New Procurements

Above are the books sent to me for review over the last 10 days or so, but I'm only going to concentrate on a few titles from the batch. At the top is Steven Harper's The Doomsday Vault, which is the start to a new Steampunk and should be in stores shortly. Mark Hodder's next Burton & Swinburne adventure sees the duo traveling to Africa to search for the source of the Nile in Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon.

A couple years back I wrote something of a diatribe about a new I, Robot trilogy coming written by Mickey Zucker Reichert, which is officially authorized by the Isaac Asimov estate. I Robot: To Protect comes out this November and I can say they at least did a great job with the cover. I'm still on the fence about reading it as I haven't read the Robot books in a long, long time, but the new trilogy is supposed to be a prequel series.  Though as I stare at the book I'm reminded that I've been meaning to re-read the first couple of Foundation books for the last year.

Stone Spring is the first new Stephen Baxter book that has intrigued me in quite awhile, since I read the Manifold trilogy and found it a bit lacking the further into the series I delved. I enjoy Baxter's alternative history related stories the best and Stone Spring takes place 10,000 years ago so it just may work for me.

Briarpatch is Tim Pratt's latest contemporary Fantasy and seems a bit darker than his normal novel-length work that is out now. This is also my first review copy from up-and-coming indie publisher ChiZine who have been earning a name as purveyors of strange fictions. I in particular enjoyed the meta-heavy A Door to Lost Pages by Claude Lalumière that I read a month or so back, bumps and all.  Eyes to See is Joseph Nassise's start to a new dark Urban Fantasy series and the blurb really attracts me:

In an urban fantasy that charts daring new territory in the field, Jeremiah Hunt has been broken by a malevolent force that has taken his young daughter and everything else of value in his life: his marriage, his career, his reputation. Desperate to reclaim what he has lost, Hunt finally turns to the supernatural for justice.

Abandoning all hope for a normal life, he enters the world of ghosts and even more dangerous entities from beyond the grave. Sacrificing his normal sight so that he can see the souls of the dead and the powers that stalk his worst nightmares, Hunt embarks upon a strange new career--a pariah among the living; a scourge among the dead; doomed to walk between the light of day and the deepest darkness beyond night.

His love for his departed daughter sustains him when all is most hopeless, but Hunt is cursed by something more evil than he can possibly imagine. As he descends into the maelstrom of his terrifying quest, he discovers that even his deepest fears are but prelude to yet darker deeds by a powerful entity from beyond the grave...that will not let him go until it has used him for its own nefarious purposes.

You Might Also Like:
REVIEW | Anti-Ice by Stephen Baxter
REVIEW | The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder
NEWS | New I, Robot Universe Trilogy
FREE FICTION | A Shweta Narayan Steampunk tale
REVIEW | Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick