My Year in Books 2025: August

Time for my monthly list of the books I read for pleasure. There are only two books this time, though at least that's more than last month. It's a bit of a mixed bag this month too, as I really enjoyed one of the books, but really didn't like the other one.

In case you're curious, here are the other lists from this year so far: January, February, March, April, May, June, July

Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter (2023)

The first book I read this month was one that I got as my ‘mystery’ book with a recent Abominable Books box. I decided to read it, because it had a cold case mystery theme (and I’m a bit of a sucker for cold case mysteries at the moment). I didn’t look into it more than that before I started reading, so the creative storytelling techniques Hunter uses came as a (nice!) surprise. The story is an investigation into the murder of Luke Ryder twenty years previously. The case is being featured on a true crime show, Infamous, and a team of experts has been assembled to explore the case and offer a possible solution. The narrative unfolds through emails, episode scripts, pieces of evidence and newspaper reports from the time, which definitely appealed to me. As each ‘episode’ of the investigation unfolds, secrets are revealed about the case, but also about the experts who are taking part. It’s not a spoiler to say that each of them has a closer connection to the Luke Ryder case than it initially appears. I really enjoyed the way the story unfolded. There were some good clues, and it was definitely possible to work things out as the plot developed. I did work out the ending – but only in the final part of the book, when something was revealed that made the solution clear. The attention to detail with the ‘evidence’ presented was also really good, making it a nicely immersive reading experience.

The Sentence by Christina Dalcher (2023)

The next book I read was a library book, but sadly this one didn’t really do it for me. The book is set in a near-future-ish version of America, where anti-death penalty protestors have managed to convince lawmakers in all fifty states to pass the ‘Remedies Act’, legislation that states that if a prosecutor requests the death penalty for a convicted felon, and they later turn out to be innocent, the prosecutor themselves is then executed in retribution. The main character is Justine Boucher, one of only two lawyers who have requested the death penalty since the Remedies Act came into force. As you can probably guess, doubt is now thrown on the conviction, meaning that Justine has to possibly face the consequences. The novel is, essentially, an anti-death penalty sermon, with some stomach-turning descriptions of executions along the way. The problem is that, in order for the premise to work, the reader has to accept some pretty implausible things along the way – not least that all fifty states (that’s right, even Texas) would adopt and enact the Remedies Act, and no state would find a loophole to avoid having to execute a state prosecutor. That just didn’t ring true at all. Additionally, the murder case at the centre of Justine’s story has such a convoluted explanation, as it has to be both watertight (explaining her previous certainty) and also an unsafe conviction, that my credulity was stretched to breaking point. Overall, an interesting idea but the execution is botched.