Publishers Weekly: Priest’s final Clockwork Century novel (after The Inexplicables) wraps things up nicely, once again turning a mash-up of too-worn genre tropes (steampunk, alternate Civil War, zombies) into a work of entertainment laced with social criticism. In 1879, as the Civil War continues to rage, scientist and ex-slave Gideon Bardsley’s invention, a massive computer called the Fiddlehead, has predicted that the zombie outbreak from the Northwest will overwhelm both sides if they don’t end the war. Continue reading »
Oct 112013
October 11, 2013
VOYA Magazine: In the Heartland, corn is both king and conqueror. It shackles the people to the land and allows the rich to live decadent, worry-free lives atop floating islands in the sky. Seventeen-year-old Cael McAvoy is determined to break free from a dead-end future, and when he discovers rogue vegetables growing among the cornfields, he knows he has found his ticket to the good life.
Kirkus Reviews: The art of falling isn’t hard to master, Penelope Sparrow discovers, when she wakes up in the hospital after a 14-story plunge that ended with her body colliding with Marty Kandelbaum’s car.
Booklist: Roy Alison, the linchpin in this novel-in-stories set in the Louisiana-Arkansas border area, has a dreadful legacy to overcome. At 16, he was high on drugs when he caused the car accident that killed his parents, starting him on a decade-long downward spiral of life in institutions, punctuated by violence in which people sometimes died. Now back home and living with his grandmother, Alison wants to be a better person. But events, generally motivated by the region’s dreadful economy, are conspiring against him.
Kirkus, Starred Review: Who would kill a sweet, elderly nursing home resident? That’s just one of the problems Rebecca Robbins has to solve now that she’s decided to remain in her hometown of Indian Falls and continue running her mother’s roller rink. 
Publishers Weekly: In this gripping follow-up to 2012’s Daughter of the Sword, Tokyo police officer Oshiro Mariko is now working in the Narcotics division. In the aftermath of a raid, an ancient mask is stolen, and its Yakuza owner demands that Mariko retrieve it. Her search for the mask leads her to a cult with a deadly agenda and a centuries-old mystery connected to the legendary sword she now possesses. 
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review: McGoran (Body Trace and two other Madison Cross mysteries under his D.H. Dublin pseudonym) impressively integrates concerns about genetically modified produce with an action-filled storyline and fleshed-out characters. Det. Doyle Carrick of the Philadelphia PD, suspended after putting a gun to a drug dealer’s head to coerce information, uses his mandatory vacation to take residence in the house he’s inherited from his recently deceased parents in the rural community of Dunston, PA.
Kirkus, Starred Review: The long-awaited fourth and penultimate installment of the sci-fi/fantasy saga The Psalms of Isaak (Antiphon, 2010, etc.) takes off running and doesn’t stop.