Donald Maass Literary Agency

B&N SFF Blog: Anne Bishop blazed onto the genre scene in the late 1990s with the Black Jewels Trilogy, a fantasy epic filled with violence, blood, and revenge that somehow mostly leaves readers with lingering impressions of its beautiful empathy, kindness, and impish sense of humor. This deeply affecting mixture won the hearts of many fans then (including mine), and remains her signature today. In this sense, her new urban fantasy LAKE SILENCE fits perfectly into her bibliography.

Bishop has always been skilled at building playful, enticing worlds, and she’s filled this one with some of her best characters yet… Fantasy trappings aside, there is a deep emotional core to Bishop’s books…

The power of community is important too—if there’s anything LAKE SILENCE tells us, it’s that getting through a tough situation literally takes a village—a village full of people who probably don’t look like you, act like you, or have your same values. You might not like some of them—you might even have to forget that you were taught to look at them as less than human. But you won’t survive without the village, so you may as well get on with figuring out how to deal with it. Because the Lady of the Lake is watching. And she’s pissed.

Locus: It’s always a treat to read a Martha Wells story, and it turns out that her Murderbot Diaries are an especial delight… Artificial Condition is a story that balances its disparate elements with exceptional skill. It’s perfectly paced, and Wells brings both a strong sense of humour and deep pathos to Murderbot’s character and to their voice. Murderbot, for all their insistence that they’re not really a person, is a very human sort of bot.

There’s plenty of cool shit in this space operatic future, and Wells makes excellent use of the varied potential of her setting for different sorts of stories. Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol are tight, tense, entertaining adventure stories that nonetheless have quite a lot to say about ethics, power, and personhood. I recommend them whole-heartedly, and I really hope that Wells chooses to write many more.

RT Book Reviews: This second installment in the Karen Memory series is as well paced and well written as the first. Karen Memory and her relationship with Priya take the forefront here, and Bear does some very insightful examinations of the ways we trust each other, how we sometimes fail that trust, and how — when the love is real — we can learn to accept that people and relationships are never perfect.

Booklist: Karen and Priya are out for a night on the town when Karen’s irrepressible curiosity gets them entangled with a pair of spiritualists, a stage illusionist, and a riled-up tommy-knocker kidnapped from its mine.

The spiritualist Arcade sisters start it off with a bit of table knocking, but it could be a real “haint”—there’s a story, Karen tells us, about a man returned from Alaska who murdered everyone in the place. Then again, it could just be a grift. Priya, more cautious, is having none of it—which leaves Karen in the hotel with the Arcade sisters and Mrs. Horner, the illusionist, when the hotel starts shaking. The Arcade sisters have gotten the attention of something much more dangerous with their tricks.

Karen is an affable narrator and an enthusiastic investigator, and the story is an excellent adventure as well as a genuinely touching narrative about relationships and compromise; Bear’s (The Stone in the Skull, 2017) narrative skill and flair for both plot and character continue to impress.