A fast-paced, richly imagined, gritty tale of modern-day good versus evil.
This sequel focuses on a hapless civilian caught up in a paranormal agency.
James’ first Hourglass novel introduced readers to ordinary guy and aspiring comic book artist Clyde Williams and his friend Kevin Carpenter. The two hang out regularly despite Kev being dead. The fact that the pals commune so easily brings them to the attention of the clandestine paranormal agency known as Hourglass. They’re both brought onboard as operatives, working alongside agents both lethally trained and superpowered. This new installment of their adventures features the same fevered pitch of pulp prose that made the first book so enjoyable: “A few cautious steps later and Clyde understood why the hub guards were so utterly oblivious to the two intruders marching down on them. They were not bored. They were dead. Grey skinned and white-eyed, blood still dripping from the puddles in their seats.” Robert E. Howard fans will recognize the tone instantly. Like James’ series opener, the sequel centers on the secret war Hourglass is waging against the evil Cairnwood Society, Citadel Security Solutions, and CSS’s dapper, diabolical middle manager, Edward Talbot. Added to the mix is the requisite fantasy “Master,” an evil, nonhuman entity named Charon, and its machinations further complicate an already very pleasingly complex plot. The baleful Eye of Charon lurks in the background of the tale’s expanded action, watching over plot threads and characters (the most memorable of whom eerily earns her name “Doll Face”) that range far afield from Clyde and Kev.
The sheer zest of the storytelling here is infectious. James has mastered the knack of meshing the fast-paced lingo of paramilitary thrillers with the colorful worldbuilding of urban fantasy. It’s the same combination found in books like Larry Correia’s popular Monster Hunter series and the novels of Simon Green, and it works to extremely readable effect in these pages as Clyde, Kev, and their Hourglass allies continue to face off against Cairnwood and its minions. This is the kind of SF/fantasy where internet encryptions and Glock 19s show up right alongside hexes and undead monsters (sometimes merging, as in “low-grade demonic radiation” and the like). Virtually all of the players in some way live on the borderline between those two realities. “Being a practical man, one of sound reasoning, science, and logic,” one such character thinks while standing in the middle of a literally haunted dungeon, he “never used to believe in fluffy matters such as souls and dark forces, but now, every time he shivered down in this dank hellhole he couldn’t help but wonder if it was the cause of ghosts brushing his shoulder.” This and similar passages highlight the volume’s only recurrent flaw: the author’s tendency to get tangled up in his own verbiage. But this defect is minor compared to the story’s many strengths: the sharply drawn characters, the frequency with which the jokes land, and, most of all, the roller-coaster pacing, which keeps the whole supernatural business hurtling to a gripping conclusion. Fans of urban fantasy should jump on this series at its beginning.
A fast-paced, richly imagined, gritty tale of modern-day good versus evil.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-4107-3486-8
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This controlled, quietly moving portrait of a life in decline coasts to a halt in an unexpected place.
A man facing the empty-nest phase of a disappointing marriage drops his daughter at college and hits the road.
Published in the U.K. earlier this year, now shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Markovits’ 12th novel establishes the unstudied and confiding voice that carries it so compellingly forward in the first sentence: “When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.” As the story unfolds, this voice often addresses the reader directly, saying things like, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound about it the way I probably sound,” and “I should probably say a word about our friendship,” and so forth, increasing the intimate effect. For the sake of his kids—there’s also a daughter, then 6—Tom Layward made a deal with himself that he’d stay in the marriage until they left home. The book opens at that point, 12 years later. “What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” Other things are also going poorly: Tom, a law professor on leave from his university after counseling the owner of a basketball team accused of racism and sexism, has also refused to add his pronouns to his email signature. Markovits, who was born in Texas, played pro basketball in Germany, and now lives in London, develops this tricky aspect of the situation in a notably nuanced way, as part of the complexity of Tom’s character rather than as a dive into the breach of the culture wars. Tom is also suffering from undiagnosed but serious-seeming health symptoms, which he vaguely ascribes to long Covid. When an argument between his wife, Amy, and daughter, Miri, erupts on the day they are to take her to campus, Amy stays home in suburban New York. And without ever actually deciding to, Tom ends up on a cross-country road trip, visiting an old basketball teammate, an ex-lover, his brother, and ultimately his son on the West Coast. Though Markovits has never been big on plot, the reader’s sense that this is all leading up to something is not wrong.
This controlled, quietly moving portrait of a life in decline coasts to a halt in an unexpected place.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781668231562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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