The State of the Card:

Last update, I had finished 3 books. I had a very good reading week this week (as is the norm when I’m playing Halloween Bingo – I just can’t read fast enough!) and finished an additional 5 books.

• The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald: I read this for my Noir square. I’ve been reading quite a bit of hardboiled/California noir fiction recently and MacDonald does it really well. Lew Archer, MacDonald’s PI, is the natural heir to Philip Marlowe, and operates within the same Los Angeles as Marlowe. The plotting in this one had some weaknesses, and the reader is blindsided at the end by a character who behaves entirely out of the character that had been built through the entire novel, but overall, very enjoyable.
• Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley: This has been on my TBR for ages, and I’m trying to bring more diversity to my Halloween Bingo reading, which is why I selected this one. It was terrific and I highly recommend it. The inclusion of the black experience in a piece of noir fiction was really intriguing. I used a Double Trouble card so I applied this one to both Diverse Voices and Film at Eleven.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow: I also really loved this book. It’s a piece of historical fiction set in Colonial America, that has a strong connection to fairy tales and feminist themes. This is the second book I’ve read by Harrow, the other being The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a portal fantasy, which I also loved. Harrow is an auto-buy for me at this point. I used this one for A Grimm Tale.
• The Cutting Season by Attica Locke: I thought I had read everything Locke has published, but it turns out I was wrong. This is an early stand-alone, and is my least favorite of all of her books. That doesn’t mean it’s not good, but I found it to be a bit of a mixed bag. I used an Amplification card (Locke is a Black author) to fill Fear the Drowning Deep.
• Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham: I am not knowledgeable about the Campion books, and I picked this one more or less at random, and because I could get it for free from the KU library. Mistake. This is an amnesia book, and I don’t know the series well enough to feel anything other than completely confused when dropped into a book where the MC doesn’t know his own name. I will probably revisit it when I have read more of the series. This one checked off the Paint It Black card, with its predominantly black cover.

I am on vacation for the week, and am headed over to the coast tomorrow, so I’ll still be reading, but not probably posting.