If you enjoyed Neuropath...

Bakker's new mystery/thriller.

The blurb:

Imagine being able to remember everything you've ever experienced. This is the lonely world inhabited by Disciple Manning. He is able to recall every conversation, meeting and feeling he has ever had, making him an extremely dangerous private investigator. When a young woman disappears, not from her home, but from a religious cult, her parents turn to Manning for help. Manning accepts, but with a chilling sense of foreboding. Heading into the heart of the cult, he encounters the beguiling intelligence of its leader, obsessed with the idea that the world is a fantastical theatre, in which we merely act out our roles, ignorant of our true existence beyond; a belief he is intent on protecting, at any cost. Manning's investigation causes him to clash with the cult's eerie air of detachment and leaves him fighting for survival and elusive answers, before they are swallowed into the town's shadowy pool of secrets. Meanwhile, it's only a matter of time before the missing girl risks being abandoned forever to the depths of our collective forgotten memories...

Bitter Seeds

This is the first novel that I read after finishing Winter 10 grading. Think alternative historical fiction in which Nazi's invent supermen and the Brit's pull their warlock's out of retirement. I was pleasantly surprised; Bitter Seeds is an outstanding debut.

Blurb:

It’s 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between

Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.

When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities—a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present—Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.

Alan Furst meets Alan Moore in the opening of an epic of supernatural alternate history, the tale of a twentieth century like ours and also profoundly different.


I give this one an 8.5/10

Check out an excerpt!

Here is another fantasy writer who gets rave reviews, especially from my brother Troy. I'm sure he will be happy to know that Pat's second novel Wise Man's Fear will finally be released on March 1st, 2011

A link to Patrick Rothfuss' blog.

Prediction - Book of the Year

This is going to be one of the best books of the year. My UK copy is in the mail and I will be reviewing it shortly.

Here is the dust jacket blurb:

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.

There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.

All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

Review - The Hedge Knight

One of my favorite fantasy authors is George R. R. Martin. If you haven't read his Song of Ice and Fire series you need to. His style is gritty, tragic, and realist. His world is more like Vietnam than Neverland. That being said, Martin has proven to be a ridiculously slow writer, and those of us waiting for his next book to arrive have been doing so for around five years. Whether you are looking for an introduction to his world, or needing something to wet your Martin whistle, The Hedge Knight is a great place to start. The Hedge Knight is a novella that occurs roughly 100 years before the events that take place in A Game of Thrones. The Hedge Knight series currently has two sequels: Sword Sword, and The Mystery Knight. Together they are an enjoyable reminder as to why Martin really is a master storyteller.

I give this one an 8.5 / 10.

Keep an eye on HBO for a new series based on the Song of Ice and Fire

Review - The Shadow Year

Jeffrey Ford's Young Adult novel The Shadow Year narrates the grotesque meeting of a 1960's classically dysfunctional American family with the Sandlot, Sherlock Holmes, and the reason Children don't talk to strangers or eat fresh baked cupcakes on Halloween. This is the most beautiful, fantastic, and scary book that I have read since Zafon's Shadow of the Wind. High praise indeed!

I give this one a 9.25 / 10.