The Books I'm Reading Now
I'm reading Anatomy: A Love Story, a gothic young adult historical fiction mystery by Dana Schwartz set in 1817 Edinburgh; Unlikely Animals, Annie Hartnett's upcoming tragicomedy that touches on saying goodbye and finding new hope; and Nightwatch on the Hinterlands, the first science fiction mystery in a series by K. Eason.
What are you reading and enjoying these days, bookworms?
01 Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz
In Anatomy: A Love Story, Dana Schwartz's young adult gothic mystery, it's 1817 in Edinburgh, and Hazel Sinnett is a young woman desperate to become something women in her time do not: a surgeon.
Jack Currer is a resurrection man, obtaining bodies for medical study in order to get by.
Hazel has made a deal with Dr. Beecham: if she can pass the medical examinations on her own, she can become a surgeon. But when she's kicked out of his lectures because she's a woman, she realizes a chance encounter with Jack could help her tremendously with her studies--and be essential to securing her future career.
But when the two of them team up, they'll discover long-buried (see what I did there?) secrets that go far beyond the medical community and pierce at the heart of Edinburgh society.
02 Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett
Emma Starling is a natural healer and a med-school dropout.
She returns to small-town New Hampshire to care for her father Clive, who is dying. He's also vividly hallucinating small animals and a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, who is advising Clive about how to spend his final days.
Then Emma discovers that her best friend from high school is missing. The local authorities aren't particularly inclined to search for opioid drug addicts like her--in fact, no one seems to believe the young woman is still alive, besides Emma and her dad.
In Hartnett's tragicomedy Unlikely Animals, the author explores friendship and family loyalty, mistakes and imperfections, and the hope that resolution and hope are always possible.
Annie Hartnett is also the author of Rabbit Cake. I received a prepublication digital copy of this book (to be published tomorrow, April 12) courtesy of Random House Publishing Group: Ballantine Books and NetGalley.
03 Nightwatch on the Hinterlands (The Weep #1) by K. Eason
In K. Eason's science fiction mystery, a templar, Iari, and a spy, Gaer, band together to solve the mystery of a murder committed by a riev, a decommissioned battle-mecha robot from the last conflict--a murder that shouldn't have been possible, because rievs don't kill. Yet all evidence points to the impossible.
Searching for the truth leads the unlikely duo to uncover who is controlling the riev--and it's someone with nefarious goals that go much farther and are much more elaborately imagined than the recent killing.
Eason is also the author of the On the Bones of Gods fantasy series. This is the first book in The Weep series.