A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris

A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. HarrisWho Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr, #20) by C.S. Harris
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, regency mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #20
Pages: 384
Published by Berkley on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The gruesome murder of a prominent nobleman throws an already unsettled London into chaos in this electrifying new historical mystery by the USA Today bestselling author of What Cannot Be Said.
August 1816. England is in the grip of what will become known as the Year Without a Summer. Facing the twin crises of a harvest-destroying volcanic winter and the economic disruption caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British monarchy finds itself haunted by the looming threat of bloody riots not seen since the earliest days of the French Revolution. Amidst the turmoil, a dead man is found hanging upside down by one leg in an abandoned chapel, his hands tied behind his back. The pose eerily echoes the image depicted on a tarot card known as Le Pendu, the Hanged Man. The victim—Lord Preston Farnsworth, the younger brother of one of the Regent’s boon companions—was a passionate crusader against what he called the forces of darkness, namely criminality, immorality, and sloth. His brutal murder shocks the Palace and panics the already troubled populace.
Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, learns of the murder from a ragged orphan who leads him to the corpse and then disappears. At first, everyone in the dead man’s orbit paints Lord Preston as a selfless saint. But as Sebastian delves deeper into his life, he quickly realizes that the man had accumulated more than his fair share of enemies, including Major Hugh Chandler, a close friend who once saved Sebastian’s life. Sebastian also discovers that the pious Lord Preston may have been much more dangerous than those he sought to redeem.
As dark clouds press down on the city and the rains fall unceasingly, two more victims are found, one strangled and one shot, with ominous tarot cards placed on their bodies. The killer is sending a gruesome message and Sebastian is running out of time to decipher it before more lives are lost and a fraught post-war London explodes.

My Review:

One of the things I utterly adore about this series is the way that each book is firmly fixed in its time and place, and that that foundation in its there and then shows the exact opposite of ANY vision we might have in our heads about what the Regency period was like. Especially if that vision owes its glitter and sparkle to Bridgerton, Georgette Heyer or even Jane Austen.

Weymouth Bay with Approaching Storm. Painting by John Constable (1816)

This particular entry in the series shines a light in darker places than usual, as it takes place in the summer of 1816, which, basically, wasn’t. Not that the summers of 1817, 1818 and 1819 were all that summer-y either. Although the sunsets were spectacular for years afterwards.

What made the situation so much darker and chillier, as this book explores rather, well, darkly, is that they didn’t know WHY clouds and storms blotted out the sun for days and weeks on end. It’s not totally unreasonable for people to have thought the world was coming to an end.

Because they were freezing and starving and it seemed like it would never end.

Not that already weren’t entirely too many people starving and shivering because Britain’s post-Napoleonic War economy was a wreck. The war was over – YAY! BUT, the soldiers were demobilized and thrown back into the population without pensions. The government was going through a period of austerity – for everyone but themselves, of course – and jobs were scarce.

And the government – and so many of the upper classes – were just so certain that it was the fault of the poor themselves that they were poor, and if they were just forced to be good, upright citizens who knew their place and didn’t question their betters that conditions would miraculously improve.

(And doesn’t that sound so very familiar?)

So when Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, gets called to the sight of the gruesome murder of one of those upper class so-called reformers, it’s clear exactly which rocks he’s going to be turning over to find out whodunnit. Because he’s certain that whoever the killer might have been, it’s not going to be the easy solution that the Crown demands in order to, well, keep order among the lower classes while hoping to satisfy the upper classes that justice is being done.

Even if it isn’t. And won’t. Unless Devlin gets his hands dirty with yet another investigation that some members of his own family would prefer he left well enough alone. Even if that well enough isn’t well at all – and they know it.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve not been remotely coy about the fact that I love this series, and this entry absolutely did not change my mind one iota. Over the course of 20 books in 20 years – and counting – it just gets better and better.

Over the course of the series I’ve realized that I’m mostly here for the historical fiction aspects of the series. Not just the way that the author illuminates this time and place that we think we know, but also the way that we walk London’s streets with Devlin and feel the cobblestones under our own feet.

At the same time, the mystery is always important and not merely in the sense of figuring out both whodunnit and why it was done. Murder is a disruption to order – to the way things ought to be. The Regency period, with its incapacitated king and its overly self-indulgent regent who will be king, was a period where order was already disrupted. And that’s before one factors in the disruptions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Meanwhile, the seeds for the Industrial Revolution have already been sown, and revolt and rebellion are bubbling up from the so-called lower orders who have seen their disruptions and results in nearby France and in the far away but less bloody and more successful United States. Change is in the wind – even if that wind is not blowing the skies clear enough to grow crops.

The disruptions caused by murder in this series, particularly this murder, are intended to show what’s lurking in the depths that is usually covered over by government propaganda and social expectations.

Because the victim in this particular case was believed to be a ‘good’ if somewhat priggish man who was working for the ‘betterment’ of the country even if he was a bit overbearing about it all. But someone knows that facade was just that, a false front that they are determined to strip away. This is a fascinating case because the point of it is NOT to capture a villain, but to expose exactly how much of a villain the murder victim really was – and to uncover his confederates in that villainy.

Justice, such as it turns out to be in this case, has already been had. And this entry in the series is all the more interesting for its purposes to have been so turned around and yet resolved as satisfactorily as possible.

I was all in on this one from the very first page, and finished the story in a bit of a sad catharsis because I was glad to see it resolved but that resolve is equivocal in exactly the way that it should be and that was marvelous in its way.

One final note about this story. I’m surprised to have a readalike for this that is not historical fiction or mystery, but if you’re interested in the effects of the year without a summer, there’s an award winning science fiction short story, “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer, that deals with the effects of a similar situation on one small community and its lovely and hopeful in ways that make it a good follow up to Who Will Remember.

A+ #BookReview: Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff + Giveaway!

A+ #BookReview: Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff + Giveaway!Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy horror, Dark Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, horror
Pages: 336
Published by DAW on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

This cozy horror novel set in modern-day Toronto includes phenomenal characters, fantastic writing, and a queer romance—the perfect balance of dark and delightful
This stand-alone novel from the bestselling author of the Peacekeeper novels mixes the creepy with the charming for plenty of snarky, queer fun—for fans of T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, and Darcy Coates

Generations ago, the founders of the idyllic town of Lake Argen made a deal with a dark force. In exchange for their service, the town will stay prosperous and successful, and keep outsiders out. And for generations, it’s worked out great. Until a visitor goes missing, and his wealthy family sends a private investigator to find him, and everything abruptly goes sideways.
Now, Cassidy Prewitt, town baker and part-time servant of the dark force (it’s a family business) has to contend with a rising army of darkness, a very frustrated town, and a very cute PI who she might just be falling for…and who might just be falling for her. And if they can survive their own home-grown apocalypse, they might even just find happiness together.
Queer, cozy, and with a touch of eldritch horror mixed in just for fun, this is a charming love story about a small-town baker, a quick-witted PI, and, yes, an ancient evil.

My Review:

Lake Argen is NOT Toronto – in spite of what the blurb says. In fact, that’s kind of the point of the place, that it is DEFINITELY NOT Toronto. Because what happens there, and how it happens, and why it happens, wouldn’t be remotely possible in a big city like Toronto.

So that’s precisely where Lake Argen is – remote from Toronto – or pretty much anywhere else. It’s a five and a half hour drive north of Toronto – not accounting for Toronto or Sudbury traffic along the way. Lake Argen is tiny and remote and near enough to Timmins, Ontario that it’s easy to guess where it would be on any map.

But of course, real maps, and real mapping, and pretty much anything of the outside world tend to ignore Lake Argen. Because that’s exactly the way that the people and the creatures in and around Lake Argen, the lake and the town and the silver mine that keeps them both going, want it to be and make sure it stays.

There’s something there that makes certain that anyone who DOES manage to find Lake Argen forgets the place and anything that happened there the moment they leave. Which is where the story begins, as a pretentious little rich boy has managed to overcome all of the town’s protections to sacrifice himself at one of the town’s sacred spots at dawn on the Summer Solstice. The body – or at least the locals presume it’s a body – has been whisked away by the sacrifice, into The Dark. Which is a real thing and not just a euphemism for disappearing a body. Travis Brayden has been sucked into elsewhere – and only Cassidy Prewitt is as worried about that as everyone should have been about exactly what that might mean.

In the near term it’s going to bring out the Ontario Provincial Police, because pretentious rich dudes have equally pretentious rich families who are going to demand to know what happened to their spoiled scions. The police can be persuaded – read that as magically induced – to believe that the idiot got eaten by a bear.

It happens. It really does. Maybe not quite as often as people think it does, but it does. It’s plausible enough to close the case file for the cops. It’s even happened before near Lake Argen, so it works all the better for being an established possibility.

But families down in Toronto can’t be charmed the way that the OPP visiting Lake Argen can. Brayden’s grandmother wants answers. So she hires, not a PI as the blurb says, but a currently unemployed teacher who needs the money badly enough to not question the dubious job she’s been given.

To go to Lake Argen, poke around for a week, and come back with what she’s learned so she can give the poor, dear, boy’s old granny some closure.

And if you believe that I have a Bigfoot to sell you. Not literally, not even in Lake Argen. But there’s certainly something behind the town’s fascinating history, near-complete isolation and surprising prosperity. Something that the town is determined to keep from any potential incomers until they’ve earned the town’s trust.

Which Melanie Solvich really shouldn’t, but somehow does anyway in spite of the shadiness of her mission. Or at least the trust of Cassidy Prewitt, to her confusion, delight and heartbreak.

Which is when the town of Lake Argen reveals its true colors, and things get really, really interesting – and very, very dark indeed.

Escape Rating A+: Direct Descendant was everything I hoped for from this author, which is what got me here in the first place.

It didn’t matter that this is being marketed as horror. I didn’t even notice when I picked it up. All I cared about was the author. I’ve loved so many of the stories she’s written, including but absolutely not limited to the Vicki Nelson/Blood Price/Tony Foster series and especially the Confederation/Valor/Peacekeeper  series.

I was expecting this to be more Blood Price, at least in the sense that I was expecting urban fantasy – and that’s actually close to what I got. (Confederation/Valor/Peacekeeper is SF and the cover of this book was enough to tell me we weren’t going to go there. Not that I’d mind, you understand, not at all, if the author did go back there because that series was AWESOME.)

Direct Descendant turned out to be awesome as well, just not in the same way. Which is even better.

This is one of those stories that is best described through the book blender – and it’s going to take a big blender to fit everything in order for this to be what comes out. The blurb is right about T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, and Darcy Coates being part of the mix, but I’d personally also throw in Jennifer Thorne’s Lute, Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House, Anne Bishop’s World of the Others – because The Dark is certainly Other with a capital O – along with Hazel Beck’s Witchlore and even a touch of Annelise Ryan’s Monster Hunter Mysteries. (If you’re looking for readalikes, those are ALL hints.)

The story sits right at the crossroads where horror and dark fantasy meet and nod warily at each other, while urban fantasy leans against a fencepost and gives both of them a bit of side-eye.

How horrifying the horror is depends on how one sees The Dark – and yes, that’s capitalized. The Dark is certainly not good, but it’s not really EVIL, either. It’s OTHER, and its motivations and morals are its own based on its own world which is not ours.

That doesn’t mean that humans haven’t and won’t do TERRIBLE and EVIL things to bargain with it, serve it, or attempt to conquer it. The history of Lake Argen as well as its current, totally anomalous, health and prosperity, are all direct results of a group of humans doing something really evil to get The Dark’s attention. An attention that their descendants still benefit from.

A more benign method of getting The Dark’s attention might have worked equally as well, but that’s not the kind of people the Founders were, so that’s not what they tried. And not that they, personally, didn’t get exactly what their methods deserved while their descendants reap the benefits.

What tips the scale, at least for this reader, over into urban fantasy or even, believe it or not, cozy fantasy, is the way that everyone in town is determined to do their duty, serve the town and make a real and really supportive community. It’s a truly lovely place – if you can stand the weather and the isolation and the generally creepy vibe. But most of the time, the weather is the town’s biggest problem by a considerable margin.

The romance between Cassidy and Melanie, while it is inevitable, is also utterly adorable. And it’s the perfect vehicle for explaining just how things work in Lake Argen AND finally getting to the bottom of what’s threatening the town. That the eldritch horror who brings the warning is also the cutest little thing ever described in the pages of a “horror” story puts an exclamation point on just how cozy this horror/fantasy really is – especially when it’s his nagging that finally saves the day. Or night. Or just Lake Argen’s symbiotic relationship with The Dark.

~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

As you can see from the above review, I LOVED Direct Descendant – and it’s far, far, far from the first time that I have fallen hard for this author’s work. Which makes the works of Tanya Huff a perfect candidate for one of this year’s Blogo-Birthday Celebration Week giveaways.

Therefore, on this the FOURTH day of this year’s celebration, today’s giveaway is the winner’s choice of ANY book by Tanya Huff in any format, up to $30 (US) which should be enough to get Direct Descendant if you’re looking for either a terrific introduction OR you’re a fan like me and you’ve already got everything else!

Good luck with today’s giveaway and remember that there’s more to come!

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A+ #BookReview: Twice as Dead by Harry Turtledove

A+ #BookReview: Twice as Dead by Harry TurtledoveTwice as Dead (City of Shadows #1) by Harry Turtledove
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: alternate history, fantasy, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: City of Shadows #1
Pages: 341
Published by Caezik SF & Fantasy on March 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Rudolf Sebestyen is missing, and Marianne Smalls is involved in an illicit affair with the shady Jonas Schmitt. Both cases converge when Dora Urban, Rudolf’s beautiful and mysterious half-sister, and Lamont Smalls, Marianne’s suspicious husband, hire Jack Mitchell, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking private investigator. Dora wants Jack to uncover what happened to her brother, while Lamont seeks proof of his wife’s infidelity.
But Dora is a vampire, in a city teeming with creatures of the night.
As Jack dives deeper, he discovers that both cases are linked to vepratoga—a dangerous new drug spreading through Los Angeles. Twice as Dead is brimming with vampires, wizards, zombies and zombie dealers, the Central Avenue jazz scene, an exclusive after-hours club, adultery, a New England ghost who prefers Southern California’s warmer clime, corrupt cops and politicians, spying rats, and a smart-mouthed talking cat.
When Jack’s home is burned to the ground, the strands of his investigations culminate in a showdown at a tire factory, where even the reliefs on the walls are not what they seem. In this unique noirish urban fantasy set in postwar Los Angeles, Jack finds more adventure, danger, and romance than he ever imagined—and learns that success may come at too high a price.

My Review:

The story begins the way all the best hard-boiled, noir stories begin, with a private detective in his down-at-heel and behind-on-rent office in the less salubrious part of town waiting for either the phone to ring, for someone to knock at the door, or for his willpower to resist the bottle in his desk drawer to run dry. Only one of those three is ever a frequent occurrence.

The knock on the door is followed by the entrance of a mysterious woman with a sob story, a need for his professional services and a whole lot of secrets she’s not planning to share unless she has to. He knows she’s likely to be more trouble than she’s worth – in more ways than one – but he can’t resist her siren song OR the temptation of the mystery she represents.

The ‘real’ Angels Flight, Los Angeles, CA 1955

It’s an opening straight out of Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep)  or Easy Rawlins (Devil in a Blue Dress), but this isn’t exactly our Los Angeles. Welcome to the City of Shadows, where the government is corrupt, the police are on the take, zombies clean the streets, vampires have their own neighborhood in the midst of the city districts filled with other so-called marginal populations and there’s a new drug on the streets that can even get the undead higher than the literal Angel’s Flight over Bunker Hill.

A real angel, an angel who has been ferrying passengers up that hill on his own wings since LONG before the Spanish missionaries were brought to meet him.

Private investigator Jack Mitchell might finally become solvent if the three cases that arrive at his door all get solved and all pay their bills – as rare as that combination has been in Jack’s experience. Lamont Small’s wife is having an affair. Clarice Jethroe’s husband is missing. So is Dora Urban’s half-brother.

Initially, the only thing the three cases have in common is that law enforcement isn’t going to help and any other PI is going to show these potential clients the door without listening to them. Lamont Smalls and Clarice Jethroe – and their respective spouses – are black. Dora Urban is a vampire, and so is her half brother.

Jack Mitchell, mixed-race enough to ‘pass’ in either direction, and all too aware of who ‘sees’ him, who doesn’t and what it means to walk that narrow line, is their only hope.

If one of the three cases doesn’t get him killed before, or after, they intersect. Unless Dora bleeds him dry first.

Escape Rating A+: I wasn’t expecting this at all. I wasn’t expecting Twice as Dead to be SO DAMN GOOD. I really wasn’t expecting a story that reads like the very best ‘Old Skool’ urban fantasy with a protagonist who could have hung out with Philip Marlowe, Easy Rawlins or Dan Shamble (Death Warmed Over) with ease even though Mitchell would be wondering the whole time whether Marlowe and Rawlins would see him for who he was (Rawlins almost certainly yes, Marlowe maybe not) while zombie PI Shamble would have creeped Mitchell out down to the bone.

I expected to like this. I like urban fantasy very much, and you just don’t see a lot of it these days, especially urban fantasy that doesn’t fall over the line into paranormal romance. Which this doesn’t, if only because Dora Urban doesn’t believe that vampires are capable of the feeling.

In fact, the one and only complaint I have with this book is the cover. It’s really cheesy, and Dora Urban wouldn’t be caught dead – pardon me, as a vampire she would say finished – in that get up. She’s way classier than that. And this book deserves something better.

What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with this story from beginning to end, setting, characters, mystery, alternate history, and absolutely ALL, even more than Mitchell thinks he’s fallen for Dora.

Then again, he’s quite possibly going to discover that he’s been a complete fool in a later book in this series – while I’m certainly NOT. This was GOOD. Downright EXCELLENT. If the subsequent books live up to this series opener I’m going to be one very happy reader.

(In case you can’t tell, I’m having a difficult time getting to the meat of this thing because I had such a good time with it. Everything keeps turning to ‘SQUEE!’)

I’m not sure whether what first dragged me so deeply into this story was the characters or the setting. Actually I do know the first thing. Mitchell talks to his cat, Old Man Mose – and Mose talks back. I got teased by the question of whether Mose was really talking or whether Mitchell was putting words in his mouth – as people who are owned by cats often do.

Because that question led immediately to two others – just how magical is this alternate post-WW2 Los Angeles, followed by the question about how big those alternatives are and in exactly what ways.

And then there’s Mitchell himself, who is so very much in the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe/Easy Rawlins hard-boiled detective mode, but with the nod to Marlowe and Rawlins because they both operated in our LA during the same time period that Mitchell does in his.

The cases Mitchell is confronted with combine the classics – a missing husband, a cheating wife, a missing brother who was clearly mixed up in something illegal and might have deserved whatever happened to him – which his sister doesn’t want to reveal because she knows damn well that he probably had it coming.

Then it spirals out into the differences. Two of his clients are black, and both his clients and himself acknowledge that the color of their skin means that they can only get help from one of their own, and that reaching out to the cops will only bring more trouble. While vampire Dora knows the cops don’t want to deal with her kind any more than she wants to deal with theirs – and that whatever her brother was in up to his neck was both ill-advised and illegal. Of course, trouble finds all of them anyway or this story wouldn’t exist.

Downtown Los Angeles ca 1950

What captivated me was the careful way in which this both was and was not Los Angeles as our own history knew it. At first, the reader believes they can place this story in time as well as location. It’s five years after the war in which Mitchell served. And that war was analogous to World War II, but it wasn’t exactly the same and is never called that, and neither were the opposing forces ever referred to as Nazis, but rather a name that translates to swastika. And they had sorcerers on their side. But then, so did the Allies.

There are other references that let the reader feel comfortable that this is post-World War II, but jazz musicians ‘Bird’ and ‘Lady Day’ are never referred to by their full names as we know them. So they might be, they might not exactly be, and we might or might not be further down the other leg of the trousers of time than we thought.

(I expected this part of the story to be marvelous because alternate history is what this author is award-winningly famous for. I just wasn’t expecting to see this depth of craft in a story that many will assume is ‘light’ entertainment. And I should have. If you are interested in alternate history and haven’t read Harry Turtledove, go forth and begin immediately because he’s awesome at it whether you agree with the choices he makes or not.)

I just settled in for the marvelous ride as Mitchell starts out with those seemingly common cases that in the best hard-boiled mystery fashion slowly congealed into a single case. An investigation that zigzagged from robbery to illicit drugs to dangerous magical experiments and landed in the machinations of an evil corporation secretly controlled by ancient gods who resorted to the most arcane method possible to silence any inconvenient enemies.

Considering how much trouble Mitchell is making for them, it’s a fate that he fears for himself and all his friends and associates – including the cat! – unless he can put together the right crew to fight back, not with knives and bullets – but on the magical plane.

Twice as Dead is the first book in the City of Shadows series, so clearly someone gets out of this story alive. Or at least, not dead. Or in the same state they went into it, if not a bit better. But the ending is just as clearly the start of something that goes with no good deed being unpunished, and this reader absolutely cannot wait to find out what that punishment is going to be.

A+ #BookReview: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison

A+ #BookReview: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine AddisonThe Tomb of Dragons (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #3) by Katherine Addison
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, fantasy mystery
Series: Cemeteries of Amalo #3, Chronicles of Osreth #4
Pages: 352
Published by Tor Books on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Thara Celehar has lost his ability to speak with the dead. When that title of Witness for the Dead is gone, what defines him?
While his title may be gone, his duties are not. Celehar contends with a municipal cemetery with fifty years of secrets, the damage of a revethavar he’s terrified to remember, and a group of miners who are more than willing to trade Celehar’s life for a chance at what they feel they’re owed.
Celehar does not have to face these impossible tasks alone. Joining him are his mentee Velhiro Tomasaran, still finding her footing with the investigative nature of their job; Iäna Pel-Thenhior, his beloved opera director friend and avid supporter; and the valiant guard captain Hanu Olgarezh.
Amidst the backdrop of a murder and a brewing political uprising, Celehar must seek justice for those who cannot find it themselves under a tense political system. The repercussions of his quest are never as simple they seem, and Celehar’s own life and happiness hang in the balance.

My Review:

Once upon a time, I picked up the first book in this series because its central character, Thara Celehar, was instrumental in enabling The Goblin Emperor Maia to ascend his throne – alive and in one piece.

The Goblin Emperor is a story of high-stakes political drama and low-places skullduggery, the battle of a reviled outsider to assume the ultimate insider’s position as Emperor. Which he does, in part thanks to Celehar.

But Celehar himself is not a political operative. He’s not even an insider of the religious hierarchy that he himself inhabits as a prelate of the deity Ulis, and more importantly in his calling as a Witness for the Dead.

A calling which has gifted him with the ability to literally speak to the spirits of the recently departed, to help them pass on by carrying out their final wishes, by getting justice for those who have been wronged by the ones they left behind – and by, if necessary, forcing the spirits that have refused to leave to GO.

But in the previous book, The Grief of Stones, in the process of sending on a ghoul who has refused all previous attempts to get it to cross over, Celehar achieves his aim, stops the series of murders that the ghoul has perpetrated – but loses his gift in the trauma.

As this story opens, Celehar is reckoning with that loss of purpose, as he does not know what to do with himself without his duties. He’s also more than a bit worried about his living situation, as his income depends on him doing a job he literally no longer has the ability to perform.

While this uneasy situation settles – even if Celehar doesn’t – his superior in the temple hierarchy has given him an assignment as a sort of ecclesiastical troubleshooter in the city he once served.

The thing about Celehar, as modest and utterly self-effacing as he is, is that he’s an excellent troubleshooter because he’s such a magnet for trouble that it can’t resist finding him no matter what duty he’s ostensibly performing. Which is precisely what happens in The Tomb of Dragons, as in the midst of carrying out his duties to his archprelate he is kidnapped and literally tossed into a witnessing that is so deep and so vast it has the potential to topple the empire itself.

Thara Celehar has vowed to witness for 192 murdered dragons before the Emperor himself. Unless, of course, Celehar gets murdered first.

Escape Rating A+: I’m in a bit of a conundrum, as this series FEELS – emphasis on FEEL – like a cozy fantasy mystery even though the things that happen – especially the murders and the politics and the political murders – aren’t all that cozy. I think it’s that Thara Celehar is a very cozy and comfortable sort of person – in spite of just how uncomfortable he often is within himself.

I think that Celehar is what makes the series feel so cozy because he’s honestly just going about his day, doing his job, living his small life. It’s just that the way he does his very best to get his tasks done – no matter how seemingly mundane they are at the outset, feels safe and comfy because that’s what he’s looking for.

Even though, as this story begins, he’s really worried about what will happen to him if his calling doesn’t come back. So we feel for him.

But as he goes about his day and his work and getting dragged out of his rooms by his friends who won’t let him wallow by himself, things just seem to happen to him. Often big, huge, empire-shattering things. Nearly always in spite of himself.

As much fun as it is watching Celehar navigate ecclesiastical bureaucracy and 50 years of dead red tape – and it is surprisingly absorbing and, well, comforting – the center of this story is the case that he is literally dropped into, where he’s pushed down a mineshaft and ends up witnessing for all those dead dragons.

The initial circumstances are harrowing, but it’s the way that Celehar handles those circumstances that literally and figuratively calls back to his small but significant contribution to The Goblin Emperor – as well as bringing the emperor himself, Edrehesivar, back to the story in person.

The dragons’ case is groundbreaking, heartbreaking, and potentially as deadly for Celehar as it has already been for the dragons themselves. The easy thing would be for Celehar to pretend his conversation with the dead dragon never happened – but his conscience and his honor won’t let him do that.

It’s his quiet courage, his need to do the right thing, that gives this story both its tension – as that decision is contested on all sides – and its heart and soul as he perseveres in spite of the forces arrayed against him.

That his steadfastness is rewarded made The Tomb of Dragons the perfect ending to The Cemeteries of Amalo series. But if it turns out that this is not an ending after all, this reader would be thrilled to return to the world of The Goblin Emperor with Thara Celehar again. And again.

A+ #BookReview: Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill

A+ #BookReview: Greenteeth by Molly O’NeillGreenteeth by Molly O'Neill
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, historical fantasy, retellings
Pages: 304
Published by Orbit on February 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Beneath the still surface of a lake lurks a monster with needle-sharp teeth. Hungry and ready to pounce. Jenny Greenteeth has never spoken to a human before, but when a witch is thrown into her lake, something makes Jenny decide she’s worth saving.
Temperance doesn’t know why her village has suddenly turned against her, only that it has something to do with the malevolent new pastor. Though they have nothing in common, these two must band together on a magical quest to defeat the evil that threatens Jenny’s lake and Temperance’s family – as well as the very soul of Britain.

My Review:

This is a book that I came into with no idea of what I was getting into. I had the blurb but that wasn’t much – or rather I didn’t glean all that much from it. Going in, I knew a whole lot more about the witch, Temperance, than I did about the titular narrator, Jenny Greenteeth. That this is the author’s OMG fantastically excellent and totally wonderful DEBUT meant that there wasn’t much in the way of previous work to look at, either.

But I was captivated from the very first page, when we meet Jenny Greenteeth under the lake near the tiny village of Chipping Appleby – and Jenny meets the witch Temperance Crump after she finds the woman weighted down with chains UNDER Jenny’s lake. From Jenny’s perspective, Temperance has obviously been accused of witchcraft. Equally obvious, the accusation is correct as Temperance is trying desperately to hang on to the air bubble she’s conjured so that she can survive this ordeal.

Little do both Jenny and Temperance know that their ordeal has barely begun.

Jenny rescues the witch – because she really doesn’t want witch corpses – or honestly ANY corpses – littering her pristine lake. AND because she’s lonely. Especially because she’s lonely even if she can’t quite let herself admit it.

Temperance allows herself to be rescued – because she’s panicked and desperate and seemingly doesn’t have much of a choice. But even in her panic and desperation – she does. She could let her fear override what little sense anyone would have while drowning at the bottom of a lake after the epic betrayal by everyone in her village. Or she could trust in the one being who is trying to help her – in spite of Jenny’s truly frightening appearance.

Considering that Temperance has just been condemned to death by a group of people just like her who have known her all of all of their lives, trusting in the kindness of a stranger who is really, truly strange is a hell of a leap of faith.

But she does reach out and Jenny reaches back and together they reach forward to someone who can help them take down a much, much bigger problem than either of them ever imagined.

So Temperance the witch and Jenny Greenteeth bargain with the goblin Brackus Marsh and together they form an unlikely ‘fellowship’ indeed. A fellowship that, just like the more famous such company in a much bigger story, goes on a magical quest to banish a great evil by taking a walk through some very dark places indeed.

That, in the end, they discover an even greater magic that elevates their quest and their story into a legend that is even more magical than they – and the reader – ever imagined.

Escape Rating A+: Greenteeth turned out to be an absolute delight of a historical fantasy, mixing a bit of myth and a bit of magic into a lovely story of found friendship and sisterhood.

At first it combines the relatively minor myths of the Jenny Greenteeths and other such creatures with the true but terrible history of the persecution of women who refused to stay in the place society had decreed for them through false accusations of witchcraft.

And I honestly thought the story was going to be about that juxtaposition – about the magic of the world, magic like the Jennies and the Fae Courts – going out of the world in the face of increased population and rational thinking while at the same time false accusations of witchcraft were being thrown around willy-nilly.

Then the story started developing layers – and I started recognizing the layers that had been there from the beginning.

I was barely familiar with Jenny Greenteeth – and mostly from T. Kingfisher’s excellent Thornhedge. But there are Jennies underneath a lot of fantasy if you can catch them out of the corner of your eye – like the grindylows in Harry Potter and the ‘Red Jennies’ in Dragon Age as well as more than few actual Jennies keeping an eye on some of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children. There are also Jenny-like creatures in many, many mythologies around the world. Stick your face in any pond, anywhere, and there’s probably a Jenny lurking somewhere under the reeds.

So Greenteeth turned into a story about sisterhood and found family among the unlikeliest creatures, a story about the magic going away, and a story about a woman reclaiming her life, her village and her family with the help of some very unusual friends.

And then it went down into the dark of a dangerous magical quest, the last gasp of powers that are fading fast and set them and itself against an evil that plans to swallow the world. Then it went to a place out of a bigger and brighter legend entirely and I was left gasping at the end in awe and relief.

If Thornhedge and Spear by Nicola Griffith had a book baby it would be Greenteeth – and I wasn’t expecting that combination AT ALL. But it was utterly, fantastically, wondrous and I adored every page of it. I hope you will too.

That this is the author’s DEBUT novel is completely amazeballs. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next, because whatever it is, I feel like I’m already ready to set out on the journey.

A+ #BookReview: Swordheart by T. Kingfisher

A+ #BookReview: Swordheart by T. KingfisherSwordheart by T. Kingfisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, romantasy
Series: World of the White Rat #3
Pages: 448
Published by Bramble Romance on November 27, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The delightful charm of The Princess Bride meets the delicious bodyguard romance of From Blood and Ashin this cozy fantasy romance from New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher

Halla has unexpectedly inherited the estate of a wealthy uncle. Unfortunately, she is also saddled with money-hungry relatives full of devious plans for how to wrest the inheritance away from her.

While locked in her bedroom, Halla inspects the ancient sword that's been collecting dust on the wall since before she moved in. Out of desperation, she unsheathes it―and suddenly a man appears. His name is Sarkis, he tells her, and he is an immortal warrior trapped in a prison of enchanted steel.

My Review:

Swordheart begins the way that a LOT of T. Kingfisher’s fantasies seem to begin, with a woman coming to the unwelcome realization that the only way she’s going to get out of the trouble she has found herself in through absolutely no fault of her own is to put on her ‘big girl panties’ and deal with it.

And that she doesn’t have nearly as much time as she’d like to locate those panties – because she hasn’t seen them in ages. If ever. Or in Halla’s case, whether she has ever owned a pair in her whole, entire life.

What she does have is a really big problem. Lucky for her, she has an equally big sword to cut through that problem. And thereby, as the saying goes, hangs a tale. And, quite probably and totally deservedly, more than a few miscreants along the way.

This shouldn’t be the beginning of an adventure story, but it is. Not because Halla sees herself as having EVER been built for adventures, but because that’s what happens to mousey women with overbearing relatives who have just come into possession of sizable estates due to the largesse of dead relatives who believe they are doing a ‘good thing’. And they are, or they would be, if the world were a bit more fair or if the rest of their remaining family were a bit less grasping.

But that’s NEVER the case, is it?

Halla has been keeping house for her great-uncle-by-marriage for over a decade. The man was a querulous old bastard, but he took her in when his nephew, her husband, died young and left her penniless. He gave Halla purpose, food and board and lodging, and in return she kept his house until he died and he left her his ENTIRE estate. Not that she hadn’t earned it, not that she didn’t deserve it, but her greedy, grasping, overbearing aunt-by-marriage and said aunt’s utterly obedient and utterly-under-his-mother’s- thumb son (with clammy hands) had plans for the old man’s property that can still be brought within their grasping grasp by marrying Halla to her cousin. Not that she’ll survive long after that.

Which is where the sword comes in. A sword that Halla intends to plunge through her own heart – if she can just figure out how to make THAT work. But first she has to draw the sword.

And then she has to figure out what to do with the MAN who appears in her room in a flash of light to Halla’s complete and utter embarrassment – and his. Because she’s half naked to get her clothing out of the way of the plunge and his heart has just started beating – for her.

Escape Rating A+: Swordheart was just so damn much fun. I want to cackle in glee at the very thought of this story. In fact, I still am. This turned out to be one of those books that I read in a day and didn’t even care that I was shedding used tissues by the score because I had a cold. I didn’t even care about the cold. I was just gone and really happy to be so.

Halla reminds me so, so much of some of the author’s other protagonists, especially Hester Chatham from A Sorceress Comes to Call. Who, in turn, seemed like the sister from another mister to Miss Percy from Quenby Olson’s, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons, meaning that if you liked any one of these three you’re going to love the others just as much.

I’ve also read several other books about swords either with a person inside or swords with minds of their own. The first I remember is the sword Need from the Vows and Honor trilogy in Mercedes’ Lackey’s long-running Valdemar series. So the idea isn’t new, exactly, but it’s certainly used to marvelous effect in Swordheart.

Also, Swordheart itself isn’t exactly new. If it sounds familiar, that’s because the book was originally published in 2018 with a considerably more understated cover. Putting it in front of readers again with THIS gorgeous cover is fan-damn-tastic.

Because the book is just so good and so much fun. I adored Halla – not so much at the beginning when she seems to be a bit of a doormat – but once she takes her life into her own hands – AT LAST – she’s terrific. Because she’s scared and has doubts and admits that she doesn’t know what she’s doing and is WAY outside her comfort zone but moves forward anyway.

Halla should be the patron saint of ‘fake it ‘til she makes it’ in the World of the White Rat.

While the adventure that Halla and Sarkis – the man trapped in the sword – find themselves undertaking is terrific, it’s the romance that makes this book sing. Not just because it’s understated – although it is – and not even because this book stands firmly on both its literary feet in that the fantasy would hold up without the romance and the romance would hold up without the fantasy. It’s that the romance feels oh-so-real and doesn’t shy away from the problems inherent in their relationship.

AND of course because it’s a romance between people who have years and mileage and baggage and fall in love not in spite of all of that but because of all that. They are the right people for each other NOW, where they might not have been at any previous time in either of their lives.

That this is now grouped into a whole entire series that begins with the Clocktaur War series in Clockwork Boys, pulls in this lovely story of Swordheart and moves right along into the marvelous Saint of Steel series (Paladin’s Grace, etc.) just makes the depths of the worldbuilding so much richer and deeper. I loved that we got yet another terrific character from the Temple of the White Rat in this one, and that it’s the LAWYER of all people who ends up saving the day for everyone.

(I have to confess that I sincerely hope that one of these days the author gets around to telling Bishop Beartongue’s story. Because she’s fascinating and OMG that has to be a doozy.)

In short, although I seldom am, I loved Swordheart and my only regret is that I didn’t read it sooner. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Clockwork Boys rapidly ascending the virtually towering TBR pile to tide me over while I wait for What Stalks the Deep, the next book in the author’s Sworn Soldier series, to come out in the fall.

A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael Nayak

A+ #BookReview: Symbiote by Michael NayakSymbiote by Michael Nayak
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: horror, science fiction, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 400
Published by Angry Robot on February 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

World War III rages, and the scientists at the South Pole are thankful for the isolation – until a group of Chinese scientists arrive at the American research base with a dead man in their truck. The potential for a geopolitical firestorm is great, and, with no clear jurisdiction, the Americans don’t know what to do. But they soon realize the Chinese scientists have brought far more with them than the body…
Within seventy-two hours, thirteen others lie dead in the snow, murdered in acts of madness and superhuman strength. An extremophile parasite from the truck, triggered by severe cold, is spreading by touch. With rescue impossible for months, it is learning from them. Evolving. It triggers violent tendencies in the winter crew, and, more insidiously… The beginnings of a strange symbiotic telepathy.
From an exciting new voice comes this propulsive SF-thriller, infused with authentic details about life in one of the world’s harshest, most mysterious landscapes, Antarctica.

My Review:

Four years from now – just think about that for a minute. Four years from right NOW. The world is on the brink of World War III.

And that’s not necessarily the most frightening part of the story!

The fears and frights and scares and outright terrors are layered in this OMG DEBUT novel, to the point where the reader’s heart is pounding alongside all the rest of the characters. I say ‘rest’ of the characters because frankly, if this is that close then we’re already in it and it’s already all of us.

A map of Antarctica showing the location of the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station (circled)

But those layers of fear may start with just thinking about how close this might be, but the part of the story that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn’t let go is the part that happens far, far away, in the remotest place on Earth.

Over an entirely too short 72 hours in the midst of the long Antarctic winter, the tiny overwinter crew at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is reduced from 41 scientists, technicians and support crew to just FIVE scarred and scared survivors after the station is invaded.

In the midst of the Third World War that is happening in the world at large, the crew at the U.S. controlled South Pole fears that the vehicle heading their way from the Chinese-controlled Dome A is the vanguard of that invasion.

And it is – but not in the way that anyone thinks. It’s not the three starving Chinese men who are the threat – it’s the dead man in the back, the one who dashed himself against the walls until he died.

He had a passenger. (Technically, the dead man had a host of passengers.) In the best SF horror thriller tradition, those passengers, a lab experiment gone much too successfully and entirely too wrong, have plans of their own.

Geographic South Pole

Escape Rating A+: There are so many ways to think/talk/write about Symbiote – and they ALL work. The whole thing was a WOW. (Admittedly, a WOW I had to stop reading at 1 am, even though I had less than an hour left. I could have finished. And I’d probably have been awake for the rest of the night as a result. It’s that kind of WOW.)

The horrors, as I said, are layered. There’s the World War III aspect, which is touched on just enough to give the reader the shivers, which then gets subsumed in all the other horrors, only to rear its ugly head again at the end.

Underneath the World War III scares and the political maneuverings that go with it is the horror so brilliantly pointed out in the first Jurassic Park movie, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The results are not actually dissimilar, although part of the horror leans a bit on another famous, and much older quote from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

One of the biggest, and most in the moment layers of the horrors in Symbiote is very definitely the human equation.

An aerial view of the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station taken in about 1983. The central dome is shown along with the arches, with various storage buildings, and other auxiliary buildings such as garages and hangars.

The small crew of overwinter “polies” is, as they are every year, alternately hard working and bored, often introverted but stuck in the enforced intimacy of a VERY TINY small town, isolated from the whole entire rest of the world and quite possibly just a bit – or a lot – cracked in one way or another.

There’s also a deep, resentful divide between the scientists – the ‘beakers’, and the techs and support crew – the ‘loggers’. On top of that there’s a huge gender imbalance, three men for every woman. It’s a pressure cooker on multiple axes and the stew gets aside to cook for a nine-month season. It’s not really a surprise that it boils over at the best of times – which this particular overwinter absolutely is not.

In other words, the story in Symbiote had more than enough stress factors to go to the ‘dark side’ from the human parts of the equation alone. And to some extent those human factors continue to drive events even after not all the humans are exactly still or just merely human.

And it’s those human factors that give the story its compulsive, breakneck pace. Because it’s the humans that we care about – and we do. We absolutely do. From the beginning, when it just seems like the scares come from humans just being human and some of them being shitty humans, we already have our hero, our sidekicks and most definitely our villains.

A photo of the station at night. The new station can be seen in the far left, the electric power plant is in the center, and the old vehicle mechanic’s garage in the lower right. The green light in the sky is part of the aurora australis.

As the snow gets deeper and the shit gets WAY more complicated, so do the motivations of ALL the players – and the reader gets even more invested as each character learns something new and shitty about themselves – and stands or folds under the weight of that knowledge.

I got so caught up in this story I barely stopped to sleep while I still could. When I finished, I found the ending cathartic enough – and yet still open. Because it reads like this chapter may be done, but there is plenty of story yet to come.

As there should be. Because the survivors have merely managed to survive the horror they faced in their isolated base. The huge, horrifying issues that brought this mess to their snowy doorstep are out in the wider world – and have yet to be addressed. Even though one of those messes already clearly has plans to address them.

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James Logan

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James LoganThe Silverblood Promise (The Last Legacy, #1) by James Logan
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery
Series: Last Legacy #1
Pages: 521
Length: 17 hours and 2 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on April 25, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Lukan Gardova is a cardsharp, academy dropout, and - thanks to a duel that ended badly - the disgraced heir to an ancient noble house. His life consists of cheap wine, rigged card games and wondering how he might win back the life he threw away.When Lukan discovers that his estranged father has been murdered in strange circumstances, he finds fresh purpose. Deprived of his chance to make amends for his mistakes, he vows to unravel the mystery behind his father's death.His search for answers leads him to Saphrona, fabled city of merchant princes, where anything can be bought if one has the coin. Lukan only seeks the truth, but instead he finds danger and secrets in every shadow.For in Saphrona, everything has a price - and the price of truth is the deadliest of all.

My Review:

To take a page from a story not nearly as different as I expected it to be, “So naturally, our story begins where all great stories begin; with the seediest bar in town,” not with a missing contact but with a man attempting to piss his life away one drink and one shady card game at a time.

Lukan Gardova believes that he’s merely in the process of completing a job he started years ago, when he killed a man in a duel, his family paid the price with what little was left of their fortune, and Lukan left home in a storm of regret and recriminations.

He thought he had nothing left to return to. He wasn’t quite right seven years ago when he left, but he is when the story opens, when his past catches up with him. When he learns that his father was murdered and that the old man’s last words, written in his own blood, were Lukan’s name, the name of a glittering city far, far from his home in Parva, and a third word that might be a place or might be a name but almost certainly represents both a mystery and one last chance to do right by his father. A task that Lukan always thought the old man believed him incapable of.

But needs must and Lukan needs a purpose even more than he needs air to breathe and wine to drink. Not that he hasn’t done entirely too much of the latter over the years he’s been on the run from his past. From himself.

There’s one talent that Lukan Gardova has, above all others, a knack for getting himself into ever deeper piles of shit and trouble – and getting himself out alive. He’ll need all of that, and more than a little help from friends he hasn’t even met yet, to find his father’s murderer.

His quest begins in the fabled city of Saphrona, searching for a person, place or thing named Zandrusa. Lukan thinks what he has is a clue, but what he really has is a key. The key to a long-bubbling pot of corruption and conspiracy, facilitated by figures out of myth and nightmare.

A key to his father’s past. And, perhaps, a key to his own future. If he can manage to survive the pile of shit and trouble that his dubious gift has placed in his path. The odds are against him. Exactly what he expected.

Escape Rating A+: Some stories are very much “out of the frying pan and into the fire”, some are frying pans and fires all the way down. Lukan Gardova, on the other hand, the moment he lands on yet another already hot griddle the flames lick around the edges and he throws himself right into their path. Again, and again, and AGAIN.

Reading this felt like watching TV from behind the couch, with my hands covering my eyes to keep from seeing the onrushing disaster while peeking through my fingers to see if the hero might manage, yet again, to escape that onrushing disaster.

I found myself caught between the book and the audio, over and over again, because, as much as I really, really, really, NEEDED to find out what happened next, I also really didn’t want to see Lukan crash and burn – yet I expected it at every turn, much as he himself does. (Also, the audio voiced by Brenock O’Connor is EXCELLENT.)

From the very beginning, The Silverblood Promise had me hooked on its mystery and its protagonist every bit as much as Lukan himself is hooked on finding his father’s murderer. This story also scratched the itch left from my epic book hangover after finishing In the Shadow of Lightning. (I’m still waiting for the second book in that series. It’s been nearly three years. Come on already! PLEASE!)

But as much as Lukan reminds me of Demir with the similar openings of the two stories, with both men rotting their brains as fast as they can in very low places, not quite suicidal but not quite looking out for themselves either, trying to outrun their own demons and secretly hoping the demons will catch up anyway, Lukan also reminds me more than a bit of Kihrin from The Ruin of Kings and Kinch from The Blacktongue Thief. The story, OTOH strikes me as a readalike for City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky with a touch of the upcoming Idolfire by Grace Curtis. These are all stories that I loved so it’s not a surprise that I fell hard for this one as well.

I’ve read that it reminds a LOT of readers of The Lies of Locke Lamora, but I haven’t read that – YET. Let’s just say that the repeated comparison has moved that story considerably up the virtually towering TBR pile.

Back to Lukan, who is, in spite of his cynicism and snark, really just a big softy under his fractured and fraying armor – both literal and figurative. He’s on his last nerve pretty much all the time, and it shows. He’s the fool that rushes in where angels and demons would both fear to follow, someone who leaps over and over again never assuming that the net will appear. He leaps assuming that it will be pulled out from under him if it bothers to shimmer into existence at all – however briefly.

It’s just a part of what makes the story so compelling as the reader is always on the edge of their seat waiting to see what mess Lukan is going to fall into even as he escapes the previous mess by the skin of his teeth.

He’s one of those characters whose heart is in the right place even as entirely too many opponents are attempting to reach it between his fourth and fifth ribs. He doesn’t merely feel the fear and do his damndest anyway, he feels the fear, fucks himself up over it, and still does his damndest anyway even though his road to good intentions is paved with trapdoors.

I had an absolute blast following Lukan and his friends and frenemies as they find their way into the rot at the heart of Saphrona and out the other side – more or less intact – on the run yet again. I’m on pins and needles waiting for the next book in The Last Legacy series, The Blackfire Blade, coming in November. I’m definitely NOT waiting most of a year to read, or more likely listen to it this time around. Because Lukan’s journey has clearly just begun, and I can’t wait to see what trouble it leads him into next!

A+ #BookReview: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

A+ #BookReview: Death of the Author by Nnedi OkoraforDeath of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: African Futurism, books and reading, robots, science fiction
Pages: 448
Published by William Morrow on January 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The future of storytelling is here.
Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.
In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.
What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.
Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.

My Review:

Don’t let the title fool you. This book is nothing like what that title leads you to imagine. Or anything like what you might possibly be imagining.

The story is a Möbius strip. The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning in an endless and utterly fascinating loop.

There’s a story here – and there’s a story within that story – and both are utterly captivating but are entirely different.

From the start, it’s Zelu’s story. She’s Nigerian-American, she’s paraplegic, she’s not all that interested in marrying, and her career – such as it is – is one that her large, extended family doesn’t seem to want to understand.

Which is par for their course, as what they really don’t seem to want to understand is Zelu herself. She doesn’t fit into ANY of the boxes that her family expects her to fit into – and she can’t stop beating at the limitations of those boxes even as she does her damndest to expel herself from them.

The thing is, her family might be right about a lot of the things that press her down. On the other hand, her family has done their damndest to emplace many of the attitudes and expectations that weigh her down.

All out of love, of course. No matter how much it hurts.

So when she’s fired from her barely-supporting job as an adjunct professor of creative writing, and she receives yet another publisher’s rejection of the fruits of her own creative writing – a novel she’s been shopping around for YEARS – while she’s at her sister’s destination wedding in Tobago – she has a meltdown. And it’s a big one.

But it’s also a productive one. In the depths of her despondency, her acknowledgement that everything she thought she’d done isn’t working for her – at all – she acts out and breaks out. She pours her heart and her feelings into a novel that she can’t make herself stop writing even though it’s nothing like anything she’s ever done before.

And it turns out to be a literary science fiction masterpiece.

Which is where the other half of The Death of the Author comes in. Because we get to read Zelu’s groundbreaking work, Rusted Robots, as the literary world and the entertainment world do their damndest to chew it up and spit it out in a form that will get the most money out of the most markets.

And if the author becomes a media darling and then a media scapegoat, well that’s the price of fame for a woman who doesn’t fit ANY of the molds that anyone wants to put her in – because she never has.

And never, ever will.

Escape Rating A+: The Death of the Author got its hooks into me early, and those hooks didn’t release until nearly 4 in the morning, when I turned the last page and my mind went spinning as the creator became the created and the act of creation worked both ways and it made me rethink everything I’d read.

Yes, I went into the story expecting Zelu to die in the end. The format of her part of the story, transcripts of interviews of the people in her life telling her story from their own biased perspectives, leads the reader to think this was written after her death.

But it’s the story that captivates, as each ‘contribution’ is set against Zelu’s own narrative of her own journey, when we get to hear the screams she kept on the inside because no one EVER seems to have truly seen her or listened to her or believed in her.

It’s also a story about the facile judgments of the anonymous faceless masses of the internet, and the way that their approbation never fills her up because it’s always manufactured and false and just as easily turned against her as their narrative requires.

And then there’s the story she wrote, the story that seems to consume everyone it touches, Rusted Robots. It’s a post-apocalyptic, post-human story of robots and artificial intelligences acting on their programming. We are their creators, we made them in our own image, and they act entirely too much like us whether they look like us or not.

Rusted Robots reads like a different variation on the seven robotic circles of hell in Service Model, even as the rusted robots themselves, Ankara and Ijele, transcend their programming, together. That their world is saved by the power of storytelling gave the whole book a breathtaking, OMG WTF happened, utterly SFnal ‘Sensawunda’, at the same time that it sends the reader’s mind scurrying back to the beginning to watch the whole, marvelous epic unfold again.

A+ #AudioBookReview: Blood Jade by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

A+ #AudioBookReview: Blood Jade by Julia Vee and Ken BebelleBlood Jade (Phoenix Hoard, #2) by Julia Vee, Ken Bebelle
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dragons, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Phoenix Hoard #2
Pages: 448
Length: 14 hours and 23 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on July 16, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The follow-up to Ebony Gate , the critically acclaimed debut of Vee and Bebelle's Phoenix Hoard series.
IT TAKES A KILLER TO CATCH A KILLER
Emiko Soong, newly minted Sentinel of San Francisco, just can't catch a break. Just after she becomes the guardian for a sentient city, a murder strikes close to home. Called by the city and one of the most powerful clans to investigate, she traces the killer whose scent signature bears a haunting similarity to her mother’s talent.
The trail will lead her back to Tokyo where the thread she pulls threatens to unravel her whole world and bring dark family secrets to light.
Meanwhile, the General rises in the East and Emiko must fight the hidden enemies of his growing army who are amped up on Blood Jade, while keeping her promises to her brother Tatsuya as he prepares for his tourney.
Her duties as Sentinel and her loyalties collide when she must choose between hiding her deepest shame or stopping the General’s relentless march.
Phoenix Hoard#1 Ebony Gate#2 Blood Jade

My Review:

Blood Jade is the second book in the dark, compelling, utterly marvelous and occasionally downright infuriating Phoenix Hoard trilogy that began with the fantastic Ebony Gate. If you love fantasy, especially contemporary set fantasy that features hidden worlds operating within our own, if you adore flawed heroines filled with angst and doubt who still get the job done no matter what or who might be stacked against them, I can’t recommend this series highly enough.

But I do absolutely recommend that you start with Ebony Gate, as the Phoenix Hoard reads like one story divided into three parts and this one is the damn middle. I promise it’s worth the ride and the read – especially if you’re still jonesing for a book to assuage even a bit of your Green Bone Saga book hangover – as I certainly still am.

The first book, Ebony Gate, was the set up and the introduction. The Jiārén, the descendants of the Eight Sons of the Dragon, hide their true operations behind magic in the world that we Wàirén only think is ours.

Emiko Soong has done her best and her damndest to leave that world; her father’s world and her father’s machinations, behind – even though she knows she’s probably just fooling herself. The question is how much.

The answer, as Emiko learns in Blood Jade is that she’s been fooling herself a LOT and that she hasn’t truly moved outside her father’s influence at all. He’s just been watching from a distance and letting her make her own mistakes for a while.

Which she has certainly done. She’s also made real friends and a life of her own in San Francisco – some of which may have also been a mistake. Or at least it feels like one when her two worlds collide and she goes back home to Tokyo, to the center of her father’s power.

But now she has a power of her own as the magical ‘Sentinel’ of her adopted city, San Francisco. A power that will either make her, or break her, mend her or shatter her. If she can manage to survive leaving the seat of her power, the very real threats against her friends AND her family, and her father’s forever secret, always hidden, and all too often damnably right, plans for her, for the future of their clan, and for their people.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve had this book for almost half a year. I hung onto it for several reasons. One, because I wanted the time to savor it. Two, because this is the middle book in the trilogy and damn I wanted to have the final book in my hot little hands before I started this one (which I do), and three, I wanted the time to listen to the audio read by Natalie Naudus because she embodies Emiko perfectly.

I also kept it as a Hanukkah present to myself because I knew it would be excellent – which it absolutely was. But I knew even before I started that I’d need time and space to deal with all the feels before I even made a stab at writing up what I thought and felt.

And, very much like Emiko herself, I realized that I had to rethink a whole lot of the story when I reached the end. Just as her relationship with her parents wasn’t quite the way she thought it was, neither was my relationship with this book.

Before I start on my own personal thoughts and feelings, one thing needs to be said up front. Blood Jade is the middle book in a trilogy. Middle books, frequently, often and absolutely in this case, are walks through dark places. If you think of Frodo and Sam’s trip through Mordor in the second half of The Two Towers, well, that’s pretty much the archetype of a middle book. Not that the first half of that middle book in the Lord of the Rings is that much less grim, just that it’s hard to imagine anything more grim than walking through Mordor.

In Blood Jade, Emiko is walking through her own dark places, in many cases made all the darker because she’s walked them before. She’s always been the ‘Broken Blade’ of her clan, her powers blocked off or non-existent, and she’s always been a disappointment to her parents and her teachers, the flawed daughter of a powerful house with no power of her own.

Returning to her father’s orbit, doing her best – which is in fact very, very good – to keep both her brother Tacchan and her friend and ally Fiona Tran protected from the very real threat to their lives also forces her to deal with the reality that her own people see her as broken, see her as ‘less than’ at every turn, see her as a failure at everything she tries.

Except being her father’s hatchet-woman, a role she has chosen to reject. A rejection that is seen as yet another failure on her part. Emiko has a LOT of angst to deal with in this story – and because the whole saga is told from her first person perspective, we’re inside her head experiencing it right along with her. It’s a LOT, it’s all justified and it’s HARD.

In Emiko’s dysfunctional family and their interpersonal relationships I found a lot of my own buttons being pressed, which made the first half of the book a difficult read – or in this case listen – for me in spite of the excellence of the narration. (I can’t say enough good things about Natalie Naudus’ voicing of this story as well as Ebony Gate. She’s just awesome even if I’m angsting over some of what happens nearly as much as Emiko is.)

Emiko’s family is utterly dysfunctional in ways that are baked into their society. The amount of abuse the children suffer through is way too much like the Antivan Crows in the Dragon Age videogame series, AND, it’s also a reminder that it’s somewhere between hard and impossible to keep a dynasty going through inheritance because the later generations don’t have the same kind of drive their elders needed to in order to survive their real struggles and manufactured struggles through torture simply don’t instill the same needs and values. (Come to think of it, that was also a part of the mess in Tuesday’s book, Echo, in spite of the vast difference in their settings.)

What made me rethink how I felt about the whole book, what makes Emiko rethink everything she’s ever believed about her relationships with both of her parents, is a huge spoiler but at the same time is something I’ve been expecting since Ebony Gate. It’s a revelation that also beautifully sets up the third book in the trilogy, Pearl City, coming in July. I have an eARC but I’m doing my damndest to resist the temptation to read it RIGHT NOW because I’m holding out for the audio that I hope will be recorded by Natalie Naudus because she HAS to take up Emiko’s mantle one more time.