RogerBW's Blog

A Dangerous Collaboration, Deanna Raybourn 21 May 2025

2019 historical thriller, fourth of its series. Veronica Speedwell is invited to a castle on a Cornish island: the lord's wife vanished on her wedding day, the brother's widow is making a living as a medium, and altogether there are a lot of puzzles to be untangled.

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Mother of Souls, Heather Rose Jones 20 May 2025

2016 Ruritanian fantasy-romance, third of its series. Luzie Valorin, sill mourning her late husband, ekes out a living by teaching music and letting out rooms in the family house; Serafina Talarico came to Roteken to study magic, but can't break through to the talent for it. And something has gone awry up in the mountains, and the annual flood is not coming…

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Notes on Mongoose's Bayern 5: Messenger 19 May 2025

This is part of an ongoing series about the preparations I've made to run Mongoose's revised edition of the Bayern campaign for 2300AD. Spoilers for Interlude 3.

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The Weekly Challenge 321: Just an Average Backspace 18 May 2025

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list processing and string assembly. (Note that this ends today.)

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For Our Sins, James Oswald 17 May 2025

2024 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, thirteenth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. An old man has a heart attack in an abandoned church; barely worth the police's time. But he turns out to have been a retired criminal, and then one of his old friends dies in the same way…

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Time Is Hard (Windows NT4 version) 16 May 2025 - 1 comment

It is a programming truism that dealing with time is hard; "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time" comes back round every so often, and I've certainly made my share of errors. But there was one Windows bug that doesn't seem to have been widely discussed, and I observed in person.

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Dead Midnight, Marcia Muller 15 May 2025

2002 mystery, twenty-first in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon looks into the suicide of an old friend's godson, who was working at a high-pressure internet lifestyle magazine.

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Murder By Memory, Olivia Waite 14 May 2025

2025 science fiction mystery novella. Dorothy Gentleman, ship's detective aboard a starship on a thousand-year voyage, suddenly finds herself incarnated in the body of a stranger, as a result of an emergency backup program she wasn't even aware of. Someone aboard the ship has just been murdered, and Dorothy's main recorded personality has been erased. So now what?

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They Live (1988) 13 May 2025

1988 horror/SF/action, dir. John Carpenter, Roddy Piper, Keith David: IMDb / allmovie. It's all a lie!

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Paladin's Strength, T Kingfisher 12 May 2025

2021 romantic fantasy. Clara's on her own in tribal lands, trying to rescue her sisters from the pillaged convent; Istvhan was the paladin of a god now dead. They have goals in common, but neither of them is telling the other everything.

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The Weekly Challenge 320: The Count Makes the Difference 11 May 2025

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various list processing. (Note that this ends today.)

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Games At Home, May 2025 10 May 2025

An extended meeting of the local game group on a bank holiday afternoon.

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The Reluctant Widow, Georgette Heyer 09 May 2025

1946 Regency romance. Elinor Rochdale is travelling to take up a post as a governess, only to find herself made a strange offer: if she will marry someone's reprobate cousin, she need never see him again, but she will not lose by it. She declines, of course, but soon finds that she has no choice.

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Wolvercote Games, May 2025 08 May 2025

The Oxford Meeples had another quarterly games day, and I had a great time again.

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Dead of Night, Annabel Chase 07 May 2025

2023 paranormal fantasy, second of a nine-book series. Lorelei Clay is trying to keep her head down, but it's a small town and a lot of people seem to need help.

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Map Colouring Strategies 06 May 2025

It has been established that no more than four colours are necessary to colour regions of a map with no adjacent regions the same colour. But hoe does one actually go about doing this?

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Mighty Good Road, Melissa Scott 05 May 2025 - 1 comment

1990 sf. There are FTL starships, but most travel and freight goes via the instant-transit Cross-Systems Railroad, at least as far as the nearest station to where you need to go. Gwynne Heikki is a salvage operator, but the job turns bad…

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The Weekly Challenge 319: Minimum Words Count Even If They Are Common 04 May 2025 - 2 comments

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved REPLACEME_DESC. (Note that this ends today.)

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The Cruellest Month, Hazel Holt 03 May 2025

1991 mystery. Sheila Malory has returned to Oxford to do some research at the Bodleian. Her godson, working there, found the victim of a shelf collapse, who turns out to have been a thoroughly bad thing and probably a blackmailer. But the police were quite happy to say it was an accident…

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The One That Got Away, J D Kirk 02 May 2025

20 police-adjacent mystery, tartan noir, first in the Heather Filson series. Heather was a hard charger in the police, but messed up. Now she's just marking time with one-night stands and heavy drinking. But she still tries to be a good cop.

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On Vicious Worlds, Bethany Jacobs 01 May 2025

2024 SF, second of a planned trilogy. The big events of the last book are bringing down the repressive government! Guess what comes next… Spoilers for These Burning Stars.

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