Dear writers: Please be aware of ongoing scams by agent impersonators. Use extra caution with any unsolicited offers from agents. Reputable agents will not ask for upfront fees of any kind. For more information, look at sites such as Writer Beware (https://writerbeware.blog/). Please always check email addresses/spellings. All official emails from Donald Maass Literary Agency will come from an address that ends in @maassagency.com (2 A's, 2 S's in MAASS).

Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman

Nov 242015
 

Cover for Planetfall by Emma Newman. The profile of a person's face made up completely of floating junk pieces from a 3D printer.i09: Newman does a fantastic job…incredibly well-realized world-building, showing a realistic (semi) post-scarcity society on another world…Newman has a real gift for depicting people’s capacity for naivete and viciousness, and how the two things often go together. Planetfall will ultimately mess with your head. It draws you in with such a well-realized world that by the time you start to realize that its main character isn’t quite who you thought she was, you’re already fully inhabiting her skin. (The device of having a first-person narrator who withholds information from the reader is a risky one, which could horribly backfire—but in this story about repressed truths and terrible secrets, it absolutely works and feels natural and honest.) There were a few points in Planetfall where I was like, “What the hell just happened?”—in a good way. And by the time you get to the last of those, this book that appeared to be sort of a cozy story of exoplanet colonization will have started to seem like something much more urgent and thrilling.

Review: This is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

Nov 232015
 

Cover for This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp. Five brightly colored pieces of chalk explode in front of a chalkboard as they are hit with a bullet.RT Book Reviews: Nijkamp’s emotional, powerful debut fictionalizes an all-too-frequent occurrence in today’s world. Her strong storytelling pulls readers into a school shooting, leaving them amongst the gunman’s victims in Opportunity High’s auditorium.

Read RT’s full review of This is Where It Ends here.

Review: The Watcher in the Wall by Owen Laukkanen

Nov 192015
 

Cover for Owen Laukkanen's The Watcher in the Walls.Booklist: Crime-fighting duo FBI agent Carla Windermere and Minnesota BCA agent Kirk Stevens (The Stolen Ones, 2015) are drawn into the hunt for an online predator when questions arise about the suicide of a classmate of Stevens’ daughter, Andrea. After promising Andrea they’d poke around, Windermere and Stevens find that the troubled teen forged a suicide pact with a girl she met on an online suicide site. FBI tech experts determine that the girl’s heavily cloaked identity is a cover for a predator who has lured other teens to their deaths. Chat logs reveal that their predator has two other victims lined up, and the hunt for a cunning killer becomes a desperate bid to save a young girl’s life. Suspension of disbelief is required as Windermere and Stevens’ boss authorizes an arsenal of resources for a case he declares isn’t under FBI or BCA jurisdiction, but Laukkanen skillfully distracts from this pesky detail with earnest characterization and incomparable pacing. This is a guaranteed lost weekend for Laukkanen’s fans and for anyone those seeking a Lee Child–like adrenaline rush.

Review: Games Wizards Play by Diane Duane

Nov 182015
 

Cover for Games Wizards Play by Diane Duane, latest in the Young Wizards series.Kirkus: “In a conflagrant climax overflowing with images of glory and wonder, Duane neatly manages to pull together and tie off plot threads that have been dangling since the earliest volumes.”

Read the full Kirkus review of Games Wizards Play here.

Review: Made to Kill by Adam Christopher

Nov 172015
 

Cover for Made to Kill by Adam Christopher. A noir stylized painting of a closeup of a robot dressed in a fedora and trenchcoat with a woman's silhouette in the background.SFX Magazine: …Christopher goes deeper than pastiche. Ray’s primitive systems can only retain 24 hours of memory, so each day he’s a clean slate, briefed on the case by Ada – and it’s not clear he can trust her. This is wonderfully noir, leaving Ray slightly adrift between the forces trying to manipulate him. And in true Chandler style, Ray quickly becomes implicated in the very case he’s investigating, making things even knottier. Made To Kill is book one of a trilogy. We’d happily go for more than three.

Read the full Made to Kill review in SFX Magazine.

Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman

Nov 162015
 

Cover for Planetfall by Emma Newman. The profile of a person's face made up completely of floating junk pieces from a 3D printer.Library Journal: Fans of unusual colony fiction such as Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden will enjoy the slightly surreal alien world Newman (Between Two Thorns) creates. Whereas many hard sf novels would wallow in the nature of the aliens and the process of getting to the planet, the real draw here is the character of Ren and the cost that keeping the colony’s secrets has on her mental health. Decades after landing on an alien planet, the colonists who live at the foot of the jungle structure they call God’s city maintain a yearly ritual. Only Mack, their leader, and engineer Ren know that this ritual is a sham. The colonists had followed the dream of the woman they call the Pathfinder, who was exposed to a spore while hiking with Ren and received a vision that drew her into spaceflight and to the alien planet. Things didn’t go exactly as planned, and now years later the stress of maintaining both this myth and the secret of what really happened at Planetfall will culminate in conflict.

Starred Review: Made to Kill by Adam Christopher

Nov 162015
 

Cover for Made to Kill by Adam Christopher. A noir stylized painting of a closeup of a robot dressed in a fedora and trenchcoat with a woman's silhouette in the background.Booklist: The genre-blending trend takes an enjoyable turn in this hard-boiled-PI and science-fiction hybrid, which author Christopher describes in his foreword as being like “Raymond Chandler’s long-lost science fiction epic.” The year, 1965. The place, Hollywood. The world, alternate (JFK is still alive, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is just getting going). The citizenry is doubly captivated by the Cuban Missile Crisis and a big Hollywood premier. Enter our hero, Ray, a robot PI. Ray is the last robot left in a world that used to be dominated by them. He has recently been reprogrammed by his supercomputer boss, Ada, to be an undercover contract killer, but with only a 24-hour memory tape, Ray is not sure how or why this happened. When a sultry starlet comes into Ray’s office with an order to kill her leading man and a bagful of gold bars to cover the payment, Ray lands in the middle of an evil conspiracy with roots much deeper than the movie industry. The action, plot, dialogue, and characters are straight out of Chandler, while the science-fiction elements are reminiscent of the very best of that genre from the 1940s and ’50s (think Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein). This first in the L.A. trilogy is a fun, fast read for anyone willing to take the speculative leap—a must-add for most fiction collections.

Review: Made to Kill by Adam Christopher

Nov 132015
 

Cover for Made to Kill by Adam Christopher. A noir stylized painting of a closeup of a robot dressed in a fedora and trenchcoat with a woman's silhouette in the background.Boing Boing: Christopher really gets to grips with the constraints of Ray’s short term memory and the social implications of the mob-destruction of all the robots (save one), telling a story that’s gripping, funny, deadly and suspenseful.

Best of all, this is book one of three, so there’s more of this kind of thing in the pipeline. That’s great news, because Christopher has hit on something that I’d hardly suspected before, and now can’t get enough of.

Read the full Cory Doctorow review of Made to Kill here.

Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman

Nov 122015
 

Cover for Planetfall by Emma Newman. The profile of a person's face made up completely of floating junk pieces from a 3D printer.Tor.com: Beautifully and heartbreakingly wrought, Planetfall is a genius novel that is far more than its exterior belies; a distressing, harrowing novel that left a deep mark on me.  It isn’t an easy, cheerful read, but it is a captivating story that can be very aptly be described as a must read.

Read Tor.com’s full review of Planetfall here.

Review: Shadow’s End by Thea Harrison

Nov 122015
 

Cover for Thea Harrison's Shadow's End.RT Book Reviews: Remarkable Harrison pulls out all the stops for this amazing new novel. This is a fantastic tale of friendship, love, loyalty and sacrifice that you won’t soon forget. Make sure you have a Kleenex nearby, for sometimes tragedy and loss are unavoidable. Without question, Harrison should be an auto-buy!

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