Reading through the winter storm

I was just out walking around the melting snow from our winter storm here in southeast Texas. It's been years since I've seen so much snow - even when visiting family up north. Family and friends who live in snow country have a hard time understanding how everything shuts down here with snow or ice storms. We don't have the infrastructure to deal with it, especially with the roads.

So with the Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday on Monday, I've been off work for five days. I spent some of that time getting my house as ready as I could (my pipes are pretty much mummified), and some of the time worrying. The last time we had a bad winter storm, in 2021, I lost power for four freezing days and nights. Thankfully, this time we had no issues with power in my area of the city.

I am still reading primarily fantasy and science fiction, though I have some interesting non-fiction books that will be due soon at the library. I did try one history of the Titanic disaster, a recommendation from Crimes and Survivors, but it was an indictment of Bruce Ismay, and I found that less than compelling.

Among the books I did finish:

Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard (library book). One of Tor's short books, a story of four young space navigators sent to represent their clans in the struggle to contain a deadly force threatening their systems (a Tangler). There are clashes between the clans - and so the women - tangled up in politics and trade. This is the first of Aliette de Bodard's books that I have read in print, and I enjoyed it very much. It led me to look for others of her work in print, because I've found ebooks of her stories hard to follow for some reason.

Falling Free, Lois McMaster Bujold (TBR, 2024). I recently re-read Diplomatic Immunity, where Miles and Ekaterin Vorkosigan are diverted from their delayed honeymoon to resolve a situation in Quaddie Space. I didn't like the book the first time I read it - I can't remember why now - and somehow I'm surprised by how good it is. "Quaddie space" is the homeworld for a gene-engineered people with four arms (and no legs) who live in free-fall environments. I was inspired this time to finally read their origin story, one of LM Bujold's earlier works. It's set 200 years before the Vorkosigan saga begins. It was interesting to read, if a little less polished than her later works.

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (re-read). This is one of my comfort reads, so I picked it up as an antidote to storm anxiety. I will also be re-reading the two novellas that follow one of the characters in his work as a Witness for the Dead, before a third one comes out later this year. There is also another short novella set in this world coming out later this month, and both will be on my "52 books for 2025" list.

Point of Sighs, Melissa Scott (re-read). I love this fantasy series set in the city of Astrient, where one of the main characters, Nico Rathe, works as a pointsman (a city police officer). His lover Philip Eslingen, a former soldier, has held various jobs in the city and is now part of the new City Guard, resented by the points. There is a sixth book in this series coming out in March, which I need to pre-order. Melissa Scott has become one of my favorite fantasy authors, and I am still working my way through her back catalogue.

Grave Importance, Vivian Shaw (library book). This is the third book in her "Dr. Greta Helsing" series, where the main character is a doctor for creatures that most of the world doesn't believe are real. I actually started the series with this book, but I felt like I was missing too much backstory, so I went to read the others first. This one is set mainly at a clinic and spa for mummies, "Oasis Natrum," in the hills above Marseille. I loved all the Egyptology and mummy-ology in the story. But that's really a sideline to the main story, about an invasion from another dimension. There's a fourth and final book in the series coming later this year, which I'm also looking foward to.

I will probably have to go back to work tomorrow, which will cut into my reading time again. But at least the libraries should be open again too.

A trilogy became a quartet

Crimes and Survivors (2024 TBR) and "Unseen," short story (ebook version), by Sarah Smith

It has been years since I've re-read Sarah Smith's trilogy of Edwardian mysteries centered around a family from Boston. I was reminded of that last year, when they were among the books I had to move for my foundation repair work. I kept them on the shelves afterwards, unlike many that I decided I wouldn't re-read again. I must have had them in the back of my mind, because in December something suddenly made me check to see what else Sarah Smith has written. To my surprise, I found not just a fourth novel, but also a short story set between the first and second books. I was excited enough on finding new stories, but then I realized that the novel is set in part on the Titanic's fatal voyage. That had me clicking the order button and waiting impatiently for the book.

I've written before about the second and third novels, The Knowledge of Water  and A Citizen of the Country. As I said in one of those posts, these aren't mysteries in the "who done it" sense, they are more novels of suspense. The central mysteries have to do with identity. In the first three, it is the identity of Alexander von Riesden, a scientist and an Austrian baron who is shocked to discover how much he looks like members of an American family from Boston. In this fourth novel, it is his wife's identity that comes into question:

It's 1912. America is the land of Jim Crow, of lynchings and segregation. And a young white concert pianist has just discovered that the grandfather she barely knows may be black. She has a family. She has a child. She can't be black, because her brothers and sisters and son can't be. She can't be black, because she couldn't play the piano in America. She follows her grandfather onto the newest, safest, biggest ship in the world, to learn the truth--the right truth, the one that will save her family. But after the iceberg, she finds the truth is more complicated than black and white. More daring, more loving, and far more dangerous. And instead of a convenient truth, what she'll have to find is a different America. (cover blurb)

The central question is an absorbing one, and also very complicated. I was constantly surprised by the turns that story took, and I am still thinking about the ending. But running along side it, and intertwined with it, is a story of the Titanic's passengers. From the "Acknowledgements," which are also a bibliography, it is clear that Sarah Smith has thoroughly researched the Titanic, and I think she succeeds in bringing to life not just the voyage and the tragedy of its sinking, but also the effects on those who survived. I had a vague memory of silent film star Dorothy Gibson among the survivors, but I did not realize that she immediately set to work making a film about the sinking, filming in New York harbor (Smith's characters are drawn into the film).

The short story "Unseen" is set in 1906, in Paris. It is the story of how Reisden buys Jouvet Medical Analyses, which plays such a big part in the second and third books. He intends to close it down after the death of its director, but first he has to resolve a last open case, a mother accused of murdering her son.

The last chapter of Crimes and Survivors felt like an ending to the stories of these characters. I wondered if it might be the end of the series. But the novel was published in 2020, at the height of the Pandemic. The short story "Unseen" was published in October of last year, which gives me hope that Sarah Smith might still have more stories to tell in this world.