Publisher: Tor Books

A+ #AudioBookReview: To Clutch a Razor by Veronica Roth

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: To Clutch a Razor by Veronica RothTo Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer, #2) by Veronica Roth
Narrator: Helen Laser, James Fouhey, Nina Yndis, Tim Campbell
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Curse Bearer #2
Pages: 229
Length: 5 hours and 46 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

#1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth pulls from Slavic folklore to explore family, duty, and what it means to be a monster in this sequel to the USA Today bestselling novella When Among Crows
A funeral. A heist. A desperate mission.
When Dymitr is called back to the old country for the empty night, a funeral rite intended to keep evil at bay, it's the perfect opportunity for him to get his hands on his family's most guarded relic—a book of curses that could satisfy the debt he owes legendary witch Baba Jaga. But first he'll have to survive a night with his dangerous, monster-hunting kin.
As the sun sets, the line between enemies and allies becomes razor-thin, and Dymitr’s new loyalties are pushed to their breaking point.
Family gatherings can be brutal. Dymitr’s might just be fatal.

My Review:

Everyone believes that they are the heroes of their own stories. Even the monsters. Perhaps, especially the monsters, so that they have justification for the villainies they permit. And commit. If the end truly justifies the means, then ANY means, no matter how terrible, are permissible in order to serve a righteous cause. It’s all about ‘the greater good’ and is precisely what makes that phrase so monstrous.

The story that began in When Among Crows presents the reader with both sides of that eternal conflict in this particular world. Our world, but a variation of it where magic walks among us and hides in not-so-plain sight.

The Knights of the Holy Order believe that their ‘war’ against magical creatures is righteous, because whenever they meet one of those creatures that hides behind a human face, the creature does its damndest to kill the knight however it can. So the knight feels justified in killing any such creature whenever and wherever they are found – and even hunting them down for that very purpose.

But those creatures tell a different story. Every single one of them is hunted. Every single one has lost friends and loved ones to the knights. And every single one of them is no match for the knights and their magic. From the creatures’ perspective, the creatures generally don’t hunt the knights, but are all too aware that if a knight finds them, they are already dead. So they fight as best as they can with whatever they have, whether knives, teeth, claws or shapeshifting. The creatures feel like they have no choice, just as they had no choice to be born what they are.

Knights, however, are MADE to be what they are.

Dymitr, Knight of the Holy Order from a long line of such knights, came to Chicago to beg Baba Jaga to destroy him, because he can no longer bear to commit the atrocities expected of him. He knows the creatures he’s been taught since childhood to kill are merely people with magic – just like himself.

Instead of killing him, Baba Jaga makes him into something that has never been, a knight who is also a creature. His family will kill him when they know. But he has a task to complete for Baba Jaga in order to claim his new life. A task that will take him back to the last place that he and his new friends should EVER go.

Dymitr really can’t go home again. But the only way to learn that – all the way down to his bones – is to go there anyway. And take his two dearest friends along with him for the terrible journey.

Escape Rating A+: This second book in the Curse Bearer is every single bit as excellent as the first book, When Among Crows. It also really, truly does not stand alone, so start with Crows.

Howsomever, a part of that ‘not standing alone’ is that the reader – or listener in my case and the narrators were all marvelous AGAIN – comes into this book already knowing these people and caring about them, so this one also gave me a bit of an approach/avoidance conflict. I needed to see how this story ended, BUT I didn’t want to actually experience each of the terrible things that happen to these characters, because I like them and wanted them to be okay. Which they are in the end but absolutely not unbloodied, unchanged, unscarred or untraumatized.

This story, and this series, takes these people we’ve come to know and love and takes them on a walk through some very dark places because those are the places they need to go to get redemption. So the story is not exactly fun but it is ALWAYS compelling – and sometimes even more so because of the darkness it has to travel through.

Putting it another way, this was a bit of a train wreck book, not in the sense that the book is terrible – instead it’s terribly good – but in the sense that I knew something terrible or terrifying or both was about to happen to the characters, whom I liked very much, and I didn’t want to watch but still NEEDED to see.

The series, so far at least because damn I hope there are more, is Dymitr’s, even though his is not the only perspective we get to experience. Dymitr is the curse bearer of the series’ title. In When Among Crows, his eyes were fully opened to the truth, or at least A truth, about his own people by seeing them through the eyes of their enemies.

The Knights have always told their story as a ‘secondly’ story, in that they justify their actions towards the creatures they hunt because, in the present at least, any creature they find attacks on sight. That the zmora and the strzyga (both avian shapeshifters) and all the others attack when cornered because that’s the only option they have doesn’t matter to the knights because they believe their mission is a ‘holy’ one.

But those creatures, those people, are only defending themselves. They’d be happy to live and let live if they only could. Or perhaps there was a point where they would have. Now, there’s so much history and blood on both sides that peace between them might not be possible. And doesn’t THAT sound familiar?

So that first story took Dymitr into the belly of the first beast, to the supernatural community of Chicago, so that he could see that the creatures he had been taught to hunt were merely people. This second book takes him home, to learn first-hand and as painfully as possible that the people he loves, the people who taught him to fight and hunt monsters – are the true monsters.

What he’ll need to reckon with in later books in the series – if they ever exist and I sincerely hope they will – is that he is part of both sides and that they are part of him. That he still loves people who are creatures AND people who are monsters. Even if only one side is still willing to love him back.

A- #BookReview: The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie RobsonThe Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: post apocalyptic, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Pages: 288
Published by Tor Books on September 30, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In games of betrayal everyone loses.

Arlo and Drienne are ‘mades’―clones of company executives, deemed important enough to be saved should their health fail. Mades work around the clock to pay off the debt incurred by their creation, though most are Reaped―killed and harvested for organs when their corporate counterparts are in medical need.

But when the impossible happens and the too-big-to-fail company that owns them collapses, Arlo and Drienne find themselves purchased by a scientist who has a job for them.

The reward: Debt paid off, freedom from servitude, and enough cash to last a lifetime.

The job: Infiltrate a highly secure corporate reclamation facility in the heart of dead London and steal a data drive.

They’re going to need a team.

My Review:

This is a caper story. It says so right there on the label, doesn’t it? And it does not disappoint – even though this isn’t quite the caper that the reader thinks it will be. It’s not even the caper that the crew participating in it think it will be. Which, of course, is part of the caper itself, because they are the ones being conned and defrauded along with pretty much everyone else.

We first meet Arlo and Drienne while they are sneaking into someplace they shouldn’t be – because it’s sponsored by a megacorp that is a bitter rival of the megacorp that owns them.

Which is where we start to see just how effed up the world has become in this not-too-distant future post-climate-apocalypse story. Arlo and Drienne are clones. They aren’t merely second-class citizens, although they certainly are that. They are slaves, owned by the megacorp that created them to serve as disposable, low-wage workers until they are needed as spare parts for the VIPs who provided their genetic material.

Unless they can manage to earn enough credits to pay off the ‘debt’ they owe to their megacorp, Oakseed, to pay off the costs of their creation and training. Which happens so rarely that it might as well be a fairy tale.

Megacorps like Oakseed are, at least theoretically, too big to fail. But reality doesn’t give a damn about theoretical models, and that’s exactly what happens here. Oakseed fails – and it fails big. Global collapse-size big, creating a tsunami of chaos that spreads to every single Oakseed installation and figuratively drowns every single one of Oakseed’s assets in its wake.

Including all those clones, who become part of Oakseed’s assets, just waiting for their ‘contracts’ to be sold. Or exploited, along with all that chaos.

Someone wants to make one last really big score out of Oakseed’s catastrophic fall. All they need is a crew to do the deed and a patsy to take the fall. Which is where Arlo, Drienne and a select group of their fellow clones come in.

They ARE disposable. There’s no need for them to know the real purpose that they are being disposed of for. Which doesn’t stop them from figuring it all out – and turning the tables on the whole scheme – after all.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because I adored the author’s earlier SF mystery, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, and was hoping for something in a similar vein – or at least similarly good. I got more of the second than the first, even though Heist is also an SF mystery. It’s just not the same kind of mystery. Words was a locked-room mystery, while Heist is pretty much anything but.

The Heist of Hollow London is about a heist. A caper. A big job that needs just the right crew to get it done. The form of the story, of the con and the score and the planning to get it done, has a lot of familiar parts to it. We’ve seen plenty of stories like this, and if you like those sort of stories you’ll like this one too, even if the SF setting isn’t quite your jam.

But it’s the SF setting of this story that sets it apart from the usual run of caper stories, and that’s what dragged me in and kept me glued to my seat for a bit over three hours. Because that setting has one hell of a set of layers to unpack.

The first layer is the cloning. As it turns out, it’s a bit of the last layer too. But the application here is old and new at once, as the megacorps go to great lengths to convince everyone, especially the clones, that they are not slaves. Even though they most definitely are.

Then there’s the reason for the cloning, and the reason why it’s not exactly working, from a scientific/medical/mercantile standpoint. Which leads back into another layer of the story – that this takes place in a world that is very much post-apocalyptic of the climate kind. It’s a bit like the world of Down in the Sea of Angels, only much closer to the ‘Collapse’ that world is recovering from. Or it’s the post-apocalypse of The Annual Migration of Clouds and The Knight and the Butcherbird, where the world is barely surviving the ravaging of ecological disaster.

Which is where one reaches the next layer, which is a humans are gonna human kind of story, in that the way that the megacorps control their corporate fiefdoms may be short term profitable but is not long term sustainable, and when that rug gets pulled it takes a whole lot out with it.

And all of that circles back to the caper itself. Someone needs to steal a macguffin from one of Oakseed’s installations before that installation gets shut down in the collapse of the company. They put together the crew that includes Arlo and Drienne by first, buying out their contracts and second, promising them freedom when the job is completed. Or, alternatively, selling their contracts to jobs they are guaranteed not to survive if they won’t play along.

Of course they’re being conned. Anything too good to be true usually is. While it’s equally true that you can’t cheat an honest person, Arlo, Drienne and their fellow clones know they can’t win, can’t break even, and are not in a position where they can even legally get out of this game. But they can cheat the people who are cheating them. If they can figure out the true goal of this wild scheme and turn it around before it’s too late.

That they are able to turn things around on everyone who intends to use them and throw them away made the heel turns of the plot, and the plot around the plot, and their own plot, all that much more satisfying – even if or especially because parts of that turn turn out to be bittersweet.

A- #BookReview: Queen Demon by Martha Wells

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Queen Demon by Martha WellsQueen Demon (The Rising World, #2) by Martha Wells
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Rising World #2
Pages: 389
Published by Tor Books on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the breakout SFF superstar author of Murderbot comes the remarkable sequel to the USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling novel, Witch King. A fantasy of epic scope, Queen Demon is a story of power and friendship, of trust and betrayal, and of the families we choose.
Dahin believes he has clues to the location of the Hierarchs' Well, and the Witch King Kai, along with his companions Ziede and Tahren, knowing there's something he isn't telling them, travel with him to the rebuilt university of Ancartre, which may be dangerously close to finding the Well itself.
Can Kai stop the rise of a new Hierarch?
And can he trust his companions to do what’s right?
Follow Kai to the end of the world in this thrilling sequel to the USA Today-bestselling Witch King.

My Review:

The first book in this Rising World series, Witch King, was a ‘how it started/how it’s going’ kind of story. It takes place in two timelines, sixty years apart. Because the character at the heart of the story, the character whose perspective we follow, is immortal – and so are the members of his found family – the story centers around the same people in both timelines.

From a certain perspective, it’s all Kai’s fault. Kai is the ‘witch king’ of the first book’s title, but the term ‘witch’ doesn’t mean the same thing in Kai’s world as it does in ours. Kai is also a ‘demon’ and that doesn’t mean what we think it does, either. (That the author invented different hierarchies and gave different meanings to terms we only ‘think’ are familiar is occasionally a bit trippy for multiple meanings of THAT word as well.)

Back to those two timelines. The earlier timeline, Kai’s past, is a story of rebellion. A vast, powerful, all-consuming empire built on pain and death magic had taken over most of Kai’s known world by feeding the deaths of whole, entire cities into their death-magic power wells.

Kai, a witch AND a demon, didn’t merely break himself out of one of the Hierarchs’ ‘pain, torture and death’ prisons, he broke the whole prison. Among the prisoners he freed were the noble hostages held captive for the good behavior of their countries. Those nobles – at least some of them – had enough vision or pragmatism to realize that if they banded together along with Kai and his allies, they had a chance to break the back of the Hierarchs’ regime.

The story in Kai’s past, the one that he is remembering as parts of that history are repeating themselves right before his rueful, regretful eyes, is the story of that ragtag rebellion as it picks up allies and enemies – sometimes the same people – and desperately tries to get half a step ahead of the Hierarchs so they can cut them off from their wells of power before those wells are used to wipe the rebellion out en masse. It’s a desperate race across an entire continent, filled with enemies within and doubts on all sides.

In Kai’s present, he’s chasing across the same landscape, pulling the pieces together after years of oblivion caused by an assassination attempt that only semi-failed. It’s difficult to kill an immortal like Kai, but it’s possible to get them out of your way for a long while if you plan very meticulously. His would-be assassin didn’t count on the power hunger and greed of his employed agents.

Now Kai is free, he’s been reunited with his found family, he’s found more people to add to that family. He’s haunted by his past, both in that many of his enemies are still as alive as he is – and that the power he once fought is still out there for the taking – if only he can figure out where to find it – and how to eliminate it once and for all.

That he has the kind of friends that mean one doesn’t always need enemies to get in one’s way makes this second book in the series another fast-pace race to an equally uncertain finish. A finish that feels only partially accomplished in both the past and the present. It’s the perfect ending for a middle book, as things are darkest in both timelines, and Kai is avoiding letting himself remember the rest of the earlier story because he knows that the situation is about to turn completely black.

And so do we. But in a way that leaves the reader salivating for more, because we also know that Kai and most of his companions survived. We just don’t know how. Yet.

Escape Rating A-: I occasionally found myself wishing for a glossary as well as a list of dramatis personae AND more of a summary of the action from the first book than was included in the eARC. (Witch King was published in May 2023, and that’s a lot of books under the reading bridge ago.) This is a hint to start with Witch King. Queen Demon is an absolutely compelling read – more so than the first book as we know more about what’s going on – but the story does NOT start here at all. It’s also more heartbreaking, as we know there’s a tragedy coming and we can see the outline of it and a bit of the shape, while the consequences of that tragedy are falling on Kai and his allies thick and fast – and the identity of at least some of his enemies is clearly a part of the collateral damage from it.

And yet, Kai is doing his damndest to remember around the terrible thing that he’s trying not to remember, which is frustrating for the reader but in a way that literally drags the reader along and compels them to keep going, because for a demon, the whole avoidance thing is just so terribly human. And just that much more heartbreaking because of it.

The politics of the various countries are all wildly different from the history we know, AND they are all dealing with their world having been decimated and their countries almost completely destroyed. A huge part of the political shenanigans in the creation of the ‘Rising World” involves figuring out where to go from here because the old world is GONE and there’s no getting it back – no matter how many people who think they should be powerful because their families USED TO BE back in the ‘olden days’ wish they could.

But they can’t rebuild until they deal with all the messes left behind – and they’re definitely not there yet. Which is what has made this series so fascinating so far. I’m looking forward to seeing what happened next – and what happens next – in each of Kai’s timeliness the next time the author takes a break from Murderbot. Not that I’m not looking forward to the next book in THAT series, the ominously titled Platform Decay, coming in May, because I absolutely, definitely AM!

A+ #BookReview: Legalist by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Legalist by L.E. Modesitt Jr.Legalist (The Grand Illusion #4) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, gaslamp, steampunk
Series: Grand Illusion #4
Pages: 576
Published by Tor Books on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., bestselling author of Saga of Recluce and the Imager Portfolio, continues the Grand Illusion, a gaslamp political fantasy series (Isolate, Councilor, Contrarian) with a prequel, Legalist.
Fifty years after the establishment of the Imperium, and 450 years before the events of Isolate, Dominic Mikail Ysella―ancestor of Avraal Ysella―is the grandson of the last king of Aloor. Stripped of most of their land, Dominic, as the third son, must support himself.
Dominic becomes a legalist and is elected to the Imperial Council quietly working as an isolate, someone unreadable by government telepaths.
Amid a time of a crumbling imperial line, Dominic must build a coalition within the Council and quietly draft a new constitution to save the Imperium from itself. Uncovering rampant corruption, graft, and potential to be arrested for treason, Ysella discovers any number of ways that simple legal specialist in water rights could get himself killed.

My Review:

Looking back at the Grand Illusion series, the very first book in the series, Isolate, was, among its many other marvelous themes and threads, a story about staging a mostly non-violent political coup from the inside. Following with Councilor and Contrarian, the series continues to explore what happens AFTER the balance of power has shifted as certain people attempt to shift it back to where THEY believe it belongs. With them, of course.

Whether that’s good for the rest of the country – or not.

This fourth book in the series takes a step back from those first three books and literally kicks the story back more than 400 years, but to a similar conflict. One that creates the possibility that occurs in the series’ ‘present’ in Isolate. A situation that is, come to think of it, is predicted late in THIS book, Legalist.

The ‘grand illusion’ of the series’ title is the illusion that government can make EVERYTHING better for EVERYONE at the same time. An idea that is so illusory it might as well be a mirror image of the famous line that goes, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time.” (The quote is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but may have originated with P.T. Barnum substituting “fool” for “please” – and doesn’t that fit all too well!)

However, just because many people either see government as utterly useless OR expect it to solve all their problems – and sometimes both contradictory thoughts at the same time – that doesn’t mean that government – or at least people in government – are completely ineffective at helping the people they claim to serve.

And it certainly – and unfortunately – doesn’t mean that they are not  absolutely capable of harming the people they serve.

It sounds as if I’m talking about now, doesn’t it? And I am, but only in the sense that the grand illusion of what government can and cannot do is fairly universal.

The story in Legalist is about a crisis in government and about a change in the form of that government in the hopes of making that crisis a bit less, well, terrible. Because humans are gonna human, and that’s true on all sides of the equation.

So the story focuses on one single member of the Council of Guldor, water legalist Dominic Mikhail Ysella – not coincidentally the ancestor of one of the primary characters in Isolate. Ysella sees the current crisis coming from miles away – and so do many of his fellow councilors.

The Imperador, the man who brought the country together and held it together, is dying. His virtually unlimited power is about to pass to his remaining son, a man who enjoys wielding unlimited power and is not at all tempered in that wielding by experience, intelligence or anything even vaguely resembling a moral compass.

Under the Heir, Guldor will become the kind of tyranny that incites rebellions – until the country breaks apart in civil war. The current Imperador may have unlimited power, but he still has the sense not to rule in such a manner as to drive the entire country into revolt. His son will have all of that power but nothing to temper it and no desire to even try.

However, the country that the Imperador created does have a founding document that outlines who has what powers AND provides a method for altering that power. The trick – and it’s going to be a trick and a half – is to get the Imperador to agree to curtailing his own power.

Or to retain his own power while limiting the powers of all who will come after him, knowing that it will happen much sooner than anyone would prefer. Change is coming, whether anyone likes it or not. The question before the Imperador, the Council, and especially Councilor Ysella, is whether this is a chance to turn that change from the unquestionable terrors of tyranny to the questionable future of a constitutional monarchy.

And who will survive the turmoil that will inevitably go into making it happen.

Escape Rating A+: This series is reading catnip for me, but I also think it’s a bit of an acquired taste – just that I’ve fully acquired it.

For one thing, all of Modesitt’s series are the ultimate in competence porn. Just like the protagonist of the Imager Portfolio, Dominic Ysella is simply damn good at his job – and he’s a decent human being as well. He doesn’t rely on luck or connections, just training and education and hard work and doing the right thing instead of the easy. He sees opportunities and he seizes them, but he also knows when to temper his own impulses.

And we see this world through his eyes as he does his best and damndest to make his country a better place than he found it.

From one perspective, it’s all about meetings and documents and political machinations – and on the other hand, it’s about not just being in the room where it happens, but making the moves needed to become the person who creates the situation that opens the room FOR it to happen.

This story could have been a bit dull – but it never is. Instead, as we follow along, we get deeper into the situation that Ysella finds himself in, we see the rock hemming him into the hard place – and watch as he opens up an unexpected space between the two so he has room to maneuver – and to make a difference.

And the story IS exciting. He’s constantly under threat of assassination, whether merely a character assassination or a bloody one. He knows he has enemies on all sides, as well as friends. He’s caught in the midst of secret work that will save his country and himself – but only if he can prevent it from a too early reveal that will inevitably lead to a charge of treason.

Ysella often feels as though he’s dancing one step forward and two steps back, on a tightrope, with no net, in the dark. We watch to see if he’ll fall even as we hope he’ll succeed.

Obviously, I loved this one, as I have the entire rest of the series. Due to this entry being a prequel to the rest, it would be possible for someone to start with Legalist, decide if this is a taste they’d like to acquire, and if it turns out to be so then going back to Isolate and reading the rest.

But speaking of the rest of the series, the author has announced that he has turned in the manuscript for what he says will likely be the last book of the Grand Illusion series, which will return to the main line of the series and take place after Contrarian. The publication date has not yet been set, however, the title of that final book will be Premier, as I predicted when I finished Contrarian. So I’m a bit chuffed about that even though I’m going to have to impatiently wait at least a year to read it.

A+ #AudioBookReview: Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: Hemlock and Silver by T. KingfisherHemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Jennifer Pickens
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 368
Length: 11 hours and 50 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on August 19, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind.
Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.
Not to die, but to save— seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.
But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.
Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.
Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

My Review:

Snow. Glass. Apples. The images are iconic, aren’t they? Snow White. Mirror Glass. Poison Apples.

Howsomever, particularly considering that he was married to a woman who might as well be Maleficent, the King of this little fantasy kingdom is actually a rather decent – and somewhat nondescript – man. Also a desperate one. His 12-year-old daughter, Snow, seems to be dying by inches – and it’s not an easy or an easy death. None of the official court healers has a clue. That this seems to be an era when leeching and purging and OMG blistering the feet were the height of medical expertise, well, that’s not a surprise.

So he turns to a very unofficial healer, the spinster daughter of one of the kingdom’s prosperous merchants, a woman referred to as ‘Healer’ Anja. In Anja’s case, the title is a courtesy only, because she’s not really a healer and she’d be the first to admit that. But the church’s blessing on her work DOES keep the witch burnings away. At least so far.

Anja is more of a medical researcher than an actual healer. And the medicine that she has spent her life pretty much obsessed with is poison. Not exactly. (There’s a lot of not exactly and sorta/kinda and maybe and well, well uh, in the way Anja talks inside her head. The place from which this entire story is told – and told well if you like protagonists who are a bit too honest with themselves and frequently to their own detriment.)

The fact that some, many, possibly even most, poisons have no known cure is a problem that Anja has spent her life solving just a tiny corner of. She knows she’s not doing much, but solving the problem of poisons has consumed her life. Treating the patient attached to the problem isn’t her thing. At all. (She’s Gregory House only tactless rather than acidly cutting. She doesn’t want to emotionally wound the patients, but she just doesn’t know what to say to make the truth more palatable than it generally is.)

The king asks Anja to come to his daughter and figure out what’s the matter with the girl. Anja knows she’s being ordered to go, even if he never, ever uses those words, because he’s the king and he can do her father’s business untold damage, or simply have them all killed, if she refuses. This king isn’t like that – although he could be – and we get to experience all of Anja’s thoughts and fears on the subject as she agrees to go, caveat-ing all over the place that it might not be poison at all.

It is, and it isn’t. Just as there’s not exactly a poisoner – but there’s not exactly not one, either. Anja’s whole investigation runs headlong into a whole lot of people and things and situations that aren’t quite what they appear to be – but aren’t exactly not what they appear to be, either.

Because there’s an entire strange, fascinating and terrifying world that isn’t nearly so benign (and yes, that’s sarcasm) as what would in our world be Alice’s side of the looking glass. Filled with men, and monsters, and a queen who spent too long looking in the mirror and painted herself RED.

Escape Rating A+: This is surprisingly cozy for a fantasy about poisons. Then again, I’m not completely surprised because this is T. Kingfisher, and a LOT of her stories have quite a bit of cozy hidden inside. Like much of her work, it’s not cozy in any overt way, rather it’s cozy because she puts in a lot of cozy details about life in her created worlds, and it’s the kind of detail that feels cozy even when the events happening around those cozy details are very much NOT.

This story, like so much of her work, rides or dies on the back of – or rather in the head of – its first person protagonist, Anja. If you enjoy Anja’s voice – a voice that often feels like the voice of the author herself – you’re going to love this book. But if Anja’s constant second-guessing and self-deprecation and constant prevarication gets in the way of the story – for you – instead of BEING the story as it was for this reader, this may be more of a cup of chime adder venom than it is a delightful cup of tea.

(I listened to this one in audio, and the narrator, Jennifer Pickens, was just perfect for Anja. I loved the way that she was calm and reassuring, just the way that I thought Anja should sound, particularly when the person she was trying to reassure was herself.)

The thing about Anja, that I enjoy a lot about this author’s protagonists, is that the stuff she is gibbering inside her head is exactly the sort of thing that we all hope goes through our heads – and doesn’t spew out of our mouths too often – in the face of some of what she faces. And we all think we’re kinda weird and wonder why anyone puts up with us and all our faults are glaring and we’re never enough, etc., etc., etc. In other words, Anja has the same kind of impostor syndrome as the rest of us, so if you like seeing someone very real as a hero, she’s lovely. If you want your heroes to be heroic all the time, she’ll drive you bananas.

The story is also a lovely paean to the joys of scholarship and the delights of finding an answer to a question that has been plaguing you for ‘lo these many years’ that is terrific. Particularly if you’re female and have been told repeatedly and often that you’re too smart or like things that other people find inappropriate or distasteful for females but think is just fascinating when a male goes off on the exact same tangent.

I’ll get off the soapbox I borrowed from Anja and get back to things.

What made this story so much fun, for me, were the details of Anja’s life and her investigations and her desperation to solve the problem of Snow’s poisoning. Not that she doesn’t want to save the child, but what spurs her is her love of discovery.

The world that she finally discovers behind the mirror – with the help of an obnoxious, egotistical, self-centered and entirely much too cattitude-filled CAT is every bit as thrilling and frightening as any hero could have wished makes everything both simpler and more complicated – as such discoveries do. She has a big piece of the puzzle – and so MANY more questions that need to be answered.

I have to admit that I was surprised at the way the mirror world worked, because a fairy tale reimaging is absolutely NOT the place I expect to find the Star Trek “Mirror Universe”, but it’s here anyway. Not exactly, but close enough, right down to the description of the characters as “aggressive, mistrustful and opportunistic” – which describes the Mirror Queen to a “T”. Or perhaps that should be an “A”, as in apple, and we’re back where we started from.

In the end, this story is terrific, and it would be even better if it weren’t a reimagining of Snow White. But it is and that makes it all the more delicious, as this is a Snow White who in the end, gets her own damn revenge thankyouverymuch – with the help of a fairy god-cat, a gang of monstrous helpers who are pretty much the opposite of dwarves, and a female healer who solves the puzzle, saves the day and earns her very own happy ever after.

A- #BookReview: The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Shattering Peace by John ScalziThe Shattering Peace (Old Man's War, #7) by John Scalzi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction, space opera
Series: Old Man's War #7
Pages: 288
Published by Tor Books on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

After a decade, acclaimed science fiction master John Scalzi returns to the galaxy of the Old Man's War series with the long awaited seventh book, The Shattering Peace
THE PEACE IS SHATTERING
For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. A tripartate agreement between the Colonial Union, the Earth, and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay, even when some would have preferred to return to the fighting and struggle of former times. For now, more sensible heads have prevailed – and have even championed unity.
But now, there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu, the most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met, are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war. This war is between Consu factions... but nothing the Consu ever do is just about them. The Colonial Union, the Earth and the Conclave have been unwillingly dragged into the conflict, in the most surprising of ways.
Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of humans and aliens alike... or destroy them forever.

My Review:

Twenty years ago, a book by a then up-and-coming author was released on January 1, 2005. That book was Old Man’s War (original cover is pictured at left). The story is still stuck in my head all these years later, because the premise was just so utterly bonkers. It begins with 75 year old John Perry fulfilling his earlier enlistment in Earth’s Colonial Defense Forces.

Which is where all the fun began – for ‘may you live in interesting times’ values of ‘fun’. First because Earth’s Colonial Defense Forces aren’t exactly that. They don’t really belong to Earth. They use Earth for cannon fodder, while keeping the entire population under ‘mushroom management’ – meaning that they are keeping Earth’s people in the dark and feeding them (bull)shit about the actual state of the galaxy and the human colonies eking a living out amongst the stars.

This story, set in the same world twenty years and six books later, is all about reaping the whirlwind of those original choices. Because humans are far, far, FAR from alone in the galaxy, habitable planets are scarce, every species needs a place for their excess population – and no one likes being lied to, particularly not on as grand a scale as the Colonial Union had been lying to the population of Earth.

The colonies – everyone’s colonies – and the need for more of them had set the Colonial Union and the everybody-but-human Conclave on a collision course that the CDF was doomed to eventually lose even before Earth pulled the plug on recruitment. But ten years ago a fragile peace was cobbled together between the opposing parties, a peace based on a moratorium on colonization for all sides.

Of course, that agreement was broken. But the breakage – in the form of a joint colony populated by non-humans, Earth humans, and colonial humans – was more or less working. Whether it was working more, or working less depended a LOT on whose reports one had access to.

Then the reports stopped. And so did everything else. Because the colony disappeared from space. Completely. Totally. It didn’t even leave any debris behind.

Which is where Gretchen Trujillo, her Obin assistant and best friend Ran, and a whole shipload of scientists, engineers, diplomats and administrators enter the scene of the crime. Or whatever this is.

It’s their responsibility to figure out what happened to the missing colony before that fragile peace shatters into the shards of war – no matter how impossible that task might be.

Escape Rating A-: The opening scene of this book is a stunner. Literally. Gretchen Trujillo walks into a training class for potential diplomatic security personnel, promises that she’s going to kill them all, and then does so. Repeatedly. They’re not really dead, but they do, EVENTUALLY, get the point. That the universe isn’t fair and their preconceived notions about what does and does not constitute a threat to their protectees – and themselves – has to get chucked out the nearest airlock ASAP if they want to have half a chance at doing their damn jobs.

And it’s a terrific introduction to Gretchen, who will be our point of view and tour guide to the currently effed up state of the galaxy – as well as to the thoroughly FUBAR’d mission she’s about to become a part of.

She needs to go to the place where Unity Colony used to be because, as those recruits just learned, Gretchen thinks outside the box to the point that the box might as well give up and go home. But that’s not the only reason. Gretchen also needs to go because she’s the one human who has a chance of being respected and listened to by at least one of the alien races – if not a few more. And that’s because of Gretchen’s ties to the people and events of two of the earlier books in this saga, The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale. Even if her presence and participation did not make it into the movie. Which she hates. The movie, not that she’s not included in it.

Which leads to an interesting question that I can’t really answer. The Shattering Peace is book seven in a series that’s been going on since 2005. I did read the whole thing but I haven’t read any of it recently. I believe there was enough backstory to remind me of enough of the details of past events to not feel lost in the present story. I THINK that would be true for someone who hasn’t read the whole thing – however long ago. But I can’t prove that assertion because I DID.

With that caveat, let’s get back to THIS story, which is every bit as much of an SF mystery as it is epic space opera – if not a little bit more. It’s also a story about humanity out among the stars in a situation where we are absolutely not the top dogs and where our frequent xenophobic and ethnocentric behavior is a ginormous problem.

It’s also a story about a whole lot of ‘home truths’ hiding in plain sight while everyone tiptoes around them hoping that they won’t explode. Even though they have, and are, all the damn time.

The fun part of the story is wrapped around the super-advanced aliens who are messing with ALL of the species involved, not just with the colony, but with the whole, entire galaxy. While at the same time being as completely unable to deal with their own bad behavior and interpersonal conflicts as any of us ‘less advanced’ species. Emotions get the best of everyone – and petty behavior gets very petty indeed – no matter how advanced anyone thinks they are.

(Fans of the author will get a particular chuckle over the names that a frustrated Gretchen gives to the two feuding über-advanced aliens. I’m still having a good laugh about THAT part of the story, no matter how chagrined Gretchen is at the consequences of her own petty behavior.)

The solution that Gretchen comes up with is as far out of the box as it gets – only exceeded by the out of the box problem that she’s been presented with. It feels like a happy ending, but then the previous book, The End of All Things, ALSO felt like a happy ending. So maybe.

Or maybe we’ll see Unity Colony again in another decade. They’ll have either done great things – or torn a hole in the space-time continuum. Either way, it’ll be fun to find out.

Grade A #BookReview: The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie MartinezThe Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, horror, queer fiction, retellings
Pages: 352
Published by Tor Books on September 9, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A gorgeous, atmospheric debut fantasy that reimagines the Jewish myth of golem in a tale rooted in history, folklore, and sapphic romance—perfect for fans of Katherine Arden, Ava Reid, Hannah Whitten, and Naomi Novik.
The forest eats the girls who wander out after dark.
As the healer’s daughter, Malka has seen how the curse of the woods has plagued her village, but when the Ozmini Church comes to collect their tithes, they don’t listen to the warnings about a monster lurking in the trees. After a clergy girl wanders too close to the forest and Malka’s mother is accused of her murder, Malka strikes a bargain with a zealot Ozmini priest. If she brings him the monster, he will spare her mother from execution.
When she ventures into the blood-soaked woods, Malka finds a monster, though not the one she expects: an inscrutable, disgraced golem who agrees to implicate herself, but only after Malka helps her free the imprisoned rabbi who created her.
But a deal easily made is not easily kept. And as their bargain begins to unravel a much more sinister threat, protecting her people may force Malka to endanger the one person she left home to save—and face her growing feelings for the very creature she was taught to fear.

My Review:

Malka’s village is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the established Ozmini Church which has tithed her people to the breaking point for being non-believers. Her people are Yahadi, which, in this alternate fantasy world of quasi-Europe in a time similar but not quite the Middle Ages, are this world’s equivalent of the Jewish People.

And, of course, just as the church did in real history, the Jews are fair game to be accused of any crime and automatically convicted, to be imprisoned and executed without trial, to be maimed for looking at a clergyman or a church knight in whatever manner is called ‘wrong’ at the moment, for any women who protest being raped to be beaten to death. This has all literally happened before and may all happen again.

The woods that surround Malka’s village, once a source of food animals and healing herbs, are now dark, dangerous and deadly. The woods eat women. They also turn formerly edible animals into poisonous monsters. The woods take what the church does not.

Putting Malka herself between that rock and that hard place. The churchmen have taken her mother for execution for a crime committed by the deadly woods and its monsters. The church would rather accuse a Yahadi because it furthers their narrative of using the Yahadi as scapegoats in order to gather more power instead of investigating the villagers’ claims that there is a monster in the forest.

Malka takes her life and her mother’s life into her own hands, and bargains with the clergy to go into the woods, kill the monster and bring the body back to prove her mother’s innocence. Malka bargains in desperation and in good faith. She’ll brave the woods and make the attempt – or die trying. Probably the latter.

The clergyman’s faith in this bargain is questionable. On all sides and for all possible motives. But Malka believes because she HAS TO.

And that’s where her true story begins, and leads her to THE true story behind the evil that has taken hold of the woods that surround her home – and the country of which they are a part. That, along the way, Malka learns that the monster she believed to be the scourge of her people is the love of her life, and that the magic of her people that she has been taught to fear is the greatest gift of her faith, are only part of the lessons that she needs to learn in order to save her mother, her people, and herself.

The Maharal of Prague and the Golem

Escape Rating A: The story of The Maiden and Her Monster stands on two foundations, one is the very real and terrible history of Antisemitic persecution across all of Europe during the Middle Ages. The second is a response in Jewish folklore to that persecution, the tale of “The Golem of Prague”, where a great rabbi, the Maharal of Prague, builds a golem out of clay in order to protect his people from persecution.

From those two starting points, the author has crafted a dark fantasy world that skates right on the edge of horror, giving that horror not the face of the monster as one might expect, but rather the human face of greedy and rapacious men who believe the righteousness of their own cause and the inevitability of their own power and don’t care who is sacrificed for their so-called ‘greater good’.

As if that weren’t enough to make a fantastic and fantastical story, layered on top of that foundation is an equally dark sapphic romantasy, as Malka falls in love, not with the good man who has tagged along on her quest but rather the female monster she once feared, hated and reviled at every turn. That love builds slowly and inexorably, step by reluctant step, even as they do their damndest to wound each other and push each other far away.

At the same time, even though the horror and the adventure and the romance along with a daring rescue and a desperate, last chance to defeat an evil that has very nearly won, there’s also a marvelously written meditation on the power of stories themselves, the power to move mountains, to inspire people, but also to hold them back in fear. That the point of view from which a story is told affects every retelling thereafter, and that the most triumphant of tales can conceal the darkest of motives.

There is a LOT to savor in The Maiden and Her Monster. The language is beautiful, the story is a desperate walk through very dark places that ultimately turns towards the light, and it’s an epic love story that springs from the rockiest of beginnings. This is one to literally ‘read it and weep’ with the understanding at the end that ‘not all tears are evil.’

A- #BookReview: The Murderbot Diaries: Obsolescence, Compulsory, Home, Rapport by Martha Wells

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews> Short Story Review
A- #BookReview: The Murderbot Diaries: Obsolescence, Compulsory, Home, Rapport by Martha WellsThe Murderbot Diaries: Obsolescence, Compulsory, Home, Rapport by Martha Wells
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook
Genres: science fiction, short stories, space opera
Series: Murderbot Diaries #0.1 #0.5 #2.5 #4.5
Pages: 92
Published by Tor Books on various dates
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

My Review:

Martha Wells is the Guest of Honor at this year’s Worldcon, which has just begun in Seattle. So, I was looking for something appropriate to review, but there’s no new Murderbot novel this year. Howsomever, there is a new short story, so here we are with a review of, well, Murderbot shorts. (I keep wanting to refer to this collection as ‘Murderbot’s shorts’, but that would be something different altogether. So I resisted. Barely.)

The first gleam of Murderbot – or at least Murderbot’s universe – is a lot further back than I thought, as well as a lot closer to now than I expected. The earliest story, Obsolescence, doesn’t talk about Murderbot at all. But it does explore a bit of the corporate-controlled universe that Murderbot inhabits. This one is a murder mystery, set in the early days of the Luna and Mars colonies, at a point of transition where the exploration has been completed, the initial colonies have been established, and life is starting to settle into its new normal. It’s a time when the part-human, part-cyber ‘Rovers’, Murderbot’s ancestors, are mostly retired if not deceased, but are still known and celebrated as early heroes. (Also the stars of a serial that Murderbot eventually watches). But the corporate hegemonies already exist, as they do, and are already doing evil in the universe and leaving their cast-off, obsolescent former forced laborers to make their own ways in the galaxy. No matter who it costs.

Escape Rating B: The story is better as an SF mystery than it is anything else, and seen from that perspective it’s a lot of fun, but the knowledge that this is the world that gave birth to Murderbot puts a sting in the tale, as all of Murderbot’s own stories do. (This story is available as an ebook for free as part of the collection Take Us to a Better Place.

Compulsory is the first ‘real’ Murderbot story, and it’s the only one of these shorts that is told from Murderbot’s own point-of-view. In other words, it’s the first instance of Murderbot’s singular voice and it would be fascinating from that perspective alone. It’s at a point in Murderbot’s existence where they have already ‘borked’ their governor module, but are still pretending – mostly – to be an ordinary SecUnit while spending over 90% of their time, energy and attention watching entertainment serials. But they are already very much who they are in this story, and it’s refreshing to read that voice and know that their personality, complete with snarkasm, coalesced early on.

Escape Rating A: It was just so damn much fun to read that voice and that perspective again. It’s been two years since System Collapse came out, and Murderbot wasn’t feeling all that much themself during a whole chunk of that story. It was good to hear them again. At the same time, this story is very much Murderbot, being very salty about the stupidity of humans and the even bigger stupidity of systems designed to serve them, while sticking their neck out just enough to save someone – quite possibly because they’ve been inspired by the serial they’re watching at the time.

The final two, so far, Murderbot shorts are Home and Rapport. Home takes place right after the events of Exit Strategy. Home – and also Rapport – are not told from Murderbot’s perspective. We don’t hear their voice, but their presence and influence lies heavily on both stories. We view Home from Dr. Mensah’s perspective, at the point where she’s desperately attempting to cover up her PTSD after the events of Exit Strategy. She’s shaken because she very nearly didn’t have one of those, Murderbot saved her life, and now it’s her turn to save them. If she can. Even though Murderbot is still saving her – this time from herself. They serve as a steadying presence, and sometimes an immovable wall, giving her time and space to take the steps she needs to complete the rest of her journey back to wholeness.

Escape Rating A-: This story is titled Home because Dr. Mensah is having a hard time reclaiming her sense of home and safety, even as she’s doing her damndest to give a home, or at least a safe harbor, to Murderbot. Quite possibly whether they want one or not. This story provides a lovely coda for the events of Exit Strategy, and it was a great story to focus on Mensah and her team from a more compassionate – or at least less snarky – perspective. And by seeing Murderbot from the outside, it’s an opportunity to see just how much they’ve changed from Compulsory.

The final story is Rapport. At least it’s the one most recently published. It’s actually #2.5 in the internal chronology, set after the events of Artificial Condition – although I’ve seen references that it should be read after Network Effect which is where my memory says it belongs. In any case, it’s a mission that Murderbot’s frenemy ART told Murderbot about, but the SecUnit isn’t present. Instead, it’s a story about Murderbot’s and ART’s influence on another machine intelligence, Perihelion. Peri seems to have picked up a lot of tips and tricks from Murderbot by way of ART, and it seems as if Peri has a bit of a crush on Murderbot. Or, at least I hope it’s on Murderbot because ART’s first name is ‘Asshole’ and they are happy to live down to that epithet whenever possible.

Escape Rating A: This is a story that spreads Murderbot’s influence out into the wider world, gives readers a perspective on inter-machine communication, and is just generally a fun story set in this fascinating universe. It’s a lot of fun to see an entirely different machine intelligence applying the lessons that Murderbot has mostly learned the hard way, and it’s a great story to put a pin in this collection of Murderbot shorts.

The next novella in the series, Platform Decay, is scheduled for publication in May, 2026, and in spite of the somewhat ominous title, I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Pearl City by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Pearl City by Julia Vee and Ken BebellePearl City (The Phoenix Hoard, #3) by Julia Vee, Ken Bebelle
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Phoenix Hoard #3
Pages: 400
Length: 12 hours and 38 minutes
Published by Sixth Moon Press LLC, Tor Books on July 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Blade. Butcher. Thief. Worldbreaker.
Emiko Soong has been called many things but Worldbreaker is the worst.
She unmasked the General and returned to San Francisco where her power is greatest. But the city, once her sanctuary from Jiaren intrigues, turns into her living nightmare. Clan war tears at the seams and her life becomes a treacherous quicksand of friend and foe. Unsure of who to trust, Emiko finds herself more alone than ever.
When an ancient power rips through the Realm to land in her city, the General will stop at nothing to take this power for his own. Emiko must face her past, her present, and her future, as she races to stop the General.
Is Emiko’s fate written to be the destroyer of worlds, or can she chart her own course to save her family?

Phoenix Hoard
#1 Ebony Gate #2 Blood Jade #3 Pearl City

My Review:

Pearl City is the end of the vast, sprawling, truly epic saga that began in Ebony Gate, and continued in Blood Jade. It’s marvelous and utterly compelling every step of Emiko Soong’s winding, twisted, churning way – and I was left both sad and smiling at the end.

Sad because the journey is over – at least for the reader. Smiling because Emiko’s hard road and long dark nights of the soul have come to a hopeful and hopefully happy ending for her, her friends and loved ones, and especially her city, San Francisco.

(This is also a huge hint not to start here. Start with Ebony Gate. Please. Soon. This thing is marvelous, absorbing and utterly compelling every step of the way.)

The story picks up right where the previous book, Blood Jade, left off. And it picks up with Emiko in the exact same position she was in when the series opened in Ebony Gate. Everybody hates and fears her because of the abilities she has revealed. And she’s just discovered, yet again, that her parents have lied to her about, well, pretty much damn everything.

She’s always believed that she was ‘less than’. That her dragon talents were minimal and that she was a failure among her people. That her only way of serving her family was as a nearly mundane blade of vengeance wielded by her powerful father. And that her mother was so disappointed in her that she spent most of Emiko’s life far away on endless missions.

Then again, Emiko has also believed all the legends about her people’s mysterious and powerful Dragon Gods, left guarding the gate to this world so that their people, Emiko’s ancestors, could escape the destruction of the Realm from which they all draw their power.

Not much of what Emiko believed turns out to be true. Her talent is so dangerous that it was deliberately broken when she was so young she doesn’t remember. She’s never been a failure – but she’s certainly been emotionally manipulated to believe that she is – and that damage lingers.

Their gods were tyrants. Tyrants they fled in order to escape slavery. Masters who want their hoard, their hoard of sycophants, servants and slaves, back under their dominion.

Emiko is as certain of that as she is anything, because the dragon people may be descended from dragons, but they are just as capable of self-deception and hubris as any garden-variety human. And one of them has connived and conspired to let one of the dragons in.

It’s up to Emiko to send that dragon back where he came from. Before he destroys her, her people, her city, and her world. Because Emiko is the Sentinel of San Francisco, and the city, and ALL its people, magical and mundane, friend and enemy alike, are hers to protect and defend.

Or die trying.

Escape Rating A: I’ve been looking forward to this book for most of a year at this point, because the previous book, Blood Jade, while it didn’t end in a cliffhanger did end on an obvious precipice that the world was just not done messing with Emiko yet. I NEEDED to find out how it ended.

But I also had to wait for the audiobook, read by Natalie Naudus, who is the perfect voice for Emiko. The whole series is written from Emiko’s first-person perspective, so we’re inside her sometimes very messy and often self-deprecating head the whole time. We’re there WITH her in that fantastic way that only happens when there’s perfect synergy between the character and the narrator providing their voice.

(However, I need to insert a kind of trigger warning here. Emiko goes through some seriously terrible stuff in this story. She’s already in a lot of emotional pain, she suffers from a hell of a lot of pre-installed angst, AND she’s forced into battle after battle where she gets deliberately tormented and grievously injured over and over again. Experiencing all of that from inside her head is a LOT. Not that it all doesn’t happen in text, but it’s just that much more immediate and visceral when you’re hearing her voice in your own head. There were points where I wanted to scream and/or hurl right along with Emiko.)

The story in this final volume is also a LOT, and an awful lot happens, a lot of it is awful, and Emiko is always right in the middle of it. There was so much going on, the way that the hits just kept on coming and it seemed like the situation was getting worse with no hope in sight that I had moments where I wondered whether or not the authors were going to need another book to resolve everything.

But it does come round right in ways that perfectly fit the world and the person that Emiko has become, yet still manage to surprise and delight the reader as the tide finally turns and Emiko comes into her own in ways that neither she, nor we, ever expected.

One minor, discordant note in this story, at least for this reader/listener, was the reveal of the true story – or at least the truth-y story – about the true history of the dragon gods reminds me a lot of the Evanuris in Dragon Age: Veilguard. Emiko’s naivete about that story doesn’t ring as true as the rest of her character, not just because she’s old enough to know that all origin stories are full of holes and made up out of the whole cloth to serve the tale’s original tellers, but also because by this point she’s already discovered that a rather large number of the stories she’s been told about herself, her family and her people were not true at all. I admit my perspective on this was colored by the speech and mannerisms of the asshole who explained it all to Emiko in oh-so-condescending tones. He was so obviously high on his own hubris that I couldn’t take his words seriously. His actions, very, but his words, not so much at all. Howsomever, this might be a ‘me’ thing and not a ‘you’ thing. In other words, your reading mileage may vary.

In the end, I’m so very glad I picked up this trilogy, because damn but it’s been an awesome ride. It also left me with the same epic book hangover as Jade Lee’s Green Bone Saga – which the Phoenix Hoard still reminds me of very much – as well as Brian McClellan’s Glass Immortals because the characters are just the same sort of misfit heartbroken heartbreakers.

One final note, not exactly a spoiler but more of a hint. ALL the titles of the books in this series, AND the series title itself, are all clues about the stories within. Awesome, marvelous, fascinating, fantastic stories filled with characters that leap straight off the page and into the reader’s heart. Including the glorious and magical city of San Francisco.

#BookReview: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka OlderThe Potency of Ungovernable Impulses (The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, #3) by Malka Ann Older
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, gaslamp, mystery, science fiction, science fiction mystery, space opera, steampunk
Series: Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti #3
Pages: 246
Published by Tor Books on June 10, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Hugo and Nebula nominated science fiction detective series continues with The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, featuring a new mystery concerning alarming incidents of targeted, escalating academic sabotage.
When a former classmate begs Pleiti for help on behalf of her cousin―who’s up for a prestigious academic position at a rival Jovian university but has been accused of plagiarism on the eve of her defense―Pleiti agrees to travel alongside her and investigate the matter.
Even if she has to do it without Mossa, her partner in more ways than one. Even if she’s still reeling from Mossa’s sudden isolation and bewildering rejection.
Yet what appears to be a case of an attempted reputational smearing devolves into something decidedly more dangerous―and possibly deadly.

My Review:

The first two Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, both began with missing persons cases rather than the corpse that kicks off most mysteries.

This third entry ALSO begins with a missing person, but not in the same way – at all. In the earlier books, the missing persons WERE the mystery, where this time the missing person is the person who usually investigates the mystery. Not that it’s not mysteries all the way down from the human-settled platforms that circle Giant (AKA Jupiter) to the roiling surface of that gas giant of a planet.

But Mossa is the person who is missing, sorta/kinda, and Pleiti is definitely the person who is missing her. (Not that THAT hasn’t happened before in their relationship!)

Mossa is lost, not physically but emotionally, deep in a depression that is so endemic to the human colony on Giant that it has a name and a pathology of its very own. Pleiti, on the other hand, is just a bit lost, leaving her partner behind in order to take a long trip around the transport rings to Stortellen, the university that sees itself as the rival of Pleiti’s own institution, Valdegeld.

Because a friend is being threatened, and she needs Mossa and Pleiti to investigate. If all she’s going to get is Pleiti, that’s going to have to do.

And it does – even if it doesn’t do at all for Pleiti herself until it’s nearly too late.

Escape Rating B: Part of what made the first two books in this series work so well, and made them so much fun to get into, was the way that Investigator Mossa and Scholar Pleiti balance each other out, both in personality and skill set. Not that they aren’t both capable in their own fields, but rather that the mystery usually involves tackling a puzzle that straddles both specialties and they need each other to reach the solution.

Neither of them can see the forest for the trees, as that saying goes, but they can each see the forest for the other’s trees, and when needed, the other way around.

This time around, Pleiti leaves Mossa behind to help out a friend – at Mossa’s seemingly indifferent behest – then feels guilt-ridden because she didn’t recognize her lover’s depression. But she’s stuck, and stuck in, and has to make the best of the situation no matter how deeply she feels like an imposter.

It should work, because the case is very strongly rooted in Pleiti’s personal bailiwick. It’s a story about academic reputations, the fragility thereof, and the ease and rapidity with which an unfounded rumor can derail an entire career. It’s steeped in the maliciously incestuous incivility of the worst of academe, and it’s an environment that Pleiti, as a scholar herself, knows all too well.

But without Mossa, Pleiti flails and angsts a LOT. Not that the situation doesn’t warrant both, and not that she doesn’t wish for Mossa’s ability to obtain an actual, legal, warrant when needed, but mostly she needs Mossa’s pragmatism and laser-focus to balance her out.

I have to say that, as much as I wanted to slip back into Mossa and Pleiti’s world, and as much as I enjoy them as characters and find their setting fascinating, this entry in the series didn’t work for me as well as the first two.

There were a few reasons for that. One is the obvious as stated above, they are better together than they are separately. With Pleiti as the first-person narrator, combined with her tendency to angst-spiral, it sometimes got a bit hard to take.

And that’s on top of the deep dive into the darker corners of bad behavior in academe, of which there was a lot and I have to say that the motives for the reputation bashing were a bit opaque and off-the-wall at the same time. I did figure out whodunnit, but their reasons for doing it mostly get chalked up to ‘ungovernable impulses’.

Also, because of the way this story was deep into the academic life, AND because English or whatever common language has evolved over the decades if not centuries on Jupiter, that language used has gone out and mugged a whole lot of other languages for words, to the point where I kept dropping out of the story to get a translation for a word that I was almost but not quite sure of in context. My immersion in the story got broken OFTEN, and I don’t believe this was the case in the previous books, but without Mossa it seemed that Pleiti got deep into the jargon and cliches and colloquialism of her own profession to the exclusion of those not a part of it. Which is exactly what kind of insider-speak is intended to do, but it frequently lost this member of the intended audience.

Your reading mileage may vary.

I still like Mossa and Pleiti, especially when they’re together, so I’m still following this series. Based on the ending of this book, this sapphic, gaslamp, SF mystery is planning to go full Sherlock Holmes in the next book, with Investigator Mossa striking out on her own as Giant’s first PRIVATE investigator and presumably, hopefully, Pleiti as her Watson-esq chronicler.

I’m looking forward to finding out!