The whole world is astroturfed, we know this much. It’s how I Think We’ve Been Here Before ended up in my lap, probably – it’s published by Lake Union Press, which is owned by Amazon, and it was promoted as one of the Goodreads books of the year despite being published in December 2024. Without the need to feed the gamification ending that is modern Goodreads, many readers likely would not have even thought to try I Think We’ve Been Here Before. It’s very low key, but it’s also entirely divorced from human nature in a way that never rings true, despite the elevated concept.

In October, news reports announce that an astronomical event will see the world destroyed by Christmas time. A family in a small Canadian town are in peril: the patriarch is inured to the concept because he has a terminal illness anyway; the matriarch can’t reach her daughter in Berlin; the daughter, unable to book a flight home, refuses to answer her phone. All the while, they have an intense feeling of deja vu, but surely the world hasn’t ended before.

Krause has two huge deal breakers that make the book near impossible to take: Nora’s inability to answer her mother’s calls for two weeks discounts most sympathies the reader is able to have; a twelve year old disappears without trace for three weeks and his parents only marginally freak out. If this was a non-apocalyptic book they’d be apoplectic; that global doom is imminent means you think they would be more desperate for the reunion.

Nobody says that people need to face the end of the world in panic; there’s a lot to recommend taking it in your stride, but who’s to says how any of us would tackle the inevitable? But Krause has preserved her characters in a sort of amber sludge where they don’t care about anything, particularly. It’s not nihilism, but an indifference that is neither credible nor distressing. Krause’s touch is so gentle that for the most part you can only feel either contempt or disdain towards.

It’s one thing for the people of a small Canadian town where nothing ever happens to be this way (if anything, they should care more), and another for the streets of Berlin that are portrayed as if they have almost no one in them, without ever explaining where anyone has gone.

This said, I can be a sucker for ends of the world when an author is brave enough to commit to them. I Think We’ve Been Here Before does, in fact, have an ending that is both stronger than anything that came before it while still feeling like it was informed by what came before it. It’s not enough, but it’s a valiant effort on Krause’s part.

I Think We’ve Been Here Before has the kernel of an interesting idea hiding in it, but Krause never really allows it to germinate, and it has an artificial air that is so intoxicating to people who enjoy reading books where the characters aren’t easily mistaken for humans. The word “cozy” has been bandied about to describe this sort of fuzzy hug of a book divorced from reality, but readers would do well remember that coziness can be suffocating. There’s no breathing room in this novel, but at the very least it thematically hits the mark for an end of year read.

Free yourself from the chains of Goodreads challenges.

The best man at a wedding tells Elizabeth that someone is out to kill him. Emerging from the rut of her grief, Elizabeth’s interest is piqued, and piques further when, the day afterwards, the best man disappears. The Thursday Murder Club bands together to figure out, with the help of their increasingly wide network of criminal accomplices, precisely what the best man knew, while also taking turns babysitting Ron’s grandson, Kendrick.

It’s all perfectly serviceable, not infrequently affecting, and often funny. But The Impossible Fortune isn’t particularly well structured: Joanna becomes a major character, which is fine, while the police are largely sidelined. Osman has become almost more enamoured with his various crims — even the freshly introduced ones — than with his established oldies. 

The character work doesn’t make up for the story, which Osman doesn’t weave together or really get off the ground. There’s dynamism to the Ron B plot (which is really the A plot) but, rather like the smug utility of AI in 2024’s We Solve Murders, the titular impossible fortune is a lame duck that is too trendy for its own good. By the end it’s not even clear if it’s really strong enough to be considered a MacGuffin.

And the character work isn’t always Everyone seems particularly bumbly, and not in a way that seems to be a cunning ruse. It often beggars belief; towards the end Joyce is unable to locate the pause button on her remote control, which Joanna informs her is the “button with two parallel lines on it.” Joyce is an eighty year old woman in 2025 with no evidence of cognitive decline (we’ve already done four books of that), the pause button was invented in Sweden in the 1960s, and there is no way, in between tapes, cassettes, videos, CDs, DVDs, and all of human history, that Joyce has not encountered it for a full three quarters of her life. If you’re going to pick a “old people don’t understand remotes” joke, don’t use a universal symbol, Osman. You are smarter than this and so are your readers.

There are also parts in here about the characters growing more frail as they age, but it still feels that Osman isn’t yet strong enough to face the concept. The groundwork is laid, but only barely. It feels like Osman is trying hard not to advance his characters too far (he is going to live longer than they can, realistically), so this is far more timid than his usual work — and one of the solutions is risible.

The Impossible Fortune is going to make a lot of people happy, and that’s fine. But we know that Richard Osman can do more than fine, even if the tone is more often than not “aw shucks” amused and the characters’ moral codes are divorced from the petty morality of the real world. This one doesn’t amount to much and, due to his publishing schedule, it will be 2027 before you see these old folks again. If it tides people over, that’s good, but readers deserve more than a faint smile. There’s no blood in this water.

And let’s face it: the movie was wrong.

The Australian crime boom continues apace, but not everyone is happy to keep their crime restricted to regional Australia or the big cities. Some, like Dervla McTiernan or Adrian McKinty, expats who found themselves on the island’s shores, became hooked on writing about their Irish homeland before branching out to America with mixed success.

Laura McCluskey has done something slightly different: she’s Melbourne (or Naarm) based and presumably Australian born, but she has Scottish grandparents. The Wolf Tree, her debut novel, is set on a remote island off the Scottish coast. It bears the lack of specificity that you can get away with from such a setting, and it promises the sort of insularity you get when everyone knows everyone else and there’s only one way off … or two, if you count the reason the police are there in the first place.

Months after sustaining a catastrophic injury on the job, George Lennox is trying to get back into police business. She and her partner, Richie Stewart, are eased back into it by investigating the seemingly open and shut suicide of an eighteen year old on the island of Eilean Eadar. The locals, under the thumb of the priest Father Ross, are not keen to talk, and while George battles her own demons she starts to almost believe the island is haunted by wolves. If George can last five days on the island and rule the death a suicide, perhaps she can make it out alive.

Crime novels often come down to the strength of their lead characters, and George Lennox is not the most sympathetic person. Eilean Eadar is the sort of place that has its own authority, which means that you have to come at it from a soft power angle; unsurprisingly, George has none of that to offer. She is a blunt instrument that isn’t even tempered with a preternatural talent for policing, with a primary talent for baseline rudeness.

The strongest element of George comes from without, in the form of her foil. Richie’s levelheaded veteran officer who does a special line in not being mad, but disappointed, doesn’t break any new ground, but he’s a nice contrast whose solidity helps to make The Wolf Tree not entirely by the numbers.

Partially inspired by the Flannan Isles Lighthouse mystery of 1900, the wisest choice in the construction of this book is that it sticks to a single timeline. Not for these readers alternating chapters 125 years apart, but rather flavour and texture that give a homeopathic tinge of history to the proceedings. It only sort of ties in to the book as a whole — one character keeps asking George “have you read the lighthouse keepers’ logs yet?” — but it informs it never the less.

Eilean Eidar is a more interesting locale than McCluskey strictly gives it credit for, and George’s bluntness acts as a smokescreen for their insularity. McCluskey briefly touches on the idea that children can be sinister, but doesn’t take it very far. She is more interested in the concept that people who reject the other have in fact othered themselves; this late revelation that George possesses an empathy that many of the citizens of Eilean Eadar are incapable of are really what seals the fate of the book, and prevents it from the delicate tipping point of policing as an act of colonisation.

Obviously it was never going to be a clearcut case of suicide (it is only on the odd occasion that you get the double blind of an open and shut case actually being open and shut despite the investigators’ attempts to convolute it), but quite how far McCluskey chooses to take it is something to boggle at.

There has to be a degree of suspension of disbelief at play here, because the outcome will have you wondering how the police could ever hope to prosecute any of it. Even if you’re not in law enforcement, you’d be glad this case isn’t yours.

The Wolf Tree is a confident, if semi-anonymous, debut novel. George Lennox is interchangeable with many other tortured detectives, with the added bonus of a mentor that she intermittently chooses to listen to. Despite the scale of the conclusion, the book isn’t neat. It is unclear whether George can return — although it would be pretty funny if she got assigned a new beat investigating murders on a series of lonely islands — but if she does, there’s enough here to bring readers back.

The Wolf Tree released in the US on February 11, 2025, and is set for release in Australia on February 28, 2025.

An ARC of The Wolf Tree was provided by HarperCollins Publishers Australia in exchange for review.

At long last, the final piece of The Long Halloween puzzle – until The Last Halloween debuted towards the end of last year. But that’s still ongoing, so we’ll put it aside. Initially intended to be published shortly after Dark Victory, Catwoman: When in Rome was delayed for four years; Hush, a very different flavour of Jeph Loeb,was published in the interim.  

This six issue rundetails what Selina Kyle was up to while Batman was investigating the Hangman in Dark Victory, a story which Selina only features at the start and end of. Realistically it’s an excuse for Tim Sale to illustrate Selina in a series of high fashion pieces – for the covers, at least. She spends a lot of the inner contents either naked or close enough to it. Combine this with an overtly lecherous Leprechaun-like Edward Nigma, and you’ve got a DC title custom-built for perverts. Sale’s art is excellent as always — and different to his previous titles, as always — but after a while the attention to detail is notable.

Frustrated with Bruce Wayne’s distant nature, Selina Kyle takes herself to Rome to investigate the Falcone crime family, which she suspects she has deeper links to than simply an easy target for funding her lifestyle. Plagued by vivid nightmares, thwarted by overly familiar enemies, and abetted by Edward Nigma in heat, Selina has to hope that she not only solves her mystery, but survives her European sojourn.

Loeb doesn’t have access to the full Bat rogue’s gallery that he loves so dearly, because he was using most of them extensively in Gotham at the time this is set. Still, he makes an effort: he borrows Cheetah from Wonder Woman, and various weaponry crosses Selina’s path in ways that she’d rather it didn’t. Thanks to the miracles of modern villain science, Sale’s gloriously tetanoid Joker gets to make a guest appearance.

Due to the holiday nature of When in Rome, Loeb doesn’t tangle it near so much as he did the other Long Halloweens or the famously twisted Hush (for which Loeb has admitted that one key element came out of nowhere). The solution to this one, such as it is, is less surprising than it is inevitable. It’s a pleasant diversion from the dramas in Gotham, a sun drenched adventure for Selina and all that entails.

Loeb and Sale were a formidable team, rarely using the same aesthetic twice – while Long Halloween and Dark Victory were of a kind, they look quite different to Haunted Knight, which is the platonic ideal of Batman art (to this reader, at least), and the luscious Italian vistas offered by When In Rome. The Riddler is some sort of grotesque, but everything else is beautiful. Selina has a lot of skin, and a lot of butt, but it’s gratuitous in a completely different way to Jim Lee’s take on the character in Hush.

That’s why it’s so weird to end When in Rome with an epilogue taken directly from Dark Victory, with no changes to the art – Sale was in a different mode.

The more comics you read – pretending to an unearned expertise here – the more you realise that they’re not all momentous events. Catwoman: When In Rome has no sense of immediacy to it because it really does play like its title: it’s a holiday from more serious stories, despite a relatively high body count. Loeb has written Selina as a credible protagonist, and Sale has lavished her with an intense amount of attention to detail. It all adds up to complete the character arc that was alluded to throughout the Long Halloween series and, while not a towering achievement, it’s certainly a satisfying one.

Time of the Child is a book that will go down in personal legend as one that all of the stops had to be pulled out for to get it over the line. Is it nearly as accessible as This is Happiness, a book about the simple pleasures of life and the lengths that one might go to to prolong them? It most emphatically is not. Does the promise of a far off hope help to offset the drear and dread that the predicaments of the Troy family engender? Not overly.

Yet in the final analysis Time of the Child is a warm piece of fiction about a village that operates its own way even within the strictures of the heavily Catholic Irish society of 1962. It just takes a bit to get there.

Doctor Jack Troy has kept himself apart from the town of Faha all of his life, despite being raised there. He worries, too, that he has kept his daughter Ronnie from living her own life, and that he has rendered her unlovable. These issues come to a head on the day of the Christmas fair, when a baby left at the church is delivered unto the Troys’ surgery and residence. As Doctor Troy tries to protect the child, he has to reconsider everything that he knows about his relation to the town and his perception of his daughter.

Time of the Child has been promoted as both a companion to This is Happiness and an introduction to Faha all by itself, but the reader would be hard pressed to say that this book is quite so immediately accessible, spending most of its first third on a single morning with a man that you would know the basic shape of if you had read the previous instalment, referring to things that nag at you, that you think you should know.

So if you’ve somehow got yourself a copy of the premier book of the festive season just passed (maybe you were gifted it for Christmas, and haven’t got around to it yet?), I would advise putting it down and finding out what happened in Faha before the Electric came.

By the time the titular Child shows up, the shape of the novel has changed. As she shakes up the Troy family, so too does she alter the form of the piece. There are so many ways that it could go, and Williams spends a decent time tottering on the precipice of disaster and creating another, far darker, novel. What seemed like idle thoughts before the Child suddenly become manic fantasies pursued with an unhealthy zeal, and the ends needed to achieve them are dubious at best. 

Williams elides much of the horror of what would become a child born out of wedlock in the era in a way that Clare Keegan, for example, did not. Regardless, it is clear that the Child would not thrive if surrendered to the Department. Ultimately Time of the Child is not interested in worst case scenarios beyond the acknowledgment that they are real and perilous, and it opens its heart to a world of possibility, however unlikely it may be.

Unlike This is Happiness, there is not a defined narrator. We already know the fates of some of these residents from what Noel Crowe told us on the last visit, and this time Williams’ omniscience is as miserly as he is generous. He knows the future, and tells some of it, but other important factors he leaves up to the reader. This is one of the quiet joys, the mixed ambiguity of a future only half-written. 

Time of the Child is a cumulative affair, with less of a carnival feeling than the previous trip to Faha and more of a quiet contemplation. There are many worries along the way, an almost leaden gloom, but it all adds up to a final sequence that at last feels like a proper celebration of Faha, an explanation of why we’d want to spend our time among its lives in the darkest and coldest months of the year. Perhaps that is happiness.

A lot of people do both, and a lot of people write or draw for both, but I think that the general reader is either DC brained or Marvel brained. Like many things, it can be rectified with study, but often the sheer volume can get to you. Over the years I have learned a lot about DC through sheer osmosis, but Marvel doesn’t penetrate my mind the same way, and the MCU, with its increasingly sanded edges, doesn’t really match up with the comics.

I’m sure that at some point that I’m going to read an X-Men run that will explode my mind, and I am well aware that my stances on comics are even more wildly subjective than those on written literature. But I said what I said.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is an iconic run, and it bears very little resemblance to the 2014 film of the same name. It also may not be helpful to read in isolation, because if you dig a little bit further it seems that there was some sort of soft(?) reboot somewhere along the way, and there’s a copious amount of Captain America lore to accommodate for all of the times he was or wasn’t defrosted over the years.

Technically, the Winter Soldier arc is only considered to be issues 8-9 and 11-14 of Volume 5 of Captain America. Mercifully, Marvel collected Issues 1-6, Out of Time and issue 7, The Lonesome Death of Jack Monroe, which go a long way both to contextualising all of this and suggesting that maybe arcs and numbering can be inherently arbitrary.

Russian businessman Aleksander Lukin has taken possession of the Cosmic Cube, and has been using it to bend the world to his whims. Steve Rogers is tracing the apparent death of Red Skull and is constantly one step behind in foiling a series of terrorist plots launched by A.I.D., the Skull’s true believers. 

When a mysterious assassin known only as the Winter Soldier shows up to do the bidding of Lukin, Nick Fury investigates his identity while hiding his suspicions from Steve.

Something you’ll notice about this is that Steve Rogers, when he’s not being a cipher, is something of a dick. He’s a decorated war hero who fought in actual campaigns, so he’s not a wide-eyed naif. However, without that character point, Brubaker’s Captain America is something of a drab character. He shows up, he reacts, he gets things wrong. Most of the time Brubaker seems to be treating him as a blunt object to be aimed at an incoming threat and, even when it’s Steve’s own idea, he almost feels like he has as little agency as the Winter Soldier himself. Apparently this is due to residual guilt from the just completed Disassembled arc of The Avengers, which would go on to birth House of M, all of which is designed to give someone trying to unpick this twenty years later a headache.

But where The Winter Soldier does shine is in the construction of that entity’s identity, from the origin story to his own version of being a Man Out of Time. This Winter Soldier  has a rebellious streak and, even under mind control, almost seems more of his own person than Steve does here.

Steve Epting’s art often doesn’t help, frequently reinforcing the stereotype that many artists can’t draw women’s faces. Otherwise, much of it is serviceable; special mention goes to the flashbacks, drawn by Michael Lark, which really do stand apart from the modern-day storytelling.

The Lonesome Death of Jack Monroe, drawn by John Paul Leon, is perhaps the single strongest entry in the story, detailing as it does one of the fill-in Captain Americas (Captains America?) who suffered from a degraded batch of super soldier serum. It helps to contextualise the gaps in Captain America history in a way that it’s safe enough to wave away, it tells its own story, and it ties in thematically to the larger run. It’s somewhat similar, but not really, to “Made of Wood” outshining The Man Who Laughs in the collection of the same name — thus far (in my experience), Brubaker works best in the macro.

The Cosmic Cube itself is a well utilised artefact, with actual repercussions for the use of its powers. It’s always been a cool looking device despite its simplicity, and it is justifiably fearsome here. Thanks to its presence, it also means that everything can be set up and resolved in a far less prosaic way than anything you see in the cinema. The final battle between Captain America and the Winter Soldier ends with two actions that could be considered — and are — hard core. It’s the sort of thing that you sign up for; when technology is indistinguishable from magic, call that cosmic.

A fun thing to note is that this came out a few years before the MCU canonised Tony Stark, so the Iron Man here has limitations as to what he can do before he has to answer to a board of investors, and he can’t be seen to be engaging in (literal) corporate warfare. He’s even allowed to cut something of a pathetic figure. There used to be a different orthodoxy, and Stark got way worse from here before Jon Favreau rehabilitated him.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes a bit of getting your head around, but it also serves as a good jumping off point if for whatever reason you do want to start following Captain America. The confusingly named Captain America Volume 5 comprises Brubaker’s entire 50 issue run, said to be among the finest work ever to bear the character’s name. In the issues comprising this volume, almost every element is more interesting than the title character himself, who only comes into something approaching his own for the explosive finale.

It’s also hilarious that they took a month off partway through the run for a House of M tie-in. Comics! You have to laugh. Or hold your head in your hands and pray that someone’s drawn you a map.

December 2025 Update: Since writing this, I know a lot more about comics and have some very different feelings about so many of them. I know if I read Winter Soldier again, I would have a completely different read on it – and I probably wouldn’t read it in such isolation. It’s funny how a year changes you – and now I understand “volumes” in comics. It’s one word that means so many different things.

I don’t think we’re allowed to call Molly the Maid “autistic”, or “neurodivergent” or even “autistic coded” – she’s just another in a long line of protagonists with undiagnosed brain chemistry, something that became excessively popular when a certain sitcom that shall remain nameless inexplicably took over the world.

But I can call The Mistletoe Mystery cruel. Which it is. After the strong showing of The Maid, Nita Prose has treated her heroine as a plaything to be batted around, written as if by a child. Nobody dies, so the mystery is in Molly’s head, and every reader can see what the solution is before she even begins to get suspicious.

In the lead up to Christmas, the dearly departed Gran’s favourite time of year, Molly becomes increasingly suspicious of Juan, who is uncharacteristically keeping a secret from her, is running around at all hours, and asks her questions about her stance on diamond rings.

Of course Molly takes all this the wrong way, and her coworkers try to convince her to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. It doesn’t take much for the not-particularly-eagle-eyed reader to piece it together, but the onus is not on Molly for her misunderstanding; but on everyone in her life who knows her intimately, who knows how her brain works and how she takes everything literally and doesn’t cope well with subterfuge, for putting her through this.

There are some unexamined factors in play here, like the fact that Molly and Juan are apparently not really paid a living wage by the Regency Grand, and that they live in penury. Prose’s prose pays special attention to the squalor and tatters that her protagonists find themselves living in, shakes it out of its head, and carries on to studiously ignore it.

The one legitimately hilarious element of this is Molly’s run-ins with her nemesis who she chose not to have fired in The Mystery Guest. A regret that she was entirely within her power to prevent, and no reader would have protested. Sometimes you don’t have to be nice for niceness’ sake.

In all honesty, this review already feels longer than The Mistletoe Mystery itself did. It is understandable what Prose wanted to achieve, but there was almost certainly a way to reach the final result while having Molly investigate a different non-mystery that it is not so distressing to her and offensive to all that she stands for.

The Mistletoe Mystery is for die-hards and completists. There is no real way to justify its Australian price tag, and it puts the “stuffed” in stocking stuffer. If The Mystery Guest already put a sour taste in your mouth, this will not help in the slightest.