Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/23

Here are the books that the hard-working publicists of American book publishing [1] sent me this past week, trying to get me to review them and make the world love these books as much as they do. I haven't read them (yet), but I do want you to know they exist, so here's what I can tell you by looking at them:

Something More Than Night is the fourth novel and first standalone from Ian Tregillis, author of the magnificent Milkweed Triptych, a trilogy of novels about a very alternate and very fantastical WW II (Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War, and Necessary Evil, which are recommended as highly as I possibly can). If you've been waiting for him to be out of the trilogy to try his work, this is your golden opportunity: it's a hardboiled mystery set in Heaven, in which one fallen angel has to solve the murder of the Archangel Gabriel. Something More Than Night is a Tor hardcover, hitting December 3rd, and I expect it will be as brilliant as Tregillis's previous books and I also expect you all to at least look it up. (Though I will be very disapproving if you don't read it.)

Angelopolis is the second in Danielle Trussoni's series about the human-angel hybrids called Nephilim, after the major bestseller Angelology. (And so Trussoni bears the same relationship to the urban fantasy genre as Michael Crichton did to SF: she writes the same sort of thing, but it's considered completely different, because it's never had the grubby genre imprint on it.) By Angelopolis, ten years have passed since the first book, and until the angel-hunter Verlaine once again encounters the mysterious Evangeline. It's a Penguin trade paperback, quite portable for reading on airplane or elsewhere, and will be available on the very last day of this year.

And last for this week is another big fat original anthology from George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, Dangerous Women, which follows their similar books Warriors and Songs of Love and Death. It has twenty-one brand-new stories by some of the best genre writers (and that definition of "genre" is wider than you may think), from Lawrence Block to Cecelia Holland, from Joe Abercrombie to Diana Gabaldon, from Pat Cadian to Lev Grossman, from Sharon Kay Penman to Jim Butcher. But the biggest draw will be the last story, "The Princess and the Queen," a new novella by Martin. This one is a Tor hardcover, and you can find it on December 3rd.


[1] If any hard-working publicists in other industries or of other nations would like to send me free stuff so I can write about it here, please let me know -- I like free stuff and I like excuses to get myself writing more.