Goldberg, Lee. Dream Town.

Seattle, Thomas & Mercer, 2024.

This is the fifth in a very enjoyable series about young Eve Ronin, a hard-nosed, driven, ambitious detective deputy with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Less than a year ago, she grabbed herself a spot in robbery-homicide by leveraging the publicity she gained by taking down a drunken movie star assaulting his girlfriend in public, and thereby also gained the resentment of nearly everyone else at her station. She didn’t really didn’t know what she was doing at the beginning, but she has solved several more major crimes since then, plus uncovering a network of secret criminal gangs within the department (yes, those really have been a scandal in LA), which involved her shooting one deputy, watching while another committed suicide in front of her, and being literally bombed out of her house.

Evison, Jonathan. Again and Again.

NY: Dutton, 2023.

When one of the caregivers in his desert retirement home in the Mojave north of Los Angeles remarks on how short life is, 105-year-old Eugene Miles silently begs to differ. His earliest memory is as a homeless street thief in Seville in the 11th century, and after a thousand years of inhabiting a succession of bodies (including six years as Oscar Wilde’s cat), most of it lonely and loveless, he’s had enough. He’s ready to die. But he’s afraid he’s only facing yet another unwanted reincarnation to add to the seven he has already suffered through. Eugene has become adept at being alone and largely avoiding the company of others, but when Angel, a young Hispanic room-cleaner is openly friendly, Eugene surprises himself by opening up and telling the young man his story. And so we follow him from the days when he was Euric, a Visigoth — and of lower status than the Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Berber-dominated Andalusia.

Frazier, Song Mei Sheng. Off the Boks.

NY: Henry Holt, July 2024.

Mei Brown is Chinese-American and a native of the Bay Area — Chinese mother and Anglo father, and it’s hinted that Mom married him to acquire citizenship — and she’s very bright but she has issues. She was at Dartmouth on a scholarship, only one term away from graduation, when he father, an Army linguist at Monterey, killed himself, and Mei quit school and went back home. She hasn’t forgiven her mother, either, but she’s still very close to her hard-case widowed grandfather, who now lives in their renovated garage and who really raised her in all the important ways.

Mosqueda, Andrea. Just Your Local Bisexual Disaster.

NY: Macmillan, 2022.

The author is a Chicana and a native of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, which is also the setting of this beautifully written YA novel. She’s also some variety of non-straight, and she now lives in NYC, which starts out being the protagonist’s target college destination, so she’s writing very much from experience. She’s an assistant editor somewhere in the publishing world, so she also knows her way around words, but given that this is her first published work of fiction, it’s amazingly well written, with often striking prose, multidimensional characters, and a sophisticated eye for the look and social feel of the Valley, especially as experienced by its younger inhabitants.

Heyer, Georgette. Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle.

NY: Putnam, 1957.

Among other works, Georgette Heyer wrote nearly three dozen “Regency romances.” They have various things in common — a romance (naturally), humor, and an especially well-researched milieu — but they’re not all alike. Far from it. Some of the books, like Cotillion, are light and frothy, a sort of literary meringue. Others, like The Grand Sophie and An Infamous Army, display much deeper plot development and characters of much greater depth. With only a couple of exceptions, though, they are all very well written and vastly entertaining. In this one, Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, is pushing thirty and still single, but he knows he’s going to have to marry soon and has essentially drawn up a list of specifications. Having held the title since he was nineteen, he never had the experience of being trained into his role and has always had everything entirely his own way. In fact, his mother, the Dowager Duchess, is becoming rather worried over signs of unthinking arrogance in her son, such as the assumption that any girl to whom he proposes will, of course, accept. All he has to do is make his selection.

Price, Richard. The Whites.

NY: Henry Holt, 2015.

I’ve been aware of Price for a few years, ever since the rave reviews of Clockers, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading him before now. But this one has been on everyone’s “Best of the Year” list, so I gave it a shot. I’m glad I did. You think at first it’s going to be a standard police procedural in format, starting out as it does with the thoughts of Detective Sergeant Billy Graves as he drives to work, of how St. Patrick’s Day is one of New York City’s ugliest and most violent “drinking holidays.” But it’s far, far more than that. And while there’s a deepening mystery threaded through most of the narrative, it’s not merely a “detective story,” either.

Pooley, Clare. Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting.

NY: Viking, 2022.

Iona and her wife, Bea, both tall and gorgeous when they were young, were major “influencers” on the London social scene — “lipstick lesbians” — in the ’80s and ’90s, long before that word even existed. Then Iona became a very successful society and advice columnist for a women’s magazine, but now, twenty years later, she’s pushing sixty and feeling left out of things. The publishing world seems to be run by young people whose attitudes and lingo she doesn’t understand (though she’s pretty hip when it comes to modern tech). The focus of her carefully managed life is when she commutes by train every day from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station and back, always dressed colorfully at her favorite table in Carriage 3, accompanied by Lulu, her French bulldog and constant companion.

Blake, Ashley Herring. Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date.

NY: Berkley, 2023.

This is the third volume in what has been a very enjoyable (and very queer) rom-com trilogy that has displayed a uniformly high quality in its writing. The setting this time alternates between Portland, Oregon, and the small community of Bright Falls. As usual in a romance, there are two protagonists. Iris Kelly was one of the three main supporting characters in the first two books — an artist and designer in her late twenties, and now a budding rom-com author herself. Her first book is coming out soon, but she’s completely stymied on the second one in her contract, and she knows perfectly well it’s because she really doesn’t understand romance. Iris, who is bisexual, has a failed long-term relationship behind her with a guy who wanted a big family, but that wasn’t anywhere in her life plan, and that was followed by a very bad experience with a married gay woman who only used her for sex. Now all Iris wants now is hook-ups (okay, she loves sex) with zero commitments.

Leonard, Elmore. LaBrava.

NY: William Morrow, 1983.

The late Elmore Leonard, known as “The Dickens of Detroit” for his in-depth portraiture of his characters, was usually described as a “crime writer,” but that’s not really accurate. The people he wrote about hung around in the company of criminals and often tried to stop them from doing what they did, but that often wasn’t difficult because he understood that people who try to live by crime are most often inept by nature. His style was light, sort of anti-noir, and he was a master of street slang and local dialects. Moreover, he wrote his stories in a series of scenes, each with a beginning, middle, and end, which is why nearly all of his forty novels made it to the big screen. (Is there anyone who hasn’t seen Get Shorty and Jackie Brown?) Leonard received a number of awards, including the Scott Fitzgerald Medal and the MWA Lifetime Achievement Award, but LaBrava won him his only Edgar.

Utley, Steven. Where or When.

Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing, 2006.

Steve Utley died in 2013 at a relatively young age, and that was a particular shame. He was diagnosed with cancer and a month later, he was gone. I got to know Steve in the ’70s, when he was one of the founders of ArmadilloCon and the Turkey City Writers Conference, both in Austin, together with Howard Waldrop, Lisa Tuttle, and Bruce Sterling. (It was a great time to be a science fiction fan and/or budding writer in Texas.) He never made it to the level of national recognition, but you may have read “Custer’s Last Jump” and “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole,” two of the most influential precursors of steampunk. Steve was an Air Force brat (I grew up in the Army) and I remember spending a long lunch across the table from him, comparing experiences in rootlessness.