Sunday, August 09, 2009

Books in the Mail (W/E 08/08/2009)

This week’s Sunday run down is brought to you by Ace, Tor

Hunting Ground (Alpha and Omega Book Two) by Patricia Briggs (Ace Mass Market Paperback 08/25/2009) – This series is an offshoot of Brigg’s best selling and popular Mercedes Thompson series. Like those books, these books deal with shape changers, though I think these are more specifically werewolves.

Mated to werewolf Charles Cornick, the son—and enforcer—of the leader of the North American werewolves, Anna Latham now knows how dangerous being a werewolf is, especially when a werewolf who opposes Charles and his father is struck down. Charles's reputation makes him the prime suspect, and the penalty for the crime is execution. Now Anna and Charles must combine their talents to hunt down the real killer—or Charles will take the fall.


Ariel by Steven R. Boyett (Ace Mass Market Paperback 08/25/2009) – The premise here sounds interesting – post-apocalyptic fantasy punk. The book was initially published more than 20 years ago in 1983 and this “definitive” edition of the book is being released a few months before Boyett’s follow-up/sequel Elegy Beach Boyett has some sample chapters on his Web site for perusal.

At four-thirty one Saturday afternoon the laws of physics as we know them underwent a change. Electronic devices, cars, industries stopped. The lights went out. Any technology more complicated than a lever or pulley simply wouldn't work. A new set of rules took its place—laws that could only be called magic. Ninety-nine percent of humanity has simply vanished. Cities lie abandoned. Supernatural creatures wander the silenced achievements of a halted civilization.

Pete Garey has survived the Change and its ensuing chaos. He wanders the southeastern United States, scavenging, lying low. Learning. One day he makes an unexpected friend: a smartassed unicorn with serious attitude. Pete names her Ariel and teaches her how to talk, how to read, and how to survive in a world in which a unicorn horn has become a highly prized commodity.

When they learn that there is a price quite literally on Ariel's head, the two unlikely companions set out from Atlanta to Manhattan to confront the sorcerer who wants her horn. And so begins a haunting, epic, and surprisingly funny journey through the remnants of a halted civilization in a desolated world.


Prospero Lost (Book One of Children of Prospero) by L. Jagi Lamplighter (Tor Hardcover 08/04/2009) – This novel, the opening of a trilogy, sounds pretty interesting. Picking the threads of a great piece of literature can be fun and I think this is Lamplighter’s first novel, though not her first published work of fiction

More than four hundred years after the events of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the sorcerer Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and his other children have attained everlasting life. Miranda is the head of her family’s business, Prospero Inc., which secretly has used its magic for good around the world. One day, Miranda receives a warning from her father: "Beware of the Three Shadowed Ones." When Miranda goes to her father for an explanation, he is nowhere to be found.

Miranda sets out to find her father and reunite with her estranged siblings, each of which holds a staff of power and secrets about Miranda’s sometimes-foggy past. Her journey through the past, present and future will take her to Venice, Chicago, the Caribbean, Washington, D.C., and the North Pole. To aid her, Miranda brings along Mab, an aerie being who acts like a hard-boiled detective, and Mephistopheles, her mentally-unbalanced brother. Together, they must ward off the Shadowed Ones and other ancient demons who want Prospero’s power for their own….


The Stars Blue Yonder by Sandra McDonald (Tor Hardcover July 2009) – I reviewed the first novel in this sequence, The Outback Stars a couple of years back and thought it pretty good, but haven’t kept up with the series.

Chief Terry Myell died and became a god. Now he’s back to life, careening around space and time at the behest of a voice that told him to save all of mankind. Helping and hindering this quest are his elderly wife, his young wife, grandchildren who haven’t been born yet, romantic rivals he hasn’t even met, a descendant from two thousand years in the future, and an alien nemesis who calls itself the Flying Doctor. Life in the military has never been so complicated.


Commander Jodenny Scott would agree. She’s seven months pregnant and trying to come to peace with her husband’s death. When Myell reappears with tales of time travel, she’s not sure what to believe.

But with an invading army bearing down on Earth’s last fleet of spaceships, there’s not much time for debate. When the dust clears Jodenny is stranded in an Australia she never imagined, and Myell’s more desperate than ever to rescue her—from aliens, from treachery, and from history itself.


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