Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/28

This week, there's only one book to write about, so I'll get the preliminaries out of the way quickly: this showed up in my mail last week, sent by a wonderful publicist from Tor, in the hopes that I'd publicize it, which I am doing right now. I haven't read it yet -- and I probably won't get to it quickly, if within the life of the universe at all -- but I still want to make sure those of you who might love it know that it's coming.

So, this week's book is Orb Sceptre Throne, the fourth Malazan Empire novel by Ian C. Esslemont. (Esslemont created the world of the Malazan Empire with Steven Erikson, something like twenty years ago now, but Erikson beat Esslemont into print by about a decade -- but they were equal partners to begin with, and have carved out different parts of the timeline to concentrate on for their own works.) It will be published (in the US) in May of this year, simultaneously as hardcover and trade paperback (and in the usual electronic formats, if that needs to be specified). I haven't read Esselmont's Malaz novels -- I'm still three behind on Erikson's gigantic monsters, so I'm trying to pace myself -- but I thought his first few books took place decades earlier than Erickson's stories, with only a few minor characters in common. It's a big, interesting, detailed world, so there's certainly room for more than Erikson's ten doorstop novels in it. This one takes place in -- or at least begins in -- Darujhistan, the city at the center of Erikson's first Malaz novel, GGardens of the Moon, and seems to take place after the end of Erikson's series, since there's a reference to the fragments of Moon's Spawn crashing into the sea. So, if you're wondering what happens after the end of The Crippled God, this may be it.