Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/17

Another week has come and gone, bringing us all that much closer to death and/or Christmas (depending on whether you're a pessimist or optimist). During that week, I got a few books in the mail, and so I want to tell you about them. Here's what a quick perusal shows me about...

John C. Wright is back with what looks like a new standalone SF novel, Count to a Trillion -- from Tor in hardcover on December 20th. It's one of those enigmatic alien artifact books, with said artifact embedded in a complicated future history and a similarly complicated relationships with a supergenius who first has it make him insane (about two hundred years on, as part of an interstellar mission from what's also described as a collapsed civilization) and then comes back, cured, another two centuries later to contemplate the artifact again and learn that his best friend is now dictator of the world. The guy's name is Menelaus Illation Montrose, and Wright's dialogue is similarly ornate, for those looking for (or avoiding) that kind of thing.

It's also time for DAW's January mass-market paperbacks, of which -- like Gaul of time immemorial -- there are three. The first is Diana Rowland's Sins of the Demon, which is the second novel about Louisiana homicide detective/demon summoner Kara Gillian listed on the card page. [1] However, the book also has quotes about other, earlier books, so I fired up the ol' Google and found this page on the author's site that lists the prior books, including two from Bantam. (TL; DR version: #1 is Mark of the Demon.) This is somewhere in the urban fantasy territory, with a strong police procedural strain in it -- there seems to be only a mild romance element (in a demonic lord who is "deeply interested" in her -- I've seen enough paranormal romance to know where this is going).

Michelle West's House Name is a big fat book, and the third in the "House War" series, a secondary world fantasy series with at least a strong thread of the epic to it, with an orphan heroine who's been brought to live in the most powerful of the ruling houses of the Essalieyan Empire and who will -- I'm morally certain of it -- turn out to be secretly special in some very important way.

And last of the three DAW paperbacks is Benjamin Tate's Leaves of Flame, the followup to his first novel, Well of Sorrows. It's another big fantasy novel, set a hundred years after the first one -- but with the same hero, which is An Important Clue when genre-typing it -- with the fate of the world in the balance and some kind of magic centering around Wells, Trees, and races that aren't called elves and dwarves.


[1] This is the technical publishing term -- or, at least it was in certain sectors of publishing where I learned it; it can be dangerous to assume anything is universal -- for the page that says "Other Books by this author" in the frontmatter.