Matthew Hunter

Thief of Lives is an unusual combination of mythology. The traditional pseudo-medieval fantasy setting, with elves and (presumably) dwarves, contrasts sharply with the primary focus of the characters: killing vampires. Or rather, exploiting the ignorance of the people who believe in vampires, because two snake-oil salesmen can make a good living getting rid of things that don’t really exist. This book follows up on the first, which revealed to the protagonists that their mythical enemy actually existed, with an exploration of the stereotypically dark and mysterious past.

Guilty Pleasures is the first novel in a long-running series. The novel is set in a world very like our modern world, with a few minor differences: primarily the strong presence of the supernatural. In fact, that presence is so strong that vampires have been granted legal rights, a vaccine has been developed for lycanthropy, and degrees in “preternatural biology” are not unknown. Anita Blake is making her way in the world through the use of her supernatural talents; specifically, her ability to raise the dead as zombies.

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.

Meet April Cassidy. She’s just applied to a software development firm on Tanusha, one of the most advanced planets in the Federation. She wants to work as a programmer, studying the intricacies of artificial intelligence – or as close as the legal restrictions will allow her to get. She is a very good candidate for the position, very familiar with the latest algorithms. Good enough to analyze them at a glance in her job interview.

If the Anita Blake series is Hamilton’s talents in full flower, then Nightseer is little more than an amateurish first novel that attained publishable status by virtue of the author’s later success. It is not so much a bad novel as it is an embarassing one; clumsy and awkward and heavy-handed like a teenager’s first dates, the occasional moments of skillful writing are not worth wading through the adolescent wish-fulfillment. Only a completist should consider this one.

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.

This is a compilation of the earliest short stories and novellas featuring Conan the Cimmerian, famed barbarian king and warrior without peer. Conan was born in a time when the cutting edge of fantasy and science fiction was often to be found in magazines, rather than novels, and this collection brings together the scattered early stories into a single place. There are many strange and terrifying beasts, a healthy helping of sorcery, and more than enough steel for the barbarian of lore to hold his own.

Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders series opens with this book, Ship of Magic. Once again the author provides an unusual and emotional story. Readers already familiar with the Royal Assassin series will recognize the world, but the areas we know well are distant places while those we see up close are new and fresh. With one significant exception, the level of magic has been dramatically reduced from the earlier trilogy, and the result is a human tale of desperation rather than a fantasy adventure on the high seas.

Legends is a collection of short stories by noted authors: Stephen King (The Dark Tower), Terry Pratchett (Discworld), Terry Goodkind (The Sword of Truth), Orson Scott Card (The Tales of Alvin Maker), Robert Silverberg (Majipoor), Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea), Tad Williams (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn), George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire), Anne McCaffrey (Pern), Raymond E. Feist (The Riftwar Saga), and Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time).

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.