Dead Witch Walking (Kim Harrison)

Rachel is a witch, working with the law-enforcement agency that governs supernatural creatures like warlocks and weres, but her boss hates her and has been deliberately sabotaging her work to make her ineffective, so she quits to go start a new agency with her friend the vampire and colleague the pixie. This means breaking her contract, so naturally they hire assassins to kill her. At that point I'm already confused by the plot. Why does her boss want her to fail, when it seems like he'd want his unit to be successful? And why spend a lot of money and effort to kill her for quitting? And then Rachel decides her only course of action is to take on the most powerful criminal mastermind in the city, figuring that if she brings in the proof that he's running drugs they'll have to - what? Take her back? Cancel the contract on her life? I'm even more lost. Then the whole book is about her doing one ill-considered thing after another in an attempt to bring this guy to justice, so that he's out to get her, or at least get her to work for him (??), and at the end she does get the proof she needs to bring him down, and uses it to blackmail him into leaving her alone instead of turning him in. ???? There's a lot to like in this first book of a series. Rachel's voice is fun, and the world in which humans have an uneasy relationship with the supernatural is an interesting one, but the plot just had me scratching my head. Sorry, but it didn't work for me.

The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross)

Stross writes intelligent, funny, surprising science fiction, and his Laundry series is all of the above. This recent example lives up to the others. Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence service, defending Queen, country, and universe against many-tentacled horrors from beyond the veil, through diligent application of the principles of government bureaucracies everywhere: paperwork, committee meetings, organizational hierarchies, and very bad coffee. The current crisis begins with a group of math whizzes working on algorithms that will allow their investment bank to anticipate market trends more effectively than their competition, and unwittingly trigger an outbreak of V-syndrome (you know, the one where you burst into flame in direct sunlight, develop a craving for human blood, are stronger than normal humans, and can exercise control over other people's minds). What is behind this new nest? Is there an enemy planted within the Laundry itself? And what does Bob's malevolent, unstable ex have to do with things? It's a fun ride from start to finish.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (David Shafer)

A rollicking spy-versus-spy kind of novel, with some loosely connected misfits who wind up working together against a terrible global force of 007 dimensions out to dominate the world. The Committee is bent on capturing and owning all the world's information: everything people do, say, buy, download, comment, or otherwise engage in anywhere in the vicinity of a smart device. Once they own it all, they can charge people to access it, or use it for extortion (pay up or say goodbye to the access codes to your bank account!). The people opposing them are a little too good to be true (gentle hippies who literally find the answer in hemp plants), but it's still fun to see how our merry band of drunken, crazy, ineffective losers actually manage to bring the bad guys down. I had to suspend belief so hard I think I pulled something, but I think it was worth it.

Lush Life (Richard Price)

This is a kind of police procedural, a will-they-catch-'em mystery instead of a whodunit. It begins by introducing a collection of colorful characters, then bringing them together with a bang when one is murdered. The rest of the story tracks the aftermath of that murder on the victim's friends and family, the police officers trying to solve the crime, and the criminals involved, all set in a gritty New York City that was a character in itself. The story is a gripping one, though I often found myself lost in the no-doubt authentic street slang. In the middle my patience with some of the more self-destructive characters flagged, but not enough for me to consider quitting before the story came to its resolution. Was there closure, redemption, or healing for anyone? I doubt it. But the story did resolve, and it felt as real as anything I've read.

Cryoburn (Lois McMaster Bujold)

Any Miles Vorkosigan story is a wild fun ride. This one starts with Miles, in a hallucinatory reaction to bad drugs, stumbling through a dark maze in an abandoned cryosleep storage facility, and ends with him on the way home having wrested triumph from the grip of evil money-hungry corporate executives. Along the way various people on both sides of the struggle are kidnapped, there's a brief mixup in the shuffling of frozen folks, and some lessons in the art of soliciting bribes as an investigative technique. As Miles ages, with wife and children to think of, there is less of the frenetic action of previous stories, but still a satisfactory sense that the poor lords of commerce with their long-term plans of financial conquest have no idea what they're up against until it is far, far too late.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Laline Paull)

This is a unique twist on a time-travel story. Harry is one of a small number of people who, for unknown reasons, live their lives over and over. Each time they die, they are born again at the same moment, in the same circumstances, to the same people, and live  through the same world again and again. What is the best way to deal with this strange situation? These folks have banded together into a society devoted to finding the newly born infants, seeing that they are shepherded into life with comfort and security, and living however they choose until their unavoidable death and cycling back yet again. By and large they try to avoid making a large impact on the unfolding of grand events in the world; past experience has shown that pushing too hard against the fabric of history has terrible ramifications. But now, someone seems to be doing just that, and the world is coming to an end. Can Harry and his friends find who is doing this and stop them? The action spirals up to a grisly, frantic, intense pitch, as Harry works against powerful hidden forces over and over again. I followed it breathlessly to the end. Recommended.

The Bees (Laline Paull)

I know this story, about a bee who rises above the rigid rules of the hive to reach a potential that challenges the reality the bees have accepted all their lives, has excellent reviews and is listed as one of the top SF/F books of 2014. It just didn't work for me. I went in expecting something more along the lines of Richard Adams's classic Watership Down, in which rabbits have speech and a longer view than rabbits really have, but otherwise were completely true to what rabbits are really like (at least, as far as I know). The Bees, though, stepped much too far outside of what I can imagine life might really be like for those creatures. The bees in this story not only talk, they shake hands and curtsey. Their hive contains large chambers with floors carved in floral patterns, with staircases and doors that swing open. They eat food from platters, and change shifts based on the ringing of bells. What they are is people in bee suits, which kept crashing my disbelief to the floor and I gave up after 50 pages. If you are more tolerant to such things then this story might work well for you, but not for me.