Unapologetic Reviews

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...

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...

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...

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...

I read The Unknown by Riley Sager as my Pick of the Month for August 2026, and I gave it four stars. For me, four stars is already a very good rating. Five stars is reserved for those exceptional books that I know I will keep thinking about and recommending for years. The Unknown did not quite reach that level, but it came close enough that on sites that allow half stars, I would probably give it 4.5. It was an atmospheric, genuinely engaging thriller that kept me guessing, and the final reveals were strong enough that I immediately put Riley Sager on my author watch list. The story takes place on an isolated island in Vermont, called New Avalon, where a film crew has arrived to make a movie about a mystery that occurred there exactly one hundred years earlier. Back then, five women were staying on the island. One morning, when supplies were brought over, all five women had vanished. Their clothes were found hanging from a tree, but the women themselves were nowhere to be found. What ...

I read By the Pricking of My Thumbs for the August theme of the 2026 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, which was Best Duo. I have read some of their earlier adventures and I generally enjoy them as a pair, so I was happy to return to them here. Unfortunately, while I still liked spending time with Tommy and Tuppence, the mystery itself ended up being one of the weaker Agatha Christie stories I have read. This is a later Tommy and Tuppence novel, with the couple now considerably older. The story begins when they visit Tommy’s elderly Aunt Ada at the nursing home where she lives. While there, Tuppence meets another resident, Mrs Lancaster, who asks her a very strange question about whether she has lost a child. It is one of those wonderfully unsettling little moments that immediately suggests something much darker is hiding underneath the perfectly ordinary surroundings. Not long afterwards, Aunt Ada dies, and Tommy and Tuppence discover that Mrs Lancaster had given her a painting befo...