Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/7

Every week, I list the books I received for review here -- perhaps to spark someone's interest, or perhaps not. But I know I'll never be able to read (let along review) all of these, and every book deserves at least a moment of notice. So here's what I saw last week:

The Better to Hold You, a contemporary fantasy that's the first novel credited to "Alisa Sheckley." Sheckley -- the daughter of Robert Sheckley, which gives her a fine literary pedigree -- also writes as Alisa Kwitney (and was a very successful editor at DC/Vertigo for most of the '90s under that name), but the Kwitney books are romances, or chick lit, or something in that vague area. And, since publishers are always worried about audiences being confused, it looks like someone asked "Can we put out this werewolf book under a slightly different name?" Now, I don't know that this is a werewolf novel -- I'll admit. It's clearly "urban fantasy," though, which generally means either vampires or werewolves. And, though the back cover says that the heroine's husband has just come back from Romania with a notable change in demeanor -- and "Romania" is often a big nudge for "vampire" in books like this -- on the front cover, the heroine also has a wolf on her pendant, another wolf right behind her, and a big ol' full moon over her shoulder. And we all know that moons on urban fantasy covers mean werewolves, right? The Better to Hold You will be published on February 24th as a mass-market paperback by Del Rey.

Kari Sperring's first novel is Living With Ghosts, another one of those supposedly rare and despised secondary-world fantasy novels with an identifiable human being on the cover. I suppose all the Abercrombie fans avoid female writers to begin with, so it doesn't have any additional girl-cooties from their point of view. It's set in a fantasy version of France, is nearly five hundred pages long, and has a fine first line. ("Even the lieutenant's ghost looked startled as the door slammed shut.") This one comes from DAW Books -- which probably, as far as J. Young Abercrombie-fan is concerned, is infested with girl-cooties -- and will be available in mass-market paperback on March 3rd.

(Has anyone else noticed that Internet buzz, at least in the SFF world, is entirely about books by boys? I wonder why that is?)

Also from DAW in March is the mass-market reprint of Michelle West's The Hidden City, the first book of her new series "The House Wars." West is one of those writers, like Sheckley/Kwitney above (or, slightly more off-point, the artist Victoria Poyser-Lisi), whose last names you need to keep an eye on -- she's also written as Michelle Sagara and Michelle Sagara West.

And DAW's third mass-market for March is Prophets, a SF novel by S. Andrew Swann -- who, just to keep the theme going, is actually named Steven Swiniarski. Prophets is the first book of a series called "Apotheosis," and is set in the old-fashioned default intermediate future, with humanity having spread to the stars. As this story opens, it's two hundred years since the last government of all humanity, the Confederacy, fell, and transmissions have just been received from parts unknown, which sets off the usual scramble to find their source and exploit it. I note that one faction here, which may be the bad guys, is the Eridani Caliphate; I haven't looked at the book closely enough to be sure if axes are grinding or not.

And my last book this time out is a hardcover from Roc, Anne Bishop's The Shadow Queen. It's the latest book in her "Black Jewels" series, which I have the vague -- and possibly completely misinformed -- sense is basically Darkover with added S&M. And I'm sure saying so will get someone how knows better to explain what these books really are like, via the universal law that the best way to learn the truth is to claim something unlikely on the Internet. Roc will publish The Shadow Queen on March 3rd.