Having read lots of enthusiastic reviews for Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, I was eager to try his latest. Tremblay has a talent for establishing a creepy atmosphere with very little information to go on. The reader is given small brushstrokes—a glimpse of a shadowy form lurking in the dark, a face peering through a window, pages from a diary scattered on the floor—and then must piece these things together to form an idea of what’s happening. It’s a very effective writing style and creates some great tension, but it can also be frustrating when nothing really happens until the very end. Sadly, I found myself bored at times with Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, especially the middle parts between the exciting opening scenes and the final reveal. In all honesty, I did have a rather fractured reading schedule this past week, which rarely improves the flow of a story. But I felt uninspired to pick the book up when I did have time to read, which frankly, makes me sad. However, having said all that, Tremblay is a wonderful writer and his book touches on a topic that many readers will relate to. The story opens at an emotional moment that…

Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older was a fascinating blend of technology, politics, big corporations and conspiracy.  Everything in this world revolves around Information, a corporatized database of sorts that contains pretty much everything. It’s like Google, research libraries and government databases all rolled into one mega-powered Information solution. Pretty much, it’s all the information in the world contained and controlled. I found the government structure in this really intriguing. Instead of countries ruled by their own local governments, the world is now broken into pieces (centenals – which contain a population of about 100,000). Each centenal is ruled by their elected government, at least until the next election in 10 years. They don’t vote for individual people here or there, the entire government is a whole package deal. They refer to this model as “micro-democracy”. Now, as you can imagine, the campaigning, research and everything else that goes into a typical election here is on a whole other level when it is the entire package being voted on. It pretty much turns governments into corporations (in fact, some of them bear the names of modern day corporations we are quite familiar with) and all the tactics are taken to a much…

I must confess, I only finished The Rook last month when the surprise arrival of a Stiletto ARC prompted me to do some quick catching up with the series, so I can’t claim to have waited for this sequel for as long as others. That said though, I was no less excited to jump right in! I loved the first book, and practically dove into this next one straight away. The first thing you should know about Stiletto is that even though it picks up where The Rook left off, it’s also not your typical conventional follow-up. For one thing, Myfanwy Thomas is no longer the main protagonist. Instead, we get two new leading ladies: a Checquy Pawn named Felicity Clements, and a Grafter surgeon named Odette Leliefeld. After centuries of being on opposite sides, the two young women are suddenly thrown together when their respective organizations are forced to make peace in a new alliance. However, putting aside their differences is easier said than done. The enmity between the two groups runs deep, and not everyone is happy about the new partnership. Almost immediately after arriving in Great Britain with the Grafter delegation, Odette becomes targeted by an angry…

The Wolf Road is a brutal and fascinating story that entrenches you in the mind and personality of Elka, a young woman living in a post apocalyptic world that can be harsh and unforgiving. I found her personality and story both riveting and touching. She is far from a sentimental type, quite the opposite really. She is driven by practicality and survival and gives little thought or need for much of anything else. In all honesty, her character has not had the luxury of being able to experience little beyond this. Lost and on her own at the age of seven, she meets a man she eventually names Trapper. A man who can appear scary to her at times but when it comes down to it, he takes her in, gives her name (Elka) and teaches her all that she knows, takes care of her when she is sick or injured. They live in isolation in the remotes wilds where he teaches her to track, trap, hunt and survive. He becomes not only the largest, but also the only, influence on her as she develops from that lost young girl into a young woman. He also teaches her to fear…

13 minutes s a psychological thriller that looks at life through the eyes of a bunch of 16 year olds. It’s one of those books that, reading as an adult, makes me simultaneously almost giddy with relief that I’m no longer at high school followed by this horrible prickly sensation about maybe never truly knowing another person. As you can gather from the book jacket the story starts with 16 year old Natasha Howland (Tasha) being pulled from a freezing cold river. For a few minutes, in fact 13 to be precise, Tasha actually died before she was revived and taken to hospital. When she eventually awakens she has no memory of the events that led to her near drowning experience but given that she was in the local woods in the early hours of the morning, with a text from an unknown number luring her to the spot the police are a little suspicious of events. What really worked for me with this book is the deceptively simple writing and the easy way that the characters and their histories are so easily brought to life on the page. This is truly a mean girls story where the popularity stakes…

Last year, I was taken quite off guard when Ink and Bone (which was not on my radar until I received a copy form the publisher) blew me away and earned a 5 star review. This was a book that I had zero preconceived notions or expectations of. I had not read Rachel Caine previously and had no idea what her world or characters would be like. In other words, everything was brand new for me in Ink and Bone. I had hoped that Paper and Fire could carry that momentum but unfortunately found that it faltered for me a bit more than its predecessor. I have to warn you, this review was difficult to write in that I felt I had more complaints mainly because I have a 3.5 star review for a book following a 5 star review. So, please keep in mind that the book is still good. I just explain many reasons that prevented this from being another 5 star book for me. I do feel that some of my loss of excitement came from already being familiar with the world. Yes, the Library is evil. They hoard and control all of the books and information. I…

If you enjoy gritty and dark, violent futuristic sci-fi mystery thrillers, then The Dark Side by Anthony O’Neill will be just the book for you. O’Neill works crime, sex, drugs, and a psychotic murdering android into a full-on non-stop plot, and that’s just to name a handful of the topics covered in this book. In The Dark Side, two key narrative threads can be discerned, but even though they are fundamentally related to each other, the connections won’t become clear until later on. In one storyline, Lieutenant Damien Justus has come to Purgatory, a lunar territory founded by megalomaniac billionaire-in-exile Fletcher Brass. Its capital, appropriately called Sin, has been turned into a haven for fugitives and other undesirables from Earth who have come to the moon to escape their old lives. It is the only place where the shadier your record is, the better the chance you’ll be let in. Even the police here have dodgy backgrounds. Justus, however, is the patently incorruptible good cop who has just arrived from Earth, and he’s just the kind of guy Purgatory needs to clean things up. To him, no one is above the law—and no exceptions. He is immediately given the lead…

This is the second book I’ve read by Whiteley, whose last book from Unsung Stories, The Beauty, was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award and was a favorite in the SFF blogging community. Although I was the black sheep and didn’t love it as much as some people, I wanted to read her follow-up novella, The Arrival of Missives, which I found to be much more accessible. While The Beauty was just a little too far on the “weird” side for me, I really enjoyed The Arrival of Missives, especially the main character, a plucky, energetic and extremely smart young woman named Shirley. (OK, not so keen on her name, but the story does take place in the 19th century, when “Shirley” might have been all the rage!) Shirley is a character ahead of her time, where she is expected to marry and be a helpmate to her future husband, raise a family and keep her mouth shut. But Shirley has other plans. She’s fallen in love with her teacher, Mr. Tiller, and wants to go away to college, get a teaching degree, and come back to her village and teach alongside him. But her plans are sidelined when she…

The Dragon Round is a fantasy adventure with plenty going on and a protagonist hellbent on revenge. At the start of the story we meet Jeryon, Captain of the Comber with plenty of experience under his belt.  He’s a fair man but also a company man through and through and one who believes in acting by the book.  Unfortunately as Jeryon and his crew are making a headland for home the shadow of a dragon appears on the horizon.  The choices are limited.  Hope the beast hasn’t spotted them, hope it’s simply not interested or engage in a fight with very little chances of success.  Jeryon favours the quietly, quietly approach in the hope that the dragon isn’t interested but it seems that certain members of his crew have different ideas and the temptation of a dragon and the wealth that all it’s component parts rendered down would bring seems too great an opportunity to pass on for some of them.  I won’t go into all the detail of what takes place next but the outcome is that Jeryon ends up with a mutinous crew, he’s given the captain’s chance and, accompanied by his apothecary known as Poth (who refused to…

I must admit, I cracked the spine on Pathfinder Tales: Bloodbound with no little trepidation. It was to be my first exposure to the Pathfinder universe, and I had no idea what to expect. While I have fond memories of cutting my genre teeth on the old TSR novels, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms haven’t stood up well over time. That said, I find I actually appreciate their Ravenloft horror/fantasy world more now than I did back then, so entering into the Pathfinder world with vampires and clerics seemed like a good choice. Having closed the book on my first Pathfinder journey, I’m pleased to say F. Wesley Schneider put together a pretty solid novel that incorporates some of the universe’s overall world-building, but which is still accessible to a new reader. I feel like I came out of it understanding at least one corner of the world, and definitely curious to know more. As for the story itself, this is largely a gothic horror story, within the setting and time period of a pseudo-medieval fantasy. There are so many little elements here that make it all work. The settings include including drafty old castles, sprawling places of worship, and an…