I’ve had a lot of real life stuff going on with limited time to read but I do have a couple of 2024 books to recommend.
I think I may have mentioned that I liked Bride by Ali Hazelwood a lot. It was a sweet and cute vamp/were MOC story. I liked both characters but especially the heroine. The suspense plot was good too.
More recently I read The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. I had sworn I wasn’t going to read anymore of his books after the second book in the Foundryside trilogy took such an unexpected left turn, but my husband talked me into reading The Tainted Cup together and it turns out I loved it. It’s the first book in a new series, a Sherlock/Watson type mystery set in a fantasy world, and the romance is only a small (very small) thread. I am not a huge mystery fan but I loved this book
The main character / narrator, Din, is something of a mystery himself early on, and it took me a little while to figure him out but once I did, I loved him. He is honorable yet willing to break the rules, and also a “still waters run deep” character type, which is one of my favorites. He is also very humble, for example we learn he’s tall, dark and handsome but only very gradually and he says nothing whatsoever about his appearance himself. He has difficulty reading, a kind of dyslexia, but he’s very bright. Like many people in this world, he chose to be altered to get some magical (sort of, because the magic in this world resembles technology) abilities, in his case to be able to have perfect recall. But it came with some unexpected consequences.
Ana, Din’s superior, is very smart, very eccentric, and on the autism spectrum or something very like it. She is one of those characters who always knows more than anyone around her. There’s a great scene near the end where she reveals something about Din and her to Din that I just loved. That said Ana wore on me sometimes.
The worldbuilding was amazingly inventive and imaginative, and half the pleasure of reading this book. A lot of it was based on botany and biology with abilities grafted onto humans, wallpaper made from ferns, and giant mushrooms engineered to work as a heating/cooling system in a house. It’s hard to do justice to.
One caution: the murders are kind of freaky.
Other than that, nothing stands out except that I reread Lisa Kleypas’s book Devil’s Daughter for the sixth time and it still held up. I love that book and hope she returns to writing.
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