You know the square jaw, the steady gaze, the proud bearing. He stands alone, confident that he’s the best of the best, ready to do the job singlehanded because anyone else would slow him down. He’s a hero; heroes never quit, never fail, and never need a hand.
Tom Cruise’s Maverick and Disney’s Buzz Lightyear are cut from the same cloth, but the fictional fabric that makes up their movies is as different as night and day. Continue reading
All the Seas of the WorldNetgalley / GoodReads / Amazon
Returning triumphantly to the brilliantly evoked near-Renaissance world of A Brightness Long Ago and Children of Earth and Sky, international bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay deploys his signature ‘quarter turn to the fantastic’ to tell a story of vengeance, power, and love.
On a dark night along a lonely stretch of coast a small ship sends two people ashore. Their purpose is assassination. They have been hired by two of the most dangerous men alive to alter the balance of power in the world. If they succeed, the consequences will affect the destinies of empires, and lives both great and small.
One of those arriving at that beach is a woman abducted by corsairs as a child and sold into years of servitude. Having escaped, she is trying to chart her own course—and is bent upon revenge. Another is a seafaring merchant who still remembers being exiled as a child with his family from their home, for their faith, a moment that never leaves him. In what follows, through a story both intimate and epic, unforgettable characters are immersed in the fierce and deadly struggles that define their time.
All the Seas of the World is a page-turning drama that also offers moving reflections on memory, fate, and the random events that can shape our lives—in the past, and today.
Diamond and the Eye (Peter Diamond #20)
by Peter Lovesey
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover
Published: October 12, 2021, by Soho Crime
ISBN: 9781641293129 (ISBN10: 1641293128)
CID chief Peter Diamond is back for his 20th caper solving mysteries in Bath, England. Diamond, for those of you who haven’t met him, is one of those classic slightly-offbeat British detectives, brilliant, hard to get close to, and a bit eccentric. He’s backed up by a small team of solid investigators; Ingeborg, the ex-journalist, the hardnosed Haliwell, the recent hire Jean Sharp, and the OCD-driven John Leaman, all of whom dutifully gather up grist for him to mill over. In Diamond and the Eye, however, he gets a hand from an outsider, Johhny Getz, Private Eye. Continue reading
The Kaiju Preservation Society
by John Scalzi
272 pages, Hardcover
Publication: March 15, 2022 by Tor Books
ISBN: 9780765389121 (ISBN10: 0765389126)
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57693406
The Kaiju Preservation Society is the most fun I’ve had with a Scalzi novel since Redshirts, and for many of the same reasons. Scalzi loves nothing more than taking a trope, plot, or other sacred sf bovine and turning it on its head, revealing a few dark truths and poking a bit of fun at it in the process. This time he takes on Godzilla and his kin, pointing out the absurdity of the whole thing, and then sciencing the hell out of it just the same. It’s Jurrasic Park meets Pacific Rim on the other side of the looking glass, and it’s great fun. Continue reading
The Paradox Hotel
by Rob Hart
Hardcover, 336 pages
Expected publication: February 22nd 2022
by Ballantine Books
There’s a dead body in room 526 but only January Cole, former time cop and now head of hotel security, can see it. Actually, there’s a lot January can see that others don’t, because she took a few too many trips into the past and, well…this is your brain. this is your brain on too many time trips. She was booted from active TEA missions because she’d reached stage 1 of the brain erosion that’s a side effect of time travel and sent to the hotel where the very wealthy stay before taking their vacations in the past. Time Travel may be a government-controlled operation, but it’s only for the rich. The hotel is located a safe distance from the Einstein timeport, which really should have been named for the black woman who invented time travel, but no, let’s name it after an old dead white guy. Continue reading