Well this was a delight.
Any romance novel where you spend half the book yelling at the characters, but in a good way, is a good one.

I really wanted this book to be my thing and, after finishing it, I would love the adventures of Ellen Burns after she decks the annoying Scotsman following her around and goes about her awesome spy business.
Romance novel heroes are always a matter of personal preference. Less so heroines, if only because the romance novel is so often a woman's fantasy and part of that fantasy is being "enough" as we are and the fantasy that men, though not perfect, will take direction and become better. So whether a given hero works for the reader is a delicate balance and one person's jerk is another person's Darcy.
Malcolm did not work for me; I kept thinking that Elle deserved better and deserved someone who actually LISTENED to her.
And I really liked the idea of this book and the work Cole did to create a civil war romance novel is incredible and I want to try more of her stuff and see if it's just Malcolm that I bounced off of. But man, this was not the right love interest for me.

I've been on a memoir kick (by which I mean I listened to one and thought "hmm, writers reading their own memoirs makes excellent ear noise. I should get another one") and then went wandering through audible looking for a new book.
I didn't JUST pick this book because Bell's cousin is N. K. Jemisin, but that was a significant part of the decision-making process. Anyway, good choice of relatives.
This book works so well as a performance because it gives Bell the space to showcase the extended storytelling with jokes that defines his work. You hear him performing as he talks about what he does, which is exactly what you want. It feels like a series of podcasts, each chapter a new routine. But it's also serious storytelling about living in this country as a person of color, as a black man, as a dad, as someone trying not just to hold the line, but make things better. They're stories we need to hear and I'm glad he's telling them.

Thank you, Alex from Galactic Suburbia, for mentioning how much you enjoyed these books. It turns out we have the same taste in Seanan McGuire and this series very much works for me.
This was a fun read. Excuse me while I devour the next...six? seven? Anyway, I'm on it.

This book was a heck of a ride (and a read).
I love Maggie, I love her back story, I love her grumpiness, and I love the world she inhabits.
The downside with reading a book right when it comes out is that now I have to wait for the second book. I was so caught up in the story, I broke my usual rule of not reading the first chapter of the next book included in the back. It wasn't enough, but it was better than nothing.
More like this, please, universe.

Seanan McGuire. Come for the cryptids, stay for the characters. Many of whom are cryptids.

Don't mind me, I'm just going to inhale these books like the seaweed snacks from Costco.
Seanan is another author whose books, in this series are fundamentally uninterested in performing questions of justice, rights, identity, and humanity's role as conquerors or stewards of the world. And yet the Incryptid series is basically one long argument for Genesis 2:15 against 1:28. To work and protect rather than fill the world and conquer.
The stories complicate what it means to protect and the work in question, but they aren't ABOUT that. They're about attractive people solving mysteries with cryptids. I'm slowly learning to appreciate that authors who don't yell "Here is the interesting kernel, do you under what I am doing!" can still be asking interesting questions.
These books don't need to be read deeply. It's just fun to stop every so often and ask what they are saying if you do.

Australia!
We've ventured outside American cryptids, werewolves are absolutely TERRIFYING and McGuire continues her background ethical argument about the role of humanity in a world where the other sapient creatures haven't written us off with a nice fishbowl saying "So Long and Thanks for All The Fish".
I appreciate the growing nuance in what the Price family is trying to do, mixed in with all the chaos and bloodshed...which is, in this case, the solution. And also the precipitate.

I think this book improves on reread. Also, it stayed with me far more than most books I read, enough that I wanted to read it again (although I somehow forgot Grace existed and then, when she showed up, realized there was a lot more to this book than I remembered). This is why I don't delete old reviews; I didn't notice any pacing issues this time, although I listened instead of reading, but I also had a sense of the story's arc. I have a feeling I'll be going back to this one again.

Closure is nice. I think post 2016, I have become the kind of jerk who suspects that everything is not going to go as right as possible if you just get rid of all the people doing wrong things.
But I appreciate it in my literature nonetheless.
I am not sure I felt the characters in this book were quite the same as the ones in the previous book. So many characters gained or lost nuance based on the demands of the plot and, while I understand why the story needed the villains it had, I could have used a little less in the way of absolute monsters on the side of bad and good people/qualified monsters on the side of good.