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One-Eyed Jack by Elizabeth Bear

Jul 222014
 

bear-one-eyedjackThe One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King: personifications of the city of Las Vegas—its history, mystery, mystical power, and heart…

When the Suicide King vanishes—possibly killed—in the middle of a magic-rights turf war started by the avatars of Los Angeles, a notorious fictional assassin, and the mutilated ghost of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—his partner, the One-Eyed Jack, must seek the aid of a bizarre band of legendary and undead allies: the ghosts of Doc Holliday and John Henry the steel-driving man; the echoes of several imaginary super spies, decades displaced in time; and a vampire named Tribute, who bears a strikingresemblance to a certain long-lost icon of popular music.

All stories are true, but some stories are truer than others.

 July 22, 2014  Tagged with: ,

The Longest Night by Kara Braden

Jul 012014
 

Cover for The Longest Night by Kara Braden. A white woman with brown hair leans down, nose-to-nose with a white man with brown hair and a couple days stubble. Her hand cups his jaw, thumb along his cheekline. Below them is a secluded winterscape, a lone cabin in snow-covered pines.Years ago, former Marine Captain Cecily Knight fled her dark past and the nightmares forever haunting her nights. Alone in the remote Canadian wilderness, she survives day to day…until Ian Fairchild comes storming into her life and shatters her protective seclusion.

Aloof but intriguing, defensive but undeniable, Ian is everything Cecily shouldn’t want but can’t ignore. He watches her with shrewd blue eyes, as if determined to decipher her secrets…and for the first time in years, she finds herself coming alive beneath the hands of a man with too many scars to count.

As the hushed and harsh winter closes in around them, two lost souls find themselves on the precipice of a love that could save their lives…or destroy them forever.

 July 1, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Elisha Magus by E.C. Ambrose

Jul 012014
 

Cover for Elisha Magus by E.C. Ambrose. A dark and brooding cover. A man is laid out on the table, by all appearances dead. Elisha, a white man with curly black hair, stands over him with a look of concentration and concern. He holds out his left hand to the man's face, producing blue light, while his right hand is held upward, producing black crows.Elisha, a barber-surgeon from the poorest streets of benighted fourteenth-century London, has come a long way from home. He was always skilled at his work—but skill alone could not protect him, on the day that disaster left his family ruined and Elisha himself wrongly accused of murder. With no way out, Elisha accepted the offer of Lucius, a haughty physician, to avoid a trial by serving under Lucius as a battle surgeon of the king’s army at the front lines of an unjust war. Continue reading »

 July 1, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Vicky Peterwald: Target by Mike Shepherd

Jun 242014
 

cover for Target by Mike Shepherd. Redheaded white woman in the center, on some sort of futuristic device, holding a futuristic looking gun of some sort.Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Victoria Maria Teresa Inez Smythe-Peterwald, daughter of wealth and power, was raised to do little except be attractive and marry well. Then everything changed—her brother, her father’s favorite and the heir apparent, was killed in battle by Lieutenant Kris Longknife, daughter of the Peterwald’s longtime enemies. Vicky vowed revenge, but her skill set was more suitable for seduction than assassination, and she failed. Angry and disappointed, her father decided she needed military training and forced her to join the Navy.

Now Ensign Vicky Peterwald is part of a whole new world, where use of her ample charms will not lead to advancement. But her father is the Emperor, and what he wants he gets. What he wants is for Vicky to learn to be efficiently ruthless and deadly.

Though the lessons are hard learned, Vicky masters them—with help from an unexpected source: Kris Longknife.

 June 24, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Graduation Day by Joelle Charbonneau

Jun 172014
 

cover of Graduation Day by Joelle Charbonneau. Rich, purple background, and slight to the left is a silver medal with two crossed lightning bolts on it.In book three of the Testing series, the United Commonwealth wants to eliminate the rebel alliance fighting to destroy The Testing for good. Cia is ready to lead the charge, but will her lethal classmates follow her into battle?

She wants to put an end to the Testing
In a scarred and brutal future, The United Commonwealth teeters on the brink of all-out civil war. The rebel resistance plots against a government that rules with cruelty and cunning. Gifted student and Testing survivor, Cia Vale, vows to fight.

But she can’t do it alone.
This is the chance to lead that Cia has trained for – but who will follow? Plunging through layers of danger and deception, Cia must risk the lives of those she loves–and gamble on the loyalty of her lethal classmates.

Who can Cia trust?
The stakes are higher than ever-lives of promise cut short or fulfilled; a future ruled by fear or hope–in the electrifying conclusion to Joelle Charbonneau’s epic Testing trilogy. Ready or not…it’s Graduation Day.

 June 17, 2014  Tagged with: ,

A Swollen Red Sun by Matthew McBride

Jun 172014
 

cover for A Swollen Red Sun by Matthew McBridge. A white, broken down trailer sits in the foreground, the title above it encased in a swollen red sun.In Gasconade County, Missouri–once called the meth capital of the world–Deputy Sherriff Dale Banks discovers $52,000 hidden in the broken-down trailer that Jerry Dean Skaggs uses for cooking crystal. And he takes it. Banks knows what he did was wrong, but he did it for all the right reasons. At least, he thinks so. But for every wrong, there is a consequence.

Jerry Dean can’t afford to lose that $52,000—he owes it to his partners, a crooked cop, and the fearsome Reverend Butch Pogue, who controls the town’s meth production with an iron fist. With the looming threat of prison or death—depending on who catches him first—Jerry Dean makes a final attempt to save himself, setting into a motion a series events that shake even Gasconade Country’s most degenerate citizens.

 June 17, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea

Jun 102014
 

Cover of Koko Takes a Holiday by Kiernan Shea. A badass woman with short, electric blue hair and white face/ black lips/ eyeliner goth make-up stands almost profile but looking at us. She's dressed from neck to wrists in a tight-fitting, futurist-looking black outfit, with an enormous, vivid-yellow and black gun slung on her shoulder like she's about to swing it around and shoot. The background is white and red stripes with action scenes illustrated in black and yellow ink in the red stripes.Five hundred years from now, ex-corporate mercenary Koko Martstellar is swaggering through an early retirement as a brothel owner on The Sixty Islands, a manufactured tropical resort archipelago known for its sex and simulated violence. Surrounded by slang-drooling boywhores and synthetic komodo dragons, the most challenging part of Koko’s day is deciding on her next drink. That is, until her old comrade Portia Delacompte sends a squad of security personnel to murder her.

 June 10, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck by Amy Alkon

Jun 032014
 

Cover for Amy Alkon's Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say Fuck. Plain white cover with black and red text above a silverware setting of a knife, spoon, and fork. The fork's middle tine is longer than the rest, so it's flipping the bird.“Miss Manners with Fangs.” —LA Weekly 

We live in a world that’s very different from the one in which Emily Post came of age. Many of us who are nice (but who also sometimes say “f*ck”) are frequently at a loss for guidelines about how to be a good person who deals effectively with the increasing onslaught of rudeness we all encounter. 

To lead us out of the miasma of modern mannerlessness, science-based and bitingly funny syndicated advice columnist Amy Alkon rips the doily off the manners genre and gives us a new set of rules for our twenty-first century lives. 

With wit, style, and a dash of snark, Alkon explains that we now live in societies too big for our brains, lacking the constraints on bad behavior that we had in the small bands we evolved in. Alkon shows us how we can reimpose those constraints, how we can avoid being one of the rude, and how to stand up to those who are. 

 June 3, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Sea of Time by P.C. Hodgell

Jun 032014
 

cover for Sea of Time by P.C. Hodgell. In the foreground, a white unicorn rounds furiously next to a white girl in a red tunic holding a large broadsword. They are turning to face an armored skeleton in a black cloak and wielding a large ax, while riding a skeletal black horse. Kothifir:  a land where time shifts and the past can circle around to the present and vice versa at any moment.  Here Jame, Kencyrath heir doomed to stalk the gods, joins the Southern Host to find that the past is infringing on the present and eating away at the foundations of the city state itself.  Jame must quest to the Wastes nearby in search of a mystery which is infinitely valuable to Kothifir–as well as being a window into the Kencyrath’s tortured history. It is a mystery that may save the land, but may spell doom for Jame’s brother, heir to the Kencyrath legacy.  Into the past Jame must go in search of a younger version of her brother.  But how can she save him as he was then and still keep the future intact?  And as the Kothfir gods fail and its towers are falling, Jame realizes that somewhere in the Waste lies not merely the promise of saving the land, but the threat of complete destruction.  For somewhere in the Waste, the Master lurks. And it is up to Jame to stop him.

 June 3, 2014  Tagged with: ,

The River of Souls by Robert McCammon

May 312014
 

cover for The River of Souls by Robert McCammon. A green cover with a oval frame in the center, containing an image of two men rowing on a moonlit river, their backs to us, one wearing a tri-corner hat. Around the frame are a bloody knife and a noose.The year is 1703. The place: the Carolina settlement of Charles Town. . Matthew Corbett, professional “problem solver,” has accepted a lucrative, if unusual, commission: escorting a beautiful woman to a fancy dress ball.

What should be a pleasant assignment takes a darker turn when Matthew becomes involved in a murder investigation. A sixteen-year-old girl has been stabbed to death on the grounds of a local plantation. The suspected killer is a slave who has escaped, with two family members, into the dubious protection of a nearby swamp. Troubled by certain discrepancies and determined to see some sort of justice done, Matthew joins the hunt for the runaway slaves. He embarks on a treacherous journey up the Solstice River, also known as the River of Souls. He discovers that something born of the swamp has joined the hunt… and is stalking the hunters with more than murder in mind.

What follows is a shattering ordeal encompassing snakes, alligators, exiled savages, mythical beasts, and ordinary human treachery. The journey up the River of Souls will test the limits of Matthew’s endurance, and lead him through a nightmarish passage to a confrontation with his past, and a moment that will alter his life forever.

 May 31, 2014  Tagged with: ,
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