Reviews by Writer Dan

I don’t know if I can accurately describe just how excited I was to dive into this book. Mark Hodder’s Adventures of Burton and Swinburne were some of the most amazing books that I read in the last few years. Major anticipation in this corner. So the fact that this book was nothing like I thought it would be, AND ended up being Science Fiction, AND I still really liked it says something impressive about Mr. Hodder and his burgeoning array of great stories.

A RED SUN ALSO RISES (Amazon), to all appearances, is a stand-alone novel in the same vein as Hodder’s previous trilogy and definitely a not book that you’d find Arthur Krystal picking up at your local bookstore. Go ahead and check out the very fine book cover and tell me that it doesn’t make your mind just go, SPROING! Seriously great artwork there. And the story ain’t half bad either!
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Like the hair in your panna cotta, or the blow fly in your bisque, a bad salesman will most often destroy the goodness that surrounds it, no matter how much of that goodness may be available. At least, it will often destroy the idea of large-scale goodness for me. This single idea represents one of the most important reasons why I just couldn’t bring myself to love this most recent read. And yet, I will often pull the fly out and eat the soup anyhow. I mean, who can resist a good soup!

KOP KILLER by Warren Hammond (Amazon), is the third book in his Kop series, but is handled well-enough that it has little problem standing on its own. The story is set on the planet of Lagarto, where the long day and night cycles make for some interesting dynamics, and nearly every inhabitant living there understands that their lives can sink no further than this.
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I think I’ve mentioned before how I like to see authorial “progress” from one book to the next. Seeing them get better in at least one aspect of their craft with each progressive offering to the reading masses gives me hope that there will, someday, be more authors that I love to read. In general, I think that most authors fall into this category. It’s hardly ever that I find one that seems to have regressed further from the goal that I think each of them should strive for: greatness in storytelling. As I’m sure you can guess by now, this book is one of those.

LANCE OF EARTH AND SKY (Amazon) is the second in the planned Chaos Knight trilogy and continues the story of Vidarian Rulorat and the empire of Alorea. Mostly, however, this is a story about the empire, as Vidarian factors so little in what actually happens.
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Anyone out there like movies that are based on actual historical events? I think there’s something to be said for them, but in general I find that regardless of how much I love them, the endings always end up being particularly less that I had anticipated. This book was totally like that. Steve’s going to love this, because this time around, I totally agree with his overall opinion of Ms. Parker’s latest offering, SHARPS (Amazon): full of unfulfilled promises. I do still disagree that this description applies to the Engineer Trilogy, but in this case, he’s totally spot-on.

SHARPS is another stand-alone from the veritable K.J. Parker, an author whom the reading public still knows so little about. It’s another book about war, and what people are willing to do to get what they want. It’s another book full of sarcasm, and multi-hued characters. It’s another book of swords and mayhem. And if she didn’t write it so dang well, I probably wouldn’t have liked it as much as I did.

But I did. Cause, boy, was it fun.
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I’m just not getting it. Science Fiction. I hate the fact that I sometimes sound like a broken record, but there’s just so little SF out there that I’ve read to prove me wrong that I just can’t help but feel jaded. The up-side is that as long as it’s well-written, I’m not going to rip into too much, because if there’s one thing that is consistent and good about these books, it’s the prose.

IN THE LION’S MOUTH (Amazon) by Michael Flynn is the third installment in his most recent space opera series featuring the inimitable Donovan Buigh.  I wasn’t very keen on the second, UP JIM RIVER (EBR Review), but I decided that to be fair, I had better read the first, THE JANUARY DANCER (Amazon), before diving into this one.  Unfortunately, I needn’t have bothered, for I just found more of the same: a beautifully-written story with a swiss cheese of a plot that ended with me asking, “What was the point of that?”
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I like being proven wrong. Well, let my qualify that statement, because I hate being told that I’m wrong.  I do, however, enjoy being surprised by finding out for myself that something is not the way that I thought it was. After reading several short stories and a novel by Mr. Lake, I’d pretty much written him off as someone that I wouldn’t enjoy reading any more of.  So having this book land in my pile was an interesting experience to say the least.  As with my most recent foray into Science Fiction, I of course felt obligated to read the first book in the series before I read this one.

ENDURANCE (Amazon) is the second book in the “Green Universe” authored by the prolific Jay Lake.  I had previously read the first book in his “Mainspring Universe”, MAINSPRING (Amazon), and was less than enthused by what I found.  In essence, great writing, interesting characters, a decent–if slightly wandering–plot, with a horrible lack of an ending.  It is a tribute to Mr. Lake’s prose and storytelling ability that he made me forget about that final point when I dove into GREEN (Amazon) and subsequently with ENDURANCE.
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I have an awesome boss.  Well, all of us are pretty cool here at EBR, but Mr. Steve is a class act.  He’s smart, he’s debonaire, he’s… what’s that? Why all the sycophantic flattery?  It doesn’t even sound like I’m talking to you? Dang. Well, here’s the thing.  You might have noticed the title of this book review already, and maybe even more than that you might remember the fact that Mr. Steve was going to have another short story in this anthology. Yeah. Well, his story rocked, but… um… wow, I better just get into it.
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I have a kid that has a blanket.  Anyone with kids (or who can still remember their “blanket”) totally knows where I’m going with this.  This raggedy piece of purple stitching gets dragged around everywhere.  Actually, it only used to be a blanket–these days about 12 square inches in size–but it’s still the only source of comfort that works every time.

DOWN THE MYSTERLY RIVER (Amazon) is a novel written by Bill Willingham that contains an amalgam of other authors’ characters caught up in a young-adult adventure story right out of the storybooks.  The main character, Max the Wolf (originally written by Lawrence Swift) is a scout’s scout that teams up with a number of talking animals (from the minds and imaginations of several others) after waking up in a forest with little to no memory of how they got there.
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I was pretty torn when I read WOLFSANGEL (EBR Review), the first in M. D. Lachlan’s historical fantasy series about the Norse god, Odin, and his eternal battle with the wolf, Fenrir. It had a whole lot that I loved and bundle more that really bothered me. Going into this book, I considered myself to be hopefully optimistic with a couple major concerns. Now that I’ve read Lachlan’s second offering, I again find myself torn but for completely different reasons. Because of this, I am going to do my best to give you my honest opinion.
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Okay, so there are times when this job gets difficult, and this is one of those times. Writing stories and then putting them out into the world for people to either love to pieces or gnash between their teeth is not easy. As a reviewer though, I feel like it’s my responsibility to give an honest opinion. I always try to do that. That being said, I’m sure that Mrs. Cooper is a really nice person, but this book just wasn’t very good at all.
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