David Gillon

I bought several multi-volume series on Amazon before Christmas as I knew I'd be offline for most of the holidays and wanted to be well stocked for new reading. The three I ended up reading (DNF'd a fourth as just too irritating at about page 30) were:

Chooser of the Slain, 9 books, 'Created by Michael Anderle'

Near-future technothrillers, but with a protagonist, Val Kearie, playing host to a reborn Valkyrie. It's probably not a good sign when the author's notes to book _4_ mention that he's decided to read up on Valkyries. This possibly explains why Val is able to manifest wings, horns and claws, none of which are prominent in traditional Valkyrie lore. Continuity is a bit problematical, but at the plotting level, rather than the oopsie level. He keeps building up cross-book antagonists and then putting them on a bus, and there's a major plot thread that just isn't explained. I suspect it's due to be explained in a further series, and I just can't be bothered. They're very readable if you like technothrillers, but I can't help feeling this would have been better as a three book series, rather than a nine book series thrown out at a book a month.

Great Lakes Investigations, 9 books, Phillipa Norcross, Michael Anderle

Embarrassingly it took me 4 books to realise these are set in Canada, not the US. In mitigation I plead the fact that they're set near Sault St Marie and there's one on either side of the border (and I know more about the US one). Their being set within a parallel magical civilization, a bit Harry Potter style, meant there were no handy references to Mounties or the like to clue me in earlier.

For a series about a private investigation agency, there's surprisingly little investigating, three or four cases in the entire series, instead they're about series protagonist Maggie trying to get over her twin brother Matt's death in a car crash she walked away from. He was a wolf shifter, her thing is time magic - being able to rewind time is a very useful talent for a PI. But in the first book her magic is going a bit wonky and things spiral out from there. The series is good at characters, Maggie, Matt, Ferrow their hyper-organized naga secretary, Shalton who hires Maggie to find his son and decides to take her on as a surrogate daughter, and so on - lots of found family. What it's not so great at is plotting. The individual books are generally okay, but the series planning isn't. There's a huge thing about the importance of tracking down Maggie's parents/family/ancestry (dad is AWOL, mom is dead), and she does eventually track down both, taking at least a book for each, and then never asks either of them anything. *headdesk*. Second series clearly signalled.

OTOH kudos to the author for working out how just plain nasty shifter society could get without the people within it really being aware. And kudos  too for setting up something in the title of the first book that doesn't play out until the climax of book 8.

I think what we're seeing is the weakness inherent in the book every month format. You could get around it with good beta readers and a good editor, but that doesn't seem to be the setup with any of these.

Witch-Warrior, 12 books, T R Cameron, Martha Carr, Michael Anderle

This really shows the problem the drive to write 9 or more books in a series to be put out at one a month causes, there's an author note about book 5 where one of them mentions they've been told their numbers are good enough it's going to be 12 books not 9. Which a) is a huge amount of extra plot to shoehorn in, and b) probably should be the author's decision. Anderle's down on the author list, but I suspect he should really be publisher, and this explains how he's managed to produce around a thousand books since 2017. (Sadly not exaggerating).

Anyway Cait Keane is Irish, from a twee village of witches, but commutes to work in near-future Boston as a US Deputy Marshal. In order to generate enough plot, by book three or so Cait is 1) doing her day job as a marshal, 2) part timing with the Marshal's Special Operations Group, 3) running an after-hours career as a cat-burglar, 4) occasionally helping out a government black ops group (fairly sure they've strayed in from another series), 5) helping out the less malevolent of Boston's two crime families against the other, 6) helping defend her family's village and the neighbouring town against wolf shifters who've given them an ultimatum to leave*, 7) helping defend her dragon partner's family against an amorphous threat, 8) intermittently running Tomb Raider style violations of ancient ruins with her archaeologist father in order to fund her various afterhours activities - and both the last two take place on a parallel world that's also strayed in from another series. Oh, and her mother wants her to start having babies. There are so many plot threads to resolve one of them is quite literally put on a bus (okay, a plane).

On the plus side, decent writing, decent characters, Cait's infomancer friend Sabrina is clearly written to be a fan favourite, and the local crime bosses get decent development. On the minus TOO MANY PLOY ARCS!!! And if you're going to set a series with two crime families in Boston, notorious for its Irish organised crime groups, why make them Chinese and Italian?

And yes, there's a spin-off series with Cait's little sister, the spy.

* So Cait may work for the US Marshal's Service, but magical Ireland apparently hasn't invented the Garda.

Seeing as I got these for £0.99 each I can't complain too much, but I do think they were all weakened by the drive to throw out as many as possible, as quickly as possible.

 A Fire at the Exhibition, T E Kinsley

Emily, Lady Hardcastle and her lady's maid/companion Flo are back, and Littleton Cotterell is having a village art exhibition, which can only mean trouble. Though at least for once there are no bodies to be found once the smoke is dispersed - just a missing priceless book (well, not priceless, but worth £1,000, in 1912). Also missing, apparently grabbed up by the thieves on their way out of the hall, are a bust and painting belonging to Emily and Flo's friends Sir Hector and Gertie. The bust is worthless, but the painting is one of a pair Sir Hector was hoping to sell, and without that money they will lose the manor in a matter of weeks. So while Emily and Flo can't really be bothered with the book (which Emily snobbishly dismisses as arriviste), there's a painting to be found, because Hector and Gertie refuse point-blank to let Lady Hardcastle pay off their debts, and a bicycle race to be survived (winning is definitely not on the menu, not even for Flo). There are a satisfying number of red-herrings, and a wandering cast of cycling club committee members, retired circus artistes and treasure hunters.

Definitely at the cozy end of the scale. 

Chooser of the Slain series, Michael Anderle.

Nine books for £0.99, so I wasn't expecting much, especially from someone with a truly ridiculous number of books to their name (if you look at https://www.fantasticfiction.com/a/michael-anderle/ he appears to be releasing a book a week or better), but I'm not sleeping well and quantity has a quality all of its own. That said, these are surprisingly good.

The series starts with Valkyrie and history post-grad/business analyst Val Kearie (geddit!) being interviewed by Viking Inc, a security consulting firm / PMC, who want to steal a march on the CIA, NSA and other TLAs who are also interested in recruiting Val, given she has an interesting skillset, on top of which she's the daughter of a general, has one brother who's a Navy SEAL and another who's in Army or Air Force specops (there's a continuity glitch over which). Impressing Viking's three Jarls (aka managing partners, aka the specops colonel, the specops colonel/ hacker and the specops major/spook), Val finds herself on the company plane to Spain along with huge ex Force Recon Marine Jacob Pinkerton, where a company that advises banks on complying with money-laundering rules is under cyber-attack. Pinkerton has the cyberskills and combat skills Val lacks, she has the European knowledge he's never gained, but things escalate, and so do the stakes.

This first book plays completely straight, and it's a decent enough modern technothriller (well apart from its belief that the language the coder speaks somehow affects how computer programmes work), but it's bookended by dreams about the Allfather.

Into the Battlefield is the second in the series, and Val's heritage is starting to make itself felt, particularly when Reginheid the Valkyrie starts offering her advice from any convenient mirrored surface. It's quite an interesting setup, even if the world-building is a little shaky (Hungarian Romani families called Boswell, Smith and Young. Really? And it takes all of about a minute to look up the name of the Hungarian FBI equivalent instead of calling them "the Hungarian FBI equivalent"). With a US-authored book dealing with anti-Romani/antisemitic violence in Hungary I was quite prepared for it to get painfully gauche*, but it's actually not bad on that front and escalates into an interesting story with an unexpected source of villain (no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, not that it's the Spanish Inquisition). 

* It does make the completely fair point that racism against the Romani is by far the most acceptable form of racism in Europe.

Requiem for Heroes sees Val and Jacob stumbling through a series of seemingly un-connected rapid fire cases, until Val realises that there is a common factor, and one they've seen before. But if you gaze too long into the Abyss, sometimes the Abyss will get pissed and come after your families. And sometimes protecting your families may mean inviting the Allfather to take his best shot at you.

By Savage Harbinger Val has a target for vengeance, but they've disappeared into the high-stakes criminal underworld, until a chance facial recognition hit puts them on the hunt again, and with a maguffin of their own to find. (Warning for ridiculously overpowered computer-based maguffin with little authorial understanding of how this stuff actually works).

4 down, 5 to go.

Witch-Warrior Series, TR Cameron, Marth Carr, Michael Anderle

Another 12 for £0.99 series, only read the first of them so far. 

Witch with a Badge: Deputy Marshal Cait Keane is a spell-slinging witch with the US Marshals Service and has just been reassigned to Boston, where, without even time for the orientation tour, she finds herself working the magical murder of a federal judge with the rest of her new team - a couple of non-magical male marshals and a technomancer/hacker who I'm reading as probably neurodiverse. On top of that job she's a member of the Marshals' Special Operations Group (think FBI Hostage Rescue Team) and also spends her weekends back in Ireland, where her family lives in a magical village. I'm strongly tempted to call the village stuff twee, which is unfair, but not by much. And to add to all that she finds herself summoned for a magical rite of passage, for which the reward is a dragon all of her own. Said dragon appears to be the draconic equivalent of a teenager, and it's not clear if he's a reward, backup for an unrevealed threat, or his family taking advantage of circumstances to get him out of the house.

There's a lot going on here, but it's a readable lot.

Compulsory, Martha Wells

Murderbot is supposed to be making sure the humans don't do any on-the-job pilfering, but mostly Murderbot is watching soap-operas. Then one of the humans gets herself into a potentially fatal situation and what's a Murderbot to do?

It's short, and slight, but it is Murderbot, and only £0.77.

Winter's Gifts, Ben Aaronovitch

Despite the name, this Rivers of London novella is not a story about Winter and Sommer and the Abteilung KDA (aka Rivers of Germany), it's FBI agent Kimberly Reynolds, Peter Grant and the Folly's American contact, investigating a call for help from a retired FBI agent in a small town on the edge of Lake Superior, just as an unprecedented winter storm blows in and isolates her from any backup - even the local cops are busy with search and rescue after the town got kerb-stomped by a snow tornado (which apparently is a real thing). Things get worse when she realises her contact has disappeared, apparently abducted, and likely not by human hands, leaving her to dig into a mystery with roots two centuries old, with the help of only a sexy meteorologist, a Bureau of Indian Affairs ethnologist, and a librarian, none of whom she entirely trusts.

It's very intense, the whole thing resolving in less than 24 hours from her arrival, and very readable, Kim is a very different character to Peter Grant, not being even remotely a wizard (though she can recognise vestigia when she feels it). She's saved from the risk of being a Dana Scully expy by being a committed Christian to the point it's bordering on a fault (she gets called out on it at least once).

The thing with the talking bears is totally a bait and switch, though.

Paranormal Nonsense, Blue Moon Investigations 1, Steve Higgs

This is another of those ridulously prolific authors who keep rolling across my Amazon ad feed, only when this one rolled across my screen for £0.99 in late August I paid enough attention to realise this series (he has about a dozen) is set in the Medway Towns, aka where I live. And it turns out to be a (largely) fun read with an unexpected ending, even if it's difficult to take a protagonist called Tempest Danger Michaels seriously. It does however have a major problem, Tempest Michaels is a complete dick, and so is his best mate/backup. Tempest is clearly an author expy (author was an army officer who took the option of having his commission bought out when the Army downsized, Tempest ditto, picture of Tempest on the cover looks like an idealised, buffed-up version of the author, Tempest has two dachshunds, author admits to owning two dachshunds, and so on), but some of the details don't work, he's trying to write Tempest as an ex-squaddie, not an officer, but the redundancy award for a squaddie is not going to be nearly large enough to let him drive around in a BMW X7 and afford a detached house in one of the villages near Maidstone (minimum of about £.5m worth, by my reckoning). The overall conceit is reasonable, Tempest is a paranormal investigator who doesn't believe in the paranormal, exposing the fakes is his thing. The problem is he's a sexist prig, any woman he runs into is assessed on her looks first, and his chance of getting "Mr Wriggly" inside her panties second - I wish I was exaggerating, and his mate is actually worse on this front. While the instant he runs into anyone from the working class* he turns into a Daily Mail leader writer who believes people get, or at least should get, ASBOs for not keeping their gardens tidy and their doors and windows painted.

The story here is a series of vampire-style killings which has Tempest investigating the world of vampire groupies, with a side-order of the Beast of Bluebell Hill, and they're both reasonably done, it's just that whenever he's off the clock or talking to anyone who's not middle class he turns into a complete holier-than-thou prig - 'I don't keep any form of white carbohydrate in the house' is a typical aside to the 4th wall.

The unexpected ending? The author's afterword in which he admits he realised later he should have made him 'kinder' (probably after reading a bunch of reviews calling him a holier-than-thou dick), but, while this is the rewritten version, he decided against changing him. And if he's going to stay like that I see no reason to continue reading.

* The one exception, his parents.

Soul Taken, Patricia Briggs

I should have reviewed this one in October, when I read it, because it's a very seasonal offering, being set at Halloween and pushing the horror-vibe a lot more heavily than usual for the Mercy Thompson series. 

Mercy and her husband Adam are busy defusing a potentially lethal problem - mysterious pack member Sherlock Post just got his memory back*, and one of the things he remembers is he's more dominant a werewolf than Adam, so either one of them walks, or one of them dies - when they are visited by a spooky apparition of Marcilia, the local head vampire, who gives them a deadline to solve an issue with the vampire seethe, who all seem to have disappeared. On top of which someone has made a film about a local urban legend - sort of Friday the 13th, but with a scythe, and bodies have started appearing with exactly the same MO, meaning the police are reaching out for the pack's help again.

Content warning for eye-scream, a lot of eye-scream.

There's a small bit of retconning around the Sherwood Post thing, the 'everyone always got him confused with Y, but he's totally a legend' explanation for 'He's X? How come we never heard of X?' doesn't really gel solidly. I'm not certain there isn't a larger amount of retconning driving the entire storyline, given it throws up backstory that rewrites how trustworthy a major character is, and sets up as inevitable a conflict we've already been told will destabilise the entire supernatural world if it happens.

* As a result of something that happened in the latest book of the related Alpha and Omega series.

The Viper's Nest Roadhouse and Cafe, Sam Quinn Book 6, Seana Kelly

Sam's friend Stheno (yes, that one, the gorgon), is opening a bar on the San Francisco docks as a business venture, so Sam and husband Clive, now retired from his role as Master Vampire of SF, are there for the soft-opening, when someone turns up dead by vampire and the police arrive all wondering why Clive's old executive assistant also just turned up dead by vampire.

It's pretty obvious who is trying to set up Clive, because his maker, Garyn is arriving in town tonight, what's not obvious is why. So Sam and Clive head over to vampire central for the reception, only for Sam to realise there's a problem - almost any vampire who gets in range of Garyn, especially the menfolk, is reduced to a simpering idiot desperate to obey her every wish. And Garyn is clearly not happy Clive married anyone who isn't her.

So it's Sam vs Garyn, or Sam and her allies versus Garyn and every vampire she's sunk her mental compulsion into in over a millennium of living as a parasite on those around her. Just as well Sam's just levelled up and her allies include a gorgon, several dragons, a half-demon, an Egyptian god, and assorted witches and dwarves.

Other things read:

The annual re-read of the complete Mercy Thompson series, plus a re-read of the other Rivers of London novellas and Amongst our Weapons as a warm-up for Winter's Gifts.

I'm not entirely convinced by the way Spangler got around the deaths, Rachel is dealing with traumatic amnesia, secondary to a serious concussion and smoke inhalation plus hyperthermia, and the guilt and grief of being rescued from a fire when Jason and Phil, people she was closer to than brothers, weren't. So she has to re-investigate, in the hope that that and her notes (which no one else can read for legitimate reasons - personal braille shorthand) will jog her memory as to what really happened. The forced structure means the first few chapters feel rather clunky, but it settles down fairly quickly.

On top of all that, Rachel's home situation has gotten really complicated. Her girlfriend has moved in, but so has Rachel's partner Santino and his wife (because their house next-door is being remodelled), and they've just had twins, one of whom just won't stop crying. In addition to which Jason and Phil's widow, Bell, was installed in the spare bedroom while Rachel was unconscious, because she's potentially a target, and Bell's being guarded by Rachel's pet psychopath Wyatt, because the last order she gave him was to guard Bell. (Which was three days ago and by now Bell's thoroughly creeped out).

The plot is clever, and sneaky, on the surface they're hunting an arsonist, but there are multiple layers beyond that. And Spangler does eventually write the death scene, and it's heartrending enough I think it would have caused legitimate pacing problems in a conventional narrative. One aspect I particularly liked was Rachel's anger at people forgetting she's blind looping around to confront her with her own forgetting that Bell's grief is greater than her own.

Not the strongest entry in the series, and definitely not the place to start (that's The Digital Divide), but ultimately  worth reading, and for a book six years in the stalling, it's surprisingly topical

The Hound And Hob Pub, Seana Kelly

Werewolf/witch*/necromancer Sam and her new husband Clive, the vampire master of San Francisco (just think Clive Owen in a particularly sharp suit) have honeymooned in Paris, but now they're in England, and hunting the vampire who has been targeting Clive since the series started, a rivalry which goes back centuries, to when both were human. And then the elves get involved, and then the dragons.

It's a reasonable entry in the series, but does suffer a little from American Author In England syndrome, though Kelly does make a belated effort to try to write off Sam's belief that there are wolves on the North Yorks Moors as Sam's, not hers - which doesn't entirely ring true given Sam is 1) a booknerd, 2) a bookshop owner, and 3) a werewolf.

All I Want For Christmas is a Dragon, Seana Kelly

While Sam is off doing honeymoon-y things with Clive, someone has to keep her bar/bookshop open, and that someone is barkeep/witch* Owen Wong, who is run off his feet, but mostly he's worried that he wants to move in with his boyfriend, and dragon-shifter, George, but he doesn't know if George wants to move in with him, on top of which it's Christmas and Owen loves Christmas (even if he's technically Buddhist) and George hates it, for unrevealed reasons, plus there's George's scary grandmother to convince his intentions are honourable.  It's a novella and close tie-in with the events of the first half of The Hound and Hob Pub, and ultimately fairly slight, but entertaining for an hour or so.



Samples Sampled

Bewicched: The Seawicche Chronicles, Seana Kelly

This is a spin-off from the Sam/Clive series, with new protagonist Arwyn, who got an offstage-intro in The Hound and Hob Pub (she made the Maguffin). She's an artist and a witch with an affinity for the sea, but also a psychic, to the point that just touching someone floods her with insights - so gloves with everything. She just wants to spend her time on converting an old cannery into a gallery, but her mother wants her as part of a witch-y triumvirate with her grandmother and there's a very annoying werewolf measuring up for the new deck.

Seems entertaining enough, so I'll probably follow through and read it at some point - ideally if it's on sale.

The War at Sea 1939--45: Volume 1 The Defensive, Captain S W Roskill, RN

Oh, oh, the Official War History of the Royal Navy, and Volume 1 is 800 pages in its own right. It's probably about time I read it, given my interests, but oof, that's big! 

* I absolutely refuse to use the series spelling of wicche if I can avoid it! 

I've got a bunch of new reads to discuss at some point - everything since August if not June, but I've been doing a lot of re-reading, including all of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels and novellas.

And mostly I've been thinking about Lesley May.

I woke up with a stinking headach, so have mostly been a bear of little brain. It was just starting to wear off when my sister rang about 4-ish and as we were chatting I wandered over to the window to look into the garden for the first time today. Which was when I realised 1) it was raining, and 2) I'd forgotten to bring in the three books I was reading when I had tea on the patio yesterday. Aaargh!

I was lucky. It probably hadn't been raining long, and even though they're softback the books are probably the best placed to resist getting wet of all the books I own. The paper they're printed on is coffee-table art book quality (they're a copiously illustrated book-format aviation magazine), and the soft cover is similar, and possibly even plastic coated. There was some slight buckling at the edge of the top one when I grabbed them, but all they needed was a quick wipe with a towel and they were fine. The top one is now the bottom one to weigh it down and it looks like I've gotten away without even the buckling.

Timely call, sister dear!

Chanur's Legacy, C J Cherryh (re-read)

It's 10 years on from the Pride of Chanur trilogy, and Hilfy Chanur is pissed off with everyone judging her against her aunt's reputation - Aunt Pyanfar being President of Compact Space, the Mekt-Hakkikt of the Kif, the Personage of Personages of the Mahendo'sat, and so on. She's also personally pissed off at Pyanfar for kicking her off the Pride post-Trilogy, because Hilfy was far too interested for her own good in the Human stray, Tully. Py made Hilfy head of clan Chanur to keep her ground-bound, which she screwed up by picking a disastrous, if pretty, husband, which her aunt Rhean had to fix by bringing in a Hani male of the old school - the old school being a muscle-bound hulk who can kill any adult male who even looks like he might grow up to be a threat without needing to engage his brain, and leave it to his wives, sisters, daughters and nieces to run the clan.

Hilfy fled back to space by appointing herself captain of the clan's new ship the Legacy, which is the one thing she's truly qualified to do - not to fly it, she has her four cousins for that - but to run the interactions with the other species of Compact space: the ape-like Mahendo'sat, the piratical Kif (about whom she has an incipient case of PTSD), the fragile Stsho and the barely understandable, multi-brained methane breathers, the Tca with their pets/symbionts/partners? the Chi, and the incomprehensible Knnn (who don't show up this time around). So when the Stsho governor of Meetpoint Station invites her for tea and opportunities she's perfectly willing to engage, and comes away with a contract that seems too good to be true - all she has to do is transport the oji, a Stsho religious object of some sort, to the Stsho ambassador at a neighbouring station, and the payoff is so generous it will get the clan out of debt for the Legacy's construction. And will she do the governor a minor favour and take on a Hani crewmember abandoned by their ship after a fracas on the docks?

Hallan Meras is that abandoned crewmember, or more specifically crewman, being one of the handful of Hani to have taken up Pyanfar's dangerously radical concept of Hani males actually being quite capable of being spacers, not killing machines. Hallan is very young, very confused and it's never entirely clear how much the crew of his former ship were using him as a novelty sex-toy rather than an actual spacer (and for 'spacer' read general dogsbody). There's no way Hilfy is leaving a Hani of any gender alone on an alien station, but she's adamant that he's not staying, whatever her cousins might think. Not even if he is huge and pretty and far too innocent to ever be a successful killing machine.

And besides, she's beginning to think she might have a bigger problem, because the contract for delivery of the oji turns out to be 240 pages of small-point size Stsho legalese, 550 allowing for alternative translations, and 28,400 if you include the ship's computer's legal commentary, and the penalty clauses for delivering it to the wrong Stsho are ferocious (to which add the complication that Stsho don't just change gender under stress, they potentially change identity). Things get worse when they get to their destination, because the entire Stsho embassy has upped-sticks and fled, and following them on to the next station only finds most of them dead. At which point Hilfy begins to realise she may have dumped herself right in the middle of Py's gods-rotted politics, with a plot that involves not just the Stsho, but a Mahendo'sat agent who claims he's only here to help her, and an enigmatic Kiffish Hakkikt who keeps wanting to talk via Hallan. And meanwhile Hallan keeps tripping over his big feet and breaking things, and the youngest of her cousins is spending half her time dreaming about him, and the others do think that maybe she shouldn't be too quick to throw him off the ship....

Hilfy is a convincingly angry protagonist, judged against a paragon she can't hope to equal, yet capable and driven to succeed in her own right, but still tangled in the emotions of what happened on the Pride, while Hallan is the convincingly naive young man, all too eager to please, while trying to parse out whether the individual crew members tolerate him, like him, or are out to exploit him.
 
I'd forgotten how really good this is, but you do really need to have read the Pride of Chanur trilogy first to get the full depth of the story. It's Cherryh in her deep-dive into alien mores mode, which she does better than anyone, but it's also at least halfway to being one of her stories where our viewpoint character is caught in the orbit of the true protagonist, the twist here being that Pyanfar never actually appears outside of Hilfy's in-jumpspace dreams. And mixed in with that are the crew dynamics of an all-female crew suddenly finding themselves with a very pretty male aboard. 

Currently Reading: Hell's Bell, 2nd of Keri Arthur's Lizzy Grace series. In which inconvenient bodies keep coming between Lizzie and getting into bed with handsome werewolf ranger Aiden.

I sat down this afternoon to try and set up my replacement hard-drive - I've had it for over a week but the packaging was still unopened as I just haven't trusted myself to handle it safely while having a flare that was making my manual dexterity even worse than usual. After a couple of hours searching for a missing power-brick - turned out to still be in the other six-way socket block even if nothing was attached - I settled down to check the status on my various external hard drives and was stunned to find the one I thought I'd beaten to death against the edge of my desk, and the reason for the new hard-drive, is now actually working again. I'm not certain how reliably - so far so good, but in the longer term? - but I've been able to confirm that the only thing on there are my steam libraries and other gaming related stuff (I thought that was the case but wasn't 100% certain). So that means I haven't lost every save game from years of gaming, plus hundreds of hours of fiddling about with stuff. Plans were rapidly rejigged to ensure I have back-ups from that as first priority. The new drive will instead be used for rebuilding the Windows disk of my desktop.

Recent Reading:

The Wicche Glass Tavern, Seana Kelly

I'm still looking askance at the spelling choices, but mostly this book is about witch/werewolf hybrid Sam finding someone to teach her how to use her newly discovered skills as a necromancer, while simultaneously finding out that her homicidal aunt is back in town and set on driving anyone she can get her claws into to attack Sam at first sight. Oh, and Sam banging her vampire fiance Clive at every opportunity. There's a fairly ruthless plotting decision that I have problems with, not just because it is so clear an attempt to pump up the melodrama levels, but because it ultimately turns into an unseen deus ex machina that seriously undermines the climax.

Overall it's a fun series, but nothing earthshattering.

Blood Kissed, Keri Arthur

I'd not read anything by the author before, but OMG she's got a lot of books out there now I look! Her thing seems to be Australian-set urban fantasy/dark romance. This one is the first of the 'Lizzie Grace Series', with Lizzie being your typical underrated heroine with a complicated backstory. As the story opens she's running a newly opened cafe in the small town at the heart of the local werewolf reservation. Among the cafe's offerings are psychic readings, because on top of being a witch Lizzie has psychometry skills, and her business partner and best friend Belle is a witch, telepath, talks to the spirits, whips up a mean potion, and is also Lizzie's familiar (and human familiars are unheard of). And despite two set of rare talents and one absolutely unique combination they've been successfully hiding themselves since they were 18 or so. Hmm!

Despite having some suspension of disbelief issues with their backstories, I did actually like this a lot. Lizzie and Belle are relatively powerful, but they aren't killing machines, and they're both very personable. Lizzie and Belle just want a quiet life, that whole hiding thing, but they can't turn away a desperate mother who needs Lizzie's psychometry skills because her daughter has disappeared, even if it means Lizzie heading out to confront an unexpected vampire on her own. Unfortunately she's too late, and that means she's standing over a dead body when local Ranger (werewolf cop) Aiden turns up, he of the tall, rangy body and the dark blond, silver streaked hair. And as soon as we find out he hates witches its obvious he and not-currently-looking-to-date Lizzie are fated to spend the series orbiting each other.

Okay, there's a lot of predictable formula at work here, but it's well-executed formula. I only really have two quibbles - my issues with the back story, and the fact that this is an awfully white Australia. There's an Asian character who appears briefly before being put on a bus ambulance, but apart from that the only non-white character is Belle, who is described as 'ebony skinned', though it seems extremely unlikely she's Aboriginal. OTOH the physical description of the Australian bush seems pretty good.

I briefly looked at the Kindle samples for the first books in a couple of other of Arthur's series and there are definite common threads in the set-up. I'm not sure if they share a common setting or not, but it seems possible, and there are thematic links if not - Australia, a near future urban fantasy setting, and sexy werewolves. Worth a look if urban fantasy or dark romance are your things.

A Call to Arms, David Weber, Timothy Zahn (and Thomas Pope)

"Book 1 of Manticore Ascendant". So the foreword explains this is basically Tim Zahn writing in Weber's Honorverse, but should really have Thomas Pope's name on it as well, because he's Weber's continuity expert for the Honorverse, but it was left off as a marketing decision. Hmmmm.

The setting is the early years of the Manticoran Navy, and having beaten off one threat a few years ago so that Manticore can live in peace the Navy is now facing internal demands to build down its strength (despite most of that strength already being in mothballs), particularly from Earl Breakwater*, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a powerful faction leader in the House of Lords) who wants to subsume it into the Customs Service, which just coincidentally reports to him. Into this scenario wanders Travis Long, an 18yo who is deeply dissatisfied with the lack of discipline in his life. Yes, you read that sentence correctly, Travis is an 18yo who is uncomfortable because there aren't enough rules to restrict what he can do. Having unknowingly let himself be cast as the getaway driver in a jewellery heist, Travis escapes the consequences because they parked outside a Navy recruiting office and he wandered inside to ask what the Navy was like. He's not sure he's completely happy with the idea of joining the Navy, but he's definitely sure he doesn't want any part of the jewellery heist's mess.

So we get the standard boot camp montage, and while there are now more rules in his life, Travis is horrified because people aren't committed to following them. And there's more evidence of venial nobles, because the Navy aren't being allowed to feed the genetically modified part of their recruits enough to live on because some noble is convinced it'll somehow lead to enhanced team bonding. And an officer with noble connections is out to get Travis because he keeps reporting that the officer is letting people cheat in their exams (given those exams are on running drive systems he may have a point). And then there's Travis's half-brother, Gavin, Baron Winterfall, who is being used by the evil vizier, sorry, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to popularise his policies with the younger elements in the Lords, and who keeps suggesting compromises that the Navy can't avoid, but which ultimately further Breakwater's plans.

Breakwater's initial scheme is to turn the Navy's nine mothballed battlecruisers into eighteen Customs Service frigates by cutting them in half** - after all, they may as well take advantage of all those multiply redundant systems even if the resulting ships will look a little odd. Producing an initial prototype takes a year or two, and by that time Travis is in space as a junior technician and on the spot when first an asteroid mining ship has a time-critical failure, and then the new Customs frigate has an oopsie. At which point the rules-loving, flexibility-hating Travis suggests an out-of-the-box way to save both ships. And a couple of officers take notice, even if the captain won't.

Fast forward another year or two and that gets Travis dragged along on a mission to the Republic of Haven, and again there's a disaster and Travis the rules-loving technician gets dragged into the decisions by the actual officers because of his ability to think outside the box.

You can possibly tell I had a problem with the protagonist. I don't know what Zahn is trying to do with Travis, put him up there as a poster boy for all kids really want discipline? But it really didn't convince me. Okay, I'm psychologically predisposed to only thinking rules are important if they make sense, which is practically the opposite of Travis, but I'm really struggling to see where he wants him to develop, and there wasn't a tremendously clear character growth in this. The other thing to annoy me is that this more evidence of Weber recycling plots*** until they've been washed clean of the last fraction of innovation - this is a re-run of parts of House of Steel (the novella in the Honorverse companion) and of the build-down under the High Ridge government in the main Honor Harrington series.

It's an okay read, and the last third is genuinely good once it forgets about the politics, but.....

* Let's not make our nominative determinism too blatant.

** Back-End/Front-End, not lengthways

*** As another example he's done war with a bunch of religious fanatics following a falsified gospel at least three times over, (Crusade in the Starfire series, Heirs of Empire in the Dahak series, and the whole Safehold sequence).

A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine

The sequel to A Memory Called Empire. Having achieved her mission of setting the all-engulfing Empire of Teixcalaan at war with the unknown power nibbling on her space station home's borders, Mahit Dzamare has fled home before she's herself engulfed, but finds all of Lsel Station's leadership want to know what's going on inside her head, and if that means brain surgery, then so be it. Meanwhile, back on Teixcalaan's capital planet, Three Seagrass (aka Reed), Mahit's former liaison and now an undersecretary in the Information Ministry (aka a senior spy) takes receipt of a plea for an expert on talking to aliens from the Teixcalaani fleet, and decides she and Mahit are the best candidates for the job. Being Reed with an idea, this means her talking very fast at everyone she encounters, and leaving them steamrollered in her wake.

I didn't like this quite as much as A Memory Called Empire, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like it a lot. Not only are Mahit and Reed back, but there are a couple of new and interesting characters with the Tleixcalaani fleet, and we also get a substantial chunk of Teixcalaani politics via Eight Antidote, the 11yo clone of the former Emperor and likely future Emperor. The problem for me was structural, in that the resolution bypasses Reed and Mahit.

OTOH we're pretty much promised a third book from something Mahit says to Reed, and I'll be queuing up for that.

To End in Fire - David Weber and Eric Flint

I thought Weber was done with Honor Harrington, but I'd forgotten the spin-off series with Eric Flint. The Grand Alliance may have hammered the Solarian League in record time, but the Mesan Alignment, the slave-trading eugenicist bad-guys responsible for the last 20 (30?) years of war are still out there, and all the intelligence types are still looking for them, And their hidden base. Utterly bizzarely the story has a single major new character, the Solarian Leaugue's new spy-chief, who is basically a Marty Stu (he's repeatedly called a genius) of Flint's frequent collaborator Charles E Gannon. He's even called Charles E Gannon?!?

The plot is completely predictable, the spies and analysts narrow down the physical  patch of space where the bad guys can be and then hand the problem over to Honor to blow up their not so little evil base, But there's something off for me, the whole thing feels rushed, even to the point of having Honor go into premature labour to get her back in the saddle a couple of months earlier, which pretty much times the whole plot to that point at under seven months, even though it can take months to get from place to place. One character even completely regrows a leg they lose in the course of the plot within those seven months, including post-regrowth physio. Yet there's absolutely no reason that I can see for the compressed timetable.

And there's at least one more book to come, because that was only the bad-guy's secret base, the good-guys don't know about the secret secret base yet.

Fighting the Great War At Sea - Norman Friedman

Wow, this one was heavy going, I think it took me a full month to get through, reading most days. The length isn't excessive, either 320 or 416 pages in the print edition depending on whose website you believe (though that's A4 pages), but it's a very dense book. As is normal for Friedman, about a third of the length is footnotes, often just a citation, but just as frequently 3 and occasionally 4 kindle pages of text. But it was heavy going because of its depth and I've come out of it finally understanding what was going on with Fisher's Baltic Project and the truth about Winston's competing desire to invade Gallipoli - yes, Winston was all for the Gallipoli landings, but so was the entire War Cabinet and Winston took the historical fall for all of them as the junior member.

And oh, dear God, Asquith*. I was vaguely aware he was discussing Cabinet affairs with his lover Venetia Stanley, I wasn't aware it went to the level of "We've been seriously discussing the invasion of Borkum, we've agreed always to refer to it as Sylt, but we really mean Borkum"

* aka the Prime Minister,

Definitely only one for the serious naval history fan, and it might more accurately be titled Fighting the Great War in the North Sea as coverage of the other theatres is minimal.
 

Recent Reading

Penric & Desdemona Series - Lois McMaster Bujold

There's a new one out, Knot of Shadows, and reading it prompted me to re-read the complete series. They hang together well, though there are still a couple of gaps of five or six years in Pen's timeline that could be usefully delved into. I'd really like to see more from the year Pen spent studying with the Wealdean Royal Shamans, and being drinking buddies with Shaman Inglis and Locator Oswyl. And Pen at Seminary has many possibiiities - he's mentioned stabbings over library books often enough.

Recent Gaming Reading
 

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - Games Workshop/Cubicle 7

I picked up the WFRP Humble Bundle last month, which dropped almost 50 books into my account for only £22, and I've been slowly working my way through them. (I never bought any WFRP stuff back in the day, but I was familiar with it from reading White Dwarf magazine). The bundle was essentially the Cubicle 7 reprint PDFs of the WFRP 1st Edition Rulebook, and almost everything ever published for Second Edition, plus a big chunk of Cubicle 7's new 4th edition stuff (3rd Edition apparently went off at a tangent). I've concentrated on reading 2nd Edition for now, and I'm actually tremendously impressed, it's some of the best games writing I've seen. Which I suspect is because they sat down and planned all of the supplements as an integrated whole in advance. I think there's still some holes in it, none of the editions really seem  to have gone into the Elves and Dwarfs in as much detail as they deserve - if you randomly roll a character there's only a 2% chance it's a Dwarf and a 1% chance it's a Wood Elf, which are probably overdoing it on a demographic basis, but the Dwarfs, particularly, and the High and Wood Elves to a lesser degree, are significant forces in the world of the Empire. And when I say Empire, that's an expy of the Holy Roman Empire, WFRP isn't your traditional high fantasy medieval setting, its early Renaissance in setting.

But I do have a problem with the setting, which a little vignette in the Nights Dark Shadows vampire sourcebook sums up for me:

"You can’t throw a rock in a crowded platz without it bouncing off two Vampires. And three Daemons.” —Mad Henrik, vagabond"

Make that one vampire and four demon cultists and you've nailed the setting. Pretty much every adventure has a chaos cult in it somewhere, and the overwhelming majority revolve around one. And GDW's chaos gods and demons just don't work for me. I will say that even Tome of Chaos, the chaos sourcebook, had tons of stuff I thought was interesting and extremely well written setting development, but their main thrust leaves me meh. (Imagine it as the Burning Times, with the Inquisition turned up to 11).

4th Edition has exactly the same setting, but somewhat revised rules - I think I prefer 2nd Edition, though I haven't gone into the playability of either in detail, 2nd just seems to have more of a clue about making characters fit the setting. Other than that the bundle dumped a whole heap of small adventures on me - Cubicle 7 have been releasing lots of £2.50 - 3.50 15-30 page adventures, most fitting in the campaign setting they released alongside the rules, which has the characters based in the unsettled frontier town/city of Ubersreik. At a quick skim it's an excellent basis for a campaign, with lots of factions vying for power and looking for a few deniable assets to hire. The other thing they've been releasing is an epic campaign - Death on the Reik. if you buy everything for it, then I think it'll run to about 1,300 pages and cost you over £100 (and that's for the PDFs, not print!). They made sure to give you the first installment in the bundle just to lure you in....

OTOH any RPG that announces its main themes and declares one of them to be "The class struggle" can't be all bad.
 

Halting State, Charles Stross

I wanted a light (re)read for my train trip and this suited my mood. In a semi-independent Scotland a company supplying in-game banking services is hit by an in-game bank raid that shouldn't have been possible and that could potentially tank their IPO, so an audit team is called in to find out what the hell just happened and so, accidentally, are the police. Which means everyone is trying to figure out not just whodunnit, but whether a crime has been committed (and in the case of the police WTF are these people talking about?). Major characters are a forensic auditor (and LARPer) and the conveniently out-of-work games programmer she hires as a native guide, plus a lesbian DS who really wishes her new DI wasn't quite such a high-flier, and the case so far out of her comfort zone nicking local neds. Things escalate quickly and by the end of the story they're rolling out a national state of emergency. This is Stross in a similar mode to The Laundry Files, managing a style that's simultaneously humorous and somewhat dark.

Rule 34, Charles Stross

This shares a character and the setting with Halting State, but about 5 years further down the Scottish Independence line (here framed as Westminster wanting an extra vote in Europe - if only!). Various people (primarily the no-longer high-flying DI from Halting State, a slightly hapless minor local criminal and a particularly nasty criminal facilitator), get caught up in an ongoing series of bizarre murders revolving around illegal fabricators and a breakaway bit of one of the post Soviet Asiatic states. There's quite an ingenious plot underlying things, but this is a darker book than Halting State (Rule 34 - if you can think of it, there's porn on the net for it). Content warning for technologically mediated paedophilia, it doesn't turn up much, but one of the instances is very early, and the later instance is pretty graphic.

The Great North Road, Peter F Hamilton

I've been wanting to re-read this for a while and took the chance while I was away. In a future Newcastle, a company executive turns up dead in the Tyne, his heart torn out by an unlikely five-fingered weapon. The problem is he's clearly one of the Norths, a clan of clones who run Northumberland Interstellar, the city's most prominent company and vital to the entire European economy for the oil it imports from St Libra, its company fiefdom on one of the planets of Sirius - gate technology meaning that importing oil from light-years away isn't a problem. What would be a problematically political case for the local plods rapidly escalates when it sets alarm bells ringing for the world's unified, and paranoid, military, because it matches the weapon used in the massacre of another batch of Norths out on St Libra 20 years ago. They convicted and jailed Angela Tramelo, the sole-survivor of the massacre, for life, despite her protestations that an alien monster did it, but if Angela's in jail, then is her monster real? And is it now on Earth? So it's decided that two investigations are needed, a criminal one in Newcastle, and an expedition into the jungles beyond the frontiers of St Libra (where animal life never evolved), to determine if there is a hidden enclave of alien monsters.

Which means we get an interleaved two-pronged narrative. On the one hand we have the Newcastle cops trying to pin down not just whodunnit, but whotheydunnitto (its a North, but which one?), which does a really nice job of extrapolating how crime and policing might evolve in a technologically advanced surveillance society. And on the other hand we have Angela Tramelo tagging along on the expedition into the wilds, as the one person ever to have fought the monster and won, despite it being led by Vance Elston, the military official who xtorturedx interrogated her before she was jailed, and who sees himself as a holy crusader for the defence of humankind. The Angela-Vance dynamic is a particularly interesting one, and that's true even before people on the expedition start to die.

('The Great North Road' gets multiple symbolic uses here -  it's the road from London to Newcastle, it's the road through Newcastle to the gate to St Libra, it's the road the expedition takes into the wilderness, and it's the diverse routes of the three branches of the North clan).

A Memory of Empire, Arkady Martine

Apparently I bought this and then completely forgot about it, fortunately I came across it while looking for books to read while away. OMG, it's so good!

Mahit Dzmare is the new ambassador from her home space-station to the vaguely Aztec meets vaguely Chinese (and poetry obsessed) empire of Teixcalaan, on whose avaricious borders it sits. Her instructions from home are basically "find out what happened to your predecessor, try not to get us annexed, don't let them know about our imago technology' - which technology means she's walking around with a 15 years out of date copy of her predecessor's memories at the back of her skull. Mahit's met at the spaceport by her liaison from the Ministry of Information Three Seagrass (Reed to her friends) and is quickly introduced to Three Seagrass's friend and colleague, Twelve Azalea (aka Petal), who has been poking around the previous ambassador's death. It rapidly becomes clear that Mahit has walked into a full-blown constitutional crisis, possibly of her predecessor's making. The aged Emperor is dying, there are at least four candidates to replace him, and an undetermined number of those may not be prepared to wait for him to finish the dying thing. And half the people she meets seem to have distinct expectations of Mahit, up to and including "I expect you to die".

But it's not the plot that shone out for me (though it's a good one), or even the worldbuilding (likewise good), it's the characterization. Mahit is thrown in at the deep end, but is determined to succeed, yet is also self-aware enough to realise that her lust for Teixcalaani culture might compromise her. Three Seagrass may only be Mahit's liaison, but she's a force of nature in bulling their way through the Teixcalitaani bureaucracy, Twelve Azalea is the usefully skilled but somewhat lackadaisical friend caught in her personal whirlwind and then there's the ezuazaucat Nineteen Edge, the edgeshine of a knife, one of the Emperor's personal advisors, who is the kind of force of nature Three Seagrass probably wants to grow up to be, and who apparently can't decide if she's trying to kill Mahit, or keep her alive.