A MISTAKE (Carl Shuker) - November 27/24

 What is this? This is such a weird book. It’s so oddly written that I couldn’t ever even figure out what was going on or who the characters were. The style is like someone who’s heard of books before but doesn’t have any idea how they work. Very weird and comically abrupt ending, too. 1/2* out of ****

WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (Catherine Newman) - November 24/24

 I basically enjoyed this but it definitely wore out its welcome. It ultimately feels very repetitive and padded out, and I just got to the point where I wanted Edi to just die already. But the main character is pretty vivid, at least. Some of the periphery figures were hard to get a handle on. (Why would you have characters named Jude, Jules, and Jonah???) **1/2 out of ****

THE NIGHT WE LOST HIM (Laura Dave) - November 16/24

 This took a little while to grow on me but I admittedly tore through the second half in a couple of days. Vivid characters and a fairly compelling mystery. *** out of ****

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (Walter Mosley) - November 10/24

 I was enjoying this at the beginning but then it turned into a typical detective thing with an excessively complicated plot and way too many characters. I was basically skimming it towards the end. ** out of ****

CONCLAVE (Robert Harris) - November 2/24

 It took a while for me to get into this, particularly since the first third spends a lot of time on the processes and details involved, but eventually the book simplifies and becomes easier to follow. The inclusion of thriller-adjacent elements in the second half turned it into quite the page turner, too. *** out of ****