Prairie Fox Reads

  Cookies, Confessions, and Christmas Carnage: A Review of Merry with All That Murder by Jack Steen The Asylum Confession Files #6 | Horror, Thriller, and Mystery | 182 pages | First published December 12, 2022 Rating: ★★★★☆ Jack Steen’s Merry with All That Murder takes the comforting ingredients of Christmas fiction—cookies, candy canes, familiar songs, and holiday traditions—and contaminates them with blood, revenge, and deathbed testimony. The sixth installment in The Asylum Confession Files is a compact anthology of five confessions from violent patients spending their final hours in an asylum’s death ward. The book retains the series’ grimly effective premise. Jack Steen, the narrator and night nurse, cares for patients who are expected to die before leaving his ward. Many are serial killers, mass murderers, and other dangerous criminals. In exchange for easing their deaths, he asks them to provide the complete versions of their crimes: not the sanitized statements, officia...

      Title:   A Fire Endless   (Elements of Cadence, #2) Author:   Rebecca Ross Edition:   First Edition Publication Date:   December 8, 2022 (Harper Voyager) Page Count:   512 pages ISBN:   978-0008514709 Genre:   Adult Fantasy / Romantasy / Folklore Target Audience:   Adult and crossover New Adult readers interested in atmospheric, character-driven mythological fantasy.   Disclaimer: I was provided a copy of this book from the publisher for review; however, this has not affected the content of this review in any way. All opinions and analyses remain my own.   Rating:   ★★★★½ (4.5 / 5 Stars) Introduction: Publication and Context Published in late 2022, Rebecca Ross’s   A Fire Endless   arrives as the sweeping conclusion to the   Elements of Cadence   duology. Arising during a literary moment heavily invested in the “romantasy” subgenre, Ross’s work distinguishes itself through its grounded f...