King of Exchanges

How to fake it in society, KJ Charles
We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead
The husbands, Holly Gramazio
Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie (re-read)
The ark
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie
Till we have faces, CS Lewis


How to Fake it In Society, KJ Charles. Titus is a humble shopkeeper who makes paints for artists, who ends up marrying a wealthy woman on her deathbed in order to ensure that her relative (who may well have had something to do with there being a deathbed the first place) is disinherited; struggling with his sudden elevation, he is thrilled when Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de la Motte, a fashionable French escaped aristocrat with a Mysterious Past offers to help him make his way in society. But Nico is a con man barely a step ahead of some very nasty gangsters, and while he hoped to salvage himself with Titus’ money, his new feelings for Titus make it impossible to admit the truth… This is fine. It’s competently put together and I like the paint details but something about this pairing didn’t quite fire for me, the ending tipped a little too far into farce complete with one too many pantomime villains, and basically I think KJ likes con artists and scammers a lot more than I do.

We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead. Solid, painful documentation of the casualties of Canada’s approach to (men’s) hockey, from juniors to professionals, emphasising the gate-keepers who could (but don’t) change their approach. Pretty awful subject material, with all the sexual assault, misogyny, bullying, homophobia and hazing that you’d expect; it’s about culture, and about those who enforce it, but also those who chose to look away or not look deeper, and how much damage reverberates through the system.

The husbands, Holly Gramazio. Lauren, single, is met one night at the door of her flat by her (previously unknown) husband Michael. When he pops up to the attic to change a lightbulb, another husband comes back down; and, every time Lauren gets one up into the attic, she gets another one back, while with each new husband her own life and those of her close friends also change. It’s a great set-up and it rattles along (what if one of the husbands is awful? What if they move away from the flat?) for the first half before running off the rails a bit in the second. Lauren meets a husband to whom the same thing is happening (also, unlike Lauren, he’s about 50:50 whether he ends up with husbands or wives), which was great, but then things go wrong with a husband Lauren loses whom she wanted to keep, and in response Lauren does some pretty terrible things and it’s hard to know how terrible the author thinks they are. I see the author is a game designer, but the book is pitched as “how to choose when there are so many options” dating app rom com rather than “if I treat other people as NPCs how can I do this ethically, especially if I can just reset everything”, which is what I would have liked her to explore more.


Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie

Evil is Poirot staying in a sunny seaside house in Devon when the alluring Arlena, who is having an affair with another woman’s husband, gets herself strangled, and Sittaford is a standalone murder in a snowstorm that took place at the exact time as a group of related people were having a seance and the table spelled out MURDER and the name of the victim. I liked the ideas behind the solution of Evil while not finding them entirely convincing; Sittaford is solider in that respect, but neither are top-tier.

The ark, Haruo Yuki (trans. Jim Rion, who does the Uketsu books). A group of friends exploring the wilderness find a strange abandoned bunker; when they go down into it, an earthquake traps them. The only way out would require one of them to stay behind and face certain death. Helpfully, someone then commits murder; if they can work out who it was, they can force that person to stay behind, although this assumes a) they cooperate and b) whoever it is stops killing more people…

I did like the atmosphere in this, although it could have done with more pace and a lot less “we’re being murdered so let’s split up and go to places individually”. The characters aren’t that well-developed, but there is at least depth to some of them, and the final twist is satisfyingly dark.

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis One of those books I’ve always meant to read but never got around to before (I think I first read about it in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which means it’s been at least 30 years of good intentions. The Cupid and Psyche myth, retold from Orual’s (Psyche’s older half-sister) point of view, with and gosh Orual is a fascinating protagonist, flawed and believable, and a product of her society even when she breaks from it (I note that Joy Davidman was at the very least the first reader on this and at most a co-author). The way Orual’s realisation of how her (selfish) love for others has hurt them reverberates.