I’ve been reading a lot this year. This isn’t a complete list by any means, just ones I want to share and/or opine upon.

Funny Ladies

I just finished Leslie Gray Streeter‘s Family & Other Calamities, which is charming and hilarious (and touching, too). A recently-widowed journalist returns to her hometown (Baltimore) to find that her ex-friend who stole her big story decades ago is about to turn it into a movie. Heroine and most other characters are Black, which means a fresh perspective for me.

‘Cuz It’s a Thriller

OK, so are thrillers the same thing as crime novels, or do they just seriously overlap?

I’m not sure how I discovered Joseph Flynn‘s John Tall Wolf series, but somewhere along the line I acquired Tall Man in Ray-Bans and liked it so much I’m now on the third book. Standard detective series, but the protagonist is Native American.

I was recently reminded of the existence of SJ Rozan, whose Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series is fantastic. I think she just stopped publishing for a while and dropped off my radar. Oddly enough, many if not all of her books are not available as ebooks, so I’m reading actual books for a change, picking up where I left off.

I also continue my way through the Reacher books, in publication order. I know the quality suffers down the line, but mostly they’re amazing.

Be Gay, Solve Crimes

Amy Lane‘s “Fish” series, thrillers with gay protagonists, is tremendously entertaining. The latest, Devil and the Deep Blue Fish, dropped recently and I tore through it. It’s pretty great. A “Moms for Liberty” type group is kidnapping kids for nefarious purposes and our heroes chase ’em down.

KJ Charles, possibly my favorite M/M author, recently released Copper Script, a crime novel set in England post-WWI. Like all her stuff, it’s excellent.

Elle Keaton has started a new series with The Last Grift, which is an entertaining thriller, a slow burn romance, and ties into her Piedras Island universe, which really makes me want to take a trip to Seattle. Best part: grumpy park ranger grows to think of new-arrival bad boy as “Charming Fucker” and refers to him as that in his head, as if that were his name.

I really enjoyed all three (so far) books in Alex Henry’s Detective Leon Peterson series. He’s a gay detective, living and working under the Heathrow flight paths in London, and there’s a smidge of luv that happens, but it’s mostly about the mystery. The characters are great. And his missing dad (plot point) has my father’s name, which made me smile every time I read it. (Happy Father’s Day, Dad!)

Boys in Luv

I really got into at least the first three of Joanna Chambers‘s Enlightenment series. Set in 1820’s England and Scotland, they track the developing relationship between closeted and somewhat self-loathing lawyer David Lauriston and a quite-a-bit-less-inhibited Lord Murdo Balfour (great name, right?). Very satisfying. The fourth book, about a different couple, is a clunker, but the fifth one (also different characters, although they’re all in the same circle) is pretty good.

N.R. Walker‘s Switched was fascinating, although the romance part is the least interesting part of the book. Our hero, the child of a rich couple with whom he has a strained relationship (even though he works for his dad and likes his job), discovers he was switched at birth with another baby. In meeting his birth family and hashing that all out, he ends up developing a much better relationship with the parents who raised him.

I also really enjoyed Kaje Harper’s Cowboy Dreams and Missing Chord.

Boys and Girls in Luv

Lucy Score‘s latest, Story of My Life, is just as charming and hilarious as all her other stuff.

Score’s sometime collaborator, Claire Kingsley, has a fun quartet of romances, The Dirty Martini Running Club, that was absolutely worth the trip.

I also recently discovered Avery Maxwell. I really enjoyed the Westbrooks series. Well, the first four, anyway, looks like it keeps going.

Oo, I finally read the first couple of Bridgerton books. A lot of fun.

Social Commentary

I recently finished journalist Jonathan Capehart’s memoir, Yet Here I Am. In it, he recommended three books on racism, White Fragility, White Rage and Dying of Whiteness. So I’m working my way through those. Not very cheery, but important.

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Yeah, that’s plenty for now. I’ve also been reading the Discworld “witches” books, having finished all the Sam Vimes ones. I just finished Lords and Ladies.