Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/6

For those of you who are in the self-declared greatest country on earth, I hope you had a pleasant patriotic holiday (and that, like me, that holiday extended into a four-day weekend). For the rest of you...well, most of you get many more vacation days than we Americans do, so I hope getting the month of August off will quell your sadness for not having a dedicated "watch explosives in the sky" holiday earlier in the summer.

That holiday is probably the reason why I only got a couple of books this week, though I never can tell -- the ways of publicists are secret and mysterious, and one can only petition the Gods of Publicity, not compel them to action. (Unless one can conjure one of the Phrases of Power, such as "Network Morning Show" or "National NPR" or the fabled "Oprah" of memory.)

Anyway, these are those two books. I haven't read either of them yet, but one of them -- heck, both of them, potentially -- could be your new favorite book of 2013. Here's what looks most interesting and/or amusing to me right this second about them:

Rachel Caine's "Revivalist" contemporary fantasy series -- about Bryn Davis, a zombie addicted to a drug that keeps her body fresh -- continues into a third book with Terminated. The previous book, Two Weeks' Notice, was a Times bestseller, and Caine's prior series, "Weather Warden," also had a lot of fans. (I read pieces of a bunch of those book when I was angling for a particular publishing job which didn't work out -- so I can't speak to how Caine shapes a whole book, but all of the bits I read were entertaining.) Terminated is a Roc mass-market paperback (and the equivalent collections of electrons in your favorite formats), coming on August 6th.

And then there's Carpathian by David L. Golemon, a St. Martin's Press hardcover hitting stores on July 30th and the latest "Event Group Thriller." (That almost sounds like a series of real-world invitation-only rave parties, but, no, it's a series of novels about the super-secret government agency that stops supernatural apocalypse at least once a novel since Event. This one is mostly about the secret army of warriors (or perhaps animals, or maybe both -- the flap copy goes both ways) that defeated the Pharaoh and the inhabitants of Jericho for the soon-to-be Israelites and then disappeared without an archaeological trace, but also (as the title hints) has something to do with Transylvania. I would not bet against Transylvania's most famous fictional inhabitant showing up at some point, either.