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HE DRANK, AND SAW THE SPIDER

Existing fans will enjoy this book, but it won’t win many converts.

Another independently intelligible outing for freelance sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse (Wake of the Bloody Angel, 2012, etc.).

As a beardless mercenary, Eddie fails to save a stranger from being mauled to death by a bear—although he does rescue the baby girl (named, oddly, Isidore) the man dies protecting. He leaves the baby and the stranger’s bag of gold with a good-hearted shepherd’s daughter and goes about his swashbuckling business. Now, 16 years later, sword jockey Eddie is between jobs (“on vacation”) and traveling with his girlfriend, the dauntless and resourceful freelance wagon-driver Liz Dumont. Finding himself in the same village, Eddie’s memories gradually surface, and he wonders what became of Isidore. Well, she’s developed into an intelligent and beautiful teenager, Isadora, who’s captured the heart of Jack, the incognito prince of the realm. But the least of the obstacles to their romance is Jack’s father, King Ellis; the pair will also have to contend with neighboring monarch Mad King Gerald and his ghastly legacy, Gerald’s overbearing sorceress, Opulora, and a huge, powerful, smelly and evidently simple-minded creature named Tatterhead. The plot’s so mysterious, even to the characters, that, halfway through, Bledsoe introduces a wandering scribe to explain what’s going on. Despite the sanitized medieval setting, speech and sensibilities are modern, with hints that the magic is actually immeasurably advanced science. And Eddie’s professed cynicism is mostly a front—he’s actually quite a humanitarian. The biggest failing is his narrative voice: He sounds exactly the same as a youngster and, 16 years later, as an accomplished veteran.

Existing fans will enjoy this book, but it won’t win many converts.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7653-3414-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA

A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.

Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.

A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

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