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Do you remember a few weeks ago, when I rhapsodized about my love of powered armor? Well, related to that, I also have a fondness for giant battle tanks, mechs, and other giant armored weapons platforms. Maybe, like other aspects of my personality, it’s thanks to Metal Gear Solid.

The titular “trolls” in this story are massive battle tanks called “Bolos”. Our protagonist is a man named Jackson who has awakened from suspended animation in some sort of military base. He stumbles outside to find the door guarded by one of these huge units. He manages to evade it and sets out to find his way home.

Unfortunately, as often happens in science-fiction stories, he realizes he’s been asleep far longer than he realized, and that the world has turned into a war-torn dystopia. He returns to his old home, and finds it a ruin, inhabited only by an eccentric old man.

Gradually, Jackson learns that this ravaged hell-scape is ruled by a mysterious figure called “the Baron,” who is believed to possess powerful and terrible mana which enables him to control the “troll” guarding his estate—that is, another Bolo. With help from the old man, Jackson makes his way there, and infiltrates one of the Baron’s social gatherings by disguising himself as a haughty officer.

So far, this sounds like a typical post-apocalyptic affair. And it is, but what sets it apart is the style of writing. It’s written like a hardboiled Chandler-esque detective story, with memorable lines and plenty of gallows humor. Darkly comic metaphors and similes abound: “The joy ran out of his face like booze from a dropped jug.” “The grin fell like a stripper’s bra.” etc.

At one point, the old man tells Jackson many of his shotgun shells are spent:

“There are shells–but the magic is gone from many.”

“That’s the way magic is, Pop. It goes out of things before you notice.” 

And then there is this magnificent passage from Jackson’s infiltration of the Baron’s estate, which I cannot resist quoting at length:

This was Baronial country, all right. A pair of guards stood at the far end of the corridor.

I’d passed half a dozen with no more than a click of heels to indicate they saw me. These two shouldn’t be any different—and it wouldn’t look good if I turned and started back at the sight of them. The first rule of the gate-crasher is to look as if you belong where you are.

I headed in their direction.

When I was fifty feet from them, they both shifted rifles—not to present-arms position, but at the ready. The nickle-plated bayonets were aimed right at me. It was no time for me to look doubtful; I kept on coming. At twenty feet, I heard their rifle bolts snick home. I could see the expressions on their faces now; they looked as nervous as a couple of teen-age sailors on their first visit to a joy-house.

“Point those butter-knives into the corner, you banana-fingered cotton choppers!” I said, looking bored and didn’t waver. I unlimbered my swagger-stick and slapped my gloved hand with it, letting them think it over. The gun muzzles dropped—just slightly.

“Heard the rifle bolts snick home!” “Banana-fingered cotton choppers!” It’s all so vivid, and, despite being a tense moment in our hero’s journey, rather funny.

If I have a complaint about the book, it’s that it all moves a little too fast. There a surprising number of plot twists packed into this for a short story, and sometimes it feels like we receive a really head-turning bit of information, but have to move on to the next thing before it’s even been processed. It’s a little like a Twilight Zone episode, if the Twilight Zone had had the budget to build futuristic battle tank sets. Can you imagine?

I highly recommend this story to anybody who enjoys sci-fi adventure or Golden Age pulp stories told with flair and wit. And, of course, to my fellow giant tank enthusiasts. I haven’t talked about it much so as not to spoil anything, but rest assured that the Bolos see plenty of action in the last act of the story.

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Ah, submarine warfare! Sure, kids these days have their grand notions about space battles, and romantics may long for the days when Hearts of Oak Really Ruled The Waves, but me? Give me being locked in a cramped metal tube deep under the ocean for months at a time, breathing stale air and never seeing trees, grass, or sunshine.

No, actually, I’m kidding. Being a submariner sounds horrible, and I have nothing but respect for people who serve their country by doing it.

Search and Destroy tells the story of such people, an American submarine crew engaged in a massive war against China, as seen largely through the eyes of Commander Christopher Coe.

Captain Coe is a harsh disciplinarian, and as the book goes on, he sometimes veers close to being a Captain Bligh. His harsh, no-nonsense attitude leads him to clash repeatedly with his executive officer, Richard Wickham.

And that’s about it on the human drama level. Most of the book’s conflict comes from listing the various pieces of awesome high-tech naval weaponry the dueling vessels (it’s more fun if you pronounce it “wessels“) hurl at one another. I admit, these scenes were a bit hard to follow–as I would imagine real-life submarine warfare is.

The book says it’s a techno-thriller on the cover, so I can hardly complain about the many references to technology. I don’t have a problem with that.

I do have a problem with the some of the prose style. For example, people say “very well” astonishingly often aboard this sub. Now, again, I’ve never been in the military, so I don’t know, but I would think the terser “okay” or “yes” would be the preferred form in intense, often radio-transmitted communications.

And then there are other oddities of style, perhaps the most interesting of which is:

“Aye, sir,” Wickham nodded through gritted teeth.

Obviously, what this means to say is “Wickham nodded and said ‘aye, sir’ through gritted teeth.” I’m not sure how you nod “through” gritted teeth. It sounds painful. But even apart from that, just try saying “aye, sir” while gritting your teeth.

But, we’re not here for lyrical prose. It’s true that some of the most interesting books about submarine warfare feature clever writing and complex psychological drama, but this one is more in the vein of Tom Clancy, where the point of the story is to watch our heroes defy the odds over and over and defeat the bad guys with their awesome technology.

And you can’t say it isn’t popular! The book has almost 4,000 reviews on Amazon, most of them positive. And for all I know, it may be a perfectly realistic depiction of how a submarine operates. Which just affirms my desire to never be on one.

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Sentient Secrets is a short story that packs a lot into a few pages. It’s a teaser for the novel Sisters Arcana. The protagonist is Lulu Wren, whose company mandates her to do a journaling project with an AI assistant.

At first, Lulu finds the exercise tedious, stupid, and cringeworthy. But soon, after gathering enough input from her, the AI starts producing new entries in her voice. More than that, it soon seems that entries in the journal have predictive power.

It was a compelling concept, and made me interested in reading Sisters Arcana. I’ll probably pick that one up at some point.

I am, as you may have noticed, extremely interested in non-linear conceptions of time. Try reading about the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment sometime. It doesn’t actually demonstrate that information can be sent backward in time. However, it takes advanced knowledge of quantum mechanics to explain why it doesn’t demonstrate that, which means that it’s close enough to time-travel for government work.

Time-travel is a bit mind-bending to think about, and that is probably why it’s one of those concepts best suited to machine minds, which are entirely comfortable with hallucinations and things that sound cool but make no logical sense to those of us made out of meat.

This kind of techno-sorcery is what is going on in Sentient Secrets, and if this blend of esoteric mysticism and modern computer technology doesn’t put you in mind of the CCRU, well… congratulations, that means you’re a normal, well-adjusted person. How did you even find this blog? Were you perchance led to it by The Almighty Algorithm?

Well, like Hunter S. Thompson said, “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” The computer age is proving to be a weird one indeed, and Sentient Secrets is a concise distillation of that weirdness.

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Literary theorist Georg Lukács said that novels were “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given.”

Well, who am I to argue? But let me just say that I think it is hard to capture all that in a single novel, unless maybe you’re doing it the Russian way. But the short story collection, now there’s a way to capture “the totality of life.”

Pacotti is like Mark Paxson and a few other gifted writers of literary fiction who have this extraordinary ability to inhabit the heads of different people and show the world from their perspective. This collection is a beautiful mosaic of unique characters in varied circumstances, all written with care and empathy. Whether it’s the wife of an alcohol smuggler in Tehran, a pair of rebels in a dystopian Hong Kong, or a young boy growing up believing he will never be as brilliant as the rich kids in his class due to their chemically-induced mental advantage, Pacotti invites us to walk around in many different shoes.

Of course, I knew of Pacotti first from his work on the dystopian video game Deus Ex, and later from his prophetic neo-noir cyberpunk horror thriller Demiurge. Both of these are absolute classics of 21st-century sci-fi, and each share many things in common with the stories found in this volume.

The most obvious common element among these stories is… drugs. Not just the typical illegal kind (though those certainly show up) but all manner of mind-altering substances, both real and, at least so far, imagined. Pacotti returns again and again to the subject of chemically changing the patterns of the brain.

And yet, at the same time, he clearly isn’t just a materialist who sees consciousness as just an accidental product of a bubbling stew of chemicals. There is an implicit human core that is somewhere beyond the reach of the drugs, and that’s the part that makes Pacotti’s work so haunting. Over and over, we meet characters exposed to the most fundamentally anti-human and unnatural circumstances, but what makes the story work is the undeniable basic humanity struggling to break through.

I haven’t done a very good job describing these stories, and I am sorry for that. The power of them is a hard thing to concisely summarize; it’s more like a feeling that gradually steals over you as you read, and find yourself rooting for (or against) his vividly-drawn characters.

I liked all the stories, but probably my top three are “Evil Spirits Travel in Straight Lines”, the eerily prescient “Conversations with the Noösphere” and “Incantation.” All the stories are available on the author’s website, so I encourage you to check these out, and read the rest if you enjoy them as much as I did. Pacotti is one of the great sci-fi authors of our era, and when the history of fin de millénaire literature is written—if it is written—it will be impossible not to include his name in it.

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The great Noah Goats once told me something I’ve never forgotten. “Berthold,” he said to me, “books lead on to books, sometimes in strange ways.” Then he closed up his butterfly knife and walked away into the darkness.

Okay, I’m embellishing. But he really did tell me that. And he was right. Today’s book is a case in point: it’s written by one of the authors of Best, which I reviewed last week. Reading another book by an author of a book you’ve enjoyed may not seem that strange, but what piqued my interest is that while Best, is a light-hearted rom-com satire of academia, Kenai is military science-fiction.

This got my attention. There aren’t many authors who dabble in genres as diverse as that. (Full disclosure: I have also written a light-hearted rom-com satire of academia and military science-fiction. Now are you starting to get an idea of what kind of eccentricity it takes? 🙂 )

Kenai tells the story of Jess Amiko, an ex-space marine trying to forget her past. During her time in the service, she was railroaded into serving a prison sentence for war crimes. They really gave her the Breaker Morant treatment, minus the firing squad, obviously. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t have plenty to feel justifiably guilty about! She does, and… she does.

Once she is finally released from prison, Amiko works as a private security guard on the world of Kenai, assisting with an archeological dig to uncover the ruins of a lost civilization.

Naturally, things don’t go smoothly. Amiko soon finds herself under attack by mercenary thugs, meeting sentient trees, and generally having a whole bunch of experiences that make her question her own sanity.

Interwoven with all this are flashbacks to her time in the service and in prison, including the lengthy counseling sessions she underwent as part of her rehabilitation. These scenes serve to flesh out her character, and also serve another purpose…

…a purpose which I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge. You see, about halfway through the book, there’s a very clever plot twist that forces you to reevaluate a good deal of what came before. And after. But I can’t explain what that is without spoiling it, and that would be very wrong. Now, I could it put it behind a spoiler tag, ’tis true. But in these days of AI combing through everything to slap together answers for inquiring minds, I can’t guarantee my spoiler might not find its way into some LLM-generated reply to a query, and I wouldn’t want that. Therefore, it’s very important I not talk about some of the things that happen in this book.

(Curiously, it occurs to me that not talking about some of the things that happen is also a key plot element in the book itself. There appears to be some sort of recursive hyperstition effect at work in this text which affects not only the book itself, but also writings about the book. But probably best not to think about it too hard. “How quaint the ways of Paradox! / At common sense she gaily mocks!”)

But anyway, what I can say is that this is a fine MilSciFi adventure. Who doesn’t love the trope of a flawed protagonist on a quest for redemption? Especially if that quest for redemption involves the liberal use of POWERED ARMOR!

Gad, I love powered armor. Any story is automatically rendered better by the inclusion of powered armor. Remember how like 15 years ago there was a fad for rewriting classic works of literature but with zombies? That really never moved me, but if they did it with powered armor? Pride and Prejudice and Powered Armor even sounds better!

In short, I unhesitatingly recommend Kenai to anyone who enjoys science-fiction and clever, mind-bending plot twists. Be sure not to skip over the author’s note at the end if you’re a writer, it reveals interesting details about the process.

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It is said that God created academia to train the faithful. Oh, no, wait; that’s Arrakis I’m thinking of. But, the point stands: the academic setting is full of little conflicts, petty rivalries, and various other annoyances that test the patience of those working in it.

And it can also be a place where people find love. At least, that’s what the dual protagonists of this book, Prof. Flora Fineman and Prof. Mark Reynolds, are hoping. Flora is still recovering from a disastrous relationship during her post-doc years, and Mark is dealing with the double-whammy of a divorce and raising a child recovering from cancer. Both of them have a lot on their plates, and that’s before they’re assigned to serve on Astor College’s budget committee for the semester.

The thing is, Flora and Mark don’t like each other. They haven’t interacted much, but to the extent that they have, their encounters have been unpleasant. But, you know how it is: fate and committee meetings have a way of throwing people together.

And soon, their work gives them another challenge to confront. An anonymous informant notifies members of the budget committee that something strange is going on with Astor’s finances, and sends the committee members a spreadsheet of all the college’s financial transactions, something which even faculty are not normally allowed to see.

Flora and Mark may not like each other, but they do like investigating mysterious goings-on, and these financial shenanigans appear to go all the way to the top.

Of course, figuring all this out means working together closely. And in so doing, Flora and Mark each realize that their judgments of each other may not have been entirely accurate.

The book is written with chapters alternating between Mark and Flora’s points of view. What makes this especially interesting is that the co-authors wrote the different chapters, with Dobson writing Mark and Anonymous Ph.D. writing Flora. The two authors have different styles as well; one being a “pantser” and one a “plotter.” This gives each character a subtly different feel, and makes the evolution of the plot feel spontaneous. As explained in the Afterword, the authors would often surprise one another with the direction they took the story.

I loved the book, partially for its unique storytelling style, but above all for its extremely vivid portrayal of the setting and denizens of Astor College. The personalities, the intrigues, the cynical humor which most people adopt as a coping mechanism… all of it felt like a very accurate depiction of a bureaucratized institution of higher learning.

I recently watched the BBC series The Barchester Chronicles, starring Donald Pleasance and Alan Rickman. It’s a delightful romantic dramedy, based on novels by Anthony Trollope, about church politics in 19th-century rural England. One of the main sources of humor in it is how unbelievably petty are the concerns of the churchmen. They imagine themselves as crusaders for Holy Justice, doing the work of their Lord and Savior… when all that they are really arguing over is some trivial question like who shall receive wardenship of a Church hospital. The meek and mild-mannered Mr. Harding muses that all this hardly seems worthy of worshippers of Jesus Christ, to which the perpetually-outraged Dr. Grantly angrily fumes, “Christ has nothing to do with it!”

There’s something similar going on in The Academy, I think. Perhaps the cathedrals of yesteryear have been replaced by university administration buildings, and yet the fundamental dynamics remain the same. The same fights over trivial fiefdoms and fleeting political power override the institution’s true mission. As my Sith mentor used to tell me, “it’s all about power and control.”

But as my other Sith mentor used to tell me, “apathy is death.” And indeed, the apathy of the faculty and staff is the principle weapon which the villains of the piece count on to ensure their scheme will succeed. So when Flora and Mark realize they themselves actually care…

Well, “it’s an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.” To which I might add, rom-coms and other light entertainments. Perhaps if more people took the trouble to actually care, things would be different. Then again, perhaps not. Either way, though, this book is a fun and funny look at academia through the eyes of two rivals who gradually learn the oldest and most fundamental lesson of all human endeavor: that sometimes you have to be willing to admit when you’re wrong.

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🎶”Oh, take me down to the Nightside City / Where the grass is rock and the girls are implanted with symbiotes…”🎶

Okay, that’s not too catchy. But it is an accurate description of the setting for this neo-noir cyberpunk detective story.

Carlisle Hsing is private investigator who is down on her luck and down in the dumps. Quite literally, because she lives in the slums at the bottom of a giant crater. Also, it’s always night, because the planet it’s on, Epimetheus, doesn’t rotate. Naturally, the place has become a tourist trap; a Sin City on a par with Vegas, with the added attraction that it will be destroyed someday.

Because the planet doesn’t quite not rotate. It rotates, but very slowly. So eventually, Nightside City will be in the blistering hot sunlight, and will then stay there for a long time, becoming an unlivable irradiated hellhole.

Hsing is hired by some slum-dwellers to investigate a mysterious effort to buy up their properties on the dingy outskirts.  Why someone would be buying land on a place that is soon to become uninhabitable is anybody’s guess, and that’s what makes Hsing take the case. That and the fact that she desperately needs money.

And so, she plunges into a web of conspiracy, intrigue, backstabbing, lying and cheating, in a world populated by persistent surveillance drones, sentient taxis, and augmented cyber-decadents, with only her wits, her own cybernetic enhancements, and her massive gun to help her survive.

In a weird way, the book made me think of Chuck Litka’s stories. Both in the ways it was like them and in the ways it was profoundly unlike them. It resembled his in that the mystery was low-stakes, and, Hsing’s aforementioned massive gun notwithstanding, is pretty low on actual violence. All that ever gets shot is one of the surveillance drones.

On the other hand, it was unlike a Litka book in that the tone is dark, and gritty, and many of the people are rather nasty. Although there isn’t much actual violence, there are numerous threats of violence. Anger, greed, lust, vanity, pride… all the standard sins are featured here. And while stupidity isn’t a sin officially, a number of the denizens of Nightside City indulge in that as well.

But the story isn’t stupid. Far from it; some of the details about planetary motion and gravity were like an intro physics class. Fortunately, Hsing’s sardonic wit makes these bits of background information interesting.

This is pretty much everything you could want in a cyberpunk story. It’s clever, biting, prophetic, and ultimately morally ambiguous. Not everyone will find the setting of a cyberpunk dystopia compelling, of course. (Though you might want to start… you’re living in one. 🙂 ) But anybody who enjoys what I have occasionally called “Techno-Decadence” will certainly want to pick this up. And that cover! Just an absolute work of art. I miss covers like that.

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1776! What a year! Things were wild back then. It’s when Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a founding text in the science of Economics.

Also that year, the thirteen colonies of America declared their independence from Britain. This year marks the semiquincentennial of that event—250 years, in other words.

Before we even begin, I question whether this even means that 1776 truly marks the founding of the country. It’s true that the colonies declared themselves independent and therefore separate from England, but the Constitution and the structure of government with which we are today familiar was not established until 1789. (Another interesting year.) So it is questionable, in my mind, whether the current system which claims to trace its ancestry back two and a half centuries is really quite correct.

Ah, except it is correct de facto, if not de jure, if for no other reason than because the United States government is a powerful entity, and, like the Mikado in The Mikado, its will is law, and if it says “let a thing be done” then practically it is done, and if it is done, then why not say so?

It was not always thus. As Mr. McCullough’s chronicle of that fateful year shows, the USA was far from a juggernaut when it started out. Very much the opposite. Indeed, perhaps it was the very rag-tag and humble nature of the initial colonial rebellion that enable it to be successful, for the mighty British government never took seriously the idea that it could succeed.

(And by the way, it is just Mr. McCullough. I was surprised to learn in writing this post that the late historian was not a professor, holding only a B.A. from Yale.)

Most of you know the story, in general outlines: America declares independence, British get BIG MAD, send army to subdue rebel colonists. George Washington is appointed commander-in chief of the rebel army. Things go poorly at first, especially at the Battle of White Plains, but then Washington crosses the Delaware and scores surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton to close out the year on a high note.

All of this I knew, not through any diligent scholarship or study, but from careful and complete viewing of the series Liberty’s Kids. (Possibly the second-greatest show to air on PBS kids, trailing only the incomparable Wishbone.)

Still, there are details Liberty’s Kids omitted out of care for its audience. It could not depict, for example, some of the more savage attacks perpetrated upon the civilian population by both sides. These are the sorts of details McCullough is able to relate to his more mature audience.

Also, both Liberty’s Kids and this book offer an incomplete picture of the British position. Both are strong in depicting William Howe as incompetent at best and a traitor at worst. Even Liberty’s Kids managed to hint at what 1776 notes explicitly regarding Howe’s proclivities, as described in the rebel song:

Sir William he, snug as a flea,
Lay all this time a-snoring;
Nor dreamt of harm, as he lay warm,
In bed with Mrs. Loring.

But Howe is only the tip of the immensely complicated iceberg that was the relationship of the British government towards the rebellion. Yes, there was more to it than just a bunch of sneering officers looking down their noses at the plucky rebels. The Star Wars-ification of history is one of the real plagues of our time.

Let’s begin with one of my favorite bits of trivia: perhaps you have heard of the New England Patriots of the National Football League, a team whose colors and logos are obviously tributes to the revolutionaries of 1776?

The connection runs even deeper: the Patriots play in Foxborough (often shortened to Foxboro) Massachusetts. Foxborough is a borough named after Charles James Fox.

Who was Charles James Fox, you ask? Well, he was a Whig Member of Parliament who was a staunch supporter of the colonist cause. Wikipedia provides a helpful summary:

….[W]ith the coming of the American War of Independence and the influence of the Whig Edmund Burke, Fox’s opinions evolved into some of the most radical to be aired in the British Parliament of his era.

Fox became a prominent and staunch opponent of King George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant. He supported the American Patriots and even dressed in the colours of George Washington‘s army.

You see, Britain was far from monolithic. The Whig party, which included many famous people such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon, broadly supported the American cause.

Is this important? I’d argue it is, if for no other reason than because it is just too easy to fall into the trap of viewing history as a caricature. Also, it’s worth noting that the Fox family were the arch-rivals of the Tory Pitt family. So, even though Pitt the Elder came earlier, I think it’s fair to say that whenever the Patriots play the Steelers, their ancient enmity is in some sense revived.

1776, alas, doesn’t concern itself much with these kinds of political intrigues. McCullough is focused heavily on the military aspect, and specifically on George Washington. Which is fine. Washington is a cool guy.

But he wasn’t, at least in 1776, the most powerful man on the side of the United States. He was just the military commander in the field, and while he had perhaps the most important job for the future of the nation, he could not yet be said to be its leader. It was led by the Continental Congress which was, by most accounts, kind of a mess. Technically, the closest thing to an executive the government had at the time, the president of the Congress, was businessman and smuggler John Hancock.

It’s difficult to overemphasize just how much the shape of the whole project changed between 1776 and 1789. In some ways, you could argue it’s almost like the evolution of the French government between their revolution in 1789 and the Coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799. Or perhaps even more accurately, the evolution of the Roman government from the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC to the rise of Octavian-Augustus as God-Emperor Princeps in 27 BC.

If there’s one thing we love here at Ruined Chapel, it’s finding surprising patterns across different periods in history. (If there are two things we love, it’s that plus Halloween. If there are three things we love, it’s obscure historical patterns, Halloween, and Natalie Portman movies. If there are four… but why am I telling you this? I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!)

Anyway, all that I really am arguing is a rather pedantic point, which is that the United States was not actually founded in 1776, but in 1789. Now, of course, I have no problem with celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, which is very much an event worth recognizing.  But are we prepared to do it all again in 13 years to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the original founding? What did they do in 1989, besides take down the Berlin Wall?

Will the United States still be around in recognizable form in 13 years? Sir John Glubb calculated that great superpowers only last for about 250 years, a fact which tinges some political commentary on this anniversary with a bit of apprehension.

Oh, well. Whatever happens, 1776 is a year worth remembering for the epic struggle between authority and liberty, for the risks run and sacrifices made, and the sheer human drama of it all. Despite what I said about Star Wars-ification, there are indeed heroes on both sides, and that fact is perhaps more salient than any esoteric arguments of political philosophy. And so, in reviewing it all, the words of William Makepeace Thackeray, as rendered by Stanley Kubrick, come back to me:

 

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Can there be such a thing as a cozy legal thriller? I’ve heard of cozy mysteries, and I’ve heard of legal thrillers, but both at once? Well, I am here to tell you that there is such a thing, care of the great C. Litka.

This is another of his Redinal Hu stories, and in this one Red gets a chance to demonstrate his legal acumen, as well as his less cerebral skills.

Hu is hired to act as the bodyguard of Constance Darma, the new head of House Darma, whose life is under threat from members of her family seeking to acquire her fortune. Mz. Darma, however, is unfazed by the increasing danger she and Red find themselves in; for she has a plan to thwart her would-be killers: she is going to alter her will to cede her inheritance to a member of a rival House.

As ever in Litka’s stories, even in matters of life and death, people are almost unfailingly pleasant and polite. The nice thing about this world is, when you walk into your house to find an enemy agent lying in wait for you, there’s no need to act like Jack Slater in Last Action Hero; you just politely tell them you’re not interested in whatever they have to say, and bid them good evening. You might even have a cup of te with them.

Speaking of that enemy agent, there’s also a bonus story, The Pawns’ Game, that fleshes out a bit more about these agents and how they operate. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I love the idea of a sort of “henchmen guild” that Litka plays with here. I’ve often joked about how villains in movies and TV shows seem to have an endless supply of people willing to do their dirty work for them. Litka offers a sound in-universe explanation for how this might actually be arranged.

All told, these two stories make for a fitting conclusion to the Redinal Hu saga… which is not to say I wouldn’t be pleased should Mr. Litka reconsider and decide to write more of them.

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Do I really need to review this book?

If you’re a long-time reader, you know I’m a Carrie Rubin fan. And there’s a pretty good chance you are too. In fact, you probably already are planning to read this book, no matter what my review says. At most, all I need to say is that it’s everything we expect from one of Dr. Rubin’s books, and that alone should send you running to buy it.

But, I would hardly be upholding my reputation as a writer of long-winded reviews if I didn’t add some corroborative detail. We’ve got the catacombs of Paris, rumors of sinister activities within them, and our heroine, Kelly Burke, a student working as an au pair with the very same family that had previously employed the titular missing woman, Erin Fenton.

Driven by the loss of another friend, Kelly is obsessed with finding Erin, no matter what obstacles stand in her way. She is assisted by her friend and fellow student, a young man named Wayne, who sticks by Kelly even as her obsession with finding the lost woman pushes her to run greater and greater risks.

That’s the plot. But the setting is just as important, 1980s Paris comes to life, drawn from the author’s recollections as one who herself was an au pair there at that time. While I’m not one to insist that a writer must experience something firsthand before writing about it (tricky for an author of science fiction 🙂 ), there can be no doubt that having experienced that time and place lends a feeling of plausibility to the entire story.

All these little touches make the book feel real, and like something that could plausibly happen. Of course, that doesn’t include the darker aspects of the story… I’m sure things like that could never happen. Right? Well, anyway, I certainly hope not. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, but let’s just say the plot involves some of my favorite fictional tropes, which is yet another point in the book’s favor. I wish I could say more about this, but I just can’t without spoiling the story.

I’m tempted to say this might be Carrie’s best book yet. It’s difficult to choose, of course, and I’ll always have a soft spot for The Seneca Scourge, with its sci-fi twist, as well as for the dark psychological mysteries of Broken Hope and the Liza Larkin series. Everyone has their own preferences, but this one is surely top tier, in no small part due to the extremely likable protagonist, who is easy to root for from the start.

It occurs to me, as I put the finishing touches on this review and WordPress’s deeply unhelpful AI assistant offers to provide suggestions, that an AI could never write a book like this, drawn as it is from the author’s personal memories. What makes a good story are all the little pieces of themselves the author puts into it, and only Carrie had the exact combination of experiences necessary to write this book. That’s what makes it such a pleasure to read.