All right, I’m way behind, and not going to catch up in one shot. But still, let’s do a bit more of a roundup here.

First up, a couple of recent books from T. Kingfisher, who you will remember from fairytale-style stories like Nettle and Bone and horror like The Twisted Ones. Thornhedge is in that fairytale mode; it’s her retelling of Sleeping Beauty. This is a fairytale that has inspired a number of retellings, and, well, this is one of them. It’s fine. It does what it sets out to do, recasting what the story is actually about, but it’s not more than fine. More interesting was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which lies at the intersection of fairy tale and horror — it’s apparently a retelling of “The Goose Girl,” but this was lost on me as I’d never read the original. It’s about a girl with a truly monstrous mother who goes a-courting, and what transpires after.

Next, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Velvet Was the Night isn’t genre at all (which surprised me; I was sort of waiting for some fantastic element to come into it, and it never did). It’s a story set in Mexico in the ’70s, about a couple of losers who get swept up into political intrigue. One part mystery, one part political thriller, one part romance. It’s good, and I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about it.

Finally, we have Daniel Davies’ Lying For Money and The Unaccountability Machine. Davies was a fun-to-read blogger, back when bloggers were a thing, and his voice comes through well in these books.

Lying for Money is about financial fraud, and tells the stories of a handful of famous frauds while using them to illuminate the inner workings of the financial world. As you’d imagine, these stories are lots of fun; and I also came away from the book knowing more about how the world works. The book is both entertaining and informative, just uncomplicatedly great.

The Unaccountability Machine is… well, more complicated. Basically, Davies tees up a really great airport book, talking about how the modern world is often designed so that nobody is actually responsible for making unpopular/evil/bad decisions, they just… happen. He talks through some entertaining examples, and introduces the idea of the “accountability sink,” which is where all the responsibility disappears. He could have stopped here, slapped some righteous indignation on it and had a banger that everyone would love. But instead he pulls the rug out, and starts trying to explain why this isn’t just evil billionaires rigging the system. And this is where the book takes a hard right turn into cybernetics (the management theory, not robot men) and system control theory, and… well, I admire the effort, but it’s entirely possible that I’m too stupid to understand this part of the book. It’s safe to say that it’s very dense, a little rambly, and I’m not sure it ever quite comes together as tightly as I’d’ve liked. I admire Davies for not taking the cheap and easy way out, but the resulting book is hard to unreservedly recommend broadly.