Gil is the illegitimate child of a wealthy man, cut off by the rest of his family after his father died. He has been earning his way running a book store that specializes in dirty books under the counter and the occasional pornographic photograph. His family reaches back out to him when it turns out his recently deceased uncle had a rather large amount of such material as part of his estate. Vik is a lawyer who does a considerable amount of pro-bono work helping others of Indian descent. Vik is contacted by the family of a young man who has gone missing, and whom may have a rich gentleman friend, and may have been posing for dirty pictures. When he starts asking around among those who deal in such things looking for any trace of the boy, he doesn't get any answers until he runs into Gil, who had been the only other Indian boy at school with him, his best friend, and the lover he had assumed was dead when he vanished one day and never attempted to reach him again. Gil recognizes the missing person from another photograph, in which he appears with another young man who is was recently murdered. The two work together to trace the pictures and discover what their feelings for each other might be like as adults.

I love these two characters. Vik is a disciplined idealist, and Gil is open and good-hearted. They're contrasts and yet it's not difficult to believe that they're perfect for each other. And this could have been a much longer book, but Charles as always makes highly effective use of the space allowed in a novella. What results is a tight romance and a tidy little mystery that you might want to read in one sitting and, depending on how much you have to do that day, you might be able to.

Overall: A

Mick Oberon, private investigator and ex-pat prince of faerie, isn't particularly interested in working for the mob. But he needs money in a hurry so his landlord can keep his building, and mob boss wife Bianca Ottati has a job that will pay it: finding her daughter, whom she has just realized was replaced with a changeling sixteen years earlier. To pick up the trail of this extremely cold case, Oberon has to follow it through faerie and negotiate with its own underworld.

This book is essentially the Prohibition era equivalent of the Dresden Files, and it's great fun. It makes nice use of folklore for the faeries in the human world, such as Oberon's diet of milk and cream, and also inventively depicts a faerie world influenced by its ties to real world Chicago. (The faerie syndicate boss known as Queen Mob was one of my favorite touches.) There's a few more out in this series already, and I look forward to seeing what else Marmell has done with it.

Overall: A

This review is based on an advance copy received from the publisher at ALA Midwinter.

Max and Pip's son, Dylan, is seriously ill. When his doctors recommend transitioning to palliative care only, they both want the best for him, but they cannot agree on what that is. Since they cannot jointly make a decision, it is left to the courts. From that point in the narrative, the book splits in two, following the story as it would unfold from each course of action.

I've seen some other reviews not mentioning that last part out of some kind of misplaced desire to avoid "spoilers." It's not a spoiler when it's the major sales pitch being used for the book. I heard Penguin promote this one several times over the course of the ALA Midwinter meeting and they never once failed to compare it to a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book; it's like when people try to talk about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves without mentioning that the narrator's sister is a chimp. Sure, it doesn't actually come up narratively until midway through the book, but it's on the flap and it's supposed to be the reason you pick it up.

Considering that the alternating narratives are the main draw of the book, they start really late. It's in the vicinity of the halfway mark before the judge makes the decision, and the timelines split. The bulk of the book is very much a standard issue-driven relationship fiction novel, in the spirit of Jodi Picoult. Once the timelines do spit, Mackintosh adeptly weaves the two together, with echoes of the same beats being played out in different lives. It shows great thought and great skill, but it still takes a lot of reading (in comparison to the overall size of the book) to get to that for which the reader is encouraged to pick it up.

Overall: B-

After the End will be available June 25.

This review is based on an advance copy received from the publisher at ALA Midwinter.

Frannie Langton stands accused of murdering her employers. Officially no longer a slave since she was brought from Jamaica to England, she is nevertheless "given" by her old slave master to the scientist and his wife. She protests that she loved and would not have killed the wife, but she is unable to remember the actual events of the evening in question.

This is a searing work, masterfully combining elements of Victorian Gothic novels, literary, and historical fiction, and in the end it's impossible to classify because of Frannie Langton's refusal to be classified. The root of so many of the evils in this book is slavery, but she knows that her abolitionist would-be benefactors don't want her real, full story, her real, full, messy self in their slave narratives, either. There's all the laudanum and infidelity and prostitution and violence that one could want in a sensation novel, plus horrific acts in the name of science that can only be based in reality because no mad Victorian scientist in a novel would think of them, and yet Frannie is too proud, too fully human, too real for it to turn melodramatic. Collins has said that this book is in part a response to Jane Eyre, and, although I have several books on my TBR pile in the right genre to make this statement inaccurate over the next few months, it is as of yet a truer descendant of it than any actual Jane Eyre retelling than I have read.

Overall: A

The Confessions of Frannie Langton will be available May 21.