Well, over the past week or so I finished a bunch of paid e-book purchases, which would put a decent-sized dent in my "I bought it, I really ought to read it sometime" ratio if I hadn't also gone and bought Baen's 2nd Frederik-with-no-C Pohl bundle and a Leigh Brackett set in case the discounts were going to disappear.
William F. Wu's excellent
A Temple of Forgotten Spirits, which as I mentioned previously is a kind of mash-up of Jack Kerouac and the intersection of Asian-American and Middle American life experience. Plus ghosts and demons and hitchhikers, oh my!
It's actually a collection of linked short stories previously published by the now defunct fantasy/horror magazine
Pulphouse which used to be edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (who then went on to edit the
Magazine of SF & Fantasy, I believe and is now one of those self-published e-backlist authors). Wu (who apparently also wrote a short story which was the basis for a popular
Twilight Zone remake episode) adds a nifty outroduction to each story giving historical/cultural background notes for the elements inside, which is something I always like to see.
Highly recommended if you like low-key urban fantasy roadtrips where old ghosts are uncovered and laid to rest. I don't regret buying this on impulse during a Fictionwise discount sale, and will be picking up Wu's other FW MultiFormat book,
Hong on the Range, even though I'm pretty sure I actually have a used hardcover copy of that which I bought years ago during a bookstore sale and never actually got around to reading.
Also nearly finished my entire purchase of
Georgette Heyer's mysteries which I bought the lot of during Sourcebooks' Heyer Anniversary Sale when they were all $1.99 or less.
Overall, I liked the Inspector Hannasyde mysteries a bit more than the Inspector Hemingway ones, but that's kind of because while Hemingway is a bit more affable (and shows up as Hannasyde's assistant before he gets promoted), his schtick is this interest in Psychology, which has advanced somewhat in the 70 or so years during which Jungian stuff is now looked upon with a certain skepticism and Freudian psychoanalysis generally treated as being debunkable.
Nevertheless, some of them are fairly good reads, although sometimes a bit predictable. In about 2/3rds of the books I was able to guess whodunnit, even if exactly why was up for grabs, due to Heyer's habit of
And then there's a decidedly annoying habit of out-of-the-blue match-making by almost always pairing off
, and whom you'd think would know better than to want to spend the rest of their life with that person if they were already that irritated by them because they're very unlikely to change. I almost sense further murders down the line.
Of the 8 assorted Hannasyde/Hemingway novels, the best of the lot are probably
Behold, Here's Poison,
They Found Him Dead,
No Wind of Blame, and
Envious Casca, as far as figuring out clever means go. For trying to catch a killer who seems to be a step or two ahead,
A Blunt Instrument and
Detection Unlimited are decent, even if the first has a rather obvious whodunnit.
Death in the Stocks has a rather clever whodunnit, but is marred by the entire cast of suspects who occupy the majority of the screentime being so profoundly unlikeable that you rather wish that all of them dunnit and were properly put away, or that the body count would simply keep piling up and do away with them that way.
You can read practically all of them in any order since they generally don't reference previous cases, except for three:
Duplicate Death directly follows up on characters who were suspects in
They Found Him Dead, and
Behold Here's Poison has a supporting character who was also supporting in
Death in the Stocks and does gossip catch-up on what happened to the other characters who were suspects in that book.
For my money, I recommend
Envious Casca and
They Found Him Dead as being the most enjoyable, but then I've always had this weird fondness for those squabbling family gatherings whose inevitable murder leads everyone who's a suspect trying to accuse everyone else who's a suspect while maintaining their own innocence right in front of the outraged accused party who valiantly maintains their own innocence while accusing the accuser in front of everyone else who's a suspect.
Plus they have mostly likeable casts, which some of the stories don't.