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I may have spent far, far too much time down the old-fashioned murder mystery rabbit hole when my kids were little, absorbing Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, but this didn't really seem to resemble a murder mystery as I'd recognize it. A pleasant enough medieval story, but the murder seemed a bit incidental (and yes, I realize it does sound a bit weird to complain about a story being insufficiently murder-ey, but it feels a bit like a failure of advertising :) ).

Inspired to read this by the latest episode of Radicals In Conversation: plutopress.podbean.com/e/beyond-the-ballot-box-on-the-far-right-with-mike-wendling/

TBH I've come to question the sense of rating an anthology. After all, if I loved every story, wouldn't that simply mean a perfect overlap between my taste and that of the editor? I read this because it contains a story by Andrew Joseph White, and that certainly didn't disappoint. Although a number of other stories didn't really do anything for me, I have discovered a number of new writers I'd like to read more by (Jose Pablo Iriarte, Tori Curtis, Kathryn DeFazio, and Kylie Ariel Bemis), plus the introduction listed a number of interesting other venues for stories.

Provides a remarkably readable history of communism, tracing its origins in the French Revolution and continuing to almost the present day. Very detailed consideration of the internal workings of pretty much any country with a significant communist presence in the last 150 years, only slightly marred by a lack of context -- but then maybe the book would have been even more of a monster than it already was.