Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/4

This is one of those weeks without a lot of books, so I have lots of time to waste in preliminaries!

Luckily for both of us, I'm not going to actually do that.

When I get books in the mail, I write about them here, every Monday. This week, I got one book, so let me tell you about it -- whatever I can tell from a quick glance at something I didn't know existed until I opened a package on Saturday afternoon.

Spymaster begins a new epic fantasy series -- The Dragon Corsairs -- from Margaret Weis and Robert Krammes, who previous wrote the Dragon Brigades series together. (Weis, of course, has written a lot of other things with a lot of other people going back to Dragonlance in the misty '80s.) This series has a Lost Prince claimant lurking in the wings -- and so I expect will be about the fates of kingdoms by the time its done -- but this first book is mostly about a privateer captain in an Age of Sail world with both dragons and battling empires. (And that's less generic, and more interesting than yet another guy who wants to be the next King of Wherever.) Oh, and the privateer captain is a woman, which would have been notable in the real-world analogy of this time, but maybe less so in the modern fantasy genre.

Spymaster is a hardcover from Tor, officially on sale March 21st.