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.
Jul 202016
Library Journal: Award-winning Kowal (“The Glamourist” series) has a good feel for the era, creating a premise and setting that make this a refreshing historical fantasy. American Ginger Stuyvesant is able to channel the spirits of the dead. Her skills, along with those of other psychics, are being put to use by a special branch of the British Army known as the Spirit Corps during World War I. Working out of a base in Le Havre, Ginger leads one of several circles whose members take intelligence from deceased soldiers who report what they saw on the battlefields. One day a fighter checks in who has been killed by a British officer, not a German enemy. Ginger has a hard time getting her male superior officers to take her seriously, but she is tenacious as she pulls on the threads of a mystery that threatens the whole of the Spirit Corps.
Tor.com: Lee knows that if the fate of the world is at stake, the reader has to care about that world, so he uses language as a way to reveal a beauty that can be found even in the depths of an interstellar war. He builds more in a couple of sentences than some authors manage in entire novels, and beautifully.
Chicago Tribune: Palmer’s most innovative strategy isn’t futuristic technology but rather the archaic and digressive 18th-century voice in which she (or Canner) has chosen to tell the tale. The result is a richly detailed, very odd future couched in language that recalls Henry Fielding more than Robert Heinlein (though there are occasional nods to science fiction along the way).
Publishers Weekly: The 19th installment of the long-running Liaden Universe space adventure series (following 2015’s Dragon in Exile) opens with the members of Clan Korval and their allies still trying to solidify their economic position and regain their strength following their exile from their home planet. With the insidious Department of the Interior manipulating their public image and outright attacking their ships, the clan is hard-pressed to maintain and expand its trade routes. Meanwhile, Clan Korval member Padi yos’Galen is starting to manifest a power that could destroy her, and AI experts Tolly Jones and Hazenthull are dispatched to mentor a newborn computer intelligence, with orders to save or destroy it as necessary. The large number of ongoing story lines, ever-growing cast, and series-wide narrative arc make this an awkward book for newcomers, serving more as the mid-point of the current cycle. However,