Matthew Hunter

Port of Shadows occupies a strange place in the chronology of the Black Company; it predates almost all of the history we know, picking the story up after the first book and before the second. The author appears to be numbering it 1.5. Thank god for decimals. This is not a good place to start the series. Read The Black Company (the first book of the series by the same name) for that.

The 7th book in Evan Currie’s Odyssey One series, this book adds a few new elements to the series that are less than ideal. Still, the writing is good, and the story remains entertaining. There are still space battles, but less exploration. If you’ve enjoyed the series up to this point, there’s no reason not to continue reading, but I can’t give the series a full thumbs up because of the unnecessary and intrusive virtue signaling.

Wearing the Cape is the first book in a rather interesting, if not especially deep, superhero series. As you might expect, the first book is the origin story, but it covers a bit more than that. It’s obvious by the end of the book that we’re not dealing with a comic-book level plot. These heroes have grown-up problems. It’s worth reading at certain price points. I started the series when it was on Kindle Unlimited, but it’s no longer there, and the books are currently priced at $8 each (about half a traditionally published new release, and roughly the same as an older traditionally published book).

The latest in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, Serpentine continues the series with the planned wedding of “Ted” and Donna. Of course, things never go quite according to plan, and there are the usual supernatural complications that seem to follow Anita whereever she goes. Since we’re talking about book 26 in a series, this is not the place for new readers to start. Further, we’re talking about a series where the closest thing to a Dark Lord threatening the world was killed off something like 10 books ago.

A Wastrel’s Tale is (probably) the first book in a swords and sorcery zombie apocalypse series. The story revolves around a member of an order dedicated to fighting necromancy with the use of arms and specialized magic, yet for decades now there have been but few necromancers. Indeed, only one of any notable talent or skill, and that one in captivity. An ideal condition for a third son who would dearly love to spend his life training, drinking, and wenching, no?

An Airless Storm follows up on the adventures of Andrew Cochrane and his security service of interstellar mercenaries. Following their initial success in funding their operations, the company has ordered more ships and larger ships. But their enemies are doing the same. The book has the same vaguely Heinlein-juvenile feel, and the plot armor is less perfect. Mostly it represents an improvement, but the ratio of people talking about their plans and engaging in covert operation shenanigans versus space battles is still pretty high.

Peter Grant’s new novel, The Stones of Silence, is set in his science-fiction universe, sharing it with his two other series starting with Take the Star Road and War to the knife. It’s unclear to me if the setting is intended to be the same, or just happens to be similar in a generic science fiction way. The setup for his new series is interesting, but shares the flaws of the earlier works.

Brief Cases by Jim Butcher is a collection of short stories in the very popular Dresden Files series, named for the central character Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard – or at least the only one with an ad in the phone book. I don’t normally go in for short story collections, but occasionally with an established universe my completionist instincts will kick in. In this case I had already read Side Jobs, a similar collection by the same author in the same universe.

A sequel to Sufficiently Advanced Magic, On the Shoulders of Titans manages to significantly complicate the plot. The number of characters who may not be trustworthy or whose interests may lie in a direction other than that of their allies grows to very nearly equal the number of characters in the book. Thankfully, the “magic school” elements of the plot are reduced almost to insignificance; the main character barely attends class and spends only a limited amount of time on screen taking tests.

What do you get when you combine an interesting magic system, a lot of influence from video games, a competent but emotionally distant author, a dash of gender ambiguity, a token pinch of political preaching, and yet another book about a child who goes to magic school? Apparently, you get a pretty good stew of a book that’s enjoyable to read, intellectually interesting, and only rarely makes me want to throw it against the wall for brief periods.