Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I haven't been reading much that feels like it belongs here (examples of things that don't: news articles, email). So, for the last couple of months, a list with some comments:

Goblin Fruit, by Celia Lake: a sequel, sort of, to Outcrossing: magic/alt history romance in 1920s England, with a detective story. One of the main characters in Outcrossing appears in the background of this. (I got the first one free; this was $2.95 on Amazon, which is reasonable, but I may wait before getting any more, because I have a lot else available compared to how much I'm reading.

How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford. This was a reread of an odd, farcical Star Trek novel. It was light and pleasant, but I remember it being funnier the last time I read it.

The Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison: a fun, somewhat weird spin-off of the Sherlock Holmes universe, with angels and steampunk-ish automata; the role of Sherlock Holmes in these adventures is played by a literal angel, and his Watson is Dr. Doyle, who came home from Afghanistan with a partly-metaphysical wound. I don't remember the original Doyle stories well enough to know how close she stays to those, for the episodes that clearly started there, like the one about the Hound of the Baskervilles. (The afterword says the book started as wingfic of the Sherlock TV series.)

A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, has dense worldbuilding, and an engaging narrator/protagonist, and is as good as everyone has been telling me.

Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh: fantasy, with a background including a seriously bad love relationship, about a man who is more than 400 uears old and guardian of a woodland, and what happens when a new landowner shows up, with questions. This is good, and I'm not sure how to describe it, but it seems worth noting that one of the important characters is a middle-aged woman, treated sympathetically. (This is fantasy in a fairy-tale sense, rather than high fantasy or a "secondary world" like Elizabeth Lynn's Arun or Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.