Angela Korra'ti

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was previously familiar with Sharon Shinn via her Samaria novels, and so when I was in the mood to take on some epic fantasy, I was pleased to check out her Twelve Houses books. Mystic and Rider is the first of these, introducing the mystic Senneth, who has been appointed by her king to patrol the land of Gillengaria and find out how bad the anti-magic sentiment among the people has gotten. With her travel a small band of other magic-users, as well as two of the King’s Riders, the elite cadre of warriors.

Mystic and Rider is not without problems; the initial pacing is somewhat clunky, and I found several of the character names and place names somewhat clunky as well. The clunky bits were never enough to drop me out of the story, though. And once the book got its feet under it, it hummed along nicely. I particularly appreciated a scene where Senneth is provoked into unleashing her fire magic.

As with the book as a whole, the grudging but increasing chemistry between Senneth and the Rider Tayse starts off somewhat clunkily. But it too gets its feet under it, and ultimately I found the development of their relationship satisfying.

Overall this was a decent little fantasy novel. The main plot of unrest fueled by an anti-magic cult in the realm is intriguing, and this was certainly more than enough to make me go ahead and continue with the series. Three stars.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Urban fantasy has to work very, very hard to seize and hold my attention these days, and I say this fully cognizant of how there are a great number of authors out there writing awesome books. For me, it’s just been a matter of wanting to read so many things–and having read so much urban fantasy the last several years–that more of it is generally pretty far down my reading queue.

For Cherie Priest, though, I’ll totally make exceptions. I’ve unilaterally liked every single thing of hers I’ve read, and Bloodshot, the first of her Cheshire Red Reports series, is no exception. It doesn’t engage me quite as hard as the Clockwork Century books do, I’ll cheerfully admit. But on the other hand, “slightly less awesome than Boneshaker” is still pretty goddamned awesome.

Here’s the thing for me about Bloodshot: it made me actively like a vampire protagonist, and it did it by making her an engaging character entirely aside from her being a badassed vampire thief. Yeah yeah yeah, badassed vampire thief, seen too much of that; see previous commentary re: reading a whole LOT of urban fantasy. What I haven’t seen, though, is a vampire who was a flapper before she was turned. Who sets off being a badassed thief with being thoroughly neurotic, to the degree of preparing for her heists to obsessive levels of detail. And who, even while she swears up and down to the reader that she’s not interested in forming lasting attachments, nonetheless has adopted two homeless children in her Seattle base of operations–and who proceeds to take a very personal interest in the case her latest client brings her, when he turns out to be a blinded vampire seeking to steal information about what happened to him while he was the captive of a secret government experiment.

Nor was it enough that Raylene rocked. Backing her up in this story is one of the most awesome male lead characters it has been my pleasure to read in some time: Adrian deJesus, a.k.a. Sister Rose, an ex-Navy SEAL turned drag queen. I adore Adrian. I adore that he is the reason why Raylene has to struggle with the question of how to address his gender identity, in a reasonable and non-angstful way, and that it’s a struggle that doesn’t take Raylene much time to figure out. I adore that he is both thoroughly badassed AND very, very comfortable with makeup. I adore that he is, in fact, the second most badassed character in the book, only slightly less badassed than the vampire protagonist. And godDAMN, that boy can dance.

With these two highly engaging main characters to blaze the way, it was no effort at all to enjoy the hell out of this book. I very much liked the exploration of the aforementioned secret government experiment, and how it dovetails with Adrian’s own backstory, as he’s on the hunt for his missing sister, who has herself become a vampire. And I quite like the exploration of the idea that a vampire, Raylene’s client Ian, has to live with the strong likelihood that he’ll be permanently disabled.

In short, there’s a great deal I liked here and not very much at all I didn’t care for. I found the kids a bit too plot-moppety for my liking, as they’re mostly there to provide character development for Raylene, and a couple of the details revealed about what happened to Ian a bit too predictable. But that’s about the extent of my problems with it, and all in all, we’re talking four strong stars here.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Die in Plain Sight is a bit of an odd duck in the run of Elizabeth Lowell novels, straddling as it does the line between her Donovan series and her Rarities Unlimited ones. Goodreads classifies it as a Rarities book, but the two series are set in the same universe–and since it provides major camera time to Susa Donovan, the matriarch of the Donovan clan, it’s hard not to call this a Donovan book.

Nonetheless the question is, how does this particular book stack up against either series? Our heroine is Lacey Quinn, granddaughter of a famous artist, who’s determined to find out whether the previously unknown works of his she has inherited are proof of murder. And our hero is Ian Lapstrake, employed by Rarities, and of whom we get brief glimpses in Moving Target and Running Scared. They’re both pretty standard, likeable lead characters. In Ian’s case, I didn’t necessarily find him as intense or as charismatic as some of the Donovans, but on the other hand, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it also meant that there was a refreshing lack of what Romancelandia calls alphole-ness on his part.

As for Lacey, I rather liked her better. She’s an artist and therefore a creative type, and even if painting isn’t my particular art, I definitely sympathized with her attempts to pursue it and especially with her interactions with Susa, whose work she revered. In fact, in many ways I enjoyed the scenes with Lacey and Susa almost more than the ones with Lacey and Ian, just because the two women had strong chemistry as fellow artists pursuing art together. Susa is a lovely character, and it’s great to see this woman get serious camera time, since it helps flesh out the history of the Donovan family and shows where her children get a lot of the awesomeness.

Antagonist-wise, we’ve also got a fairly Lowell-typical screwed up rich family, across whose secrets our heroine has inadvertantly stumbled and who will do anything to keep those secrets secret. There aren’t any real deviations from the standard plot track there, though on the other hand, Lowell doesn’t get too over the top with the antagonists as she’s sometimes done in other books.

So all in all I’ll give this one a good strong three stars, on the strength of Susa.