Set two years after The Furies of Calderon, Jim Butcher’s Academ’s Fury continues the story of Alera. Tavi is now a student at the Alera Imperial Academy, secretly studying to become a Cursor—one of the First Lord’s intelligence agents. The other characters from the first book are similarly occupied with new responsibility and battles of [...]
Steampunk? Check. Detectives? Check. Queen Victoria with cybernetic implants keeping her alive into the early 1900s? Check. A murderous villain trying to achieve immortality using an ancient Egyptian ritual? Check. There is just no way George Mann’s The Osiris Ritual couldn’t be entertaining. It’s a fun quasi-Victorian penny dreadful with a dash of the supernatural [...]
Jim Butcher, author of the ever-entertaining Dresden Files books, has a lesser-known fantasy series that I finally got around to starting. The Codex Alera, as it is called, is set in a sword-and-sorcery type world (with it’s own unique twists on a usual trope, of course) and is quite the departure from the famous sardonic [...]
Death Masks is the 5th book in the Dresden Files series, but only the 2nd book that I thought was awesome. The other is Fool Moon. It starts out a little aggravating, since there is still too much emphasis on vampires for my taste. There is a funny scene with Harry Dresden to be interviewed [...]
At the beginning of Summer Knight, the White Council convenes in Chicago to discuss the matter of the war with the Red Court vampires, and maybe execute a meddling wizard by the name of Harry Dresden if they can get away with it. But that’s the least of his problems. Queen Mab, ruler of the [...]
With The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson begins a new richly-detailed fantasy series known as The Stormlight Archive. Clocking in at over 1,000 pages, it is only the very beginning of an epic story that will span an estimated ten books before its completion. There are three main protagonists, along with numerous side characters. Kaladin [...]
This was a frustrating one. The fourth book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Feast for Crows continues where its predecessor left off…but seems more like half a book than a full novel. It’s an enjoyable read, but it focuses primarily on the evil scheming folks down at [...]
In this book, Jim Butcher split up vampires into groups similar to how he grouped werewolves in Fool Moon. There are three different types: Red Court which are traditional vampires but drug their victims and feast on them at parties, Black Court which are monsters with little resemblance to humans, and White Court which feed [...]
Hosts is the 5th book in the Repairman Jack series. For those of you who haven’t been introduced, Repairman Jack fixes things, fixes situations that are out of control. When people have a problem caused by illegal behavior, when there may not be a legal answer to the problem, they call Jack. Just Jack, because [...]
All the Rage is the 4th book in the Repairman Jack series. The story centers around an impossible molecule that becomes inert a month after extraction from its source. All evidence of it (digital image, physical composition, notes on paper) reverts to a different molecule, different substance. Dr. Nadia Radzminsky has been hired to study [...]
