Matthew Hunter

In The Killing Dance, Anita faces a new and unusual threat: a human assassin seeking to collect a cool half-million in return for her untimely demise. But assassins are only the beginning; the problems that Richard has created within his pack by trying to encourage a non-violent exchange of power are growing, and Jean-Claude’s “more photogenic, less monstrous” vampire regime is less than stable at the present. In that context, the obligatory murder mystery is almost anticlimatic.

George RR Martin is a writer with a long, if less than best-selling, list of hits. His previous work includes science fiction like Tuf Voyaging, the tale of a solitary “eco-engineer” with the resources of an intersteller bioweapons facility at his command, or editing the Wild Cards collection, which featured short stories about the real problems faced by comic-book superheroes. He was established as publishable – but there was absolutely no hint of what would come.

After the events in Shadow Games left the Black Company with neither of its commanding officers, with Dreams of Steel covering the consequences of that loss, Bleak Seasons (the Book of Murgen, and the first book of Glittering Stone) picks up the story of the majority of the surviving Company – those who made it into the walls of Dejagore. The tale is disjointed in space and time, as the narrator is subject to hallucinatory fits that drag his mind to other times and other places.

Who do you call when you have a mass grave that’s two centuries old and you want to raise them all from the dead? Anita Blake, of course. No one else can do it. But it’s never as simple as that. Where The Lunatic Cafe served to broaden the Anitaverse to include lycanthropes, Bloody Bones reaches into a different sort of mythology: fairy tales. Specifically, the Faerie, cold iron and four-leaf clovers and bad nursery rhymes and all.

Having established Jean-Claude as Master of the City in Circus of the Damned, in The Lunatic Cafe the attention shifts to Richard… Richard, Anita’s science teacher and romantic interest… as well as beta wolf to Marcus in the local werewolf pack by way of a bad batch of lycanthrope vaccine. And while Anita learns to deal with her beloved getting furry once a month, she’s handed a missing-lycanthrope case and a naga skin.

The Silver Gryphon is the third book in Lackey’s Mage Wars trilogy, which itself is an attempt to fill in some major backstory to her Valdemar universe. It’s not particularly memorable, and there are few ties to the larger world and story of Valdemar itself. Even if you’ve read the first two books in this trilogy, you’re safe skipping this one. It’s really bad, but in an inoffensive way.

Anita Blake and Jean-Claude struggle to sort out their love lives as a rogue pack of vampires moves into town, determined to take over the reins from the new Master of the City – and not incidentally, to leave a few corpses for the police to investigate in the process. What sounds like the plot of a novel is only another day in Anita’s harried life, and it doesn’t get any easier from there.

Lord of Chaos, the 6th book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, marks a turning point for the series. It is the last book that can be effectively defended as lacking major flaws. In some ways it is almost a victim of its own bloat… almost, but not quite, for the high points of the story are very, very high. We are witness to Rand’s struggle to control the nations he has conquered; between Tear, Cairhien, and the Shaido, his political plate is more than full.

Anita Blake is back, and this time she’s asked to sort out a murderous zombie while convincing Jean-Claude, the vampire Master of the City, that dinner and a movie really aren’t in her schedule, especially not when the undead are asking. And as if that wasn’t enough, one of her clients wants her to raise a someone from the dead… someone long enough in the grave to require a human sacrifice.

Jordan’s Wheel of Time series continues with The Fires of Heaven, the 5th volume of what may be the longest-running fantasy series ever… at least in terms of page count. Rand’s destiny has taken him to the Aiel Waste, a vast desert populated by nomadic warriors, where he will contend with the Shaido Aiel following Couladin for the title of Car’a’carn (chief of chiefs)… and with the Forsaken, who lurk as always in the shadows, awaiting the opportunity to strike.