Genre: urban fantasy

A- #AudioBookReview: Crazy as a Loon by Hailey Edwards

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Crazy as a Loon by Hailey EdwardsCrazy as a Loon (Yard Birds #1) by Hailey Edwards
Narrator: Stephanie Richardson
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Yard Birds #1
Pages: 133
Length: 4 hours
Published by Black Dog Books, Tantor Audio on July 4, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Ellie Gleason has protected the town of Samford, Alabama for decades. It’s not as glamours as her glory days as the WitchLight Hub, but it keeps her active during her golden years.
Life is good.
Well, it’s okay.
Fine.
It could be bloodier with a smidge more gore, but retirement is meant to be low-key. It’s not like her fragile bones could handle the strenuous hunt for monsters anymore, even if her current duties are dull as dishwater.
But when her great-nephew shows up on her doorstep in tears—or is he her great-great nephew?—begging for help, Ellie straps on her beloved shotgun, Bam-Bam, and gets the coven back together.
Sure, Betty just had a hip replacement, and Flo would rather flirt than fight, and Ida is busy with her anniversary plans, and Joan is…Joan. But Ellie is certain she can whip the girls into shape in time to defeat the creature preying on kids at a nearby summer camp. She might even have them home in time for dinner.

My Review:

Ellie Gleason isn’t, really, and neither are the rest of her friends. Well, maybe Joan is just a bit. Crazy as a loon, I mean. None of them are crazy, loony or otherwise, no matter how much Ellie might fake it by running around the tiny town of Samford, Alabama in her housecoat with ‘Bam-Bam’ strapped to her back.

Bam-Bam is her shotgun. And nope, still not crazy.

Because when you’re still patrolling as a working member of Witchlight – even if you are in your second century – it’s better to be armed as well as dangerous. Which Ellie and the rest of her coven certainly are. Even if it takes them a little longer to get to the scene of the crime.

Or, for that matter, to the point of any discussion, because they’ve been together so damn long that there are plenty of times when the pointed barbs and the old grudges take over the planning of any and every op.

It’s mostly small town stuff – because they’re not the top tier of Witchlight operators no matter how much they all still wish they were kicking ass and taking names and riding monsters to the rescue. So when this case literally crawls into their laps, they’re all a bit giddy with the adrenaline of the chase.

Even if the person at the heart of the mess is a child under their protection. Particularly because another member of their family is doing their damndest to keep it from them.

They may not be what they used to be – but when one of their cubs is threatened it brings out the mama bear in every single one of them. Even if not one of them shifts into an actual bear. That’s okay. After all, one of their sons is bear-shifter enough to handle THAT part of the job.

Escape Rating A-: I picked up this book and audiobook, in fact this whole, entire series, on a recommendation from Caffeinated Reviewer. I caught her review of the third book in the series, Free as a Bird, and had to ask myself where had this been all my life and how had I missed it?

Based on this first book, this series is an absolute hoot from beginning to end. It was also the perfect book for this week as it is a hilarious pick-me-up with a heart wrapped around found family and lifelong sisterhood.

The combination of elements got me from the opening paragraphs. Because this takes off from the same premise as one of my favorite urban fantasies, A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark, but goes about it differently.

That book, and I still mourn that it was only ever the one, took off from a question about what happens to all those young, limber, kickass urban fantasy protagonists if they survive to middle age and even older. Marley Jacob got herself a kickass sidekick and went about her own personal kickassery through negotiation and mediation once the years caught up with her.

Ellie and her coven have just kept on kicking – even as they also kick against the inevitable slowing down of age. They use magic to slow down slowing down – and then they do too much and pay the price later. But they all refuse to quit even as they are forced to change gears.

They’re a LOT like the sisterhood of retired spies turned assassins in Killers of a Certain Age – complete with the sharply pointed banter and the lifelong grudges. So if you liked that and want to give urban fantasy a try, you’ll love Ellie and her Yard Birds.

The case here, and there certainly is one, does a great job of introducing Ellie and her sisters and setting up their family situation – which is just a bit complicated – while giving them a case that is close to their hearts even as it shines a light on just what sorts of things can go wrong in a world where the paranormal exists but still has to keep itself under wraps.

And then the case managed to tie itself back into the reason they all got involved in the first place, as both the evil they fight and the reason they’re fighting it come from the same place – a mother’s love.

The story is told from inside Ellie’s snarky head – and I loved every minute of it. The narrator, Stephanie Richardson, captured the essence of Ellie perfectly, so I’m very happy that she is the narrator for the whole series so far.

I only have two quibbles about this whole experience. One is that I wish there were more. Which there is, of course, as the second and third books, Dead as a Dodo and Free as a Bird, are already out and I already have them.

But the second is that I hope those later books resolve a niggle left over from this one. They did solve the case. They absolutely did. But there was a dangling potential co-conspirator left in their midst. I may be wrong about their co-conspirator status, but there was something rotten left in the heart of the family that got a rug pulled over it. I hope that rug gets pulled back in the books ahead.

I’m certainly there for it. I definitely want to hear as much more from Ellie as I can get!

#BookReview: Buried Memories by Simon R. Green

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Buried Memories by Simon R. GreenBuried Memories (Ishmael Jones, #10) by Simon R. Green
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, mystery, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Ishmael Jones #10
Pages: 219
Published by Severn House on October 25, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


Returning to the small town where he crash-landed in 1963, Ishmael Jones is in search of answers. But his investigation is de-railed by a brutal murder.

"I think something very bad and very dangerous has come to your little town, Inspector . . ."
As long-buried memories from his hidden past begin to resurface, Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny feel compelled to return to the small country town where Ishmael crash-landed in 1963; the place where his memories began.
Norton Hedley is no ordinary town. Apparitions, sudden disappearances, sightings of unusual beasts: for centuries, the place has been plagued by a series of inexplicable events. Ishmael's first task is to track down local author Vincent Smith, the one man he believes may have some answers.
Ishmael and Penny aren't the only ones seeking the mysterious Mr Smith. When their search unearths a newly-dead body in the local mortuary - a body that's definitely not supposed to be there - Ishmael becomes the prime suspect in the ensuing murder investigation. His only hope of discovering the truth about his origins lies in exposing a ruthless killer.

My Review:

Ishmael Jones is as he has always been. The problem is that he’s been the same, absolutely unaging, for 60 years now. And he doesn’t remember who – or more likely what – he was before that. Before 1963, when his alien space ship was blown out of the sky over Earth and crashed in a field near the tiny village of Norton Hedley.

Which doesn’t seem to have changed much either in the intervening 60 years.

A situation that is quite a bit more worrying than Ishmael’s own unchanging face, because he at least knows why THAT’s happening. Or not, as the case may be.

But Norton Hedley, a place where people come and go and live in hope for a good tourist season every year, seems to be a haven for the uncanny. After all, that’s what has brought Ishmael and his partner Penny to the village.

Because Ishmael and his unchanging appearance began – at least as far as his memory goes – with the crash landing of his alien spacecraft in the woods surrounding Norton Hedley in 1963. He’s returned because his previous two cases, Night Train to Murder and The House on Widows Hill, have provided him with some scattered but ominous clues about who and what he used to be.

And he needs to know. Because he needs to know if he’s a danger to Penny. Or anyone else on Earth who doesn’t deserve it.

In his research about Norton Hedley, or the research the coyly named black ops group, the Organisation, has done on his behalf, he – and they – have learned that Norton Hedley has been weird central for years. Not just the years since his ship crashed in 1963, but for centuries. Millenia even.

Something in, on, or more likely under – like the thing that was under The House on Widows Hill – has been creeping its creepy way along into the lifeblood of the town for eons uncounting. It might have the answers he’s been searching for for decades.

And it might not want to let him know.

Escape Rating B: This series has been one of my Halloween reads since I first discovered it, so it seemed appropriate to finish it up this Halloween. As I’ve already read the final book in the series (so far), I’ll have to pick something else horror-adjacent next year.

The author is an acquired taste – one that I acquired decades ago. It’s the snark. It’s always been the snark no matter what the ostensible genre or subject of ANY of his many series might be. If you like his voice, then when you’re in that mood nothing else will do. But if you’re not, you bounce off, and bounce hard. Your reading mileage may vary.

The concept of this particular series throws a whole bunch of speculative fiction tropes into one hell of a blender. The series began, back in The Dark Side of the Road, as English country house mysteries where the supernatural agencies turn out to be merely human – but with a touch of the paranormal or extraterrestrial for spice and added bodies.

Over the course of the series it has turned into Ishmael’s quest to learn enough about who or what he used to be to figure out just how he can continue to stay one step ahead of all the various secret agencies that would like to use him up in one way or another. Even more important, he’s thoroughly invested in keeping Penny safe – if necessary from himself.

At first, what made this series work as well as it does – at least for this reader – was the revelation in each case that no matter how weird things got – often very – that the enemies were always human after all.

What has kept me going this far have been the questions about Ishmael’s past and Penny’s future. While Ishmael has been unchanging for 60 years, the series has been set in a sort of ‘perpetual now’. Days and weeks pass but seemingly not years. This entry in the series is one of the first that confronts head on the problem of Ishmael and Penny’s relationship.

Not that they have problems, but that together they have a problem. Penny is an ordinary human, she will age, and Ishmael will not. Short of a deus ex machina – and not that there haven’t been plenty of powerful machina around over the course of the series – this can’t end happily. Howsomever, I already know that it does not end in the next book, Haunted by the Past. And in spite of the ominousness of that title, it doesn’t dive nearly as deeply into Ishmael’s past as Night Train to Murder, The House on Widows Hill and Buried Memories have done.

So, I have begun to wonder if the author is planning to end this series at all. I wonder even more whether or not he should. I’d rather just think of Ishmael and Penny in that perpetual now, continuing on their quest to find evil humans at the heart of supernatural hoaxes, raging together against the dying of their light.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Candle and Crow by Kevin Hearne

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Candle and Crow by Kevin HearneCandle & Crow (Ink & Sigil, #3) by Kevin Hearne
Narrator: Luke Daniels
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Ink & Sigil #3
Pages: 352
Length: 11 hours and 4 minutes
Published by Del Rey, Random House Audio on October 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles comes the final book in the Ink & Sigil series, as an ink-slinging wizard pursues the answer to a very personal mystery: Who cast a pair of curses on his head?
Al MacBharrais has a most unusual job: He’s a practitioner of ink-and-sigil magic, tasked with keeping order among the gods and monsters that dwell hidden in the human world. But there’s one supernatural mystery he’s never been able to solve: Years ago, someone cast twin curses on him that killed off his apprentices and drove away loved ones who heard him speak, leaving him bereft and isolated.
But he’s not quite alone: As Al works to solve this mystery, his friends draw him into their own eccentric dramas. Buck Foi the hobgoblin has been pondering his own legacy—and has a plan for a daring shenanigan that will make him the most celebrated hobgoblin of all. Nadia, goth queen and battle seer, is creating her own cult around a god who loves whisky and cheese.
And the Morrigan, a former Irish death goddess, has decided she wants not only to live as an ordinary woman but also to face the most perilous challenge of the mortal world: online dating.
Meanwhile, Al crosses paths with old friends and new—including some beloved Druids and their very good dogs—in his globe-trotting quest to solve the mystery of his curses. But he’s pulled in so many different directions by his colleagues, a suspicious detective, and the whims of destructive gods that Al begins to wonder: Will he ever find time to write his own happy ending?

My Review:

When we first met sigil agent Al MacBharrais back in Ink & Sigil, standing in the apartment of his seventh and latest apprentice – along with the corpse of said apprentice AND a caged HOBGOBLIN – we’re instantly aware of several things. Al’s world is just a bit bigger than the one we think we know, he has an absolutely fascinating line of work, and he’s in deep shit.

Or shite, as Al would say. It’s the same substance either way and no one wants to be standing in it as deeply as Al is already standing. And the story has barely begun!

It began in Ink & Sigil with Al hunting down the beings who were trafficking in beings from the fae planes – like the hobgoblin Buck Foi. It middled with an ‘adventure’ in Australia in Paper & Blood, and it ends here, back in Al’s native Glasgow in Candle & Crow, as Al’s mission to end the careers of as many traffickers as possible – no matter what species of sentient being they might be trafficking – ties itself up with Al’s personal quest to learn who cursed him AND why so that he can finally train up an apprentice to mastery and retire before the myriad dangers of his fascinating line of work catch up with him – fatally.

Candle & Crow perches right on that crossroads between “crying because it’s over” and “smiling because it happened.” I’m going to miss Al and his friends, but this was absolutely the right end for this series and I’m happy that I got to see it – and that Al’s office manager, Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite finally got to see the awesome shite that she came to see.

Escape Rating A: First of all – and last of all – Candle & Crow is an ending. Not just to the Ink & Sigil series, but by extension to the whole, entire Iron Druid Chronicles from which it sprang. Consider this a ginormous hint not to start here. It’s not necessary to start all the way back with the first book in the Iron Druid Chronicles, Hounded, and it’s absolutely not essential to have finished that series – because I haven’t and I still loved Al and his crew.

But you do need to start Al’s story with Ink & Sigil. And if you like urban fantasy, it is absolutely worth reading the whole glorious adventure.

I actually read this twice, or rather I read it once and had it read to me once. The first time I read it I was sitting in the train station in Al’s native Glasgow, waiting for the train back to London and eventually home after the close of the Glasgow WorldCon. It was the perfect place to read this story, with the one caveat that it made me regret not having taken the time to visit the Glasgow Necropolis, if only to see how close the book’s description of the tomb of Isabella Ure Elder is to the real thing. (Based on the photo at right, the answer is VERY – admittedly without the “dreich” weather experienced both in the story and, honestly, for much of our trip.).

In the series of mad dashes, long waits, and exhaustion at the end of a glorious trip, I didn’t have the opportunity to write this review before the details flew – or more likely slept – their way out of my head. But Al’s story has been marvelous every step of the way, so I picked up the audiobook and listened to it all again. And loved it again.

However, I have to say that, although the story is obviously the same, listening to Candle & Crow is a MUCH different experience than reading it. (I also wonder whether the author wrote this book, or perhaps the whole damn series, at least in part, just to mess with his audiobook narrator Luke Daniels.)

About that story…some stories start out as a whole, then the layers get peeled back until it’s much bigger on the inside than it looked like from the outside. Candle & Crow goes the other way.

Initially it reads as a loose pile of unrelated threads. There’s Al’s continuing investigation into the curses that have done their damndest to wreck his life. Then there’s the problem that hobgoblin Buck Foi is drinking to keep himself from thinking about. On top of that there’s Al’s attempts to help the police by providing them with evidence of human trafficking – only for the local police to decide that Al only has such information because he’s one of the traffickers and harass him repeatedly over that mistaken assumption.

(This is the point where I need to comment that, as much as I enjoyed most of the narration, the voice used for Detective Inspector Munro would have worked equally well for Dolores Umbridge of Harry Potter infamy. That character grates, the voice used for her grated to the point that chalk on a blackboard would have been an improvement – and possibly at a lower and more tolerable pitch as well. Getting down off my soapbox now. Hem-hem.)

On top of the issues that directly involved Al, there’s also the Morrigan’s desire to step away from her identity as “chooser of the slain” so she can fall in love, Al’s accountant Nadia and her search for a demi-godly purpose that turns to the founding of a new and potentially dangerous religion, and the ever-present question of exactly what sort of deity or superbeing Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite might be when she’s not being Al’s receptionist and just how dangerous the shite she has been waiting around in Glasgow to see might be for Al and his friends.

Al has a LOT on his mind at all times. That discovering the ‘nine ways to Nancy’ turns out to be the perfect metaphor for tying all of the many threads of Al’s story into a neat bow of a perfect ending for the series made for a fantastic conclusion to a marvelous series.

Grade A #BookReview: Fangs So Bright and Deadly by Piper J. Drake

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Fangs So Bright and Deadly by Piper J. DrakeFangs So Bright & Deadly (Mythwoven, #2) by Piper J. Drake
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, urban fantasy
Series: Mythwoven #2
Pages: 304
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A Kitsune, a Kumiho, a Witch, and a danger not even their combined magic is strong enough to defy. 
Marie Xiao lives a double life, moonlighting as a freelance consultant in corporate Seattle even as she dedicates herself—and her powers as a witch—to chasing down objects of myth and magic before they can be used to harm humankind. She carefully guards the bridges between worlds and has never once been tempted to stray.
Until she catches the eye of a pair-bonded kitsune and kumiho and her whole world is thrown into chaos.
Japanese and Korean fox spirits Yamamoto Kuro and Joseph Choe have been hoping to cross paths with Marie since their first chance meeting at an artifact retrieval gone decidedly wrong. They may work for Marie's enemy, but they don't see any reason why they can't mingle a little work and play…especially when a (literal) dead man waltzes into their impromptu reunion, raising intriguing questions about a deeper magic that may be afoot. Temporarily teaming up, the trio investigate the unusual unrest…but as loyalties begin to shift and lines blur, Kuro, Joe, and Marie may find themselves at the precipice of something none of them are prepared to face…or deny.

My Review:

This second book in the Mythwoven series, after last year’s Wings Once Cursed and Bound, is every bit as fascinating and downright captivating as its predecessor.

We met Marie Xiao, nature witch and member of the Darke Consortium family, in the spellbinding – and spell breaking – conclusion of that first book, as the members of the Consortium came to rescue of kinnaree Peeraphan Rahttana from a collector who planned to ‘acquire’ the rare Thai bird princess for nasty and nefarious purposes.

As it turned out, during that operation, Marie needed a bit of rescue of her own, provided by two beings she knew had been working for Babel, an organization dedicated to acquiring magical objects for the purpose of sowing chaos among the human population.

She was grateful for the rescue but didn’t trust the two nine-tailed foxes who helped her – out of either the goodness or the mischief in their hearts. Whatever made the kitsune and gumiho come to her aid – she wasn’t able to forget how much the two male supernatural creatures captivated her senses. Even though she ALSO couldn’t forget that were present on the scene at the behest of her own organization’s enemies.

So when she encounters Kuro and Joe on the streets of Seattle, she’s more than a bit wary of their motives. And so she should be.

She’s just learned that the client she believed was mundane is, in fact, playing with dangerous artifacts they shouldn’t have ever had access to – an access that the Darke Consortium will need to revoke at the first opportunity.

It’s clear that Kuro and Joe are on the trail of the artifacts that Marie has just discovered – but for a much less benign reason. Or so it seems.

But Joe and Kuro haven’t forgotten Marie any more than she has them. Unfortunately for all of them, Babel hasn’t forgotten that the foxes’ protection of Marie may have obeyed the letter of their contractual obligations but certainly violated the spirit of it. And that the fox spirits need to pay for that transgression – with the very thing that makes them who and what they are – and as painfully as possible.

In that pain, and in their desperate need to be rid of the curse AND Babel, Kuro, Joe and Marie find a common cause, a common purpose – and the possibility of something even more precious. All they need to do is hoodwink Babel while revealing the deepest of truths to each other.

Escape Rating A: The fun thing about this series so far is the way that it manages to take the formulas for urban fantasy and paranormal romance – formulas that are tried and true and familiar – and make them fresh and new by adding in the panoply of mythical creatures and legends from places that weren’t touched on back in urban fantasy’s heyday AND then combining those legends with romantic possibilities that just weren’t publishable back then.

And then adds just a touch of cozy by bringing it all back to a found family where the vampire and the werewolf are the most mundane members of the crew. While Marie doesn’t get stuck in that dreadful ‘torn between two lovers’ melodrama, nor does she fall into the terrible romantic triangle trap. Instead, their happy ever after is a triad – and it’s wonderful!

But this isn’t just a romance, it’s also very much part of both urban fantasy and action adventure. If Anna Hackett’s Treasure Hunter Security and Simon R. Green’s Gideon Sable series(es) had a book baby, Mythwoven would be it. The Darke Consortium hunts down the weird and the mystical and gets it out of the hands of people who either have no clue or have entirely too much of one.

What made this entry in the series particularly fun was that it was a bit of both, with a heaping helping of a fascinating new magical system, a touch of Egyptian mythology, and references to not one but two great movies, Ladyhawke and The Sting. A combination that should not even be possible but works oh-so-well.

The Mythwoven series is clearly not done – and this reader is VERY glad of it. So, even though the next book isn’t yet on the horizon, I’ll certainly be looking to put it on my TBR pile the moment it appears!

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Junkyard Roadhouse by Faith Hunter

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Junkyard Roadhouse by Faith HunterJunkyard Roadhouse (Shining Smith #4) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #4
Pages: 153
Length: 4 hours and 36 minutes
Published by Audible Studios, Lore Seekers Press on July 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Goodreads

Shining Smith stands on the brink of achieving her goals, and yet now she could lose everything.

The presidents of four motorcycle clubs are coming to claim blood sacrifice and to ink her with motorcycle club tats. Her new roadhouse and its charter have to meet their approval or the roadhouse has no future, and neither does Shining.

An injured kid shows up at Smith’s Junk and Scrap, but collapses before he can speak.

A note arrives containing a warning and a plea for help, addressed by someone who knows Shining’s most intimate secrets—her history, her plans, and the names of her friends. The sender claims his daughter has been kidnapped by Shining’s enemies. To keep her secrets, he wants Shining to get his daughter back.

In order to rescue the hostage and keep her junkyard, her roadhouse, her people, and the cats alive, Shining Smith will have to suffer, fight, and bargain her way out of danger. All without accidently transitioning anyone—creating an accidental thrall—no matter how much her nanobots want her to.

Lock and load. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

My Review:

When I finished the previous audiobook in this utterly awesome, completely riveting, absolutely compelling series that began with Junkyard Cats four years ago, that story, Junkyard War, felt like a slam-bang ending.

And it kind of was. But as things turned out – thankfully, blissfully and painfully – it wasn’t the end of Shining’s story at all – merely the end of the beginning. Because Junkyard Roadhouse is clearly – and OMG this listener/reader is so, so glad – the opening of a whole new chapter in Shining Smith’s quest to keep her people safe – no matter how much of her world she has to take under her protection in order to make that happen.

It’s a much, MUCH bigger world than we saw in the first book in the series, Junkyard Cats. In that opening story, the world came to Shining in the junkyard she inherited from her ‘Pops’. And it came to take her out and take over everything she had and everyone she had come to love – no matter how reluctantly.

But the enemy that came for her, Clarice Warhammer, is dead. Dead at the hands, and guns of Shining, her friends and allies, and the clowder of sentient battle-cats who are probably the true masters of Shining’s junkyard. Just ask them.

Shining’s reward for taking out Warhammer is three-fold. Warhammer and her nest have been eliminated – with extreme prejudice. So that’s one enemy in the ground. Shining took all of Warhammer’s intel as part of the spoils of war – a vast increase in Shining’s knowledge and insight into the world around her and the enemies that were backing Warhammer and will absolutely see Shining and her allies as a threat.

Because they absolutely are.

But first, Shining gets to collect her reward – a reward for which she has already paid in blood and will again. It’s not really a reward for herself – or at least she doesn’t see it that way. What she sees is the increased responsibility for keeping her people – whether two-legged or four – as safe and secure as she can make them.

So, with the posturing and permission of the motorcycle clubs that control the region, that were her allies in the battle with Warhammer, Shining Smith officially opens the Junkyard Roadhouse, a club chapter house that includes a restaurant and rooms to rent, trading post, and neutral ground – owned, operated and administered in all of its somewhat safe and mostly secure glory by Shining Smith herself and her own entirely independent motorcycle club.

It’s all hers – if she can manage to keep it.

After all, Warhammer was just the tip of a very dirty iceberg filled with powerful enemies – and Shining Smith is already in their sights. What none of them, not the military, not the Gov, not the Hand of the Law, recognize is that they are already in hers – and that hers are considerably more than they ever imagined.

Junkyard Roadhouse marks the beginning of THEIR end – they just don’t know it yet.

Escape Rating A: This is the story I felt compelled to finish last Friday, to the point where, as much as IMHO Khristine Hvam thoroughly embodies the voice of Shining Smith, I switched to the text – grateful that the text was already available for a change – in order to see how Shining got herself and her people out of the pickle she was in, turned it to her advantage, AND set the stage for the next book in the series.

Because Shining CLEARLY isn’t remotely done with the black ops of the military, their supporters in the Gov OR the corrupt Hands of the Law – all of which seem to be legion, planning something big and nefarious and aiming straight for her.

But that’s for later – and this reader is oh-so-happy that there will be a later, because Shining’s story could easily have ended with her victory at the end of Junkyard War.

Whether you experience this series in text or in the marvelous audio rendition, the series and whether or not you will like it rides or dies on the voice of its protagonist Shining Smith. If her blend of bravado and snark, her ability to take charge but her internal doubts about her ability to lead, her impostor syndrome combined with the utter certainty that if she doesn’t do it the job won’t get done – in other words, all the things that made ‘Little Girl’ survive the mamabot to become Shining Smith – if that voice and attitude trips your reading trigger you’ll love Shining.

As her friends and especially her enemies would attest, however, Shining Smith is a bit of an acquired taste – and there are parts of her world that are depressing as hell. The conditions that she has survived certainly depress the hell out of her frequently and often. She just puts on her ‘big girl panties’, gets on her bike and rides out to meet those conditions whenever and wherever necessary and that’s what I love about her and her story.

This particular entry in the series is a bit of a bridge between those initial three books and what’s coming next – and it starts with an excruciating rebirth that sometimes felt like it got lingered over a bit too long. Your mileage may vary but the change from Shining Smith, member of the OMW to Shining Smith, president of the independent Junkyard Roadhouse motorcycle club is both bloody and painful to the point where if I hadn’t already been all in on this series I might have turned off – or at least switched to text which wouldn’t have been quite so… visceral.

Meaning that this is not the place to start your experience of Shining’s truly fucked up future Earth. Start with Junkyard Cats – you’ll be glad you did. I was then, I am now and I can’t wait for more.

One final note on the audio, well, sorta/kinda on the audio. I’ve enjoyed Shining’s voice so much, especially as portrayed by Khristine Hvam, that I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to check out whether she is also the voice of Jane Yellowrock in the author’s signature series of the same name. She is, which just threw 15 more books, and counting, onto the top of my TBL (that’s To Be Listened) pile. Which I absolutely did not need but am still incredibly happy about because it will give me something (else) to dive into while I wait for Shining’s next adventure/confrontation/full-scale war.

#AudioBookReview: The Hermit Next Door by Kevin Hearne

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: The Hermit Next Door by Kevin HearneThe Hermit Next Door by Kevin Hearne
Narrator: Annalee Scott
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, urban fantasy
Pages: 96
Length: 2 hours and 43 minutes
Published by Audible Audio, Subterranean Press on June 30, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Kevin Hearne, author of the acclaimed Iron Druid Chronicles, returns with an otherworldly new novella!
 
Newly widowed and trying to cope with her grief, Winnie Mae Chisholm moves from Tennessee with her teenage son, Pax, to Oregon, hoping the change will let them both heal and move on. She’s warned when buying their new home that the next door neighbor, Mr. Fisher, is a famous recluse and no one has seen him in years, but that’s fine with her—she’s looking for quiet.
 
She’s not going to get it, however, because when Pax meets the neighbor, he discovers that the reason Mr. Fisher hides from the world is that he isn’t actually from this world. He’s been stranded for decades and he’s trying to get home, and he could really use some help.
 
Abruptly part of the best-kept secret on the planet, Winnie Mae and Pax have to protect Mr. Fisher from a nosy neighbor who would ruin his work and doom him to die among aliens, but they also have to ask How far would they go to escape their grief? Would another world be far enough?

My Review:

I picked this back up after starting it before we left on vacation because I really wanted to review a book I read while we were away – and I will – but Kevin Hearne’s Candle & Crow won’t be out until October 1 and it’s just too soon to post that now – no matter how much I want to.

But I was still in the mood for his style, and, well, even the audiobook for The Hermit Next Door is blissfully short. I’m also still a bit jet-lagged, and the result is the review you are about to read.

The idea of this story has been done before – that the recluse next door is either really creepy, from REALLY far away or a bit of both. What made this a bit different was the way that Winnie Mae Chisholm and her son Pax came to this little bend in the Willamette River and not just what they found there.

The story begins as an escape – and Winnie Mae and Pax just keep right on escaping – getting themselves farther away than the ever imagined from the tragic death of Winnie Mae’s husband and Pax’s dad, Benny Chisholm, back home in Tennessee.

Too many memories, and too many grief casseroles drove them out of their former home. The settlement money from the accident and the sale of their previous house got them to Oregon.

At first, nobody’s happy. Winnie Mae because happiness is the last thing she expects to find again, and Pax because he’s still grieving, he wasn’t given any choice in the matter, and he’s a teenager. Which of those three things is at the biggest weight on his heart and soul changes every day but they’re all part of it, all the time, and the situation isn’t looking like it’s going to get any better any time soon.

Because grief doesn’t – and neither does being a teenager.

The house is lovely, the river is quiet and peaceful, and the neighbors are, honestly, a lot. Winnie Mae can identify the types, knows just what she has to do to give her invasive, intrusive, gossipy across the street neighbor just enough and no more to not think she and Pax are TOO weird while still getting them to leave the Chisholms as alone as the woman’s nature is capable of managing.

But the situation changes entirely and completely – actually, all the situations take a sharp left turn into the weird, wacky and wonderful – when Pax meets their reclusive next-door-neighbor Mr. Fisher.

Who is, quite literally, out of this world. And wants to get back home – if he can just get a little bit of help from Pax and his very reluctant, somewhat creeped out, not quite totally losing her shit, depressed and disaster-projecting and spiraling mother, Winnie Mae.

A woman who, in spite of having lost pretty much all of her faith in things ever getting better ever again is going to have to take an absolutely ginormous leap of faith over the chasm of her disbelief in order to keep her son safe and maybe, just maybe, find a bit of peace and even happiness in a place she never once imagined she could even imagine.

Escape Rating B: I finished this book with a lot more mixed feelings than I expected. I thought I would just love it (spoiler: I did love Candle & Crow). In the end, I did like The Hermit Next Door, but I middled in directions I just didn’t expect to go.

Your reading and listening mileage may both vary.

The idea of Mr. Fisher and his journey reminded me a LOT of Simon R. Green’s Ishmael Jones series, and that was not a place I expected to be at all. Ishmael Jones is more creepy horror adjacent mixed with twisted country house mystery, while Mr. Fisher is more like an E.T. who needs to phone home, but they both start from the same place, a being from another world who is stranded on this Earth and is having a difficult time going home and has to make some equally difficult decisions about dealing with that particular dilemma.

Howsomever, Ishmael Jones at least looks human. Mr. Fisher is a giant otter from an Earth that took a different evolutionary path down the “trousers of time”.

One of the things that I personally found a bit off-putting was that the narrator for the audiobook, Annalee Scott, sounds an awful lot like Khristine Hvam, the narrator for the Junkyard Cats series. And that was a bit of a mind-screw, as Shining Smith in the Junkyard Cats series kicks ass and takes names with wild abandon and lots of gunfire, while Winnie Mae Chisholm goes into panicked disaster spirals at every turn. The characters are just VERY far apart but the similarity in the narrators’ voices made my mind try to equate them which simply isn’t possible. At all. Ever. In ANY way.

Very much on my other hand – or ear – I did love the SFnal ending. I was fully expecting it, but that doesn’t mean it still wasn’t fun. I’ll admit that I particularly liked the idea that the nosey neighbor might have gotten exactly what she deserved. She certainly had the option to save herself, but I can’t help but get a bit of glee out of the thought that she probably couldn’t resist doing what she was explicitly told not to. We’ll never know but a girl can dream.

What made the story work in the end was that Winnie Mae and Pax find happiness in a way that they were not expecting – and in a way that doesn’t attempt to pass over or by the depths of the grief that sent them on this journey in the first place.

There were also a couple of references to some interesting SFnal stories that shouldn’t have gotten near this one but did anyway in surprising and delightful ways. There’s just a touch of John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society that I was not expecting at all, as well as a hint of Edward Ashton’s Fourth Consort that goes in a completely different direction from The Hermit Next Door but has some unexpected but fascinating similarities along its way.

#BookReview: Where is Anybody? by Simon R. Green

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Where is Anybody? by Simon R. GreenWhere is Anybody? (Gideon Sable, #5) by Simon R. Green
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Gideon Sable #5
Pages: 192
Published by Severn House on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Legendary master thief and conman Gideon Sable must pull off an impossible heist to save his partner's life in this fast-paced supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling British fantasy author Simon R. Green

Gideon Sable specializes in stealing the kind of things that can't usually be stolen. But these days the legendary master thief is officially retired from the caper game. Now, instead of pulling off elaborate heists with his crew of supernatural specialists, he runs a magical shop in the heart of London with his partner Annie Anybody. Still, he can't resist occasionally going out in the night to steal things when Annie's not looking. For old times' sake - and for the joy of the con.

But after one of his late-night illicit jaunts, Gideon returns to the shop to find that while he's been stealing, someone else has been hard at work . . . stealing from him. I have taken Annie Anybody, reads the note on the countertop. If you ever want to see her again, you must find and steal Time's Arrow. You have forty-eight hours.

Stealing the legendary Arrow isn't a challenge; it's certain death. But Gideon will stop at nothing to save Annie from their unknown enemy - with or without the help of his talented, terrifying former crew . . .

My Review:

Gideon Sable is a lot of things – thief, rogue, collector, jack of all slightly nefarious trades and a master of several of them – more than he admits but then he likes to be underestimated. It’s all part of the game, after all.

But he’s been trying to go straight – or as straight as anyone can who operates in Old Soho – after the events of Not of This World. But it’s not working for him. He misses the thrill of the hunt – and the curiosities and oddities store he inherited always needs more stock.

He may have sorta/kinda convinced himself that’s that’s enough to justify all of his occasional illegal forays into other people’s collections  – particularly as he only steals from people – and creatures – who really, really deserve it. But his partner, Annie Anybody, can always see right through him.

She always wears someone else’s face, so it’s easy for her to spot that her partner is wearing a mask of contentment that doesn’t quite fit. Gideon may always be ‘the man with a plan’ but this time Annie has a plan of her very own – and it’s much, much better than Gideon’s.

All he has to do is get the old gang back together – or at least as together as some of them can ever be – and ride to Annie’s rescue. Because Annie’s been kidnapped by one of Gideon’s many, many old enemies – and he’ll do anything to get her back. No matter how many impossibly well-guarded collections he has to burgle to save the love of his life.

But no plan – not even Gideon’s – survives first contact, especially when that enemy already knows all of Gideon’s tricks. As Annie’s kidnapper most definitely and absolutely does.

Escape Rating B: If the TV series Leverage had a book baby with the author’s own Nightside series the result would be Gideon Sable. Gideon is a liar, a thief, and a con artist, much like Nate Ford in Leverage – who is also ‘a man with a plan’. But Gideon, even though he usually operates outside the law and against the powers that be, only operates against villains who are much worse than he has any intention of ever being – even if those he considers fair game often represent that law OR are themselves among the powers-that-be. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Gideon Sable is right there waiting for some of them to step over a line that sometimes only he can see.

But he’s not really Gideon Sable. Or rather he IS Sable now but he hasn’t always been. In Old Soho, the mask and moniker of Gideon Sable belongs to whoever can steal it and keep it. In the first book in the series, The Best Thing You Can Steal, he had just assumed that identity – whoever he used to be.

This story, which looks like the final book in the series, reads like a bit of a victory lap for the character – in spite of his desperation to save Annie and enact some serious justice on whoever took her from him.

Along the way, first he has to get the old gang back together – and every single one of them needs help before they are available to help him. Even old friends and enemies manage to pop onstage for a brief moment and fans of the series will enjoy seeing most of them again – even the ones that Gideon himself would prefer to drop into a pit lined with spikes or vipers or both.

One of the things that has made this series work for me is that Gideon is a stream-of-consciousness snarkmaster of the first order and we see everything from inside his wry, cynical, sarcastic head. If you like his voice, you’ll enjoy the series – and probably most of the author’s other series – because the style is the same throughout and his worlds tend to bleed into one another – often literally.

Just don’t attempt to start here. It would be like reading the last chapter of a book before the first – before anything that’s going on in the ending has enough backstory to make sense. But all the books in the series are just barely above novella length, so if you like a lot of sass and snark in your protagonists then Gideon Sable might be your jam.

It certainly has been mine, and I’m sad that this series seems to be ending. At least I still have a few of his Ishmael Jones series left to read for when I next need some high quality snarcasm!

A+ #BookReview: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djeli Clark

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djeli ClarkThe Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djèlí Clark
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Pages: 208
Published by Tordotcom on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats.
Nor do they have tails.
But they are most assuredly dead.
Nebula and Alex Award winner P. Djèlí Clark introduces a brand-new world and a fantastical city full of gods and assassins.
Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins―resurrected, deadly, wiped of their memories―have only three unbreakable vows.
First, the contract must be just. That’s above Eveen’s pay grade.
Second, even the most powerful assassin may only kill the contracted. Eveen’s a professional. She’s never missed her mark.
The third and the once you accept a job, you must carry it out. And if you stray? A final death would be a mercy. When the Festival of the Clockwork King turns the city upside down, Eveen’s newest mission brings her face-to-face with a past she isn’t supposed to remember and a vow she can’t forget.

My Review:

Consider it 50/50 on the name. They’re not cats, they don’t have tails, (they’re also not wearing cat’s tails) but they absolutely are assassins and they are most definitely dead.

They are also not supposed to have a single, solitary memory of who they were when they were alive, or whatever caused them to swear themselves to Aeril, the Matron of Assassins and goddess of knives. And chefs, because knives.

Our story begins with a member of the Dead Cat Tail Assassins, Eveen the Eviscerator, taking a contract on behalf of her goddess. At first, it seems above board – or at least as above board as any contract to assassinate someone can be.

And that’s where things get interesting. And absorbing. And compelling. And utterly profane in the best way possible.

Because the person that Eveen is contracted to and absolutely MUST kill on pain of her own eternal torment is herself. Her old self. Her former self. The self she must have been twenty or so years ago, before she died and pledged herself to her goddess.

A self she is not supposed to be able to remember, because that’s the way the contract with the Matron of Assassins is supposed to work.

Someone clearly found a loophole. A big one. Eveen can’t kill herself, not even her rule-following, goody-two-shoes former self. Because seeing the person named Sky that she once was gives Eveen the one thing she’s not supposed to have – memories.

Not that either her past memories or her present ones explain not just how someone managed to tear this gigantic hole in the contract between Aeril and her contracted assassins, but a hole in the whole, entire, space time continuum.

And as big a question as that how is in a magical sense, an even bigger question is why anyone would go to this much trouble to torment one assassin, because this is way too big a mess to create for shits and giggles, and Eveen is merely one assassin among many.

But whether the motive behind this magical mess is in Sky’s long-dead past or Eveen’s recently dead past, this once and perhaps future assassin has until dawn to solve the mystery.

Or face consequences that this time she hasn’t even earned. Or has she?

Escape Rating A+: I picked this up because I adored the author’s Dead Djinn Universe, particularly the utterly marvelous A Master of Djinn. I wasn’t expecting this to be quite like that, although I certainly wouldn’t mind another foray into the Dead Djinn Universe, but I knew that whatever this turned out to be, it would be awesome. And it absolutely was.

Also cats. I fully admit he had me at cats. Even though I knew going in that there weren’t any actual cats.

What I was not expecting was a world that had some surprising resemblances to Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence/Craft Wars series, but it’s certainly there in the contractual obligations between gods and their agents, either or both of whom may be dead but still working and still bound by their contracts.

What makes this story work so well, so damn well in fact, is the relationship that develops between Eveen and Sky. They are day and night in so many ways, and yet, they are each other’s past and future and neither knows what caused the one to make the choices that led to the other.

In their mirror imaging of each other, they manage to reach through the silvered glass and work towards each other while still remaining who they are and it’s fascinating to watch. (It’s a bit like one of the Doctor Who episodes where the past Doctors get dragged into the present Doctor’s current dilemma, which was a lot of fun to see. Because it is.

At the same time, Sky’s astonishing advent into Eveen’s world lets Eveen show it to us as well. It’s a world that, for all its differences to ours, works both surprisingly well and every bit as badly in some of the same ways. Clearly, humans are gonna human, even when they’re dead. Or all powerful. Or both.

While the motives behind this whole mess are not, in the end, all that original, the execution (pardon all the puns) most definitely is, in a way that kept this reader at least on the edge of her seat until the bittersweet end. Which could, possibly, hopefully, lead to a new beginning.

Because if this turned out to be the start of a series, I absolutely would not mind AT ALL.

Grade A #BookReview: On the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: On the Fox Roads by Nghi VoOn the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo
Format: ebook
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: ebook
Genres: fantasy, historical fantasy, urban fantasy
Pages: 38
Published by Tor Books on October 31, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

A new novelette from Hugo Award-winning author, Nghi Vo!
While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers their authentic self, a hidden gift, and that there are no straight lines when you run the fox roads. . .

My Review:

Unlike the popular image of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde, “Chinese Jack” and “Tonkin Jill” didn’t ENTER banks with guns blazing. That didn’t mean they didn’t EXIT that way, but the guns weren’t the point.

Jack and Lai were merely following the rule laid down by their contemporary Willie Sutton, they robbed banks because that’s where the money was. Even if the kind of small-town banks that the Chinese duo robbed had a lot less of the green stuff and a lot more of other kinds of paper than either of the robbers would have liked.

That’s where the third member of this duo turned trio enters the picture, a young Chinese-American girl who stows away in their getaway car intending to steal back the deed to her parents’ store from one of the “Jack and Jill’s” earlier scores.

A seemingly magical deed that will re-open the store as soon as the deed is laid down on the ground it belongs to.

The question is whether that stowaway wants to go back to belonging to it, to being the girl their parents want them to be, prim, proper and most of all – obedient – or whether that girl wants to undergo more than one transformation – robbing banks, driving getaway cars, getting to see the big, wide world, living as a man instead of the woman that fate originally intended.

All things are possible on the magical, mysterious, ever-changing fox roads that travel no known path and go in no known direction except for the will and the whim of anyone who is on the run from a hard chase and desperate enough to drive fast and trust to fate.

Escape Rating A: This is one of those stories where my only complaint is that I wanted just a bit more than I got. Every single bit of this one is terrific, but I wish it had qualified as a Hugo nominee in the Novella category (between 17,500 and 40,000 words) instead of as the Novelette it is (between 7,500 and 17,500 words). Not that I actually WANT more options in the Novella category because it’s going to be a really hard choice for me.

On the Fox Roads is one of those book baby situations, where it feels like it owes some of its DNA to several books I’ve read – and probably more that I haven’t – but at the same time is still a thing of itself meaning that the blend creates something new and marvelous.

Bonnie and Clyde in a photo from around 1932–33 that was found by police at an abandoned hideout

In this particular case it reads like it owes something to, first of all, the real Bonnie and Clyde, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, both in the way that Jack and Lai operate and in the setting, small-town America during the Great Depression just as Prohibition is about to change everything.

But the story also has a bit of The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo in that one of the characters is a fox masquerading as a human, who is someone with a somewhat different set of morés and values than the human narrator and the fox’s human partner Jack.

And then there’s that third element, the fox roads themselves, which read a lot like the roads to alternate realities traveled by the magical muscle car in Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.

Those impressions were what I brought into this story, what I got while I was reading it was considerably more, as the narrator has the opportunity to try out a much different life than they thought could possibly be available to them as a young Chinese-American woman in racially-stratified 1930s America.

The way that the magic mixed into the heady brew of the story and swept it off down mysterious roads and sometimes equally mysterious and magical cities blended the whole delicious melange into something delightful and unexpected and yes, magical.

To the point where I’m oh-so-grateful that this got nominated for the Hugo, because I’m not much of a short fiction reader and probably wouldn’t have found this otherwise. But I’m glad that I did, even if it does make my Hugo voting that much harder.

A+ #AudioBookReview: When Among Crows by Veronica Roth

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: When Among Crows by Veronica RothWhen Among Crows by Veronica Roth
Narrator: Helen Laser, James Fouhey, Tim Campbell
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, urban fantasy
Pages: 176
Length: 4 hours and 29 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on May 14, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When Among Crows is swift and striking, drawing from the deep well of Slavic folklore and asking if redemption and atonement can be found in embracing what we most fear.
We bear the sword, and we bear the pain of the sword.
Pain is Dymitr’s calling. His family is one in a long line of hunters who sacrifice their souls to slay monsters. Now he’s tasked with a deadly mission: find the legendary witch Baba Jaga. To reach her, Dymitr must ally with the ones he’s sworn to kill.
Pain is Ala’s inheritance. A fear-eating zmora with little left to lose, Ala awaits death from the curse she carries. When Dymitr offers her a cure in exchange for her help, she has no choice but to agree.
Together they must fight against time and the wrath of the Chicago underworld. But Dymitr’s secrets—and his true motives—may be the thing that actually destroys them.

My Review:

There’s an old Polish saying – not the one you’re thinking of, at least not yet – that translates as “Not my circus, not my monkeys” Which pretty much sums up the attitude of the first zmora that Dymitr approaches in regards to the very dangerous trade he wants to make.

The second zmora comes to him, because what he’s offering IS her cursed circus and those are her damned monkeys. Or, to be a bit more on the nose about the whole thing, it is her murder – or at least it will be – and those are her crows, who are already flocking to the scene.

Dymitr has acquired a legendary magical artifact that holds the possibility of a cure for the curse that Ala suffers from. A curse that killed her mother, her aunt, and her cousin, and is now killing her. A curse that will pass down her bloodline to the next female relative in line – no matter how distant – until the whole line is wiped out.

In return, Dymitr wants an introduction to another legendary ‘artifact’, the powerful witch Baba Jaga [that’s how her name is spelled in the book]. As merely a human, Dymitr does not have access to the places and people that will get him to his goal. As a zmora, while Ala does not know Baba Jaga at all, she does have contacts who can at least get Dymitr a few steps further along on the quest that he refuses to either name or explain.

Their journey proves to be a very different “magical mystery tour” than the one that the Beatles sang about, observing the different magical populations that have migrated to Chicago from his native Poland, and how each group abides by the proverb, “When among crows, caw as the crows do.”

The zmora, who feed on fear, operate movie theaters that feature horror movies, the strzygi, who live on anger and aggression, run underground fight clubs, while the llorona, who collect sorrow, own a chain of hospice centers. It’s all perfectly legal, or at least most of it is. And the parts that aren’t, the strzygi fight clubs, fit right in with the rest of the organized crime and corruption that operates in Chicago.

The supernatural have learned to caw like the crows do, the better to hide from the powerful so-called ‘Holy Order’ that hunts down anyone and anything it deems to be ‘not human enough’. And isn’t that the most human impulse of all?

An impulse, and a life, that Dmitry is willing to cut himself off from – literally as well as figuratively – at any and all cost. Even the cost of the humanity that his family has held so dear over the centuries.

All he needs to do is find Baba Jaga – and pay whatever price she demands in order to cut the sword out of his back once and for all.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve frequently said that a story has to be just about perfect to make the leap from an A- to an A. This one absolutely did, and listening to the audio put it over the top into A+. With bells on. To the point where I have to restrain myself from just squeeing all over the place.

The tone of When Among Crows felt very much like ‘old school’ urban fantasy before it left its horror with mystery roots behind to fall down the paranormal romance rabbit hole. Not that I don’t love a good paranormal with a kickass heroine posed on the cover in an utterly impossible position, but those got to dominating the genre and that’s not all I wanted from it.

(The blurb implies a romantic relationship between Dymitr and Ala. Don’t be fooled, that is absolutely not what is going on here – and it shouldn’t be. The relationship they are scrabbling towards is family, that the pain they have both suffered, and from the same source, can lead to them finding the family ties that pain has cost them with each other.)

At the same time, the way this story drew in so many Slavic myths and legends that I itched for a mythopedia (I was driving, that would have had terrible consequences) reminded me, a lot and very fondly, of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, because that book gave me the same vibes – along with the same dilemma – and I listened to it well before the Annotated Edition was published. I won’t say that When Among Crows was better, because American Gods had a much larger scope, but for the smaller size of the package of Crows, it still managed to evoke that same sense of memory and wonder, that so much that is old and weird still walks among us hidden in plain sight – made all that much more poignant in that the place the weird is hiding is the darker corners of Chicago – a city that has always had plenty.

When Among Crows was utterly enchanting, and I was totally enchanted by it, staying up entirely too late to finish the audio because it was just that good. While the story was relatively short, it also went surprisingly deep, and then came around full circle in a way that surprised and delighted even as it led to a delicious sort of closure that I wasn’t expecting but utterly loved.