contacted by the Brown Palace hotel about a new case, Olivia immediately agrees to investigate. Not only is it one of the most recognizable landmarks in Denver, but the hotel is also the one in which Naiche killed herself in Room 904. It comes to light that every five years, a woman mysteriously dies in that room, no matter what the hotel does to prevent it from happening, even sealing it off altogether. As Olivia and her friends try to make sense of these connections, she receives a disturbing call from her mother, sounding distressed and confused, revealing that she has somehow checked into Room 904—despite having no recollection of how she got there. Now racing against the clock, Olivia’s investigation brings her to confront everything from a secret cult to the mysteries of an ancient power.

It honestly annoys me whenever a book with an amazing premise manages to completely unravel under the weight of its own ambition. It’s a shame because The Haunting of Room 904 could have been great, but what we get instead is an overstuffed narrative with simply too much happening at once. Rather than having things unfold naturally, the novel stumbles from one subplot to another like an easily distracted toddler. Things start off smoothly with Olivia’s investigation into a haunting but they quickly devolve from there, shifting suddenly to her family problems, then to her dealing with a stalker ex, and out of the blue a romantic development gets thrown in as well. There’s enough silly drama here to fill ten books, but instead everything is crammed together in a way that leaves everything feeling half-baked.

On top of that, the protagonist Olivia is the worst kind of idiot, someone who is constantly positioning herself as the smartest person in the room, yet her decisions contradict that perception at every turn. In one egregious example, she moralizes about guns only to justify getting a concealed carry permit because she believes her situation is unique, yet fails to arm herself when it critically mattered, resulting in the gun being turned on her by the very person she wanted to protect herself from—all because she set a glaringly obvious passcode on her safe. She’s also unbearably judgmental of others yet blind to her own flaws, making her difficult to root for. Partly, I think this in part is due to the book seeming more concerned with checking identity boxes and inserting social commentary than telling a compelling story. For example, every character’s race, gender, background, disability, etc. is noted, even when it’s completely irrelevant to the plot. The dialogue suffers greatly because of this too, because no one really talks the way these characters do. In some of their interactions, rather than an organic conversation, they come across more like stilted, overly self-aware message pushing instead.

Then there’s the matter of character development—or lack thereof. Olivia’s friends are little more than stock archetypes, defined by their identity labels above and further slotted into cookie cutter type caricatures: Genius Loudmouth Friend A, Sensitive Supportive Friend B, etc. And obviously, we mustn’t forget the dastardly ex-boyfriend who is cartoonishly villainous. But of course, Olivia being Olivia, she immediately gets the googly eyes for the next man who gives her attention, never mind that he’s a suspiciously charismatic leader of a fucking cult! Remember though, Olivia isn’t too bright, and the fact the guy is hot and fits the dark, broody goth aesthetic means that he gets a pass.

As if the disjointed plot and shallow characters weren’t bad enough, the writing itself is a hot mess. Transitions between events are choppy, making it a pain to follow the story. The pacing is also all over the place. The horror elements, which should have been at the forefront, feel tacked on and underdeveloped. What could have been an intense, mysterious, and atmospheric ghost story instead reads like a bland, dime-store thriller with some paranormal elements hastily sprinkled in. Any sense of suspense or dread is completely lost.

Ultimately, The Haunting of Room 904 is a book that had all the ingredients (one might even argue too many ingredients) for a creepy and engaging horror novel with some thriller elements mixed in. However, the failure to pull all these pieces together in a cohesive and coherent manner resulted in a disappointing read where the core mystery lacked direction and focus in its execution. Sadly, the book started out strong, but by the end, it simply fell apart under the weight of all its missteps.

 

Tomorrow is the launch of  Graham Austin-King's Fae: The Wild Hunt Kickstarter. This is in celebration of the tenth anniversary of Fae: The Wild Hunt's publication. Here's the blurb for the book:
History becomes legend.Legend fades to myth.But some myths are a warning.
Klöss wants nothing more than to pass the trials and join the ranks of the Bjornmen raiders. But times are changing in the Barren Isles. Coastal plunder is making way for outright conquest, and war looms.
A foundling from the forest, Devin leads a simple life. But fate, it seems, has other plans. Whispered rumours tell of creatures in the moonlight, shadowy figures with eyes of amber flame. As the first battles rage, only one man seems to know the truth of the fae, but can Devin or Klöss convince anyone before it is too late?
The cover artwork is by Tomasz Jedruszek. 



The cover and sprayed edge design is by the amazing  Rachael St Clair of Claymore Covers. This edition will also sprayed edges, foiled hardboards, colour endpapers, refreshed cartography, custom chapter art & of course all copies will be signed by the author
Fae: The Wild Hunt is the first book of The Riven Wyrde Saga, a complete trilogy where the mythologised fae return to a world which has forgotten them. And as the barriers protecting the world of Haven begin to falter, Bjornmen raiders abandon coastal plunder for outright conquest. This Kickstarter, the first of three, aims to change that, with fresh cover art and a stunning special edition hardcover.