by David Baldacci Grand Central Publishing Hachette Book Group, © 2014 ISBN 978-1-4555-2123-4 Mass Market Paperback, 432 pages, $10.00 When faced with the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to take down a global threat—U.S. President Cassion weighs the risks and reluctantly gives the order. The mission must succeed. Failure means certain retaliation, probable impeachment, and…
Category: Reviews
The Seventh Victim
by Mary Burton Kensington Publishing, Inc. © 2013 ISBN 978-1-4201-2505-4 Mass Market Paperback, 362 pages, $7.99 When Texas Ranger JAMES BECK arrives at the crime scene, the details—victim clad in a home-made white dress, blonde hair fanned out around her head, and a penny clutched in one hand—seem familiar somehow. It’s only after Beck begins…
Just Fall, by Nina Sadowsky
Ballantine Books, © 2016 ISBN 978055394863 304 pages, $26.00 Looks can be deceiving. That’s what ELLIE LARRABEE finds out moments after saying “I do” when the man of her dreams reveals in one shocking sentence a truth that shakes her world. Everything she has taken for granted is built on shifting sands and suddenly her…
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King Pocket Books © 1999, 2002 ISBN 9780743455961 Mass Market Paperback, 320 pages, $11.19 The “King” of horror fiction got his start just like most other writers: trial and error and a lot of persistence. Growing up in Maine, surviving high school, thriving in college, then working a day job, raising a family,…
The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman
Pan Publishing © 2014 ISBN 1101988649 Mass Market Paperback, 354 pages, $36.99 hardcover Imagine a reality where librarians live forever (or near enough), a truly magical place that intersects with other worlds and other timelines through hidden doors and a secret language. This is the world of The Library, an enormous secret world where agents…
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
Tor Books, © May 2016 ISBN 9780765378002 Hardcover, 432 pages, $11.42 Several hundred years in the future, Earth—and human civilization—is completely unrecognizable. Religion has been outlawed. Gender pronouns are eradicated, as is a binary gender system. Select criminals are no longer imprisoned. Instead, they are put to work as Servicers in whatever capacity best benefits…
The Queen of Blood: Book One of the Queens of Renthia
by Sarah Beth Durst HarperCollins Publishers, L.L.C. © 2016 ISBN 978-0-06-241334-5 Print length 368 pages, $19.99 Renthia’s spirits want to create, according to their nature. Earth spirits wish to make things grow. Wood spirits build. Water spirits flow, and so on. But more than anything else, they long to destroy. Not just each other. Not…
Arkwright
by Allen Steele Tor Books/Tom Doherty Associates, LLC © 2016 ISBN 978-0-7653-8215-3 (Hardcover) Print length 336 pages, $23.58 Nathan Arkwright, best-selling science fiction writer and wealthy philanthropist, dies without providing for his daughter Sylvia or granddaughter Kate. Instead, he leaves his entire considerable fortune to the Arkwright Foundation, a nonprofit organization to be established and…
A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers
Harper Voyager, © 2016 ISBN 9780062569400 Print length 384 pages, $16.99 This stand-alone sequel to Becky Chambers’ debut novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, begins 28 minutes after a sentient AI personality has been transferred from the body of a ship to a human-like body. Nothing could have prepared her for such…
Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson
HarperCollins Publishers © 2015 ISBN 978-0-06-233451-0 880 pages, $35.00 When the moon blows up for no apparent reason, people first wonder what happened. Then the fuzzy, expanding cluster of seven enormous boulders that once made up Earth’s sole satellite becomes a curiosity. But once the scientists realize what’s going to happen next, the novelty quickly…