Donald Maass Literary Agency

Publishers Weekly: When Dahlia Dutton’s father sends her and a small crew to salvage a house near Lookout Mountain, Tenn., she finds that what you don’t know can hurt you in Priest’s spectacular modern haunted-house story. Dahlia is no stranger to ghosts, whether she’s being emotionally haunted by a failed marriage or by the metaphorical spirits that linger in old buildings. The concept of home salvage disturbing ghosts is brilliant, and while common elements of haunted house stories are certainly present (a mysterious owner with family secrets, locked rooms, unnatural storms, etc.), Priest (Boneshaker) handles them with tremendous skill, putting the pieces together to keep the reader guessing and more than a little scared. The characters are given a compelling reason to stay (the family business will fail if this job falls through) and their interpersonal dynamics humanize them, making them more than just cannon fodder as the hauntings increase in severity. Priest has written an excellent modern house story from start to finish.

Publishers Weekly: In this entrancing alternate history, Kowal (the Glamourist Histories series) introduces the Spirit Corps, a group that communicates with recently killed soldiers to gather important wartime information. It’s the summer of 1916, and American medium Ginger Stuyvesant works with the British Army at Le Havre to coordinate and lead spirit circles. When her intelligence officer fiancé, Capt. Benjamin Harford, uncovers a German plot to target the Spirit Corps and is sent to the front soon after, Ginger must use every power at her disposal to track down a traitor and protect the corps. Kowal’s depiction of spiritualism is richly imagined, and its complications and consequences are thoughtfully considered. Her depiction of the Western Front includes diverse characters often neglected in wartime stories: the many people who help Ginger include women young and old, people of color, and disabled veterans, all of whom are dismissed by the British men in charge. The well-drawn characters and the story’s gripping action and deep emotion will captivate readers.

B&N SFF Blog: Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has been praised for its elegant prose, outsize SF-nal ambition, and rigorous technical detail. Hard SF space opera from a mathematician and data analyst: one of those times you put a bunch of boring words together, and the result is only awesome. Ordered to retake a fortress captured by heretical rebels and with no other way to win, Captain Kel Cheris must welcome into her head the digitized consciousness of Shuos Jedao, an infamous military strategist who has been exiled to machine space ever since he engineered a disastrous campaign that left an entire planet dead. Together, they will unlock a galaxy-wide conspiracy that could disrupt the entirety of their rigid, ordered, highly mathematical society, throwing everything into chaos. This is one of the most challenging, mind-expanding new sci-fi books you’ll read this year.

Read B&N’s full review of Ninefox Gambit here.

RT Book Reviews: Suitably enough, given the rigid Doctrine of the hexarchate and the irresistible formation instinct of the warrior Kel faction, Ninefox Gambit is a book of precise rigor that gives a wonderful amount of worldbuilding without any clunky exposition dumps, is ruthlessly clear-eyed about the costs and concerns of war (especially at this technological level) and gives us an instantly ingratiating heroine who spends most of the book doing her best to outmaneuver the forces that have set her up to fail, waste the lives of her troops or just die. This is a future to get excited about, especially given the likely path of the next book.

Read RT Book Review’s full review of Ninefox Gambit here.