Lewrie, Prodigal, Greywalker, Working for Devil, Cruel Wind,
I finally finished up the Alan Lewrie naval series; Lewrie isn’t the noble seaman that Horatio Hornblower was and shares Jack Aubrey’s bad luck with women and money; he also gets dragged into a lot of Stephen Maturin-style espionage work. The Lewrie novels are easier to read than the Aubrey/Maturin novels, though; they have a contemporary narrative style, with more action and less jargon. I’d recommend them if you’re in the mood for some 19th-century macho, somewhat roguish seafaring bravado; a few of the novels are set in the Americas, so there’s interesting fictionalized history to pick up.
Prodigal by Marc D. Giller is the sequel to Hammerjack and returns us to the Inru Ascension plot and the perpetual struggle with uber-intelligent AI Lyssa. Science fiction with a cyberpunk gloss. Neither Hammerjack nor Prodigal are amazingly gripping or original, but they’re readable action-adventures, and the parts of Prodigal that take place on the deep-space ship Almacantar would make a nice horror movie.
Greywalker by Kat Richardson introduces another paranormal detective, Harper Blaine, whose temporary brain death leaves her vulnerable to the effects of the Grey, a sort of halfway plane between life and death. Richardson wasn’t able to resist bringing in gorgeous and all-powerful vampires, which is a strike against the novel, in my opinion, but if you can ignore the annoying presence of those ubiquitous parasites, the rest of the Grey concept is interesting and atmospheric. The genre is part horror, part detective, and part romance. If Richardson can stick to ghosts and magic and avoid jumping on the vampire bandwagon any further than she has — God forbid Harper fall for a vampire, pleeease — then the series could turn out to be interesting. Worth a read, especially if you aren’t as fang-averse as I’ve become.
Working for the Devil and Dead Man Rising by Lilith Saintcrow are also paranormal detective/romance novels, featuring necromancer Dante Valentine. They’re set in a future world where magic and paranormal creatures have reappeared (yes, the bloodsucking parasites show up here, as well), and Valentine is a professional necromancer who raises souls to settle legal disputes and, sometimes, solve crimes. She’s hired by Satan in the first book and undergoes a significant physical alteration about midway through, and then spends most of her time in the second book whining about it while trying to solve a bunch of murders linked to her abusive schoolyears past. The novels have an interesting, if strongly anti-Christian, story world and there’s some steamy romantic tension between Valentine and devoted devil Japhrimel in the first novel, but this whole whining about becoming superhuman thing just has to stop. “I’m gorgeous, super-strong, regenerating, and probably immortal, waaaaaah.” Gimme a break.
A Cruel Wind is a limited-edition reprint of Glen Cook’s three main Dread Empire novels, Shadow of All Night Falling, October’s Baby, and All Darkness Me. This was Cook’s first major series, and Cook fans will detect in it the themes that continue to appear in his work — vast armies at war with each other; lovely and troubled queens and innocent if slightly ruthless little girls; mercenaries whose honor gets tugged on despite their best efforts; competitive and eccentric wizards; questions about means and ends; tangled prophecies and loyalties; doomed romances; non-Western cultures; lots of characters who are neither completely good nor completely evil, and so forth. The scope of Cook’s imagination never fails to amaze me, and this is worth a read, especially if you enjoyed his later Black Company novels.
drupagliassotti @ February 19, 2007