Tag: 2012 Ebook Challenge

Hunter’s Prey

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

Hunter’s Prey (Bloodhounds, Book 2) by Moira Rogers has all the ingredients to cook up a terrific wild-west romp. Take one former hooker with the requisite heart of gold. Add one former spoiled party-boy who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and feels like he’s been turned into “Beast” from Beauty and the Beast.

Then again, sometimes Hunter literally does turn into a Beast. A Bloodhound, that is.

The Bloodhounds, and the steampunk-flavored post-Civil War alternate Wild West they prowl, were introduced in Wilder’s Mate, book 1 of this series. Not only do a lot of the characters from Wilder’s Mate reappear in Hunter’s Prey, but the first story provides a chunk of useful information about Bloodhounds and their world.

Not to mention, it’s a darn good book!  (See reviews at Fiction Vixen, Book Lovers Inc, Smexy Books, and of course, Reading Reality)

Hunter’s Prey takes up where Wilder’s Mate left off. Hunter was rescued by Wilder, found in a cage in a vampire’s lair. Hunter was changed against his will, and not made by the mysterious Guild.

The story is all about Hunter’s first month of freedom as a bloodhound. Whether he can accept himself as he is now, and not as the man he used to be.

Bloodhounds are ruled by the moon. During the full moon they crave violence. Hunter had no problems dealing with that urge. A camp of 50 or so vampires near the Deadlands border made for easy pickings.

But it’s the insatiable sexual hungers of his Bloodhound nature that Hunter isn’t certain how to handle. Bloodhounds fall prey to three days of mindless lust during the dark of the new moon. Hunter is afraid to inflict the violence of his new nature on any woman, even the prostitutes who make very good money from the Bloodhound Guild every month. They volunteer for this service. The Bloodhounds need to satisfy their lovers, and they are damn good at it.

Even in the short time Hunter has been free, he’s already become attached to a woman, and he didn’t intend to.

Hunter’s Prey isn’t just Hunter’s story, it’s also Ophelia’s story. Ophelia runs the Guildhouse in Iron Creek. She keeps all the Bloodhounds fed, sees to any guests, hires and fires the help. She keeps the pantry stocked. And she listens to everyone’s troubles. Ophelia used to run a bordello. Except for the nature of the business, running a Guildhouse isn’t much different. She’s tired of managing other people’s houses and other people’s lives. Ophelia wants a place of her own.

But Hunter is just the kind of trouble that draws her in. Ophelia knows she shouldn’t get involved with him. Not because he’s a Bloodhound, but because he isn’t ready to accept that his dreams of a respectable life are over. Bloodhounds aren’t respectable, they are violence incarnate.

However rationally Ophelia decides that she shouldn’t be involved with Hunter, fate has other plans. So do a whole bunch of ghouls and a vampire drug lord.

With the deck stacked so high against them, will Hunter and Ophelia survive long enough to find out that they belong together?

Escape Rating B: Even though Hunter is the title character, Ophelia is the person who really made the story work for me. I could understand completely why she felt the way she did, both about running the house, and why she was thinking of leaving.

And I could definitely see her misgivings about a relationship with Hunter. Until he accepts who he is now, there’s no future. He has to stop looking backward at who he was, and accept himself for who he is now, however that came about. I do love watching a relationship build; the chase should be every bit as much fun to watch as the catch. This was scorching.

I did find myself going back to see where the villain went. The ending was fast and furious, but we didn’t see a whole lot of the bad guy before the take down. On the other hand, I did like the hints that the Guild is going to feature more in later books. They are infernally and internally mysterious. I want to know more about them, so I’m looking forward to that!

 

Peacemaker

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

Peacemaker is the third book in Lindsay Buroker’s Flash Gold Chronicles. When I finished the last page, I was already pining for book four. I hope I don’t have too long to wait for the next episode in these steampunk adventures of a self-taught tinkerer and her bounty hunter business partner.

Kali and Cedar are tremendous fun. Especially because the scrapes Kali gets into (and gets herself out of) read like a Girl’s Own Adventure version of the Perils of Pauline. Or maybe more like “Dudley Do-right and Snidely Whiplash”? But in Ms. Buroker’s tales, Kali McAlister never waits for any man to rescue her, and her partner Cedar is much, much smarter than Dudley ever hoped to be.

Cedar needs to be smarter if he’s ever going to have half a chance with Kali. But there are Mounties hanging around. Peacemaker takes place in Dawson City, Yukon during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush.

During the Gold Rush era, “Peacemaker” was a nickname for a Colt Single Action Revolver.    Between 1949 and 1959, “Peacemaker” was also the nickname for the Convair B-36 strategic bomber. In this steampunk wild west where airship pirates steal gold from men who shoot back with six-shooters, both nicknames turn out to be strangely apropos.

Dawson was a dangerous place. All Gold Rush towns were. But Dawson is particularly dangerous for Kali and Cedar.

There’s a serial killer on the loose. He’s targeting Native girls, and he doesn’t just kill them. He tortures and rapes them first. Then he butchers them. Jack the Ripper might have been the killer’s teacher, or his student.

The worst part is he’s trying to lay the blame on either the Natives, or animals, or superstitious nonsense. In any case, he escapes clean every time. Finding out just how he does it is a big part of the story.

The absolutely worst part is that the crimes appear to be the work of the same serial killer who struck in San Francisco just before Cedar left–the crimes that Cedar was accused of. There’s a Pinkerton agent on Cedar’s trail, and he’s come to Dawson to get his man.

Cedar isn’t the murderer. But the murderer is tracking Cedar, knowing he can lay the blame at Cedar’s door. And Kali is half-Native. Adding her to the body count will serve two purposes; it will hurt Cedar, and it will make him look even more guilty. After all, that’s how it worked in San Francisco. The last victim there was someone Cedar cared about, too.

About that bomber: Kali wants an airship. Attempting to get her hands on one lands her, and everyone around her, in all sorts of trouble. Read the book and find out how she gets herself out.

Escape Rating A: I was happy that Peacemaker was a bit longer than Flash Gold and Hunted, because I didn’t want it to be over. I really like Kali as a character, and I didn’t want to let her go.

We see more of her background in Peacemaker, and she’s come a long way. Kali is a child of two worlds, and feels like she doesn’t belong in either one. Seeing that she has made a way for herself that takes the best of both makes her a truly interesting character.

I do hope that someday Kali and Cedar get a happy ending. These are not romances, so that’s not part of the story. But these are two people who have had some rough times, and as a reader, you hope they get rewarded. They’re just good together.

 

Hunted

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

Hunted is the second book in Lindsay Buroker’s Flash Gold Chronicles. If you like western-themed steampunk, you’ll love the Flash Gold Chronicles. Start with the first story, Flash Gold (reviewed here) and just keep right on reading. You’ll be glad you did.

Hunted picks right up where Flash Gold left off. So there will be some spoilers for Flash Gold in this review. (It’s difficult to review book 2 of a series without spoiling book 1 a tiny bit!)

Kali and Cedar are business partners. But not partners of any other kind. However, when Kali’s low-down, no-good con man of an ex-fiancé strolls into her tinkering shop, Kali pretends that Cedar is her beau. She’s just so incensed that Sebastian believes that no man could possibly be interested in her unless he was after her dwindling supply of her father’s flash gold.

There turn out to be three problems with her deception of Sebastian as to the nature of her partnership with Cedar.

Problem number one: Sebastian has a job for her, a real one. He’s planning to prospect for gold out and he wants her to come out and handle the engineering. She needs the money for parts for her airship.

Problem number two: her business partner Cedar not only wants her to take that job, he wants to come along with her. He needs the excuse to go out to the goldfields. Cedar is a bounty hunter, and the bounty he is hunting is rumored to be on the next claim over from Sebastian’s.

Problem number three: while Cedar was standing behind her with his arms wrapped around her, pretending to be not just protective, but downright enamored of her, Kali discovered that she liked the feeling far too much. Pretending to be engaged might upset the balance of their relationship in ways she hadn’t expected.

And with Kali’s luck, once she and Cedar arrived at Sebastian’s gold claim, the entire situation immediately went from bad to worse. The only gold Sebastian was after turned out to be the bounty on Kali’s head!

Escape Rating A-: The Flash Gold Chronicles are simply way too much fun. Kali’s endless inventiveness, her positive lust for all things mechanical, is an absolute delight. Every time some new engineering marvel takes pot shots at her, she’s every bit as interested in seeing how it ticks as she is in shooting it down. Kali is a character I’d love to meet.

I’ve already started Peacemaker, the third book in the Flash Gold Chronicles. I’m delighted to be spending more time with Kali and Cedar.

 

Flash Gold

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

Flash Gold by Lindsay Buroker is the first story in her Flash Gold Chronicles. What are those, I hear you asking? They are an absolutely marvelous series of western-style steampunk-flavored romps set in a gold rush-era Yukon featuring a terrifically inventive heroine, Kali McAlister.

In other words, it’s fun!

Kali McAllister plans to enter her “dogless sled” in a mushing race, all so she can win the $1000 prize and leave the Yukon in general and the town of Moose Hollow in particular, forever.

Kali is an inventor. Her dogless sled runs on steampower and mechanical engineering trickery. Most of the folks around Moose Hollow believe she’s a witch. They’re wrong.

Kali’s mother was a witch. Well, a pretty powerful medicine woman of the local Han tribe, anyway. And her father, well, he was the closest thing to a wizard that this world is likely to see for a while.

And he invented “flash gold”. Gold flakes that go “BOOM” like gunpowder or TNT, only more stable, and way more valuable.  The really neat thing about flash gold is that it obeys instructions like the punch cards on a jacquard loom, but way easier. Flash gold accepts verbal instructions.

The world’s last known supply of was her father’s legacy to Kali. But Kali’s trying to keep that fact very, very quiet. She has enough problems with the idiots in town who want to sabotage her sled.

So when a big, sword-toting stranger comes to town and wants to hire on as her guard for the race, Kali is pretty skeptical. But she needs a guard. It’s just that this man who calls himself “Cedar” is too expensively equipped for someone willing to work for just the promise of wages.

And that’s when Kali discovers that  every nefarious no-good varmint in the Yukon and Northwest Territories seems to be hunting her for her father’s flash gold. And that Cedar is hunting all of them!

Escape Rating A-: I read this twice. I requested a review copy from the author, and read and really enjoyed it. But I didn’t get the review written. The third book in the Flash Gold Chronicles just came out (Hunted is #2, and Peacemaker is #3) and I decided it was time to write the review. I roared through Flash Gold again, and it was just as much fun the second time through.

A reader can’t ask for better than that!

Blue Monday

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

“Blue Monday”, according to some very shaky pseudoscience, is the most depressing day of the year.

Which makes Blue Monday a fitting title for the first book in Nicci French’s new mystery series. Psychotherapist Frieda Klein features as the reader’s guide into the darker recesses into the human mind.

Frieda’s first “case” delves into dark places, indeed. Because this mystery is a case about lost people. Not just the initial tragedy of a missing child that opens the story, but all of the characters in this multi-act tragedy have lost essential pieces of themselves.

Including the psychotherapists who are supposed to guide their patients out of the depths. And the deeper this case goes, the murkier it gets. But it is enthralling until long after the last page is turned.

It all starts with a lost child. Twenty years ago, Joanna Vine disappeared on her way home from school. Her sister Rose lost track of her for just a couple of minutes, and little Jo vanished. Joanna was five years old. Rose Vine was only nine.

Joanna was never found. Not the child, not her body. Rose never stopped blaming herself for that one moment of childish selfishness.

The Vine’s marriage didn’t survive the tragedy. Richard Vine drank too much. Deborah Vine remarried and tried to move on.

Then a little boy disappeared, under almost identical circumstances, over twenty years later. But serial criminals don’t usually wait that long. Two doesn’t make a serial anything. But there is no other child snatching like these two, not in the long intervening years.

And psychotherapist Frieda Klein has a new patient. A patient who came to her before the boy, Matthew Faraday, was kidnapped. Frieda’s new patient described seeing a little boy just like Matthew waiting for him and imagined a little boy just like Matthew being his son.

Is Frieda’s patient, Alan Dekker, the kidnapper? This time? He’s not Joanna’s snatcher since he was a child then himself. But does he know something?

Frieda’s investigation into Alan Dekker’s lost boy unearths the lost, lonely, abandoned child that Alan Dekker used to be. A child who never knew Joanna Vine then, and doesn’t know anything about Matthew Faraday now.

But Alan’s lost history is the key to everything. If it doesn’t destroy him first.

Escape Rating A: This is a psychological thriller, and it is excellent. It also has one of those endings that twists at the very, very last second in a very neat and creepy/spine-tingling way.

The characters in this drama are fascinating. The story starts out as a tragedy with the lost child. But every single person has lost something important. There is a major theme about the loss of identity, and about adult children with major pieces of their identities missing. But even the supposedly “whole” people have major gaps in their lives and are patching over them as part of the story.

If you enjoy psychological thrillers with darker edges, read this one on a sunny day!

 

 

Heart of Perdition

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews

Heart of Perdition by Selah March is a short, chilling gothic story. And I do mean chilling. The ending was very eerie, and I got the shivers. Not from cold, but from the creepy-crawlies. In a good way.

Heart of Perdition takes place in a steampunk-style world, but the story isn’t steampunk, and that doesn’t matter. Steampunk can be a setting, just as an alien planet or near-future apocalypse can be a setting, while the story is another genre entirely. That’s how we sometimes get genre-benders like futuristic romance or historical mysteries.

So the steampunk setting of Perdition allows the use of airships and clockwork servants, but doesn’t drive the story. What drives the story is an ancient evil creature named Xaphan, and a terrible curse embodied by one lonely young woman.

Elspeth Shaw lives alone on the Greek island of St. Kilda. It’s a very bleak island, and it’s better that way. Elspeth suffers from a terrible curse. Every living creature who becomes emotionally attached to her, dies. Every creature, not just humans. Elspeth can’t even have a pet without watching it die horribly of her curse.

Elspeth only allows herself one human servant, a housekeeper whom she pays well and treats just barely tolerably, guaranteeing that the woman never forms any attachment to her. It’s her only way of keeping the woman alive. All of her other servants are automata.

Poor Elspeth’s own feelings don’t enter into the curse, she can love anyone she likes. Or not. What matters what they feel about her.

The curse is the result of an evil bargain her father made the night she was born. Her father tried to cheat death. To do so, he stole a powerful artifact that had been safeguarded by a church. That artifact controlled an evil spirit named Xaphan. The bargain her father made was that the curse would be visited on his first-born child. Elspeth’s father assumed his first-born would be a son. He was an egotistical scientist in the Victorian era, he was like that. Instead, his firstborn was Elspeth.

Her father was not killed by the curse because he never loved her. He lived a normal life-span.

But as he died, an old bitter man, he decided upon one last act of horror. Dr. Shaw died in the house of James Weston, Earl of Falmouth. Weston was a young man dying of congenital heart disease. Contemporary physicians could recognize it, but not cure it.

With his dying breath, Dr. Shaw directed Weston to go to Elspeth, and to release Xaphan. Knowing the evil would grant the dying young man his wish of restored life, at the cost of releasing that terrible evil back into the world.

The inevitable result is tragic and horrible and incredibly chilling.

Escape Rating B+: I recommend Heart of Perdition if you like your romances with a side of eerie. You will gobble this story right up–but don’t gobble this one up alone in the dark with your ereader. The ending haunts.

Wrong Side of Hell

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews

Wrong Side of Hell by Juliana Stone is a teaser novella for her new League of Guardians series. If you are one of the readers who is duly teased by this link between Stone’s Jaguar Warrior series and this one, don’t worry, you won’t have a long wait. The first League book, Wicked Road to Hell, will be released on April 24.

I was definitely teased. This was a terrific introduction to a new series!

Logan Winters is one of the baddest of all “bad boys”. He’s a hellhound. His job on Earth is to pick up souls marked for damnation, and escort them to their proper place in Hell. If Logan is sent to get you, you’ve earned yourself a spot in District 3. This means you were a very, very wicked person during your life.

Nothing about contract signing or selling yourself to the Devil. That’s not Logan’s end of the business. He handles pickup and delivery. If there is someone handling “sales”, we don’t see that part of the process. And this doesn’t seem like that kind of worldbuilding.

The person we do see is Askelon, except he’d rather be called “Bill”. He cloaks himself in glamour to appear as a short, round middle-aged man, but “Bill” is really one of the most powerful beings in any of the dimensions. And “Bill” bats for the opposite team from Logan’s. I don’t mean sexually, I mean metaphysically.

Logan is a hellhound. Askelon is a being of the heavenly dimension. And one pretty high in the hierarchy at that. Seraphim generally are.

Askelon blackmails Logan into doing him a very, very big favor. Which doesn’t sound all that angelic. He demands that Logan go into purgatory and rescue the soul of a young woman that Logan already returned once from death.

The first time Logan rescued Kira Dove, he spent millenia in The Pit for his crime. (Time passes differently in the infernal dimensions). And he did it because Askelon blackmailed him then, too. Also because the Seraphim convinced him it was the right thing to do.

The same thing is happening again. Neither heaven nor hell should be interfering in one human’s life this much. The Seraphim is convinced that too many fates depend on this one young woman’s survival, and not just human fates either.

Logan tries to convince himself that none of that matters to him. He owes the Seraphim, so he’ll take care of what he has to. But he still remembers that girl, after all those centuries in The Pit.

The difference is, Kira Dove is a woman now. When Logan Winters saved her the first time, she believed in him. She continued to believe in him, and everything she saw when she died that first time and Logan brought her back.

Even though everyone said she was crazy. And committed her for it. Experimented on her. Abused her. She still believed in what she saw, who she saw.

Kira Dove was dead again, but all she knew for certain was that everything she remembered was true. And Logan came to rescue her. Again. But this time, she could fight beside him.

But would he let her?

Escape Rating B+: As an introduction to a new series, this story really whetted my appetite for the first full-length novel. This particular story, although it seems like it resolved to an HEA, also feels like it sets up the series as a whole. I think there are a lot of trials and tribulations ahead for Kira and Logan, even as the focus of the series moves to other members of the League.

Kira reminds me a little of Sarah Connor from Terminator 2, at the beginning when Sarah is in the State Hospital. She has that vibe of “I know I’m not crazy and I have to keep myself strong for the day I’ll need to fight my way out”, but with a hint of vulnerability that Sarah didn’t have or need.

This is intended as a bridge story between Stone’s Jaguar Shifters series and this new series, as Logan appeared as a side-character in the earlier series. But if there are details that I missed, they didn’t hamper my overall enjoyment of the story.

 

Donovan’s Bed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews

Donovan’s Bed by Debra Mullins turned out to be the best kind of surprise. All I expected was to get my curiosity sated about Samhain’s Retro Romances. What I discovered was a guilty pleasure of a book.

Sarah Calhoun made one mistake, and the small-minded small-town gossips are never going to let her forget. Admittedly, it was a pretty big mistake. And the entire town knows that Sarah isn’t going to go to her marriage bed (if any man is ever willing to overlook her past, that is) a blushing virgin.

So Sarah has spent the last two years living down her terrible sin, and throwing herself into running her father’s newspaper. The newspaper is all she has left of him. Being a good businesswoman, instead of just a woman, barely keeps the busybodies out of her life.

But of course there is a man. His name is Jack Donovan. She’s been pursuing him as part of her work. He’s new in town, and he’s bought the biggest ranch for miles around. But…no one knows who he is or where he came from. Donovan just showed up in Burr one day with a fistful of cash and bought himself a lot of respectability. Sarah knows he must have a dark secret buried someplace deep.

Jack Donovan does have a secret, and he doesn’t want Sarah to find it. So whenever she tries to interview him, he tries to get her temper riled up. Not true anger, just to deflect her a little. And because the sexual tension between them makes the sparks fly.

But when Donovan has an ornate four-poster bed shipped to Burr from “Back East”, all the mock-flirtation comes to a boil. Sarah wants to know why a single rancher, however wealthy, lavished so much money on such an ostentatious piece of furniture.

Donovan tell her that he’s decided to settle down and find a wife. Then has the gall to tell Sarah that she isn’t on the list. Even worse, he tells that she’d be just fine for a passionate affair, but that she’s not a woman to marry.

Not having lost his entire mind, he doesn’t tell her that the reason he won’t consider marrying her is that he wants a full-time rancher’s wife, and he knows she won’t give up her newspaper. And that it is unfair of him to expect it of her. And there’s that other little problem–he won’t tell her his secrets, and she won’t rest until she finds out.

But Sarah is incensed. Telling a newspaperwoman that she isn’t good enough to marry you is not the way for a man to lead a quiet and respectable life in a small town. Sarah prints Donovan’s wife hunt as front page news the very next day, complete with his stated list of qualifications.

The poor man finds himself besieged, even in his own home!

But the more women who throw themselves at him, the more he realizes that Sarah, the one he believed was totally unsuitable, is the only woman he could possibly spend the rest of his life with.

But first they have to deal with a few pesky little problems. Like his past. And her past. And whether or not they are both willing to make serious compromises in their expectations.

Sarah was right all along. Jack Donovan  really did have a deep, dark secret buried in his past. Jack wanted it to stay buried forever. Until his worst self turns out to be the only one who can save Sarah’s life.

Escape Rating B+: If you have a fondness for Western romances in small frontier towns, this is a good one. I’d forgotten how much fun these stories are. It probably helps a lot that this particular “Retro Romance” isn’t all that retro–Donovan’s Bed was originally published in 2000.

I’m even considering reading the rest of the Calhoun Sisters series, just for fun.

Do not judge this book by its cover. Donovan is probably even more alpha than the picture, but Sarah is making her way as a businesswoman in a man’s world, she’s no sweet, submissive little miss. The original paperback cover may be more lurid, but more accurate.

 

Arctic Rising

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

Tobias Bucknell’s Arctic Rising is a near-future science fiction techno-thriller that leads the cast, and the reader, at a breakneck paced tour of a thawed Arctic. Unfortunately for our heroine, she’s on this tour because someone really is out to get her. Fortunately for the reader, figuring out who turns up a grand scheme that keeps the reader guessing until the very end.

It’s also kind of a pre-apocalyptic story of eco-terrorism. What do I mean by pre-apocalyptic? The apocalypse hasn’t happened, yet, but if events in this story go pear-shaped, well, you can definitely see the apocalypse from here.

Anika Duncan begins the story as an airship pilot for the United National Polar Guard. The UNPG has airships patrolling the waters of the Arctic Circle to check for drug smuggling and occasionally nuclear waste dumping. Why? Because airships (read blimps) are cheap on fuel and fossil fuels are expensive and running out. Why are they needed? Because the Arctic Ice Cap has melted, and all that ocean is pretty empty. There’s nobody looking. Nuclear waste, as we already know, is a pain to get rid of. Dumping it in deep water no one is watching is cheap.

But when Anika’s gear pings a radioactive hotspot on the ship below her, she sets of a chain reaction of events much bigger than she could ever have imagined. The crew of the unidentified ship brings out heavy artillery and brings down her ship. Then they ram the debris. Crash landing in the Arctic Ocean is a fast way to die of hypothermia.

Anika’s co-pilot makes it to the hospital, but dies of his injuries. Anika did a better job getting her survival suit zipped up, so she is okay physically, but someone tries to run her off the road. And that’s only the first attempt on her life. Her house is blown up. She’s arrested by men who have no identity.

A friend —  who wants to be her girlfriend — smuggles her out. Anika’s friend Vy is a criminal, but Vy has connections. Right now, Anika needs friends in low-places just to figure out what is going on. But the more she discovers, the crazier things get. And the more collateral damage piles up around her.

Somebody wants to terraform the Earth, to turn back the global warming clock. They’ve even found a way to do it. But there are a lot of powerful people and corporations who like things just fine the way they are, and don’t want to change. They’re willing to let the future take care of itself.

Some of those people have found a nuke. Anika and her friends are caught in the middle. At Ground Zero.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those books where you just saddle up and hang on for the ride. The story is all about the thrills and chills, and it has plenty.

Something about this story that ties into reality is the opening of the Northwest Passage. In the 1800s, explorers searched, and died, seeking the fabled Northwest Passage over the top of Canada from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The story of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition is especially interesting, because they found mummies from some members of the party in the 1980s.

The Northwest Passage is opening. Bowhead and gray whales have managed to make the crossing from the Pacific to the Atlantic through the Passage for the first time in centuries. A cruise ship sailed through the Passage in 2006 and a commercial freighter in 2008.

The other neat, funny, cool thing was the portrait of the new Arctic as the really, really last frontier, the place where everyone gets to be an extreme individualist. I lived in Anchorage for three years, and Bucknell’s portrait of the new Arctic was Alaska taken several steps further. Which totally worked.

Arctic Rising is one of those books where you read it and you keep thinking that things can’t get any crazier for the main characters, and yet, they do. And it just makes you want to keep reading even more!

Under Her Brass Corset

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews

Under Her Brass Corset by Brenda Williamson looked like steampunk when I picked it up from NetGalley. I mean, really, “brass corset”? What would you think?

Instead, think of it as the counterweight to Leslie Dicken’s The Iron Heart, which is steampunk but doesn’t explicitly say it’s steampunk. Under Her Brass Corset has a title that practically screams steampunk, but is more of a historic romance with fantasy and steampunk elements. Any time immortality and Avalon get mentioned, I call fantasy.

The hero has installed steam power on his ship, it does fly, and this is Victorian England, but he hides the steam power from anyone who is not in on his big secret, his immortality. (I’m not calling this a spoiler because it’s revealed to the reader very, very early in the story)

Abigail Thatch begins the story pretty much at the end of her rope. Her father was murdered only two months previously foiling a break-in of their home, and since then, her finances have been going steadily downhill. Her museum job isn’t enough to pay the bills, and the bank is threatening foreclosure.

In walks Jasper Blackthorne. Abigail doesn’t remember Captain Blackthorne, but he remembers her all too well. In between sea voyages, Blackthorne has watched over her all her life, just as he guarded her parents before her. Blackthorne is immortal, having drunk from the waters of Avalon over 400 years previously. He feels responsible for Abigail’s family, because he gave her grandfather a sip from the waters himself. Unfortunately not a big enough sip…her grandfather is immortal but rather absent-minded. He forgets all the children he has created over his very long life.

History records Abigail’s grandfather as Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard the notorious pirate.

Jasper hid something in Abigail’s house before his last voyage: a clockworks compass that points to sources of the healing waters of Avalon, the waters that are sometimes called the “fountain of youth”. Jasper needs to get the compass back. He fears that Abigail’s father was murdered in an attempt to find it. Murdered by Abigail’s cousin, Eric Teach.

But Jasper has another reason for coming to see Abigail. He’s been watching over her from a distance all these years, and he’s seen her grow from child to girl to woman. As a child she was a delightful little sprite, but as a woman, she’s captured his heart and soul. And it tears him apart. Jasper loved a mortal woman once, 150 years before. She refused the gift of immortality, and he has never loved again.

But Abigail challenges him, body and spirit. She wants him, and the adventure he represents. She also knows that there is a treasure to be found with that clockworks compass; she simply doesn’t believe in his tales of immortality. Abigail needs a rich prize to rescue her home from the bank.

Abigail finds herself falling for Jasper, even though she thinks that everything he says might be a con. She doesn’t remember him from her childhood, but she instinctively trusts him, though her mind says she shouldn’t.

The journey they embark upon is filled with wonders. But also with great perils and dangerous sea monsters. But none more dangerous than Abigail’s long-lost family.

Escape Rating C+: I was expecting much more steampunk than this turned out to be. I like fantasy romance, but I wasn’t expecting one. There are definitely steampunk elements, but they arise because Jasper’s been inventing stuff for himself to keep people away. I tend to think of steampunk being more pervasive to the society-at-large.

The romance itself worked pretty well. I liked Jasper and Abigail, and could understand why they fell for each other. I also definitely got why she didn’t believe his story. From a rational standpoint, it was pretty far-fetched. On the other hand, since she didn’t believe him, she should have needed a LOT more convincing in order to go with him on that trans-Atlantic voyage.

For my willing suspension of disbelief, or the throwing out the window of it, there were one or more too many borrowed elements from other stories. Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake and Avalon and Blackbeard the Pirate and Ponce de León! For this reader, it was a little over the top. Your mileage may vary.