Noblebright novels on hope in dark times

The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains, Reena McCarty. Something about the marketing of this one -- the cover art, the cover copy, and so forth -- made me think it's a cozy novel. It absolutely is not. Which isn't to say it's grimdark, because it isn't that, either; just that the stakes here are higher than cozy reaches for, and the trials the characters go through have sharper edges.

Which for me was a good thing, because I was extremely uncertain if I was going to like a cozy book about the fae. (That tips over into twee with shocking ease.) So I was very pleased to instead get a novel in a world where fae have always been known to exist, but Europe has largely -- and deliberately -- destroyed its own Otherworld, while the U.S. has set up strict laws governing how people are and are not permitted to make deals with the fae. The faerie courts are not the familiar Seelie and Unseelie, but they absolutely have their own politics, which unsurprisingly turn out to underlie the small-scale disaster the protagonist is trying to set right.

The fae themselves are pleasingly alien (even if I find the human-sounding ones like "Sloan" rather distracting). There's just enough echo of dysfunctional human patterns like narcissism to keep their weirdness from feeling random, and McCarty does a good job of selling the idea that the fae simply do not have the same priorities and mentalities as mortals do. The ending was particularly effective in that regard!

Below the Root, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Murderer’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. I continue to gravitate toward shorter books at the moment, which is probably contributing to how many mysteries I've been reading lately.

By this point in the series, it is well established that the first scene will be from the viewpoint of the title character. So when you name your book The Murderer's Tale . . . yeah, Frazer is not faking you out. From the start, you know who the killer will be, and you can very rapidly guess who the victim will be, too. The killer is an unpleasant piece of work, thoroughly convinced of his own superior significance and misreading the motivations of everybody around him, who of course are lesser. Though I thought it was a deft touch when you see him being judgmental toward certain characters, and then soon after that you're in Frevisse's perspective and seeing her be judgmental toward them, too. Class distinctions are very real to these people. But this one really does read like a tragedy, because you see what's coming, it shouldn't happen, and of course you can't stop it.

A Case of Mice and Murder, Sally Smith. A newer mystery, set in 1901 London, about a barrister of the Inner Temple very comfortably settled into his routine, who gets piked out of it because the Lord Chief Justice has been murdered -- within the Temple! -- and the guy in charge of the place is extremely motivated to get the case solved as discreetly as possible. I very much like the central conceit here, which hinges on the fact that the Inner Temple's governance means the City of London police can only intervene there if asked; since the Temple is very much an elite bastion of the sort that thinks scandal is the kind of thing that should only happen to other people, having an insider investigate is exactly how such men would handle even a murder.

And Gabriel Ward is a congenial detective, very nerdy and obsessed not only with the law but with a whole array of historical tidbits. I like how Smith handles his very obvious OCD: another book might have made more emotional hay out of the stress and pressure of the condition, but Gabriel has long since arranged his life in ways that accommodate it. He does, over time, become more aware of the restrictions it places on him, but since he's a well-off gentleman cushioned by his residence in the Temple, it is not really a source of angst. It's just how his life works.

I enjoyed this one enough that I started out listening to it in audiobook and then transferred to ebook, not because the narrator was bad -- I liked him, despite fluctuating volume levels that sometimes made the quiet bits difficult to hear -- but because I have approximately 1-2 hours of audiobook listening time in a given week, and I didn't want to wait that long to get the whole story!

Cinder House, Freya Marske. This is the point at which I pivoted to reading the Hugo-nominated short fiction categories. I also read the short stories and novelettes this month, but since those weren't published under separate cover, they don't get tracked here.

It takes a fair bit of effort to make a Cinderella retelling feel original, but Marske manages it well -- starting with the fact that the protagonist gets murdered at the start of the novella and spends the rest of it as a ghost haunting the house now held by her stepmother and stepsisters. Marske also adds in a fresh layer by giving the prince his own story, with a curse that belongs nowhere in the original while fitting well into the general shape of fairy tale tropes. Be warned that there's some fairly heinous abuse here, quite apart from the murder; it turns out there are ways to torture a ghost who is more or less coterminous with the house she haunts, and one of the stepsisters eagerly explores those. The ending, however, finds a lovely and unusual resolution for the core problems.

Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite. SFnal murder mystery in space, aboard a vessel that's not so much a generation ship as a reincarnational one: people regularly save their memories to data "books" and upload the contents to their new body after their old one dies. The crux here is that someone has been murdered at the same time that several books were destroyed, with many complications ensuing.

I do tend to engage less with SF titles, but given the mystery kick I'm on right now, this one fit right in with my current mood. I enjoyed it a lot, even if I'm not sure it stands out in a way that would make me say it's award-worthy. There's another one out in the series and a third one on the way; I may well hunt them out.

Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz. Also SF, this time firmly in the cozy corner. In the aftermath of a war that saw California win independence from the United States, robots have their freedom . . . sort of. They're still discriminated against in a number of ways, many of which pose problems for a group of bots who want to open a restaurant.

I am extremely hit or miss with cozy books, because sometimes the warm fuzziness winds up making the perils feel a bit too toothless for my taste. Here, Staybehind lists at the outset several things that could go badly wrong, and then almost none of them happen. I suspect that actually dealing with those would have required this to be a novel, not a novella, and also it would have been markedly less cozy.

The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar. This, on the other hand, is so firmly up my alley that I might as well have painted a target on myself. Folkloric-mood novella based on a murder ballad, with a central motif that plays off the connections between language and magic? YES PLEASE. And the writing is a lyrical (without being overwrought) as usual. If Amal wants to write another six of these, all riffing on different ballads, I will be first in line for them.

And All Between, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik. Last of the novellas, and I'm a little puzzled: in the Hugo packet it gets labeled as a "sample," and there's a link to request the whole thing on Netgalley. I wasn't minded to create an account just to do that, so I figured I would read what's here . . . and it feels like it's all but maybe the last two pages? Anybody who's read the full thing, I'd love to know how much the sample cuts off.

Anyway, I was feeling jaundiced because of that whole "sample" business, but this won me over. There's a tenuous peace between Faerie and the mortal world, but given the way faerie memory works, that means almost nothing: the events that set off the original war are as fresh today as the day they happened. The main character winds up in the thick of that, of course, and has to figure out how to protag from within very constrained circumstances.

The pacing of this one did feel a little odd to me, in that it spends a lot of time on setting the stage before we get to the main act. In ways I understand -- without that setup, much of the resolution would be less satisfying -- but it took me a bit longer to get into it as a result.

Until the Celebration, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

A Case of Life and Limb, Sally Smith. Second of the Gabriel Ward mysteries, and the last for now, though there's a third coming next year. While eventually you get a murder here, much of the novel concerns someone sending packages with desiccated body parts to an assortment of men in the Inner Temple. (There's an entertaining discussion about whether this is even a crime, under the laws of the era.) Gabriel is once again tasked to investigate lest -- oh, the horror -- the journalists of Fleet Street find out and splash it all over their papers.

I should note that each book also involves some trial Gabriel is involved in, with the investigation taking away from the precious time he needs to prepare for that. I like that his trials are not murder trials; the first concerns a very tangled question of intellectual property rights around a beloved children's book, and this one concerns a defamation case brought by a popular stage entertainer. Topsy Tillotson is a delightful character, and I like how getting involved in her situation causes the rather mousy Gabriel to grow some unexpected teeth. (In my head he is played by Eddie Marsan, specifically channeling Mr. Norrell, sans that character's less admirable qualities.)

One other note I want to make, though, I'll put behind rot-13 -- not because it's directly spoilery, but because it might prejudice a reader's thoughts in spoilery directions: Gur jnl gung Tnoevry'f pheerag pnfr unf gb or gvrq va fbzrubj jvgu gur pevzr jvaqf hc aneebjvat gur svryq bs aneengvir cbffvovyvgvrf snveyl funecyl. Bs pbhefr vg jbhyq srry n yvggyr enaqbz vs vg jrera'g pbaarpgrq, ohg abarguryrff, gur aneebjvat fyvtugyl qvfncbvagf zr.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/09/books-read-june-2026/)