The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig (author), Carey Mulligan (narrator)

Penguin Audio, ISBN 9780593340233, September 2020

Nora Seed has been having a life in which it seems every important choice she makes is bad. She lets everyone down, or so it seems the people she cares most about have always told her. Her mother, for whom even the slight asymmetry of her ears is unacceptable. Her father, whose own athletic career died due to an injury. Her brother, when she quit their band for which she was the real songwriter and the best singer. Herself, perhaps, when she quit university, and didn't pursue a career in either philosophy, or glaciology.

Now she's 35, living alone, and is estranged from both her brother and her bestS friend. She's just been let go from a dubiously adequate job at a music shop called String Theory. And then an occasional customer at String Theory knocks on her door to tell her, very kindly, that he's found her cat, dead by the side of the road. She decides to kill herself. Yes, this is just the very start of the book.

Olive, Mabel and Me: Life and Adventures with Two Very Good Dogs, by Andrew Cotter (author, narrator)

Tantor Media, ISBN 9781705293706, March 2021

In 2020, we went from our normal lives, angst-ridden about work, family, politics, various national concerns varying by what country you lived in, and the need to rush everywhere, to angst-ridden over a global pandemic, not at all affectionately known as COVID-19. The only one of the previous concerns that was knocked out was the need to rush everywhere, due to shutdowns or lockdowns (depending on how bad things were in your location) that meant almost no one was going anywhere. If you could do your job from home, great! Time to get familiar with Zoom. If you couldn't, you were either a "frontline" or "essential" worker (which did not mean you were earning above minimum wage, necessarily), or you were unemployed. Andrew Cotter was a Scottish sports commentator, working primarily for the BBC. With sports events canceled, he was sitting at home. With his two dogs, a black Labrador named Olive, and a yellow Labrador named Mabel. What does a man who loves walking with his dogs, and is a sportscaster who suddenly has unlimited time on his hands, do with his time, and his dogs, and his GoPro camera?

Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean's Greatest Predator, by Jason M. Colby (author), Paul Heitsch (narrator)

Highbridge Audio, ISBN 9781684415533, January 2019

Orcas are the most popular, profitable, and of course, controversial, animals on display in history. The controversy stems largely from the fact that captivity is objectively horrible for orcas. They're large, intelligent, and highly social. They live in large, matrilineal family groups, who live near other, related family groups whom they socially interact with. There's no way we can provide a truly appropriate habitat for orcas in captivity. When captured, they lose their entire families, their entire social group, they lose the auditory stimulation that's a normal part of their world, they're forced to change their diets to what we can feed them, and they are confined to what are rceally unbearably small spaces for orcas. The more people learn about this, the more people want no more orcas in captivity.

Barrio Girls, by Charles de Lint

Triskell Press, May 2019

Ruby and Vida are barrio girls, cousins and best friends. As children, they were obsessed with fairies. As teenagers, they're obsessed with vampires, and have crushes on the stars of a hit vampire movie, based on a set of books they also love.

They go out one night to the arroyo, looking for bits of magic, most especially a "magic pearlstone" that will help them be like the heroes of their favorite movie and books. What they find instead is a witch, a tlahulpuchi, a vampire witch. And when the witch starts to get alarming, the man following them, Pepé, one of the members of their Uncle Crusher's gang, steps forward to protect them. The witch tosses a spell, and in moments Pepé is dead.

Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night, by Charles de Lint

Triskell Press, ISBN 9780920623466, January 2015 (original publication in Worlds of Fantasy and Horror #2, Fall 1994)

Sophie Etoile, is an artist and a dreamer whose dreams take her into the the otherworlds--or one particular otherworld, Mabon, where among other charms is found the bookstore run by Mr. Truepenny, and where she meets her good friend, Jeck Crow. Or at least, that's where her dreams usually take her.

One night, she hears flute music, and steps out the back door of the bookstore, expecting to find herself in the alley behind the store. Instead, she's in the desert of the American southwest--and the bookstore, and the door back into it, are gone.

What, or rather who, she meets here are spirits of the southwestern desert, except for Nokomis, also called Grandmother, a spirit of the Kickaha tribe that lives much further east, in the area of the city of Newford, where Sophie lives. Nokomis tells her she can't get out of this dreamworld until she finds the reason that she's here, and than only Coyote or Kokopelli, another spirit who plays the medicine flute, can help her.

Hammers on Bone (Persons Non Grata #1), by Cassandra Khaw

Tor.com, ISBN 9780765392701, October 2016

As all faithful readers of this blog know, I don't read horror.

Except when I do.

This is Tor's free download for September, and it features a P.I., and a kid who wants his stepdad killed. His stepdad is an abusive monster...no, literally, a monster.

Which is what makes John Persons, P.I., right for the job. He's a P.I. right out of the noir era, and that's because he's a monster, too, and the intelligence keeping the body alive and working is way older than anything as recent as the noir era.

So, reluctantly, Persons agrees to take the case, with the promise of being paid with the contents of the boy's piggy bank.

Judge Dee and the Three Deaths of Count Werdenfels: A Tor.com Original (Judge Dee), by Lavie Tidhar

Tor Books, February 2021

This isn't Judge Dee, the 7th century Tang dynasty Chinese magistrate and statesman. This is another Judge Dee, a fictional vampire judge, wandering medieval Europe, enforcing the law as vampires see it--which is mostly making sure vampires don't do things that attract too much human attention. Anything that would cause humans to become aware and alarmed enough to endanger vampire-kind. It's not about protecting humans; it's about protecting vampires from humans.

Judge Dee is accompanied by a young man named Jonathan, a human whom he rescued from underneath a pile of dead bodies for entirely practical, even selfish, reasons. He needed directions. Then he decided that Jonathan was useful, and kept him. Mostly he takes good care of Jonathan, but sometimes he forgets that his human servant needs food, and gets cold.

We Interrupt This Broadcast (Lady Astronaut Universe #0.5), by Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal, February 2014, https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/45th-birthday-short-story-party-favour/  (original publication in The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, ed. by John Joseph Adams, 2013)

This story is set in the Lady Astronaut series, shortly before the start of The Calculating Stars. Do not read it before you read the book. Seriously. Do not. Read it after. 

Unfamiliar Magic (The Familiar Cafe), by Bonnie Elizabeth

My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing, March 2021

Jade Owlens runs a cat café in Waverton, Kentucky. Or rather, she runs a familiar café. Jade is a witch, and Waverton is a witch town. There's a specialty library for witches, breeders of a wide variety of familiar animals, not just cats but dogs, birds, horses, sheep, goats--any familiar a witch might find best suits them. There's also a shelter, and Jade's café, taking in familiars who have lost their witches, and are looking to be adopted by a new witch.

Jade's café only handles cats, making it look quite normal for "ordinaries" who don't know that much of the town, including the police force, is populated by witches. One fine Tuesday morning, Jade and two friends--Trinity, the senior library assistant at the specialty library, and Natalie, the manager of the local hotel--are having their weekly "long break," at the café where they have good coffee and good pastries, and the presence of the cat familiars. One of the local police officers comes in, but before he can get his coffee, he gets a call, and leaves. The Jade's own familiar, Mason, howls loudly in distress, and instead of wondering what's going on with the cop, Jade is soothing her cat and asking him what upset him. Mason has seen a spirit, a very distressed spirit, probably murder victim. Mason helped the spirit transition. He doesn't know who it was, but it felt familiar. Maybe someone he'd met.

Lending a Paw (Bookmobile Cat Mystery #1), by Laurie Cass (author), Erin Bennett (narrator)

Tantor Audio, December 2017 (original publication, December 2013)

Minnie Hamilton has been working in the job of her dreams, Assistant Library Director in the small resort town of Chilson, Michigan. Her latest proud achievement, in the face of her boss's cost-cutting preferences, is to get a bookmobile to service the areas no longer served by the now-closed branch libraries. She achieved this by getting a donation from uber-rich Stan Laraby, to purchase the bookmobile and fund the first year's operations. Stan has a reputation as a miser who gives money to no one, but he really values libraries (and, we later learn, other valuable public services), and not only provides the money, but works with her to plan the startup of services. And then, on her first day driving the vehicle, at her last stop on that day's route, she finds a dead body--Stan's. He's been shot.