I stumbled upon a short, haunted treasure of a story called Slade House by David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame. It’s a spooky mystery unfolding in an overlooked alley with consequences that ripple through time. A misunderstood teenager, an overconfident police officer, and a self-conscious college student find themselves at the doorstep of Slade House…
The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch came out over ten years ago, and ever since the massively popular Gentleman Bastard series ground to a standstill, there have been any number of debut heist books that generate tons of excitement as something to fill the gap. This comparison is almost always deeply unfair to debuts…
Continue reading ➞ The Silverblood Promise – He’s Just So Dumb
Robert Jackson Bennett, Quill to Live favorite, is back with a brand new series about a pair of detectives in a world threatened by enormous sea monsters. The Tainted Cup is the first book of the Shadow of the Leviathan series and it is overflowing with dark, damp, leafy mysteries. These shadowy secrets contrast perfectly…
Today I am excited to present one of the best romances I have read in a while that is out here masquerading as a fantasy mystery thriller. The Hexologists is the first book in the latest series by Josiah Bancroft, of Tower of Babel fame. It stars a duo of mature protagonists, husband and wife,…
Vlad Taltos, by Steven Brust, is a sleeper series that has now officially been coming out for 30 years. Planned as a nineteen-book series and still going strong, Tsalmoth is the sixteenth entry in the story and one of my favorites. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this series and feel like I…
My decision fatigue is taking me into new reading territory this year, which has been great because I’m not overthinking my next book and it has pushed me to read different types of stories. This week’s unanticipated read was a suspenseful mystery tinged with the paranormal called Night Will Find You by Julia Heaberlin. The…
You all know the stories. The tales where a man marries a mysterious woman with secrets she begs to keep. But the man’s curiosity always wins out in the end, and he learns something that causes irrevocable damage. Even when I was told not to, I decided to pull back the layers of Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada…
Continue reading ➞ The Last Tale Of The Flower Bride – Artful Arrangement
The Helm of Midnight by Marina J. Lostetter was one of the most complicated and confusing books that I read in 2021. It was a strange murder mystery in a dystopian bubble world where people could summon the skills of the dead to empower them through masks. The book was so complicated that reading the…
Continue reading ➞ The Cage Of Dark Hours – Taking Off The Shackles
We flipped a coin to determine who would get to review this and I said the quarter would get caught in a time paradox so here we are. Children of Memory is the third book in a series that Adrian Tchaikowsky keeps promising won’t have sequels (and I am very glad he wrote them despite…
Continue reading ➞ Children Of Memory – Spooky And Uplifting
Happy New Year everyone and welcome to another year of The Quill to Live. Our first review of the year is of a fabulous book I read over the holidays that greatly impressed me. Empire of Exiles, by Erin M. Evans, is a hit-the-ground-running mystery about four POVs in a giant society locked in a…
Continue reading ➞ Empire of Exiles – Shapeshifting Salty Mysteries
