Review: Ties That Bond in Gretna Green, by Linzi Day

Series:	Midlife Recorder #3
Publisher:	Linzi Day
Copyright:	February 2023
ISBN:	9798376517017
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	616

Ties That Bond in Gretna Green is a self-published fantasy novel and the third book in the Midlife Recorder series. As with the previous book, it picks up almost immediately after Painting the Blues in Gretna Green. Day calls the genre paranormal women's fantasy, and that sounds about right to me.

There is an intervening short story that you can get by joining Day's mailing list (along with an epilogue to the first book and to this book). I don't think it's that important, but there are frequent references to it at the start of this novel that become somewhat annoying if you haven't read it.

Valentine's Day is fast approaching. This the busiest day of the year for the part of the Recorder's job that Niki already knew how to do: marrying people. She performed marriage ceremonies in her previous job before her inheritance, and she loved that work despite her awful boss. Performing marriages in the Gateway sounds even more rewarding, but the sheer number of couples and the political complications from the first two books create logistical problems she has to solve first.

Also, the remaining member of her staff held over from her grandmother's time has returned from vacation to discover that Niki has upended most of what she thought she knew about the job. Time for Niki to apply what she learned from the change management training her old boss forced her to attend and then ignored! (If you just groaned, rest assured that Day somehow makes this work, although she clearly has a higher opinion of corporate training than I do.)

This plot was more to my taste than Painting the Blues, mostly because Niki seemed on top of the problems and didn't postpone looking at them for half the book. There is more of the management competence porn that readers have come to expect of the series, a few more revelations about Niki's magic, more mysterious manifestations and the first mention of a prophecy, and a few political developments. As always, the pacing is exceptional. These books grab me and pull me along, page after page, often robbing me of sleep because I find them nearly impossible to put down.

Ties that Bond (and to some extent the last book) looked like it was going to introduce a romantic subplot, and I was preparing to be annoyed by it because I did not like the man in the subplot at all. I won't spoil how it works out in this book, but I will say that Niki surprised me and showed more sense than I thought the author was telegraphing. This is not the first time that Day has surprised me with what I thought was foreshadowing that did not turn out how I expected, usually for the better. If she can keep that up, it's a nice effect (if a bit unbalancing) and adds to my desire to read just one more chapter.

The way the world-building of these books is structured continues to intrigue me. Day gets away with some problems that I think would be more noticeable in other books thanks to the excellent pacing (no time to ponder the world-building, we're on to the next crisis!) and the tight third-person perspective. Niki is not a detail person, to say the least, but she does keep returning to bits of world-building and poking at them a bit harder, which gives Day repeated opportunities to shore up ideas that felt shaky and dubious at first glance. Still, this is not a book that prizes deep logical consistency or full exploration of the ramifications of a bit of magic. You have to be willing to go along with the ride and not think too hard.

For example, Niki can see bonds between couples and judge their strength. This is apparently a long-standing power of the Recorder's line (she was able to do that before she became the Recorder), and part of her responsibility in these weddings is to check the bonds of the couples. This leads to some well-handled scenes where she diagnoses a problem or resolves a conflict because she can magically see the true relationship structure.

Everyone in the book just takes this power in stride. This is wild to me! This ability would completely upend half of society if you fully worked out its ramifications and could find people other than Niki with the same ability. Even if one assumes that a bond only forms over time and can't be sensed in the early stages of a relationship (something the book never establishes), can you imagine the implications of having an infallible oracle that says at a glance whether a marriage will work (permanently, the book strongly implies)? The implications for how to structure marriage, for family planning, for psychology and psychiatry, for how to structure dating, even for living arrangements and housing markets? This is not a small world-building detail, and yet it's treated more like part of Niki's characterization than like a foundation of society.

I think some of this all-vibes world-building may come from the general new-age feel to how magic works. Day makes a grab-bag of random magic canonical in this world: psychic lie detecting abilities, auras, chakras, premonitions, and other bits of the sort of spiritualism that tends to be heavily marketed to middle-class women. I have that niggling feeling that one sometimes gets in SF that a lot of this is in the world-building because the author believes it's partly real (see, for instance, psychic powers and the Dean drive in 1960s science fiction). If one believes that psychic powers and various bits of mysticism are true in our world, one has already developed the rationalization mechanisms to explain away their almost total lack of influence or impact on how the world is structured. If one then introduces them into a true fantasy world, one may not notice how many implications that should have for how society is structured, since one is used to believing magic exists but has no significant implications.

I could be entirely wrong about this analysis, and maybe it's a bit unfair to Day. I should also be clear that this is not a complaint, just a point of fascination to me when I think back over one of these books after I finished it. There is a glut of fantasy out there that's constructed like an engineering problem or that goes deep into politics or social theory, usually written by people with strong opinions but not a lot of training in real sociology. One of the joys of self-published books is that you occasionally get something that assembles genre conventions in a way that feels odd and delightfully strange. What if, in addition to dimensional gates and overwhelming protean power invested in a true heir, all the magic sold by the local Tarot and crystal store was also true? Sure, why not! If the pacing is good and the story is grabby, it works for me.

It does seem worth attaching a warning for the folks who need scientific reproducibility and explored implications in their world-building, though. If you're the sort of reader who is bothered by political boundaries and economic systems that match our world despite the existence of magic, this series may cause you problems.

This continues to be a grabby, highly entertaining story of a woman who finally gets to run her own small business the way that she always thought the business should be run after years of working for an awful manager, except that her business is total magical power over an interchange point between dimensions, she's the chosen one, and the setting is a high fantasy world with prophecies and gods. If that sounds appealing, don't start here, but I highly recommend giving Midlife in Gretna Green a try. The series seems to be holding up.

Followed by a short story epilogue available by joining Day's mailing list, an optional novella (maybe novelette) published in Spilling the Tea in Gretna Green, and then Seeing Red in Gretna Green.

Rating: 7 out of 10

14 Oct 2026 3:50am GMT

Debian Contributions: 2026-09

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian's mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf site visit, by Stefano Rivera

In preparation for DebConf 27, Stefano Rivera, Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, and Jongmin Kim from the DebConf Committee visited Asahikawa Japan. A contingent of the local team gathered to tour the venues with us, discuss plans, and meet the local organizations assisting the event. We held a press conference at the city hall that got some coverage. A few potential day-trip options were explored. Photos from the site visit.

autopkgtest-virt-pconr, by Helmut Grohne

Following the creation of the pconr module that provides a basis for unschroot and a more secure containment for mmdebstrap, an experimental autopkgtest backend autopkgtest-virt-pconr is now available. It fits a spot between autopkgtest-virt-unshare and more fully fledged containers as it does not require much infrastructure like setting up incus or lxc but still provides a containment running an initsystem. Due to the use of erofs as base image format, it boots and reverts quickly. This development also required fixing concurrency issues in asyncvarlink and even shed light on a matching bug in systemd that was promptly fixed upstream.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles reviewed and submitted six Catalan po-debconf translations using po-debconf-manager. Improved po-debconf-manager's workflow for updating translations.
• Carles reviewed, translated or updated webwml Catalan translations for security and CD pages. He also fixed issues that prevented building webwml, deleted orphaned translation pages, etc. and experimented with a more global HTML tidying up experiment.
• Carles refactored check-relations adding capacity to ignore concrete from_package -> to_package specific relations and more flexibility around ignores. Detects unused ignore rules as well.
• Carles improved some Wiki pages (LibreOffice, Framework amongst some other ones)
• Thorsten did an hplip upload to replace an expired certificate of HP. This certificate is used to sign new upstream releases and modules that can be downloaded later. Afterwards work on a new upstream version started.
• Thorsten also struggles with autopkgtest problems of the new upstream version of cups. Work is still ongoing.
• Antonio loaded the video recording URLs into the MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026 website, and deployed the website for MiniDebConf Curitiba 2027 (still very early work in progress at this point).
• Antonio uploaded debci 4.3, autodep8 0.31, gem2deb 2.2.10, ruby-sass 3.7.4-7, init-system-helpers 1.69+nmu2 and 1.69+nmu3.
• Antonio worked on several topics around Debian CI maintenance, reliability and performance.
• Stefano updated the autopkgtests for cPython packages in Debian to support setuptools 80.
• Stefano uploaded pypy 8.
• Stefano helped to get DebConf 26 reimbursement claims processed, and worked on some of the resulting issues in debian-reimbursements.
• Emilio managed various transitions.
• Emilio worked on the rustc-web/trixie bootstrap for armel, using the rustc 1.95 version from trixie-backports. This will be needed by the upcoming clamav security updates.
• Helmut sent patches for 11 cross build failures.
• Helmut introduced a new build profile to libcap-ng to keep architecture cross bootstrap working.
• Helmut uploaded debvm_0.5.5 introducing support for Hurd thanks to a lot of work by Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues.
• Colin worked with OpenSSH upstream to reduce the linkage of /usr/sbin/sshd, hardening it a little further.
• Colin upgraded to new security releases of groff and parted.
• Colin upgraded 50 Python packages to new upstream versions, and fixed over 40 RC bugs in the Python team.
• Santiago continued mentoring Aryan Karamtoth with the GSoC project about introducing livepatching support for linux. This mentoring is done in collaboration with Emmanuel Arias. In particular, Santiago explored different requirements for providing binary modules for the same kernel packages used by Debian, that require a matching version number.
• Anupa joined Jean-Pierre Giraud to prepare the files for point release announcement for Debian 13.7.

14 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

A new release 0.4.29 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this evening, had already been built for r2u as well as on r-universe and has just been uploaded to Debian.

QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for twenty-three years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded to CRAN.

This release of RQuantLib brings two new calendars (Malaysia, Philippines), updates to a number of other calendars as well to other files, and two deprecations we are reflecting in this release. It also benefits from a number of careful and attentive pull requests by Maximilian Muecke cleaning up an (astonishing !!) number of likely rather old little bugs. Full details from the NEWS file follow as usual.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.29 (2026-10-13)

• Configure check for outdated QuantLib version updated,

• Adjust two instantiations on macOS x86_64 with old compilers

• Correct Euribor2W and Euribor3W tenors setters (Maximilian Muecke in #196)

• Accect Euribor1W as alias for EuriborSW tenor (Maximilian Muecke in #197)

• Correct default handling of the payFixed parameter (Maximilian Muecke in #198)

• Assign missing S3 class to American option implied volatitly return (Maximilian Muecke in #199)

• Correct spelling in manual pages and R code (Maximilian Muecke in #202, #203)

• Support additional Polish settlements (Maximilian Muecke in #204)

• Check for curve parameters in FittedBondCurve (Dirk in #205 fixing #201)

• Reflect two deprecations in QuantLib 1.44 and adjust code in two spot (Dirk in #206)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

13 Oct 2026 9:07pm GMT