Spectacularly and convincingly inventive, assured and wholly spellbinding: one of the most impressive debuts in years.
A sort of paranoid-conspiracy, hard sci-fi whodunit: the Scotland resident, Finnish author's jaw-dropping debut.
Notorious thief Jean le Flambeur serves an indeterminate sentence in the surreal Dilemma Prison governed by artificial intelligences, or Archons, at the behest of Earth's ruling "upload collective" called the Sobornost. The Archons' notion of rehabilitation is to compel the prisoners, incarcerated in infinitely repeating transparent cells, to play murderous mind games with infinite copies of themselves. Soon enough, though, along comes spacer Mieli in her alluring sentient spaceship to rescue le Flambeur—providing that he's willing to work for her. The thief has little choice, it's either accept or stay and be shot through the head over and over. And so they're off to Mars, where the multi-legged city of Oubliette wanders the landscape, terraforming as it goes. Here, time itself is currency; memory, and hence reality, is held collectively, privacy is a fetish preserved by unbreakable encryption and enforced by powerful "tzaddiks," but everybody's strings are being pulled—even the string-pullers'—by hidden higher authorities. Mieli's employer, known only as the pellegrini, wants le Flambeur to perform a particular if unmentioned service, while the thief has his own ulterior motives for cooperating: years ago he hid large chunks of his memories here, and now he needs to recover them to attain his own vengeful goals. Meanwhile, brilliant young detective Isidore Beautrelet, having just solved the murder of a prominent chocolatier, accepts another assignment—involving an arch villain named…le Flambeur. All this barely hints at the complex inventions and extrapolations, richly textured backdrop and well-developed characters seamlessly woven into a narrative stuffed with scientific, literary and cultural references.
Spectacularly and convincingly inventive, assured and wholly spellbinding: one of the most impressive debuts in years.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2949-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Fans will gobble up this final battle, in which the characters they love fight desperately to save everything they hold...
The action-packed conclusion to a rich and absorbing fantasy trilogy.
Kell has been taken prisoner in White London, trapped in a collar that dampens his magic. His magical connection to his brother, Prince Rhy—the connection that keeps the prince alive—is weakening. Alucard Emery is helplessly watching Rhy, his former lover, fade as that connection begins to break. The White London magician Holland is being slowly taken over by the dangerous, powerful, Black London “shadow king” known as Osaron. And Osaron has his sights set on devouring the magic-rich prize of Red London. But Lila Bard is ready to do the impossible to save Kell and the world—starting by crossing the barrier between worlds by herself, using her own newfound power, for the first time ever. This third and final book in the Shades of Magic series begins where A Gathering of Shadows (2016) left off and keeps up a breakneck pace as our heroes struggle to find a way to stop a magical demon/god who can possess almost any human host. Schwab has created an apocalyptically powerful villain, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Desperate gambits, magical battles, and meaningful sacrifice make this a thrilling read—and there’s even a little time to further complicate and deepen some of the series’ compelling characters.
Fans will gobble up this final battle, in which the characters they love fight desperately to save everything they hold dear. Schwab has fully delivered on the promise of this inventive and captivating series.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8746-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A terrifying new storytelling experience that affirms, even in our darkest moments, that love conquers all.
A female big-rig driver crisscrosses America searching for signs of the wife everyone else thinks is dead.
This spooky third novel by Welcome to Night Vale creator Fink (It Devours!, 2017, etc.) is similarly based on an original podcast and offers a more threatening but equally personal take on the horror genre. Switching from the podcast’s intimate first-person narration, delivered with powerful emotion by actress Jasika Nicole, allows Fink to stretch out into the more remote corners of his mythos while delivering the same scary beats. The main character is Keisha Taylor, whose wife, Alice, disappeared while working for the mysterious Bay and Creek trucking company: “No cause of death. No body. No certainty. There was a disappearance, and after a long and increasingly hopeless search, the presumption of death.” Now Keisha has taken a job with the company as a long-haul driver, which thrusts her firmly into the eerie mythology at work here. Keisha is a fascinating character partially because one of her defining characteristics is chronic anxiety, and it’s a potent imperfection for a character who battles literal monsters on a regular basis. Along the way, Fink unveils the strange universe that swallowed Alice whole, revealing an underground war between two secret societies, time-bending oracles, and other Lovecraft-ian horrors. He also gives Keisha a charismatic ally in Sylvia Parker, a teen on the run who becomes her “anxiety bro,” and a bloodcurdling enemy in the macabre, twisted police officer who stalks her across the span of the country. But the book also tempers its terrors with everyday humanity, portraying the mundane joys of love, the rich fabric of the American countryside, and surreal “Why did the chicken cross the road?” jokes that are a hallmark of the podcast. By the time Keisha learns Alice's fate, readers will realize that this marvelous character is more than the sum of her faceless anxiety or her very real fears.
A terrifying new storytelling experience that affirms, even in our darkest moments, that love conquers all.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-284413-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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