Wulf's Book Reviews

Wicked Women by Angela Marsons My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Wicked Women” is one of those rare long-running-series instalments that makes you feel, within a handful of pages, that you have come home. As the twenty-third novel in the Detective Kim Stone series , it has every right to coast on familiar beats, but it does the opposite. Angela Marsons drops you straight back into Kim Stone’s world with that familiar, brisk authority - sharp observation, sharper dialogue, and a case that refuses to sit still. The premise flirts with witchcraft, but the book’s real trick is how elegantly it keeps the supernatural at arm’s length: present as culture, performance, fear, and suggestion, yet never allowed to bulldoze the procedural logic. Like Kim, I do not believe in witches, and I loved how the novel leans into that scepticism while staying delightfully ambiguous. » ‘But no one really believes in them,’ Kim stated. « That line sets the tone: we are here for evidence, motives, and human choices, ...

The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan My rating: 4 of 5 stars Dervla McTiernan’s "The Good Turn" is, for me, the point where the Cormac Reilly series stops being “a case” and becomes properly his (and, to a lesser degree, Peter’s) story. Book three feels like the culmination of the internal conflicts he’s been dragging around since “The Ruin”: loyalty versus integrity, ambition versus decency, and the nagging sense that the job will always ask for more than it gives back. It’s a page-turner in the straightforward, genre-satisfying way you want from contemporary crime fiction. What makes “The Good Turn” stand out, though, is that the case is almost the excuse. The real investigation is internal: what Cormac will tolerate, what he’ll sacrifice, and what it costs to keep choosing the “good” option when everyone around you has a spreadsheet of compromises. » ”I don’t think you would, Emma, and I wouldn’t blame you because the truth is I wouldn’t be happy. That isn’t what I want.” ...

To Sir Phillip, With Love by Julia Quinn My rating: 1 of 5 stars When the “Happily Ever After” Feels Like a Moral Hangover This one was supposed to clear the air. Well, it succeeded in making it smell worse. Every single character, and every major aspect of this novel, left me with an uneasy feeling. Eloise Bridgerton is confused, snobby, garrulous, and somehow deeply ambiguous. She runs away from what exactly? Nobody forces her into marriage but herself. After a year of merely exchanging letters, she decides to marry a stranger and be a good, obedient wife. And yet, she also strains toward what might, at the time, have passed for an “independent spinster”. Phillip, meanwhile, basks in his self-sacrificing suffering-husband and widower roles while being emotionally estranged from his two eight-year-old children. The children are neglected, abused, and basically thoroughly traumatised, which Eloise unconvincingly tries to “love away”. Their mother, Phillip’s late wife, looms over the ...

The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan My rating: 5 of 5 stars I flew through “The Scholar”, and it felt like McTiernan sharpened everything that already worked in " The Ruin ", the pacing, the mounting pressure, and the uneasy sense that every answer creates a worse question. Cormac Reilly is pulled into the death of a young woman linked to Galway University and a pharmaceutical dynasty with money, influence, and far too many reasons to want the truth managed. The investigation is the kind I love, official interest, media heat, colleagues second-guessing every move, and the creeping suspicion that the system is designed to protect itself first. What really sells the suspense is how personal it becomes. Cormac’s relationship with Emma Sweeney adds an edge of emotional risk to every decision, and the novel keeps nudging you into uncomfortable questions about bias, loyalty, and what “objectivity” looks like when the stakes are human. The atmosphere is crisp and chilly, even when the...

Deep End by Ali Hazelwood My rating: 4 of 5 stars Ali Hazelwood's " Deep End " had me hooked early: a Stanford platform diver, Scarlett, fighting her way back from an injury, and an Olympic-level swim captain, Lukas, whose devotion to discipline borders on devotional. When an unguarded secret pushes them into an arrangement, Hazelwood lets competence, vulnerability, and desire braid together until the romance feels truly earned. One of the novel’s most important threads is how it treats desire as something to name and negotiate. Lukas’ dominant impulses and Scarlett’s submissive curiosity are explored through explicit communication, boundaries, check-ins, and consent that stays present on the page. Their sexual exploration becomes its own kind of intimacy, a way of learning each other, and of choosing each other. I also greatly enjoyed the tenderness around recovery. Scarlett’s trauma is not a hurdle to clear so the plot can sprint on, it’s something the book sits with...

Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is a quick, spicy, unapologetically nerdy enemies-to-lovers novella, and it works because it keeps the conflict personal, specific, and relentlessly in the same room. » I am as certain of their love as I am of the binary code. « Two rival game studios get pushed into a forced collaboration, and then into a December “team retreat” at a cabin that feels like corporate captivity with snow outside and tension indoors. The heroine is a designer who cares about characters and story; the hero is all action-adventure polish, and she keeps trying to pretend their history is just professional rivalry, when it plainly isn’t. The best part is the slow re-framing of him: the silence that reads as disdain at first, then as restraint, then as something like carefulness. The chemistry is sharp, the humour doesn’t overstay its welcome, and when the emotional turn happens, it feels earned rather than dumped in at the end. My one actual “note t...