Welcome to Litsy!

My first KJ Charles, but definitely not my last! A truly excellent historical murder mystery where the killer is revealed but someone else emerges as the true villain. Wonderfully drawn characters and themes, including class, race, disability, abortion, and queerness as they play out in a group of friends attending Oxford in the 1890s. Ten years later, after an unsolved murder, our protagonist Jem sets out to finally find whodunnit. 🔥🍂🌧

Excellent narrator, excellent queer, creepy fun. I agree with @shanaqui that the way his family treats neurodivergent Zeb is very distressing but the romance and bizarre twists of the story are terrific. (I guessed a bit, recognizing one authorial influence -- but there was so much more!) I feel like reading the whole thing over in print now.

Important warning: alongside period-typical homophobia and misogyny, the main character has ADHD and people are awful to him for it.

It took me a while to get into this as a consequence, but this evening I sat down and dug in, and loved it. Properly gothic thriller, though. For that I'll say it's a #HauntedShelf recommendation!

#BirthdayBashReadathon
#RestlessSpirits

Haunted house, crazy family with even weirder family secrets, MC with ADHD, M/M romance

#BookMail

Preordered, officially published last week and I'm surprised it's here already. My unreliable bookshop estimated it to be delivered in December. 🙄🙄

I guess this time my @DeweysReadathon is going to be packed with re-reads.

My Aardvark books are here! 😍

Two down! #Swords #WickedWords @AsYouWish

It‘s finally October!!!

🍁🍂🎃🖤🧡😭🧡🖤🎃🍂🍁

Left/vertical is #bookofthemonth #botm (finally getting that cute corduroy hat!), and bottom/horizontal is #aardvark #aardvarkbookclub … which gave us IMPOSSIBLE choices this month, so, alas, I couldn‘t get all I wanted. Why are they so good at that?? 🤔🥲 Tagged is the one I‘m moooost excited for, but it‘s a close call - their exclusive short story collection is also 🔥

Happy October!!! 🎃🍁🖤

“My mother always says that the sweetest sound in the world is a baby‘s borning cry.”

May Amelia‘s mom is a midwife. Her family lives in a small community in Washington state around the turn of the 19th century, where farming and logging are primary subsistence. Poignant

#Read2025 #LitsyAtoZ #Bookspinbingo #Series2025 #Pantone2025

(Ch 1) He was the very last sort of man to be murdered.
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He was the very last sort of man to become an amateur sleuth.
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Looking from the great dark bulk of the library looming in front of him to the green slope leading from the Terrace to the wide expanse of the lawn, he would often murmur to himself the words of the great Roman advocate Cicero: ‘If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.‘

Thanks to these Litsy folks for today‘s prompt:

#CHARACTERCHARM
@Eggs
@AlwaysBeenALoverOfBooks

TODDAY‘S PROMPT: JUDGE

A high-profile trial, an honest, fair judge, and some undisclosed history of the participants.   All these circumstances resulted in a judge being found murdered in his home office along with a white rose and a Bible.

FULL REVIEW: https://tinyurl.com/4njavjav