#Review - The Sister's Curse by Nicola Solvinic #Mystery #Occult #Supernatural

Series: Anna Koray # 2
Format: 384 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: October 21, 2025
Publisher: Berkley
Source: Publisher
Genre: Mystery, Occult, Supernatural

There’s something in the water in Bayern County, Ohio,

When mysterious drownings plague her small town, a detective haunted by her serial killer father must uncover whether revenge, ancient legends, or something darker lurks beneath the surface.

Lieutenant Anna Koray thought she'd finally found solid ground and escaped her past as the daughter of a notorious serial killer. A loving boyfriend, a loyal dog, a life that almost feels normal—except darkness has a way of seeping in. When she saves a boy from drowning, the strange marks on his body tell a disturbing story: something in the depths tried to drag him under.

Days later, another victim surfaces with identical marks and Anna's instincts scream that these are no accidents. Both victims are connected to the Kings of Warsaw Creek—men of the town's wealthiest and most influential families. And they have enemies.

Others whisper that there are witches in Bayern County, seeking revenge for a long-ago murder. Perhaps it's the work of Vivian Carson, the enigmatic bartender who’s rumored to cast hexes on those who wrong her. Or maybe it’s a secret coven who’s been leaving serpentine symbols and skulls behind at the scenes of the drownings.

But Anna's investigation reveals an even more sinister truth: something is stirring in the water, and it wants the Kings to pay.

With time running out and more victims appearing, Anna must separate superstition from truth. But in Bayern County, where legends and curses run deep as the water itself, one wrong step could drag her into the depths—this time for good.

The Sister’s Curse by Nicola Solvinic is a chilling, atmospheric sequel to The Hunter’s Daughter that deepens Lieutenant Anna Koray's story while leaning further into folklore, magical realism, and the blurred line between human malice and something older and darker in Bayern County's waters. The story follows the same protagonist: a decorated rural sheriff’s lieutenant who has tried to build a normal life with her boyfriend and loyal dog while concealing that she is the daughter of the notorious serial killer known as the Forest Strangler. 

Solvinic brings procedural authenticity to the investigation while surrounding it with Gothic unease, Slavic folklore (notably the Rusalka—vengeful spirits of drowned women), local legends, curses, and possible witchcraft. The story opens with Anna intervening in a drowning. The strange marks on the boy’s body, and later on other victims, suggest something dragged them under. The incidents connect to the “Kings of Warsaw Creek”—wealthy, influential local men—and an older unsolved disappearance of a young girl whose sister may have vowed revenge. 

Whispers of witches (including the enigmatic Vivian Carson, sister of the deceased Dana Carson), serpentine symbols, skulls left as warnings, and something stirring in the water force Anna to confront both the town’s occult underbelly and her own fractured past. Flashbacks and resurfacing memories explore her relationship with her mother as much as her father, intensifying her fear that she may have inherited a capacity for darkness or that “the Forest God” of her father’s delusions is more than delusion. 

Solvinic’s descriptive prose immerses readers in murky water, tangled woods, and the weight of small-town secrets, creating sustained tension that builds with hallucinations, paranoia, and rising body count. Themes of childhood trauma, nature versus nurture, vengeance, and the long shadow of family legacy run throughout, alongside an undercurrent of gendered power and retribution against powerful men. Anna remains a compelling, morally conflicted protagonist: she desperately wants to do the right thing and uphold the law, yet her history, emerging memories, and the pull of darker forces create genuine internal struggle. 

Supporting characters and possible culprits muddy the waters effectively, while the folklore feels organic rather than decorative. The lyrical atmosphere, propulsive suspense once it takes hold, and the way the book raises the emotional and supernatural stakes from the first novel are major strengths. The Sister’s Curse is a strong, immersive follow-up that expands Solvinic’s world while staying true to Anna’s complicated psychology. It succeeds as both a tense mystery about revenge and a haunting exploration of whether darkness is inherited, learned, or summoned by the land and its wounds.

 

1

Handfishing for Monsters

"You can't keep running!"

No one really could. Truth always slithered to the light. It could wait underground for years-decades, even-exulting in darkness. But truth inevitably lifted its head and flicked its tongue at the sun. It was sometimes beautiful, often terrifying, and usually poisonous.

And painful as hell when it bit.

"It's all over, Rod!" I shouted as I ran into the gloom. The sun had set, the last golden light fading from the tassels of summer grasses.

The man I chased was just ahead of me, a stringy dude in a camo T-shirt and jorts. He looked back over his shoulder, fearful. If he had any sense, he would've gone to ground and crawled through tall grass and purple ironweed. But Rod Matthews hadn't thought straight in many years. Decades of bad decisions had led him to today, to being chased by the Bayern County Sheriff's Office, on charges of meth production. A whole nest of meth heads had been disturbed, scattering to the four winds, and Rod was my chosen quarry for the evening.

"I ain't goin' back to prison!" he shouted.

Rod put his head down and pumped his scrawny fists, running for what was left of his life. I hadn't judged Rod to be in great shape, but adrenaline was a helluva drug. I'd eventually wear him down and he'd collapse. Eventually.

I toyed with the idea of taking my time, of hunting him. Sometimes . . . I wanted to enjoy circling my prey, feeling the space of air in my lungs, and the tightness of my muscles ready to spring.

But I didn't take that slow luxury. I increased my pace. I'd take him down quickly, haul him back to his meth lab. Clean. Like the good cop I once was, and was trying to be again.

In my peripheral vision something rippled the grass, as if an invisible shark swam beside me. It moved parallel to me, surged past me.

My heart lurched into my mouth, shattering my single-pointed concentration. No . . .

Rod screamed and collapsed, disappearing from sight.

"Fuck. Fuck. Stop it!"

I rushed to the place where Rod had fallen. He was lying on the ground, whimpering. A large, spotted pit bull was sitting on Rod's chest, chewing his T-shirt and growling like thunder.

"Gibby! Gibby, get off!" I reached for my dog's collar.

Gibby huffed at me. He drew his lips back into what I interpreted to be a smile, but Rod took as an expression of utter bloodthirstiness. I pulled Gibby back. Gibby liked hunting, too, but his methods were more direct. I couldn't really fault him for that.

I turned Rod over, shoved him face down in the grass, and cuffed him. To my relief, I noticed no blood on either Rod or the dog-just lots of slobber.

I glanced at Gibby, who smiled and thumped his tail on the ground. "You were supposed to wait in the car with Monica."

I swore he laughed at me. I had no idea how he'd gotten out of the SUV; I'd closed the doors and left the AC running. Gibby was a rescue dog with a very questionable reputation. A year ago he was on death row with animal control for mauling a cop; I'd pulled some strings to get him released into my custody.

"You're under arrest for the manufacture, possession, and distribution of a Schedule II substance," I told Rod, rolling him over to search him for drugs and weapons. His pockets were full of foil-wrapped pills-likely pseudoephedrine-and a pop bottle half-full of liquid. I squinted at it. It was the wrong color for cola or piss. Likely, it was one of the precursor chemicals for meth production-acetone or ether. I stuffed the evidence into my pockets and hauled Rod to his feet. I read him his rights as we crossed back through the field, toward a distant barn. He'd lost a flip-flop somewhere in his attempt to escape, so I took it slow for his benefit.

Above us, starlings flew west to their nests, chattering to themselves. They clotted together in a murmuration, twisting and turning in a cloud of seething, chirping shadow. It never failed to amaze me how they could become something so much more than the sum of their feathered parts, and I wondered what invisible current drove them.

Rod hung his head and plodded along, ignoring the show in the sky. "I'm going back to prison."

"Probably," I agreed, one eye still on the sky.

"Can I cut a deal? What if I roll over on my brother, Timmy?"

"Depends on what you've got to say about Timmy. Is he in town?" Rod's brother was a well-known drug runner. He was well-known because he wasn't very good, and got caught with some frequency.

"He's back from Florida, with a trunk full of ketamine."

"A whole trunk full?" I was skeptical.

"He picked it up at the airport, with some dudes from Germany . . ."

We reached the barn, and uniformed officers took Rod from me. A row of Rod's buddies were sitting on the ground, their hands zip-tied behind their backs.

Captain Monica Wozniak grinned at me. "I see you found him."

"Rod or the dog?"

She winced in regret. "Sorry. I opened the door to grab my gear, and he was gone like a flash before I could get his harness on. He doesn't like being apart from you."

I stared down at Gibby, who was gazing upon me with enough adoration to cause even the stoniest heart to explode.

"What am I going to do with you and your separation anxiety?" I murmured.

I grabbed an evidence bag for the manufacturing paraphernalia from Rod's pockets. "Rod made off with some precursor ingredients."

"Great," Monica said. "Forensics will love to try to figure out what they're using to cook up smoky quartz."

A new permutation of meth had crept into Bayern County. Tweakers called it "smoky quartz," because it looked like little gray crystals. They would've been pretty in a rock collection but were a hazard out on the streets.

In the distance, I heard music, a woman singing. Probably a radio. Patrol cars were clustered around the old barn that Rod and his pals had been squatting in. But the music was coming from another direction, off to the east.

"Do you hear that?" I asked Monica.

"Hear what?" She frowned.

"Never mind." Maybe there were campers with a radio out there. "I'll be back . . . Gonna check to make sure Rod didn't drop any more evidence."

I waded back through the grass, toward the music trickling into my pulse and tightening my throat. I felt it then, the exact moment when the sun vanished and the light changed. Sunset. I turned west, to where the sun had dipped below the trees, gold melting into leaves and fading out. A brief flash of lurid green lit up the horizon. I held my breath as it flared and vanished, leaving the land in soft twilight.

The fabled green flash, a rare meteorological phenomenon. I hadn't seen it since I was a child.


“Don’t make me go down there,” I whispered.

I was maybe eleven years old, judging by the Wonder Woman Underoos I wore as swimwear. I sat on the edge of the three-foot-wide well, next to the still pump, feet dangling into the darkness. I could see something moving below me-could be water, could be snakes. My toes curled in fear.

"Quit whining and go down there," Mom snapped. She was standing in the grass in the fading light, one hand on her hip and the other holding the ember of a cigarette. "You're the only one small enough to get down there and see what's clogging the pump."

I flinched. This was my dad's domain, fixing things. But he and my mom had had an argument yesterday, and he'd taken off. "Can't we just wait for Dad?"

"No," she said quietly, a vicious smile on her lips. "We can't wait for him anymore. What if he never comes back?"

Fear trilled through me. I couldn't imagine my dad leaving forever. For a few days or weeks, sure . . . he did that sort of thing when he and Mom got into it. But I couldn't imagine him leaving me with . . . with her . . . forever.

She shoved at my shoulder with her espadrille-clad foot. I teetered, then fell in with a shriek.

I landed, sputtering, in black water up to my chin. My fingers brushed the muddy walls of the well. Evening light streamed in, in a circle above me, a diffuse light that did little to show me the PVC pipe reaching into the water beside me. My mom glowered at me.

I turned to the pipe, reaching down. I couldn't feel the end of it.

"It's too deep!" I called.

"You're not coming up until you find it."

I took a breath, closed my eyes, and went underwater. My hands followed the pipe down, down to where the debris trap had to be, somewhere . . . My fingers closed around mud and sticks clotting the end of the pipe. I flung the crud away . . .

Something brushed against my leg in the dark.

I screamed, my cry muffled in bubbles, and I clawed my way back up to the surface.

"Let me up! Let me up!" I blubbered. "There's something down there. There's-"

Mom reached for my arm and hauled me out. I didn't think she was that strong, but she tugged me up to the grass with little effort. I curled up in a ball and wrapped my arms around my knees.

Mom gazed into the well, the way she did when staring into her teacup, still and contemplative.

"Was it a snake?" I gasped.

"No," she said.

I felt it then, that moment when the sun disappeared. I'd always been able to feel that exact moment, even when I was indoors or under cloudy skies. The light changed that much. I gazed out at the fading sunset and spied the green flash.

I pointed to it excitedly. "Did you see that?"

Mom nodded, but her face was lined with tension. "I saw."

"What is it?"

She exhaled. "The green flash means that something woke up. Something bad. Something we don't wanna mess with."

"But what is it?" I had read entirely too many fairy tales. "Is it fairies?"

She gripped my arm and pulled me to my feet. "No. It's time for bed."

I frowned. It was barely dark, but Mom usually made me go to bed early. But this time I was ready to go, to get away from that claustrophobic well and that look in my mom's eyes.


My mom told many lies.

She had to, I think. She was married to a serial killer, the legendary Forest Strangler, who left a trail of deceit and bodies throughout Bayern County. While he lied about his whereabouts, who he'd seen, what he'd been doing. Pretty much everything.

But she'd lied to herself about what kind of evil slept under our roof, and she'd lied to the police about wanting to take care of me. She'd given me up for adoption as soon as my father had been charged and had disappeared into the night.

I'd worshipped my father when I was a little girl. I always thought of myself as my father's daughter in so many ways, even after I learned who he was and what he'd done. The forest spoke to me the way it spoke to him, and I felt its pull, that beckoning darkness. He'd lied to me the whole time. And I hated that.

And I was slowly beginning to hate him, for both what he did and the lies he told me.

I didn't know if my mom lied to me about the green flash. There was nothing in it for her to lie to me about it . . . so why would she?

As an adult, I saw a television meteorologist talk about how the green flash was a rare phenomenon that occurred when a clear sky acted as a prism under just the right conditions. The meteorologist showed some grainy cell phone footage of such a flash. When I was a child, the flash had been magic. As an adult, I was relieved to know that it was just a freak meteorological event, perfectly scientific and perfectly safe.

I supposed my mom was a liar about that, too.

Swallowing the lump of a memory, I turned to Monica, now fifty yards distant, to see if she saw, but her back was turned.

I inhaled, a whispering breeze stirring the grass in a circular pattern. It felt like something was on the move, like on those full-moon fall nights when the deer traveled miles.

At my side, Gibby whined.

I lowered my hand to his head. "We should go back." Some things in the world were not to be fucked with. This was probably one of them.

A woman screamed in the distance.

Instinct overrode my hesitation, and I burst into a sprint toward the scream. Grasses made zip-zip slashes against my jeans, and Gibby panted beside me. We raced across the field toward the distant cry.

"Help!"

The land was darkening by the time we burst out onto freshly mown grass, a full yellow moon rising in the east. A grand two-story brick house with a slate roof stood in the center of the lawn. Old money, not new money. The slate was streaked from decades of acid rain, and wavy glass windows gazed down with black eyes.

A young woman, no more than sixteen, raced toward us. A brunette braid flopped over the shoulder of her T-shirt. She was wearing sandals and a long denim skirt.

"Are you the police?" Her fingers were knotted around her cell phone. "I just called 911."

I held up my badge. "I'm Anna. What's going on?"

"I'm Leah. The babysitter. I was watching Mason, and I . . . I can't find him. I . . ." Her face crumpled.

I took her by the shoulders. "It's okay. We'll find him. How old is he?"

"He's four. He's got blond hair, brown eyes. He's wearing a blue T-shirt with the Superman logo, and red shorts. Oh my God."

"Where did you last see him?"

"He was in the living room when . . . when I went to the bathroom. When I got out, he was just . . . gone."

"Show me." As we approached the house, I scanned the scene. I saw no cars whose drivers might have abducted him, heard no engines.

I spoke into the radio microphone pinned to my shoulder. "This is L4 at County Road 12. Report of a missing child."

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#Review - Disenchanted by Lucy Jane Wood #Contemporary #Fantasy

Series: Selcouth # 3
Format: 400 pages, Paperback

Release Date: September 8, 2026
Publisher: Ace
Source: Publisher
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy

A reluctant witch must confront the magic she's always denied after accidentally triggering a curse in this delightfully cozy fantasy from the author of Rewitched and Uncharmed.

Sage Hemlock has no interest in embracing her witchy side. Magic has betrayed her before, bringing nothing but heartache, and she will not let something so foolish happen again.

Instead, Sage has thrown herself into her work and studies, running the local museum and largely preferring the company of her library and her cat to other humans. Her one goal is to fly under the coven’s radar so that she can finally shed her blasted powers forever.

But when a strange historical book accidentally sets off a curse, Sage’s quiet small-town life is suddenly overrun and magic is running rife. A beanstalk grows in her garden, and her friend and coworker Casimir starts to look an awful lot like a handsome prince. Fairy tales are coming true. . . .

Now, with the threat of the coven on her tail, Sage must confront the magic she’s always denied to solve the mysteries of the book and save everyone she’s come to love from being lost to a fairy tale forever. The question is, can she finally learn to be her own happily ever after?

Disenchanted is the third installment in author Lucy Jane Wood's Selcouth series. Each book features different characters. The events of Disenchanted take place after Annie's story in Uncharmed and Belle's adventures in Rewitched, but all three are standalone stories set in the Selcouth world within alternative London. This story follows Sage Hemlock, a witch who deliberately suppressed her powers after they betrayed her as a teenager, leaving her with lasting heartache. 

She has poured herself into academia and into running the local museum in the small, magically tinged town of Port Sylvan, preferring the company of books, her library, and her cat as she tries to stay under the coven’s radar and eventually shed her abilities for good. When a strange historical book—a grimoire linked to the witch Lilara Mournfell—accidentally triggers a curse, Sage’s carefully ordered life unravels. 

Fairy tales invade reality: a beanstalk sprouts in her garden, her sister travels by pumpkin, neighbors and surroundings take on storybook forms (gingerbread houses, winged children, archetypal roles), and her best friend and museum co-worker Casimir begins to resemble a classic handsome prince. Sage must confront the magic she has long denied to unravel the curse’s mysteries and prevent her loved ones—and the town—from being permanently trapped in fairy-tale roles. 

The central question is whether she can become her own happily ever after. Wood has described the early pitch as “witchy Shrek”: a cantankerous, grumpy, less typically lovable witch furious at being surrounded by ridiculously clichéd magic. Sage is the standout—prickly, academic, overthinking, and shaped by eldest-daughter pressure and past trauma. Her reluctance feels earned rather than merely contrary, and her gradual growth toward self-acceptance and the courage to claim her power (and her life) anchors the story. 

Casimir is the golden-retriever counterpart: loyal, witty, infuriatingly charming, and supportive without rescuing her. Their relationship is a gentle friends-to-lovers slow burn that develops from longstanding closeness and mutual irritation; romance is present but secondary to the magical and emotional core, remaining low-heat and non-spicy. Supporting figures enrich the world without overwhelming it: Sage’s siblings, a cheeky cat familiar named Malachite, and a ghostly companion, Maggie, who makes an ideal companion for Sage. 

Family, her brother Robin and sister Laurel, is portrayed as steady and loving rather than dramatic. Core themes include self-love, forgiveness, accepting one’s full self (magic and all), and the bravery of choosing joy and whimsy despite past hurt. It emphasizes that the witch can win on her own terms. The book balances humor (especially Sage’s exasperation) with emotional depth around self-worth and trauma. The story is especially suited to readers who enjoy cozy fantasy with witchy, small-town, and fairy-tale retelling flavors (think low-stakes magic, found family, and autumn atmosphere in the vein of Wood’s prior books.

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#Review - The Shadow Friends by Tess Gerritsen #Espionage #Thriller

Series: The Martini Club # 3
Format: 307 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: August 25, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Publisher
Genre: Espionage, Thriller

When a renowned disease expert and Russian defector dies mysteriously during a global affairs conference in Purity, Maine, the tight-knit band of former spies in the Martini Club once again sees their quiet coastal retirement interrupted by international intrigue. And when a waitress at the conference hotel is found murdered, Ingrid Slocum sees chilling links to a disastrous mission that nearly killed her three decades ago.

Desperate to uncover the truth, Ingrid’s drawn back into the game by a magnetic ex-CIA colleague—and former lover—who was with her on the long-ago doomed mission. He convinces her to join him, and together they head to Amsterdam to track down her would-be killer.

Ingrid’s frantic husband Lloyd and Maggie Bird are close behind, but a clandestine network of assassins is intent on stopping them. Forced to question every allegiance, the Martini Club must rely on the skills they tried to leave behind. Because in this game of revenge and deception, the past never dies—it just hides in the shadows.

The Shadow Friends is the Third installment in author Tess Gerritsen's The Martini Club series. The Martini Club consists of former Agency operatives (Maggie Bird, Declan Rose, Ben Diamond, Ingrid Slocum, and analyst husband Lloyd) who have settled in the quiet coastal Maine town of Purity for martinis, friendship, and a quieter life. That quiet rarely lasts. Recently, Purity Police Chief Jo Thibodeau learned about the Club's operations and has become the bulwark against other agencies looking too closely at the club members. 

The novel opens nearly three decades earlier in a Provence safe house, where young operative Ingrid is protecting a young woman who has turned against a Russian organized-crime syndicate. The mission collapses in violence: the protectee is killed, a colleague is executed with a signature stiletto through the eye, and one attacker may have escaped. The present-day story returns to Purity, where Ingrid is organizing a local global-affairs/disease-control conference at a resort. The keynote speaker, a Russian defector and bioweapons/disease expert (Dr. Mikhail Maslov), falls ill and dies of poisoning. 

Almost simultaneously, a young waitress is found murdered in a car trunk with the same distinctive stiletto wound. The killing method immediately links the present crimes to Ingrid’s old failure. Her former colleague and lover, Rodrigo Estrada (now running a private intelligence firm called Argus), reappears and draws her back into the field. When Ingrid vanishes, her husband Lloyd and Maggie follow the trail to Amsterdam and beyond, while the rest of the Club and local police chief Jo Thibodeau work the Maine end of the case. 

The story expands into questions of lingering Cold War-style networks, personal loyalties, and whether the past can ever truly be outrun. The dual timeline is used effectively: the opening Provence sequence is widely noted as one of the book’s strongest set pieces, establishing stakes and character history without feeling like mere backstory. The shift into international territory gives the series more scale and menace than the more localized earlier books, while still retaining the charm of the aging-but-still-competent protagonists. 

The international plot, while more ambitious, occasionally leans on familiar Russian-assassin tropes. Ingrid is the clear focus, and the reappearance of her old flame creates both romantic and professional tension that is handled with adult restraint rather than soap-opera excess. Lloyd’s role as the non-field analyst forced into active pursuit adds texture, and the group dynamic among the Martini Club members remains one of the series’ pleasures. Jo Thibodeau continues to serve as a useful grounded counterpoint—the local law enforcement figure who knows the retirees are not ordinary citizens but still has to navigate official channels.

The Shadow Friends succeeds because it takes the premise of the Martini Club—competent, scarred people who thought they were done with the game—and forces them to confront how unfinished that game still is. It balances friendship, competence, and genuine danger without turning the characters into superheroes or the plot into pure nostalgia. Recommended for fans of spy fiction featuring older protagonists, dual timelines, and the uneasy intersection of personal history and professional duty.

Note: While putting together this review, I discovered a fourth novel in this series, The Italian Thriller (2028). I will definitely look forward to seeing what happens next to this crew. 

 

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#Review - The Enigma Challenge by S.C. Godfrey #Thriller

Series: Standalone
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: August 11, 2026
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller

Zoe Wilder has the unflashy, solitary life of an academic, studying ciphers in literature at a California university. When her research takes her to a cryptology conference in Madrid, she’s not expecting to trigger the Enigma Challenge, a clandestine puzzle competition few dare to enter.

The Enigma Challenge is an infamous competition with impossibly high stakes: Lose, and your identity is wiped forever. It doesn’t take long for Zoe to realize that she’s in over her head. Enter Dane Seaver: the mysterious hacker who insists they team up. Dane knows the Enigma Challenge—its secrets, its players—and Zoe knows ciphers. For better or worse, they need each other.

Six days, five puzzles, three countries, and innumerable rivals. What’s more, the spark of attraction between them becomes harder to ignore, but distractions are dangerous. With twelve million dollars and multiple lives on the line, the Enigma Challenge is anyone’s game. Will Zoe and Dane come out unscathed against the other players—and each other?

Story Locale: Madrid; Barcelona; Paris; Edinburgh

S.C. Godfrey’s The Enigma Challenge is a high-speed thriller that treats codebreaking as both the engine of the plot and the metaphor for a bad relationship. This one is designed as an action vehicle with an open-door love story bolted on, and that hybrid is both its selling point and the source of the split verdict. Zoe Wilder, a thirty-year-old postdoc who studies literary ciphers at the fictional Bay Area university Chessmont, arrives in Madrid for the International Conference on Cryptology to present a paper and to end things with Eric, her boyfriend and her boss. 

The conference is also the kickoff for the Enigma Challenge, a clandestine competition of five puzzles, a rumored multi-million-dollar purse ($12 million), and a penalty that makes ordinary defeat look mild: lose, and the organizers “delete” you—bank accounts, degrees, credit, identity, gone. Zoe solves the throwaway opening puzzle at the Ángel Caído in Retiro Park, the mass text goes out, and she is suddenly the target. She teams up with Dane Seaver, a previous two-time winner, hacker, academic bad boy, and the man Eric specifically told her to avoid. 

Six days, five ciphers, a route that runs Madrid–Barcelona–Paris–Edinburgh and on into the Scottish Highlands and Inverness, and a growing list of rivals who will threaten, attack, and kill to stay in the game. Godfrey has been frank about the lineage. The spark was not The Da Vinci Code but Kit Williams’s 1979 picture-puzzle book Masquerade, which she loved as a child; the ciphers themselves were built with the help of Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh’s practical codebreaking guide, and Dunin reportedly solved the book’s puzzles on a Zoom call. That research shows. 

Zoe walks readers through Caesar, pigpen, Playfair, columnar transposition, and the rest, and the novel is written so you can try the puzzles or simply watch her solve them. Real sites—the fallen angel in Retiro, the cloisters of Barcelona Cathedral, Arthur’s Seat—are used as clue locations rather than postcard backdrops, which is one of the book’s cleaner pleasures. Once the challenge starts, the pair barely stop moving. Zoe is smart and spunky; Dane is abs with a vulnerable heart; the villains are extremely villainous. 

Godfrey has said the romance was written in service of the thriller, not the other way around, and that she did not hold back on either the sex scene or the violence. That matches the book’s self-description. The emotional through-line that actually works is Zoe’s exit from a toxic workplace relationship, and her inherited love of puzzles, shared with a late father. Dane functions more as a guide, bankroll, and romantic obstacle than as a fully independent mystery, at least until the late revelations the ending is built to protect. The last page is a deliberate cliffhanger. Godfrey has said the next book is not a direct sequel but another story in the same world, with related characters.

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#Review - Tempest by Victoria Aveyard #Fantasy

Series: The Lyrian Sea
Format: 464 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: September 8, 2026
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Source: Publisher
Genre: Epic Fantasy

Cat Rose knows what it is to live in two worlds, in two times. Before—as Lady Catrine Rose of the Meridian Empire, chained to a loathsome lord with a dwindling fortune. And after—as the Widow Rose, queen of a pirate tavern in the Lyrian Sea, determined to be the master of her own fate.

But tides turn, and winds change. The Meridian Empire looms on the horizon, its full weight falling on the Lyrian, bent on reclaiming the wealthy colonies and crushing the pirate republic once and for all. Ship after ship is captured, save for one, captained by a pirate who continually evades both noose and blade: the legendary Valerian Kane.

With his fearsome ship and uncanny connection to the song of the sea, Valerian is the only man who might rally the pirates who remain. The only man who threatens the Empire. And the only man Cat has ever loved, blazing in and out of her life like a star.

Desperate for victory, the Empire offers Cat a devastating choice: bring them Valerian or hang. In truth, no choice at all.

But Cat Rose is nothing if not a survivor.

A storm is rising on the Lyrian. What will it leave in its wake?

Tempest, by Victoria Aveyard, is the first installment in a brand-new series called The Lyrian Sea. Tempest, the first half of the Lyrian Sea duology (sequel Tyrant due summer 2027), opens after the war is already lost: the pirate republic of the Lyrian Sea has been broken in six months, bodies hang from a harbor arch, and Catrine Rose walks past the displayed corpse of the last pirate lord on her way to the tavern she runs. The empire that once owned her now wants one more name. Bring them Valerian Kane, the captain who keeps slipping the noose, or hang. 

The chapters alternate strictly between Before and After, with almost no other markers. Before is Lady Catrine Rose at nineteen or twenty, dragged across an ocean by a bankrupt, loathsome husband into colonies the Meridian navy cannot hold. After is the Widow Rose at thirty, coins sewn into her hems, a pistol in her pocket, working under the governor who hanged the world she once lived in. The pleasure of the structure is not mystery so much as contrast. A card game answers a card game. A cabin door answers a cabin door. 

You watch a woman who cannot mend a shirt become a woman who counts cards while people talk, and that transformation is more satisfying than most of the set pieces. Cat is the reason the length mostly works. She is selfish, an excellent liar, and never asked to apologize for surviving. The relationship with Valerian is a ten-year situationship told out of order: flirtation and raid in one timeline, history and hatred in the other. Navy captain Jasper Fell, an orphan climbing a ladder rather than a pure rival, is often the more interesting man on the page. 

The Lyrian Sea is openly built from the Golden Age of Piracy and the Bahamian pirate republic: elected captains, articles that are about not being property rather than about honor, sugar and indenture running the trade routes, a lion-flagged empire with a boy king three thousand miles away, a rival crown, and an island people whose harbors and temples were already there when the explorers arrived. Marketed as romantic fantasy, Tempest spends most of its roughly 460–500 pages as historical adventure on an invented map. 

No magic system does the heavy lifting the way blood powers did in Red Queen. Arcayan faith, song towers, and Valerian’s “uncanny connection to the song of the sea” sit at the edge as belief and rumor until very late, when the fantasy arrives and reframes what the sequel is for. The romance is almost entirely fused. Held wrists, interrupted kisses, a decade of looking. Aveyard is explicit: the before is the dance, and the after is a couple who know each other and now hate each other. Anyone arriving for romantasy consummation will be reading a prologue. 

The middle idles in travel and reconnaissance in both timelines. The ending is a cliffhanger, with an epilogue that shifts point of view. Nothing closes. That is a feature of a duology written, by the author’s account, as one book that split; it is also a tax on patience. Content is adult in the grim sense more than the spicy one: public executions, including drawing and quartering; coerced sex inside a marriage, mostly referred to rather than staged; naval combat; indenture; colonial erasure. There is very little on-page sex. 

Read it if you want politics taken as seriously as the black flag, a slow burn told backward, and a heroine who will sell a sea to keep her neck. Skip it if you need a finished story, magic before the last stretch, or the relationship paid off in this volume. The last line is a gauntlet for Tyrant. Whether that feels like a promise or a deferral depends on how much of the wreckage you were willing to walk through to get there.

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#Review - The Vanished Sister by Sherry Thomas #Historical #Mystery

Series: Lady Sherlock # 9
Format: 333 pages, Paperback

Release Date: September 29, 2026
Publisher: Berkley
Source: Publisher
Genre: Historical, Mystery

In Victorian England, It’s been three years since Charlotte Holmes struck a decisive blow against Moriarty's operations in Britain, three years of relative calm and benign developments. In a buoyant mood, everyone gathers at Lord Ingram's seaside cottage in North Devon for what promises to be a perfect summer holiday. Until Mrs. Watson receives an invitation from Mrs. Carstairs, her long-estranged sister, to attend a house party nearby.

Mrs. Carstairs has married spectacularly well. She is the mistress of a great manor, a doyen of all domestic arts, and still an unforgettable beauty. Now she clamors for a reconciliation with her sister. Mrs. Watson does not trust Mrs. Carstairs's motives. Yet she cannot help but feel tremors of the old admiration for this once-beloved sister. 

Then Mrs. Carstairs disappears without a trace. The next day a woman is discovered floating on the waves, her build and coloring matching those of Mrs. Carstairs. But her husband insists that the corpse fished out of the Bristol Channel cannot be his wife. So where is the real Mrs. Carstairs? Would she have purposely dragged Mrs. Watson into a murder investigation? Or was it Sherlock Holmes's involvement that she needed from the very beginning?

The Vanished Sister, by Sherry Thomas, is the Ninth installment in the author's Lady Sherlock series. Three years have passed since Charlotte Holmes dealt a serious blow to Moriarty’s operations in Britain. The interval has been unusually quiet. Charlotte, Mrs. Joanna Watson, Lord Ingram (Ash), and Penelope gather at his seaside cottage in North Devon for what looks like an ordinary summer holiday. Then Mrs. Watson receives an invitation from Justina Carstairs, her elder sister, whom she has not seen in years. 

Justina has married twice and well. She is mistress of Noble House and High Burrow, a holiday estate near Ash’s cottage; a beauty and a model of domestic accomplishment; and the granddaughter of a country curate who calculated every step of her rise. She cut Joanna off so that Joanna’s past—as an actress, a courtesan, and a duke’s longtime mistress, later the wife of a middle-class doctor—would not stain that ascent. Now she wants a reconciliation, during a house party, with her son’s engagement in the balance. 

Joanna does not trust the motive, but she goes anyway. Soon thereafter, Justina vanishes. The next day, a woman’s body is pulled from the Bristol Channel, similar in build and coloring. Everett Carstairs insists the corpse is not his wife. Charlotte and the others, including Inspector Treadle, are left with a missing-person case, a possible murder, other missing women who may or may not connect, and the question of whether Justina engineered Sherlock Holmes’s involvement from the start.

Moriarty remains a shadow rather than the engine of the plot. Joanna, to the women Justina now moves among, might as well be a parrot: even if she recited Cicero, she would still belong to an inferior species. Justina’s own cost is quieter and meaner—the loneliness of a woman not born to the manor, standing in front of senior servants and a web of bloodlines, afraid her children will be marked by a mother who was once “of no consequence whatsoever.” 

The Carstairs marriage has love, but also deception, jealousy, and dangerous games. The investigation peels Justina off her pedestal and forces Mrs. Watson to revise the story she has told herself about which sister was the righteous one. Series readers who have wanted more of Joanna’s history get it here, and the emotional payoff is the reason to read the book. The mystery itself is busier than it needs to be. There is a large cast, several locales, class lines that matter to motive, and breadcrumbs that blur if you don't track them closely. 

Charlotte’s methods are still clever, and the ensemble is the pleasure it has become over nine books, but the solution asks for patience more than it invites the reader to race her. The romance between Charlotte and Ash, as well as Olivia and Stephen, has progressed to the point where nothing should surprise you. Read the books in order. Taken on its own terms, it is an eloquent, slightly overplotted Victorian mystery whose best scenes are not the reveal but the cost of the life Justina built and the sister she discarded to keep it. One last comment: if you were waiting to find out if Penelope would know who her mother really is, then your wait, SPOILER, is finally over. 

One

August 1890

On the coast of North Devon

What a perfect day, thought Mrs. Watson drowsily.

A breeze billowed the sails of the gaff-rigged sloop. To the starboard stretched the sunlit waters of the Bristol Channel, the silhouette of Wales faintly visible in the distance. On the other side reared the magnificent coastal bluffs of North Devon, carpeted in purple heathers.

They were sailing due west, but the green-lensed carriage specs Mrs. Watson sported-a fashionable gift from her dear Penelope-blunted the strongest rays of the afternoon sun. Across from her, Miss Charlotte Holmes examined the inside of their picnic hamper with the solemn concentration of an archeologist.

Mrs. Watson wanted to laugh-the dear girl would not find much. They'd sailed to Lynmouth this morning and, despite Miss Charlotte's preference for the newly constructed cable railcar, zigzagged up the steep path on foot to the clifftop hamlet of Lynton.

From there they'd explored the otherworldly Valley of Rocks, noted for its unusual rock towers, and walked past the abbey to Woody Bay before returning to the outskirts of Lynton for a picnic luncheon.

The picnic hamper, which had traveled up the cable railcar in the care of Mr. Mears, Mrs. Watson's butler, had seemed a veritable cornucopia. Yet it had proved barely sufficient for the appetites of six hungry ramblers in addition to Mr. Mears himself. Mrs. Watson, who usually watched what she ate, had indulged in two large servings of a glistening tart, topped with wild raspberries they themselves had harvested near Lord Ingram's seaside cottage.

"I thought there was nothing left of the food," said Miss Olivia Holmes from the bow of the vessel, where she sat next to Mr. Marbleton.

"It's all gone," replied Miss Charlotte. "I am but surveying the scene of the carnage. Does anyone want limeade, by the way? If we finish that, too, then we can claim total victory."

Penelope's bell-like laughter rang out. "Well, if you put it like that, then of course we must do all we can for total victory."

Mrs. Watson chortled as she sank more deeply into the pleasant woolliness that was the inevitable byproduct-at least at her age-of vigorous exercise followed by a great deal of delicious food.

She felt Penelope leaning forward and heard the splash of limeade falling into a cup. Lord Ingram, at the helm, asked whether they ought to sail faster so that they'd sit down to tea sooner. "No need," replied Miss Charlotte. "Let's not jostle Mrs. Watson."

Mrs. Watson meant to protest that she didn't mind a little jostling in exchange for greater speed. But the words, right on the tip of her tongue, disappeared into the ether. And it was so very agreeable, their current pace, bobbing just enough to let her feel the boat's progress.

Rather like how life had been in the past three years, ever since Miss Charlotte had outmaneuvered Moriarty: more or less smooth sailing for the two women responsible for the operations of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective.

In fact, with Moriarty in hiding, life had been good for everyone on the sloop.

Penelope, five years into her seven-year French medical education, remained fascinated by everything that could go wrong-and right-with the human body.

Lord Ingram had written a well-received archeological treatise on Celtic Britain and gone on a standing room-only lecture tour the previous year. His children thrived in spite of the absence of their mother. And at thirty-one, he was fitter and more striking than ever.

Miss Olivia thrilled Mrs. Watson by publishing not one but two novels featuring the great consulting detective. In addition, she'd written several short stories in which Sherlock Holmes flexed his deductive prowess, with the goal of making them available as a collection at a later date.

Mr. Stephen Marbleton, Miss Olivia's beau, had perhaps profited the most from Moriarty's retreat: After losing his entire operation in Britain, Moriarty had left the Marbletons, his sworn enemies, alone.

As a result, Mr. Marbleton no longer needed to be constantly on the move, as had been the pattern his whole life. This greater stability worked wonders for his courtship of Miss Olivia. Instead of always meeting each other in passing, he could now remain near her for an extended period of time.

"I will never not love the sea and I would like to live within view of it, if possible." Miss Olivia's words, despite the enthusiasm in her voice, sounded a little faint. "Not directly hanging on a cliff over the waves, as much as I love that house in Lynton-the one that you said used to have a private cable car-but a mile or so inland, with the sea in walking distance."

"My cousin has a place on the Sussex downs that might be perfect for you," said Lord Ingram, his words too a bit indistinct, for all that he stood only a little aft of Mrs. Watson.

"Really?" Miss Olivia's voice was becoming inaudible. "I like Sussex. It's sunnier than . . ."

Mrs. Watson rested her head on Penelope's shoulder. The dear girl only ever smelled of good Provençal soap, not like Mrs. Watson, who used to reek of attar of jasmine.

You can't live like this, Joanna. You can't waste so much money on perfume and other fripperies.

How odd. She actually agreed with Justina's chastisement. She had been too spendthrift and her purchases had been no proper essence, but badly diluted who knows what. But ah, the joy she'd felt applying those drops to her inner wrists, the contentment of feeling a veritable Salome at that silly, marvelous age . . .

". . . very nice dress. What do you think, Miss Charlotte?" came Penelope's voice.

"Oh, I agree. And that is probably a very beautiful woman, too."

"Too bad we can't see her face behind her binoculars," said Miss Olivia.

"I wonder if she's from that house on the bluffs." Mr. Marbleton added his voice to the discussion.

Mrs. Watson slowly opened her eyes. The sun still shone. A few puffy clouds now drifted across the vast blue sky. Lord Ingram's cottage, its terrace overhanging the bluffs, was visible a mile or so ahead. Were they that close to home then? How long had she slept?

She sat up straight and turned in the direction of everyone's gaze. Two great conical outcrops, the Hangman Cliffs, came into view. Great Hangman, at just over a thousand feet in elevation, was the highest sea cliff in all of England.

But the sloop had already sailed past Great and Little Hangman, and now cut across the waters before a secluded beach. At the very edge of the precipice that loomed over the beach stood a slender figure in a white dress. Her skirts danced in the breeze; the long ends of a green sash belt levitated sinuously.

A pair of binoculars hid her face. She could be looking at anyone on the sloop, yet Mrs. Watson felt herself under scrutiny.

She tensed. "Who's that?"

"The house across the bay from ours, the one you said you wanted to see up close? It's hidden from us right now because the land dips down," said Penelope cheerfully, "but it's right beyond these bluffs, a quarter mile due south. What is it called again, Ash?"

"High Burrow."

From the terrace of his cottage, one had a panoramic view of the Hangman Cliffs and the sheep-dotted moors beyond. On such an expanse of moorland, high above the little town of Combe Martin, perched a Gothic house that, at first glance, appeared incongruous with its surroundings.

Then again, such an edifice rather embodied the spirit of the age: Architectural vernaculars were ground together as if put through a vegetable mill and new owners transformed old dwellings with wild abandon.

"You think she's from that house?" Mrs. Watson asked, staring. Something about the woman was familiar. Too familiar. The figure. The air of authority. That head of shiny chestnut hair, not a strand out of place despite the air currents.

"Could be," answered Lord Ingram. "I've not met the family."

Abruptly, the woman turned around and walked away, disappearing rapidly. Mrs. Watson let out a breath, released her fingers from around the gunwale, and slowly turned around. "So who owns High Burrow?"

"The Carstairses of Lincolnshire," said Miss Charlotte, looking directly at Mrs. Watson. "Have you heard of them?"


Lord Ingram’s seaside cottage was a cottage in roughly the same sense that Chatsworth House was a house. He had bought it as a present for his former wife, who, as it turned out, had no use for it. For years it sat empty, seldom visited by either husband or wife, and certainly not the two together with their children. At one point it only had a single elderly caretaker who could barely keep up with the grounds, let alone cook and clean for visitors.

But things had changed since Lord Ingram's divorce. Or rather, since he took up with Miss Charlotte. Lord Ingram, thoughtful man that he was, quickly realized that while Miss Charlotte could visit him occasionally in disguise at Stern Hollow, his country seat, it was much more convenient for everyone if she didn't have to run the gauntlet of a large manor house that was both full of servants and surrounded by curious neighbors.

Subsequently, this long-neglected spot on the Devon coast became their love nest. It now boasted modern plumbing and a well-ventilated new kitchen, as well as new floors, new flues, new windows, and a new name. Mrs. Watson wasn't sure what the place had been called earlier, but Miss Charlotte had dubbed it Sans Souci-French for Without Worries-and Lord Ingram had had the name engraved upon a plaque and affixed it to the gate.

Mrs. Watson, prone to fretting, had felt unusually carefree at Sans Souci. But as the company reached the cottage at the end of their otherwise idyllic excursion, she was anything but happy and assured.

In fact, she made sure not to look toward High Burrow, now a looming presence in the distance.

Mrs. Watson had not needed to answer Miss Charlotte's question, for Miss Olivia had piped up at that moment, My goodness, that's the family Philana Newell will be marrying into! I knew that they had a place somewhere on the Devon coast, but I had no idea it was so close to Sans Souci.

For the past three years, though Miss Olivia spent a good bit of time with Mrs. Watson and Miss Charlotte, she officially resided with Mrs. Newell, distant cousin and great friend to the Holmes sisters. The world believed her to be Mrs. Newell's companion, though in truth she was more the latter's guest at her dower house in Derbyshire, not far from Lord Ingram's estate.

And so Mrs. Watson learned that Philana Newell, Mrs. Newell's granddaughter, had become engaged recently to none other than the Carstairses' younger son. Moreover, the Carstairses, who made use of their holiday house only sporadically, would presently be hosting the Newells at High Burrow to celebrate the engagement.

Miss Olivia deemed that the house party would not affect them and they'd continue with their own holiday as planned. But Mrs. Watson felt a tightening of her collar.

On the eve of this important social occasion for Justina, Mrs. Watson had blithely sailed by High Burrow, her grown-up daughter by her side, surrounded by their friends. Would Justina see that as merely the coincidence it had been, or would she extrapolate a wholesale insurrection on Mrs. Watson's part?

The tea that welcomed the ramblers back to Sans Souci was a substantial spread. As everyone else tucked into cakes and sandwiches, Mrs. Watson badly wanted to fortify her cup with a dram of whisky, or at least some brandy. But such a beverage would be difficult to explain on a warm day . . .

Penelope was already proposing a game of tennis. When the cottage was renovated, Lord Ingram had added a tennis court and his guests had made good use of it.

"I'm still surprised that you do, in fact, play tennis." Miss Olivia laughed as she addressed her sister. "You always wrote that 'Games of tennis were played' and I always imagined that someone was conscripted to play with Ash while you sat nearby with a Victoria sponge and a stack of books."

"You're not wrong about the Victoria sponge," answered Miss Charlotte while biting into a slice of Victoria sponge. "Ash knows how to dangle a carrot. He always promises a grand picnic, but only after games of tennis or long rambles for which we must start at dawn."

Miss Olivia tittered. "So you were the conscripted one."

They scattered amid peals of laughter-which were beginning to take on a fey and brittle tone in Mrs. Watson's ears-to change into tennis costumes. Mrs. Watson did so grimly and sat in her room for a quarter hour, her head in her hands, before she went down to join the company at the rear of the house.

Newly shorn grass, smelling of green sap and deep summer, fresh lines of chalk dust, laid down to mark the boundary of the court, young people in tennis whites stretching and limbering up-nothing but peace and unmarred contentment everywhere Mrs. Watson looked. Yet fear swirled in her heart.

"Where's Ash?" asked Penelope.

As if to answer her question, their host emerged from the house and headed straight for Mrs. Watson, a slight frown on his face. "Ma'am, Mrs. Carstairs from High Burrow is here to see you. Are you at home to her?"


Mrs. Watson did not remember what she said to Lord Ingram in turn. It didn’t even occur to her, until she was walking into the house, that he must already know, from a single look at Justina, that the two women were closely related.

Inside the drawing room, her caller, clad in a simple white dress cinched by a green sash-the same attire as the woman on the precipice-stood before the mantel. She looked up at a charcoal drawing of a Greek temple in ruins set against a stony mound that resembled nothing so much as a half-melted sugar loaf. Mt. Cynthus on the island of Delos, where Lord Ingram had recently carried out excavations on behalf of the French School of Athens.

Her silhouette was fashionably slender-how did she manage to maintain such a trim figure? But everything had its cost, did it not? Without a little padding on the body, a woman of their age was liable to be gaunt in the face.

Justina turned around. Yes, she had aged, and yes, her face was lean. That lack of youthful plumpness, however, only made her more deep-eyed and finely chiseled. Even the few strands of grey in her hair did not make her look old, only more distinguished.

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