A novella, as opposed to one of James's ginormous novels. The subtitle is “A Study,” and it is indeed a study of the young American tourist Daisy Miller, as seen theough the eyes of the slightly older American expatriate Frederick Winterbourne. It's at least partly about a contrast between two subtly different classes of wealthy late 19th century Americans, and it's not clear that either of the two main characters understand each other even at the end of the book.
A complicated what-might-have-been, with magic.
A scavenger manages to get her hands on a mysterious new technological artifact, and there's more to it than appears at first sight. It's partly a story of survival and revenge, and partly a love story.
A novella set at roughly the same time as The Nightmare Stacks. Bob Howard is in Tokyo on a joint operation with the Miyamoto Group, the Laundry's Japanese counterpart. Hello Kitty is scary.
A Laundry novella, A Conventional Boy, and two bonus Laundry short stories, “Overtime” and “Down on the Farm”, with an afterword about the D&D moral panic of the 1980s.
A Conventional Boy takes place some time after The Fuller Memorandum and before The Rhesus Chart. The main character is Derek Reilly, who appears as a minor character in other Laundry books, and he's a victim of that moral panic: at the beginning of the story he's been imprisoned for decades in a secret camp for dangerous wizards and cultists because the Laundry, just like the more mundane authorities, had trouble realizing at first that D&D was just a game.
A historical fantasy about a different version of the late 18th century, where one of the great struggles between aristocrats and commoners is the right to practice magic, and where slavery is even more horrific than in our world. All but one of the main characters are historical figures, I think, including the revolutionaries Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins in Paris, and the parliamentarians and abolitionists William Pitt and William Wilberforce in London. It's obviously the first of a series.
The book reminded me in some ways of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the parts about the French Revolution reminded me of Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. I was amused to see, in the author's photo on the flyleaf, that both of those books are clearly visible on the bookshelf behind her.
Also published as The Hollow Man. It's a classic locked-room mystery, including a chapter where the detective gives a lecture on the general theory of locked-room mysteries.
Sequel to Witch King, and a continuation of the story. Or a continution of both stories: both books have the same dual-timeline structure, alternating the story of a revolution against the Hierarchs, and a story set generations later in a world that's still trying to rebuild.
I finally understand why the previous book was called Witch King. I don't understand why this one is called Queen Demon. Only two of the characters are demons, and neither of them is a queen.
A late Gideon Fell book, published 1958, just a few years before Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It starts off as a midcentury American small town novel about academics with unhappy marriages, and then we get the locked room mystery. The mystery itself is inspired by a (fictional) unwritten Wilkie Collins novel, including letters from Collins to Dickens hinting at the clever trick.
It's a long novel with no single central character, but with several interlocking and overlapping storylines. It's carefully plotted, and the different storylines and groups of characters mesh together like gears.
This is also one of the books that reminds you that Dickens can be very funny, and sometimes it's the most horrible characters who are the funniest. My favorites are probably the two fortune-hunting swindlers who married each other because each of them mistakenly thought they were marrying money. The first passage that literally made me laugh out loud was when “that horrible old Lady Tippins (relict of the late Sir Thomas Tippins, knighted in mistake for somebody else by His Majesty King George the Third, who, while performing the ceremony, was graciously pleased to observe, “What, what, what? Who, who, who? Why, why, why?’) begins to be dyed and varnished for the interesting occasion.”
It begins with someone stealing hats and putting them in whimsical places, then we get the theft of an Edgar Allan Poe, then a murder. Yes, all is connected.