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The Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig (The Stonewater Kingdom, #2) * * * *

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I read The Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig as my September 2026 Pick of the Month. I chose it because it is the second and final book in the Stonewater Kingdom duology, following The Knight and the Moth , which I read last year. I gave that first book three stars. It was fine, but I found Sybil frustrating, particularly because so much of the story revolved around a quest whose eventual destination seemed obvious to me long before it became obvious to her. She kept insisting on things that I was already fairly certain were wrong, and after a while, watching her slowly catch up became more irritating than suspenseful. So I went into The Knave and the Moon with some trepidation. I wanted to know how the story ended, but I was not particularly confident that I was going to enjoy getting there. Surprisingly, I liked this one considerably more. I gave it four stars. It is not quite in my five star, I am going to think about this forever and recommend it to everybody category, but it d...
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Endless Night by Agatha Christie * * * *

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I read Endless Night by Agatha Christie as part of the Read Christie 2026 challenge. The overall theme of this year's challenge is “Biggest, Best and Beloved,” and September's theme was “Best According to Agatha.” Endless Night was the official choice because Christie herself named it as her own favourite at the time when she was asked about her favourite books. She also wrote it incredibly quickly, finishing the novel in only six weeks rather than the three or four months she usually spent writing a book. I gave it four stars. This is a very interesting Christie novel because it does not initially feel much like a mystery at all. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which I also read for this challenge earlier this year. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd comes from much earlier in Christie's career, while Endless Night was published in 1967, but both play with perspective and with what we assume about a story simply because of the person telli...
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The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Thursday Murder Club, #1) * * *

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I read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge. This was for prompt #20, "a book with a character who does Pilates or Lagree". One of the main characters does Pilates. We never actually see him doing it, but he mentions it a couple of times, so I’m counting it. The Thursday Murder Club is the first book in the Thursday Murder Club series, and it was also Osman’s debut novel. Before turning to fiction, he was primarily known for his work in television. I really wanted to love this book. It is incredibly popular, the premise sounded exactly like the sort of thing I should enjoy, and I generally like mysteries with unusual amateur detectives. Sadly, I ended up giving it three stars. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, and I wouldn’t call it a bad book at all. It was perfectly serviceable. I just didn’t find it particularly compelling, and for a murder mystery, I found it far too slow. The story takes place at Cooper’s C...
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A Cup of Flour, A Pinch of Death by Valerie Burns (Baker Street Mystery #3) * * * *

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I read A Cup of Flour, A Pinch of Death by Valerie Burns for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #49, "a book that mentions your zodiac sign". I’m a Dog in the Chinese zodiac, and this book has a very large and very memorable dog, so I’m counting it. A Cup of Flour, A Pinch of Death is the third book in the Baker Street Mystery series, and I gave it four stars. This book also brings the larger mystery that has been developing since the first book to a conclusion, which I found very satisfying. There is a fourth book in the series, so I’m curious about where the story goes from here now that this particular arc has been wrapped up. We are back in New Bison, Michigan, with Maddy Montgomery, who has now settled much more comfortably into the life she unexpectedly inherited along with Baby Cakes bakery and Baby, her enormous English mastiff. Most of the characters from the previous books return, along with a few new ones, and we also get more of Maddy’s father in thi...
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The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Ana and Din Mysteries, #1) * * * * *

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I read The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge. This was for prompt #2, "A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and a woman". The Tainted Cup is the first book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, now also called the Ana and Din Mysteries, and I gave it five stars. I actually hesitated between four and five for a while because I could not quite decide how much I had enjoyed it. In the end, though, I realised that I had enjoyed it a lot. The mystery kept me interested, the characters worked for me, and most importantly, I was completely fascinated by the world Bennett created. The easiest way to describe The Tainted Cup is Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy world built around biological engineering. The story takes place in the Empire of Khanum, which is protected from the sea by enormous walls. Every wet season, gigantic creatures called leviathans emerge from the ocean and approach these walls, and the Empire has bui...
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Medalist by Tsurumaikada * * * *

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I read the Medalist by Tsurumaikada for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #17, “A book about your favorite event in the Winter Olympics.” I am not really a huge sports fan, but I do sometimes enjoy watching figure skating, so that was the obvious event for me. The problem was finding a book about figure skating that was not primarily a romance. There really are not that many. Then I happened upon Medalist, a manga that is actually about the skating itself, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. Medalist follows eleven year old Inori Yuitsuka, who desperately wants to become a figure skater. There are two fairly major problems with this. The first is that her older sister used to skate and eventually gave it up, so their mother does not want Inori to go through the same thing. From her perspective, skating took up a huge part of her older daughter's childhood without ultimately leading anywhere, and she does not want to watch that happen again. The sec...
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A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal * * *

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I read A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #13, "A book featuring a character with a hidden past". I ended up giving this one three stars, and I think “ambivalent” is probably the best word for how I feel about it. I enjoyed reading it, I liked the world, and I was interested in what was happening. But despite the fact that it contains vampires, and I absolutely love vampires, I was never particularly excited about it. A Tempest of Tea takes place in a fantasy world that has very obvious parallels to cultures and countries in our own. Our main character, Arthie Casimir, originally comes from Ceylan, which is based on Sri Lanka, while she now lives in the city of White Roaring in Ettenia. Ettenia has much more of an English feel to it, complete with its own history of colonialism. Arthie is young, ambitious, and already a fairly successful criminal. She runs Spindrift, a respectable tearoom during the day that becomes an ille...
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