A delusional prison patient warns Dr. Brian Heiser, Marriage and Family Therapist, of enormous impending disaster. Dr. Heiser and his best friend, a lauded Forensic Psychologist, find themselves entangled in a 72-hour deadly race to stop an AI bill being fast-tracked through the Texas state legislature.
Under Vixen’s Mere is one of those novels that quietly gets under your skin and then refuses to leave.
From the opening pages, the prose immediately stood out to me. It’s spare without ever feeling sparse—clean, confident, and quietly assured. Dialogue and description are held in careful balance, each doing its work without calling attention to itself. Nothing strains for effect, and that sense of restraint builds trust early on, inviting the reader to settle in and follow where the story leads.
What makes this book especially satisfying is its sensory richness. The attention to detail is so precise you can practically smell the bread cooling on the racks, the sharpness of cheese, the damp stone after rain. It is comfort reading with substance: sunshine and laughter paired with the everyday complications life throws at us, and the quiet resilience required to meet them.
This is not a book about capital-H heroes. Instead, it centers on people who engage in small acts of service, kindness, and yes, heroism—not for recognition or glory, but because it was the right thing to do in the moment. These are stories of people showing up when it would have been easier not to.
The Locked Room is clever, cozy without being complacent, and deeply satisfying for puzzle-lovers. If you adore classic detective fiction but crave a fresh perspective, Harriet White deserves a place on your shelf—and very likely, in your reading rotation for a long while to come.
I’d love to adopt another dog, someone for Wolf to play with, cause Max doesn’t like to play!
I get the same way with the Dogs Trust commercials. All of our dogs when I was growing up were rescues of one type or another, and it just breaks my heart that I can’t adopt one (or fifty) now.
I’m kinda the same way about adult cats. Everyone wants kittens and some really great cats just languish because people want “cute.” Phooey. I adopted my Skeeter when he was 8 – he previous family brought him to the vet to have him put to sleep because he has FLUTD. And you know what? he’s never had a single problem in the 6 years I’ve had him. He’s such a sweet little old guy now. His feet are creaky and he’d rather sleep in my lap than climb up the curtains, but I consider that a good thing.
Anyway… enough about me…
I think we need to use genetic engineering so that cats and dogs would never mature past the puppy/kitten stage. Then everybody would want one and they’d never reproduce naturally. Lots of demand and a supply that is based on need not nature. Give it some thought, Melissa.