Twenty-one-year-old Madison T. Jackson is already the star of the Emerson College student newspaper when she nabs a coveted night internship at Boston’s premiere newspaper, The Boston Lede. The job’s simple: do whatever the senior reporters tell you to do, from fetching coffee to getting a quote from a grieving parent. It’s grueling work, so when the murder of a prominent Boston businessman comes up on the police scanner, Madison races to the scene of the grisly crime. There, Madison meets the woman who will change her life forever: prominent socialite Dahlia Kennedy, who is covered in gore and being arrested for the murder of her family. The newspapers put everyone they can in front of her with no results until, with nothing to lose, Madison gets a chance – and unexpectedly barrels headfirst into danger she never anticipated.

Gaby Dunn's Bury the Lede revolves around Madison, an intern with plans to become a reporter, whose big break comes when a murderer decides that Madison's the only person that she's going to give information to.

( Read more... )

Divorced single mom Mandy Meadows scrapes by working as a barista and receiving payments from her cousin, Ryan, who rents her basement apartment. At night, she and her teenage daughter Vellum run a successful home business creating journaling content on their popular social media channels.

But Mandy's carefully organized world is about to come crashing down. While filming their latest journaling tutorial, Mandy and Vellum hear a loud noise on the basement stairs, and Mandy is horrified to find Ryan dead on the landing. The police quickly start to treat the death as a murder - with Mandy and Vellum as chief suspects. Why would someone murder Ryan? Determined to clear their names and find Ryan's killer, Mandy soon discovers he wasn't the man she thought he was...

Heather Redmond's Journaled to Death is the intersection of two of my most favourite interests: stationery and cozy crime novels. Underemployed single-mother Mandy has a lot on her plate; her job in the hospital café is under threat, her stationery channel is taking up more of her time – and her cousin has just been murdered.

Okay, I need to get this off my chest before I go further into this review: I WOULD REALLY LIKE A COZY MYSTERY WITH AN OPENLY BISEXUAL PROTAGONIST PLEASE. Like, sure, Mandy talks about how hot the men around her are, but she also talks about how hot her female neighbour who stress-bakes late night brownies is, and how proud she'd be to land her hot female frenemy as a date, so would it REALLY be that much of a stretch to make them an option in her dating pool? Especially in a book that acknowledges that bisexuality and polyamory exists, at least for minor characters!

(It might also mean that there was less of the "I'm not saying you're asking for trouble by dressing like that, but," stuff going on, which would be SPECTACULAR.)

Anyway, back to the actual book! ( Read more... )

The NYTPD sent her to 1986 New York City to investigate the Quintum Mechanics megacorporation for Crimes Against Time. Piecing together the clues, Dayoung Johansson discovers the "Future" she calls home--a
high-tech alternate reality version of 2013--shouldn't exist at all!

I really wanted to like Rocket Girl. A teenage police officer comes back from her glossy high-tech dystopian 2013 to investigate a company for committing CRIMES AGAINST TIME, which somehow involves crashing a student project? And solving regular crime with her rocket pack?

I'll be honest, I read the entire thing and I have no idea what the hell was going on in Rocket Girl. I understood tiny snippets of the plot, but nothing that I could actually put together into a narrative. The art is cool, I love the colours, but I don't get it. Not even in a "This is too weird for me" way, literally in a "I think I missed a chapter somewhere that explained the plot" way. I'm going to find someone to explain it to me like I'm five, and then maybe I'll come back and be able to give it a more thorough review.

Originally posted at ladybusiness.

Hi! I'm Susan, and I'll be your reviewer this evening. I read a lot of mysteries; I prefer my mysteries to be cozy, sff, graphic novels, and/or queer-centric, and this is where I'm going to hang my capslock.

Basic housekeeping

• Reviews will go live on Mondays! I review at a bunch of sites (ladybusiness, The Lesbrary, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, and SFF Reviews among them), so sometimes I'll be linking back to reviews I did elsewhere, but check back on Mondays and there'll be SOMETHING. If you don't want to check back but do want to keep up-to-date, Read and Buried is on twitter as unreadandburied!


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• I am open to ARCs! If you want to talk about it, I'm on twitter as unreadandburied, or you can email me at readandburied at outlook dot com. I don't read thrillers or anything with explicit sexual violence, but I'll consider other things.


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