Skin Game (Jim Butcher)

I started this series (the Dresden Files) quite a while ago, and dropped out after a few books. Recently I picked up this, the most recent entry, and really enjoyed it. Harry is a wizard operating in modern-day Chicago, along with an assorted cast of other wizards, warlocks, witches, demons, faeries, shape-shifters, angels (Fallen and upright), Knights of the Cross, and on and on. In this book he's drafted by Queen Mab, who runs the Seelie Court in Faerie, to pay off a debt she owes to all-around bad-guy Nicodemus, by helping Nicodemus raid the deepest vault in Hades. Harry is not happy about this, partly because he doesn't want to do anything to benefit someone as evil as Nicodemus, and partly because he assumes that Nicodemus will turn on him and kill him as soon as Harry's part of the job is over. How can he arrange things to fulfill his obligation to Queen Mab while undermining Nicodemus's plans and keeping himself and his friends alive? I was a little disappointed by the rabbit Harry pulled out of his hat toward the end (with a first-person story, you don't expect the narrator to keep secrets like that from the reader for so long), but the breathtaking action of the climax more than made up for it. There's a moment that had me, a Star Wars fan, literally cheering aloud in delight. Now I need to go back and read some of the stories I missed before. This world is a fun place to spend time.

Sweet Silver Blues (Glen Cook)

I've heard good things about the Garrett, P.I. series and I'm interested in fantasy, so I thought I'd give it a try, starting with this, the first book of the series. It's a fairly standard noir PI novel, set in a magical world of vampires, pixies, centaurs, witches, and trolls. The writing is solid and the action interesting, but I couldn't get into it. Part of the problem is the breathtaking sexism. Granted, the story is 25 years old, but even in 1990 this should have been too much. There are exactly three female characters that appear in more than one scene. One is a literal witch, complete with haggard face, shrieking cackle, and mysterious omens. One is a figurative bitch, beautiful but stupidly, mindlessly nasty to everyone and everything. The other is a lovely and willing wench with nary a brain. That's it. This spoiled the whole thing for me. If it's not a problem for you, you might well enjoy this start to what is a popular series.

Raising Stony Mayhall (Daryl Gregory)

Once again, Gregory takes broken, dangerous people and turns them into complex, intriguing, and sympathetic heroes. Stony Mayhall is a zombie, but a very unusual zombie. Found as a newly-undead newborn and taken in by a solid apple-pie Iowa family, Stony manages to do the impossible over and over again, and we are rooting for him all the way. This is a story of family, of love, of trying to do the right thing in the most difficult of situations. We know from the opening chapter, which sets a frame to which the rest of the story is flashback, that key people will survive, but how remains unclear until the very end. I have nothing but admiration for Gregory's storytelling.

Shovel Ready (Adam Sternbergh)

The first-person narrator of this book scrabbles a living in a dark, dangerous post-apocalyptic New York City. He calls himself Spademan, a name with two meanings. He once was, he tells us over and over, a garbage man, back when the city worked and people came and took away your garbage. Now, he is a killer for hire, one with strict rules about not knowing why you want someone killed, only that you're willing to pay for it. When someone points him at the estranged daughter of a famous evangelist, he starts to have second and third thoughts and winds up being drawn deeper and deeper into a morass of murder, torture, and terror as he tries to do the right thing. It is surprisingly easy to like this protagonist because we never see him acting in his primary occupation as a cold-blooded murderer; we only see him as someone who has become the unlikely defender of the young and helpless. With its intense action and its spare style (short, incomplete sentences and one-line paragraphs abound) this story moves quickly, almost breathlessly. Recommended.

The Martian (Andy Weir)

This book and Age of Miracles (Karen Thompson Walker) are a study in opposites. Whereas Miracles was strong on characterization and relationships but weakened by stomach-clenching bad science, this one is all science, all the time, propped up with some cardboard characters in invisible relationships. I'm comfortable with what it says about me to say that I loved this one. Its narrator, Mark, is a smart, determined guy with a good sense of humor, but no deep personality beyond that, and nobody else registers much on the human meter. But then Mark finds himself stranded on Mars with no means of communication, in a habitat meant to keep six people alive for 31 days and possible rescue four years off, and he sets out to keep himself alive. He forces machinery to do things its designers would be afraid to have nightmares about. He applies chemistry, biology, and physics like an acid trip. All the science is rock-solid, while still being surprising and creative. I couldn't wait to find out what Mark, and Mars, would come up with next. Much recommended for any science nerds.

Maplecroft (Cherie Priest)

I'm not a big fan of horror, nor of historical fiction, so this book wasn't really up my alley. Given all that, I quite liked it. Lizzy Borden, she of the axe, had reasons for what she did, reasons based in an ancient evil that calls to people, turning them into inhuman creatures of death. The Victorian style, based on what are supposedly written notes and letters, is inherently slow, but the action still built to a satisfactory conclusion. I liked that the central figures are strong, intelligent women, and that science and rationality are important to survival. If horror is your cup of tea, you'll enjoy this one.

The Age of Miracles (Karen Thompson Walker)

There is a lot to like in this touching story of a girl on the edge of womanhood dealing with the usual teenage issues and also with the global catastrophe that may signal the end of the planet. For some unknown reason, the rotation of the earth begins to slow drastically. Really drastically - it gains over half an hour in the first day. This slowing continues at an unpredictable pace throughout the book, with a day stretching to well over 70 hours before the tale ends. Along with this unexplained shift in rotation, there is also an unexplained change in gravity, which apparently increases enough to interfere with the flight of birds and soccer balls but not with walking. The orbit of the moon also shifts, so that a solar eclipse that was supposed to occur in the Pacific instead happens unexpectedly in California. So although the main character is well drawn and her family and peer relationships are touchingly illuminated, I kept being thrown off by the cavalier disregard for the most fundamental nature of reality. My disbelief just wouldn't suspend enough for me to ignore conservation of momentum, or gravity, or orbital mechanics, and not all happening together. I kept getting thrown off by other minor but unforgivable gaffes as well. When Julia's best friend abandons her she says she missed her "like a phantom limb" - but phantom limbs are not something you miss, they are something you wish would go away. Strange things are happening to airplanes, and also to the astronauts on the space station "ten thousand times higher," but of course the orbit of the space station is about 250 miles up, less than a hundred times higher than a commercial jet. When the earth's magnetic field begins to break down (something that would, indeed, follow from the slowing of the earth's rotation), people hear and feel this sudden shift, which is nonsense. The bottom line is that I just couldn't shut off the part of my brain that kept scoffing at the science, which spoiled everything else for me, which is too bad, since the other stuff was pretty good.