The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

RECOMMENDED: The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter is $1.99! Lara gave this an A:
This book just got better and better with every twist and reveal. Original, compelling, well-written and immersive, this is a great book to escape into. It is perfect for right now, for the holidays, and for re-reading, which I will definitely be doing very soon.
Knives Out gets a holiday rom-com twist in this rivals-to-lovers romance-mystery from New York Times bestselling author Ally Carter.
The bridge is out. The phones are down. And the most famous mystery writer in the world just disappeared out of a locked room three days before Christmas.
Meet Maggie Chase and Ethan
She’s the new Queen of the Cozy Mystery.
He’s Mr. Big-time Thriller Guy.
She hates his guts.
He thinks her name is Marcie (no matter how many times she’s told him otherwise.)
But when they both accept a cryptic invitation to attend a Christmas house party at the English estate of a reclusive fan, neither is expecting their host to be the most powerful author in the Eleanor Ashley, the Duchess of Death herself.
That night, the weather turns, and the next morning Eleanor is gone.
She vanished from a locked room, and Maggie has to Is Eleanor in danger? Or is it all some kind of test? Is Ethan the competition? Or is he the only person in that snowbound mansion she can trust?
As the snow gets deeper and the stakes get higher, every clue will bring Maggie and Ethan closer to the truth—and each other. Because, this Christmas, these two rivals are going to have to become allies (and maybe more) if they have any hope of saving Eleanor.
Assuming they don’t kill each other first.
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Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren is $3.99! This is a standlone, which is typically a bit of a departure from their Beautiful and Wild Seasons series (less explicit sex). However, there is a content warning for the book. If you want to read the spoiler, you can find it here.
The heart may hide, but it never forgets.
The first women’s fiction novel from New York Times and #1 international bestselling author Christina Lauren (Autoboyography, Dating You / Hating You).
Macy Sorensen is settling into an ambitious if emotionally tepid routine: work hard as a new pediatrics resident, plan her wedding to an older, financially secure man, keep her head down and heart tucked away.
But when she runs into Elliot Petropoulos—the first and only love of her life—the careful bubble she’s constructed begins to dissolve. Once upon a time, Elliot was Macy’s entire world—growing from her gangly teen friend into the man who coaxed her heart open again after the loss of her mother…only to break it on the very night he declared his love for her.
Told in alternating timelines between Then and Now, teenage Elliot and Macy grow from friends to much more—spending weekends and lazy summers together in a house outside of San Francisco reading books, sharing favorite words, and talking through their growing pains and triumphs. As adults, they have become strangers to one another until their chance reunion. Although their memories are obscured by the agony of what happened that night so many years ago, Elliot will come to understand the truth behind Macy’s decade-long silence, and will have to overcome the past and himself to revive her faith in the possibility of an all-consuming love.
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Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is $2.99! I mentioned this one on a previous Hide Your Wallet. Might be worth picking up if you’re in the mood for a queer space oepra.
From Astounding Award Winner and Crawford Award Finalist Emily Tesh
“Masterful, audacious storytelling. Relentless, unsentimental, a completely wild ride.”—Tamsyn Muir
While we live, the enemy shall fear us.Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the majoda their victory over humanity.
They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.
Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr escapes from everything she’s known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is award-winning author Emily Tesh’s highly anticipated debut novel.
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An Immense World by Ed Yong is $1.99! I believe Aarya mentioned this on a previous Hide Your Wallet and I’ve heard it’s wonderful on audio. Did any of you pick this one up?
Enter a new dimension—the world as it is truly perceived by other animals—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.
“A stunning achievement, steeped in science but suffused with magic.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.
In An Immense World, author and Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”
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I really liked Some Desperate Glory, and I’m looking for the right moment to pick up their next book.
An Immense World is a magnificent mind-blowing book that will alter your perception of the world forever. It might also change how you walk your dog, if you have one.
SOME DESPERATE GLORY won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel, so I’m immediately interested. (I still apparently trust the Hugo, while other awards have lost their luster…)(I totally trust the bitchery, so thank you for the confirmation @Glauke!)
“Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth.
…so she’s going to kill all the billionaires? And us? (Because I partook in the process of capitalism this past week, and though it was unavoidable, I’m feeling a tad guilty.)
An Immense World is an amazing book and one of my favorites that I read this year. There are a lot of wonderful footnotes–not the funnest experience on my nook, but they were very interesting and worth the back and forth.
Most Wonderful Crime of the Year was my book of 2024! I really loved it.
Not referring to a particular book: In the “my one and only love left me in high school” trope, does the person who left ever say, “Sure, high school was great, but that’s it.”? I don’t understand the lifelong mutual pining, especially from then-teenagers. I’m old.
@Darlynne I wonder if the lingering high school crush stories work better for readers in their 20s and early 30s than they do for those of us who’ve travelled further?
Agree with @L.A. and @Glauke that AN IMMENSE WORLD is an amazing. It’s beautifully written, with just the right level of detail. I have a terrible memory, but I read this book several years ago and I still remember a bunch of fascinating details from it. Lions can’t see zebra stripes. Dogs do have color vision, it’s just not as good as ours. Some insects communicate via vibrations along plants. There are quite a few aquatic animals who can sense linearly polarized light.
I had really mixed feelings about Some Desperate Glory. I’m not sure I recommend reading it, even though I gave it a B. It’s really grim. And I don’t think it sticks the landing.
Here’s my 4 star GR review:
Not quite sure how to rate this immersive and very intense, very grim dystopian space opera that genuinely surprised me more than once.
I’m a sucker for SSF stories where the MC discovers that everything they were raised to believe is a lie and then have to decide who they want to be and how they want to live (and then they and their rag tag band usually go off to save the world). Emily Tesh skillfully follows and then subverts this trope. The main character, Kyr, is frustratingly slow to see what’s obvious to the reader. She’s completely bought into the (fascist) ideology of her tiny warrior community of remaining humans.
This also works as a feminist reimagining of Ender’s Game. I don’t think you need to have read EG to appreciate this book, but there are a lot of subtle and not so subtle call outs – from the child soldiers (they’re teens in this book though) trained to fight an alien enemy to the AI training program to the three gifted siblings in a culture where three siblings are not usually allowed.
It’s a very ambitious book. I don’t think it’s 100% successful. Once I finished it, I realized the social and political commentary is not nearly as well thought out as it seemed while reading it. But it’s fast paced and it works pretty well as a summer block buster type read (just a very grim one). Oh, and I hated the ending.
For people interested in the Emily Tesh, there’s a good C review of it on Dear Author. The comments are a little spoiler-y.
Lots of people loved this book and ymmv, but I want to let people know what they’re getting into with it. It is much more grim than the blurb implies.
https://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-c-reviews/review-some-desperate-glory-by-emily-tesh/
$.99:
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$1.99:
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by Brendan Slocumb
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Free:
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– Paying For It (Bennett Sisters, #1.5) by Eve Dangerfield
Thank you for the further comments on SOME DESPERATE GLORY! I clicked through and read the Dear Author review, then hopped over to Goodreads to check what my friends had written. And there I found the author’s short and long content notes, which were illuminating. I am possibly interested in the book for a future date, but not at this moment. (I need rainbows and magic and sparkly unicorns right now.)
I loved An Immense World! It was just wonderful brain food, and yet I might almost call it a comfort read, too?? There’s plenty of competence porn, for sure. And even a romance element in the acknowledgments 🙂