Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/14

It's another week, so here's another pile of books that recently arrived in La Casa Hornswoggler. I do review books, but I can never manage to review everything I see -- so I do these lists to have an excuse to mention and at least quickly talk about all of them when they come in.

It's a big pile this week, so let's dive right in:

Angels' Blood by Nalini Singh is the first in the "Guild Hunter" series, about vampire hunter Elena Deveraux, hired by the archangel Raphael to track down (and presumably dispose of) an archangel gone bad. Singh is also the author of the 5-book "Psy-Changeling" series, published, as Angels' Blood is, by Berkley Sensation. What intrigues me is that the description of this book is solidly in the fantasy camp -- no love interest is even mentioned, and the focus is on the difficulty of the job and Elena's obstacles -- but Sensation is generally a romance imprint. The cover is also balanced between the two: the heroine is shown nearly full-figure and has a weapon, but she doesn't look particularly tough -- though she's also alone and not posed to be sexy. Angels' Blood is a mass-market paperback, and will be in stores March 3rd.

Also on March 3rd, and from Berkley Sensation's older sister, Ace, comes Death's Daughter by Amber Benson, whom I gather is an actress of some kind. (I don't hold it against her; there's no reason an actress can't settle down into a respectable job, like writing urban fantasy or making artisanal cheese.) This is Benson's first solo novel, though she's written the screenplays for two films and several previous novels with Christopher Golden. The title is absolutely straight -- our heroine is the daughter of the anthropomorphic personification of Death, and she's trying to live a normal life when suddenly she gets dragged into the family business. (Some readers may detect similarities with Terry Pratchett's character of Susan, but remember that she's only death's grand-daughter, and by adoption at that.) Continuing my fascination with covers, I like that this one has a model who isn't in a stereotyped "sexy" pose, doesn't have any visible tattoos, and could possibly be older than eighteen.

Ace is also publishing -- still in mass-market, still on March 3rd -- Anton Strout's second novel, Deader Still. It's a sequel to his first, Dead to Me, which introduced Simon Canderous, a government functionary for a secret organization that investigates the supernatural in modern Manhattan. This time, it sounds like the problem du jour is vampires -- though, since they just killed a boat-load of lawyers, it sounds like they're performing a valuable public service, and should be commended rather than tracked down.

Also loosely connected to Penguin, though independent, is DAW Books, which sent me an anthology called Ages of Wonder. (They'll publish it on -- yes, you guessed it! -- March 3rd, as a mass-market paperback.) It's edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Rob St. Martin, and it has nineteen original fantasy stories set in worlds that are analogous -- though not alternate versions of -- to ages in our own world. A quick look at the authors' biographies shows a lot of new writers here -- that plus the loose theme could make this a good book for discovering new talent...assuming these are good stories, which I couldn't tell you at this point.

March 3rd will be a busy day for the SFF section; also coming along on that day is Rob Thurman's Deathwish, which I think is the fourth in a series about supernatural detectives Cal and Niko Leandros. Cal's only half-human, and his other family -- something called Auphe, whatever they are -- are turning up again. And, as usual, estranged family means trouble. Deathwish is from Roc, yet another sibling to Berkley Sensation and Ace in the big Penguin family.

I only saw one manga collection this week: Shizuru Hayashiya's Hayate X Blade, Vol. 2, published by Tor/Seven Seas on February 3rd. I reviewed the first book for ComicMix back in November, and this looks to be more of the same: mildly homoerotic schoolgirls doing a lot of swordfighting.

The Alchemist's Pursuit is the third in a series -- the alchemist has previously had an Apprentice and a Code -- by the indefatigable Dave Duncan. It's set in an alternate medieval Venice, and features Nostradamus in a somewhat (Nero) Wolfean role, with the cover hunk, his apprentice Alfeo, as his Archie. Ace is publishing this in March in trade paperback.

Patient Zero, the new novel by Jonathan Maberry, is subtitled "A Joe Ledger Novel." A quick google leads me to believe that it's not only a Joe Ledger novel, at the moment it's the Joe Ledger novel. (There's a tendency in the mystery field to position even a first book as if it's a long-established, well-known series -- and it must work, if its still going on today. Comparing that to, say, epic fantasy or to the superhero comic is left as an exercise for the reader.) Patient Zero isn't a pure mystery, though Ledger is a Baltimore police detective -- it's aimed more down the line between horror and thriller. You see, the usual fiendish terrorist organization has gotten hold of a new bioweapon, one that turns people into zombies. (Yes, more zombies. Some people are surprised by the resurgence of vampires in popular fiction over the last decade, but I'm astonished by how popular zombies have become.) Patient Zero is a March trade paperback from St. Martin's Press.

Chris Marie Green's "Vampire Babylon" series continues beyond the initially-promised trilogy with a fourth book, A Drop of Red, which sees series heroine (and stuntwoman turned vampire hunter -- who says retraining programs don't work?) Dawn Madison toting something hard to identify but definitely dangerous-looking on the cover. In this book...well, she's a vampire hunter, right? So she goes out and hunts some vampires. C'mon -- you don't need me to explain that, do you? This is an Ace trade paperback in March.

Da Capo Press is publishing a book on the odd and unlikely Antikythera Mechanism -- something very much like an analog computer from classical antiquity, discovered by Greek sponge divers in 1900 in March in hardcover: Decoding the Heavens by London science writer Jo Marchant. It appears to be the first book-length study of the AM, and it also appears that there's been quite a bit of new research on the AM in recent years -- those two facts together imply (or at least give me hope) that this will be a major, important book on a fascinating scientific subject.

Chris Roberson has been publishing books quicker than I've been able to keep track of them, let alone read -- the card page of End of the Century lists eleven previous novels (not even counting two "Shark Boy & Lava Girl" books), nearly all of which have come out since 2005. End of the Century is a Pyr trade paperback, coming to stores tomorrow. And it's a fantasy novel with major characters in three distinct time periods: a young modern London woman in a strange city, a Victorian consulting detective, and the night Galaad. I feel bad about getting so far behind Chris's stuff, so I'll see if I can fit this one in somewhere.

The newish dark fantasy publisher Underland Press sent me one of their upcoming books: Chaos, a thriller from a Dutch couple who write as Escober, about a British soldier who returns from combat duty in Bosnia to a life that falls aprt around him. And then, apparently, things get really bad.

A Magic of Nightfall is the second book of the "Nessantico Cycle" by S.L. Farrell -- Nessantico is a fantasy version of Rome or Byzantium (with secular and ecclesiastical authorities, not always working together) and Farrell is a pen name for Stephen Leigh. It's very big -- six hundred pages in hardcover -- and DAW will publish it on March 3rd.

Allen Steele's fourth novel about the human colony world Coyote is Coyote Horizon, and -- according to the copyright page, at least -- only one of its eight sections was originally a separate short story, which makes it somewhat different from the initial trilogy. Ace will publish Coyote Horizon on March 3rd.

The first novel that's gotten more attention this year (so far -- we're not far into the year, I admit) is Lamentation from Ken Scholes, and now I'm looking at a copy of it myself. It's an epic fantasy, first in a five-book series, and has a map with placenames like "Desolation of Windwir" and "to the Churning Wastes." And yet it's had a lot of glowing pre-publication reviews and quotes. Frankly, I don't know what to make of it; I've become pretty allergic to Yet Another Big Secondary World Fantasy over the past year or so, and I don't think I've started any new series or writer in that space in that time. Lamentation will be published by Tor in hardcover tomorrow; I may just have to wait and see what other people say about this one.

Nancy Kress's new novel is Steal Across the Sky, coming from Tor as a hardcover tomorrow, under one of the most bleak John Jude Palenecar paintings I've ever seen. (And, if you know Palencar's work, that's saying something.) In the near future, an alien race calling itself the Atoners contacts mankind: they're terribly sorry for something they did to us ten thousand years ago, and will send teams of three humans to each of seven alien worlds, each to observe a human society and return to Earth to learn the truth of the Atoners' "Crime." Steal Across the Sky follows one of those teams. It's also a "Sci-Fi Essential Book," for those of you who trust the editorial judgement of the grey eminences of the Sci-Fi Channel.

As SFF writers get older -- assuming their careers continue more-or-less-smoothly -- they almost inevitably circle back to their older works, writing new sequels to old completed works or deciding that they can link everything they ever did into one massive superstructure (the better to re-sell it to publishers and a new generation of readers, presumably). And so, thirty-three years after their Inferno was originally published, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have decided to follow it up -- not with the expected Purgatorio (they didn't manage to get their hero out of Hell in the first place), but with the more pulpily-titled Escape from Hell, which Tor is releasing into the world this month. The first was one part Dante pastiche and one part satire on SF writers of the day; it remains to be seen what the now much older authors (who may be thinking about their own mortality in a way they weren't in the mid-'70s) will make of the continued story this time around.

And last is a book that gives me a chance to teach you all another odd publishing term: blad. A blad is a preliminary marketing tool, usually for a heavily illustrated book -- it's a full-color pamphlet with some spreads, and sometimes full chapters or sections, from a forthcoming book. Sometimes the book's cover is printed on the blad; sometimes the blad sits inside of an early sample cover. And what I have in front of me right now is a blad for The Photographer, a book about Afghanistan, created by cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, photojournalist Didier Lefevre, and graphic designer Frederic Lemercier. The Photographer combines Lefevre's actual photographs with panels from Guibert putting them into context, and telling Lefevre's story -- he first traveled to Afganistan in 1986, with the nonprofit organization Doctors Without Borders -- and it will be published by First Second on May 1st.