paperback published Tor January 2015
I started reading this series when the first one came out and have bought every book since, including the short story collection in TPB. I am saddened to hear that the next may be the last in the line as I love Kitty and don’t much enjoy the other series the author has begun. A matter of personal taste I hasten to add.
So, in Low Midnight the book opens with Cormac about to be released from jail and listening to the warden uttering a list of platitudes, saying goodbye and wishing him well. This story is mostly Cormac and his spirit passenger, Amelia. They are on the trail of a diary that may contain sufficient information to allow Kitty, Ben, Cormac and Amelia to successfully defend themselves and even the world against the machinations of Roman the Vampire. All Cormac and Amelia have to do is decode the diary.
Not so simple. Because to persuade a relative of the person who wrote the diary to provide the key to that, they have to find out how a magician was mysteriously killed more than a hundred years ago, work around two groups involved in a number of illegal activities both of which know Cormac, cope with a skinwalker, and Cormac’s old love, and manage these things while Cormac cannot carry or use guns. I found this book a pleasant read, perhaps a little lighter in quality than usual because it is the set-up book for the final volume but still I enjoyed it and as I was reading it as the next in a series of which I have always enjoyed the characters, I didn’t mind. I have Kitty Saves The World on pre-order and look forward to that. The set will stay on my shelf to be re-read again and again over time, and you can’t say much better than that for a book series.

Hardcover, published Minotaur Books October 2014, 18th in the Meg Langslow series.
The mixture as before and thank heavens for it. Having stopped buying one mystery series that I loved because the author went off at a tangent, and with another much-loved series being on the same brink, I was really happy to find nothing like that had happened to this series. In fact I read this book when it reached me last October, and enjoyed it so much I’ve just re-read it for this quick review. That’s twice in six months which says a lot as to how well it held up. And it’s all on again in Caerphilly when a Christmas-themed Show Home, each room decorated by a different designer showing off their skills and wares, becomes the scene of a murder. Before that there’s in-fighting, sabotage of some of the rooms, and Meg’s mother as one of the twelve designers, right in the thick of it.
Writing a humorous whodunnit is tricky. If the author goes too far over the top it merely becoms silly, if her humour is too vulgar it merely becomes crass, I find that Donna Andrews keeps an excellent balance. Her humour arises from the people and natural situations and events. Much of it, only very slightly tweaked, is the sort of thing that may well have happened or been said to the readers at some time, (leaving them laughing for ages) and I love the feeling at least once in any of this series, of ‘ah ha.’ Yes, something similar once happened/was said to me. It’s that natural progression of amusement that is to my mind, one of the strongest underpinnings of the books. Oh, and by the way, Minotaur books gives her excellent covers as well. Nothing outre, just attractive and relevent. And long may that continue because when I look at the covers provided some other authors, I can only wonder what their publishers were thinking!

Hardcover, published Bantam 2015. And yes, the title’s a pun.
I’m sorry to say that this series is only just holding me. It is now more the cumulative effect of the books and characters that makes me keep reading than the impact of each book. I like the characters, and yet their hold too is slowly fading. I found that the two books before this one were weaker, less of an engrossing story and more of a meander through faux-history. If the next is no stronger, then it is likely that I will not only stop purchasing them, but I will give that last four to my local library and keep only the series up to and including The God of the Hive. It happens. Another author whose books I loved lost me a couple of years ago when she switched main characters from mother to son and to me anyhow her books lost my interest totally with that switch. I do however cherish the 15 previous to that switch and will continue to read and re-read them. Likewise with Ms. King. I’ll have the first ten books, which I love and will keep.
So, in Dreaming Spies Mary and Sherlock are on the way to America, to check up on some long-neglected business relating to Mary’s family, when they break the trip with a stopover in Japan. But before they arrive there they become involved with a young Japanese woman, and with a notorious clubman, The Earl of Darnley who is known to Sherlock as a blackmailer, Darnley’s young wife and his adult son, and the possibility of spies, international blackmail, and the Emperor of Japan.
This book is sweet and rather gentle, officially it ticks all the boxes, it suggests a fore-view of what in another twenty years will be the foundation of world war two, it has Sherlock and Mary immersed in a very different culture with a quite in-depth look at that, and then it has them back in Oxford with odd events and dangerous people. It has deceit, mystery, minor mayhem, and scholarship. Still it never quite caught me up into the story. I think that this is because the last three books have been more about the cultures that background the books, more as if the author wants to introduce me to these cultures, than involve me in an exciting mystery/crime, and I read mysteries for the whodunnit aspects, not to be taught about a culture I may not know.In fact I have known, and that has made much of that aspect slightly boring. This series continues to be well-written, but as I say, I read whodunnits, and for the fast-paced, catch-me-up interest, not for social studies. One more of that type, and that’s me, gone.