Tag: historical fiction

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand? 3-4-12

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Virtual Nightstand

I heard something on NPR today about a computer algorithm that can reasonably identify anonymous authors by their choices of words and phrases. Then I thought about how many times I used the phrase “on the one hand…”

On the one hand, March 7-11 is the Book Bloggers and Publishers Online Conference. I have to wonder how many book bloggers are going to be too wrapped up in the conference to post! I’ve heard it’s absolutely awesome and I’m really looking forward to it.

On the other hand, I signed up for NaBloPoMo again over at BlogHer. So I’ve committed to posting something every day again in March. The prompt this month is “Whether”. For the days of the BBPOC, that would be whether or not I spend my whole day glued to the conference I still have to post something. I’m planning to queue up some reviews.

Speaking of queuing up reviews, I’m going to say this now because I absolutely cannot believe it. I read everything from last week’s Nightstand. Well, not quite everything. I’m in the middle of Nicci French’s Blue Monday right now. But this is the closest I’ve ever come to finishing all the books on the stand, ever.

Of course, that doesn’t account for all the previous nightstands, but we have to take our little victories where we can find them. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Let’s talk about next week’s pristine, new nightstand. So empty, so bright and shiny and waiting to be filled.

There is a treat on it. One of my most fun author discoveries was Cindy Spencer Pape. I absolutely adored both her steampunk series Steam and Sorcery and her urban fantasy Urban Arcana series. I’ve been waiting for the next book in her Urban Arcana series and Motor City Mage is finally here. If it is anything like her previous books, this is going to be a “read in one gulp” book. Yummy.

I picked Gentlemen Prefer Nerds by Joan Kilby by the title. I’m a geek girl, and this story of a jewel thief chasing the nerd girl tickled me for it’s concept. The recent trend in romances has been for the nerd to be the guy. But when the description mentioned espionage, I got a whiff of Scarecrow and Mrs. King. I loved that show. I’m a sucker for stories that use that trope.

Katee Robert’s science fiction romance Queen of Swords has been perplexing me just a bit. Goodreads lists it as book 2 of her new Sanctify series, with The High Priestess, the prequel novella as book 1. The only problem for this compulsive completist is that The High Priestess doesn’t seem to be available anywhere. ARGH!

As a complete change of pace, I have The Book of Lost Fragrances by M.J. Rose. It’s subtitled a novel of suspense, but it sounds like a historic thriller to me. Or, at least I hope so. The read-alike listed in Amazon, at least for me, is C.S. Harris’ When Maidens Mourn, due out March 6. I love the C.S. Harris St. Cyr series and have the book pre-ordered. If Lost Fragances is anything like St. Cyr, I’ll be enthralled. The proof will be in the reading.

My last and final book this week is The House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe. This is another historical, but this author isn’t new to me. Katherine Howe also wrote The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a debut novel about the Salem Witches that was absolutely compelling. Her new novel looks equally compelling, but concerns a young woman who loses herself after her closest family dies in the Titanic disaster. I received a print galley for review through Book Browse First Impressions in return for an honest review.

My poor Nightstand is full again. C’est la vie. And there are supposed to be lovely ebook giveaways from the BBPOC, too. So many books, so little time.

Don’t forget to come back tomorrow for Ebook Review Central. It’s time for the four-in-one ERC with Amber Quill, Astraea Press, Liquid Silver Books and Riptide Publishing. Tune in to see who the featured titles are!

 

Past Tense

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

Nick Marsh’s Past Tense is almost two books in one. The first half of Past Tense is science fiction/horror, and it’s pretty much of a sequel to Marsh’s first book, Soul Purpose (reviewed here). The main purpose of chapters 1 through 44 (or I through XLIV) is to provide a reason for the rest: the marvelous time travel feast that gives Past Tense its name.

The present day bits about the vet Alan Reece and his friends George and Kate, who saved the world from a Lovecraftian-Cthulhu-monster type takeover in the previous book, serve as introduction. The world is going to hell in a handcart again. Alan is not just seeing monsters, he also keeps slipping sideways into a world where Cthulhu seems to be running the place. And this is NOT GOOD.

He’s also being stalked by a couple of guys in ill-fitting suits and rather poor hygiene. When they finally catch up with him, their explanation floors him. They are like him, except from other “Soul Plains”. They are Conduits, with a capital “C”, and so is Alan.

And they are on Earth to help Alan save it, again. Because that last time Alan saved the Earth, he caught the attention of something nasty, and it wants to spoil things at the Soul Plain level, where only Conduits can fix things. Earth wasn’t even supposed to have a Conduit yet, so Alan is special.

About the poor hygiene thing. The other Conduits are just borrowing the bodies of people from Earth. They don’t quite know how to operate the equipment, so to speak. They get the language and general movement, well mostly, but the nuances of hair combing and tooth brushing are pretty much beyond them.

But they can show Alan how bad the problem is. The creature has no physical existence, except what he borrows. But on the Soul Plain level, he consumes Conduits, kills them, and steals their power. And he wants Alan. But he also want the entire Soul Power of the Earth.

The 21st century didn’t work for him. He was drawn to it because that’s where Alan was, but the 21st century doesn’t believe in much anymore, not on a superstitious level. This being needs to be worshipped to manifest. People need to believe in him. So he’s gone back into Earth’s past.

And that’s where the second “book” comes in. The creature has manifested in Britain, during the late period of the Roman occupation, in a fort on Hadrian’s Wall. In order to stop him, Alan has to go back to that same period to stop him from changing whatever piece in history he changed to trigger the wrong turn in history.

Alan has to occupy someone else’s body, just as the other Conduits do. Alan’s spirit, or soul, or Conduitness, or whatever, travels back and occupies the body of a medicus, a surgeon, on the Roman frontier in Britain at around 177 A.D. This glimpse into the life in Roman Britain is absolutely fascinating.

Even better, although worse for her, one of the creature’s minions mistakenly believes that Kate is the Conduit and sends her back to the same place and time. Kate occupies the body of a slave girl.

Between Alan and Kate, they are able to observe Roman life from top to bottom.

Their mission, which they must accept, is to prevent the assassination of the future emperor Commodus. Bastard that Commodus was, his place in history was necessary in order for the Roman Empire to fall at the appropriate time.

The only way they may be able to accomplish this seemingly impossible task is to convince a loyal and rational Roman Centurion that his commander is already dead and that his best friend is a time traveler. Can they do the impossible in time?

Escape Rating B+: I am of two minds. The set up with the part in the 21st century at the beginning, was necessary, but I wanted more of the part in the past. I adored the story once it moved to Roman Britain. Alan’s perspective on life in the fort really shone. It was so ironic that he found his place in life nearly 2,000 years before his birth. And he knew it couldn’t last.

And Kate, trying so hard to hold up at the absolute bottom of society’s ladder, reminding Alan that his current privilege rested on the backs of people like her, on slavery.

The historic bits reminded me a lot of Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove’s excellent Household Gods. This was a marvelous book about a woman whose spirit travels back to live on the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire at the same time period as Past Tense.

There’s a slight hint of the Star Trek Original Series episode City on the Edge of Forever in Kate’s relationship with Lucius the centurion. She wants to save him, to the point where she writes herself a message the second they get back to the 21st century, which she already knows she will find and read at the beginning of this adventure, but he will still attack first and die. And it’s necessary to save the future. And she grieves.

For more of my thoughts on Past Tense, take a look at Book Lovers Inc.

 

Scarlet

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

Robin Hood is one of the best-loved (and most often re-told) English legends, probably just behind the King Arthur stories in the number of times it’s been re-done and re-interpreted. And examined by everyone from Disney to Sean Connery. Cartoon to pathos.

Scarlet by A. G. Gaughen is a slightly different take on Robin Hood and his so-called “Merry Men”, who are certainly not merry in this re-telling of the tale.

In Gaughen’s version, “Will” Scarlet is known as “Scar” for the scar on her cheek. The change twists the tale. Scar is female, passing as male for her own safety. The story of how this young woman came to be hiding as a boy in the midst of a band of outlaws in Nottinghamshire makes something new out of an otherwise familiar legend.

We all know the Robin Hood story. Robin, Earl of Locksley returned from the Crusades after his father’s death. He should have inherited the Earldom. Instead he became an outlaw, a hero, and eventually a legend.

In this story, Robin is the outlaw Earl, still trying to protect his people. The difference is Scarlet, or Scar. All the rest of the familiar players in the drama are present and accounted for.

But Scar is a confused young woman. She hides her nature from the villagers in Nottinghamshire, but Robin and the band know that she is female. No one knows her real identity. And all of her deceptions begin to unravel when the Sheriff hires a thief-taker named Guy of Gisbourne, and Scar is so petrified that she freezes at the mention of his name.

Although the outlaw band do rob the rich to keep the villagers fed and help them pay their taxes, Scar truly is a thief. She loves bright shiny objects and steals for the challenge of it. But she never keeps what she steals. Scar sells everything she takes to help keep the village ahead of the taxman. She doesn’t even eat enough, because she knows someone else, anyone else, is more deserving than she.

Robin worries for her, and has from the day he met her in London when she tried to pick his pocket, thinking he was still a Lord. He sees that something terrible preys on her, but doesn’t know what it is until Gisbourne comes to wreck the delicate balance of their corner of the world.

Scar’s unknown past has become a danger to the outlaw band’s present. But her secrets reveal that Robin has never known anything of who she really was, or is. Once he finds out, can he live with the knowledge? No matter how high the cost?

Escape Rating B-: I have mixed reactions to this book. On the one hand, the concept of changing one of the characters from male to female was a very neat idea. That was terrific. On the other hand, I did figure out what Scarlet’s real identity was pretty early on, so if I was supposed to be fooled, I wasn’t.

The author I think was trying to write Scarlet’s character as using a sort of street vernacular to show that she was not a lady.  Even in Scarlet’s own thoughts, her use of language was not as formal as the “upper classes”. When it’s used for Scarlet’s thoughts as opposed to speech, it can be annoying to read. It is part of her secret, but I wonder if she would think that way. Speak, yes–think, I’m not so sure.

The Robin Hood legend has been re-told so often that it is hard to make it original. For this reader, this version wasn’t quite original enough. Scarlet conceals her female nature so effectively, she often succeeds in hiding it from herself. Where it would have been fascinating to have a young woman’s reactions to being a female in a band of men, most of the issue of Scarlet being female is handled by her suddenly becoming the object of jealousy between two of the band, and her being ill-equipped to cope with the problem.

The Professor’s Assassin

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

The Professor’s Assassin by Matthew Pearl is a prequel short story to his new novel, The Technologists. 

The main character of The Professor’s Assassin is not the assassin. It’s the man who finds him. Which is an excellent thing, because William Barton Rogers is a much more fascinating character.

Rogers is a professor of the practical sciences. At the still relatively young University of Virginia, he is the professor of practical science.

In 1840, the University of Virginia was plagued by student protests and campus riots. The more hotheaded among the student body were violently petitioning for the right to bear arms on campus.

The violence escalated to frenzies of drunken rock-throwing at faculty housing. Of course, the rioters were always masked and hooded before they started drinking and beating on the walls of the houses with clubs, so no one could be identified in the morning.

One night, Rogers decided he’d had enough. He went out to confront the rioters. He confronted the leader face to face. Or face to mask. The young man threatened Rogers repeatedly, asking him how he dared to challenge the “University Volunteers”. Rogers walked away, daring the man to shoot him in the back, not certain that he wouldn’t, scared that the young man would and knowing, certain that if he wavered in the assuredness of his strike for one instant, the man would bring him down.

The next morning the President of the University was found shot outside of his home. Although President Davis knows who shot him, he refuses to name his assailant. A few days later he dies of his wound.

Rogers is a man of science. He also feels compelled to find justice for his friend and colleague.

As Rogers works through the case he feels he must solve, and the reasons why he must solve it, he finds himself dealing with the differences between his own practical methods, and the more philosophical minds of his peers.

It is as he works through his solution for this case that the germ of the idea for MIT is born.

Escape Rating B: This was a good introduction for The Technologists, and the story holds up on its own merits. The notes in the back are a must-read, because they explain how the author used the documentation of the real case to build the story. The story is closely based on a historic event. Davis was assassinated, and he did refuse to name his killer. A good bit of the rest is storyteller’s license, but Pearl used that license well.

When I think about love stories…

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Valentine's Day

Today is Valentine’s Day and everyone is thinking about love stories.

Not necessarily romance novels, mind you, but love stories. The stories that last. The ones that endure.

We all have them, names that instantly spring to mind when someone mentions the word love.

The names “Romeo and Juliet” always invoke the image of star-crossed lovers. Shakespeare’s story lives for the ages. It’s ironic that one of the best known images of romance is about a love story that ends tragically.

I’d prefer to look at three of my favorite fictional couples whose pages I return to because they either end happily, or they show no sign of ending at all.

I’ve never made any secret of following the adventures of Eve Dallas and Roarke. One of the things I enjoy most about the series is that the stories show a strong relationship between a married couple that continues to throw off hot sexual sparks well after they tie the knot. The author has managed to make married life interesting. If this were a TV series, the wedding would have ended the show. But with Eve and Roarke, the continued influx of homicide investigations into her squad room just means more interesting cases for Eve to solve–and more peeks into Eve and Roarke’s evolving relationship. Readers still don’t know the man’s first name, but we continue to be fascinated, 33 books and counting. Celebrity in Death, book 34 is coming on February 21. I’m already planning to stay up and read it.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander was not initially marketed as a romance. It was sold as historical fiction, and considering the amount of research that goes into each volume of the series, that’s probably the right place for it. Yet the core of the stories (7 doorstop sized books and counting) is the century-spanning love story of Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall. Claire is the daughter of the 20th century, and Jamie the son of Scotland in the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Yet magic, or fate, brings them together.

While I enjoy the story of Jamie and Claire’s first romance, it’s not what draws me back. My copy of Voyager opens automatically to Part Six, Chapter 24. I’ve read over and over the part where Claire takes her courage, and her life, in both hands and risks the standing stones to go back to Jamie, back two centuries in time, knowing that he survived the disaster at Culloden, but having no idea what changes the intervening 20 years have wrought in his life. All she knows is that she must tell him that he has a daughter. But  she really wants to be his wife again, and has no clue whether he still loves her as she has never stopped loving him.

My other favorite is from Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. Again, this is historical fiction of the intensely researched and amazingly complicated school. The Lymond Chronicles are about a young man named Francis Crawford of Lymond, the second son of the Earl of Midculter and his wife Lady Sybilla. Francis Crawford is many things over the course of the six books of this saga, an outlaw and a spy and a mercenary and a drug addict and a diplomat and a fool. But always he is a Scottish patriot at a time when Scotland was a small and independent country playing her chief rivals, France and England, off against each other in the hopes of retaining that independence. In the mid-1500’s, that time was running out.

Crawford commits crimes and treasons, both great and small, in the service of his country. He lives his life believing that the ends always justify the means and he never counts the cost to his own soul. Until near the end of his story, when he finally discovers that there is a woman who has grown to be his equal. Philippa Somerville set herself the task of cleaning up Crawford’s messes and tending to his victims almost ten years previously, and has been following him around Europe ever since he wrongly accused her father of betraying him.

But when they started, Philippa was a precocious 12-year-old, and Crawford was only 19. Both of them much too young for Crawford to declare at 29 that it was too late for him to love anyone. That he had seen too much and done too much for him to be worthy of love, or of being loved. Three scenes I come back to, over and over. The one in The Ringed Castle where Crawford realizes that Philippa is not the child he remembers, but a woman who has played music for kings and comforted queens, and is fully his equal, and that he loves her. Then he returns to his home and locks all his feelings away because he feels unworthy.  The night of the rooftop chase in Checkmate, when Philippa realizes that she loves Lymond, and feels rejected because she offered to share friendship, and he turns from her when she shows that she feels more. And last but not least, the conclusion at the end of Checkmate, when the prophecy from the opening of The Game of Kings is fulfilled.

Lymond was prophesied that he want two things, one he would have, and one he would not, nor was it right that he should. The answers are love, and his birthright. The story is everything.

What are your favorite love stories for Valentine’s Day?

 

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand? 2-12-12

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Virtual Nightstand

I need to be more careful when I write about the weather. Not only is it  36° outside, the windchill makes it feel like 27°. And tomorrow night we might even see some of what I call “freezy, skid stuff”. In other words, rain mixed with sleet and snow.

Sounds like the perfect night to stay in and read!

Looking ahead to next week, the things I have to review are definitely not the usual suspects.

There’s a reason my nightstand is mostly but not totally virtual–two of my upcoming books are print.

I have a print galley of Matthew Pearl’s The Technologists. This is a historical thriller that takes place just after the Civil War. The setting is Boston, during the founding years of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The description of the book makes it sound like a cross between Young Sherlock Holmes, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (except using engineering as a substitute for magic), and CSI. I’m looking forward to it.

Speaking of print books, I just picked up my copy of Apocalypse to Go, by Katharine Kerr from the post office. I’m the lucky recipient of one of the Goodreads First Reads copies. This is my first one. Apocalypse to Go is the third book in Katharine Kerr’s Nola O’Grady series. I read the first book License to Ensorcell, last year when the series started, but I didn’t get to the second book, Water to Burn. Although the Nola O’Grady series is urban fantasy, Kerr is best known for her epic fantasy series set in the land of Deverry. Daggerspell and Darkspell are two of my all-time favorites. Stories about the cost of magic and power always get me.

I have one other review due next week, and I did get this one from NetGalley. I’ve discovered that once you get involved in a mystery series, it’s very hard to stop. I’ve read or listened to all of the Hamish Macbeth mysteries by M.C. Beaton, because I started listening on audio. Mysteries are great in the car. After 27 books, I still have to find out what’s happening to all the people in Constable Macbeth’s tiny Highland village, besides the annual corpse. So I’ll be reading M.C. Beaton’s Death of a Kingfisher and savoring my annual glimpse of Scottish rural life, and death.

I’m going to confess that I got totally sidetracked yesterday. I read a glowing review of Merrick’s Destiny, the new novella in Rogers’ Bloodhounds series at The Book Pushers. Although the review is fantastic, it was the cover that really got my attention. Compare these two pictures and you’ll understand why. (The picture on the far right is Cmdr. Riker from Star Trek Next Gen)  After I got over the double (triple) take, I read the review again. Since Merrick’s Destiny is book 1.5 in the series, I took a look at the first book, Wilder’s Mate. The summary sounded a lot like Shona Husk’s Dark Vow (reviewed here), but more emphasis on the sex and less on the angst. The Bloodhounds series is turning out to be a fantastic sidetrack!

Looking back at last week, I can see where things ran right over me this past week. I did send my review of Danger Zone to Library Journal, and I also queued up a longer review to appear on these very pages, so that’s done. I really enjoyed both of Ms. Adams’ books, and I’m looking forward to the third story in the Adrenaline Highs series sometime this summer.

The weekends are never long enough, but that means that tomorrow will be Ebook Review Central. It’s time to turn our freezing brain cells to 2012, and the January titles from Carina Press.

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand? 1-22-12

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Virtual Nightstand

I am in Dallas at the American Library Association Midwinter Convention. Connectivity is decent, so this post is coming to you from my room, and not from the hotel bar. I’m not sure whether that’s the good news or the bad news.

The biggest problem with any kind of ALA Conference is the exhibit hall floor. The exhibits are miles and miles of carpet over concrete, and endless walking. There is no thrill of victory, there is only the endless agony of the feet.

And, because I want to get on more publishers’ direct lists for reviews, I left my card at every fiction publisher’s booth…and I picked up Advance Reading Copies. Well, I couldn’t very well say I wanted to review their books without actually picking up some books to review, now could I?

I just took a look at what’s on my TBR (is that To Be Read or To Be Reviewed?) list for January 31 and February 1 and wanted to avert my eyes. Then I scrolled through the rest of February and decided it’s not so bad after all. There’s a lot for 1/31 and 2/1, but not much after. I’ll catch up. But let’s just deal with the 1/31 books this week. February is a whole other month, right?

How to Dance with a Duke by Manda Collins caught my eye on NetGalley because the heroine is a wallflower and a bluestocking and involved an exclusive academic society. It reminded a tiny bit of Elizabeth Peter’s Amelia Peabody Emerson books. Whether the heroine does or not, well, the reading will be the proof of that.

Horizon is book 3 in Sophie Littlefield’s Aftertime series. Aftertime is a dystopian series about one of the few survivors of the zombie apocalypse, and I heard a lot of terrific things about the series. When this book popped up on NetGalley, I grabbed it. But in my usual completist fashion, I need to read through the series to get to it, so before Horizon, there is Survivors (prequel novella), Aftertime, and Rebirth ahead of me.

And slightly out of the usual for me, I have The Mountain of Gold by J.D. Davies. This is adventure on the high seas, similar to Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series, which I read and loved, all 20 books of it. The difference is that O’Brian’s series took place during the Napoleonic Wars, and Davies series concerns the Restoration period, about a century and a half earlier. Yes, I said series. The Mountain of Gold is the second book. I still need to read the first book Gentleman Captain. (At least I don’t have to worry about running out of time on The Mountain of Gold from NetGalley. I found a print ARC at the conference.)

As I expected I haven’t been able to take many books off my nightstand while I’ve been at the conference. Too many meetings, too little time.

I did finish up Todd Grimson’s Stainless, because I started it on the plane from Atlanta. The story was weird, mostly in a good way. Obsessive love, obsessive hate and an endless quest to feel anything at all make for quite a story. I’m reviewing this for Book Lovers Inc, and I’ll write it up after I get home.

I’m in the middle of The Canvas Thief by P. Kirby, and so far, I like it better than a lot of the other reviewers did.  I’ve also finished The Stubborn Dead by Natasha Hoar, and that review will be up early this week. My short take on The Stubborn Dead is that it is excellent but too darn short!

I’ll need to pick one of the ARCs off the pile for at least part of the trip home. It is so annoying when they make me turn off my iPad. It’s not just any electronic device–it’s a book!

Tomorrow is Dreamspinner’s turn on Ebook Review Central, with a whopping 59 titles for December 2011. Don’t forget to tune in!

 

 

 

12 for 2012: My most anticipated books in 2012

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> books> ebooks

It’s very difficult to figure out what books I’m looking forward to most in 2012. I mean when I started to look at lists, I realized that most of what I was anticipating were the next books in series, or new books from authors I already knew. But when I looked at the list of my best reads from this past year, most of them turned out to be authors who were new to me. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?

This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the series books that I read. I certainly did. But it’s the discoveries that turned out to be the most memorable. Maybe that’s because they were such surprises.

Just the same, these are the books I am planning to stalk NetGalley for review copies. And if I can’t get a review copy? Well, then I’ll just have to buy a copy and review it anyway. There’s even a reading challenge about reading one book a month just for fun!

But the books I’m looking for in 2012 are…drumroll, please!

When Maidens Mourn by C.S. Harris will be the next book in her Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series. What Angels Fear is the first book, and St. Cyr is a detective of the amateur and aristocratic variety. He should be the hero of a Regency romance, and in other circumstances, he might have been. But his service in Wellington’s army has left him much too tormented for that. His personal life makes him a tragic hero; the demons that drive him make him an ideal detective, if only to keep him from becoming a criminal. March can’t come soon enough on this.

Celebrity in Death by J.D. Robb. This is Eve Dallas’ 34th outing. I’ve read all of them. Usually in one sitting. I still can’t figure out how she does it, but Robb/Roberts does it really, really well. This book means there will be one warm night in February.

Restless in the Grave by Dana Stabenow. I think I will always have a fondness for Alaska stories. Heck, I still tell Alaska stories, and it’s been 6 years now since I left Anchorage. But living in Alaska is something that changed my perspective, probably forever. The situations Dana writes about in her novels are always a tiny bit familiar, even the ones set in the Bush. Because Alaska is possibly the world’s biggest small town, and there weren’t six degrees of separation, there were three at most. Even for cheechakos like us. Dana writes damn good mysteries, but I always read them for a taste of the place we almost called home.

Master and God by Lindsey Davis. I love Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco series. The whole idea of a hard-boiled detective operating in Imperial Rome has always been utterly delicious. And Falco’s wife Helena Justina is made of awesome. Master and God is not a Falco book. It’s historical fiction set in the same time period. Davis wrote one other work of historical fiction set during the Falco period, The Course of Honor. I read it years ago and it was fantastic. If Master and God is half as good, it will be well worth reading. Come to think of it, I hope people re-discover The Course of Honor. It was incredibly good and I don’t think it got half the attention it deserved.

The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green. This one has been teasing me every time I look at Amazon. The recommender can figure out I want to read this, so it sorta/kinda looks like it’s available, but it’s not. January 3, 2012. Come on already. For those fans of the Nightside, John Taylor is finally going to marry his long-suffering (in more ways than one) girlfriend, Suzie Shooter. He just has one last job to finish up before he meets her at the altar. But no job in the Nightside is ever easy, especially not for John Taylor.

Redshirts by John Scalzi. This sounds like it’s going to be really cool. And really, really funny. And yes, the redshirts in the title are those redshirts. Like in Star Trek. The ones that always get killed at the beginning of the mission. What happens if a bunch of them figure it out? And decide that they are not going to let it happen to them? This sounds like something only Scalzi could possibly do justice to. In June, we’ll all find out.

An Officer’s Duty by Jean Johnson is the next installment in her series, Theirs Not to Reason Why. I loved the first book, A Soldier’s Duty (reviewed here), and I can’t wait to see where Johnson next leads her time-travelling heroine, Io, in her quest to save the human race from utter extinction. July 31 is way too far away for this one.

Copper Beach by Jayne Ann Krentz. I knew that someday the Krentz was going to link the Victorian era Arcane Society of her Amanda Quick novels to her contemporary Jones & Jones psychic investigations to her futuristic romances under her Jayne Castle pseudonym. I read them all, but the links make for an added twist that I love. In January Copper Beach starts a new subseries, Dark Legacy.

Crystal Gardens is the start of a second subseries, Ladies of Lantern Street, that Krentz is starting in April under her Amanda Quick name. That means it’s a Victorian era story, at least for the first book. All of the Arcane Society books, both contemporary and Victorian, have been excellent romantic suspense.

Tangle of Need by Nalini Singh is the 11th book in her Psy-Changelings series, and the first to be published in hardcover. Although her Archangel series hasn’t wowed me, the psy-changeling books have never failed to please. I only wish that the release date was earlier than May. And I wish the US version had a better cover. The UK cover is awesome. (UK on left, US on right.)

Dragon Ship by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I want to go back to Liaden. I want to catch up on the books in between (there are several) that I haven’t read, and I want to finally find out how things are going. Liaden is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, space opera science fiction romance universes of all time. Dragon Ship is due Labor Day. I think I have enough time to get caught up. It will be so worth it.

This last book is an absolute flyer. It sounds really cool, but who knows.

The Yard by Alex Grecian. What if, after Scotland Yard failed to capture Jack the Ripper, they started a Murder Squad? 12 detectives specifically charged with investigating the thousands of murders in foggy, grimy, crime-filled London. How much luck would they have? When one of their own is murdered, the Yard’s first forensic pathologist is put on the track of the killer. I love historic mysteries, and this sounds very, very cool. In May, I’ll find out.

 

These are the books I’m looking forward to this year. I wonder how many will end up on my “best books of 2012” list.

What are your most anticipated books for 2012?

Maroon: Donal agus Jimmy

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

Maroon: Donal agus Jimmy is an amazingly complex story that deftly interweaves three distinct themes;  a tender love story of sexual discovery, the debate about Irish Home Rule, and the building of the great passenger steamers at the Belfast Docks. I said amazingly complex because the book is only 73 pages long, but the melding works beautifully.

PD Singer’s novella begins as Donal Gallagher is waiting in line to collect his pay at the Harland and Wolff dockyards in Belfast. Donal is a master carpenter, skilled labor on the ship builder. He creates fittings for the luxury cabins. Normally his wages are enough to send money back to his parents and siblings, but tragedy has struck at home and they need more. He needs to find a roommate.

Salvation arrives in the form of a man two lines over.  Jimmy Healy, a boilermaker, also needs to find a room to share. The only problem for Donal is that he has noticed Jimmy for quite a while, in a way that would be more than embarrassing in the extremely religious atmosphere of Ireland in the early 1900s, let alone the testosterone fueled work-place that is the dockyards. Donal knows he’s gay, but there isn’t another soul in Ireland who does.

Jimmy does take the other half of Donal’s rented room, and moves into his life. He also moves into his heart. At last, Jimmy fakes being drunk one night in order to break through Donal’s reserve to explore what they both feel. The love scenes are very touching, in their sense of discovery. Both men know what they want, but don’t really have a clue about what to do. In that time and place, who the hell would they have asked?

This story begins in 1911. The Archduke Ferdinand is still alive and well, and World War I will not start for another 3 years. Ireland in its entirety is still under the dominion of Great Britain, and will be for another 9 years. Irish Home Rule is under heated debate. The Great Irish Potato Famine is 60 years in the past, but the diaspora it left in its wake means that every Irish family has kin in America.

Irish Home Rule is the one that gets them. Jimmy is a boilermaker, which means he’s an engineer, among other things. The Irish path to independence was long and bloody, and the ends of the journey were still drawing blood not all that long ago. But this story takes place at the beginning. Some very hard men come to see Jimmy, wanting him to store guns in the empty boilers. Jimmy puts them off with excuses, but he knows they’ll be back, and they won’t take no for an answer. What can he and Donal do?

The history involved in this story was what really drew me in. Donal and Jimmy manage to keep their relationship secret for a couple of years, but when Irish Home Rule starts heating up, they get sucked in. Jimmy doesn’t have any family, but Donal, and Donal’s big family, makes him vulnerable to pressure. If Donal were threatened, Jimmy would have to give in, and he would start making guns for the men who threaten their happiness. But Jimmy has found an alternative: emigrate to America. The risks involved seem less, but are they?

Escape Rating B+: The author sent me this story, and I started to read it at my computer, thinking I had a sample. Halfway through, I realized that I was hooked, that I had the whole thing, and that I needed to download it to my iPad and find a comfier chair. The amount of stuff packed into this story was amazing!

The Edinburgh Dead

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

The Edinburgh Dead, by Brian Ruckley, is an extremely creepy, extremely gritty book mixing very black magic, Frankenstein’s monster, true crime body snatchers and the dark beginnings of Edinburgh’s police force. The Frankenstein element made this less of a historic urban fantasy and closer to horror than I expected.

The police sergeant investigating the case is Adam Quire, a member of the relatively new Edinburgh Police Department. Quire was a soldier under Wellington in the late Napoleonic Wars, and soldiering and policing are the only two things he’s ever been much good at, even if as a policeman he only seems to follow orders when it suits him.

In 1828, Quire is called to to a corpse in the Old Town section of Edinburgh. The corpse has been savaged by dogs, to the point that Quire hasn’t seen anyone this badly damaged outside of a battlefield. Napoleon having been finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815, Quire had hoped never to see a body this completely destroyed ever again.

The savagely deceased is eventually identified as Edward Carlyle, formerly in the employ of one John Ruthven. And it is in Quire’s questioning of Ruthven that the story really begins. Or perhaps descends into the pit.

Ruthven appears to be a wealthy man who can wreck Quire’s career with a few well-placed social calls. Ruthven makes his threats, and carries them out. But Quire knows from the beginning that Ruthven is lying about something, and Quire can’t let it go, even when his life is threatened. Quire knows that too much about the case is not what it appears to be.

And Quire is absolutely right. Ruthven’s whole life is a sham. He has been mixing black sorcery with an attempt at the same types of scientific experiments that Dr. Frankenstein performed in Mary Shelley’s literary masterpiece Frankenstein (published in 1818). Ruthven has more than succeeded–something dark and malevolent has come to inhabit his “monster”–it is not just alive, it is self-aware and very, very self-willed.

But Ruthven’s experiments must continue. He must do even better. And into this fictional horror there is added real horror. Ruthven needed more bodies for his experiments, so he contracted with William Burke and William Hare, real serial killers who were operating in Edinburgh in the 1820’s. Burke and Hare were providing fresh corpses to Dr. Robert Knox, an anatomy lecturer at the Edinburgh Medical College by murdering their victims and presenting Dr. Knox with fresh subjects for his lectures. Burke, Hare and Knox were real, and were caught in 1828. Presumably the ending was not quite as it occurs in Edinburgh Dead, although the case is gruesome enough.

Escape Rating C: There were a tremendous number of story elements. The early history of Edinburgh’s police department, the Burke and Hare serial murders, the medical education establishment in Edinburgh in the early 1800’s, the black sorcery, the Frankenstein’s monster. Juggling all of those elements, along with the character development required to maintain interest in Quire himself, took a lot of doing. It made following the plot more than a bit tangled at times.

Also, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite as heavy on the horror elements as it was. That’s a case of one’s mileage may vary.