Donald Maass Literary Agency

Publishers Weekly: Underdogs abound in this scrappy, series-launching historical fantasy from Carrick (the Rook and Rose trilogy), the pseudonym for Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms. The authors pit a displaced human and the faerie changeling left in her stead against a Spanish colonial empire bent on conquering both the New World and the faerie realm of the Sea Beyond. The human protagonist, called the Hungry Girl for her need to eat regularly, unlike her fae captors, was sent to the faeries for protection from an uncaring father and now serves as a jester for a capricious faerie queen in exile. Then the Spanish conquistadors arrive, using their religion to break the magic of the Sea Beyond and claim its treasures. The fae protagonist, Estevan, left in Hungry Girl’s place and raised in the human world, seeks to stop this invasion by uncovering the source of the conquistadors’ power. Because time is out of joint between the two realms, the dual narrative becomes slippery and occasionally hard to grasp. Bridging the story lines is Diego, a mortalizado, or faerie enslaved by humans whose immortality has been removed by baptism, whose appearance as old or young helps keep the timeline straight. Carrick makes both the mundane world and the danger-filled fantasy realm of the Sea Beyond vivid. There’s a warmhearted center to this sweeping, mirrored fantasy that’s sure to draw readers in.

Kirkus: Two veteran authors join forces under a pseudonym to launch a series about a wildly unlikely amateur sleuth.

Mo Ellery never wanted to get involved in detection. All she wanted was to hold on to her live-in boyfriend and keep her job at a Chicago marketing agency. After losing both within a few minutes of each other (the losses are connected, but you’ll never guess how), she moves to downscale Buffalo Park and takes the only job she can get, as a crossing guard near a city school. A driver with a car full of poodles constantly harasses her until the whole crew gets swallowed up in a sinkhole that opens beneath her eyes, leaving him dead and the poodles in urgent need of adoption. Scared of being called out by the police, Mo reluctantly agrees to take custody of the late Cran Johnston’s show dogs—Jean Valjean, Louis XIV, and Jacques Cousteau—with the idea of fobbing them off on Tond Johnston, Cran’s brother and heir, or on Benny, the dog trainer Cran had just fired, or, really, on pretty much anyone. Along the way she gets sucked into investigating not one but two maybe-murders. Working with Marlowe Golden, a pink-haired 12-year-old who shifts smartly from giving Mo a hard time about crossing the street to installing herself as Mo’s sidekick, she follows a series of hunches that cast suspicion on nearly everyone in Chicago, from Alderman Merle Carey to Tasha, his hot assistant, who quickly becomes Mo’s new lover. The frantic pace will make many readers accept a plot that’s even crazier than the protagonist.

Move over, Ellery Queen. There’s a new Ellery in town, and she puts a whole new spin on being a queen.

Booklist: “…one of his very best: a story that pulls readers deeply in with a consuming dread that becomes almost unbearable. Truly a magnificent work of horror fiction.”

Library Journal: The underqualified misfits undertaking this intergalactic art heist have no idea what mission they’ve actually signed up for. They think they’re going to steal back the art treasures that Earth gave up in return for a quick fix to their onrushing apocalypse. Now that Earth is repaired, it wants its stuff back, even if they have to steal it. The crew thinks the mission is sanctioned, their leader believes that everyone will forgive his deceptions, and the art historian is in this to get her lover back. Meanwhile, their friendly alien pilot with the handy spaceship plans to use them as a convenient scapegoat for nefarious plans of their own. It will be a miracle if any of them get out of this one alive. Tanzer’s (Creatures of Charm and Hunger) sci-fi heist caper surprises everyone, including readers, every parsec of the way.

VERDICT Inside this combination of Beth Revis’s Full Speed to a Crash Landing with Becky Chambers’s To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a story about alien con artists, self-deceptive historians, self-aware clones, and self-centered cyborgs, along with a surprising look at what it means to be real in both art and relationships.

Publishers Weekly: An exercise in elaborate worldbuilding, this ambitious outing from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Walton (Or What You Will) transports readers to the fantastical city of the Serenissima, “built on nothing but layers of magical mist and memories and dreams.” The Serenissima’s geography shifts with the fog that drifts through it, “opening a new square here, closing up an old canal there, like a face caught in the fleeting act of changing expression.” Its waterways, maintained by shared belief in their existence, connect eight disparate worlds, including Earth. The Venetians believed the Serenissima into being first, and through it soon found neighbors: beings who look much like the Venetians, but with the faces of cats, dogs, or domino masks garlanded with flowers and feathers, and who connect to the magic of the Serenissima in their own ways. Against this inventive backdrop, a fisherman wakes from a dream that the city will elect its first doge. A local mystic confirms that she can see this coming to pass—and also sees a cure for the plague that blights the fisherman and his lover—after which the city itself pulls everyone around him into the rush to fulfill the prophecy. Told through the eyes of nine different characters, each with a perspective and backstory rich enough for its own novel, the relatively low-stakes plot still manages to feel personal and affecting. This fascinates. (June)