It’s a clever queer YA whodunnit, which juxtaposes a murder that occurs in the 1930’s with a crime committed in the same place in the present day. Marlowe Wexler accidentally burns down a house trying to impress her girlfriend. A summer job at the Morning House - a tourist museum located on an island - seems to be a good way to get some distance and a fresh start. The Morning House has a macabre history, however, with two children dying in accidents there in the 1930’s, and as Marlowe quickly realises, the place isn’t quite done with death. Lots of twists, some good atmosphere writing, this book works well as a palate cleanser between weightier reads.

A freelance writer is shown some floor plans by a friend planning to buy a house. Something feels off, so he ropes in an architect to consult, and in the discussions about form and function, a grisly mystery begins to unravel. A sequel to the hugely popular Strange Pictures, this is an interactive experience that invites the reader to join in solving the mystery. It did get a little complicated near the end but overall, I really enjoyed this.

Richard Grey is a progressive politician with a reputation for being a rake. Anne Sheffield is the sheltered daughter of his fiercest opponent. She approaches him for lessons in seduction in exchange for informing on her father’s less than savoury dealings. Against their better judgement, they fall in love. Behind the swooning and sighing, the author draws a grim picture of how the elites manipulated the less fortunate for their own gain, and sitting as I am in the era of techbros taking a dump on democracy, or our own homegrown bigots trying their damnedest to put women back inside a box, yours truly was very triggered.

Childhood friends Gabriel and Lydia have been in love forever - until Gabriel leaves to become an assassin and spy. By the time Lydia has recovered from her broken heart, she’s an old maid by Regency standards. Gabriel comes swanning back into her life, and after she accidentally witnesses him in action, they are forced to wed - for her protection. This reads like a Judith McNaught book, updated for contemporary sensibilities (minus the regressive values, in other words) and if I failed to fall in love with it, it’s because of the mood I am in and not because it’s lacking in any way.

Fans of the Kamogawa Food Detectives series (of which, I belatedly learned that this was the third instalment) will know that it centres around a father and daughter duo who hunt down and replicate nostalgic recipes for their clients. Each chapter reads like an episode of a sitcom, where a client tasks our protagonists to find and replicate a recipe, and when the chef is invariably successful, the meal also resolves some long-standing issue in the client’s life. It might seem repetitive, but for me, it felt soothing and almost meditative, so no complaints. The main warning I have is: DO NOT READ ON AN EMPTY STOMACH.

From the same author as Days at the Morisaki Bookstore comes a piece that’s actually a couple of separate stories set in the same location - a little coffee shop in a cul-de-sac in a sleepy part of Tokyo. Somewhere between Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Coffee gets Cold series and David Szalay’s Turbulence, we meet the ensemble cast in this self-contained world - the heartbroken café assistant and the ghost from his messy childhood; the guest that abandons his one true love to chase money and seeks redemption in a friendship with his ex lover’s daughter, the family torn apart by tragedy…in all these stories, there is a search for closure, and the sense of community created in the café helps them find it.

AJ Fikry, the reluctant bookseller is mourning the loss of his beloved wife, and the theft of a prized first edition that he’d been meaning to sell before retiring, when someone leaves a baby on his doorstep, and against his better judgment, he decides to adopt her. It’s a beautiful, optimistic, heartwarming, heartbreaking story that doesn’t reinvent the genre because it doesn’t need to. You find a cast as colourful and flawed and real and they bring you gently into their fold, and the ‘twists’ come right on cue, like the bridge of a beloved song. If you’re as weary as I am at the state of the world, this charming book is a welcome escape.

A fairly simple story about a live-in tutor Satya, who falls in love with her employer Aakash, this May-December romance starts off a little like Jane Eyre set in Darjeeling, gets really raunchy midway, and ends a little like an Austen novel, and surprisingly a little bit of Begum Rokeya, with the green energy commentary? I know the author went into it intending to dabble in writing some smut, but she clearly kept her big-picture brain turned on when weaving the story.