Review: The Jasad Heir

The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first of a promising new fantasy series in an Egyptian-inspired desert setting is a great showcase of debut author Sara Hashem's talents. Centering on the lost heiress to a kingdom thought destroyed and the terrible debt she finds herself in to a leader from the enemy nation that led the crusade to destroy hers, it's been billed as "enemies to lovers" but it most definitely isn't that simple. Normally, that trend and trope is one of my least favorites, but Hashem's leads walk the fine line of that tension better than most examples I've seen in recent years. 500 pages go by almost in the blink of an eye - I was able to read this book in one sitting - and no, there is no way there won't be a kickass sequel to really raise the stakes.

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Review: Soulbrand

Soulbrand by Andrew Rowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The third book of Weapons and Wielders - and the last one to date - is where I'll have to stop my ongoing read-through of Andrew Rowe books for now, at least until one of my local libraries finally sees fit to acquire the fourth book of Arcane Ascension. But it's a good stopping point, I'd say. While it's far longer than either of its predecessors in this series, long enough to stand on par with the first two Arcane Ascension novels, it still has a blistering fast pace and a hell of a lot of fun in the weapons department. Pale Crescent, in particular, is a new favorite weapon of mine, purely for its lunar imagery involved. I really hope that it gets used more often in future installments, though hopefully not paired with the dreaded Weight of the World attack, because that one's a real doozy...

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Review: The Mountain in the Sea

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book got a pretty nice push in marketing a few months back from Barnes & Noble, if I remember correctly, selecting it as a Book of the Month. So when I placed an order for it at the library, it was a very long waitlist, over two months...and let me tell you, I'm sorry to say that it was not worth the wait. The premise is intriguing enough, with its idea of octopi whose language is just waiting for humans to decipher, if the octopi don't kill the humans first. It's like Arrival in that respect, especially when the octopus language relies heavily on variations on circular symbols, but also like Arrival it's a very slow burn of a story. Too slow, if you ask me, and the dull human characters and their endless philosophizing doesn't help. No, this one's not for me, but maybe I'll try another Nayler novel some other time...

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Review: Tides of Fire

Tides of Fire by James Rollins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Seichan largely sat out the last Sigma Force adventure, but that was because Rollins had a lot more personal peril in mind for her in this latest installment. Following multiple lines of narratives throughout the South Seas and Southeast Asia not unlike previous adventure The Judas Strain, this time around, Sigma has to face a string of escalating geological cataclysms throughout the interconnected submarine trenches of the region, from Tonga to New Zealand to Indonesia to China. Naturally, making things worse, a Triad gunfight against a recurring Russian enemy breaks out while Seichan and Gray and friends are visiting with Seichan's mom Guan-yin, the Triad boss - and there happens to be a huge earthquake in Hong Kong, followed by a tsunami.

Inspired, as Rollins says in the author's note at the end, by the movie Krakatoa, East of Java, this book focuses more on the enormous eruption of Tambora in 1815, the Year without a Summer, with the usual historical prologue focusing on a strange phenomenon around the volcano where people's bodies turned to blackened coral. Connecting that phenomenon to some bizarre geological substrata - remnants of the planetoid Theia's collision with the young Earth that birthed the moon, though I'm pretty sure Rollins made a typo saying it was four and a half million years ago, instead of billions - and the Aboriginal Australian stories of the Dreaming and the Rainbow Serpent, with evidence to suggest that perhaps Australia, not Africa, was the origin of the human race all along...it's as head-spinning as Rollins's adventures get, but beware, and I do mean BEWARE, of the weapons-grade cliffhanger at the end.

There's gonna have to be another big team-up for the next one, that's for damn sure.

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Review: Seven Mercies

Seven Mercies by L.R. Lam and Elizabeth May
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm very glad that I was able to read this fast-paced series conclusion so soon after finally getting around to its predecessor Seven Devils super late to the party. Normally, I'm not much for the duology trend - I've complained about it numerous times - but reading the two books in such quick succession is exactly what the doctor ordered. It may have technically taken me many days, but that's only because my reading time has been a bit shortened as of late, especially with library ebooks. But this book really does live up to Lam and May's promise of Fury Road in space, a high flying and high speed and high stakes narrative as we finally set the stage for the fall of another deadly interstellar empire. Hopefully some indie movie producer gets the rights to a film adaptation someday (I say indie because let's be real, the major studios have lost a lot of goodwill with their greed in these times of WGA and SAG strikes.)

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Review: Forging Divinity

Forging Divinity by Andrew Rowe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

While waiting for the third book of Weapons & Wielders, I took a little side trip through Andrew Rowe's backlist to the first book of another series with a tangential connection at best to the other two series of his that I've been reading on my coworker Tory's rec. I think Tory might've read these books too, but it was Arcane Ascension that he liked the most, followed by Weapons & Wielders, and this series barely earned much mention from him. And I'm not surprised. Being written well before the other Rowe series, it's definitely less polished, but the dual POVs in this one are so detached and dull that it makes the book more skimmable than anything else. I'll give up after this book for this series, but at least I have another Weapons & Wielders book ready to read soon.

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Review: Dead Mountain

Dead Mountain by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The latest mystery for Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson is quite an adventurous one, once again tackling some mysterious deaths high in the mountains - this time, in the Manzano Mountains of central New Mexico. Tackling a cold case - in more ways than one - of dead missing hikers in one of the highest caves in the range quickly leads to Nora running afoul of the long arm of the corrupt law, as a nastily racist sexist shitheel sheriff tries to railroad her and her brother while they try to explore the remains ethically, since they're also in close proximity to ancient Native American burial grounds. Preston and Child, for the climbers, took inspiration from a strange incident in Soviet Russia, for which Preston was actually about to sign up for film rights before Russia invaded Ukraine and the studios decided to abandon the project. But being set in New Mexico, they get to incorporate some mysterious radiation, since they're so close to the site of the Trinity test and all...and in parallel to the Manhattan Project is a fictional, but eerily plausible, conspiracy theory in universe about the "Boston Project" of supersoldier experiments with Yeti DNA. (Be glad Steve Rogers was nowhere near this project.) Naturally, since their Relic days are behind them, Preston and Child come up with more earthbound explanations for what has happened, but that doesn't make this mystery any less interesting for it.

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