Category: A++ Reviews

A++ #BookReview: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson BennettA Drop of Corruption (Shadow of the Leviathan, #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery, urban fantasy
Series: Shadow of the Leviathan #2
Pages: 465
Published by Del Rey on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The brilliant detective Ana Dolabra may have finally met her match in the gripping sequel to The Tainted Cup—from the bestselling author of The Founders Trilogy.
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.
To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.
Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.
Worse still, the killer seems to be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud. Here, the Empire's greatest minds dissect fallen Titans to harness the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the destruction would be terrible indeed—and the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.
Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat.

My Review:

There is something rotten in the state of the Empire. There are PLENTY of somethings ROTTING in the state of Yarrowdale, some naturally so, some deliberately so, some neglectfully so and some, even, all of the above. It’s a matter of which is which, which is what has brought Ana and Kol from their previous assignment to this rotting backwater on the edge of the Empire.

In a situation where the words “rotting”, “backwater” and “edge” should all be taken as many ways as possible – which is just the sort of situation that Ana Dolabra revels in solving.

Din’s first case assisting the eccentric genius (The Tainted Cup) began with the gorge-revolting sight of entirely too much corpse, as the victim had died as the result of a tree taking root in his stomach and growing downwards to root in the floor of the room in which he died even as the tree grew upward to entwine its branches with the ceiling.

This second case opens with much too little corpse, as all that officials have in the remote. soonish to be (negotiations are ongoing) imperial province of Yarrowdale of their latest assigned case are the right hand, left shoulder, and partial ribcage of the murder victim. The head comes later.

The carnivorous turtles that were clearly intended to handle corpse disposal must not have been quite hungry enough to get the job done before chance threw the remaining bits up and into the path of Imperial Iudex Commander Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol.

It’s all part of just the delightful kind of clever, confounding, murderous puzzle that Ana Dolabra literally seems to live for, as it begins with a diabolical bit of a locked room mystery that sends out roots and tendrils until it blossoms into a vast, far-reaching conspiracy that threatens to topple the Empire.

Only for the entire, province-spanning construct to collapse of its own weight into the person of one small man who has lost sight of his purpose – as well as his mind – in a web of greed of his own manufacture, leaving Ana Dolabra bemoaning the banality of his crime even while she brings down its perpetrator and saves the empire yet again.

As she was made to do.

Escape Rating A++: For this enthralled but still somewhat emotionally exhausted reader, A Drop of Corruption – at nearly 500 pages (I think that estimate is LOW) – represents a lost weekend. I dove into the story late on Saturday and didn’t emerge until Sunday evening, still mired in a book hangover that seems as if it will require every bit as much time to recover from as one of the psychotropic drug binges that aid Ana in her deliberations.

I picked up the first book in this series, The Tainted Cup, because I couldn’t resist the premise. It’s billed as a take-off, or perhaps homage would be a better word, to Holmes and Watson. But it’s set in an epic fantasy world – for epic in multiple senses of the word. I haven’t seen this combination done at all, let alone as well as it is here, since the late Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series a VERY long time ago.

There has been a recent run on science fiction mysteries, including an SF Holmes and Watson-esq duo in Claire O’Dell’s A Study in Honor, but fantasy mystery, not so much. (The exact opposite is happening in regards to fantasy, SF and romance, as fantasy romance is hugely on the uptick, but science fiction romance is ticking along at the same rate it has always been – meaning some and some really good but not a lot.)

What makes Ana and Kol’s investigations so fascinating – and so much weird fun to watch – are the way that the series combines their very peculiar characters – and Ana in particular is quite peculiar in multiple ways – the way their strengths and weakness shore each other up in a relationship that is clearly NEVER heading towards the romantic, AND the way they stand on the shoulders of Holmes and Watson without ever being slavishly devoted to the portrayal yet STILL managing to sharply delineate the outlines we know, love and expect.

At the same time, those character outlines are firmly set in a fantasy world that is wild and weird and strange in ways that are completely unexpected while still sitting in a frame that practically defines current epic fantasy.

There’s no epic battle between good and evil here. There’s just the evil that men, and women, and other creatures, do. Those evils are committed in a corrupt empire that is rotting from within and without – and those evils are battled by people, like Ana and Din, who are doing their damndest to stem the tide and make sure the Empire remains a place worth fighting for – in their own way.

Layered on top of all that is that there is no wand-waving magic. But there are magical potions, and concoctions, and decoctions, and grafts, and pills in a vast pharmacopeia that literally boggles the mind. It certainly boggles Ana’s mind whenever she’s in need of inspiration, stimulation, or simply something to stave off ennui.

That pharmacopeia serves as both the foundation of the empire and most likely the source of its eventual destruction. That drop of corruption in the title, is everywhere and in everything and is what makes this world go ‘round even as it brings it ever closer to the edge of annihilation. As it very nearly does in this entry in the series.

A series which I dearly hope is not even close to done yet. Because damn but the whole thing is mesmerizing and fascinating and more than reminiscent of a fever dream created by Holmes’ own 7 percent solution – if not something a bit stronger. And I’m absolutely riveted by every single part of it.

(Book three is listed in Goodreads but with no title and no date. Still, that gives me hope!)

So come for the mystery, because it is compelling from the moment its tiny locked room is opened, all the way through its mind-blowing vastness and right into its surprisingly small conclusion even as its consequences spill out to bankrupt a province and change the course of an empire. Stay to watch that drop of corruption cause gigantic ripples in the course of a vast empire. Then wait and hope with me for more in this compelling series.

A++ #AudioBookReview: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A++ #AudioBookReview: The Daughters’ War by Christopher BuehlmanThe Daughters' War (Blacktongue, #0) by Christopher Buehlman
Narrator: Nikki Garcia
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, grimdark
Series: Blacktongue #0
Pages: 416
Length: 13 hours and 14 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on June 25, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure from Christopher Buehlman, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief .
The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.
They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.
Now, our daughters take up arms.
Galva ― Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill ― has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.
The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted ― not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

My Review:

I finished The Daughters’ War for the second time over the weekend, but I was so deeply into the story, the characters and simply the world between the pages that I had to sit on even attempting to write a review for a bit – to let the SQUEE calm down some. But I also felt compelled to reread the first book set in this world, The Blacktongue Thief – which I did. Which didn’t tone the SQUEE down AT ALL.

The book hangover was huge after my first read of Blacktongue, and after my first read of The Daughters’ War earlier this year for Library Journal, but this time I listened to the thing – and the book hangover is absolutely epic.

Now let me attempt an explanation – which is still going to have a LOT of SQUEE in it. Because damn I loved this book – and I fell hard into Blacktongue again, too. So hard.

The title of this book immediately tells the reader just how badly this world is totally wrecked. You see, the first war between humans and goblins was the Knights’ War, because the noble Knights beat the goblins back on their swift and equally noble horses. So the goblin mages created a poison, a bioweapon, that killed all the horses. The second war, not even a decade later, was the Threshers’ War, because the goblins cut the untrained farm boys sent to fight it like they were threshing wheat. This war is the Daughters’ War because that’s pretty much all that’s left to fight this time around, less than a decade after the end of the Threshers’.

This is one of the rarest of rare cases where the old saying that “There never was a good war or a bad peace” doesn’t feel strictly true. Because the goblins USED those brief years of peace while the humans WASTED them.

Readers of The Blacktongue Thief will remember Galva as she will be, as in that story she’s 30 years old, a hard-bitten, cynical, heart-sore veteran of the Daughters’ War, on a mad quest to save her queen, her country, and quite possibly her whole entire species from the idiocy of the so-called powers that be who seem to be wasting yet another peace.

The story of this book, The Daughters’ War, is the story of how this Galva got to be that Galva. How the 20 year old swordswoman and newly fledged Corvid (read that as war-raven or murder-bird) knight came of age, lost her innocence and her naiveté, as well as her faith in pretty much everything she once believed, including her family and her country – or at least the king who usurped its throne.

So this is Galva’s story, which means it’s a story about the cost of war and the price of peace, and the question of which one is higher than the other and whether either will prevent the actual extinction of the human race. Because it’s also a story about the damage a small man can do to shield himself from the knowledge that he is truly small and the way that power and privilege can blind a whole society to the destruction that is happening all around them because they rather maintain their power than save everyone’s future – including their own.

And over and under and through all of that, The Daughters’ War is a poignant, lyrical, heartbreaking paean to times and places that are no more, told by someone who develops a truly cynical perspective on command and control and the lack thereof and the high price that may be paid because humans are gonna human even if it kills them all.

Escape Rating A++: I don’t give A++ ratings often as that’s kind of the point of the thing, but The Daughters’ War absolutely earned one – as did The Blacktongue Thief three years ago. My one and only disappointment with this book is that I can’t seem to find any information on whether or not the author will be returning to this world – but that was also true after Blacktongue so I still have hope.

After all, Galva’s – and Kinch’s – world is so FUBAR’d that there are plenty of possibilities for more stories where these two came from. And I want them. BAD. Seriously BAD.

Ahem…

I keep talking about the two books, The Daughters’ War and The Blacktongue Thief, as though they are intertwined. Only because they are. Blacktongue was published first, but Daughters’ War comes first in the internal chronology. So it doesn’t matter which one you read first. Whichever one you can get first will be fine – especially if you like your epic fantasy with more than a bit of grimdark – because their world is very grim – and both Galva and Kinch are VERY cynically aware of that grimness.

Although I have friends who don’t like grimdark who STILL enjoyed Blacktongue, that I think I’ve convinced to read Daughters’ War. The author does such an excellent job of getting inside his characters’ heads to let the reader – or especially listener – see the world from their point of view that he carries the reader through the grimdark exceedingly well. I fully admit, however, that I got so into the characters and their perspectives that both books made me cry more than once each.

The stories are a bit different in tone, as Kinch is an extremely unreliable narrator and Galva is the exact opposite. She hates lies, lying and liars, while he can’t stop any of the above – sometimes not even to himself. He’s also a bit of an optimist in spite of his circumstances, while she’s definitely a pessimist.

Both stories are told in the first-person singular, so we spend the entire story inside each of their heads. Which does serve as a kind of a hint that they each survive their own adventures. It’s the audiobook that really got me in both cases, not just that we see the world from their perspectives, but that excellent choices were made for narration in both cases (the author chose himself for Kinch which says something about several somethings but absolutely worked). So if you like audiobooks these are excellent and Nikki Garcia did every single bit as fantastic a job “being” Galva as the author did Kinch.

I have to conclude this review and I honestly don’t want to. I simply do not want to be done with this world and these characters. I hope that this review and my general, overall squee about the marvels of this series will convince you to give it a try as well. Because both books are seriously awesome and well worth a read – or even better – a listen.

A++ #BookReview: Court of Wanderers by Rin Chupeco

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: Court of Wanderers by Rin ChupecoCourt of Wanderers (Silver Under Nightfall, #2) by Rin Chupeco
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, Gothic, horror, steampunk, vampires
Series: Reaper #2
Pages: 448
Published by Gallery / Saga Press on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Remy Pendergast and his royal vampire companions return to face an enemy that is terrifyingly close to home in Rin Chupeco’s queer, bloody Gothic epic fantasy series for fans of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree and the adult animated series Castlevania.
Remy Pendergast, the vampire hunter, and his unexpected companions, Lord Zidan Malekh and Lady Xiaodan Song, are on the road through the kingdom of Aluria again after a hard-won first battle against the formidable Night Empress, who threatens to undo a fragile peace between humans and vampires. Xiaodan, severely injured, has lost her powers to vanquish the enemy’s new super breed of vampire, but if the trio can make it to Fata Morgana, the seat of Malehk’s court—dubbed “the Court of Wanderers”—there is hope of nursing her and bringing them back.
En-route to the Third Court, Remy crosses paths with his father, the arrogant, oftentimes cruel Lord of Valenbonne. He also begins to suffer strange dreams of the Night Empress, whom he has long suspected to be Ligaya Pendergast, his own mother. As his family history unfolds during these episodes, which are too realistic to be coincidence, he realizes that she is no ordinary vampire—and that he may end up having to choose between the respective legacies of his parents.
Posing as Malek and Xiaodan’s human familiar, Remy contends with Aluria’s intimidating vampire courts and a series of gruesome murders with their help—and more, as the three navigate their relationship. But those feelings and even their extraordinary collective strength will be put to the test as each of them unleashes new powers in combat at what may be proven to be the ultimate cost.

My Review:

I loved this second book in the Reaper duology even more than I loved the first book, Silver Under Nightfall. Which means that it is going to be damn near impossible to keep my SQUEE under enough control to write this review.

But then again, I loved this so hard that I have literally nothing truly serious to say, except to tell people to go out and read this duology and to start with Silver Under Nightfall and be prepared to forgo sleep until you’ve finished the set.

The story in Court of Wanderers picks up right after the ending of Silver Under Nightfall, and everything that happened in that first book is part of the setup for this second. So my one very serious thing to say is to start with Silver Under Nightfall to get acclimated to this intricately designed and convoluted world where the good humans are working with the good vampires, the bad vampires are killing the bad humans and someone or something is maneuvering behind the scenes on both sides for dastardly reasons of their own.

Because divide and conquer has been a sound strategy since the dawn of, well, strategy.

At the heart of this truly epic dark fantasy are Malekh, Xiodan and especially Remy. Malekh and Xiodan are vampires at the center of seemingly ALL the power plays among their people. A people who are distrustful of each other and seem to hold humans in contempt. But are forced to or hopeful of or a bit of both regarding an alliance with at least some humans in order to fight a common enemy that is targeting them both with armies of infectious, unkillable monsters.

(And yes, anything that a vampire thinks is a monster is pretty damn monstrous – as are the people (for loose definitions of ‘people’) controlling them.)

Remy Pendergast, the point of view character for the story, is a garden-variety human. Or so he believes, in spite of all the rumors to the contrary he grew up with and was constantly reviled for. His father leads the human armies on behalf of the Alurian Queen Ophelia.

His father, quite frankly, is also a bastard – the marital status of HIS parents notwithstanding.

Remy was supposed to be his father’s spy among the vampire courts. Instead, Remy has found the first place he could ever call home. A place where he is respected, appreciated, and most definitely loved. By Malekh and Xiodan, the leaders of the third and fourth vampire courts, who want to make him their acknowledged third, whether he remains human or lets himself be turned.

But Remy isn’t quite the mere human that he believed himself to. Then again, quite a few of the things he believed and the people he believed in are not exactly what he believed them to be, either.

The war that Remy is at the forefront of, on both sides at the same time, will test his courage, his mettle, his resolve – and most especially, his heart.

What comes out the other side – intact or otherwise – is for Remy to discover. If he survives – and if his world survives with or without him.

Escape Rating A++: The SQUEE is strong with this review. Let’s get into at least a bit of the why of that fact.

The comparison that keeps being made in the blurbs is to Castlevania. I’ve never played the game, so I can’t say if that’s on point or not. What is very much on point – and not just the pointy fangs of the vampires themselves, is that the Reaper duology does a fantastic – no pun intended – job of combining the battle of good vs. evil that so often lies at the heart of epic fantasy with epic fantasy’s complex worldbuilding AND its underlying thread of very long, downright historical forces teeing up to fight the same battles over and over again.

At the same time, and I think this is where the Castlevania reference comes in, some of the prime movers and shakers in this world are vampires. And it has been observed, at least by this reader, that vampire politics tend to run towards exceedingly long games and even longer grudges because those original movers and shakers are still doing the moving and the shaking down through the millennia. It’s difficult to get a fresh start when the people who need it are battling not against institutional memory or country-founding ethos but against actual memory – usually in worlds where therapy is not remotely a thing.

A big part of what is ultimately uncovered, the evil at the heart of this world, is that the forces arrayed have been maneuvering on the down low for longer than the short-lived humans could possibly imagine – not that plenty of them haven’t either been caught up in it or killed by it or both over the centuries.

Our point of view on those discoveries, and on those centuries of underhanded and underground dealings, is Remy Pendergast. In Silver Under Nightfall, we’re with Remy as he’s used and abused by everyone around him in the human world, and we follow his perspective as he learns that the vampire courts are not much like he’s always been taught. And that he has considerably more value as a person than the human courts – particularly his own father – have ever led him to believe.

As Court of Wanderers begins to unravel the plots and counterplots that have set up the epic confrontation, Remy learns that so much of what he’s been taught to believe just ain’t so. We feel for him as his illusions are destroyed, as some of them get rebuilt, and as the layers of the whole onion of his life peel back with tears every step of the way. We get caught up in his journey as well as the battle yet to come and its multiple horns of dilemma consequences.

I got caught up in this story for Remy, because it was impossible not to feel for him, and because the way that his continual discoveries of how the world REALLY works as opposed to how he thought it did gave me a captivating and compelling ‘in’ to this complex world.

I stuck around because as the romance – and it is absolutely a romance – between Malekh, Xiodan and Remy gets deeper I found myself feeling for them, both in the romance AND for the centuries of trauma they had experienced and the way that their world was damaged and how desperately they wanted to fix it in spite of the forces arrayed against them.

I was fascinated with the way that the good vs. evil battle that has been fought through the whole story wasn’t reduced in any way to the easy fixes. Although many people at the beginning believed it was vampires vs. humans, and the villains were trying hard to make that point stick, in the end there was good among both and evil among both and deception on all sides. And redemption as well.

When I closed the final page of Court of Wanderers, I left this world with a deeply conflicted reaction. The ending of this book, and this duology, is utterly right for the story that was told within. The mix of the bitter of loss with the sweet of possibilities was, in the immortal words of Goldilocks, ‘just right’. But I’m deeply sad that this marvelous story is over, and that I won’t get to see the outcome of the life-altering choices that Remy has before him – and I desperately want to know.

Maybe I’ll find out in some future story by this author. I hope so. I KNOW that I’ll be all in on their next adult fantasy, whenever it appears, because Silver Under Nightfall and Court of Wanderers constitute a tale that I’m going to remember for a long, long time.

Review: Fall by Tracy Clark

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Fall by Tracy ClarkFall (Detective Harriet Foster #2) by Tracy Clark
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Detective Harriet Foster #2
Pages: 347
Published by Thomas & Mercer on December 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In the second book in the Detective Harriet Foster thriller series, author Tracy Clark weaves a twisted journey into the underbelly of Chicago as Harriet and her team work to unmask a serial killer stalking the city’s aldermen.
The Chicago PD is on high alert when two city aldermen are found dead: one by apparent suicide, one brutally stabbed in his office, and both with thirty dimes left on their bodies—a betrayer’s payment. With no other clues, the question is, Who else has a debt to pay?
Detective Harriet Foster is on the case before the killer can strike again. But even with the help of her partner, Detective Vera Li, and the rest of their team, Harriet has little to go on and a lot at risk. There’s no telling who the killer’s next target is or how many will come next.
To stop another murder, Harriet and her officers will have to examine what the victims had going on behind the scenes to determine who could be tangled up in this web of betrayal…and who could be out for revenge

My Review:

When we first catch back up with Detective Harriet Foster, she’s in the midst of a doomed attempt to get closure for the unclosable. She’s attending the sentencing hearing of the young man who murdered her son. As much as everyone in her family wants her to – not so much put it behind her because that’s impossible – start living in the present and the future she has rather than the past she can’t change and can’t return to.

But when we first met Harri back in Hide, she was also still grieving the suicide of her police partner Glynnis Thompson. While closure for that loss may still be elusive, Harri does get at least a reason for that seemingly unreasonable act. A reason that is clearly going to dog her footsteps for months if not years to come.

What makes this second entry in the series so compelling is its deep dive into the seemingly baked in ways and means that the sausage of Chicago city government gets made. And seemingly always has been.

That a former alderman, convicted of corruption, gets out of prison after serving her time may be newsworthy as it happens – just as her trial and conviction three years before was – but it isn’t at all unusual. It’s just part of the way that ‘business’ in the City of Chicago has always been done.

Howsomever, that the aldermen who should have gone to prison with her – but whose names seem to have been barely whispered during the course of the investigation – start dropping like flies the minute she gets out is not only newsworthy, it’s juicy news at that. The kind of news that he newsies are all over like a bad rash.

Because that former alderman, Marin Shaw, should be the prime suspect for the killings. And in some people’s minds, she is. But not to Detective Foster and her current partner Vera Li. Because down in the dirt of Chicago politics and power, there are simply too many motives for killing an alderman or two, or even three.

Especially when one of the victims is the kingpin of a whole network of dirty City dealing not done remotely dirt cheap.

To the two experienced cops, it looks like a frame that someone is trying to make former alderman Marin Shaw fit into. But it doesn’t, quite, because the motives are as elusive as the killer has been, and they’ve been looking in the wrong direction all along. As they were intended to.

Escape Rating A++: I finished this at 3 in the morning because I simply could not put it down. I mean, I tried, but I just couldn’t let this one go until the end. An ending like black coffee, tasty but bitter, with a solid kick at the finish.

In other words, there are plenty of reasons why this book has ended up on so many “Best of the Year” lists – and quite possibly will mine as well. It is even better than the first book in the series, Hide, and provides an even more in-depth look at a damaged person doing her best in a broken system to make each day count for others – even if she can’t make them count for herself.

Detective Harriet Foster is compelling in her brokenness. I want to say that she’s strong in the broken places, but she’s not there yet. She’s putting one foot forward, one day at a time, and giving what of herself she feels she has left to her job of saving somebody else’s son because she couldn’t save her own.

She isn’t ready to put her own life together, but she’s reaching for the point where she can at least put her work life back together, when someone tries to pull that rug out from under her. The questions that get raised about her partner’s death do not get resolved in this entry in the series, leading to a fascinating ending of a cliffhanger that isn’t a cliffhanger. This case is resolved, Harri’s problems are just beginning.

At the heart of this one, however, is the mystery. And not so much for the mystery itself, as much as I enjoyed getting caught up in the clues and in Harri and Li’s investigation. But it’s what she’s investigating that adds the compulsive factor. Because that investigation creates a portrait of Chicago politics that manages to read both as the corruption the way that popular imagination has painted it AND as the way that the city’s newspapers cover it, all at the same time. And that feels entirely too true to life.

What gave the case a very nice twist at the end was that, as much fun as the dive into the political muck was to read, the motive for the murders wasn’t part of that muck. Not that it wasn’t mucky and murky in its own right, but it wasn’t the usual muck when it comes to Chicago politics which made for a more satisfying resolution – at least for this reader.

Anytime that a story keeps me up until 3 in the morning, I want more than I have. Not more of this particular book, because it was the right story at the right length at the right time, but more like this or more of these characters or both. Definitely both.

If you have that same impulse after you finish Hide and Fall (and do read both because the series just keeps getting awesomer as it goes), if Detective Harriet Foster, with her damage and her dangerous investigations into the broken places and people of Chicago grab your attention, you might also want to check out Inspector Anjelica Henley and the dark and dirty parts of her London, because the two are very much sisters under the skin with their respective city’s grit under their nails. The first book in the Henley series by Nadine Matheson is The Jigsaw Man.

As I’ve already read the Henley series, I’ll have to look for something else to tide me over until the next book in one or the other appears. (That’s The Kill List for Anjelica Henley in September and Echo for Harriet Foster next December. Tracy Clark has another Chicago-set mystery series, the Cass Raines series, that begins with Broken Places. I always enjoy a trip to Chicago, so I’ll be giving that a look while I wait for Harriet Foster’s next investigation.

Review: Murder Crossed Her Mind by Stephen Spotswood

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Murder Crossed Her Mind by Stephen SpotswoodMurder Crossed Her Mind (Pentecost and Parker #4) by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Pentecost and Parker #4
Pages: 384
Published by Doubleday Books on December 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The latest action-packed installment in the Nero Award-winning Pentecost & Parker Mystery series follows Lillian and Will tracking the suspicious disappearance of a woman who might have known too much. From the author of Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin.
Vera Bodine, an elderly shut-in with an exceptional memory, has gone missing and famed detective Lillian Pentecost and her crackerjack assistant Willowjean "Will" Parker have been hired to track her down. But the New York City of 1947 can be a dangerous place, and there's no shortage of people who might like to get ahold of what's in Bodine's head.
Does her disappearance have to do with the high-profile law firm whose secrets she still keeps; the violent murder of a young woman, with which Bodine had lately become obsessed; or is it the work she did with the FBI hunting Nazi spies intent on wartime sabotage? Any and all are on the suspect list, including their client, Forest Whitsun, hotshot defense attorney and no friend to Pentecost and Parker.
The clock is ticking to get Bodine back alive, but circumstances conspire to pull both investigators away from the case. Will is hot on the trail of a stickup team who are using her name--and maybe her gun--for their own ends. While Lillian again finds herself up against murder-obsessed millionaire Jessup Quincannon, who has discovered a secret from her past--something he plans to use to either rein the great detective in . . . or destroy her.
To solve this mystery, and defeat their own personal demons, the pair will have to go nose-to-nose with murderous gangsters, make deals with conniving federal agents, confront Nazi spies, and bend their own ethical rules to the point of breaking. Before time runs out for everyone.

My Review:

It’s still 1947 in this fourth entry in the Pentecost and Parker series, not too long after the conclusion of the previous book, Secrets Typed in Blood, and still very much under the influence of those events.

Willowjean Parker, is private detective Lillian Pentecost’s right-hand woman, still a bit sensitive about her roots as a ‘cirky girl’ and still in a bit of mourning for the people she left behind when she ran away FROM the circus after running away TO that circus to escape her abusive father.

But she’s proud of her accomplishments as a licensed private detective, and embarrassed, chagrined and downright ashamed when she gets mugged by a couple of two-bit con artists working Coney Island, getting coshed with her own sap and losing her favorite purse with its IDs, keys, and brand new – and registered – gun when she breaks up what she believed was an attempted rape – only to get suckered into a situation that she really should have seen coming a mile away.

Which turns out to be a kind of metaphor for this whole case, as in her haste to cover up her own mess she falls right into an even bigger one – and very nearly loses her boss’ trust into the bargain.

It starts as a missing persons case, brought to Pentecost and Parker by their least favorite lawyer, Forest Whitsun. When Whitsun had Pentecost on the stand in their latest confrontation, he implied that she was not just physically incapacitated by her progressing multiple sclerosis, but mentally compromised into that very bad bargain.

Having him show up at their door as a prospective client, that he trusts their expertise enough for him to ask Pentecost to help him locate a missing friend, is rather a surprise. Although not nearly as much of a surprise as discovering that Whitsun has actual friends and that any of them are female and almost, sorta/kinda, mother-figures in a life that seems bereft of all emotional contacts.

That his friend was a hoarder is a shock to everyone’s system. That she was so famous for her prodigious memory that she was the ace-in-the-hole for a high-powered white shoe law firm AND was recruited by the FBI during the late war is an even bigger shock.

That Will finds her body hidden in the piles of detritus choking her apartment – not so much.

But the ensuing shenanigans raise questions about Pentecost’s history, bring up the specters of one of her greatest enemies and poke holes in a whole lot of people’s lives. Because it’s pretty clear that Vera Bodine’s death was related to some secret that someone felt they had to kill to keep.

But the woman knew so many that it’s hard for even Pentecost and Parker to determine which of the many, many motives surrounding this very secretive woman was the one that caused her death.

Before it causes, not a second woman to die, but a third. Or perhaps a fourth.

Escape Rating A++: Murder Crossed Her Mind was an actual, literally, honest-to-goodness one sitting read for me. I started it thinking I’d read for an hour or so before bed, and then just stayed there reading. And stayed. And STAYED. Until it was done nearly four hours later. Hence that A++ rating because I simply could not put this down until Pentecost and Parker knew everything and staged a great – but still slightly speculative – reveal at the end.

Even though they, and I, both know that those things work better on TV than they do in a real case. Then again, their lawyer-client has been compared to Perry Mason, so the TV-worthy ending fits right into the feel of, well, everything.

What continues to make this series shine is the voice of its narrator, ‘Will’ Parker, who serves as Lillian Pentecost’s right-hand and leg-woman, as well as, increasingly as the series goes on, her investigative partner.

What makes this series, let’s call it ‘inspired by’ by the classic Nero Wolfe series, is that while the stories are set in the immediate post-World War II period, and is clearly heading straight into the strait-jacket of the 1950s, Will’s voice feels more contemporary to us even as she observes the times in which she lives.

Which works because, while we know the date of the period Will is narrating for the story, we don’t know when she’s narrating it FROM. It’s obviously later, she’s clearly older, sadder and wiser, but the world changed a LOT from the late 1940s to, for example, the 1970s and 1980s. Will’s in her 20s when this story takes place, so the possibility that she’s looking back from 30 or 40 years on and is still alive to do so is quite plausible and allows her to be a bit outside her time.

What made the case work, both as a mystery and as an interesting story in its own right, was the mysterious figure of Perseverance Bodine at its heart. She had the gift of perfect recall, and that gift gave her a financially secure life while allowing her to work in the shadows. But as a woman, it was all too easy for her to be seen as a mere helper with a freakishly useful talent rather than as the mover and shaker she could have been – or perhaps should have been.

It was also a bit different because it was never about what enemies Vera might have made – because she didn’t. Instead, it was about which secret someone could least afford her to reveal, which made the investigation just that much more complicated.

I was enthralled from the very first page, and this one just didn’t let go of me until the end. I’ve been just as caught up in every single one of the Pentecost and Parker mysteries so far, from their very first outing in Fortune Favors the Dead, through Murder Under her Skin, Secrets Typed in Blood and now this latest entry in the series, which dammit ends on a ginormous cliffhanger. So there’d better be a FIFTH book in this fantastic series! I just hope we don’t have too long to wait…

Review: Generation Ship by Michael Mammay

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Generation Ship by Michael MammayGeneration Ship by Michael Mammay
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 608
Published by Harper Voyager on October 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this riveting, stand-alone novel from Michael Mammay, author of  Planetside,  the beginning of a new human colony must face tyrannical leaders, revolution, crippling instability, and an unknown alien planet that could easily destroy them all. In 2108, Colony Ship  Voyager  departed Earth for the planet of Promissa with 18,000 of the world’s best and brightest on board. 250 years and 27 light years later, an arrival is imminent. But all is not well. The probes that they’ve sent ahead to gather the data needed to establish any kind of settlement aren’t responding, and the information they have received has presented more questions than answers. It’s a time when the entire crew should be coming together to solve the problem, but science officer Sheila Jackson can’t get people to listen. With the finish line in sight, a group of crewmembers want an end to the draconian rules that their forebearers put in place generations before. However, security force officer Mark Rector and his department have different plans. As alliances form and fall, Governor Jared Pantel sees only one way to bring  Voyager ’s citizens together and secure his own a full-scale colonization effort. Yet, he may have underestimated the passion of those working for the other side... Meanwhile, a harsh alien planet awaits that might have its own ideas about being colonized. A battle for control brews, and victory for one group could mean death for them all. 

My Review:

“Space, the final frontier”…has an awful lot of, well, space, in it. But Star Trek promised that we’d navigate all that space at faster-than-light speed, better known as ‘warp’. Which is probably what FTL will be named if we ever figure out how to do it. Trek history said (says? will say?) that we’ll have it all figured out by 2063 – at least according to Star Trek: First Contact.

But reality is likely otherwise. At least so far as we know now, and seemingly as far as the engineers, designers and builders of the Colony Ship Voyager knew by the time it launched in 2108 – less than a century from our now.

(Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity implies that FTL travel is impossible for anything that has mass. Meaning humans. And spaceships. Even light is implied to be incapable of traveling faster than the speed of light.)

None of the above prevents humans from either wanting or needing to leave Earth and putting down roots – so to speak – among the stars. Even though the nearest planet we know of, at least so far – is Proxima Centauri b, four light-years away. The nearest likely habitable planet, again, that we know of so far, is Kepler-452b and it would take 1,400 years to get there.

Without FTL travel, space is big and vast and even potential ‘Class-M planets’ (again to use Star Trek terminology because Trek named everything) is too far away from Earth for conventional space travel to work.

The two most often used science fictional methods of interplanetary travel for colonization that work – often badly in fiction – with this dilemma are sleeper ships and colony ships. Generation Ship, as one can tell by the title, is a colony ship.

Colony ship stories have all sorts of dramatic possibilities because, while space may be vast and infinite, the world of the colony ship is relatively small and even claustrophobic – especially over a vast, generations-long, journey to a new home.

Also, humans are gonna human, no matter what circumstances they find themselves in.

Which leads us, by a bit of a roundabout, to the Colony Ship Voyager (Trek again!) on its 250 year journey from Earth to Promissa. A planet which may or may not live up to its promise even as it hoves into sight and reach.

While there’s a philosophical cliché that “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey”, in colony ship stories it’s not the journey, it’s the destination where all the dramatic tension comes into play. The journey, at least after the drama of the launch and the early years of settling in for the long haul, is mostly about keeping on keeping on as everyone adjusts to the new normal.

But the destination, or at least the increasing stress as the destination becomes all too real, represents a time of great change, as the life and routine that the ship has settled into is about to be overset by planetfall. Which may or may not be everything everyone hoped and dreamed way back when the first crew set off on their journey.

And will certainly upset the status quo. Life is going to be vastly different after the ship’s crew become planetary settlers. Whoever it is who has knowledge and power aboard ship may or may not have the skills it takes to be a leader on the ground. Which does not mean that the shipboard leaders aren’t going to do their level and even skullduggery best to remain powerful and privileged.

The story of Generation Ship is all about the jockeying and politicking and outright underhanded dealing that goes on as the Voyager’s probes are able to finally reach the ‘promised land’ and the end of the long journey is about to begin.

Unless, of course, Promissa itself has other ideas.

Escape Rating A++: In spite of the relatively small size of the Colony Ship Voyager, the final months of its long journey to Promissa contain a utterly riveting, terrifically complex and downright huge story that isn’t about the science of colony ships a quarter so much as it is about the political shenanigans of the humans aboard them.

It’s a roiling stew of “we have met the enemy and he is us” coming to a full boil in an atmosphere of “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, especially over time and covered by the slowly eroding illusion of “we’re all in this together” mixed with a heaping helping of “the greater good”.

At the center of the drama are a series of first-person perspectives from all over the ship, from the all-powerful but absolutely not all-knowing governor who is desperate to hang onto his power while cementing his legacy, to the over-ambitious security guard who is just so sure he’s smarter than everyone around him, to the reluctant leader of the not-so-loyal opposition to the scientist whose beloved science is telling her that they are not ready to make planetfall – no matter what the governor has manipulated people into believing. While behind the scenes an ace hacker/engineer sees a truth about their ship that no one is ready to believe or understand.

By seeing the situation from so many sides we’re able to get inside the life of the ship, AND the life on the ship, which are not nearly as much the same things as everyone believes. We’re watching a world come apart – even if that’s what was always supposed to happen. And it’s utterly fascinating as the players negotiate and maneuver themselves into a situation that is nothing like the first crew expected.

And it’s absolutely riveting every step of the way, even as it recalls several previous colony ship stories that wrestle with the same issues but take them down to the mat or to the planet in entirely different ways. If Generation Ship sounds fascinating to you, and I sincerely hope it does, you might want to also check out Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji, Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport, Mickey7 by Edward Ashton and, last but absolutely not least, the Pixar film WALL-E.

Review: Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Emergent Properties by Aimee OgdenEmergent Properties by Aimee Ogden
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction mystery
Pages: 126
Published by Tordotcom on July 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Emergent Properties is the touching adventure of an intrepid A.I. reporter hot on the heels of brewing corporate warfare from Nebula Award-nominated author Aimee Ogden.
A state-of-the-art AI with a talent for asking questions and finding answers, Scorn is nevertheless a parental disappointment. Defying the expectations of zir human mothers, CEOs of the world’s most powerful corporations, Scorn has made a life of zir own as an investigative reporter, crisscrossing the globe in pursuit of the truth, no matter the danger.
In the middle of investigating a story on the moon, Scorn comes back online to discover ze has no memory of the past ten days—and no idea what story ze was even chasing. Letting it go is not an option—not if ze wants to prove zirself. Scorn must retrace zir steps in a harrowing journey to uncover an even more explosive truth than ze could have ever imagined.

My Review:

When we first meet Scorn, ze is pretty much of a mess. A very determined mess, but a mess all the same. Ze has just lost over ten days of memory – along with ALL of zir backups. As ze is an autonomous AI, that shouldn’t even be possible. But as ze is an investigative reporter doing zir best to make zir mark by breaking a sensational story to get zir high-powered, highly intelligent, mega-corporation-owning mothers off zir back about zir’s career choices, it’s a tragedy in the making.

At the same time, in the best tradition of investigative reporters everywhere and everywhen, it’s also a sign that ze is on the right track to that story. Which means that ze is incapable of letting it go. And as a state-of-the-art AI, Scorn is capable of retracing his steps, both digital and physical, to get back what ze lost.

On the moon, which is where Scorn lost it the first time. Which is also the last place zir mothers want zem to go – considering Scorn’s last trip got zir memory wiped.

Emergent Properties is the story of Scorn’s journey back to where ze nearly lost zirself, dodging EMP pulses and drone attacks every step of the way, along the trail of a story that will either make or break zem.

Or both. Definitely both. In ways that Scorn never, ever expected – even though ze very much should have.

Escape Rating A++: I’ve been pushing this book at anyone willing to stand still for it for months. I read this one for a Library Journal review and fell completely in love, and don’t seem to have fallen out in the intervening months. To the point where a reread just now was like catching up with an old friend.

One of the things I loved about Scorn is that ze is pretty much Murderbot’s ‘brother from another mother’, even though neither identifies as or even has a gender. Which doesn’t change how much their snarkitude is in sync even if pointed in different directions.

Notice I didn’t say anything about either of them not having a mother, because Scorn certainly has two – both of whom are giving zem exactly the same kind of grief that mothers the world over give their newly adult children when those children are not living their parents’ dreams for them.

Mother may not always know best, but she always thinks she does, and Scorn is getting that times two. Which ze does zir best to ignore or delay or postpone dealing with, as so many of us do. At least until this time it bites zem in the ass – in multiple senses of the phrase – even if Scorn doesn’t always have an ass, depending on which carapace ze happens to be using at the present.

While Scorn is very much the character that carries the story, the places ze carries that story through are both fascinating and fantastic every step of the way.

A part of this reader wants to say that Scorn comes across as very human, because that’s our default paradigm. But like Murderbot, Scorn isn’t human and doesn’t want to be – no matter how much zir mothers hoped that ze would aspire to such.

And the whole idea that ze still must deal with zir human mothers and their human disappointment in zem is what makes Scorn so easy for human readers to identify with. Ze has mommy issues – and don’t we all?

But zir world is our future, and it feels plausible even as we get sucked into it. Human greed carried out through corporate political shenanigans is running the show. Independence for human colonies and autonomy for sentient, sapient, autonomous AIs are being spun into opposition instead of banding together to help each other. Because the corporations make more profits out of war than they do peace.

Scorn moves through zir world as an AI, not a fixed body in time and space. Ze uses bodies, but is not attached to or possessed by one, and it changes zir perspective in ways that go even beyond what we’ve already seen in John Scalzi’s Lock In, although there are some similarities. Scorn goes well beyond the ‘threeps’ in what ze does and how ze does it. It feels like a next step.

At the same time, Scorn’s emotional landscape is as fraught and confused as any human’s. Ze just processes it differently some of the time, and turns it off some of the time, but it is still recognizable and well within our empathetic parameters.

So I had an absolute blast reading about Scorn’s surprising Emergent Properties, was fascinated with zir world, and hope the author takes us back to zir and it sometime in the future!

Review: The Stars Undying by Emery Robin

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: The Stars Undying by Emery RobinThe Stars Undying (Empire Without End, #1) by Emery Robin
Narrator: Esther Wane, Tim Campbell
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Series: Empire Without End #1
Pages: 518
Length: 16 hours and 32 minutes
Published by Orbit on November 8, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this spectacular space opera inspired by the lives and loves of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, a princess stripped of her power finds control through an affair that could help regain her reign—perfect for readers of Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine.
Princess Altagracia has lost everything. After a bloody civil war, her twin sister has claimed not just the crown of their planet Szayet but the Pearl of its prophecy, a computer that contains the immortal soul of Szayet's god. Stripped of her birthright, Gracia flees the planet—just as Matheus Ceirran, Commander of the interstellar Empire of Ceiao, arrives in deadly pursuit with his volatile lieutenant, Anita. When Gracia and Ceirran's paths collide, Gracia sees an opportunity to win back her planet, her god, and her throne…if she can win the Commander and his right-hand officer over first.
But talking her way into Ceirran’s good graces, and his bed, is only the beginning. Dealing with the most powerful man in the galaxy is almost as dangerous as war, and Gracia is quickly torn between an alliance that fast becomes more than political and the wishes of the god—or machine—that whispers in her ear. For Szayet's sake, and her own, Gracia will need to become more than a princess with a silver tongue. She will have to become a queen as history has never seen before—even if it breaks an empire.

My Review:

The queen. The carpet. The conqueror. It’s an indelible image, even if it was fixed in the collective unconscious by a mistranslation of Plutarch combined with a desire for a salacious story rather than anything that might have happened in history. Several sumptuous movies cemented that image.

So it’s not exactly a surprise that this science fictionalized reimagining of the romance of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, while it doesn’t start with that scene, features it prominently. And makes it every bit as captivating and unforgettable in this story of two towering giants at the center of the rise and fall of an intergalactic empire as it was in the same circumstances of the world-spanning empire.

At first, and on the surface, The Stars Undying reads as a grand romance. And it definitely is that – even if neither of the protagonists begin their relationship thinking that’s where they are heading and what it’s all going to be about.

Altagracia is a disgraced princess leading a rebellion against her twin sister – who has just become the Queen of Szayet and the Oracle of their god, Alekso the Undying. We experience her side of this space opera from her first-person perspective so we begin the story thinking that we’re inside her head – even as she admits that she’s lying both to us and to herself as she sets out to overthrow her sister’s divine rule and take the crown for herself.

Which is where Matheus Cierran, the Commander of all the fleets and armies of the vast Empire of Ceiao, enters the picture. And Gracia enters his quarters rolled into a rug. Gracia conquers the conqueror – not so much with her beauty as with her wit and charisma – and he conquers her sister on her behalf.

As their romance spans the galaxy between Szayet and Ceiao, we see their universe from their alternating, first-person viewpoints, never quite sure who truly conquered whom, who is lying to whom, and whose intentions are the most righteous. While we watch them fall deeper in love with each other, and while both fail to recognize who their true enemies are – and fatally underestimate those enemies and each other.

Cleopatra and Caesar, (1866) painted by Jean-Leon Gerome
Cleopatra and Caesar, painted by
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1866)

Escape Rating A++: Because The Stars Undying is, most definitely, a reimagining of the relationship, both personal and absolutely political, between Cleopatra of Egypt and Julius Caesar, we do go into this story thinking that we know how it ends and even a bit of how it gets there. And just like Friday’s book, The Cleaving, that bit of foreknowledge does not keep the reader from frantically turning pages to see how it gets there.

In addition to the epic romance, and more important than that romance in the long run, The Stars Undying is also the story of the decline and fall of empire. As it begins, as it began, when Cleopatra rolled out of that rug – or more likely rose out of a sack – Rome was at the peak of its power. Just as Ceiao is when Gracia emerges from her carpet at Ceirran’s feet.

The thing about being at the peak of something is that from that highest point there is only one direction to go. Down. So this story is not about the crest of the peak but about the tip over it and into the decline that will inevitably follow – even if the principals can’t see it. Not yet anyway.

So the romance is how we get into this story, but that beginning takes us deeply into what one writer called “the romance of political agency” as we watch Gracia and Cierran jockey for power within their relationship and attempt to maneuver their way through and around the pitfalls of the densely factional political climate of Ceiao. An empire where the backstabbing never seems to end and Ceirran is always the target whether he recognizes it or not.

One of the fascinating things about the way that this story unfolds is just how tightly it gets wrapped around religion. Not any particular religion as we know it today, but religion and its seeming antithesis nevertheless. The Empire of Ceiao was founded on the basis of the disestablishment of ALL religions, which is carried to the point of being a religion unto itself.

Szayet, very much on the other hand, is not just a religiously backed monarchy but their religion is based on the idea that their god, Alekso Undying, lives on in an oracular artifact that is worn by each of his descendants as a symbol of their holiness and his godhood. It’s not even a myth. Gracia wears the Pearl and the spirit of Alekso within it does communicate with her frequently, often and always with disappointment in her and her actions. The only question in both the reader’s mind and Ceirran’s is whether the being she is communicating with is truly Alekso’s soul or merely his mind locked in a sophisticated machine.

That question, and both Ceirran’s and Ceiao’s reaction to any and all possible answers to it, turns out to hold the key both to his downfall and Gracia’s future in a way that surprises the reader and manages to seem inevitable at the same time. But then, all great leaders sow the seeds of their own destruction – at least in fiction.

The story in The Stars Undying reads like an unlikely amalgam of the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough, The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Elizabeth George, Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine and Engines of Empire by R.S. Ford. As a stew it shouldn’t work but most definitely does, combining the first-person perspective of the Memoirs with the deep dive into Roman history and politics of the McCullough series with the variations of the great empire not able to see or admit that it is past its prime in all three of the space opera series.

It’s not the stew that anyone would have expected but it’s absolutely glorious in its execution and now that I’ve read it I can’t help but wonder why no one got quite all the way here sooner. That the audiobook version that I listened to gave the two central figures, Gracia and Ceirran, their own separate, distinct and extremely well-acted voices was just icing on a very tasty cake.

(I had to switch to text near the end because I couldn’t bear to hear Gracia’s perspective on learning that Ceirran was gone in “her” voice, told from her internal, intimate, point of view. It would have been just too painful.)

That ending was so inevitable, based on the source material, that saying it happened does not feel like a spoiler. Howsomever, speaking of that source material, it is equally clear that the ending of The Stars Undying cannot possibly be the ending of the entire saga. This book, unbelievably the author’s debut novel, is listed as the first book in the Empire Without End duology. The second book in the duology is tentatively titled The Sea Unbounded and I can’t wait to read it whenever it appears. I might, maybe, possibly, have gotten over the book hangover from this book by then!

Review: Signal Moon by Kate Quinn + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
Review: Signal Moon by Kate Quinn + GiveawaySignal Moon: A Short Story by Kate Quinn
Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld, Andrew Gibson
Format: audiobook
Source: publisher
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, timeslip fiction, World War II
Pages: 57
Length: 1 hour and 22 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories, Audible Audio on August 1, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye comes a riveting short story about an impossible connection across two centuries that could make the difference between peace or war.

Yorkshire, 1943. Lily Baines, a bright young debutante increasingly ground down by an endless war, has traded in her white gloves for a set of headphones. It’s her job to intercept enemy naval communications and send them to Bletchley Park for decryption.

One night, she picks up a transmission that isn’t code at all—it’s a cry for help.

An American ship is taking heavy fire in the North Atlantic—but no one else has reported an attack, and the information relayed by the young US officer, Matt Jackson, seems all wrong. The contact that Lily has made on the other end of the radio channel says it’s…2023.

Across an eighty-year gap, Lily and Matt must find a way to help each other: Matt to convince her that the war she’s fighting can still be won, and Lily to help him stave off the war to come. As their connection grows stronger, they both know there’s no telling when time will run out on their inexplicable link.

My Review:

This story was so beautiful it just about broke me. It was gorgeous and glorious and heartbreaking all at the same time, and I was in tears at the end.

I want to say this is a timeslip story but that isn’t quite right. It’s more of a time-merging story, or a bit of technological SF sleight of hand story. It’s best to just say that it works. It all works marvelously, and let the how and why of it remain a bit nebulous.

After all, our two principals don’t completely understand the why of it themselves. They just know that it happened. And that it saved them both.

Lily Baines is a signal tech in Yorkshire in 1943, spending her days and nights with a Bakelite headset wrapped around her “bat-like” ears, listening for German signals. She’s a Petty Officer in the WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service), doing her bit for in a war that she’s entirely too afraid is being lost.

Late one shift, she picks up a signal from an American ship, broadcast in English, in the “clear”, detailing an attack on the ship by “Vampires”. An attack that results in the ship sinking with all hands after 42 minutes of harrowing transmission by the U.S. Naval signal tech, ST Matt Jackson, who gives the date as 2023.

While her superiors are certain that Lily has just been working too many days in a row without a break, Lily feels like she owes it to her fellow signal tech, the man she just heard narrate his own death, to try to help him. So she sends him a letter, a 1943-era radio, extra batteries, and a list of frequencies that she promises to listen on at a specific time every day.

There’s no science fiction involved in her package to the future. Her uncle is a solicitor and she contracts with his office to deliver the package to a certain room in a certain hotel in York on the day Matt said he checked in. Law offices do this all the time, just not necessarily for quite 80 years.

When Matt gets the radio, he’s sure it’s a prank, but he dials the frequency anyway. Even when Lily starts talking, he STILL thinks it’s a prank – at least until that night, when an event that she predicted comes true.

They have less than 24 hours to analyze the transmission that Matt hasn’t sent yet, in the hopes of figuring out what is about to go wrong so that he can prevent it. Or save his ship. Whatever it takes to prevent yet another war.

What they get is more than either of them ever bargained for. It’s enough – and it’s not nearly enough at all.

Escape Rating A++: Signal Moon is short and absolutely perfect in its length. It represents a very brief moment in time and needed to reflect that brevity. Also, it’s just so damn bittersweet – and appropriate in that bitter sweetness, that more would be just too much to take.

It’s that good.

But because of that short length, I was able to sit down with the audiobook and finish in one utterly absorbing and in the end completely heartbreaking listen. (If you have Amazon Prime you can get both the ebook and the audio as part of your Prime membership, and it’s so worth it to listen to the audio if you have a mere 82 minutes to occupy your hands while your mind wanders back to 1943 – and forward to OMG next year.)

The strength of this story is in the characters. The author sketches us a complete picture of Lily and her wartime service with just a bit of description and a whole lot of Lily’s internal monologue as she goes through her day pretending that everything is going to be alright even though she’s scared right down to her not-nearly-warm-enough fingertips that all is already lost.

While Matt’s more frank and frequently profane dialog, along with the desperation of his own internal monologue, gives the reader or listener a clear portrait of who he is and what drove him to become the person – and the officer – that he is on the brink of what could be – briefly – his very own war.

In the audiobook, the two characters are brilliantly voiced by their own narrators, Saskia Maarleveld for Lily and Andrew Gibson for Matt and they embody their characters beautifully. The audio would not have worked half so well with a single narrator. (Saskia Maarleveld is also the narrator for several of the author’s novels, including this year’s The Diamond Eye, which just moved up the towering TBR pile as a result.)

The ending of this story is inevitable. There’s just no other way this one works. But it’s easy to get so involved in their story that you just want it to have a different ending anyway. And that’s what broke me in the end. I knew what the end would be, but this was just one of those times where I really wanted a deus ex machina to step in and make that difference happen – even knowing how much I usually hate those kinds of endings. But it wasn’t, and it shouldn’t have been, meant to be.

Dammit.

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

Kate Quinn and Amazon Publishing are giving away a $50 Amazon Gift Card to one very lucky entrant on this tour!
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Review: Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Jade Legacy by Fonda LeeJade Legacy (The Green Bone Saga, #3) by Fonda Lee
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Green Bone Saga #3
Pages: 713
Published by Orbit on November 30, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Jade, the mysterious and magical substance once exclusive to the Green Bone warriors of Kekon, is now known and coveted throughout the world. Everyone wants access to the supernatural abilities it provides, from traditional forces such as governments, mercenaries, and criminal kingpins, to modern players, including doctors, athletes, and movie studios. As the struggle over the control of jade grows ever larger and more deadly, the Kaul family, and the ancient ways of the Kekonese Green Bones, will never be the same.
The Kauls have been battered by war and tragedy. They are plagued by resentments and old wounds as their adversaries are on the ascent and their country is riven by dangerous factions and foreign interference that could destroy the Green Bone way of life altogether. As a new generation arises, the clan’s growing empire is in danger of coming apart.
The clan must discern allies from enemies, set aside aside bloody rivalries, and make terrible sacrifices… but even the unbreakable bonds of blood and loyalty may not be enough to ensure the survival of the Green Bone clans and the nation they are sworn to protect.

My Review:

As the final book in the epic – but not necessarily epic fantasy – Green Bone Saga, the story here deals with resolving the past and turning towards the future. In other words, the legacy of the two rival Green Bone clans in Kekon; The Mountain and No Peak.

A legacy that both clans continue jockeying over and for every step of the way – until the bitter end of not one but two old tigers that we’ve watched fight for control through three marvelous books.

The story that began in Jade City centered on the hot war for the city of Janloon between the Mountain clan led by the master strategist Ayt Madashi and the Mountain’s former allies turned bitter enemies, the No Peak clan founded by the Kaul family and led in its current generation by the wartime chief, or Pillar as they are termed in Asian-inspired Kekon, Kaul Hilo with his sister Kaul Shae at his side as the business leader or Weather Man of the clan.

That Ayt Mada is the first female Pillar, while Kaul Shae is the first female Weather Man is part of the long struggle between the clans.

That hot war switches to a cold war in Jade War, as the two clans have become so large and control so much of their country that neither can manage to swallow the other. Instead they fight through foreign subsidiaries, mercenaries, and proxies.

By the time that Jade Legacy begins, that cold war has turned into a “slow war” with the Ayt and Kaul families on opposite sides of both local and international conflicts. They cooperate in small ways while backing up their international proxies with money, jade, and in the case of the Mountain, the drugs that allow non-Kekonese to master the Jade disciplines. The larger countries, the Republic of Espenia and Ygutan, believe that the Ayts and the Kauls are tributaries in their wars, when from the Kekonese and clan perspectives, both clans of Green Bones are using their allies instead.

The story of Jade Legacy takes place over a span of 20+ years, as Kaul Hilo and Ayt Mada mature and even begin to grow old as both adversaries and jade warriors. As the saying goes, “Jade warriors are young, and then they are ancient.” When the story began in Jade City, they were young, barely into adulthood, newly and unexpectedly the Pillars of their respective clans, still under the long shadow cast by their predecessors, the Spear and Torch of Kekon who threw out an attempted colonization by powers who thought they could not be defeated by barbarian savages.

Jade War is the story of both in their prime, while Jade Legacy is about the long, slow progression of Kekon in their wider world, and of the transition from their generation to the next as we see Hilo’s children and the children of his family and friends grow to take their places in the clan.

It’s an epic, uplifting and heartbreaking by turns. It’s a sprawling family saga, in the same way that The Godfather was a family saga. A story about multiple generations of a family, of people who do some very bad things for what they perceive or believe are good reasons. People who are often thought of as criminals by outsiders, and whom we feel for anyway. Deeply.

Escape Rating A++: This book, and this entire series, deserve all the stars. I picked this to be the last review of the year because I wanted to finish this year’s reading with a real bang of a winner, and Jade Legacy delivered all the highs and lows I could possibly have ever wanted.

I started with the audio on this, which was ,as usual, excellent. But I read a lot faster than I listen, and I desperately needed to know how this one ended so I finished in one epic, 5-hour reading binge. I still have the epic book hangover to go with that long binge followed by that bang of an ending.

As I look back on the whole thing, the Green Bone Saga feels like it’s Shae’s story. At the beginning, she’s on her way home from exile in Espenia to pay her respects to her dying grandfather, the old hero once known as the Torch of Kekon. In the wake of his passing, Kekon explodes, eventually leaving Shae as the first female Weather Man of her clan to her brother Hilo’s Pillar.

Shae is at the center of the whole saga. Hilo and Ayt Mada may grab all the attention in the foreground of the story as much of the action centers on the more active aspects of their feud, but Shae is always in the room where it happens – and is the cause of much of it happening. And in the end, Shae is the last one of her generation still standing. Even the formidable Ayt Mada has been brought low. Only Shae is left to tell their story. And I grieved with her at the ending of it all.

It began as a story about what happens to a family and a society after the revolution has been won. How do you keep the ideals alive in the second and third generations as the memory fades and the wider world seduces with new temptations and new shortcuts?

It ends as a story about moving forward into the future by setting aside the old grievances without leaving behind the old virtues.

Ultimately, the contest between the Mountain and No Peak was a war of differing perspectives on how to accomplish that feat. And the difference between them came down, not to a specific strategy or even a specific individual, but rather a contest between a leader who relied only on herself and accepted no vision and trusted no word other than her own – and a leader who was not afraid to gather the best and the brightest around himself, listen to them even when they disagreed with him, and let them do their damn jobs. One person’s vision of “the greater good” vs. the squabbling but ultimately unified vision of an entire family.

Watching them rise, and fall, and rise again is a journey very worth taking. If you have not yet had the pleasure, start with Jade City and be prepared for a wild, satisfying and heartbreaking ride. I envy you the journey.

Although the story of the Kaul family and the No Peak clan has come to a fittingly bittersweet ending, there is still one brief visit to Janloon to look forward to. The Jade Setter of Janloon, a prequel novella for the trilogy, will be out in the spring of 2022. And I’m glad because I’m not at all ready to let this family and this world go.