Publisher: Caezik SF & Fantasy

A+ #BookReview: Haze by Katharine Kerr

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Haze by Katharine KerrHaze by Katharine Kerr
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cyberpunk, science fiction, space opera
Pages: 428
Published by Caezik SF & Fantasy on November 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Three thousand years in the future, a starship pilot battling addiction becomes the unexpected key to unraveling a mystery that threatens the very foundation of space travel.
In the tradition of Kim Stanley Robinson's deeply researched science fiction and Lois McMaster Bujold's thrilling space opera adventures, HAZE transports readers to a multi-alien society governed by the Rim Council, a loose republic of planets protected by the formidable military force known simply as The Fleet. Interstellar civilization hinges on the use of hyperspace "shunts" for travel, but alarming rumors suggest that this crucial system is under threat.
In response, The Fleet deploys a reconnaissance team from its Special Ops branch to investigate. This team includes a washed-up, drug-dependent star pilot with a talent for finding hidden paths in hyperspace, an AI wrangler with an extensive network of artificial intelligences, a soldier gifted in detecting patterns in time and space, an alien gunner with impeccable aim, and a steadfast female captain who keeps them all in line. Together, this motley crew of space misfits discovers far more than they bargained for, uncovering secrets that could shake their society to its core.
Haze is a character-driven novel featuring a diverse cast of POC and alien characters, set in a future where humanity embraces bisexuality and polyamory, adding layers of complexity to an already captivating narrative.

My Review:

As much as I’ve loved this author’s fantasy series, the sprawling and awesome Deverry Cycle, I couldn’t have stopped myself from diving into Haze if I tried. Her fantasies are so good that I couldn’t resist the impulse to see if her science fiction would be just as addictive.

Which is an appropriate turn of phrase with which to open a review of Haze, because its strung-out, washed up protagonist is irrevocably addicted to the drug Haze, and has not even a flickering impulse to go to rehab, no matter how low he has to sink in pursuit of his next fix.

Which turns out to be as low as it gets. In a place called Nowhere Street on a dead end planet, crawling in search of someone who will buy his ass so he take the money to the nearest dealer afterwards. It’s definitely NOT a living after the Fleet dishonorably discharged him for being addicted to the drug they encouraged him to use to improve his piloting skills.

Dan thinks there’s nowhere left to go but death until a dubious rescue arrives in the form of Fleet reinstatement AND a guaranteed supply of Haze AND permission to use it as needed arrives in the form of new orders and a clandestine mission. He’s more than willing to sign because even if the job kills him, because, well, that’s where he was heading anyway.

At least this way he has a chance of going out in a haze of altered consciousness among the stars, riding the light.

Because that’s what Haze does, at least for starship pilots. It helps them literally ride the light through ‘shunt space’ that makes interstellar travel possible, and forms the backbone of the Rim Coalition of sapient species. Without the mysterious but providential stargates, and pilots with the genetic legacy to guide ships through them, the far flung coalition, its government and its commerce, could not exist.

Which is what makes it such an emergency that rumors have sprung up around the Coalition that the stargates are disappearing. One did. ONCE. Nearly 400 years ago. It happened, it was big news and a huge tragedy as there were colony ships lost in that event, but it dropped out of the news when nothing happened again. Now those old rumors are being riled up. Even worse, anyone who even hints at investigating either the original event or the new focus on it, gets disappeared. Or kidnapped. Or killed along with the ship they happen to be on.

Fleet is worried, because these are just the kind of rumors that lead to panic, which leads to violence, which destabilizes the Coalition. They want to nip this in the bud before the teacup this tempest is boiling in gets any bigger.

And that’s where Dan Brennan comes in. He’s the most talented pilot the Fleet has ever produced. He’s also the most deeply addicted to Haze, and those two things may be more connected than anyone even thought to imagine.

Keeping Dan functional becomes most of the focus of the crew of the Merchant ship Dancing Mary, part of a clandestine Fleet operation to find the source of the rumor and shut it down. As a part of a ‘Black Op’, the captain of the Mary can get Dan’s drugs and ignore the amount of time he spends sleeping off those drugs as long as he’s functional when it counts. Which he is.

So Dan pilots the ship and pursues the high he gets from Haze while the ship pursues the rumors and follows the money that seems to be behind them while the ship’s AI – and the whole entire network of AIs – seems to be pursuing an agenda of their own.

And it all comes together at the speed of light, when Dan’s addiction turns out to be the key to unlocking more different mysteries than the crew of the Dancing Mary – and in fact the whole entire Fleet – ever had an inkling might be being covered up by one panic-inducing rumor.

Escape Rating A+: I expected good things, but this turned out to be simply fantastic space opera, and an absolutely compelling read from beginning to surprising, utterly satisfying end. Which turned out to be an EXCELLENT thing all the way around, as the original estimated page count of 290 turned out to be a severe underestimate. Fortunately, it flies by at the speed of light.

On the surface, Dan Brennan seems like a poor choice for the hero of a space opera, and technically, he probably isn’t actually. The hero, that is. But he is our entry point to this far future world, showing just what it looks like from the very bottom of the ladder.

Also, and this may take a bit of a trigger warning, this is not his redemption story, well, not exactly. He does not get clean and sober. Instead, he discovers that his addiction to Haze is what he’s meant to do, and it gives him the talents that save them all. It’s a weird sideways evolutionary step forward and that’s not a narrative that gets looked for ever – even in SF.

What the story does do is combine the military operations/investigations backbone of K.G. Wagers’ NeoG series with its mercantile empire universe building of corporate greed and corruption. So there’s a mystery within a mystery within a plot to drive profits higher than a pilot on Haze. Hidden behind that, there’s a second mystery about human immortality by transferring consciousness, while underneath that there’s a big of good old-fashioned space piracy just to keep the plots from ever becoming clear.

I keep saying Dan isn’t the hero. The hero isn’t one person, it’s the crew of the Dancing Mary as a whole – including its ever so helpful but just a touch insubordinate AIs. One of the things that makes this story so much fun is that the four species that make up the Rim Coalition have recognized AIs as persons, and that the different species traditions and imperatives among them have meant that tolerance for others’ personal preferences and predilections is the norm for behavior and personal choice. There’s no soapbox about any of this, it simply is what it is in this universe and it’s lovely.

And I’m not saying that because this is a utopian future. People, even for an expanded definition of people, are always going to find something to hate and fear based on bigotry and prejudice. Howsomever, in this universe those things are not skin color, gender representation, sexual preferences or even gender itself. Instead, the triggers for that hate and fear are new, and they engender new and interesting responses even though the beings ginning up those prejudices are using the same old playbook.

The story in Haze, not so much Dan’s story as the story of the Dancing Mary’s mission, reminded me a LOT of K.B. Wagers’ NeoG series, but also Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, as well as a bit of Tanya Huff’s Valor/Confederation/Peacekeeper series, Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War and Vatta’s Peace, and even John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. All of which are/were long-running series and I wouldn’t mind AT ALL if Haze turned out to be the first entry in something similar.

Which it absolutely looks like it is! Dan Brennan’s second adventure, Zyon, is coming out in March. YAY!

A+ #BookReview: Twice as Dead by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
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 Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better 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.