And with great fanfare, 2025 is now here.

 So here we go, 2025 is underway. I hope it's started off well for you. Today it's not raining here in the Valley.. Not yet anyway. So let's start off 2025 with a look at the books I'm reading, what I've completed so far (1 book) and any new books....

I hope to read 120 books in 2025. I also hope to be a bit more focused and stick to one book per challenge. We'll see how that works out as the year progresses. So Happy 2025 and we're off.

Completed

1. Gideon's March by J.J. Marric (Gideon #8 / 1962). One of my favorite police procedural series.

"J.J. Marric was one of the most prolific writers I've tried; Commander Gideon, Inspector West, Dept Z, Doctor Palfrey, etc. The Commander Gideon series consists of 20+ books. It's basically a police procedural, featuring Commander Gideon as head of London's Criminal Investigation Division. Every book I've read thus far has been excellent.

In Gideon's March, the 8th book, Gideon has to prepare the London police for a major visit; the US president, the French president and the German president. Adding to his responsibilities, he must also take over the uniformed division as that head is on sick leave. Gideon must now deal with the hurt feelings of the Assistant of that Division, who feels slighted.

It's a fascinating story that wanders from Gideon to other police officers assisting him, including those from the countries that are visiting. As well, Gideon is dealing with specific crimes and criminals so we get to be involved with their lives and plans. You've got Matthew Smith, who wants to assassinate the French president who he blames for the death of his son. You've got various other criminals, Sonnly who runs pick pocket teams and other petty criminals. You've got his partner, Klein, plotting with the Glasgow gangs to take over the activities during the visit. His plan is kind of neat (I won't ruin it)

For a relatively short story, it's rich and deeply developed. The planning process is intricate but very accessible and interesting and as we get closer to the final procession of the leaders, the pace picks up and the activities of the police forces are more intense and detailed. It's amazing how much Marric can pack into one little story and how exciting it ends up being. I've enjoyed the TV episode that pulls this portion of the story out and I do like how the book is different enough that the ending was surprising and both satisfying and depressing at the same time. If you like police procedurals, this is a mystery series worth checking out. (4.0 stars)"

Currently Reading

I have 5 challenges this year; a Dusty Book Challenge (16 books that have been on my Goodreads' shelf the longest), a Finish Series Challenge (once again, 16 books), a Start a Series Challenge (as many as possible), a Continue Series Challenge (as many as possible) and a Non-Series Challenge (as many as possible)

1. Deadly Beloved by Jane Haddam (Gregor Demarkian #15). For my Dusty Book Challenge.

"Down the aisle--to death

Armies on the eve of invasion could learn a thing or two about preparation from the denizens of Cavanaugh Street, who never do anything halfway. This time it's a wedding that's taking over the collective consciousness of the street...and bringing up painful memories for Gregor Demarkian. So when he's consulted on a murder in exclusive Fox Run Hill, the ex-FBI special agent is grateful for the diversion.

Why did country-club matron Patsy MacLaren Willis coldly shoot her husband in his sleep? Why did she remove every trace of her existence from the home they'd shared, pipe bomb her own car--and then disappear? The police think it's another marriage gone bad, but Demarkian thinks there's more to the case. And it soon looks like he's a second pipe bomb explodes, with devastating results, and Gregor knows that he must find a killer wedded to an explosive secret--before more victims take that final walk down the aisle."

2. Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice (Moon #2) This will finish this series unless Mr. Rice decides to continue it.

"Twelve years after the lights go out . . .

An epic journey to a forgotten homeland

The hotly anticipated sequel to the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow

It's been over a decade since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy. Evan Whitesky led his community in remote northern Ontario off the rez and into the bush, where they've been living off the land, rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions in total isolation from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in the world after everything, Evan's people are in some ways stronger than ever. But resources in and around their new settlement are beginning to dry up, and the elders warn that they cannot afford to stay indefinitely.

Evan and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nangohns, are elected to lead a small scouting party on a months-long trip to their traditional home on the north shore of Lake Huron--to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life--and what dangers--still exist in the lands to the south."

3. The Blackhouse by Peter May (Fin McLeod) and yes, this is for my Start a Series Challenge.

"The Isle of Lewis is the most remote, harshly beautiful place in Scotland, where the difficulty of existence seems outweighed only by people's fear of God. But older, pagan values lurk beneath the veneer of faith, the primal yearning for blood and revenge.

When a brutal murder on the island bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the investigation also represents a journey home and into his past.

Each year the island's men perform the hunting of the gugas, a savage custom no longer necessary for survival, but which they cling to even more fiercely in the face of the demands of modern morality. For Fin the hunt recalls a horrific tragedy, which after all this time may have begun to demand another sacrifice."

4. A Darker Domain by Val McDermid (Karen Pirie #2).

"In Britain circa 1984, the news is dominated by the national miners’ strike. The region of Fife in Scotland is hard hit by the strike, devastated economically and shaken by clashes between miners and police. Against this violent and bitter backdrop, heiress Catriona Maclennan Grant and her baby son are kidnapped. The ransom should have gone smoothly, but instead, the payoff goes horribly wrong, and Catriona and her son disappear without a trace.

Twenty-four years later, dramatic new evidence discovered by a jogger in Tuscany prompts police to reopen the cold case. Detective Sergeant Karen Pirie leads the investigation. It won’t be the only cold case to end up on her desk. A young woman soon walks into the station reporting a missing person, Mick Prentice, who abandoned his family in Fife in 1984 to join the strike-breakers down south. Labelled a blackleg scab, he might as well be dead as far as his friends and relatives are concerned."

5. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher (2024). Jo got me this for Xmas this past year.

"From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”

While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.

Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.

Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone."

New Books

(These arrived once our postal strike ended).

1. The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny (1968) Ursula K. Le Guin referred to this story in the preamble to one of the short stories I read by her.

"The last really unexplored frontier of knowledge may well prove to be the human mind. The Dream Master is the novel of that farther frontier, of a Twenty-first Century invention which enabled a psychology engineer to actually enter a man's mind, to experience his thoughts, to live with him his dreams—and to redirect and control those soaring universe-creating visions which are the essence of all thinking.

This novel of Render the Shaper, in its magazine serial version—originally published in 1965 as the Nebula winning novella 'He Who Shapes'—has already won Roger Zelazny the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America for the finest short novel of the year. Ace Books now proudly presents its final and complete full-length version."

2. The Teahouse Detective: Unravelled Knots by Baroness Orczy (Teahouse Detective #3).

"It has been twenty years since Polly Burton last saw the Teahouse Detective, but one foggy afternoon she stumbles into a Fleet Street café and chances upon the cantankerous sleuth again. The years have not softened his manner, nor dulled his appetite for unravelling the most tortuous of conspiracies, shedding light on mysteries that have confounded the finest minds of the police.

How did Prince Orsoff disappear from his railway carriage in-between stations? How could the Ingres masterpiece be seen in two places at once? And what is the truth behind the story of the blood-stained tunic that exonerated its owner?

From the comfort of his seat by the fire, the Teahouse Detective sets his brilliant mind to work once more."

3. Cue the Easter Bunny by Liz Evans (Grace Smith #6). A favorite mystery series, unfortunately, only six books long.

"Spring has come to the faded seaside town of Seatoun. Vetch’s Investigations is buzzing with clients, but Grace Smith is the only one without a client. The situation has become so desperate that Grace has taken a job with the local Tourist Board. Dressed as the Easter Bunny, she's supposed to be promoting the town’s “child friendly” image. Unfortunately, a series of encounters with kids who can't resist tormenting dumb creatures results in Grace being the first bunny to be nicked in Seatoun for Grievous Bodily Harm. So when a woman named Della comes calling, and informs Grace that her son is receiving threatening letters and that she wants someone to trace the sender, Grace eagerly accepts. She lives to regret it most bitterly."

4. Cormac McCarthy's The Road: a Graphic Novel Adaptation by Manu Larcenet (2024). I've read the original book and also seen the movie, so now to see how it looks as a graphic novel.

"The first-ever graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning postapocalyptic classic, The Road, approved and authorized by McCarthy and illustrated by acclaimed cartoonist Manu Larcenet "Superb. A suitably dark graphic treatment of McCarthy’s postapocalyptic masterpiece."

(Kirkus) 

The story of a nameless father and son trying to survive with their humanity intact in a postapocalyptic wasteland where Earth’s natural resources have been diminished, and some survivors are left to raise others for meat, The Road is one of Cormac McCarthy’s bleakest and most prescient novels. 

Dedicated to his son, John Francis McCarthy, McCarthy’s The Road is one of his most personal novels. Ranked 17th on The Guardian’s 100 Best Novels of the 21st century, it was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, and the James Tait Black Memorial Award, the Believer Award, and it was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This first official graphic novel adaptation of McCarthy’s work is illustrated by acclaimed French cartoonist Manu Larcenet, who ably transforms the world depicted by McCarthy’s spare and brutal prose into stark ink drawings that add an additional layer to this haunting tale of family love and human perseverance. Cormac McCarthy personally approved the making of this book before his death, and the adaptation bears the approval of the McCarthy estate."

So there you go. Enjoy 2025. Let's hope it's more fun than The Road, eh?