Wanted Dispatch June 22....

Blade Reforged by Kelly McCullough (Ace)

I knew nothing about this series and I wish I had a while back when it started. The descriptions from Kelly's website (here) put me in mind of the assassin/thief centric series like Brent Weeks' Way of Shadow and Jon Sprunk's Shadow's Son both of which are quite good reads and I heartily recommend. The series starts with the hero discredited and hunted in a place where he once was respected. Aral and his companion a ghost like being hat takes a dragon like form apparently have a buddy cop like relationship and I like the mixing of tropes of the police procedural and fantasy so this is a draw for me. Like I said I know only what I found on the website and the fact writers I like give it good electronic word of mouth...

Here is the synopsis of this volume...

After the fall of the goddess of justice, temple assassin Aral Kingslayer lost his purpose in life and turned to the bottle. That might have been the end of him if luck hadn’t given him a few people to help him get back on his feet—notably the irresistible Baroness Maylien Dan Marchon, who once sought his aid in claiming the throne that’s rightfully hers. Reluctant to resume the role of an assassin, he turned her down.

But now Aral has learned that one of the few people willing to help him in his darkest days has been imprisoned by Maylien’s uncle, King Thauvik. Aral knows he can’t let an old friend die, but the alternative is to return to the life he left years ago. It was the death of Thauvik’s half brother that earned Aral the name Kingslayer, and now he is thrust into a war that will see no end until he lives up to his name…

here is a link to the synopsis to the first book...

 

Crash by Guy Haley (Solaris Books)

Champion of Mars was a book I wanted to read and Guy Haley's first novel for Solaris its a book called Kim Stanley Robinson meets Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read about Crash here on Chuck Wendig's blog and I'm very intrigued and want to get a copy of this next week. I read mainly fantasy and steampunk but I miss good hard SF and Crash certainly would fill that need. Guy's story this time around is a colonization story one that thankfully goes arwy because that always makes for a good tale. In his interview with Chuck he talks about the bigger picture that is is a glimps of ; I love the idea of colonies separated by some catastrophe.

Here is the synopsis from Solaris..

The Market rules all, an Al that plots the rise and fall of fortunes without human intervention. Mankind, trapped by a rigid hierarchy of wealth, bends to its every whim. to function, the Market must expand without end. The earth is finite, and cannot hold it, and so a bold venture to the stars is embarked upon, offering a rare chance for freedom to a select few people.

But when the colony fleet is sabotaged, a small group finds itself marooned upon the tidally-locked world of Nychthemeron, a world where one hemisphere is bathed in perpetual daylight, the other hidden by eternal night. Isolated and beset, the stricken colony members must fight for survival on the hostile planet, while secrets about both the cause of their shipwreck and the nature of Nychthemeron itself threaten to tear their fragile society apart...

Here is the link to Chuck Wendig's blog I encourage you to go check it out....

 

Cold Steel by Kate Elliot (Orbit Books)

I have a couple of Kate's books in my to be read pile including the first in this series Cold Magic. I began reading it while I was living in Vancouver Canada and had to put it aside as we planned a move back to Oregon and got involved in reading ARC's I needed to review so have not gotten back to it. The series seemed a mix of epic fantasy, steampunk and the magical school kinda thing like oh those books about the young put upon guy named Harry something. Kate's writing style really appealed to me and I really have to go back and read through it since it was quite good as I recall. Here is a link to a sample from this volume...

Here is the synopsis from Kate's site here

When the cold mages come for her, who can she trust?

Cat Barahal was the only survivor of the flood that took her parents. Now, betrayed by her family and forced to marry a powerful cold mage, Cat will be drawn into a labyrinth of politics. There she will learn the full ruthlessness of their rule. For it is the dawn of a new age, with industry and revolution transforming the land. There’s just one problem: the cold mages don’t want things to change.

iD by Madeline Ashby

This is the sequel to the well received vN last year and a book I much want to have the time to get to. It was up for awards and got great e word of mouth from the likes of a favorite of mine Rudy Rucker which said it combined the best if cyberpunk with that of urban fantasy. I expect this to be a dark and moody book with lost of character development and awesome action given the tags I have read about it. Here is the link to the Angry Robot site page for it. There are links there to Madeline's site and to an extract from the novel.

This is the synopsis for the first volume to wet your appetite...

Amy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot.

For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother’s past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.

Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she’s learning impossible things about her clade’s history – like the fact that the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has failed… Which means that everyone wants a piece of her, some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her.

Hunted by Kevin Hearne

 

I just finished reading Kevin's short story that appears in Carniepunk later this year and am sad I have yet to encounter his Iron Druid Chronicles. The story I read had a bit of the wry wit that would be familiar to fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Though his main character is several thousand years old, and I have to know how that comes about, he drops cultural references worthy of John Creighton so Farscape. Atticus is a character that is appealing and not above making mistakes, he may be a Druid but he is human, he has a brilliant sidekick and a cool apprentice from my reading. Looking around Kevin's website there are a total of six novels and several shorter works to date... As I said above I liked the short piece that mixed folklore with Christian mythology coming out with something unique in tone. Here is the synopsis from Hunted...(looks like my to read pile will be getting just that little bit bigger....)

For a two-thousand-year-old Druid, Atticus O’Sullivan is a pretty fast runner. Good thing, because he’s being chased by not one but two goddesses of the hunt—Artemis and Diana—for messing with one of their own. Dodging their slings and arrows, Atticus, Granuaile, and his wolfhound Oberon are making a mad dash across modern-day Europe to seek help from a friend of the Tuatha Dé Danann. His usual magical option of shifting planes is blocked, so instead of playing hide-and-seek, the game plan is . . . run like hell.

Crashing the pantheon marathon is the Norse god Loki. Killing Atticus is the only loose end he needs to tie up before unleashing Ragnarok—AKA the Apocalypse. Atticus and Granuaile have to outfox the Olympians and contain the god of mischief if they want to go on living—and still have a world to live in.

Here is a link to Kevin's site where you can check his work out.... I think as a fan of urban fantasy its something fellow fans should give a look...

 

So seems a goodly haul for the coming week... A little bit of this and a little of that ....cheers, reviews to come...

 

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