octavia_cade's reviews
2466 reviews

This started really well, with a road trip to an interesting destination - the Slabs, near Salton Sea in California. The end, however, was a shocker, and not in a good way. I've said in reviews for previous books in this series that one of the reasons I like Kinsey is that she's practical, with a commonsense approach to her own safety - but here, her absolutely moronic decision-making almost gets her killed, and honestly: she would have deserved it. If you find a body in someone's back shed, with suspicions that there are more, you call the police instead of poking around for half an hour and putting yourself in a position where you're about to confront a killer and no one knows where you are. Admittedly, the killer's an ancient old man and can easily be defended against, but then there's the hitman after her and she blows that off too.

My only consolation is that she had a head injury early in the book, and this explains her subsequent behaviour. I'd say nice things about the violently practical Rochelle, except her inability to be that violently practical earlier on gets her brother killed, so you know what, this one's a dead loss. Use your brain, Kinsey. You're supposed to have one. 

I've read and reviewed these books separately, so this is basically just for my own records. Postmortem got four stars from me and Body of Evidence three, so the average comes to three and a half.

When I first read these books, back as a teenager, they were the first mysteries I'd read (and I hadn't read many) that focused on forensics. The first book made a real impression with all the science, which is why I rated it so highly, but it seemed as if there was substantially less in the second book, which didn't grab me as much. I think, too, that part of the difference is not only the amount of science present, but what type it is. Biology will always be more interesting to me than the other scientific disciplines, and that most of what forensics there was in the second book had to do with different types of nylon rope... well, I was less than riveted. Still, an interesting series, and I'm coming back to it now so am excited to get past the first few books, which is where I stopped last time. 

It's funny how your reaction to books changes over time. I remember reading the first few books in this series when I was a teenager, and Lucy was the most interesting character for me then. Now she's a pain in the arse that irritates me with her sulky, self-destructive drama every time she's on-page. I'm sorry to say that in The Body Farm she's absolutely taking after her aunt, whose boring romance with the married Benton kicks off a book-long tantrum from Marino that had me rolling my eyes at all of them. Scarpetta's constant looking-down at her (admittedly awful) sister because of that sister's poor behaviour with men is just flat-out hypocritical at this point.

Please just give me the crimes and the science... and the cooking. If Scarpetta has to work through her issues outside of the morgue, I'd rather read about her delicious food than this trainwreck of relationships. The crimes, here, were the most interesting thing: the slow unveiling of the antagonist's dreadful behaviour was genuinely disturbing. 

Oh, this is outstanding. I knew I'd like it from the first chapter, which is narrated by a swamp - my wetland-loving self could not have had a happier opening. Compelling hook, gorgeous language, but then came the relationships between three sets of neighbours, and the characterisation here is just incredible.

Sera and her family are climate refugees recently settled in New Zealand and struggling to adapt both to a new country and the loss of the depressing and terrifying old. Sera forms a close bond with Keri, a single mother trying to raise her kids with limited resources - the two women are both marginalised in a number of different ways, including race and poverty - and Keri's teenage daughter has an uncanny connection to the swamp that once underlay the land they're all living on. As appealing as the two women are, however, the third house in this little community houses Janet and her red-pill, white-supremacist, attempted-terrorist son Conor. It's Conor who is particularly well-drawn, in an absolutely noxious way: his spiral into right-wing extremism is chillingly portrayed.

In the end, however, water overcomes all. I won't say how, as I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, but the ending is extremely satisfying, and connection, resilience, and basic human decency win out. This is a confronting but ultimately very hopeful book, and I'm so glad to have read it. 

I've been meaning to read this book for a while, as I've heard such good things about it! And it's a likeable read. I particularly enjoyed all the cultural elements - I know very little about Latinx culture, and everything around the Día de Muertos here was fascinating. Part of that, I think was the gorgeous imagery: everything to do with marigolds, especially (one of my favourite flowers!). Cemetery Boys is filled with really beautiful images, and I think that was my favourite part about it.

I was less convinced by the romance. This has nothing to do with the protagonist, Yadriel, who I found both sympathetic and convincing. I just couldn't get into Julian... people who are this frenetic in real life exhaust and irritate me, and apparently it's no different in fiction. He's very clearly a decent person, but still: exhausting. I understand that there's a sequel to this, which I will certainly read, and maybe now that the two boys are together they can chill the fuck out a little. Unless there's another supernatural jaguar emerging from a sacrificial pool, because that deserves every bit of screaming that it gets. 

This was a fantastic read! I have to admit that the prose is fairly workmanlike, but the scientific intellect behind it is compelling and enormously influential. Kalema-Zikusoka, who is Uganda's first wildlife vet, began her career working with the gorillas of that country. It soon became plain to her, however, that disease could cross over from human to gorilla and back, and so - to be an effective environmentalist - she had to find a way to merge conservation and public health. By the end of the book, she's spent some thirty years with this as her focus, and it is the best illustration I've ever read about the importance of breaking down barriers between conservation and other economic and social practices.

The Ugandan gorillas mean tourist dollars, and so there's an economic incentive to protecting those animals - which means that issues of infection, agriculture, birth control, education, and business come into play as supporting pillars in conservation. It's clear, too, that although gorillas are Kalema-Zikusoka's primary conservation focus, that the interconnection of human and nonhuman that she explores here can be applied to other species. The brief example of the hippos dropping dead after contracting anthrax, for example, was shocking. 

This is going on my list of books to buy (as this one has to be returned to the library today). What an excellent argument for conservation, and what a fantastic scientist Kalema-Zikusoka is! 

Again, I've read and reviewed all the novels collected here separately, so this is for my own records. All the books got three stars from me, and hence the collection does as well.

I'm reading my way through this series at a very desultory rate - each volume is self-contained, so I don't need to remember much of what went on in a previous book, which is honestly quite nice. Don't get me wrong: I like the more interconnected series as well, but sometimes you just want to pick up something with characters you've read before and not have to think too deeply about what you're reading.

Of the six Kinsey books I've read so far, I think D Is for Deadbeat is the best. I probably won't read any of these again, but if I did it would be that one. It's pretty grim, but it's got a very affecting ending. 

I read and reviewed each of these separately, so this is just for my own records. I gave both books three stars, so the average isn't hard to calculate.

I've commented before, on this series, that it moves from mystery to mystery-thriller, depending on the volume. Both these books fall towards the latter end of the spectrum, and E Is for Evidence in particular really leans into the melodrama. I tend to prefer the Kinsey books that are straight mystery, but even so it's not a strong preference: I've given them all three stars, I think, no matter their position within genre, so it clearly doesn't make that much of a difference. They're popcorn reads and if I don't expect much from them, they're still enjoyable. I like the protagonist, so I'll keep reading. 

I liked this, but I do think it fell apart a little towards the end. While some of these Millhone books are straight mysteries, some add thriller elements in and this is one of those, except it doesn't quite hold together for me in that respect. I think Kinsey made it harder for herself than she needed to, and it might not have gone into thriller territory if she'd kept her head and not run haring off. I began to wonder if she was a little - not addled, but still affected by - the explosions of the last book. She felt jumpy, which is fair enough under the circumstances, but only if the story is aware of her jumpiness. It's one thing to present a character as making hasty decisions as a result of lingering trauma, and it's another to have the trauma and the hasty decisions and have the story not make the connection, averring that this is business as usual.

What I tend to like best about this protagonist is her sensible practicality, so I hope she goes home, gets hold of herself, and comes back in the next book a bit less jittery. 

I have to admit, the first half of the blurb made me think this would be a little more climate focused than it was - it speaks of melting permafrost and the secrets exposed thereby. It is hardly Mettner's fault that my mind immediately turned to mammoth carcasses and viruses!

Instead, what's unearthed is the secrets that exist in the relationship line of things - friends, lovers, politics - and the resulting poems are full of feminism and humour. I really enjoyed it. This is Mettner's second book, I understand, and I want to go and find the first one now because the poems here are so relatable that it's easy to miss how polished they are. It's a lot more difficult than it seems to produce poems that are both incisive and approachable, and I wasn't more than a few pages in before I'd entirely forgiven the lack of mammoth.

This is going on my get-a-copy-of-your-own list, given that this one has to be returned to the library. It was a pleasure to read.