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Portal Fantasies are some of the earliest subset of fantasy novels, going all the way back to the great Lord Dunsany. In those early stories, characters were often transported to a “Fairyland” but over the years, there are other worlds characters can visit. Take Ilona Andrews’s This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, the first novel…

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

First Sign of Danger by Kelley Armstrong

Mogsy’s Rating (Overall): 4 of 5 stars

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Series: Book 4 of Haven’s Rock

Publisher: Macmillan Audio (February 17, 2026)

Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins

Author Information: Website | Twitter

Narrator: Therese Plummer

I make it no secret how much I love the Haven’s Rock series, and I’ve been with this crew since they were first introduced in Rockton. As the fourth installment in this spinoff series, First Sign of Danger delivers the same tense, wilderness-set mystery I’ve come to expect, nothing more, nothing less. But while that may sound like business as usual rather than anything standout, it’s still a satisfying read.

The story picks up six months after the previous volume, Cold as Hell. Casey Duncan and Eric Dalton are new parents! Their home, the off-the-grid settlement of Haven’s Rock hidden in the wilds of the Yukon, continues to serve as a sanctuary for people looking to disappear, and this is where they are content to raise their family. Even the nearby mining operation has, for the moment, fallen into a workable truce. Boundaries are being respected, and both sides are keeping to themselves, at least for now. Everything feels relatively calm and balanced, just the way the town’s residents would prefer as they head into winter hoping for as little drama as possible.

But that fragile peace is abruptly shattered when Casey and Eric encounter two hikers who have wandered far too close to Haven’s Rock’s borders, raising immediate concerns about exposure. Thinking quickly, they point the interlopers away from town, towards a safer direction. But when they return the next day to make sure the hikers have moved on, they instead find one of them dead and the other missing without a trace. With no clear idea who these people were or why they were in the area, Haven’s Rock goes on high alert as Casey and Eric begin digging into the mystery. At best, the hikers’ presence is an unfortunate coincidence, but at worst, it could mean a new threat has found its way to their doorstep. Given everything this town has already endured, there’s too much at stake to take any chances.

One of the things this series does well is atmosphere, and that still holds true. The setting once more plays a starring role, the Yukon providing an active source of tension. Between the isolation, the harsh conditions, and the ever-present danger of nature and wildlife (speaking of which, there is a truly harrowing scene involving a bear in First Sign of Danger), there’s just this constant awareness in the back of your mind that things could go wrong at any moment. It gives the story a survivalist edge that perfectly complements the police procedural elements.

In terms of character development, Casey and Eric are now navigating a completely new phase of their lives with their six-month-old daughter, Rory. There’s a clear adjustment period as they figure out how to balance parenthood with their law enforcement responsibilities, but the book takes a refreshing approach here. Instead of playing up the usual themes of stress, exhaustion, and guilt in stories about new parents, it highlights how a strong support system can make all the difference, even in a remote place like Haven’s Rock. Here, the side characters step up. While overall they are in more background roles this time, their presence is still felt in meaningful ways, reinforcing the town’s sense of community. Sure, Casey is tired, but she’s never forced to choose between her job and her child. Rory, meanwhile, is growing up loved and cared for by a network of honorary aunties and uncles pitching in when needed, giving mom and dad the space to do what they need to do.

The mystery itself is engaging, though inevitably it feels familiar at times. Some of the plot points are recycled, easy to anticipate because we’ve seen them before. That said, I come at this as someone who genuinely loves this series, and there’s an undeniable comfort of returning to something I know. At the same time, I’m realistic. Between this series and the original Rockton run, we’re pushing close to a dozen novels in this world, and it’s starting to feel like we’re nearing the natural end of the road. And maybe that’s why I’m not all that upset about the author’s news that the next book will be the last. As much fun as I’ve had, quitting while you’re ahead is never a bad thing, and in this case, I’d much rather see the series wrap up on a strong note than stretch things out unnecessarily.

At the end of the day, First Sign of Danger is another dependable and easy-to-enjoy installment of the Haven’s Rock sequence. I also had the pleasure of listening to this in audio, and narrator Therese Plummer as ever does a fantastic job as Casey, bringing a natural and down-to-earth tone to her voice that fits the character completely. While this book doesn’t quite reach standout status for me, it still delivers a satisfying mix of mystery, character development, and wilderness tension, which are the exact ingredients that have always made this series so enjoyable.

D Street—the closest thing Hope’s Pass has to a red light district. Three whorehouses and a few independents to service the miners who survived the mines outside of town.

When someone murders a prostitute, Will, the mayor, must fill in for the drunken sheriff and investigate. Only the crime has deep roots—roots that will touch Will’s entire family and make him question everything he has ever known.

“Death on D Street” is free on this site for one week only. If you like this crime story, you might like my other crime stories. A Kickstarter for my latest crime novel, Candid Shots of the 1970s, will run until Thursday, April 16. There you can get the new novel as well as Consecrated Ground, a novel that hasn’t seen print in 15 years, and a brand-new collection of short crime stories (although this one is not included). Click here to look at the Kickstarter.

If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

 

Death on D Street Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Ginny had just blown out the lamp and snuggled against me, her slender arm across my chest. The house still held too much of the day’s warmth for us to be cuddled so close together, but I didn’t move her. I liked the touch of her skin against mine, even when we were both too tired to do anything about it.

The baby was quiet for the first time in two days. She was teething and not happy about it. Ginny’d been rubbing my brandy against the baby’s gums and it didn’t seem to be doing anything except wasting good liquor. Still, Ginny swore that was a teething trick and I figured she’d know. She had gotten Sam through it, and on her own. By comparison, this couldn’t be as bad.

We should have expected the knock on the door—or something to break the quiet, but the knock surprised both of us. The baby wailed. Ginny must have already been asleep because she rolled over fast and reached for the gun she kept in the top dresser drawer.

I caught her arm and soothed her awake. I’d seen this reaction before and knew its source. A woman traveling alone across country had to be adept at protecting herself and her child. Nothing I could do convinced her she was safe. I’d stopped trying a year before.

I jerked on my pants as the knock came again. The baby’s wail grew into a scream. I grabbed a shirt and said, “See to the kids.” Then I headed down the stairs.

The knocking started a third time. I yanked the door open. Travis stood outside. He’d set his lantern on the porch. The yellow light illuminated his mud-stained pants and scuffed boots. The stench of cigars and cheap booze wafted inside.

“Sorry to wake ya,” he said, “but Doc sent me. We got a holy hell of a mess on D Street.”

D Street was the closest thing we had to a red light district. Three whorehouses and a few independents all lined up in a row. When I was sheriff, I restricted the hookers to that area. I’d learned that getting rid of them was impossible, not to mention unpopular. When men got time away from the mines, they wanted some affection, even if they had to pay for it.

“Where’s Sheriff Muller?” I asked.

“Couldn’t roust him.”

“Drunk again?” I glanced up the stairs. The baby was still crying. The floorboards creaked as Ginny walked with her, trying to quiet her.

“Smelled like it,” Travis said.

“What kind of mess?”

“Somebody killed Jeanne.”

I stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed. “While she was servicing him?”

“Jesus, Will, how’m I supposed to know?”

I shook my head and strode down the street. The dust was caked thanks to the summer heat, the wagon ruts treacherous in the darkness. The air was cool now, almost cold—one of the benefits of being in the mountains—but by dawn the heat would be creeping back, oppressive and overwhelming.

D Street was three blocks over and two down. I walked along Main Street. Most of the saloons were still open. Music filtered out of O’Hallerans—someone was banging on the town’s only piano. A few drunks were collapsed on the wooden sidewalk, leaning against the building, and I knew who they were.

I’d lived in Hope’s Pass since it was founded, eight years before. I’d stumbled through here, looking to make my own fortune mining for silver. I lasted a month underground in the dark, candle burning away the oxygen, cave-ins a constant threat. Even though the pay was pretty good, I realized there were other ways to make money.

The town needed a sheriff and I volunteered, setting my own pay so high that no one in their right mind would meet it. But in those early days of what would become known as the Comstock Lode, no one was in their right mind.

They paid me more than I was worth for six years. Then Ginny came to town with little Sam and enough money to set up a dressmaking business. Four months later, we were married and I had resigned as sheriff. I felt it wasn’t right to be dragged out of bed at all hours to calm down drunken miners or settle disputes over one of the town’s whores. I ran for mayor and won; then I appointed Johann Muller as the new sheriff, which was, I think, the worst decision I’d ever made.

D Street was down two blocks from Main, at the very edge of the mountainside. The ground was treacherous here—subject to floods in heavy rains. The buildings here had washed away more than once. There were other problems as well. Mine shafts had been dug underneath this entire area of Hope’s Pass, and more than one man had fallen through the street to the emptiness below. One of my campaign pledges had been to shore up the South Town area, but no one was really pushing me to fulfill that promise.

Lights were on in all the houses, and laughter filtered down from one of the porches. The men here weren’t drunk—or at least weren’t obviously so. A lot of them stood outside, smoking and talking as they waited in line. It must have been payday for one of the mines. I’d gotten so caught up in my daughter’s teething drama I hadn’t been paying attention.

I walked to the very last house. The street trailed off into nothing here, just scraggly grass and dust. Light poured out of this house as well, but the door was shut tight. As I approached, I saw a man knock and get sent away.

I didn’t bother to knock. I tried the knob but it didn’t turn. I glanced over my shoulder. Travis hadn’t followed me. Apparently his only task had been to fetch me. That completed, he was able to go back to one of the saloons and see if he could finish the task of getting drunk.

So I rapped on the big picture window, closed despite the coolness of the evening, and shouted, “It’s the mayor!”

The door opened just a crack.

“Doc sent for me,” I said.

The door opened the rest of the way. I didn’t recognize the girl behind it. She was blonde and buxom, wearing a cheap satin wrap that tied at her waist and left nothing to the imagination. I didn’t recognize her, but that wasn’t a surprise. Girls came and went at these places so fast that sometimes I was surprised anyone knew who they were.

Her face was ashen and she didn’t even bother to greet me. She just stepped aside, waited until I crossed the threshold, then pulled the door closed.

Six girls were in the parlor. A few were wearing dresses. The rest had on stained wraps just like the girl who had opened the door. Lucinda Beale, who’d opened this house six years before, sat on the edge of a chaise lounge.

She waved a hand toward a door. “In there.”

The room smelled of sweat and perfume. One of the girls sat on the ornate staircase leading to the second floor. She held her face in her hands, her legs slightly spread, revealing everything.

I walked through the women. They all moved away from me, something I’d never experienced in a whorehouse before.

The door led to the back parlor. It was usually reserved for the girls and “family,” anyone involved with the house. I’d been there half a dozen times before, mostly for a drink after getting rid of unruly customers. I hadn’t been inside since I married Ginny.

I swung the door open and stepped inside the room. It was hot and had the copper odor of blood.

“Watch where you step.” Doc Clifton leaned against the wall, arms crossed. His open medical bag sat on the ornate red sofa. His face was puffy from lack of sleep. He’d been up the night before helping one of Rena’s girls down the way through a particularly difficult birth.

I gave him a sideways look. Doc nodded toward the floor.

Jeanne lay there, legs splayed, wrapper open. Her torso was undamaged. The only visible wound was around her neck. It had been cut so deeply that her head had nearly been severed. Her hands, flung back beside her face, were cut as well.

I crouched beside her body. Her eyes were open. Her expression was one of great fear. I’d seen that expression on her face before. Her ebony skin brought a certain kind of clientele to Lucinda’s—one with exotic tastes. But some of the customers objected to Jeanne’s presence. Most of the fights I’d stopped in his last year as sheriff had started over Jeanne.

“Someone got her this time, huh?” I asked.

“It’s not that simple.” Doc pushed himself off the wall. He pointed to her hands. A single matching slit ran across both palms.

“So he surprised her, cut her throat, and she grabbed at the knife at the last minute.”

Doc nodded. “But he killed her in here.”

I rocked on his toes and looked around. Blood spattered the rug and a nearby table. It had clearly spurted. “He spun her.”

“Yep.”

I sighed. Murder in a small town was always difficult. I hated the cases when they involved someone important. Investigating one with a prostitute—and one who wasn’t even white—would be even harder.

“We knew it was only a matter of time, Doc,” I said. “If someone didn’t get her here, they would have got her when Lucinda sent her to service the boys in Shantytown.” I’d escorted her back a number of times and that was when I’d seen the fear on her face. The men usually ignored her, but the town’s women—even my usually tolerant wife—gave her looks filled with hate.

Doc’s eyes narrowed. “You gonna let this slide, then, Will?”

Of course I was. Solving murders wasn’t my responsibility any more. “That’s for Sheriff Muller to decide.”

“Sheriff Muller’s a drunk and you know it. You gave him the job so someone would take the midnight calls and you could continue overseeing everything else.”

I stiffened. “The girls get hurt. Sometimes they die. It’s not a safe or particularly joyful profession. If anyone knows that, it’s you, Doc. How many times do you get sent to D Street to tend to someone who’d had it too rough or was dying in childbirth and didn’t know who the father was?”

“So we let this go.”

I looked at Jeanne. She’d been pretty in a quiet sort of way. And she had been soft-spoken, almost shy. The prettiness was gone now, leached out of her with the blood. “It might be better to forget about it.”

“Will you say that when this same maniac slits some other girl’s throat? Or what if he attacks a real citizen, someone you care about? What then?”

There was an edge to Doc’s words that I had never heard before. “You got a personal stake in this, Doc?”

His gaze slipped away from mine. “I don’t ever want to see a mess like this again.”

“Chances are it was a drifter.”

“Who got invited into the back parlor?”

“All right. Maybe it was someone who knew her. Maybe even a relative. Lord knows Lucinda wouldn’t want a colored man in her waiting room.”

Doc looked at me. His gaze was clear and direct. “Is this about Jeanne’s profession, Will? Or her color?”

My cheeks heated up. “I’m just trying to take care of this with a minimum of fuss.”

“Fuss? We got a dead woman lying at our feet. Someone damn near sliced her head off and you’re worried about fuss?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my job to keep things calm in Hope’s Pass.”

Doc’s cheeks were an ugly red. “You ignore this, Will, and I’ll kick up a fuss like you never seen before.”

I turned to him, careful to keep my feet away from the blood smeared on the floor. “What was Jeanne to you, Doc?”

“A person,” he snapped, and walked out of the room.

***

I’d never been shamed into an investigation before, and truth be told, it didn’t make me enthusiastic about it. Still, I’d prove to Doc that I could solve this—or at least make sure whoever’d done this was long gone.

First, I gave the scene one more once-over. A silver tray lay near the kitchen door. Two glasses lay on the rug. One still had a bit of whisky inside. The smell of blood overpowered the smell of alcohol, which was why I hadn’t noticed it when I’d first come in.

The couch’s cushions were untouched, except for Doc’s bag, which he had left behind. I peered in it and saw nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, except for the body and the blood, the room was neat. Lucinda always had a penchant for clean.

There were no footprints in the blood on the floor, no handprints on the wall. Whoever had done this had been careful. There was also no break in the spatter, so he hadn’t gone at her from the front.

Already I could hazard a guess on how the attack happened. He’d been sent to the back parlor and waited there, standing near the empty fireplace as Jeanne came out of the kitchen, carrying a silver tray. She’d clearly expected to entertain him, but whether that entertainment would lead to a trip upstairs, I couldn’t yet tell. She’d planned on drinking with him, though, and she hadn’t even gotten to the place where she could set the drinks down.

He grabbed her from behind, slit her throat quickly and viciously. She’d realized what was going on—she probably had a hell of a self-preservation instinct—and grabbed at the knife as he pulled it along her throat. But she hadn’t had a chance to scream—he’d been too fast for her—and the method he chose wouldn’t have allowed it.

Her life sprayed out of her fast, but she’d still struggled, forcing him to spin around because he was having trouble holding her. But she’d stopped pretty quick, going limp in his arms. Then he dropped her and ran out the kitchen—arms and hands bloody, but otherwise unscathed.

Knife wasn’t there. Nothing else was there, except a downed silver tray and the body of a woman Doc felt important enough to take time from my family.

I pushed open the kitchen door, and went inside. The kitchen was clean and everything was in its place. No dirt on the sideboards, tin canisters lined up against the walls. No fire burned in the stove, even though this room was hotter than the parlor. The only thing out of order was the whiskey decanter on the long kitchen table—and the bloody handprint on the back door.

***

I decided to talk to the girls individually. Most of them couldn’t tell me anything—they’d been upstairs with a client. Only Lucinda and Elly had seen anything at all.

Elly’d been between customers when the front door opened. A blond man, his hair falling ragged over his collar, came inside. Despite the day’s heat, he’d had on a gray coat. It was worn, almost a part of him. His hands were tucked in the pockets, pulling it down, messing up its shape.

At first she thought him old because he was so thin and he walked with a limp. Then she looked at his face and realized he couldn’t be thirty yet. He spoke with a Southern accent and his eyes were haunted. She figured him to be a Reb who’d been wandering since the war ended. She didn’t remember seeing him before.

She’d sidled up to him, put a hand on his chest, and thrust herself against him. “I’m just what you need,” she’d said.

“Maybe so, darlin’,” he’d said gently, “but you ain’t what I want.”

She’d backed away from him then, and Lucinda’d come forward. Elly went to the kitchen where Jeanne was cleaning the sideboards. She hadn’t had a customer all night and she was restless, feeling trapped in the house, unable to go outside.

They talked for a while, about nothing, Elly said, and then Elly rolled herself a cigarette and took it out back so Lucinda wouldn’t catch her.

Not that Lucinda was trying. She was talking to the stranger, finding out exactly what it was he wanted.

He’d heard, he said, she had a colored girl in the house. Then he’d lowered his voice so soft she had to strain to hear. “Growin’ up the way I did, I got me a special hankerin for colored girls.”

“We do have a girl,” Lucinda said. “Her name’s Jeanne. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”

He glanced at the front door then, and she could sense how nervous he was. “I’d like to talk first, but if my friends find me with her…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Lucinda had heard that request dozens of times.

“Why don’t you go to the back parlor?” Lucinda said, pointing the way. “I’ll have her join you in just a few minutes.”

He’d smiled then. She’d thought it a particularly gentle smile, grateful really, and she’d smiled back. She hadn’t thought anything of it, not even when she’d heard the tray and the thud. Jeanne knew the rules—clients should be taken upstairs once the transaction was to begin—but sometimes men were too eager. That was a rule Lucinda was always willing to bend, as long as the man paid in full.

It was when the hour was up and then some that Lucinda got impatient. She’d expected her southern drifter to leave long before that. So she’d pushed open the door to the back parlor, and she’d seen Jeanne and she’d hoped that somehow the girl had lived through it, which was why she’d sent for Doc at the same time she’d sent for the sheriff.

Which was why she was willing to talk to me.

“This sort of thing got me closed down in St Louis,” she said. “I been real careful about it in Hope’s Pass. I run a safe house and my girls get treated good. You catch this man, Will, and you make everyone know that what he did had nothing to do with me.”

“You should check your clientele for weapons, Cinda,” I said.

“I do. They have to leave their guns at the door.” Then her eyes brightened and she held up one chubby finger. “Just a moment.”

She walked toward the door, moved a picture and opened a wall safe. From inside, she pulled out a small pistol.

“I suppose all your clients know that’s there,” I said.

Lucinda nodded. “That’s where we keep the guns. The real safe is somewhere else.”

She studied the pistol for a moment, then came toward me. “I got this off him before he went into the back parlor. Obviously, he didn’t come back for it, although he should have.”

“Should have?” I stood.

“I’ve never handled a gun quite like this one before.” She extended the gun to me, and I froze.

It was a Remington-Elliot single shot Derringer, .41 rimfire caliber, with walnut grips and blue plating.

“You sure that was his?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.” She frowned at it. “Pretty little thing, isn’t it?”

It was. It was so small that it fit in the palm of her hand. I took the gun from her and examined the barrel. Etched into the plating were the initials V.L., exactly as I expected.

“What’s there?” Lucinda asked.

“Hmm?” I looked at her. She was frowning at me. “Oh, nothing. Mind if I keep this?”

“I surely don’t want it.” She put her hands on her wide hips. “But it is a special gun. He might come back for it.”

“He might at that. Where’s Travis?” Travis worked as her security on busy nights.

“Probably drinking. He hasn’t come back since he fetched you.”

I checked the gun’s chamber. It wasn’t loaded. I slipped the gun in my pocket. “You get your own gun out, stay awake a while. I’ll make sure Sheriff Muller comes to keep an eye on this place, and I’ll find Travis for you.”

Lucinda smiled at me. “You always take good care of us, Will.”

In the past, I would have leaned over and kissed her cheek. But I didn’t dare get more perfume on me than had already leached into my clothes from this place. “You can tell Doc that it’s all right to come downstairs again.”

Lucinda’s smile turned sly. “I’m sure he’ll come down when he’s ready.”

“When he does,” I said, “make sure he does something with Jeanne. Remind him that’s his responsibility, not mine.”

Her smile faded. “Of all my girls to end up like that, I’d’ve never imagined Jeanne.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Lucinda’s gaze met mine. “She never was one who liked it rough.”

***

I found Travis and sent him back to Lucinda’s, not that he would do much good considering the condition he was in. Then I slapped Muller awake and sent him as well. He, at least, was a little more sober than Travis, only because he’d had time to sleep it off.

All the while, I fingered the gun in my pocket, the cold metal sending shivers through me. It took all my strength to find the men, to get them back to Lucinda’s, before heading home.

The sun was rising as I walked up Main. My house was dark, curtains closed, and the door locked. I opened the front door as quietly as I could and stepped inside. The early morning brightness hadn’t reached the interior of the house. Everything was in shadow. But the baby wasn’t crying.

I made my way up the stairs. When I reached the bedroom door, I stared at my wife, asleep in our bed. She lay on her left side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, her chest rising and falling with her even breathing. Even asleep she looked tired.

I walked toward her, never taking my gaze off her. She didn’t stir. I crouched beside her and opened the top drawer of the dresser, and suddenly she was awake, reaching for the gun, the one I was covering with my right hand.

“Will?” she asked, as she blinked herself fully awake. “Everything all right?”

“I don’t know.” My voice sounded odd to my own ears, flat and emotionless. I pulled her gun out of the drawer and rested it on my left palm. The blue plating was nicked, the walnut grip scratched. But even from my angle, I could see the engraved initials.

V.L.

“Will?”

From my pocket, I pulled out the other gun and let it rest on my right palm. “Look what I found tonight.”

All the color left her face. Her brown eyes were wide, and I could see her tamping down panic. “Where?”

“In a whorehouse safe.”

“That what they called you out for? A gun?”

I had heard that kind of question before, and it made me sad. It was a stalling-for-time question, one that let the asker think about her story rather than try to obtain an answer.

“No,” I said, not willing to tell her what had happened. “Tell me about your gun, Ginny.”

“It’s just a gun, Will.” Another stall.

“Then there’s nothing to stop you from telling me about it.”

Her gaze hadn’t left my face, but I could see that took some effort. She was at a disadvantage. I was good at reading people, but I was best at reading her.

“I got it in a pawn shop in Kansas City, before I took the wagon train out here. I figured Sam and I needed protection.”

“From a single shot revolver?”

She shrugged. “It was all I could afford.”

She was lying. God help me, I could tell she was lying. The slight twitch of her upper lip, the sweat forming at the hairline. Something about this was scaring her and she didn’t want to tell me what.

“I thought the V.L. stood for Virginia Lysander,” I said. “In fact, you told me that once.”

“It’s my gun,” she said. “It can stand for anything I want. I don’t know what it stood for before.”

“It was just a bit of luck that you found a gun with your initials on it?”

“That’s why I picked it out,” she said.

“I thought you said it was all you could afford.”

A spot of color formed in each cheek. She knew I’d caught her. “That too.”

“Ginny,” I said, almost pleading with her. “This is serious.”

She pushed her lips together. She wasn’t going to say any more.

“The man who owned this gun murdered Jeanne.”

She blinked at me. “Jeanne?”

“She was a whore on D Street.”

Ginny frowned as if she were trying to place the name. It was a small town and she had lived here nearly as long as Jeanne. I knew they had to know of each other. “You mean that coal-black girl who worked Shantytown?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you said you got the gun from a safe.”

“It’s a long story, Ginny. I just want to know how you fit in.”

She flung back the covers and got out of bed. She was moving with great purpose. “Where’s the man now?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I have to find out. I thought maybe you could help me.”

“How can I help you?” She grabbed her dress off the chair that she had lain it on the night before.

“Tell me what the connection is between the guns.”

She pulled the dress over her head, then keeping it bunched around her shoulders, stepped out of her nightdress. I couldn’t see her face when she said, “How should I know?”

“The matching gun, Ginny.”

“I told you. I bought it at a pawn shop.” She slipped her head through the dress. Her hair was mussed. “You believe me, don’t you?”

I stared at her, this woman I thought I knew well. I didn’t believe her, and I didn’t like the way I had started thinking. The way she woke up on edge, the fact that she always kept the gun near her, the difficulty she’d had initially trusting me or any man.

“Where’d you get the gun, Ginny?”

She blinked, looked away, then shook her head. “Don’t ask me any more. You’re not going to like what I have to say.”

“What I like and don’t like doesn’t matter, Ginny. Where’d you get the gun.”

She leaned against the wall, her head narrowly missing the crucifix she had put up there when we got married. “From a dead man.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me. “Who?”

She swallowed, closed her eyes, and bowed her head. “Sam’s father.”

***

He’d been a decorated officer in the Confederate Army. He’d returned to Atlanta on a short leave around Christmas, 1862. That was when he’d forcibly raped Ginny and left her pregnant with Sam. Sam was born in August 1863 and she found she didn’t care how he was conceived. He was her boy. She made up a husband, a father for Sam—Russ Lysander, tragically killed at Gettysburg, the man she’d always told me about—and prepared to leave Atlanta as soon as she was healthy enough.

It took her some time to regain her strength after the birth. By November of 1863, she was ready to leave. But as she was figuring out how best to travel with an infant, she ran into Sam’s father again.

He had returned to Atlanta on Jefferson Davis’s business. Somehow—Ginny wasn’t real clear about this—Sam’s father managed to overpower her and take her to his home where he tried to rape her again. Only this time, she managed to get his gun.

She shot him, point-blank range, through the heart. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Then, she said, her voice oddly emotionless, she robbed him—took his gold wedding band, the diamond earrings he’d given his wife, some pieces of silver—spoons, a small box, and napkin rings. She also took the Confederate bank notes from his pocket, and the gold coins he’d stashed in his safe, and she used all of that to make her way west.

As she told me all of this, she met my gaze. It was as if she didn’t care what I thought—she would always be proud of what she had done.

“Who’s the man with the second gun?” I asked.

“His son.”

I waited for her to tell me his name.

Her lips thinned. “Beau Lewis.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. I could see the fear and hesitation behind her bravado. She wanted me to reassure her that I still loved her, even though she had killed someone, even though she’d been defiled. Neither of those things mattered to me.

What mattered was that she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me either of them until now.

“May I have my gun?” she asked.

“You don’t need it,” I said.

“And if he somehow finds out I’m in town?”

“You’re not using the same name, are you?” That question was as much for me as it was for her.

She shook her head once.

“Then you’ll be all right.”

“I don’t like to be without it, Will.” A plaintive note to her voice, just the hint of begging.

I handed her the gun. “Stay inside. I’ll be back soon.”

“How’re you going to find him?” she asked.

“If what you say is true, then this gun means something to him. He’ll come back for it.” I slipped the extra gun in my pocket. “And I’ll be waiting for him.”

***

Whorehouses were quiet places in the daytime. The girls usually slept long past noon, and no clients appeared before dark. Things began to become active in the afternoons at a well-run place like Lucinda’s—people ate, cleaned, shopped, did all they needed to do.

I figured Lewis knew this, and would be back. I had only a few hours in which to catch him.

By the time I arrived back at Lucinda’s, Travis had fallen asleep in the chair by the door. Muller for once was awake and alert, but hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.

I relieved him, locked and jammed the back door, ordered Lucinda to keep the girls upstairs, and then I unlocked the front door. I positioned myself between the front door and the safe, my Colt resting on my leg with my hand covering it.

Sure enough, long about 9 a.m., I heard rustling outside. My grip tightened on the Colt, and I fished in my pocket for the Derringer. The door opened, and a man sidled inside.

He was gaunt and blond, his hair ragged, his face careworn. He wore a threadbare gray coat, his hands in its pockets, ruining its shape.

“Come back for this?” I asked, holding up the Derringer.

He froze, one hand on the jamb of the open door. Sunlight framed him, making him look as if he were outlined in light. “I left in a hurry last night.”

He had a soft Southern accent, not as coarse as I had imagined from Elly’s description. He sounded educated.

“I bet you did. A man usually doesn’t stick around when he murders someone in cold blood.”

To my surprise, he didn’t even try to bolt. “You the sheriff?”

“I’m the mayor.”

“Then you should know why I did what I did. That nigra girl, she murdered my daddy.”

“Did she now?”

“Yes, sir. After the Devil Lincoln issued his illegal declaration freeing all the slaves in a country he no longer ruled, she let herself into the house, took one of my daddy’s guns from his matched set, and shot him with it. Then she told all her people to run away. Thank the good Lord some of them stayed to tell me about it when I came home more’n a year ago.”

I felt cold. “You’re sure this was Jeanne?”

“Her name wasn’t Jeanne. It was Jubilee. She took my dead momma’s name when she pawned my family’s silver in St. Louis and signed onto the wagon train. That’s how I tracked her here.”

“Your momma’s name?” I had to brace my arm so that the hand holding the Colt didn’t shake.

“Virginia Lysander.”

I felt as if I were encased in a shell.

“I take it,” I said flatly, “you never met the woman who murdered your father.”

“Oh, I seen her,” he said. “She was ours, after all.”

“But you don’t remember her,” I said, “and you didn’t ask for her by name when you came here.”

“What is this?” He stepped further inside. “Why should I ask for her by name? She’d already changed it twice. I just asked where the town’s nigra women were. I was told there was only one.”

“And?” My throat was dry.

“She recognized me same time as I recognized her.” He held out his hands. “I was telling you this because I thought you was a reasonable man. I wasn’t willing to take her back to Georgia for trial. Laws’ve changed, and I didn’t want to travel with a darkie, not in today’s world. Surely, you can see that.”

“I can.”

“So you can give me my daddy’s gun, I’ll leave your fair city, and we’ll pretend this conversation never happened.”

I stood. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Whyever not?”

“You just reminded me,” I said as I approached him. “Laws have changed.”

“It’s Biblical. An eye for an eye. Justice has been done.”

“No, it hasn’t,” I said, fishing for my handcuffs. “Murder’s a hanging offense in Hope’s Pass.”

“She was a nigra, a murderess, and a whore. Ain’t no one gonna miss her.”

“I can think of at least two people who will,” I said as I cuffed his hands behind his back.

I led him into the sunshine. As we stepped onto D Street, I wasn’t surprised to see Ginny, standing alone in the dust, her Derringer out and pointed at Lewis.

“Go home, honey,” I said, feeling more weary than I’d ever felt in my life, hoping that Lewis wouldn’t realize the mistake he’d made.

But his face flushed an angry red. “Ruby,” he said in soft recognition. “Son of a bitch. You and Jubilee done this together.”

“Step aside, Will,” she said to me. “I don’t want my shot to go wild and hit you.”

“Ginny, honey, this isn’t right.”

Lewis gave me an odd sideways look.

“It’s right that he killed Jube?” she asked.

“He’s going to hang for that.”

“He’s gonna ruin our lives, Will.”

“What the hell’s she talking about?” Lewis asked me. “You got something with this woman?”

“She’s my wife,” I said softly.

“Tarnation, man, don’t you know what she’s done? She’s been passin’. She was one of our house niggers from the time she was old enough to carry.”

“Shut up!” Ginny waved the gun at him.

“She’s been lying to you,” he said in that sly voice. “All these years, making you think she’s something she’s not.”

“Move aside, Will,” she said again.

“She used you to make her greater than she was. And now you know what she is. A killer, an animal, no better than a snake.”

That frozen feeling was still with me. All of this felt like it was happening to someone else.

“Will.” Ginny sounded panicked. “I don’t care what you think of me. But what about Sam? The baby?”

Sam, with his gray, trusting eyes, and my daughter, whose black hair had more curl than I’d ever seen in a baby. Curly black hair and skin so white it made mine seem dark.

I reached into my pocket for the handcuff key. My hand was shaking. I wasn’t thinking. I was just acting.

I unlocked his cuffs and walked away, leaving her with her single-shot pistol alone with him and his knife.

***

She had left the children by themselves. The baby was crying in her crib, drool coming from her sore gums. Her diaper was wet. I changed it by rote, then cradled her against me and looked into her black, black eyes.

I could see it now, of course, now that I was looking. The curl of her hair, the darkness of her eyes, the twist of her features in a way that I had once thought particularly Ginny. Amazing that I’d missed it before.

Sam was tugging on me, his face splotchy. He’d been crying too, although, at three, he was too big a man to admit it. I crouched down and hugged him to me, and willed the numb feeling to go away.

I was afraid of what I’d find underneath it. Loathing for Ginny, for me. I’d always despised men who used their slave women, like my father had used his. I’d walked away from that life ten years before, wanting no part of it, content to sit out the war in the West and watch the casualties roll by.

I didn’t figure I’d have some of its victims in my own house.

Sam was a bright little boy, full of pluck and energy. He didn’t deserve half a life. And neither did the baby, her whole future ahead of her.

Maybe, on some level, I could understand what Ginny had done. And why she had to lie to me.

I could understand it, but I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive her.

***

She came home about a half hour later, her eyes haunted. The blood that spattered the bottom of her skirt told me she’d had to use Lewis’s knife to finish the job—her shot had only wounded him.

The baby was quiet. Sam was watching us from the doorway.

I led her into our bedroom, careful not to touch her, and closed the door.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“I left him on the street.” Her voice was low. “Someone’ll find him.”

“And come get me.”

She nodded. “But if you don’t make something of it, no one else will.”

She was right. No one would care, and everyone would have their own version of what happened. Some might even credit me.

In an odd way, they would be right. Because I wasn’t going to speak up. As Lewis had said, justice had been done.

“You want to tell me the truth now?” I asked. “I deserve to know.”

Ginny looked away, her expression sad. Then she closed her eyes, and took us both back to the past.

***

When she was sixteen, Lewis’s father visited her for the first time. When she was seventeen, she had his child. She had another child the next year, and the next, and when it became clear that she preferred motherhood to her duties, the children were sold as part of a package to a nearby plantation and she never saw them again.

She was pregnant with Sam when word of the Emancipation Proclamation hit. She stole the derringer, and waited, shooting Lewis’s father as he pressed down on her in the dark.

Jeanne heard the shot, and was the one who thought of taking the money, the silver, the rings. Together the women left, making their way north, helping each other survive.

Sam was born in New York, the first free child in Ginny’s family. It was there she realized that unless she was seen with Jeanne, everyone thought she and Sam were white.

She sold one of the spoons and left in the middle of the night for St. Louis, not telling Jeanne where she was going. She invented Russ Lysander and his untimely death, and received treatment beyond her dreams.

Everything went well, until Jeanne turned up in Hope’s Pass. She’d followed Ginny across country. Jeanne earned part of her living at Lucinda’s and supplemented it by blackmailing my wife.

Which was why every time I saw them near each other, they looked at each other with such hate.

***

Ginny’s voice had trailed to nearly nothing. Her gaze met mine, and I saw the pleading. But Lewis’s voice echoed in my mind.

She’d murdered two men. And she’d lied to me.

There was a knock on the door. I jumped, even though I’d expected it. In the next room, the baby started to wail.

“What do we do now?” Ginny asked.

“Will!” Travis yelled from the street. “Doc says we got another situation.”

The baby’s cries had grown piercing. Sam tapped on our door. “Mommy?” he said.

Ginny’s gaze met mine and held it. I always prided myself on doing the right and honorable thing.

Only this time, I had no idea what the right and honorable thing was.

“Will!” Travis yelled.

I could see fear in her face, fear greater than any I’d seen before. I sighed.

“Change your clothes,” I said, “and feed the children. I have no idea when I’ll be back.”

I pulled open the bedroom door. Sam launched himself at my leg, and held it so tight that he nearly cut off circulation. He would grow up slender like his uncle. He’d have the same gray eyes, the same deep voice.

I slipped my hand on his head, feeling his thin straight hair.

Ginny was watching us, her hands clasped together.

“And make sure you’re here when I get home,” I said. “I want to have dinner with my family tonight.”

Her breath caught. I could see her fighting to stay calm. “What happens next, Will?” she asked, her voice soft. “To us?”

I stroked Sam’s hair. We had only one choice. “We put the past behind us, Ginny, like all people who come West.”

Her smile was thin, but there was hope in her eyes. Maybe there was hope in mine as well.

“Will!” Travis yelled from below.

I nodded at her, kissed our son as I extracted him from my leg, and went downstairs to clean up Ginny’s mess.

Death on D Street

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright ©  WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

 

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.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

By popular demand – I wonder if other authors get so many demands, heh – here is the Cast of Characters. This is a basic version. You will have to wait until Maggie’s site, the app, or the Companion to Kair Toren, for the images version.

This thing is hyperlinked and should be spoiler free. Not every character is included. Some are meant to be discovered and others are too minor to mention.

Blanket permission to print and share on socials.

This Kingdom Cast of CharactersDownload

The post This Kingdom’s Cast of Characters first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

A new week of Women in SF&F Month starts today with a guest post by Cheryl S. Ntumy! Her short fiction includes “The Ghost of Dzablui Estate” in The Bright Mirror: Women of Global Solarpunk, “Godmother” in Apex Magazine and later The Best of World SF: Volume 3, and those in her BSFA Award–nominated collection Black Friday: Short Stories from Africa. She’s also written stories set in the shared Afrocentric speculative fiction universe named the Sauútiverse, including the novella Songs […]

The post Women in SF&F Month: Cheryl S. Ntumy first appeared on Fantasy Cafe.

Other LitStack Spots We’ve spotted a few other titles we are definitely adding to our…

The post Spotlight on “The Republic of Memory” by Mahmud El Sayed appeared first on LitStack.

Fell asleep reaching for mah phone.

I think you might have a problem, my dude.

Yeah, he thinks his pan is half full, but actually…

That’s a really weird metaphor, my friend.

It really is.

He’s going to be pissed when he wakes up and finds THE PHONE IS MINE.

 

1996 was 30 years ago. And it was quite the year for movies. Big-screen extravaganzas dominated the box office, and some movies outside the Top 10 still more than resonate today.

On July 3, Independence Day dropped. Man, that was a huge hit. EVERYBODY I knew saw, or was talking, about it. And smooth crooner Harry Connick Jr. became a lot more popular. With a US gross of $306,156,000 ($644,338,000 in today’s dollars) on a budget of $75 million, it was a smash hit.

Big-screen action continued the trend of domination, with Twister ($241,721,000) second, and The Rock ($134,069,000) fourth.

And at number three saw the birth of a mega-franchise that seven hit follow-ups and which only wrapped up last year: Mission Impossible. That first movie was an homage to the original series, and I really liked it. Then John Woo turned it into special effects cotton candy and I never watched another installment.

Eddie Murphy was at the end of his run as a box office super draw, and came it at number five with The Nutty Professor. The rest of the top ten was Ransom (Mel Gibson), The Bird Cage (Robin Williams), A Time To Kill (Matthew McConaughey), 101 Dalmations (a bunch of dogs), and The First Wives Club (Goldie Hawn).

Some Other Notable films

Eraser (11)
Arnold Schwarzenegger was five years removed from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. And two years from the disaster that was Junior. Ugh. But in addition to the sci-fi noir Eraser, he also made one of my favorite Christmas movies, Jingle all the Way (number 25).

Star Trek: First Contact (14)
I loved the original cast reboot of Star Trek. And then Generations transitioned to a new era. First Contact ensured there would be more Star Trek films, and it had James Cromwell. BTW – if you’ve not seen 1997’s LA Confidential, it’s a superb hardboiled noir flick, and if you have read James Ellroy’s novel, Cromwell was a terrific choice as Dudley Smith.

Jerry Maguire (18)
The box office rankings are by the calendar year receipts. It released on December 13, and its total gross would have ranked it fourth for the year. This was the Romcom of 1996.

Twelve Monkeys (22)
I never got into this movie with Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe, but it became a sci-fi cult classic. I should give this another try.

Tin Cup (26)
Post-apocalyptic movies – Waterworld (1995) and The Postman (91st this year) – did not exactly build on the success of The Bodyguard. But in between those two movies, Costner made a charming golf Romcom with Rene Russo and Don Johnson.

Grumpier Old Men (31)
The two-year take would put his up at number 17 (which was Broken Arrow). In the last 7 years of Walter Matthau’s life, he made Grumpy Old Men, Grumpier Old Men, Out to Sea, and The Odd Couple II, with Jack Lemmon. And I am darn glad those two old friends rekindled their on screen magic, which began in 1966 with The Fortune Cookie. And if you like this duo, I highly recommend My Fellow Americans. James Garner slips into a Walter Matthau role opposite Lemmon. My favorite of this whole bunch.

Toy Story (32)
Released the prior year, it’s total gross would have made it the number three movie of 1996. This was Pixar’s first feature film, and it changed movies. Pixar, and the animated types of movies it influenced other studios to make, are still part of the industry today.

Happy Gilmore (38)
I’m not an Adam Sandler fan. Stuff like Little Nicky, and The Waterboy, falls in what I call ‘dumb funny’ and I think it’s just dumb, not funny. To each their own. However, I LOVE Happy Gilmore. It’s simply funny. And frankly, hilarious. Great comedy. I put Talladega Nights in this category.

The Ghost and the Darkness (39)
I’m a big William Goldman fan. He wrote The Princess Bride (novel and screenplay), and two memoirs about working in Hollywood are among the best memoirs you’ll ever read. His chapter on this movie, which was not the hit expected, is interesting. The guy was an elite screenwriter, if you check his IMDB.com.

No. Not THAT one!

Heat (42)
Michael Mann had hit it big with The Last of the Mohicans – not the case with his adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep. Heat is a ‘really good but not quite great’ movie for me. Like Bogie’s Dead Reckoning. But man, this is a taut heist film, with a great cast. Another one I’m due to watch again.

Striptease (48)
I am almost done re-reading/re-listening to the first ten Carl Hiassen novels (they drop off for me around number nine, so this won’t be a complete re-read). But I do love his books. They are laugh-out-loud dark crime comedies. I remember seeing this movie and thinking it wasn’t bad. But the book was much better. I suspect that would still hold true. Still, I think I’ll check it out again. TV’s R.J. Decker (based on Double Whammy) is losing it’s Hiassen roots, but still worth watching so far.

So, that’s it for the Top 50. Other notable movies of 1996:

Leaving Las Vegas (53)
Sabrina (61) Excellent remake of a Bogart/Hepburn film
That Thing You Do! (67) A total gem!!!!!!!
From Dusk til Dawn (68)
Escape From LA (70) A far cry from the original.
Scream (74) A late release that would have been #11 for the year
Fargo (75) Coen Brothers wizardry, but not box office magic
Last Man Standing (97) Based on Hammett’s Red Harvest (which influenced Yojimbo)
The Phantom (100) Bruce Campbell lost out to Billy Zane for the lead
GoldenEye (108) Late release that was a 1997 hit
My Fellow Americans (120) See Grumpier Old Men, above
Mulholland Falls (124) Was a good year toe be a hardboiled/noir fan
2 Days in the Valley (125) More noir
Two if by Sea (128) See Grumpier Old Men…
Seven (129) 1997 hit
Heavens Prisoners (161) Hollywood is 0 for 2 on James Lee Burke. Do better!)
Swingers (164) $4 million box office, but a cult classic
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (166) Big hit in 1997
Cutthroat Island (170) Not quite Pirates of the Carribean
Barb Wire (180) Pamela Anderson remakes Casablanca/The Maltese Falcon. Soooo bad

Tastes certainly vary, but there was a lot to go see in 1996. As a hardboiled guy, Heat, Mulholland Falls, Last Man Standing, and 2 Days in the Valley, were all worthwhile. I liked Heavens Prisoners okay, as a Dave Robicheaux fan.

Scifi, comedy, action, offbeat – a good year for movies.And up top, Independence Day is still a great watch. That was from Dean Devlin, who had written Stargate, and would give us Leverage, and The Librarians. Mission Impossible continued to make bank for decades.

Share your thoughts on the list. Or others I left off. I skimped on the horror stuff.

So…what year shall we look at next?

Some previous entries on things to watch:

Firefly – The Animated Reboot
What I’ve Been Watching – February 2026 (The Night Manager, SS-GB, Best Medicine)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2026 (Return to Paradise, Lynley, Expend4bles, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2025 (Ballard, Resident Alien, Twisted Metal, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – May 2025 (County Line, The Bondsman, Bosch: Legacy)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2024 (What We Do in the Shadows, The Bay, Murder in a Small Town)
What I’m Watching – November 2023 (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, A Haunting in Venice)
What I’m Watching – April 2023 (Florida Man, Picard – season three, The Mandalorian)
The Pale Blue Eye, and The Glass Onion: Knives Out
Tony Hillerman’s Dark Winds
The Rings of Power (Series I wrote on this show – all links at this one post)
What I’m Watching – December 2022 (Frontier, Leverage: Redemption)
What I’m Watching – November 2022 (Tulsa King, Andor, Fire Country, and more)
What I’m Watching – September 2022 (Galavant, Firefly, She-Hulk, and more)
What I’m Watching- April 2022 (Outer Range, Halo, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, and more)
When USA Network was Kicking Major Butt (Monk, Psych, Burn Notice)
You Should be Streaming These Shows (Corba Kai, The Expanse, Bosch, and more)
What I’m BritBoxing – December 2021 (Death in Paradise, Shakespeare & Hathaway, The Blake Mysteries, and more)
To Boldly Go – Star Treking – (Various Star Trek incarnations)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2021 (Monk, The Tomorrow War, In Plain Sight, and more)
What I’m Watching – June 2021 (Get Shorty, Con Man, Thunder in Paradise, and more)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
What I’ve Been Watching – June 2021 (Relic Hunter, Burn Notice, Space Force, and more)
Appaloosa
Psych of the Dead
The Mandalorian
What I’m Watching: 2020 – Part Two (My Name is Bruce, Sword of Sherwood Forest, Isle of Fury, and more)
What I’m Watching 2020: Part One (The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, Poirot, Burn Notice, and more)
Philip Marlowe: Private Eye
Leverage
Nero Wolfe – The Lost Pilot
David Suchet’s ‘Poirot’
Sherlock Holmes (over two dozen TV shows and movies)

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, and 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.

The Dark of the Soul (Tower Books, 1970)

Here’s another anthology I picked up because it had a Robert E. Howard story in it.

The Dark of the Soul, edited by Don Ward, A Tower book, 1970. Cover artist unknown. It contains a short story by Robert E. Howard called “The Horror from the Mound.” It’s a good story, although not one of Howard’s best.

This collection is more horror and gothic, magic and witchcraft, and not Sword & Sorcery (S&S). The stories are atmospheric but maybe slow for modern audiences. Here are my thoughts.

1. Introduction by Don Ward. Gives some context to the stories but probably wasn’t needed.

2. “The Horror from the Mound” by Robert E. Howard has the highest level of action in the collection, and is genuinely creepy.

3. “The Muted Horn” by Dorothy Salisbury Davis doesn’t have any action and is not my cup of tea.

4. “Mrs Amworth” by E. F. Benson was also slow, with a long setup that could mostly have been cut.

5. “Song of the Slaves” by Manly Wade Wellman is a long way from this author’s best work.

6. “The Ash Tree” by M. R. James is a creepy piece. James didn’t beat around the bush getting to the heart of the tale and this is one of the better pieces in the book.

7. “Cool Air” by H. P. Lovecraft. I’m a big Lovecraft fan but this isn’t among his best stories.

8. “Taboo” by Geoffrey Household was a solid tale but maybe with too much unnecessary material.

9. “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a memorable tale from an author you don’t generally see in such collections.

10. “Smee” by A. M. Burrage is a good ghost story, though fairly slow.

11. “The Dressmaker’s Doll” by Agatha Christie was a surprise. I knew her from her mysteries but this was creepy and with a strong ending.

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a review of two Sword & Sorcery anthologies from L. Sprague de Camp. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

The fifteenth annual Women in SF&F Month continues with three new guest posts this week, starting with a new essay tomorrow. Thank you so much to last week’s guests for another fantastic week! The new guest posts will be going up on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, but before announcing the upcoming schedule, here are last week’s essays in case you missed any of them. All guest posts from April 2026 can be found here, and last week’s guest […]

The post Women in SF&F Month: Week 3 Schedule & Week in Review first appeared on Fantasy Cafe.

So there is no sigl for clearing bruisings? Mending doesn’t apply an rebuild can only work on muscles, do all people that might get bruisings (like soliders) have basicly constant bruisings or do they get enhanced priorly, sothat there is no reason to think about healing bruisings?

Art by Vladimir Logos

I’ve lost count of novels that involve some sort of magical college featuring adolescent misfits plucked from humdrum daily existence thrust into contests between good and evil, not to mention raging hormones.

Blame Harry Potter, though Rowling was building on the trope, not inventing it (c.f., in particular, A Wizard of Earthsea). She just got wildly successful with it. So why shouldn’t others also build on that success?

Granted there is nothing new under the sun; no one is irked that Maggie O’Farrell did yet another riff on a Shakespeare play with Hamnet. Even so, not to knock the whole dark academia thing, I can understand how some might sneer at yet another mystical schoolyard fantasy.

Sure, some are tapping into a built-in audience without trying to rise much above the hackneyed (c.f., example, Starfleet Academy, despite the presence of Paul Giamatti and Holly Hunter, though you could probably say the same about most of the Star Trek spinoffs, The Next Generation and Strange New Worlds notwithstanding). Most others expand the form (c.f., the aforementioned Hamnet).

Which brings us to The Library of Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw. A sort of middle finger to the whole Harry Potter universe.

The Library at Hellebore, by Cassandra Khaw (Tor Nightfire, July 22, 2025)

Here’s how it starts.

When I woke up, my roommate, Johanna, was dead… the walls were soaked in effluvium. Every piece of linen on our beds was at least moderately pink with gore. The floor was a soup of viscera, intestines like ribbons unstrung over the scuffed wood.

So despite all the familiar elements — The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted, students with magical abilities, the titular library — we’re not in Kansas anymore. Hammering home the point that this is not a Harry Potter clone is when the headmaster says,

That we might be sorted into houses, a prospect so repellant the crowd spontaneously lost all fear of her and began groaning objections.

“I am just kidding,” she simpered among the thunderous murmurs. “Although the way you’re all complaining, I might have to make it happen.”

Though she retained her mask throughout, what mystique she possessed was lost in the wake of that awful joke.

While Hellebore might seem to connote humdrum existence in the netherworld (and maybe at some level Khaw intends to convey that), a hellebore is actually a poisonous plant, sometimes used in antiquity to treat psychosis. Indeed, our narrator, Alessa Li, hasn’t escaped a humdrum Muggle existence by being chosen to enroll in the institute; rather, she’s been kidnapped to prevent her powers from harming normal society.

Further distancing the novel from run-of-the-mill dark academia is that the Institute’s faculty aims to eat the student body. Now that’s dark.

Which brings us to the titular library, where Alissa and some of her surviving classmates — though hardly friendly allies — escape from professorial ravenous cravings. But there are no safe spaces even at this bastion of learning and knowledge as the monstrous librarian has her own carnivorous cravings.

The only lesson here is that of kill or be killed. Not in a Hunger Games kind of way. More like in an eat or be eaten Darwinian kind of way. Literally.

The horror genre is transgressive, meant to provoke revulsion in reminding us of bodily disgust, of psychological dislocation, of humanity’s animalistic nature. The horror of the Library of Hellebore is that “things like decency are nothing but human inventions. The cosmos bends nowhere except toward annihilation.”

David Soyka is one of the founding bloggers at Black Gate. He’s written over 200 articles for us since 2008. See them all here.

As You Like It speaks directly to the twenty-first century through its explorations of sexual…

The post Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” | A Fun-Loving Celebration Of Sexual Ambivalence appeared first on LitStack.

At least the editor replied back to you. Hopefully nothing needs to be done so your draft will be ready for print

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

Green & Deadly Things by Jenn Lyons

Mogsy’s Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Genre: Fantasy

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Tor Books (March 3, 2026)

Length: 368 pages

Author Information: Website

I enjoyed Jenn Lyons’ Sky on Fire, so when I heard she was returning with another standalone novel which sounds right up my alley, I was immediately intrigued. But while Green & Deadly Things is an undeniably entertaining “in the moment” kind of book, it’s also not one that’s easy to breeze through. Despite being packed with action and big ideas, it also somehow feels lighter and surface-level than expected, never quite digging deep enough to leave a lasting impression.

The story follows Mathaiik, a young novitiate training with the Idallik Knights, an order devoted to protecting the world from the lingering threat of necromancy. But though he has spent years preparing, Math still struggles to control the magic required to complete his training to become a full knight. At the same time, he’s hiding a secret related to his family’s past and his own strange connection to plants. In a world where nature itself has become increasingly dangerous, Math’s ability to tap into its powers is something that is viewed upon with suspicion.

Then, an unexpected attack throws the Idallik Knights into chaos, leaving Math in a position to help uncover the truth behind the sentient vegetation that has suddenly turned hostile. Subsequently, he finds himself magically linked to a mysterious woman he awakens from beneath the order’s fortress. A necromancer from the long-lost era of the Grim Lords, Kaiataris may hold the key to understanding and ultimately stopping the unchecked wild magic driving these cycles of destruction. From there, the two are forced into an uneasy alliance as they flee from the knights and into the unpredictable wilderness, where the enemy is the very landscape around them.

Necromancy. Ancient magic. Killer plants. There’s a lot to like here. Lyon’s creative talents are something to be admired for sure, especially when it comes to world-building and magic systems. The integration of botanical horror into the epic fantasy framework is genuinely cool, giving readers some vivid and occasionally unsettling imagery as the natural environment comes to life and IT IS PISSED. There’s also a quiet sense of dread lingering just beneath the surface, because I guess there’s just something deeply unsettling about the inevitability of cyclical destruction.

That said, my biggest issue with the book involves its pacing and its lack of depth, in that it never quite slows down enough to let all its ideas breathe and settle. The plot is relentless, throwing the characters into one crisis after the other. While this rapid-fire development is what kept the pages turning, paradoxically it also made it more difficult to stay fully invested as events started to blur together.

The characters fall into a similar pattern. Math is a likeable enough protagonist, but he’s also tragically bland, an earnest figure caught between loyalty, truth, and his own feelings, like any standard fantasy hero pulled from a template. Kaiataris, meanwhile, offers a slightly more intriguing dynamic as an ancient necromancer who challenges everything Math believes. However, rather than fully exploring that conflict, the story quickly steers them into a romance, and a rushed one at that. It’s frustrating and it’s disappointing, because one feels that both characters deserve far more than simply becoming a checkbox for a romantic subplot.

Still, that’s not to say the book isn’t enjoyable. Lyon’s writing is approachable and easy to get into. The characters’ banter has plenty of sass and humor to keep things from getting grim. I also love the fact that it’s a standalone. As it was with Sky on Fire, it felt refreshing to read Green & Deadly Things knowing you’ll get a complete story in one volume. These strengths go a long way toward counterbalancing the novel’s weaknesses, which mainly come down to parts of the narrative feeling predictable or too convenient, and the relationship between the characters relying too heavily on proximity and magic rather than more organic development. Still, all this, along with its accessible tone which sits comfortably in a crossover space between adult and YA, makes this book a strong “entry into fantasy” kind of read.

In the end, Green & Deadly Things is a fun, fast-moving fantasy with lots of cool concepts and an easy reading style, but while reading it, I also couldn’t help but feel a nagging sense that it’s reaching for something a little deeper, a little more. Regardless, it remains accessible and entertaining, a good standalone that will probably work best for readers looking for a lighter entry point into fantasy rather than something more complex or layered.

French publisher Monsieur Toussaint Louverture will publish their new two-volume translation of The Wolf’s Hour on May 22, 2026. They have not revealed the covers yet, but they have teased them. Monsieur Toussaint Louverture has previously published Boy’s Life and Swan Song.

Here’s their new Facebook post:

Après plusieurs tentatives, plusieurs directions, nous avons fini par trouver une forme de livre en mesure de correctement accueillir, aujourd’hui, les romans de Robert McCammon, qu’ils soient inédits ou non, qu’ils soient amples ou resserrés, qu’ils parlent de psychopathes ou de loups. Ces livres étaient pourtant sous notre nez (bouché, donc) depuis quelques années !

La Bibliothèque McCammon s’inscrit dans la continuité du geste esthétique engagé avec Michael McDowell et Pedro Oyarbide.

Une fabrication française, un format accessible, pour faire découvrir, simplement, l’un des plus grands conteurs contemporains.

L’Heure du loup, volumes 1 & 2, paraissent ensemble et l’histoire forme un tout. Le volume 2 inclut une nouvelle inédite consacrée à Michael Gallatin.

Précommandes la semaine prochaine. Sortie le 22 mai.

In English:

After several attempts and exploring various directions, we have finally found a book format capable of properly housing Robert McCammon’s novels today—whether previously unpublished or not, whether sprawling or compact, and whether they feature psychopaths or wolves. Yet, these books were right under our noses (stuffed-up noses, evidently!) for the past few years!

The McCammon Library continues the aesthetic vision first established with Michael McDowell and Pedro Oyarbide.

Produced in France and featuring an accessible format, this series offers a straightforward way to introduce readers to one of the greatest contemporary storytellers.

*The Hour of the Wolf*, Volumes 1 & 2, are being released simultaneously, forming a complete, cohesive story. Volume 2 includes a brand-new, previously unpublished short story centered on Michael Gallatin.

Pre-orders open next week. Release date: May 22.

As we mentioned in December, Earthling Publications is producing a signed limited edition of MINE, the last Robert McCammon novel to receive the limited edition treatment. Copies were available as part of a bundle back in December, but the remaining copies will be going up for pre-order on Tuesday, April 14, 2026, at Noon ET. The book features art by Tomislav Tikulin. Three of the art pieces are shown below.

Full information and ordering details will be posted here on Tuesday!

Earthling’s MINE art by Tomislav Tikulin Earthling’s MINE art by Tomislav Tikulin Earthling’s MINE art by Tomislav Tikulin

A new Dresden short story hits the shelves soon in Paranormal Payback! This collection of urban fantasy stories holds an all new Dresden Files story featuring Goodman Grey. Paranormal Payback is available April 14th!

Happy Friday, everyone!

Yesterday, we read about Maggie going on tour and witnessed some of the excitement of being able to see Ilona and Gordon live.

But not all of us could be there to ask our questions and give them our love. So now we’re fixing that:

Maggie Zoom

Ilona and Gordon will be hosting a Zoom Q&A on Saturday, April 18th at 10 AM Central Time to chat with us about everything This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me and what comes next.

REGISTER FOR MAGGIE ZOOM

I have almost three hundred questions gathered for the Zoom list, so over the weekend I’ll be whittling them down into something manageable for our brave authors to tackle. To be fair to the Horde, they knew exactly what they were doing! Of course we barsaed all over it.

If you have more questions, please continue the discussion on the spoiler thread for now. Since the book is longer than usual, we need to protect our fellow readers who may still be making their way through it.

The Q&A will be posted on the Ilona Andrews Moderator YouTube channel a few days later, but if you want to interact with our IA live, please register as Zoom spots are limited.

The bit more

When is the Maggie sequel coming?

We wouldn’t be BDH if we hadn’t started asking this even before release day.

The good news is that House Andrews are hard at work on it, and it is shaping up to be a substantial draft. We like big books and we cannot lie, the other Hordes can’t deny, when a draft comes in with a wordcount high and a plot that won’t de…Ok, I hear you, Sir Modsalot out. 

As soon as the manuscript is ready to move to the next stage in the traditional publishing process (developmental edits), we will hear about it here first.

Ilona and Gordon have just come off an intense release cycle and tour and went straight back into writing the Maggie 2 draft and ongoing admin work. We’ll need to allow them a little breathing room so they can keep doing what they do best: telling us the stories we love.

To put to rest the conspiracies already cropping up thanks to my people, Team Facts be Damned: yes, this is a planned trilogy. No, there is no cruel joke at play intended to leave us with an unfinished series and just two novels like Maggie’s own situation. In over 20 years of publishing, House Andrews have never failed to deliver on a contract. The best thing we can do is wish them health, rest, and long creative lives so they can keep feeding the Horde for years to come.

And reread, just in case … If one day we wake up on the streets of Kair Toren we’ll need to know exactly which Duke to ask for help. (Jk, of course we would go to Clover.)

Audiobook news?

The traditional audiobook recording for Beast Business (Augustine’s Hidden Legacy novella) will begin soon – once it enters editing stage, we will be able to estimate a release date better and will announce it.

I’m very happy to share that the actor who was chosen for Augustine was such a perfect fit that he will also be recast as Pancakes Montgomery in the Graphic Audio dramatized adaptations of Catalina’s Hidden Legacy trilogy, which should make for a wonderfully consistent listening experience for us.

I also have a 70% off promotion for the Burn For Me dramatized Graphic Audio adaptation on Audiobooks.com, as a Friday treat.

I do not have any official news about the dramatized adaptation of This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, by Graphic Audio or otherwise. The traditional audiobook, narrated by the wonderful Kristen Sieh is available from all major retailers.

International editions of This Kingdom?

German readers in particular seem to be very worried – keine Sorge!

• The German edition of This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me has already been announced by Cove Verlag and is scheduled for September 25, 2026
• The Spanish edition coming from Editorial Hidra is planned for June 2026
• The French edition, handled by Éditions Bookmark, will also release in June, and will come in three formats: boutique edition with reversible dust jacket (art by Luisa Preissler), bookstore edition and digital

That’s it for this Friday update. Thank you again for these past two weeks of discussion, theories, laughter, and sheer joy of seeing the Horde in full swing!

The post Maggie Zoom Q&A and a bit more first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Consecrated-Ground-Book-Trailer-Small-.mp4

Here’s the book trailer, specifically designed to feature the Kickstarter, for my noir novel, Consecrated Ground. This is the novel that I mentioned on Tuesday, the one that the original editor slapped an offensive title on (which stuck for nearly two decades). I’m using the original title.

This novel is historical through and through, although, like its compatriot in the Kickstarter, the novel straddles two different timelines. Memory and crime feature in both novels.

There’s also a short story collection in the Kickstarter, and it has some previously unpublished stories. Readers who are in my newsletter told me they wanted to see more short story collections, so I’m working diligently to give them what they asked for.

I hope the trailer interests you enough to send you to the Kickstarter. Consecrated Ground won’t be available anywhere but the Kickstarter for several months. So if you want to get a copy early, head on over now.