Books shelved under “Mystery”

So there’s this new show on TV called CSI: Cyber. It’s a spin-off of a little-known TV series you probably haven’t heard of—CSI or something like that—about people investigating cybercrime. Every episode involves bad guys trying to do bad things with computers (sometimes their computer, sometimes your computer!), and the good guys have to race against the clock to stop the bad things by doing things that are like the bad things but…

Jumped on this after seeing it in the new paperbacks section of the library. Having recently read, and greatly enjoyed, The Forever War, I was happy to see something much more recent from Joe Haldeman. That being said, the description made it seem more like a thriller than a science-fiction novel, so I didn’t go into it expecting too much. This proved fortuitous, because there isn’t much here. Thrillers are neither my area of…

I’m hesitant about proclaiming love for historical fiction. To me it’s just a genre that can be so hard to get right. Take too many liberties, and it’s not really historical any more, is it? But don’t take enough liberties, try to follow the actual course of history (as best we know it) too slavishly, and then it’s not really fiction…. The best historical fiction is the kind that follows the main narrative but tries…

I seem to remember reading some or all of Stephen Baxter’s Manifold books when I was much younger. Those also involved a future sentience/intelligence at the end of the universe reaching back in the history of the universe to alter events through weird, inexplicable phenomena. So I guess this is a thing for him. Proxima starts its life as a straightforward tale of enforced penal colonization of another planet before gradually sprawling into a parallel…

I discovered this on my library’s new paperbacks shelf last week and literally squealed aloud. I have a warped perspective of this series’ publication structure because I’ve read the first three books in short succession to get caught up, so I had forgotten The Diamond Conspiracy was coming out so “soon” after I read Dawn’s Early Light.

A lot was riding on this book. With the disavowal of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences at…

We continue my epic re-read of the Animorphs series with book 2, because I’m boring and read series in order, OK?

Animorphs resembles an after-school kids show: each book is like an episode of the show in which the kids have an adventure while learning an important life lesson. In The Invasion the lesson was, “Yes, your principal is an alien bent on enslaving humanity.” The Visitor is about the harsh effects of marital strife…

I don’t pay much attention to blurbs on book covers. The worst one are when the publisher has cherry-picked a list of adjectives from someone’s review, as if hearing that the New York Times thought a book is “inspiring, powerful, thought-provoking” is going to make me want to read it any more or less. Blurbs have little substance and are not helpful. Most of the time. But I’m going to start off by quoting the …

The Warrior’s Apprentice was, by all metrics, fun, but I didn’t think it was especially substantive. Miles blunders his way into and out of a problem, succeeding more on luck and determination than any particular flash of brilliance on his part. (There is nothing wrong with luck and determination, of course. These are valuable qualities to possess!) I enjoyed the book, but it’s not going to keep me up at night.

The Mountains of Mourning…

Centuries after the events of The Fall of Hyperion, and three and a half years after I read that book, Endymion takes place and I read it. I had actually forgotten that there was a book between this one and Hyperion; I described this as the second book in a series when friends asked me what I was reading. Oops! And it has been so long since I read the first two that…

Right, so you don’t have a soul, which means any supernatural creature you touch turns back into a mortal. Handy, but also it makes you a kind of threat to the supernatural community. Queen Victoria makes you muhjah, which is a fancy term for “I have a bureaucratic position as well as target painted on my back.” And you marry a werewolf member of the peerage. Who is Scottish. Then, suddenly, a phenomenon that replicates…

Dark Currents, the anticipated debut to Jacqueline Carey’s new urban fantasy series Agent of Hel, got my attention back when it first came out. I saw it on io9, added it to my to-read list.

And promptly forgot about it.

Because that’s what happens when you have a list so long that even if you stop adding books to it today, it will take you about four years to get through it.

Fortunately,…

Every ongoing but somewhat formulaic series has its tipping point, that moment where the overall story arc and mythos of the series’ world begins to subsume the individual plots of each book. For The Dresden Files it was Summer Knight, the fourth book, which adds faeries to the Dresdenverse. For the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, that tipping point is here, with Dawn’s Early Light.

On the surface, there is little to make …

Agents Books and Braun are back. Aftering solving their case in Phoenix Rising in their “off hours”, the unlikely duo get involved in a new rash of abductions of suffragists from around London. These abductions involve strange, lightning-like teleportations. Braun knows one of the leaders of the suffragist movement—in fact, she used to date the leader’s son, back in New Zealand. Meanwhile, Books continues to struggle with keeping his military past and skills from Braun.…

Why did no one tell me this book existed until now????!!!!111

Seriously, it took a careful browsing of the library’s New Paperbacks section to discover the second and third books in this series. A quick hop to the nearby computer (which I think is running some kind of locked-down Ubuntu if the font anti-aliasing is anything to go by) to check the library’s catalogue, and sure enough, Phoenix Rising was in the stacks of that…

This summer saw the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge splash onto social media. ALS terrifies me. A deadly disease that slowly robs you of your ability to move but doesn’t affect your reasoning? I’m not particularly fond of physical activities, but I like embodiment; I like being able to engage with the world actively. The idea of being unable to do that but remaining sound of mind sounds like a terrible way to go.

Lock In…

It has been ages since I read a Poirot novel. Poirot is my favourite fictional detective. So I thought I should start again from the beginning, with his debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is at once classic Christie with so many of the nascent attributes that would become hallmarks of Poirot’s career. Nevertheless, it is also much rougher and undeniably an early work, with much looser plotting and characterization than some…

Can a thriller also anaesthetize? Spook Country tries to find out. It has all the trappings of a modern espionage story, with quasi—government agents and a mysterious shipping container being tracked by a paranoid GPS geohacker. Yet William Gibson seems strangely reticent to let the story or the characters off their leash and venture boundlessly into this world. Instead, he escorts the reader on a meandering tour of a possible present (or near-future) which ponders…

Living in the UK these past two years, I have of course taken the opportunity to avail myself of the choice historical programmes (mmm, double m and an e) on offer from the BBC. These include the innumerable and delectable documentary series from a seemingly standard rotation of telegenic academics whose knowledge is second only to their enthusiasm for the stretch and span of the history of the British Isles. And then there are the…

I read Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead last summer when he was first nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. I remember getting a good deal of enjoyment from it during a few sunny days reading outside. It was fantasy, but not as we’ve become accustomed to know it. Gladstone’s Alt Coulumb was a twisting maze of legal deals entwined with magical contracts. The worldbuilding was simply superb, and the plot had me hooked. So…

Here we are at the end of the To Hell and Back trilogy. As I said in my Dreams of Gods and Monsters review, a trilogy works best for me if each successive book raises the stakes and widens the scope of its world. By these criteria, Matthew Hughes has succeeded. The first book introduces Chesney Arnstruther, a high-functioning autistic man whose world is mostly numbers until he accidentally summons a demon, incites a strike…