For established fans, a bittersweet reunion with old friends; for new readers, a reasonable enticement toward the superior...
Hurley (The Stars Are Legion, 2017, etc.) collects five grim new adventures of Nyxnissa so Dasheem, disgraced ex–government assassin and current bloody-minded bounty hunter with an existing but deeply buried moral sense.
All stories take place before the main action of God’s War (2011), the first book of the Bel Dame trilogy, set on a barely terraformed and metal-poor planet half laid waste from biological warfare, with a technology based on genetically engineered bugs. The stories are somewhat repetitive: Nyx is hired to do some ethically shady job that isn’t what it first appears, and a bloody mess results. At least Nyx and her team usually get paid, albeit not enough to crawl out of their desperate lifestyle. There’s enough explanation provided that readers who haven’t read the series should be able to get along. But those who have read the books, which are a powerful exercise in character development over time, will be aware of the fate of Nyx and each member of her team: com tech Taite, sniper Anneke, shape-shifter Khos, and the mediocre magician Rhys, the unacknowledged love of Nyx’s life. Knowing what the future holds for these people adds a certain weight of sadness to these stories. (Hurley even makes a grim, heavy-handed joke about the tragedy that will befall one character, but only a reader of her novel Infidel would even know the joke was being made.) Four of the five tales were previously published on Hurley’s Patreon, and there’s a definite sense that they were written simply as Nyx fan-pleasers. While two of the stories explain how Anneke and Khos join the team, the collection as a whole doesn’t really advance the general storyline of the series or add much to our understanding of these characters.
For established fans, a bittersweet reunion with old friends; for new readers, a reasonable enticement toward the superior novels of the series.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61696-294-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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