An airship murder, or is it?

Death on the Graf Zeppelin

by Shelley Adina Bates

A super new historical crime story by the author of the Magnificent Devices steampunk series. This one sends you flying into the stormy world of airship exploration. Germany’s in a race with the other Great Powers to take an airship across the Atlantic, and Lady Hay has wrangled herself a passage on a promise to report the voyage for the Hurst corporation newspapers. In fact, she’s the only woman with 59 male crew members and journalists.

When a mysterious death disrupts the voyage with the Spanish coast barely out of sight behind them, Lady Hay is trapped above the turbulent sea with a desperate killer on the loose.

This author does an amazing job of setting the scene and the mood of the late 1920s, when the world held so much technological promise, and everybody wanted to be the first to achieve the next milestone.

Lady Hay is a promising sleuth, a competent widow leaving behind a parcel of grown stepchildren to pursue her independent career as a reporter. She has a marvelous eye for fashion, a basic grasp of airship function, and a not so secret yearning for the renewed attentions of a handsome fellow traveler. Being a reporter, she can ask questions that not only reveal clues but help ground readers in the complications and restrictions of airship travel. Can she take a second pair of shoes to match her evening frock in New York, or will that put her over her very tight luggage weight allowance? Readers in any era of air travel will feel for her in those decisions.

But much more than that, this tale is a competent mystery as tightly plotted as any cruise ship killing. The suspects are a good variety, and the victim is much more interesting than first appears.

 

 #NetGalley #Airships #Steampunk #Mystery #Murder #Travel #Adventure #Historical #Fiction #AtReading #CrimeFiction #SpeculativeFiction 

OnSpec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic

From the charming and whimsical to the haunting and deeply Wyrd, this anthology is a tribute/continuation of Canada’s long-running speculative fiction magazine, OnSpec, that recently ceased publication. 

Many stalwarts of the Canadian science fiction scene are represented in these pages, as well as some relative newcomers, which makes for a conundrum: when I'm acquainted personally and/or professionally with half the authors in an anthology, having wined and dined with some, paneled and presented with others, and twisted many of their arms to sit on juries or moderate programs for my various writerly organizations, can I write an unbiased review? 

Let's not pretend I can, or will. But I will forebear from special mention of every story by every author I know and just mention the overall theme and striking features.

Longest acquaintance award goes to Edmonton’s Candas Jane Dorsey, who I first met at a nerd-vention of some description in Regina, Saskatchewan sometime in the 1990s. She was already a storyteller of note while I had exactly 2 short story sales to my name, neither of which were SF or indeed F. We had a spirited conversation nonetheless, and I have followed her career with interest in the intervening decades, including collaborating with her on panels and presentations in the crime writing field, where I have since left my modest mark. So it is fitting for me, particularly, that her story involves an unsolved death, and a journey where the destination is unknown and the road toward it shrouded from sight.

Destination unknown. That's as fair a description of the entire anthology as it is of Candas' story. We are not in Kansas anymore, and sometimes not anywhere recognizable as part of this humdrum contemporary world. Instead we traverse landscapes of the mind, the body the spirit, the stars. Our guideposts appear in first person, third person, sometimes second person narration like a choose-your-own-adventure. 

At When Words Collide in Calgary last summer, I asked the publisher, Edward Willett of Shadowpaw Press (Regina) if he'd had a theme in mind when selecting stories from among all those that might have previously appeared in the pages of OnSpec the magazine. He said no, just whatever appealed most to him. And yet this anthology has a theme, and it's journeys. From the first story to the last everyone is traveling somewhere, some-when, some-how. 

In a quiet B&B cottage or a post-apocalyptic desert town where the fossils of past civilizations are a valuable currency. On a generation ship, fleeing a deathly past towards an unknown future, if you can survive the increasingly desperate present. From space cowboys on a spree to delicate disarmament in a hostile planetary jungle. Each story takes us somewhere new, or sends us deep into philosophical streams from which there is no obvious off-ramp nor reason to seek one. Which is what makes speculative fiction such an intriguing genre to read: every story is a journey to and through a landscape, a society, recognizably not the normal world as we understand it. How can that not be intriguing to a curious mind? 

This might be the only anthology or there might be a further one. A time of writing, the publisher isn't committing. The future life of OnSpec is somewhere on the mist-shrouded road ahead. Or not. I'd grab this one if you can. Such a fine and representative collection from Canada's early-2000s speculative fiction community may never come around again.

#Netgalley #OnSpec #ShadowpawPress #postapocalyptic #graveyard #museum #relics #aliens #lifeforms #ghostly #GenerationShip #bones #fossils #TravelingShow #futuristic #historical #SpecFic #SpeculativeFiction #CanadianAuthor #Read #amreading #journey 
 

 

Life Out of Order, Love Out of Time

Life Out of Order 

 By Audrey Niffenegger

 

Gripping from the first sentence, even if you've never read 'The Time Traveler's Wife'. 

From a mere heavily policed 2022 with curfews and at-risk groups and circling black helicopters to a future significantly more challenging, and back again and forward again, it's a sign of this author's mastery that readers are always immediately anchored in the who, the where, the when. Alma and Zach and their friends and co-resisters are quickly drawn and instantly engaging. We want so much for them to have happiness but as their lives tangle and the threads of Fate spool out, we can never be sure of anything more than their present. It's an emotional roller coaster with intermittent coasting, just enough to catch our breath before the tension climbs again. 

There's familiar ground here for science fiction readers too: not only the time travel but interfaces and uploads and tech taking directions unintended by its creators. But ultimately it's about the characters, their lives and lies, their loves and friendships.

The early chapters seem particularly timely (pardon the reference) for the fall of 2026 when ICE operates unchecked in American cities and the word 'antifa' is hurled like a grenade at anyone left of Attila the Hun (much like Al Qaeda used to be in the 2000s)  Zeigeist is an overused concept but captures the spirit of resistance so cleverly woven in all its hope and despair and dogged determination. I had to ask myself if I'd have been as entranced if the menace of the early fascist elements was less, but I don't have a clear answer. I had to read on, though, to learn if the characters escaped - kind of like in The Handmaid's Tale - and was gradually drawn into their ongoing emotional lives beyond the sociopolitical threat. 

Well worth a read today and any day, but not for those looking for a cosy time-traveling mystery, romance, or fantasy novel like the Jodi Taylor St Mary series. This is more like Aimée & Jaguar if Michael Crichton had collaborated with Erica Ficsher: beautiful, haunted, hopeful, fatal.

#LifeOutOfOrder #Niffenegger #PenguinRandomHouse #timetravel #romance #love #loss #death #resistance #implants #AI #politics #marriage #divorce 

All the holiday heart of “Miracle on 34th St.“ but with homicide

Murder on 34th Street
by Mariah Fredericks 

OCTOBER 6, 2026

Does anybody invoke the spirit of 1930s New York City as well as this author does?

As an editor, I often I’m forced to tell authors some variation of “ get the reader grounded in the scene.” and I am seldom wowed by a description of setting. But in this book, navigating the largest department store in the world (as of 1932)  with Miss Grace Verlander, assistant to the personnel manager, made me "Wow!" out loud. Macy’s department store was huge, covering nearly an entire city block, and the statistics that follow are enough to make anybody gasp. They include not only the number of employees but the fact that it takes 270 people just to clean the place. 

 

This setting not only serves to give the reader a sense of how big the place is and how complex, but it also sets up our narrator's job: Grace is assistant to the head of personnel. She solves problems all over this immense building, for its thousands of staff and millions of customers. And she very subtly works in how the Great Depression is affecting shoppers and threatens jobs, even though she avoids mentioning the word depression or indeed much about the external economy or political situation. At least until they become relevant to the unfolding mystery. A promising start, for sure.

I also admire the way, with so many peripheral characters named in those early pages, we always know which ones will be important: they’re the ones she stops for conversations with on her way through the memorable store, those who do and say memorable things; those who stand out from the throngs. The detective, the juggler, the gorgeous perfume counter woman who will be throwing candy canes to children during the Macy’s Santa Claus parade. 

 

Oh, and Santa himself, who has just received a threatening letter he wants Grace to deal with....

All that said, there is quite a lot of set up. It is entertaining, and Miss Verlander voice is lively, consistent, a combination of competence, irreverence, and generally good-natured snark, but this is not a high tension opening. The pace picks up satisfactorily and the sleuthing is smart. The characters all feel very real and their stories go straight to the heart of life in 1932 New York City.

If you want to start this in October as a means of avoiding Halloween saturation, you won't regret the hours spent with Grace. She's also good company for November reading, when you’re just getting your holiday spirit revved up and aren’t completely flattened by the overload of carols and baking and shopping. Highly recommended.

 

#Netgalley #Minotaur #MiracleOn34thStreet #MakeItMurder #MurderForChristmas #Holidays #Christmas #MiracleOn34thStreet #amreading #bokreview #NewRelease #CandyCanes #MacysParade #SantaClaus #SantaParade #sleuthing #amateurdetective #cops #WindowDressing #nativityscene #NewYorkCity #NYC #KissTheGuy #Family