literature.cafe chat

Last week I polished off the eleven books in the King's Watch series by Mark Hayden, as well as the cozy mystery spinoff by the author's sister with the excellent title Murder Within Tent, and the... what do you call the relationship between two spinoffs of the same show? Cousins? As well as the two modern UK procedurals in a cousin series (the Tom Morton books), and a couple of so-so novellas in yet another spinoff series featuring a minor set of characters from the King's Watch books by someone else entirely.

This week I banged through a few books in a really quite decent urban fantasy series, the Lost Fall books by Chris Underwood, a quick, fun, not especially complex action thriller set in a Mexican border town called Cryptid Slayer, and the latest Prof Croft urban fantasy book which is really a dollar store Dresden Files that I'm only still reading out of inertia, really. Today I read the first Rev Parata Occult Mysteries book, a fun lovecraft-flavored noir set in 1984, and I'm about 75% through the second one which I'm not enjoying as much because the author made the decision to lampshade the solution to the mystery less than a quarter of the way through, and I'm not sure if he intended to turn the book into a howcatchem instead of a whodunit or he just thinks I'm a moron. I expect I'll finish that off before bed.

Kindle Unlimited is a real mixed bag in terms of quality, but it's one flat fee every month for a huge library and every now and then you find a gem amidst the mediocrity.