BOOK REVIEW: The Rage of Dragons (The Burning, #1) by Evan Winter

The Rage of Dragons is the debut novel by Evan Winter, one of the few African-American authors working in the epic fantasy genre. This 2019 work made quite a splash, and when I read it in February 2021 it had well over 16,000 ratings with a very impressive 4.37 average on Goodreads’ 5-point scale. I had made the decision to try and read as many Black authors as I could during Black History Month and selecting Winter’s well-regarded fantasy novel from my burgeoning Kindle TBR pile seemed like a no-brainer.

Most of my reading these days is in genre fiction, but typically I would say I spend more time reading crime fiction, then science fiction and rarely fantasy. However I was impressed very early on by Winter’s characterization of the protagonist of The Rage of Dragons, Tau Solarin. I was even more impressed by the world-building in the novel.

The story in The Rage of Dragons is set in a satisfyingly complex society which has two primary castes: Lessers and Nobles. The two are physically distinctive, although it is clear that both groups would be racialized as “Black” in our contemporary society. Almost all Nobles are taller, faster, stronger than most Lessers. Both are part of the Chosen people or Omehei. Omehei society appears to have a level of technological advancement equivalent to the Bronze Age on Earth. In addition to a society chock full of complicated moral questions Winters adds dragons and a spiritual realm that allows certain Gifted Omehei to practice powerful, specific magical effects such as Enraging (making someone physically bigger and stronger), Enervating (stripping someone of their will and ability to act on their own), Edifying (communicating information over long distances) and Entreating (taking over conscious control of another living thing’s body). Winter situates his story in a historical context where the Omehei have spent 200 “cycles” (presumably solar years) trying to keep control over land on the Xiddan Peninsula that they think they should get to keep because it’s where they landed after they were hunted and nearly exterminated in a land called Osonte located far across the sea by creatures they call The Cull. Omehei believe they were "Chosen" by the Goddess to survive the Cull and their faith in her is why some have been "gifted" with powers and why they survived the rough sea passage from Osonte and also believe they have a right to claim Xiddan as their own.  Unfortunately, it was already occupied by another group of humans, who (rightly, IMO) view the Omehei as invaders and colonizers and have been fighting for generations to expel or exterminate the Omehei. The Omehei also seem to be able to convince dragons to fight on their side fairly regularly and this behavior is viewed as further evidence the Omehei are "chosen by the Goddess."

The Rage of Dragons is an intricate, multi-layered story with several fascinating creations combined together to produce a compelling setting for what is at its heart a fairly traditional plot ("Local boy makes good"). These layers include class (there’s a very explicit and strongly enforced caste system among the Omehei AND a Royal sovereign!); race (almost all the Omehei are described as having skins of various hues ranging from tan to pitch-black); religion (belief in a spiritual world called Isihogo, the realm of demons, as well as an omnipotent, omnipresent, invisible "Goddess."); magic (the previously mentioned Gifted abilities); and war (the Omehei are in a generations-long battle with the original inhabitants of the Xiddan peninsula whom they call “hedeni” who they think are over abundant, light-skinned heathens and savages).

The main character Tau is an 18-year-old Lesser whose best friend Jabari is a Petty Noble and Winter does an excellent job of depicting the unequal opportunities and futures Lessers and Nobles have in Omehei society. Through an unfortunate interaction with a less open-minded Noble than Jabari, Tau’s father is killed early in the book in order to assuage a Noble ego and Tau vows revenge on three specific Noblemen who he sees as ultimately responsible for his father’s thoughtless murder.

The primary animating force of Tau's actions in The Rage of Dragons is revenge against his “betters” and he sets off to prove that he will literally do whatever it takes, no matter how painful or difficult, in order to have an opportunity to strike back at the men who destroyed his family. This makes Tau a sympathetic but also problematic figure. There’s an entire arc of the story which is about how Tau becomes a great warrior, not through some innate or genetic or magical ability but through intense, obsessive hard work, day-in and day-out. This is a nice choice by the author, because although Winter is duplicating a common trope of epic fantasies (the downtrodden orphan who grows up to become more powerful than anyone or he could ever have dreamed) he also subverts the trope by making it clear Tau is NOT the biggest, smartest or “most special” character in the book. Tau makes mistakes and wrong choices, more than once, but these humanize him and greatly strengthened my interest and connection with the character.

I only have a few quibbles with The Rage of Dragons (obviously, since I gave it the highest possible rating of five out of five stars on Goodreads). First of these quibbles are the too-frequent, detailed descriptions of hand-to-hand combat and fight scenes. In some sense it follows because Tau is in military training for more than half the book, but I think the number of paragraphs describing precisely how, who and with what Tau is fighting could have been reduced by half (or more!) with very little reduction in my enjoyment of the book. My second quibble is with the ending and the author’s penchant of raising the stakes by literally killing off multiple major characters in the last 5% of the book; some of the characters killed had been around since the first 5% of the book. This is incredibly gutsy, I guess, and I understand the dilemma the author is in. If he puts all of the characters in peril (or at the very least the vast majority of the ones we care about) and never kills off any, then the peril isn’t real, and the reader may feel cheated. But if he kills off major characters that we have known for the vast majority of the book in a shocking denouement towards its conclusion then it feels overwhelming and the reader feels somewhat cheated for investing in certain relationships that had built up as the story progressed. Winter made the latter choice in The Rage of Dragons and it definitely increased the emotional wallop the book delivers, so maybe he made the "right" choice in this case. I’m not sure there really exists an optimal choice for an author here.

Overall, The Rage of Dragons is an incredibly well-written and powerful debut novel. As I said at the beginning, epic fantasy is not particularly one of my favorite genres but I was thoroughly entertained and entranced by this book and look forward to reading The Fires of Vengeance as soon as the price for the Kindle edition goes on sale!

Title: The Rage of Dragons (The Burning, #1).
Author: Evan Winter.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 544 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: July 16, 2019.
Date Read: February 16, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★ (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Bone Readers (DC Digger, #1) by Jacob Ross

The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross is an excellent book in the police-procedural, murder-mystery genre with a great hook: it’s set on a small (fictional) island adjacent to Trinidad and Barbados called Camaho.

The author was born and raised in Grenada (which is an actual island adjacent to Trinidad and Barbados), and so was I! Ross uses his familiarity and comfort with the culture, geography, and language of the West Indies to infuse this story with the verisimilitude of Island life. You can almost taste the mangoes, smell the spicy curry and feel the bumps when driving on the badly paved roads!

The main character in The Bone Readers is Michael “Digger” Digson. In the great tradition of the crime fiction protagonists, Digger has a troubled past and a complex personality. Early on in the book we discover that he’s an “outside child” (illegitimate son) of an important man on the island, the Commissioner of Police. This is a curious coincidence because it is only through some unusual circumstances that Digger became a police officer himself. Basically, he was bullied into doing it by DC Chilman, an apparently alcoholic detective very near retirement with an eye for rudderless youths with the potential and talent to become excellent police officers. Digger lives by himself, in the house left to him by his grandmother, who has raised him since the awful day a little over a decade ago when Digger was a little boy that his mom kissed him and said “Don’t worry, Sweetman, I home a lil later” and never came home again. In fact, her body was never even found but it’s pretty clear she was killed as part of a public protest in 1999 that was violently settled by the police at the time. Part of the reason why Digger agreed to become a cop was so that he could research his mother’s death and disappearance and discover the details of the role his father may have played in her death. 

If you think Digger has a complex personality, Ross is just getting started. Many of the other players in the novel, such as DC Chilman, Miss Stanislaus and Malan Greaves are also fascinating characters. They all have complicated relationships with each other and oftentimes with Digger. As I have said in reviewing other books, a key factor in the assessment of the quality of a genre book is the multifaceted nature of how the secondary characters are depicted. Since most police procedurals are very similar what makes the reader continue to enjoy them and read volume after volume in a long-running genre series are the changes and developments that happen to characters that readers can identify with and/or care about. From this perspective, The Bone Readers is very high-quality first entry in what I hope becomes an extended series of books.

DC Chilman, we discover, has an outside child himself and a surprisingly durable relationship with the Minister of Justice (the most important law enforcement official in the island country.) Malan Greaves is Digger’s boss; he takes over supervision of the Camaho police station after Chilman retires. Malan has his own foibles. He’s married but he’s constantly flirting (and more) with women and is all too eager to engage in violence himself to “keep the peace.” This behavior is forced to change with the arrival of Miss Stanislaus on the force, who wants nothing to do with Malan but notes everything he does. Miss Stanislaus is brilliant, with Sherlockian powers of observation and deduction. But she also has a troubled past, and although her professional and personal disdain for Malan is quite clear, her attitude towards Digger is quite different. They make an intriguing couple, and an effective team.

The pace of the story is somewhat languorous, like the pace of island life, but this doesn’t make The Bone Readers any less compelling. The central mysteries are all “cold cases’ of varying degree. There’s the case of who killed Digger’s mom, which he is obsessed with, for obvious reasons. There’s also the case of a missing young man named Nathan that Chilman is obsessed with and makes Digger (and Malan) promise to focus on after their mentor retires. In their investigation of Nathan’s disappearance, Miss Stanislaus and Digger find out about someone else who has disappeared, a teenaged girl named Alice, and Miss Stanislaus notices that something is very peculiar about the church that Nathan and Alice attended. The Old Hope Spiritual Baptist Church is run by a charismatic (and corpulent) preacher named Deacon Bello who happens to be a spiritual advisor to several very important men on the island, including, it turns out, the Minister of Justice. Miss Stanislaus joins the church and starts living at their compound with several other women and young children, any of whom appear to be curiously similar. However things get hectic when Deacon Bello ends up dead at the hands of Miss Stanislaus using an official police weapon she had never been officially issued.

Overall, reading The Bone Readers, especially for someone who was born (and partially raised) in the Caribbean, is a rare treat and joyful experience. The book shimmies and shimmers with the sounds and sights of the islands. The dialogue has the rhythms and cadences of island patois, and the descriptions reflect the unique look and feel of "home." There are so many familiar (and unfamiliar) little details that produce feelings of nostalgia and pride (“Yes! This is how we/they do!”) which is a very unusual experience for me to have while reading crime fiction, but a welcome one. I think even for people without a familial connection to the islands, the novelty of the setting and the richness of the story will be attractive and compelling. I hope to spend A LOT more time with Miss Stanislaus and DC Digger solving mysteries on Camaho, so I hope Mr. Ross writes more books, and soon!

Title: The Bone Readers.
Author: Jacob Ross.
Kindle: 273 pages.
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press.
Date Published: November 8, 2016.
Date Read: February 3, 2021

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A+ (4.17/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A+.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3) by John Scalzi

The Last Emperox is the final entry in a space opera from John Scalzi, best known for his Hugo-award winning novel Redshirts and his excellent debut novel, Old Man's War as well as his large social media footprint and record-breaking, multi-million-dollar publishing contract. The Last Emperox completes the story began in The Collapsing Empire and continued in The Consuming Fire. 

A reviewer at Locus magazine mentioned that they noticed that the The Last Emperox is dedicated "to the women who are done with other people’s shit" and that this is apparent in the centrality of its three primary main characters who are all strong, decisive women. First among these is the last emperox herself, Cardenia Wu-Patrick ak.a. Emperox Grayland II. Cardenia has been pretty much the most central character in the first two books and this doesn't change in this final entry in the series. However, two other female characters, Nadashe Nohamapetan and Kiva Lagos are also central to the story.

To remind you The Interdependency is set in a Universe where interstellar travel occurs via something called The Flow. In the first book some dude, i.e. Lord Marce Claremont, discovered that The Flow was becoming unstable and was likely to stop "flowing" in the not-too-distant future, which would result in entire planets being cut off from the rest of humanity, and likely falling into chaos and starvation. The Interdepenency depends upon extensive trade between planets, using The Flow as a means to transport goods and services between the participating planet. This economic system depends on a near-feudal political system where Houses control various monopolies on certain commodities and supplies, and the most important monopoly is the one run by House Wu (which is the house the Emperox has always come from, for centuries). Thisis the monopoly for ships.

Basically, the entire series is a metaphor for our current world which is facing a cataclysmic future (due to climate change) and currently has economic-political system which is dominated by soulless, corrupt elites. However, being Scalzi, he takes these serious underpinnings and overlays it with profane humor and ridiculous situations. Oftentimes, this style doesn't work for me, but in each of the three books in The Interdependency I found that it was quite effective. The middle book was probably the most appealing of the three to me, but he does do a good job of wrapping up many of the primary conflicts and the plot takes some very surprising turns (including the death of one of the major characters I have mentioned earlier).

Overall, I would say that I enjoyed The Last Emperox more than the average Scalzi book I have read. And acknowledging the degree of difficulty of combining social commentary, space opera and readability, I believe the book (and the series as a whole) has to be considered a success.

Title: The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3)
Author: John Scalzi .
Pages: 308 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: April 14, 2020.
Date Read: August 27, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B+/A- (3.5/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: The Saints of Salvation (Salvage Sequence, #3) by Peter F. Hamilton

Peter F. Hamilton is definitely my favorite science fiction author, and since since science fiction is my favorite genre, he is probably my favorite author overall. He is on my short list of must-buy authors that also includes literary mystery writer Tana French, epic fantasy writer Brent Weeks and British speculative fiction noir aficionado Richard K. Morgan. My must-read list of authors is much longer and includes people like Louise Penny, Peter V. Brett, Alastair Reynolds and many, many mystery-thriller authors whose series I’m making my way through methodically and contentedly. Hamilton has a special place in my heart as the author of the Night’s Dawn trilogy, which is probably my favorite science fiction work. But his duology Pandora’s Star/Judas Unchained is not very far behind that classic at the very top of my list of most esteemed reads. Hamilton’s books are huge sprawling works, often thick tomes running into page lengths of 4-digits, peopled with large casts of characters and featuring mind-bending technologies and bizarre physical phenomena. Hamilton’s latest work is another trilogy, intriguingly called The Salvation Sequence. (This is intriguing because maybe this sequence of books won’t end at three? Hamilton has written many books in what is called the Commonwealth Universe but none of his prior book series using a majority of the same characters and/or same timeline has ever had more than three entries.) The third book in The Salvation Sequence is The Saints of Salvation, which follows Salvation and Salvation Lost. As I have mentioned before, there are certain themes that often reappear in Hamilton’s works and many, if not all, of these are also present in the Salvation Sequence. Some of these themes are: a futuristic/utopian society, disruptive technology (often involving novel transportation methods), culturally opaque aliens, incredibly wealthy and powerful tycoons, secret/double agents and extinction-level threats to civilization. In The Saints of Salvation, the two timelines of the plot from the previous books in the sequence (one plot line depicts the invasion of Earth by previously benevolent aliens and the other plot line is 10,000 years in the future where technologically advanced humans are planning to strike back against the aliens after the surviving human refugees escaped into the empty spaces of the galaxy) eventually intersect in a surprising way. Time, especially the manipulation of time as another feature of the physical world like gravity, becomes an increasingly important of the story in The Saints of Salvation. The animating reason behind the alien invasion of Earth is that the aliens claim to have received a message from the future from a being whom they call “The God at the End of Time” telling them to bring as many sentient creatures to him as they can. The aliens’ response to their God’s message is to seek out intelligent civilizations and place individuals in life-preserving cocoons in their ships and take them to their secret enclave until the end of time. The aliens have been doing this for literally millions of years and are often an order of magnitude more advanced than the other civilizations they meet/cull/kidnap and bring back to their enclave, whose location is their greatest secret. We learn that the aliens have the ability to slow and accelerate the passage of time, which they use to maintain the alien civilians they have collected in stasis. Humans eventually also learn how to manipulate time as well, which makes travel at relativistic speeds over vast distances possible within a human lifetime. Hamilton’s books are often peopled with huge casts of characters, many of whom don’t make it to the end. The Salvation sequence is anchored around a group of five main characters, called the Saints. One of the key plot points in the first two books when we’re experiencing the story told in two time lines set thousands of years apart is to try and figure which characters in the earlier time line become beatified as Saints by the surviving humans in the later time line. In The Saints of Salvation, we follow the Saints for a large part of the story. The other main thread in this books follows two advanced humans, named Dellian and Yirella, who lead a cadre of humans in the far future that are trying to finally get revenge on the aliens who forced humanity to abandon Earth and go into hiding millennia before. One way that The Saints of Salvation and the other books in the Salvation sequence is very different from prior Hamilton works is the depiction of gender. As an indicator of technological and sociological advancement, Hamilton has characters who are non-binary and uses specialized pronouns (like sie, hir) to describe them. This occurs in the earlier timeline (which is set in the early 23rd century), where humanity has started forming habitats with their own cultural and social standards. In addition to non-binary characters, there are also characters who cycle between more male and more female presentations. In the beginning these depictions of gender can be somewhat distracting but eventually the reality of non-binary or (literally) gender-fluid characters becomes pretty standard. None of the main characters are non-binary but several of the important/pivotal ones, especially in the last book, are. A definite gap in the diversity of Hamilton’s characters is the lack of any openly LGB characters as we would perceive them, although there is some same-sex attraction (and perhaps bisexual sexual activity?) portrayed. Interestingly, he often does go out of his way to indicate racial and ethnic diversity in his books, and this is true here as well, although white British people are (unsurprisingly) over represented. Overall, The Saints of Salvation is a fantastic final entry in another amazing, mind-bending space opera written by a science fiction grandmaster operating at the peak of his powers. If you have enjoyed his other similar, equally impressive works, such as Pandora’s Star / Judas Unchained, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, Great North Road, and A Night Without Stars / The Abyss Beyond Dreams, I am very confident you will enjoy the Salvation Sequence as well.

Title: The Saints of Salvation.
Author: Peter F. Hamilton.
Pages: 528 pages.
Publisher: Macmillan.
Date Published: October 20, 2020.
Date Read: January 17, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Blood Road (Logan McRae, #11) by Stuart MacBride

The 11th book in the Logan McRae series written by Stuart MacBride set in Aberdeen, Scotland is one of the best. The Blood Road has all the elements we’ve come to love from a Logan McRae novel: irrepressible humor and awfully funny jokes, ghastly images of murder and mayhem, and extensive details of police procedure as they try to solve truly horrific crimes, some committed by the dregs of humanity and some by people Just Like Us.

The Logan McRae books have quickly become some of my favorites in the genre of British police-procedural, murder-mysteries. They have all the feature of other similarly labeled books but somehow MacBride is also able to successfully include humor, in multiple forms. The Logan books feature macabre jokes, awful puns, ridiculous encounters, and truly farcical situations. I’m shocked the series hasn’t been adapted for television yet like other series (which are also quite good but not nearly as amusing) Peter Robinson’s DCI Alan Banks, Val McDermid’s Tony Hill & Carol Jordan and Elisabeth George’s Inspector Lynley.

What really makes the Logan books extraordinary is while they are often hilarious they are also suspenseful thrillers and interesting mysteries. The very first book begins with Logan returning to work a few months after being stabbed repeatedly in the stomach and experiencing a near-death experience. In fact, Logan earns the nickname “Laz” (short for Lazarus) by his boss, the astonishingly horrible DI Roberta Steele. Steele is one of the great fictional comic inventions in British mysteries. She’s completely without shame or scruples; she regularly takes credit for Logan’s excellent detective work and is a walking H.R. and P.R. disaster. The interactions between Logan and Steele are the primary sources of comic relief in the books, but there are many others as well; first among these are the antics and descriptions of their eccentric police co-workers.

In The Blood Road, the Scottish police are dealing with multiple major (high-profile) crimes simultaneously: several young children have disappeared recently and the public is increasingly anxious about their whereabouts and safety. The book begins with the body of a Scottish police officer being found in a car—the problem is that same officer had been found dead and buried in an official funeral two years before after a supposed suicide. This means that not only was the officer (known by the sobriquet of “Ding-Dong”) a rotten cop, someone (likely Ding-Dong himself) must have killed someone else two years ago to produce a body that could be mistaken for him and now he’s been killed himself! As usual, Logan gets up to his eyebrows deep in solving multiple crimes (which is odd because after the events of the previous book In the Cold Dark Ground Logan now works for Professional Standards, not Major Crimes).

Overall, The Blood Road is one of the best entries in the series, reminiscent of some of the very best which cemented its appeal for me (books 4-7, in my humble opinion). It has multiple laugh out loud (LOL) moments while simultaneously being legitimately suspenseful. Logan gets put through the ringer again physically and the reader isn’t really sure he’s gonna get out of peril without permanent serious consequences (like death!) All of the best sidekicks from the previous books make appearances in this one (Steele, Tufty and of course Rennie!) and even the though the central crimes are truly appalling the book is quite engaging and enjoyable. The sad part of finishing The Blood Road is the knowledge that now there’s only one unread entry in the series remaining: Book 12’s All That’s Dead.

Title: Ancillary Justice.
Author: Stuart MacBride.
Paperback: 496 pages.
Format: Kindle.
Publisher: HarperCollins.
Date Published: June 14, 2018.
Date Read: November 25, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

Blood on the Tongue (Cooper & Fry, #3) by Stephen Booth

Blood on the Tongue is the third book in the police-procedural, murder-mystery series featuring Detective Sergeant Deborah Fry and Detective Constable Ben Cooper written by Stephen Booth set in the Peak District north of Nottingham in Derbyshire. In the first three books there have been three very different but compelling mysteries that Cooper and Fry have successfully solved. The central feature at the heart of these books is the relationship between two very different main characters. Cooper is an insider, while Fry is an outsider; Cooper is well-liked, Fry is not. Cooper is a DC, Fry is a DS (and Cooper’s boss). Cooper grew up in Edendale on a family farm with multiple siblings and a father who was a copper, Fry grew up in foster care in the big city of Manchester with a sister whom she has lost contact with due to addiction. 

Booth often gives us access to his protagonists’ thoughts and feelings in order to engage the reader. Fry basically despises everything that (she thinks) Cooper stands for. She views him as a daydreaming Boy Scout who doesn’t really understand the point of policing. He views her as strange and emotionally distant but an efficient cop who doesn’t understand that empathy and cultural competence can improve police outcomes. What I noticed more in Blood on the Tongue than in previous books is that Fry spends a lot more of her mental energy thinking about Cooper than Cooper does thinking about her. Their relationship is somewhat asymmetrical in that regard. Similarly, although they began the series equal in rank, Fry now outranks him, which means their professional relationship is also asymmetrical as well.

There are three main mysteries in Blood on the Tongue: 1) a dead body of an unidentified well-dressed man is found at the side of a road during a massive snow storm after a snow plough hits the corpse; 2) a dead body of a woman who they discover had given birth to a baby within the last two months is also found frozen in the snow (the whereabouts of Baby Chloe becomes the more important mystery here because it seems like the woman died by deliberately exposing herself to the wintry elements); 3) a 57-year-old cold case of the disappearance of a survivor of a World War II plane crash that killed 5 men, including one Polish soldier whose brother still lives in the area, is being actively investigated by the survivor’s attractive Canadian granddaughter trying to clear his name of the ‘deserter’ label. Of course these mysteries lead to other questions/puzzles: Who is Baby Chloe’s father? Will Ben and Allison (the Canadian granddaughter) hook up? Why did Chloe’s mom kill herself? Why do so many of the people involved with the recently discovered dead bodies also have connections to the decades-old crash?

As with all good sequential mystery series, a significant fraction of the appeal of the book is the new information provided about the protagonists Cooper and Fry. Cooper finally bites the bullet and moves out of his family’s farm into an apartment ‘in town.’ He fitfully adapts to living by himself (although he has a stray cat or two as a roommate) and after he moves in he begins to realize that maybe the reason why Fry is so dedicated to her job is the fear of coming home to a lonely, empty apartment. Fry seems to be more and more interested in Cooper, what he’s thinking and what he’s doing (and whom he’s doing it with.) At one point she says to him directly “Sometimes I can’t tell what you’re thinking, Ben.” It’s bizarre to me that as Cooper’s superior officer she thinks she has the right to know his thoughts at all times when he’s on duty! However, at the end of the book her watchful eyes over him probably saved his life after Cooper makes a selfless (and reckless) decision to try and save a suicidal suspect from self-harm. Fry, of course, does the appropriate thing by calling for back-up instead of rushing into help without a clear plan or assessment of the danger of his actions.

Overall, Blood on the Tongue is another excellent entry in what is fast becoming one of my favorites in the genre of British police-procedural murder-mysteries (which experienced readers know is quite a large and varied genre). Readers of books by Peter Robinson, Peter James, Ian Rankin, Stuart MacBride and Jane Casey will likely agree with me that the Cooper & Fry series is an enjoyable addition to these lists. And, happily, there are more than a dozen more books in the series for me to read, which I intend to do!

Title: Blood on the Tongue.
Author: Stephen Booth.
Page Length: 400 pages.
Format: Kindle.
Publisher: Witness Impulse.
Date Published: December 3, 2013 (First Published 2002).
Date Read: December 18, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Not Dead Yet (DSI Roy Grace, #3) by Peter James

Not Dead Enough is the third book in the long-running and best-selling Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series written by Peter James set in the Southern England area of Brighton and Hove. These books are British police procedural novels in the mystery, crime, suspense, thriller and detective genres. After reading the first three books I have a growing admiration for the superior quality of the series and understand why they have sols so well and are soon to be adapted into a television series by the BBC (what took so long?). In the first three books, we have been exposed to three very different but compelling stories which DSI Grace has successfully solved. Happily, these are not simplistic portrayals of our hero cracking the case on their own, figuring out things that have stumped everyone else through the use of magical power or plot devices. Instead the books are centered around depictions of collaborative teams of investigators working together to try and bring perpetrators of horrible and horrific crimes to justice.

In addition to Grace, other interesting characters we spend a fair amount of time with include DS Glenn Branson (Grace’s best mate who happens to be big, bald and black; he is going through some marital trouble in Not Dead Enough and so the two are currently temporarily living together!), Cleo Morey (Grace’s new heterosexual love interest) and a number of other police officers who are on Grace’s team (such as his frightful superior the Assistant Chief Constable, the boorish DS Potting, the up-and-coming DC Nichols, etc).

The central mystery in Not Dead Enough is pretty interesting and intriguing. The wife Katie (and mistress) Holly of a successful local business owner named Brian Bishop are both found dead, naked, raped and garroted with World War 2-era gas masks on their faces within days of each other. It takes awhile for the police to even realize that Brian is related to both deaths, primarily because even though he is the main suspect when his wife Katie’s body is found (it’s always the husband!), he doesn’t appear to be lying when he adamantly denies knowing Holly and repeats in every interview how much he loved his wife. He has a pretty strong alibi since he was having dinner in London right before his wife was being murdered in Brighton. Similarly, although there’s an eyewitness saying they saw someone matching Brian’s description the afternoon before Holly’s body was found, Brian was being closely watched by Brighton police in that time period. So, police need to find someone who looks like (and somehow has easy access to significant quantities of Brian’s DNA.) James does a good job of providing interesting twists on the expected solution to this mystery. (One of the tag lines of the book is "How can someone be in two places at the same time?"

Another thing the author does well in Not Dead Enough (and the other books in the series so far) is to strategically provide the reader with information about the motivations of multiple characters (even the perpetrator!) This works frighteningly well, especially when the characters we care about are placed in imminent danger and the suspense ratchets up to pulse-pounding levels. (Happily this time the source of suspense is entirely sourced not in the mortal danger to our main character. Overuse of this plot device is an annoying pet peeve of mine; far too many authors use it too often as a cheap means to engage readers in the story.)

Overall, Not Dead Enough is another excellent entry in the DSI Roy Grace series. We get advances in the lifestories of many of the main characters and they solve an exciting and puzzling mystery. This series is definitely on my list to follow to its conclusion.

Title: Not Dead Enough.
Author: Peter James.
Length: 546 pages.
Format: Kindle
Publisher: Pan.
Date Published: August 1, 2007.
Date Read: December 5, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★ (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Searcher by Tana French

Tana French is on my short list of must-buy authors. These are the authors who when you hear they have a new book coming out you think, “I must buy that!” It is a rather short list: French, Peter F. Hamilton, James S.A. Corey and Richard K. Morgan. My must-read list of authors is much longer. The reason why Tana French is one of the authors that I am willing to put down my hard-earned cash to pre-order their latest book is because she always produces reading experiences for me that are engrossing, exciting and extraordinary. All of this is to say, I’m very happy to have a new Tana French novel to read and review. You’re in for a treat!

In her new book, The Searcher, French again eschews producing an entry in her Dublin Murder Squad series; instead she has written what is presumably a stand-alone mystery novel with a new protagonist in a new setting. In fact, she’s moved even further away from the series that brought her fame, fans and fortune in The Searcher than she did in The Witch Elm, which at least was set in Dublin, even though that book didn’t contain any characters from earlier novels, which had been French’s signature story element prior to its publication in 2018. The Searcher, however, is set in a tiny fictional Irish village (named Ardnakelty) and the main character is not Irish but American: Cal Hooper, an ex-Chicago P.D. detective who, following a bewildering divorce and sudden retirement, has bought a pile of land and decrepit fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere Ireland.

Just like The Witch Elm was very different from any of French’s previously published books (by not using a previously introduced secondary character as the primary character in a subsequent book) so is The Searcher different from all her previous books. One of the constitutive elements of her stories has been a view of the interplay between the police protagonist and their fellow detectives as well as between the protagonist and their profession. Plus all of French’s previous books were set in Dublin or its suburbs, with urbanized living as a feature of her characters’ lives. In French’s new book she throws out all these familiar aspects of her previous work and strikes out in a new, unfamiliar direction. It’s a brave (and rewarding) move.

The Searcher is set in a remote, rural village that has at its core a pub cum general store and one gas station and a police station with one cop. Most of the inhabitants earn their meager living from the land as farmers. Ardnakelty is the kind of place where all the kids who graduate from school are expected to leave for better opportunities elsewhere, with only the unsuccessful trapped behind, with only distant (or not so distant) relatives. Cal has moved here precisely because it is remote and sparsely populated. He was also interested in Western Ireland when he was looking for places to retire to on the Internet because the weather doesn’t get too cold or too hot. French is clearly enamored by such places, and her typically lyrical prose waxes poetic as she describes the weather, landscape and scenery.

The book starts with Cal making friends with a local tween boy named Trey Reddy who has learned that the new American neighbor is some kind of cop and wants him to find out what happened to his older brother Brendan, 19. Trey last saw his brother nearly six months ago when Brendan left their house in a hurry with a backpack and a worried expression. Cal really doesn’t want to take the case, because as a cop he is pretty sure what a 6-month-old missing persons case means (Brendan’s dead, right? Or run away to the big city to seek his fortune). He’s also unfamiliar with the terrain (literally) and because he’s new to the area, he doesn’t know where the bodies are buried or what the criminal undercurrents in the village are. Cal’s neighbor Mart has generally been his guide to acclimating to life in Ardnakelty but he is definitely not in favor of Cal sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. He doesn’t even want Cal to look into what or who is going around killing local farmer’s sheep in strange and disgusting ways. Are these cases related? As an experienced mystery reader, I was pretty sure they would be.

As others have noticed, basically, what French is doing in The Searcher is that she is writing a Western disguised as a mystery novel! Cal is the taciturn stranger new to town who is convinced to try to resolve an injustice that the townspeople have been living with for a longtime. Trey is the sympathetic local resident who convinces the outsider to act. And the current powerbrokers don’t react well to the newcomer trying to disrupt the status quo. It’s a brilliant move, and French puts a fresh twist on a familiar tale. As the plot unwinds, she slowly ratchets up the tension higher and higher, while simultaneously revealing secrets about the quiet, remote village and its inhabitants who shows themselves to be as potentially dangerous as those in Cal’s old stomping grounds on the South Side of Chicago.

Overall, I though The Searcher was very good, but not as good as French’s two previous books, The Witch Elm and The Trespasser, which I think are two of her very best. Of course, French at her very best means these are some of the best mystery novels in the entire genre and obviously no one can reach that level all the time. Even merely sublime Tana French is extremely satisfying, and The Searcher is one of the best books I read all year. (I still hope that her next book is Dublin Murder Squad mystery, or perhaps follows one of the minor characters from The Searcher or The Witch Elm!)

Title: The Searcher.
Author: Tana French.
Format: Hardcover.
Page Length: 451 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 6, 2020.
Date Read: December 27, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A+/A (4.16/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A+.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A+.

BOOK REVIEW: Age of Empyre by Michael J. Sullivan

Age of Empyre is the culmination of a six-book epic fantasy series written by Michael J. Sullivan. It's been a long journey from the first book, Age of Myth which was released in 2016. (I didn't start reading the series until 2017, but have enjoyed every entry since then. The other books in the series are Age of Swords, Age of War, Age of Legend and Age of Death. 

The series is officially known as Legends of the First Empire. It is set a few thousand years before the events of the Riyria stories featuring Royce and Hadrian that are told in Theft of Swords, Rise of Empire, Heir of Novron. Those books are some of the most enjoyable epic fantasy books I have ever read, and has permanently affixed the name Michael Sullivan to my list of must-read authors.

So, I was very excited to hear about and read the Age of books and quite anxious as the end of series approached in Age of Empyre. Another interesting aspect of Sullivan's books is that he basically writes all the books in a series before he self-publishes them, so there really wasn't any doubt that the entire six-book series was going to be available to be read. (Take that, George R.R. Martin!)

The main characters in the series have been Persephone, Brin, Raithe, Suri, Arion, Nyphron, Mawyndule  and Malcolm. The primary story is about relations between the various inhabitants on the world (which they call Elan). Those species are humans (called Rhune), elves (called Fhrey) and dwarves (called Dherg or Belgriclungreians). Basically, the Fhrey are the most powerful, because they have access to magic, which they call The Art. The Art uses the energy of the world to can re-channel it to do incredible things: move heavy objects, change the weather, set things on fire or make things very cold, etc). There are different "tribes" of Fhrey, and only one of the tribes, the Miralyith have the power to do the Art, but all Fhrey are extremely long-lived. In fact, some of the Fhrey from this series are still very much alive in the Riyria Revelations series and part of the fun in reading these books is seeing how events and people depicted in the ancient past in one series are similar/different than how they are portrayed in real time. 

And by relations between the species, I really mean "war." The Rhunes basically thought that the Fhrey were gods, and the Fhrey thought that the Rhunes were basically dirty animals. The Rhunes vastly outnumber the Fhrey and their lives are a fratction of a Fhrey's. However, in Age of Myth a Rhune kills a Fhrey (mostly by accident) and when that information gets back to the main group of humans where Persephone, Suri and Brin live it changes everything. 

The main tension in the series is between the Fhrey and the Rhunes. The first surprise is that the Rhunes actually have a chance to survive. In the earlier books, the Rhunes' ingenuity (invention of the wheel and steel) are able to balance out the Fhrey's magical powers such that for a very long time the wars that they fight against each other result in stalemates.

In Age of Empyre the tension between the humans and the elves are resolved in various ways that are surprising. It's hard to say which side "won" the war. What happens is that the relationship between humans and elves is resolved in such a way that the future existence of humans is assured, and there is "regime change" at the head of the elves so that the policy of Rhune extermination is rescinded. The borders of where each of the species (humans, dwarves and elves) should live are clarified and agreed to. I don't want to say more than that or else I will be including too many spoilers.

I do want to remark on another aspect of the books, which is its mythology. In the 5th book, Age of Death, there are several characters that "die"--by this I mean that they go into the afterlife. It turns out that there are three afterlives and our characters have to make it through all three in order to find a macguffin. Not all the characters make it through all three afterlives, and there is a  great deal of thoughtful (and thought-provoking) rumination on the nature of life and death and teleology (fancy word for purpose and the meaning of life). That Sullivan can include these elements successfully in the middle of a rip-roaring, action-packed epic fantasy is a testament to his skills as a writer. Even a jaded atheist as myself was willing to go along with the worldview the author promulgated in the last two books.

Overall, I felt that Age of Empyre was a suitable and well-done conclusion to the Legends of the First Empire series of sux books, with multiple, satisfying payoffs for readers who had made it through all six books (and even more for readers who have also read the other six books of the Riyria Revelations and Riyria Chronicles). Interestingly, Sullivan has announced a new epic trilogy called The Rise and Fall which will bridge the thousands of years between the events of the Legends of the First Empire series just concluded and the Riyria stories which were published first but are far in the future. I am definitely looking forward to reading those!

Title: Age of Empyre (Legends of the First Empire, #6).
Author: Michael J. Sullivan.
Paperback: 395 pages.
Publisher: Riyria Enterprises.
Date Published: May 5, 2020.
Date Read: August 10, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★ (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Chaos Vector (The Protectorate, #2) by Megan O'Keefe

Chaos Vector is the second book in the space opera series called The Protectorate written by Megan O’Keefe; it is the sequel to Velocity Weapon. The world-building in Velocity Weapon and Chaos Vector is impeccable; these books are set in the Thirty-Fourth Century where humans have inhabited multiple star systems due to the existence of Casimir Gates that allow faster-than-light travel. The biggest secret in the inhabited universe is the technology that is used in the gates, which are created and controlled by Prime government. One of the interesting features of the first book was the inclusion of multiple time lines, one of which described how Alexandra Hallston, the founder of Prime Technologies back in the Twenty-First century, came to discover gate technology. The inclusion of vignettes following Hallston's story continues in the second book and is clearly going to be a source of major surprises about the foundations of Prime society as the series goes forward.

The main characters in The Protectorate books are Sanda Greeve and her brother Biran. When we meet Sanda she is in the Prime military, on active duty in an ongoing war between Ada Prime and Icarian, a neighboring system. In the first book, Sanda was captured by enemy forces and injured; she wakes up from a medically induced coma and she’s had her left leg amputated below the left knee. It turns out that her captor was actually an Icarion super-weapon, an AI-enabled warship named The Light of Berossus that has speed and weapon capabilities far exceeding anything Prime possesses. Sanda eventually bonds with the intelligence in control (which she calls Bero) and at the end of Velocity Weapon  she has been reunited with Biran safely at home while Bero disappears into the void to try and learn more about his creators.

Biran is Speaker of the Keepers of Ada Prime. A Keeper is someone who has been granted with the near-sacred responsibility of keeping a portion of the knowledge of how Casimir Gates work securely in a microchip embedded in their brain. Keepers are the elite of the elite in Prime society. They go through a number of aptitude tests in order to be admitted to an academy from which future Keepers are selected. Access to any information/knowledge about specific technologies that could conceivably be used to discover how gates work is harshly regulated and only Keepers can access it. As Speaker, Biran is the mouthpiece for the Protectorate, which is the small group of Keepers who are tasked with making executive decisions for the Prime government. (One small quibble with the books is that they really do not make it clear how the government of Prime works—are there terms for the Speakers on the Protectorate? How exactly are they selected? Mundane but important details like this are necessary to give the reader a sense of the politics of Prime and are generally missing, or not repeated frequently enough that I can’t remember them.)

The plot(s) of both books are extremely complex, and the stories are filled with multiple jaw-dropping reveals and twists. I don’t want to reveal or spoil any of these so instead I will discuss some other highlights of the books which may help explain why I am so enamored with them.

First, the characters of Sanda and Biran are presented with exquisite nuance and well-defined clarity. Sanda is a kick-ass older sister who finds herself in a bewildering series of deathly dangerous situations and constantly makes the right choice. Biran is in a similarly bewildering thicket of political alliances which he has to successfully navigate. Sadly, he doesn’t always make the right choice. But by giving the reader access to their inner thoughts we are always right there with Sanda and Biran as they wend their way through the treacherous plot. That makes for a tremendously exciting reading experience.

Second, the prominence of diversity in both books is extremely attractive and rewarding to me. Biran and Sanda were raised by a gay male couple and clearly they both love both their dads. With one leg Sanda is disabled (or the better term would probably “differently abled”) and having a hero in an action-packed military sci-fi story who also needs a wheelchair sometimes to get around and regular worries about her prosthesis is definitely unusual, but O’Keefe makes it work, because Sanda is awesome! She is clearly heterosexual, and we thought Biran was too, until the later chapters of Chaos Vector make it clear he’s also attracted to guys. (Yay!) Although there's no sexual scenes in the books, remember we do have constant access to Sanda's and Biran's inner thoughts, so.... In addition to the diverse main characters there is a major supporting character named Mx. Arden Wyke who has near-legendary computer hacking skills and is ‘enby’ (non-binary) and referred to by the pronouns them/they/theirs seamlessly. Another major supporting character is revealed to be an ex-boyfriend of one of Sanda’s dads. The author also makes it clear that many/most of the characters would not be racialized as White in our contemporary social context. The author goes out of her way to mention that the ancestors of most of the inhabitants of Ada Prime are from Ecuador, which is apparently where the first space elevator was constructed on Earth a millennium before, which explains why most people on Ada have brown skin and very dark hair. The diversity of the characters is an integral, impressive and important aspect of these books.

Third, the technological details of the Prime universe are believable and very cool. One incredibly important feature of science fiction to me is the realistic presentation of technological advancements. They should be incredible but also somewhat plausible. (Yes I know faster than light travel is not possible but gates/wormholes are at least theorized.) O’Keefe does a good job of presenting the technology of the 34th century in a way that seems realistic. The society has aspects which seem like magic to us, but there are still disparities in status, wealth and power among different sets of people. Those divides do not seem to be based on race or gender but they do seem to be related to one’s birth circumstances.

Overall, Chaos Vector is an impressively strong sequel to Velocity Weapon and one of the best space opera books I have read in several years. If you like the work of Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan and Arkady Martine, I’m very confident that Megan O’Keefe’s Protectorate series will put a smile on your face and a gleam in your eye, it did for me!

Title: Chaos Vector.
Author: Megan O'Keefe .
Page Length: 416 pages.
Format: Kindle.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: July 28, 2020.
Date Read: December 25, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Lucifer's Hammer

Lucifer’s Hammer is one of the classic works of science fiction; it was nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards for Best Novel. Written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven and published in 1977, Lucifer’s Hammer is one of the most prominent examples of the post-apocalyptic trope of modern science fiction. Set primarily in California, the story follows a large cast of characters as they are affected by the discovery of the Hamner-Brown comet, its rapid approach to Earth, catastrophic collision and immediate aftermath.

The story is set in the late 1970s and the cultural assumptions and depictions are somewhat jarring as one views them from the perspective of a gay, Black man living in the 21st century. This is not a new experience I (and am sure many other readers who are not in the expected target audience of straight, white, males) have had reading alleged classics of science fiction. Honestly, I would say that Lucifer’s Hammer has fewer “ugh!” moments than others I have read. For example, the N-word does appear in the text, unexpurgated.

The primary way the disconnect between the modern reader and the somewhat dated text manifests is in a lack of empathy for the primary characters. I was never that invested in whether a particular character that we’ve been given a first-person perspective of would survive or not. To me, the narrative tension in the book that kept me reading to the end was the recognizable plausibility of the depiction of the rapid deterioration of civilization after the cataclysmic comet collision and whether human civilization would still be viable at the end of the book. 

Pournelle & Niven use 3-4 main characters as vehicles through which they tell the bulk of the story. The first is Tim Hamner, a rich astronomical dilettante who happens to discover the comet and then escapes with a woman-who-is-not-his-wife to Northern California after devastating tidal waves basically inundate and decimate Southern California where he lives. Another is Harvey Randall, a producer of television documentaries who does a series of stories on Hamner and the comet. The third most prominent character is Maureen Jellison, daughter of U.S. Senator Arthur Clay Jellison. When the comet strikes, Jellison becomes the de facto leader of a group of survivors in Northern California, due to his thforesightedness to stockpile useful supplies on his ranch in the area. There are many other characters who also get first-person accounts, from the murderer-rapist who takes advantage of the turmoil and confusion to commit crimes, to the policeman who punishes him and maintains law and order despite the uncertainty of whether humanity itself will persist and lastly, the Black criminal Alim Nassor who (unsuccessfully) attempts to use the abandonment of white folks their homes to enrich and empower himself and his “brothers.” Some of these characters are simply bad people so that’s one reason why it’s difficult to connect with them or care about their survival. However, some of the characters are simply not that relatable to me (perhaps because I’m not in the expected target audience). And some of the depictions of the characters (especially their attitudes and beliefs) are borderline offensive.

However, in the end I would say that overall Lucifer’s Hammer is an effective, if flawed, entry in the genre of speculative fictional depiction of apocalyptic events. It would have been improved by providing a more diverse set of perspectives on the cataclysmic events by the inclusion of different characters.

Title: Lucifer's Hammer.
Author: Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 642 pages.
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services.
Date Published: September 22, 2010. (First Published: July 1, 1977)
Date Read: November 29, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B+/B (3.16/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: B-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: B.