The Folding Knife
With luck, intellect, and an innate skill with strategy on his side, Basso is a powerhouse of ambition. His goal: to take everything he can and control the rest. Just because he can.
Well, at least that’s what he’ll tell you. But, as Basso would say, there’s always another reason.
Set in the ancient Rome-like city of the Vesani Republic, THE FOLDING KNIFE (Amazon) follows the life of Bassianus Severus, First Citizen, from the odd circumstances surrounding his birth, to his meteoric rise in the banking industry, to becoming the elected leader of the most civilized city of the known world. It’s a story of politics and business, of love and hate–and how little it takes for one to become the other. But mostly it’s about Basso, and no matter how great a man becomes, and how pure his intentions are, when everything finally crashes the sound can be deafening.
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New contest!
Yes. Another one. Already. Don’t even pretend you’re not just giddy with childlike excitement.
This one is easy. If absolutely every one of you don’t enter, Steve’s ninja-zombie-assassins are going to come after you and Nick will blow up your shoes. You may be able to take the beard off the terrorist, but you can’t take the terrorist out of the beard…. wait… that doesn’t work… Crap! You get the idea. Just be afraid.Read the rest of this post »
Yay For New Reviewers!
So. We had a contest. All sorts of people entered. We were expecting one or two good ones amidst several crappy ones. As it happens, nearly all the submissions were solid. However, some were just better than others. We ended up with three “winners” who are going to enjoy doing a couple reviews a month for us. So, here they are, along with reasons why we chose them:
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Spellwright
If you are an aspiring author, we can guarantee you have heard this advice: write what you know. Now granted, for the most part you can come to know most anything via study and research. When it comes to disabilities, however, you simply can’t know unless you’ve experienced it. We use this as a preface to Blake Charlton‘s SPELLWRIGHT (Amazon), because Charlton took that bit of advice and ran with it.
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Procession of the Dead
PROCESSION OF THE DEAD (Amazon), the premiere book in a new series, The City, is Darren Shan‘s first foray into adult novels. We knew his Cirque du Freak novels were dark and creepy (if for a younger audience) and therefore were pretty excited to see what the guy could do with more adult content, and we weren’t disappointed at all.
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Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates
As you will all recall, our Fantasy 202 post involved a lot of Horror. It is an under-appreciated genre that contains one of (in our opinions) the best writers out there: Brian Lumley. His novels, over the years, have continually been able to impress our critical minds. With the paperback due out soon, Tor sent us a copy of Lumley’s NECROSCOPE: HARRY AND THE PIRATES (Amazon).
Upon first taking the book in hand, the reader will first notice two things. First, the cover is done by the true Necroscope series artist, Bob Eggleton (one of our favorite artists)… and yet it seems almost YA. Second, PIRATES is very thin, only 189 pages. Suffice it to say, PIRATES is not YA. It contains two novellas, and a vignette (as Lumley calls it) that are set during the Lost Years of Harry Keogh’s life. For the uninitiated, the Lost Years mark the 8ish year period between books 2 and 3. We’ll say right here that if you haven’t read NECROSCOPE (Amazon) and VAMPHYRI! (Amazon) you shouldn’t read PIRATES yet. It just won’t make enough sense to you. If you find yourself in that camp, do yourself a favor and buy those novels yesterday.
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Watcher of the Dead
New J.V. Jones? Yes please. WATCHER OF THE DEAD (Amazon) made us want to sing the “we love J.V.” song over and over. Yes, we wrote a song about her. We are Gods to you, our loyal reader-slaves, who are you to judge us!?
There are very few authors we like as much as J.V. Jones, and even fewer with the attention for detail that she has. If you couldn’t tell from our previous mention of her, we just might have a little (OK, huge) crush on her. But it is with good reason!
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Acacia: The War With the Mein
We have received quite a few requests to review ACACIA: THE WAR WITH THE MEIN (Amazon), and we decided that we should probably honor those requests. We ARE very kind and giving, after all. Yeah, we know the book isn’t a new release, but it seems a shocking number of people haven’t read it. Luckily, our good buddy Rob was all sorts of anxious to do this review, and you all get to benefit. Enjoy–EBR.
****
Is your George R.R. Martin starting to sag? Do you still love his epic storyline, but hate the wait? Do you find yourself wondering if there will ever be a way to get that same gritty, edge-of-your-seat sensation without waiting years (or is it decades?) for character and plot progression? What if we told you it was possible? And what if we said that you could get it on-time? Early, even? That you could have twice the Martinesque, twice as fast? You wouldn’t believe us, would you?
Believe (feel free to drop a “hallelujah”).
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Contest: Reviewers Wanted
So, you want to be an Elitist Reviewer too? Well, you are in luck.
Contrary to popular belief, we do have lives. We work full-time, attend college, have families, aspire to be authors ourselves, and require sleep (sometimes). In short, we want to recruit a few peoples to be reviewers for us.
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WWW:Wake
In our ongoing effort to read all the Hugo nominated novels for 2010, we continue with Robert J. Sawyer‘s WWW:WAKE (Amazon). Maybe it’s just us, but it seems like Sawyer is consistently nominated for the Hugo for “Best Novel”. Does this mean his books are always awesome? For many people, yes.
But not for us.
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