hello! it got very hot here ahead of when I was prepared for it (am I ever? nevermind.) so I battened down the hatches (closed the blinds) and spent some time replaying Powerwash Simulator 2 and listening to audiobooks at 1.5x speed. Hence the sheer number of audiobooks in this newsletter. It cooled off again, so I’ve backed away from the edge again. For now.

read: Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh (1937), read by James Saxon. I went into this in much more depth over here, but this golden age Marsh murder is definitely a product of its time (1930s) and place (Aotearoa/New Zealand, which is where Marsh was from). That she was clearly trying to be woke for her time makes it a very interesting reading experience. If you choose to listen as I did, be ready to hear the n word definitely used as a slur (at least it was in the youtube rip i found, linked above).

watch: Taskmaster Series 21 (2026). The new season of Taskmaster has begun and I am having a wonderful time. Last week’s ep had me in stitches the whole way through. Joanna Page the funniest person in the world??

read: Posie Parker Mysteries #1-7 (2014-2017) by LB Hathaway, read by Clare Wille. Back to the depression audiobooks. I started out enjoying this series and by volume 7 felt I was more or less locked in psychological combat with it (which is also when I ran out of Hoopla borrowing credits—probably a blessing) so I don’t know that I’d recommend it per se. I really liked the first few (it’s set in 1920s London and follows Posie Parker, private eye), but found the mysteries got more repetitive and the author increasingly fatphobic as it went.

read: An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister, read by David Berry & Marny Kennedy (2025). This is an enemiesish-to-lovers story in which two academics get married purely so that one of them can take advantage of a partner hire clause in the other’s job offer. An intriguing concept, made more interesting (to me) by the fact that it is set in Australia, so the academic landscape was somewhat unfamiliar. On the whole I enjoyed it, but I thought the relationship between the leads could have been spikier (my usual complaint), and I didn’t enjoy the title-dropping of other current romance books. Took me out of things.

read: Castle Knoll Files #1-3 by Kristen Perrin (2024-2026). I read the first two books, How to Solve Your Own Murder and How to Seal Your Own Fate in audiobook, but the third, How to Cheat Your Own Death, just came out and I borrowed it from the library and devoured it all yesterday. The premise of the books is that in the 1960s Frances Adams received a fortune that foretold her own death, and in the 2020s when she is in fact murdered, her will stipulates that her vast estate goes to whichever of her heirs can solve it. The book switches between Frances’s journals and her great-niece’s point of view, and it works extremely well. The follow-up does the same thing, and it works…less well. Still enjoyable, but the concept feels clunky instead of natural. I am pleased to say that the new book is much steadier on its feet. I enjoyed it immensely.

read: Mockingbird Court by Juneau Black, read by Cassandra Campbell (2025). The newest Shady Hollow installment takes Vera Vixen into her own past in the big city, all without leaving her adopted town. It can be tricky to introduce a past trauma to a well established character who has never thought of it or mentioned it before, but I think this worked in a way that made sense.

read: The White Octopus Hotel by Alexandra Bell, read by Mei Mei MacLeod (2025). I really loved the trappings of this twisty story about a woman in 2015 who can remember a hotel that shuttered permanently in the 1930s and finds herself looking for clues about it. The Art Deco setting, the details of the objects that came from the hotel (which protagonist Eve comes across relating to her job as an auction house appraiser—a treat for me), the eventual interwar time frame, it all worked super well. Unfortunately, I found the characters less compelling, in particular the romance meant to be at the heart of it all was just kind of…blah. Disappointing!

read: Cinder House by Freya Marske, read by Anna Burnett (2025). This is a cinderella retelling in which Ella is a ghost, killed by her stepmother and trapped in service within the house. Which is a very fun premise, but it goes even further, weaving in just enough fantasy magic and politics for the eventual twists on the traditional tale to hit really well.

read: Five Found Dead by Sulari Gentill, read by Katherine Littrell & Eden Gabay (2025). This was a month heavy on Australians, unintentionally but not disappointingly. Five Found Dead is a very drab title for a thriller in which a crime writer and his sister find themselves trapped on the Orient Express in the 2020s by a COVID outbreak on one of the cars while fellow passengers and staff are being murdered around them. It was a stylish and clever story, and I quite enjoyed it.

read: A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna (2025). I loved Mandanna’s first book, so I’ve had this one since it came out last July, just waiting to be in the mood for some fantasy romance. That mood finally hit, and this was perfect. This is set in a different kid of magical Britain than her earlier book, but is still fundamentally about being brown and from England, and how to feel about loving a place that doesn’t necessarily love you back. It’s the kind of “cosy” fiction that really works for me—where bad things do happen and the stakes are real. And best of all, there’s a semi-sentient magical house. My favourite.

read: Nosy Neighbors by Freya Sampson, read by Sarah Lambie (2024). This was categorized by one of my libraries as a murder mystery, and while it is definitely mysterious, there’s no murder. It’s about two women—one in her 70s and one in her 20s—who both live in apartments in an old house, whose lives become entwined when the owner announces he’s demolishing the place and then one of the other tenants is attacked. They are two determined loners with messy pasts who unite to care for the other tenant’s small dog and try to stop the demolishing of the house. I really enjoyed it, even if nobody gets killed.

game: God of War (2018). I picked this up secondhand a few months ago with no real plan to play it, just to have a game in the back pocket. When it suddenly got very hot I looked in my games cabinet and thought that one looks like it might have snow in it. And I was right! Many hours later I, a Spartan hero, have journeyed through several realms of Norse myth. It was a surprise to both of us (I didn’t know anything about Kratos going in). Really enjoyed the game, especially that it did its own thing with myth, rather than staying true to other popular adaptations. I also have the sequel game, but I’m waiting for the heat to come back. There’s even more snow in the next one.

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