In April of last year, I reviewed Laura R. Samotin’s The Sins on their Bones, which I was sent an eArc of by a publicist. I liked it enough that I finished it in six hours and immediately ordered a physical copy of it, and while it’s been sitting on my shelves for a minute or two, I got the sequel on release day as well.

And … well, I could literally rewrite the previous review more or less word for word for this book. I finished The Lure of their Graves in an hour before going to sleep last night and a few hours across this morning and afternoon– less than a day, easily– and if I talk about it much it’s going to seem like I hated it. My gripes about the first book still apply to the sequel; everyone’s obviously Jewish but the word “Jewish” never appears; Russian only exists for the phrase moy tzar, the main character is kind of a lot, the characters in the book are supposed to be the main figures of a government but come off more like a grad school polycule, etc, etc. I’m slightly revising my initial “holy shit, this book is gay as hell” assessment; it’s gay as hell, but what it actually is is a world where literally everyone is bisexual. Sexual orientation and possibly even sexual preference effectively doesn’t exist. Dmitri Alexeyev, the Tzar from the first book (and still the tzar of the second, although he’s never going to feel like a ruler of anything at all) spends most of the book trying to decide who he should marry to keep his country and the surrounding lands stable, and the three main candidates are a man, a woman, and a nonbinary person who makes it abundantly and repeatedly clear that they are willing to swing any direction the vine can get to.

Also, I genuinely don’t get the title. It’s possible that I’m dumb, but I don’t get it.

That said, once again I enjoyed the hell out of this book and I will be reading more from Laura Samotin in the future. Yes, I know I just did nothing but complain. I contain multitudes. Deal with it.

I apparently didn’t review K.M. Enright’s Mistress of Lies when I read it back in July, but I liked it quite a lot, and I finished the sequel, Lord of Ruin, yesterday, and because any time I read a Laura Samotin book I have to have weird synchronicity with the book before it, it’s also super gay and involves a spymaster and a king and an attempt at a rebellion and a fair amount of explicit sex, although this one also involves the scariest vampires I’ve ever encountered in a book (Oh, and the book before this, Coffin Moon, also involved vampires, so we’re all about the themes recently) and a Polynesian monstrosity called a manananggal that is not something that your nightmares need to be aware of in Donald Trump’s America.

Oh, and magical trans people. I’m deliberately withholding details. But transitioning at least can involve magic– it’s not clear if it has to– and you’re going to be confused at a couple of points in this book by who has what body parts, because being trans in these books does not work like it does in the real world. Just a heads-up. The Cursed Crown books are a duology that is now finished, and Enright’s series still has one more coming. I’m definitely in.