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Mortedant’s Peril Review

Book: Mortedant’s Peril
Author: RJ Barker
Publisher: Tor Books
Year: 2026
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “In a city of ancient automata, strange spirits, and sleeping gods, a cleric of death is about to find his own life on the line…unless he can find his apprentice’s killer first. This thrilling fantasy murder mystery is the first in a perilous new series from the acclaimed author of The Bone Ships and Age of Assassins.”

Review : Mortedant’s Peril is a winding, twisting, murder mystery wrapped in a fantasy novel set in a strange world filled with blood magic, old gods, and strange lands across the sea. It follows a Mortedant, that is, a death worker whose job is to read the final thoughts of those who have passed, named Irody Hasp as he embarks on a quest to not only seek out his apprentice’s killer but to take vengeance on those who may have, in fact, killed his apprentice on accident while attempting to kill Hasp himself. Hasp embarks on the journey with the help of his apprentice’s young sister, Mirial, and his assigned bodyguard, Whisper, a sea person warrior with potentially royal family ties. What follows is a classic murder mystery with winding back roads, secret passageways, poison berries, death cults, and magical beings who seemingly control the city and, indeed, seem to control Hasp’s own fate.

Mortedant’s Peril gets off to a slow, so very slow, start. It was difficult for me to find my way into the world of Elbay, the city Hasp resides within, and even more difficult for me to wrap my head around all the different creatures, spirit forms, and even the way people are addressed within the world. It didn’t feel like a smooth dive into a new world and the world building felt a bit stunted. There were several instances where I found myself reading and rereading passages, trying to make sense of Barker’s descriptors, often times leaving things without an image in my mind. There’s a sweet spot with fantasy novels where the reader doesn’t have to work too hard to imagine what’s being introduced and this book missed the mark a bit in that regard. However, while a slow start, once I got into the meat of the novel, I found it hard to put down. If you can make it through the first hundred pages or so, you’ll be well into an enjoyable mystery.

While a fantasy first, this book is at it’s heart a mystery so I do want to tell you that I was able to solve the mystery – though, not the mechanics – long before the book reached it’s zenith. On top of that, Barker introduces the reader to so many different religious sects, cults, and names I found difficult to connect to, that the mechanics of how the murder took place and who exactly was involved felt hard for me to piece together in the end. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the reveal, but it did take something away from the experience.

I struggled a bit with the broader picture of what this book was ultimately about. At first, I believed this was a fantasy novel written to reveal to the reader the dangers of racism and an us vs them perspective, as Hasp, and truly so many people in this book, relies heavily on what I could only call racism (though, in this fantasy world we’re talking about the distinction between people of land vs people of sea, rather than people of differing skin colors) and it’s that very racism that made me recoil at the first bit of the book. The use of “it” as a pronoun is difficult to stomach, to say the least. But the anti-racist plotline doesn’t really pan out beyond Hasp’s subtle move from using “it” to “she” when referring to Whisper, though notably, not when he refers to other creatures. There’s also a strange “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument made toward the end of the book that didn’t sit well with me, either.

All in all, I enjoyed the overall plot of Mortedant’s Peril, I was able to figure out the mystery before the end of the book, and there are several questionable themes throughout the book that don’t resolve in a way that feels good. I found myself returning to the book over and over again to turn the pages and see how things would play out, so this was better than it wasn’t, but it was still not my favorite nor was it a truly successful fantasy book.

Advice : If you love fantasy, or dark and dystopian worlds, if you don’t mind doing extra work where world building lacks, and like the idea of a mystery fantasy novel, this will be a great read for you! If you don’t want to do the work, you might skip this one or check it out from your local library rather than buying it outright.

A Zoom With A View Review

Book: A Zoom with a View
Author: Jess Cannon
Publisher: Dutton
Year: 2026
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Leo can’t believe she’s back in Blue Oak. Her small, quirky Texas hometown feels suffocating after trying to make it big as an English professor in New York – especially due to her strained relationship with her overly hair-sprayed mother, Karina. But with Leo’s career in academia in shambles, at least she’s able to work as a photographer for her godmother’s real estate business. And her best friend, Emily, is around to help her navigate through the mess – and maybe force her to reconnect with her old high school boyfriend, Mack.
But while at work, Leo makes a grisly discovery: the dead body of rival real estate agent and social media influencer Chaz. Even worse, Leo and Emily have been secretly running a snarky Reddit page making fun of Chaz’s cringe-inducing advice and duck-faced selfies. When someone Leo loves is accused of the murder, she finds herself flung headfirst into a dangerous investigation, teaming up with a local detective who grew up to be quite attractive. Meanwhile, Karina has been acting stranger and stranger, as if all her hair hides a big secret…”

Review : A Zoom with a View is a cute, sort of cozy, I-just-moved-back-home mystery I love. I extra love that it’s a mystery with a female protagonist who is neither drunk, nor having a mental break. It’s the perfect break from the (ugh) normalized unreliable female narrator trope. We need that. An entire genre of modern mystery books needs that. Jess Cannon has created a fun, hard to put down narrative of twists and turns and fun characters that feel like they stepped right out of your own lived hometown experience, and I genuinely enjoyed reading this book for all of those reasons.

Once I got into the meat of the novel, the plot was easy to follow and the mystery was fun to unravel. I did figure out whodunnit fairly early on, but I will say that the motive was unclear to me until close to the end of the book, so while you may be able to narrow it down early, it doesn’t necessarily take away from the plot. I won’t give the ending away for you, but I will tell you that I thought the villain would have a different motivation and felt the ending suffered a bit from a fairly reductive character. The final reveal felt semi-believable, but I wanted a little more depth than we were given. There’s still time, I think…

Cannon lost me early on, and I want to warn you, reader, that A Zoom with a View has an incredibly slow start and hasn’t been smoothed out in a way that felt easy to read. While it does get much better as you get into the meat of the book, the plot is a bit meta, if you’ll pardon the pun, and this is the real problem with Cannon’s rocky start. In attempting to lay the groundwork for her novel, Cannon has set herself up for some tricky narrative and it doesn’t seem to me that she’s entirely succeeded in making it something everyone will be able to follow. The main character, Leo, runs a snark subreddit centered around someone she went to high school with, Chaz, who as grown up to become a wellness influencer. Leo, and subsequently Cannon, spends a great deal of time explaining the subreddit, running through the cast of characters in Chaz’s universe, and laying out a lot of Chaz jargon. All of this feels true to life, but it’s not written in a way that brings ease to the reader. Snark subreddits aren’t new to me and I still found myself going back and rereading paragraphs, trying to wrap my head around what Cannon was attempting to describe. There’s a sweet spot you find in books where the words flow and the narrative unfurls in your mind and you don’t have to do much work as a reader, and it isn’t really until about halfway through the book that I found that sweet spot here. The first good bit requires you to work for it, and that’s hard for me to argue for. I don’t think it’s necessarily due to the content, though it’s not an easy task to describe a subreddit and an entirely made-up world, but fantasy writers world build all the time. Sometimes it reads easily and sometimes it doesn’t. This was the latter.

Once I got into the swing of things and found the rhythm of A Zoom with a View, I found myself really enjoying how things were unfolding. Like I said, I had the mystery solved pretty early on, but I enjoyed going with Leo to interview each character, seeing how things were happening in Blue Oak and in the broader Chaz snark subreddit world, and seeing my own suspicions confirmed. What really let me down, though, was the ending. I’ve found myself frustrated in recent years by suspense and mystery books that spend 90% of the novel building up to a climax, revealing the villain, and then wrapping the whole book up in the last couple of pages and unfortunately, that’s exactly what A Zoom with a View has done. It’s only in the final few pages of a pretty hefty book that we finally find out the truth behind Leo’s Mom’s secrets and as soon as we learn her secrets, the book ends. It’s a gnarly cliffhanger, if it actually is a cliffhanger. I can’t find any information online about whether this is the first of a series or at least the first of two books and the ending is so nebulous, yet still ties everything up, that I have no idea if it was meant to leave me feeling confused or it was an intentional set-up for the next book. I have to hope it’s a set-up, and I would surely read book two if there were to ever be a sequel, but it felt disjointed and rushed. The ending unraveled fast. I wanted more. So much more. I think much of what I found off-putting about this book would be a non-issue in a sequel now that the groundwork has been done. Ultimately, Cannon is an enjoyable writer who’s created an enjoyable universe and I have questions I’d like to see answered in a second book. Sign me up.

Advice : If you like a well-written mystery that doesn’t feature an unreliable female narrator, I think you should stick out the slow start and give this book a chance! It was fun and enjoyable and once I got into it I found myself swiftly turning the pages. It’s worth the read.

The Housekeeper’s Secret Review

Book: The Housekeeper’s Secret
Author: Sandra Schnakenburg
Publisher: She Writes Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “A catholic family in 1960s Chicago headed by a narcissistic and demanding father takes on Lee, a housekeeper with a mysterious past. Lee becomes like a second mother to the Krilich children, especially Sandy. After Lee’s death, Sandy begins a determined quest to find out her dear friend’s backstory – and proceeds to uncover one shocking fact after another, even as the story of her own family drama, and the heartwarming role Lee played in the Krilich’s lives, unfolds.”

Review : While this book’s title and synopsis might lead you to believe the entirety of the novel will be spent uncovering a housekeeper’s secret(s), the truth is only about 20% of the book was spent actually delving into Lee’s past. While I don’t particularly think the information Schnakenburg was able to gather about Lee, her beloved housekeeper, is broad enough to fill an entire book, I do find it hard to wrap my head around how little of the book was actually devoted to Lee’s life and how much of it was devoted instead to our writer. I don’t find this problematic as far as storytelling goes, Schnakenburg, nee Krilich, had an extraordinary childhood filled with trauma, neglect, abuse, and a near fatal accident – but the title of the book is The Housekeeper’s Secret and we didn’t begin to dive into Lee’s secret until the book was nearly over. The title and the content didn’t match up.

Like I said, though, I found the story of Schnakenburg’s upbringing to be enough to keep me turning pages, wanting to know how things would evolve in the lives of Sandy’s family members, forced to endure a grueling childhood with a demanding and demeaning father with a roiling anger problem and no regard for the wellbeing of anyone in his path. I found Schnakenburg’s portrayal of her father to be quite interesting – in fact, I believe her storytelling of his abuse throughout her childhood to be far too lenient and more forgiving than I would hope. We spend, as I mentioned, about 80% of The Housekeeper’s Secret growing up with Sandy in a hellish nightmare world of a home, growing with her from the time she’s no more than a toddler until she’s an adult with children of her own. It’s throughout this memoir-like progression that we come to find Sandy’s relationship with her father, and the relationship he shares with her 5 additional siblings and mother, is strained at best. He is, to put it bluntly, a menace. Demanding 7 different types of juice each morning, forcing Schnakenburg’s mother into situations that endanger her life (more than once), forcing a six-year-old to utilize hedge-trimmers with zero supervision, and having a second family are only some of the stories we read in this book – it is well and truly a nightmare. And yet, Schakenburg attempts to humanize her father, explaining that he suffered the loss of a childhood friend in a drowning accident, as if this singular trauma might explain the evil that he unleashed upon his family; it’s particularly glaring when you consider that Schakenburg’s mother suffered from a terrible fear of drowning, so much so that she never learned to swim, and her husband forced her onto multiple boating trips, one in which the threat of drowning was quite real when their boat suffered damage and began to take on water.

*Spoilers Ahead*

When we do finally make our way to Lee’s story, a story she told the children for years she wanted to write (but spent no time actually writing down, nor telling to anyone to transcribe), the story we end up with is one of tremendous tragedy, horror, and loss. It is hard to endure, yet necessary to read. Lee, a Black woman growing up in the 1940s, was brutally attacked, beaten, and sexually assaulted by multiple men while walking to the bus after work. She was left for dead. Because it was winter and there was snow on the ground, she managed to survive the night, but suffered incredibly bodily damage as well as a traumatic brain injury. Being unable to fully recover and in a family that was enduring their own physical ailments and diagnoses, Lee was sent to a sanatorium for care. While there’s significantly more to Lee’s story, I’d like to leave it here and encourage you to read this book if for no other reason than the necessity of hearing a story like Lee’s – a story that deserves to be heard and told. The history of women’s medical treatment is one we should never take lightly, especially as we find ourselves simply not all that far removed from the most egregious “treatment” and experiments performed – often for diagnoses that are now easily managed with medication, therapy, and simple kindness. Women of color, even more so.

I sobbed through Lee’s story, wishing so much that there was more information available, that we could see retribution for the actions of the men in her life who treated her with such unimaginable disregard, wishing Schnakenburg could have dug up and revealed names so we might know them for who they were. It’s the human response, I believe, to reading a story like Lee’s. You want to see justice done, you want to see more come from it than 20% of a book about an abusive father, you just want more. I think it’s commendable that Schnakenburg took up the mantle of this task, but I wish there was less about Schnakenburg herself (perhaps saving it for a separate memoir) and more about Lee. As we meet Lee’s children toward the end of the book, Schnakenburg and her siblings share stories about Lee that were never mentioned at any other point in the book and I can’t help but think this book would have better served Lee’s memory had it included more stories of Lee’s life, even on where she was an employee of a family that was not her own. Schnakenburg dips her toes into the realm of white saviorism at the end, when she learns one of Lee’s children fell victim to the system as an orphaned child born in a sanatorium, suggesting that this child would have been better off in Schnakenburg’s home where her horrifically abusive father ruled with an iron fist of unpredictability. In fairness, I think her intentions were noble in this moment, believing the child would have been better off with Lee, and I agree, but again, I feel she’s been far too forgiving of her father and a bit short sighted, considering how deeply she had previously detailed his abuses. There were moments that left me gasping for air for the sheer horror of it all, moments where I sobbed, and moments where I cringed. Lee’s story is a tragedy that deserves to be heard.

Advice : It’s worth noting that if you choose to read this book it does speak about verbal abuse, emotional abuse, manipulation, gang rape, power dynamics, torture, water torture, sexual assault, traumatic brain injury, a car accident / bicycle accident, and drowning. This book is not for the faint of heart, but if you’re a woman I think it’s a deeply important and impactful story to read.

Best of All Worlds Review

Book: Best of All Worlds
Author: Kenneth Oppel
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Xavier Oak doesn’t particularly want to go to the family cottage with his dad and pregnant stepmother. But family obligations are family obligations, so he leaves his mom, his brother, and the rest of his life behind for a weekend at the lake. Except…on the first morning, he wakes up and the cottage isn’t where it was before. It’s like it’s been lifted and placed somewhere else.
When Xavier, his dad, and Mia go explore, they find they are inside a dome, trapped. And there’s no one else around.
Until, three years later, another family arrives.
The Jacksons are a welcome addition at first – especially Mackenzie, a girl Xavier’s exact age. But Mackenzie’s father has very different views on who their captors are, and his actions lead to tension, strife, and sacrifice.
In this masterpiece, award-winning author Kenneth Oppel has created a heart-stopping, can’t-wait-to-talk-about-it-story, showing how our very human choices collectively lead to humanity’s eventual fate.”

Review : Best of All Worlds is a serious mind bending, quasi-scifi, semi-dystopian work of speculative fiction. A family leaves for their lake cabin, something they’ve done for over and over again for so many weekends of their lives, and when they wake in the morning they find they’re somewhere else entirely. What follows is a journey into what a so-called perfect life might look like : no diseases, no bugs, no predators; what a simpler life in a world undisturbed by human activity might entail: hard work, homesteading, eating simply; and what kind of emotional processing that might require. We spend perhaps just shy of one third of the book with the Oaks alone during the first few weeks after they arrive, learning the lay of the habitat, discovering they’re encased within some kind of smart, self-healing dome under which they have electricity and everything they need to survive, but not much else. We find they’re all on their own, their captors seem fairly benevolent, and while they certainly haven’t been transported and isolated with consent, they do their best to make do with the situation at hand. It’s at this point that the book jumps three years into the future – our protagonist Xavier is now 16 years old and has given up all hope of ever seeing another soul again when, out exploring the dome in the middle of the night, looking for a way out, he witnesses a new home being built by tiny nano-bots. The Jackson’s have arrived and suddenly the Oaks are no longer alone.

Oppel has created a visionary work that left me with questions all the way up until the final page. There was no moment where I’d figured everything out, nothing that disappointed me in a predictable sort of way. Best of All Worlds is a truly impressive work that delves into the current climate disaster, the weight of impending future pandemics, climate related deaths, and the paranoia and racism that seem to grip so many people these days. Set sometime in the future, though I would suspect it might be sometime between 10 and 15 years beyond where we find ourselves now, BoAW takes place at a time when the climate crisis has turned into a full-blown climate emergency, with sea walls being built (or not built, depending on the not really mentioned political leanings of each particular state), thousands of people dying due to heat domes over intensely warm states like Florida, climate refugees seeking new land, and, of course, horrific racist conspiracy theories that keep people in the grimy clutches of paranoia. The Jackson’s offer a foil to the Oak’s level-headed mindset – Riley Jackson, our intrepid patriarch, is a deeply paranoid Christian with a belief that the broader governmental system is out to get, well, everyone. Convinced that the dome is nothing more than a big government conspiracy designed to…do something vague…Riley sets out immediately to find a way out and through, to expose the government’s plans, and to live on the fringes of society while he does so. On the other hand, we have Caleb Oak, hard working the land where he now lives, convinced that the reason they’re living within the dome is due to some form of alien activity – a conclusion he only came to after several years living as a captive, seeing technology he’s never witnessed before, and gaining an understanding of what does and doesn’t work in this place. Two equally strange ideal systems, though Caleb Oak seems content to exist in a world where his family is safe and freedom is less about fear and more about a calculated, level-headed decision.

Oppel speaks so clearly to the fear-based conspiracy theories that currently run amok within our world, particularly within the United States, and while we all know this isn’t exclusive to the US by a long shot, we do see this played out in the book with the Oaks being Canadian and the Jackson’s hailing from Tennessee. Much like Xavier will find at the end of the book, I believe anyone on any spectrum of political ideology could read BoAW and come away with something different – we hear what we want to hear, read what we want to read. However, there’s no overlooking the very real inherent through-line of racism that permeates everything the Jackson’s do, the way in which their own need for a life free of fear has actually cast their entire world in a metaphorical bubble of fear and hatred and, ultimately, evil, and the way in which the incessant need to overcome what they perceive as a targeted attack on their rights ultimately leads to just one thing : death. In our present world, this may look like so many things, from the genuine climate disaster, to concentration camps, deportations without due process, and the vulnerability of the weakest members of society when anti-vax conspiracies and rugged individualism run rampant. There’s a lot to be said for compassion, and I believe that’s what Oppel is touching on with this book – a desperate need for compassion, for truth to prevail, and for humanity to release it’s grasp on the idea that we are somehow alone amongst the masses of those who might not be or think just how we do.

This is one of those rare books where I’m going to choose not to spoil anything for you, even with a spoiler warning. You won’t know what hit you until you turn that final page, so buckle up and dive in, you don’t want to miss this one.

Advice : Part science fiction, part coming-of-age, Best of All Worlds is an excellent read. Perfect for those interested in the nuance of the ever widening divide between political parties, for those who believe the humanity deep within each of us is something that makes us inherently more connected than we ever will be different, and for those who are really ready to see the racist get what’s coming to them in the end. That’s all I’ll say for now. Read this one.