When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the past hidden.
In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she meets the boy next door.
But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a killer’s motive, while struggling to hold together her increasingly troubled relationship with Sævar.
An outrageous blend of cosy crime and biting social satire for fans of Richard Osman, Mick Herron, and Marina Lewycka.
Janus Lodge isn’t your typical retirement community. Sylvia Abercrombie and her knitting-obsessed gang of octogenarians are feisty, foul- mouthed, and fiercely protective of their home. So when a shady developer plots to evict them and build a ‘gentlemen’s club’, they hatch an audacious plan to save their sanctuary – by starting a secret knitwear empire with a scandalous twist. As sales skyrocket, secrets unravel, and Sylvia’s ex-husband lurks in the shadows, the gang must pull off the ultimate heist to protect their beloved Lodge.
Hilarious and heartfelt, Knit One, Heist One is a riotous romp proving that age is no barrier to action.
Format: 244 pages, Hardcover Published: May 5, 2026 by Tor Books ISBN: 9781250827005
Description
Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.
After volunteering to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realizes that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn’t know.
Including human children. Ugh.
This may well call for… eye contact!
(Emotion check: Oh, for f—)
My Review
Now I’m settled in to my new home, I’m working through my currently reading pile and this was the first one I’ve finished. I still have an entire library to unpack, but there are a few books that I’ve fished out and I’m working through them and the books I was sent over the summer.
I enjoy The Murderbot Diaries a lot and have all of them. I find Murderbot’s cynical response to events entertaining. The development of its relationships with the humans in its orbit and the continuing development and expansion of the world really gives depth to the story. Martha Wells is a skilled writer and every development is well paced.
The plot is gripping, packed with action and emotion as Murderbot tries to deal with its own emotions, understand the emotions of people around it, and keep everyone alive. It actually makes decisions based on whether or not the humans will be traumatised and barely kills anyone in this instalment.
If you’ve not read the other Murderbot Diaries, this book might be a bit confusing, so I’d recommend definitely reading the other 7 books before this one.
Now, I need to go and dig out the other books so that I can shelve them.
A forgotten wreck. A forbidden map. A gate that should never have been opened. On the salvage moon of Veyra’s Fall, Kade Renn only wants one thing: a working air filter for his sick sister, Lira.
Instead, he finds a buried courier ship older than the official history books. Inside it is a dying Driftborn pilot, a forbidden star map, and a message from Kade’s mother, Elian, who supposedly died nine years ago. The Directorate says the gates saved civilisation. It says the Driftborn are criminals, free-route smugglers and a threat to every recognised human world.
The Directorate is lying.
Forced to flee with Lira, their strange scrap-mech Nix, and a half-illegal ship called The Moth, Kade is pulled into a hidden war over the true origin of the gates. The deeper they travel beyond authorised space, the more dangerous the truth becomes.
The first crossing was not what humanity was taught.
The gates were not built by us.
And something has been waiting for us to understand what we woke. For readers who enjoy grounded space opera, ancient alien mysteries, damaged ships, found family, dry humour and human stakes beneath the scale of the stars.
The Driftborn is a tense, character-driven science fiction novel about control, memory, survival and the danger of mistaking every door for an invitation.
A deadly contagion spreads throughout the world, while scientists grapple to find a cure before it’s too late…
Dr. Monica Cucinotta works on the front lines of a hospital in Cassino, Italy, dealing with a deadly contagion that causes thorns to erupt along the surface of the body. When Monica becomes infected with the virus and must leave the hospital, she begins ajourney across the dark landscape of a pandemic world where she meets the best and worst of humanity that tests her belief in science and faith as she struggles to return home to her loved ones.
Hardcover with sprayed edges. In the sequel to A Rebel’s History of Mars, Azad and his fellow time-traveling historians must contend with the consequences of the dark secrets they’ve exposed…
After exposing the dark origins of his world on the distant planet of Nabatea, Azad is a fugitive, hunted across the galaxy by the fearsome Vitruvian Authorities. But to lead a passive society into revolution, Azad and his crew must enlist the unlikely help of a space pirate with an agenda all her own. Their adventures once again draw them into the past, into the early days of settlement on Nabatea, where a death continues to haunt the fledgling community and a mother must contend with her son’s monstrous vision for their new home.
The year is 2050. In the teeth of a climate catastrophe, the world is left with a drastic solution: one global leader to steer it through the coming apocalypse.
The final two candidates are ex-US President Lockwood, and Solomon, the world’s first political artificial intelligence. As whispers of a global conspiracy emerge, investigative journalist Marcus Tully find himself at the centre of it – when Solomon’s creator turns up murdered.
Overnight, one investigation becomes two, and it’s not just the result of the election that’s at stake but the future of the species. Suddenly humanity must make an impossible choice – between salvation, or freedom.
A ship, a gun, and a nice teal robe to find one killer on a planet of criminals: will Qays Mendoza get the answers he is looking for? Qays Mendoza get the answers he is looking for?
On the edges of mankind’s domain there is a penal planet called Fresh Start where a sentence is at best exile to five generations, but more likely death in its harsh unforgiving wastes. It is to this planet the empire sends the worst of the worst and it is on this planet that Qays Mendoza searches for his old captain.
The galactic empire is falling, civilization contracts. Fresh Start is abandoned. Without oversight, the planet is wild, without guards; the Oubliette, the supermax prison on the supermax planet, lies open, and the Butcher of Raznak, a killer worse than the one Qays seeks, is on the loose. With the help of a street waif called Patience, Qays seeks answers. His soul is stained with guilt and his spirit broken by complicity. Religion did not have the answer; duty did not explain it. Birthright and station were not enough. His answers lie somewhere on Fresh Start.
Low Town is the worst slum in the Empire, where lives are sold on the penny. Once its heir apparent, Wren returns after fifteen years to a city in turmoil, the syndicates feuding and the city on the brink of rebellion. Drawn into a tangled web of intrigue and murder, Wren finds himself the pawn in a conspiracy threatening to drive the Empire to war.
But all is not as it seems. Because Wren was trained by the most brilliant crime lord that ever lived—and he’s come back to Low Town to find him.
I was sent an ARC of this book after I signed up on the GdM newsletter. I haven’t read any of the author’s books before but I liked the sound of it and now I’m intrigued by the Low Town novels. Which I will not be buying because I’m being evicted and I need to stop collecting books for the foreseeable. Once I’ve found somewhere stable to live, I’ll work my way through the collection, and then I’ll buy them. Or at least the first one. I want to know more about the background to this novella.
We meet Wren as he steps off the boat and into the Low Town. He’s clearly on a mission and affecting a rather insouciant air about the whole thing. At the same time, a very important peace treaty is being negotiated. Someone is trying to stop that treaty and Wren has a job to do, preferably without getting his coat dirty. Picking up a young assistant, picking fights with various gangs, and upsetting the secret police are just the start of things. Wren is looking for his father, who is supposed to be dead.
It’s a mystery and I loved every second of it.
There will be spoilers from here. Skip two paragraphs if you don’t want to know.
Wren is a pain in the arse to all the wrong people and charming, although it’s superficial – just to get what he needs – as he takes control of the Low Town, deals with gangsters and Black House effectively, and stops a violent uprising. He’s a cynical, violent man, who really doesn’t want to be. He hates killing, although he’s able to end lives easily, and he has a secret no one else knows, a skill he uses subtly. I don’t think it’s supposed to be a surprise to the reader when he uses his magic to defeat Katarina, since all the hints are obvious, but the magic he does is small magic, building up to his easy defeat of the Academy trained mage.
What was a surprise was the conspiracy he takes apart, I wasn’t ever sure who was doing what and why Wren was involved, until it all came together in Uncle’s office in Black House. That was a marvellous reveal.
Spoilers end here.
The setting is extremely well realised. Obviously, the author has written in this world a lot, so he is familiar with it. I’m not, and that could have been difficult, but the novella doesn’t assume previous readers, and describes the city and wider world in enough detail to understand events.
The complex politics going on around the main character, how the machinations of those with power affect those without power and how people are influenced by propaganda are explored in this novella, almost incidentally to the made plot. It’s very well done.
The Low Town makes me think of an seventeenth century London, with magic. The High Line, that connects workers to the upper reaches of society reads as though someone has dropped a maglev train into a medieval city on a hill. It is a good description of what happens when you put a major road through long-established communities that then become left behind and separated.
The secret police, Black House, is very reminiscent of so many real-world organisations, with paid informants, junior officers fighting for position willing to stab each other in the eye, and a tough leader at the top. There have been so many of those, all over the world. They usually aren’t a good thing. Think of all those killed/had their lives ruined by the FBI or the Stasi on the rumour of dissent.
The main characters, other than Wren, are Geraldine, the young person who somehow becomes Wren’s assistant, and Katarina, the Black House operative that he works with. These women are intelligent, ambitious and street smart. And violent. I found them fun to read, and their motives are not clear, although Geraldine’s growing loyalty to Wren is subtle enough that the ending isn’t that surprising but there’s still some question of where she’ll jump in the final confrontation.
The perspective of the novella is generally close 3rd person present, with Wren being the POV character, but sometimes other perspectives come in, and we never see Wren’s plans or motivations, beyond finding his father, the Warden. The writing is easy to read and I could follow events fairly well. The dislocation between perspectives – jumping from Wren in one situation to Katarina in another, for example – is used well and makes sense in context, especially when Wren turns up immediately after. It’s as though he’s actually been observing events, but the reader and the observed people don’t know he’s there.
In summary, this is an accomplished novella by an experienced writer. The world is dark, gritty, and quite realistic. The title is a hint of what’s to come and when you’ve finished the novella makes total sense.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 