THE WILD DEAD – Carrie Vaughn

Posted by Daniel on January 27, 2020
Posted in: MYSTERY, SF/FANTASY, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

It was about a year and a half ago when I read Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless and was really taken by surprise in a good way.  I knew nothing about the book and was only familiar with Vaughn’s name as someone I hadn’t yet read. This time I went in to the book with some idea of what I would find, and I had high expectations.

A big part of my enjoyment here is the world Vaughn has created.  It is, in some ways, a dystopian world.  A post-holocaust … no, a post-collapse world.  There are hints of the technology that we are currently familiar with, but I don’t sense the devastation that would come with a world war. And unlike so many of the dystopian-set books I’ve read, this world is almost peaceful, serene.

But even in a peaceful world with human inhabitants, the worst of human attributes will come out, and so the civilization we see here have form of police investigators. Enid and her new partner Teeg are these new investigators.

Enid and Teeg are called to mediate a dispute in a remote region along the Coast Road.  A body of a young woman is discovered in a swamp nearby. The woman is not from the Coast Road but from one of the nomadic tribes inhabiting the woods.  This makes her death quite a mystery and yet no one seems to care in the slightest.  Except Enid.

Teeg argues that this isn’t their problem since it isn’t part of the Coast Road but Enid’s sense of morality and determination to to bring a sense of closure has her going into the wild alone.  This brings about no small amount of danger for Enid.

I really enjoy this series, based on these first two books.  Combining a mystery with dystopian sci-fi is great. And that this dystopian world isn’t the doom-and-gloom the way most dystopian worlds appear to be, is really wonderful.

I don’t get a lot of intensity or drama in this.  It’s not a page-turner.  But I like it.  This is a great beach read or a sitting-by-the-fire-in-winter read.

Looking for a good book? The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn is a wonderful mystery set in an American future after an economic and social order collapse.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Wild Dead

author: Carrie Vaughn

series: The Bannerless Saga #2

publisher: John Joseph Adams/Mariner Books

ISBN: 0544947312

paperback, 264 pages

LAST SONG SUNG – David A. Poulsen

Posted by Daniel on January 24, 2020
Posted in: MYSTERY. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

It’s always a gamble to pick up a book in mid-series these days.  Sometimes a story relies on the reader’s prior knowledge of previous books and sometimes you can jump right in and get everything you need through the course of the story.  David A. Poulsen’s mystery, Last Song Sung, falls somewhere in between.

Freelance journalist Adam Cullen and cop-turned-private detective Mike Cobb are hired by a young woman to track down her grandmother.  The problem … the grandmother, Ellie Foster, disappeared 50 years ago.

Ellie had been a rising star in the music scene in Calgary during the late 1960’s.  One night, during a ruckus in which gunshots happened, Ellie went missing and there had been no sign of her since then.  But recently her grand-daughter found that someone had broken into her car and left a CD with a previously never-before-heard recording of Ellie.  Could Ellie still be alive? Why else would her once-missing music start to turn up? Cullen and Cobb’s search reveals some unexpected political tie-ins.

It’s pretty common for me to gravitate toward a book with some music theme and that’s what initially drew me to this book. That music theme doesn’t play as central a role as I had hoped, but I quite enjoyed this read none-the-less. The story built up nicely and the mystery adds layers and reveals bits of information at a nice pace.  It was easy to be hooked on the story and want to read just one more chapter each time I sat down to read.

The book is written in first person, from Cullen’s point of view.  This makes a certain amount of sense since he is a journalist and tells a story, but I would have liked getting the detective’s insight through more than just table talk.

This story, of Ellie Foster, is clear and concise and we get everything need to follow this story, and we learn a bit about Cullen and Cobb along the way.  But there is also another story that is running in the background – something that clearly began in an earlier book and is not yet resolved.  This was a little bit irksome since I wasn’t familiar with it, and some of it feels important enough that I should know more.  Though it is an interesting bit of character and plot development. I’m not likely to go back and read the first couple of volumes, but I hope more is explained if I should read future books.

Looking for a good book? Last Song Sung by David A. Poulsen is a fun, modern mystery that looks back at a fifty-year-old incident. This is great for mystery and cozy mystery lovers.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Last Song Sung

author: David A. Poulsen

series: Cullen and Cobb #3

publisher: Dundurn

ISBN: 1459739868

paperback, 352 pages

STARSHIP ALCHEMON – Christopher Hinz

Posted by Daniel on January 22, 2020
Posted in: SF/FANTASY, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Every once in awhile I come across a book that I feel is well written and with an interesting set of characters in an interesting story, and yet it doesn’t click with me.  This is one of those books.

Given the number of books I read in a year, and with many of them being by authors who are new to me, I shouldn’t be surprised that I run into this, and yet each time it happens, it surprises me none-the-less.

A team of explorers are on an intelligent space ship, Alchemon. They are sent to investigate some unusual signals from a distant area, but everything possible seems to go wrong and soon they begin to distrust one-another … a dangerous thing to do when you need to rely on everyone for day-to-day survival. In time, they realize that this fight for survival is also a fight to save the human race.

Mostly I just found this book rather dull.  The suspense didn’t built up enough for me. Only one moment stands out in which I wondered how one person was going to react and if another would manage to survive the encounter. Otherwise I thought the book was so evenly paced that you could pick up reading the book at any page and it would feel the same from that point on.

The characters never grabbed my attention and so when they started to fear one another I never knew who I was supposed to root for and who I was supposed to worry about.

The “something is out there” story also never caught on for me. I’ve read this sort of space opera fairly recently, and done quite well (The Expanse series comes first to mind) so this turned out to be quite a disappointment. There are differences, of course, but it just wasn’t enough to excite me into reading more.

Looking for a good book? Starship Alchemon by Christopher Hinz is a space opera story that hits all the right marks for clever characters and story, but does so in such a methodical and evenly paced way that the book is really quite dull.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgally, in exchange for an honest review.

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Starship Alchemon

author: Christopher Hinz

publisher: Angry Robot

ISBN: 085766817X

paperback, 376 pages

THE LOVECRAFT SQUAD: DREAMING – Stephen Jones, creator

Posted by Daniel on January 20, 2020
Posted in: Dark Fantasy/Horror, SF/FANTASY, SHORT FICTION, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

How did I not know about this series until book three?!

The premise: There are cultist out there (such as Olde Fellowes and the Esoteric Order of Dagon) who are trying to disrupt Order and they do it by going through dimensions of space and time.  There is an organization set up to combat these cultists: The Lovecraft Squad – fighting agents of Cthulhu since everywhen!

The book is a collection of short stories – although if I have one major complaint about the book, this is never really made clear. There are a number of authors listed on the title page, but there is no table of contents page.  We start out with “The Story So Far…” and then a prologue (“The Black Ship”) and then to “One | The Dreams in the White House” and then to “Two | Weird Shadows Over Innsbruck” etc. There is no author listed for each chapter or each story, so it looks like a novel, but I was really confused when we never came back to the events of a chapter. But when I read this as a series of connected short stories, it made much more sense.

The Lovecraft Squad fight off all kinds of supernatural creatures through some really significant events throughout history.  From the assassination of President Kennedy to the Watergate break-in to landing on the moon we follow squad members – who often know how the events are supposed to turn out.

This was delightfully fun.  Crossing H.P. Lovecraft with The X Files – that’s how I see this – is kind of brilliant. Once I caught on how to read this, I really enjoyed it.

I also have to say that the cover art (as depicted here) by Douglas Klauba is spot-on perfect and really, this was one of the things that first caught my eye about this book.  I have a real fondness for 1950’s-70’s pulp literature, especially YA for boys, and there was a ‘look’ about the covers that let you know immediately what was inside.  Think Christopher Cool:

 Or Mike Mars:

Or Tom Corbet:

This cover has that same effect for me.

I do wish I knew who had written which parts, because there are some of the pieces that were stronger than others and it’s always nice to build up a library of authors whose work you enjoy.

The authors who contributed here are:

Peter Atkins
Stephen Baxter
Brian Hodge
Sean Hogan
Lisa Morton
Kim Newman
Reggie Oliver
John Llewellyn Probert
Lynda E. Rucker
Angela Slatter
Michael Martin Smith

Looking for a good book? If you enjoy the dark strangeness of H. P. Lovecraft and the energizing mysteries of The X Files, you should really enjoy The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming, created by Stephen Jones.

I received a digital copy of the book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

creator: Stephen Jones

series: The Lovecraft Squad #3

publisher: Pegasus Books

ISBN: 168177867X

paperback, 368 pages

NUKING THE MOON – Vince Houghton

Posted by Daniel on January 17, 2020
Posted in: NON-FICTION. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Who doesn’t like reading about secret government plots and massively ridiculous ideas that were once seriously considered?  Well, if you don’t, then just move on as this clearly isn’t for you.  But if the idea of reading about stupid, top-secret government plans puts an evil grin on your face, then consider this!

Whether it’s the CIA’s plan to implant live cats with listening devices and releasing those cats in Russia (because, well, top-level Russian figures just love to have stray cats sit on their laps while they discuss their plans to conquer America, right?) or actually detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon (because, ah, because the Russians were reportedly planning to do it, so we needed to do it too, and the resulting mushroom cloud would be impressive, right? Um…no.  You actually need an atmosphere to form a mushroom cloud) author Vince Houghton has pulled together a delicious collection of wacky ideas from the government archives that have been declassified.

On the surface, most of these ideas seem reasonable (okay … maybe not sending cats as spies). I mean, I can see the government brain-trust sitting around coming up with ideas that are off-the-wall because they hoped no one else would suspect them for being anything other than what they appear to be.  But … where this book is most interesting is that we would like to believe that people are smart enough to recognize a stupid idea and not actually spend the time and money on a stupid idea.

One of my favorites was the idea, repeatedly tested!, was the idea of attaching bombs to the backs of bats. The man behind the idea was convinced his idea was still better than what the government eventually went with (dropping nuclear bombs on Japan) and would have brought about an end to the war with fewer civilian deaths.

There are quite a few ridiculous ideas here and Houghton’s writing style is easy, relaxed, and quite personable, addressing the reader directly and making some fun, snide, sarcastic remarks along the way.

This isn’t really the sort of book one just sits and reads from cover to cover (though you could). Each chapter is its own story segment and so for me it’s the sort of book I would pick up between novels and read a chapter or two. Or perhaps as a bathroom reader. However you read this, it’s a lot of stupid fun.

Oh…and one of the brains behind nuking the moon?  Someone most of us will recognize as a very brilliant man.

Looking for a good book? Nuking the Moon by Vince Houghton is a delicious look at brilliant stupidity.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, though Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

author: Vince Houghton

publisher: Penguin Books

ISBN: 0525505172

hardcover, 304 pages

FURY FROM THE TOMB – S.A. Sidor

Posted by Daniel on January 15, 2020
Posted in: Dark Fantasy/Horror, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Romulus Hardy is an academic Egyptologist and now, in 1888, he has made a discovery that could shock the world and give him some great academic recognition.  He has found a tomb in Egypt with five undisturbed coffins and a very large sarcophagus. Retrieving these, however, seems dangerous as all on the expedition but Romulus die horribly.

Romulus manages to get his items to the United States, but while on the train to his recluse backer, the train is hijacked and Romulus and an odd assortment of others must track down his stolen goods, now in Mexico.  But the goods themselves have other ideas.  Now released from their cursed imprisonment, the mummies, led by Amun Odji-Kek, Sorcerer of Set. It will be no small feat for Hardy to just survive his encounter with Kek, much less restore order.

I had a lot of fun with this.  It reads like classic pulp fiction. There’s a bit of Lovecraft style here with Romulus going on and on, telling us what is happening and how he’s feeling about things, but then there is more action, as though it were combined with some better B-grade horror movie.

I know that the popularity of horror ‘monsters’ ebbs and flows.  Vampires will be the hot things, then zombies or other forms of the ‘undead’ will be big.  I haven’t stayed very current with horror pop culture, but I wonder if this is a sign that evil/cursed mummies will be the next wave of horror creatures.  I had seen evidence that dark mermaids or other evil sea creatures were popping up in books, but they’ve waned a bit.

It’s nearly impossible to not make any comparisons to Indiana Jones here.  We’ve got an academic going to the desert to unearth some ancient artifacts.  How do you NOT think of Indiana Jones unless you are under twenty and haven’t been exposed to the films?  But the comparison only lasted for a chapter or two, and then the darker aspects took over.

This isn’t the sort of book you take too seriously.  It’s guilty fun while it lasts.  I can’t imagine I’ll think back on it too much, but I enjoyed it.

Looking for a good book? Fury from the Tomb by S.A. Sidor is fun horror fiction, complete with evil mummies and curses.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Fury From The Tomb

author: S. A. Sidor

series: The Institute for Singular Antiquities #1

publisher: Angry Robot

ISBN: 0857667610

paperback, 448 pages

THE OLD SEX SYMPHONY – Vincent Kane

Posted by Daniel on January 13, 2020
Posted in: HUMOR, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve long been fascinated by the idea that music and literature are very similar in the way that themes are presented and developed and a story is told, using notes instead of words. For this reason I’ve been eager to read music-related fiction to see if the authors can find a way to blend the forms. This is what drew me to a book titled The Old Sex Symphony.

Author Vincent Kane has put together a small collection of short stories – each, presumably, a movement in a symphony – dealing with sex among seniors (Perkins-menu-seniors, not high-school-seniors). And Kane, or his publicist refers to the book (according to Goodreads) as “Chaucer meets Masters and Johnson in a humane and hilarious novel about overage sex – including the joys, aches and fearlessness that it entails.” Unfortunately, the funniest thing about the book is this description.

The humor here tries to be all sorts of humor at once: droll, tongue-in-cheek, sophisticated, slapstick. But for this reader, none of it works.

I was put off immediately when our first story about a soldier seeing the doctor for a physical, but the soldier refuses to bend over for his rectal examination because he’s heterosexual. The doctor quickly suggest bringing in a lady doctor (“Well it would be a bit naughty. I don’t think the missus would be too pleased. But it would be more my cup of tea.”)  But the first doctor isn’t allowed to stay … “No peeping Toms allowed.”  Then the pair of doctors just laugh at the man for thinking that a rectal exam was sexual.

Aaaaaand that’s pretty much the style of the rest of the book.  Only the situations and characters change.

There are some good opportunities and ideas here, but this book just doesn’t work.  Trying to tie the short pieces together with a pair of doctors reflecting on past cases while trying to write a book about sex over 60, really doesn’t work.  It’s clearly a gimmick to tie these stories together and frankly this might have been better if it had just been some stories about seniors and sex.

I don’t recommend this at all.

Looking for a good book? The Old Sex Symphony by Vincent Kane  is a limp read.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Old Sex Symphony

author: Vincent Kane

publisher: Tsada Publishing

ISBN13: 9781999933128

paperback, 396 pages