One of the many reasons I’m delighted to have me an iPhone is that I can finally get caught up on reading my backlog of ebooks. This includes several I’ve purchased from my very own publisher, Drollerie Press, and I’ve been working recently on reading those along with several other ebooks.

However, in the interests of impartiality, I’m not going to do formal review posts for the Drollerie books. I will however give y’all picoreviews and touch on at least one thing about each that I like! So here right quick are the first three:

Pixie Warrior, by Rachael de Vienne: In a genre that’s been heavily overpopulated by urban fantasy the last several years, it’s a nice change of pace to get a period fantasy novel set in a decidedly non-urban locale. It’s also kind of neat to get a story in which the protagonist, the pixie daughter of a human lumberjack and his pixie wife, gets romantically involved with NO ONE. The love story with her parents is certainly an important subplot, but really, this story’s all about Sha’el. Three stars.

Unseelie, by Meredith Holmes: It should surprise none of you that with Faerie Blood under my belt, I’m a bit of a sucker for any book that involves the Unseelie Court. Meredith’s book gives ’em a bit more of a traditionalist touch than I do. Come for the subverting of which Court is the good guys and which one the bad (a trick fans will certainly recognize), and stay for the complicated Court intrigue and why, exactly, all these people are going berserk for Alfhild of the Seven Snows. Three stars.

Scars on the Face of God: The Devil’s Bible, by C.G. Bauer: If you like your horror old-school, with a hint of Rosemary’s Baby and a side helping of Omen, you’ll probably groove for this. I quite liked the dual-layer story involving our protagonist both as a boy and as an old man who must root out the nasty cause of why settlers in Three Bridges, Pennsylvania used to murder their babies–and why his parish’s own bishop seems to be batting for the other team. Four stars.

It took me a bit to get into A Fountain Filled With Blood, which is the second book in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s series about a young female Episcopalian priest who becomes involved with the police chief of her small town. For one thing, I made the mistake of trying to read this book before I read Book 1. For another, several of the initial scenes involve violence against gay people in the town, and I was genuinely unsure if I could handle reading about that. Nor was I terribly happy about the relationship brewing between Clare, the priest, and police chief Russ–because Russ is married to another woman, and that seemed to me to be asking for all sorts of annoying angst I wouldn’t enjoy reading about.

But then I did go back and read Book 1, In the Bleak Midwinter, and wound up enjoying that more than I expected. So I opted to give this one another chance.

As with Book 1, the writing here is quietly engaging, with just enough descriptive detail to be vivid, and not so much that it gets in the way of the story. The spate of violence–which soon enough includes murder–that must be investigated is suitably complex, and once I got past the uneasiness of seeing gays targeted, it was refreshing to see Clare speaking out against such acts being perpetrated. Clare in general seems to be a highly atypical priest, which for me at least makes her an interesting character even if sometimes I have a hard time buying her plausibility.

The heart of the book is of course her burgeoning relationship with Russ. If the idea of a protagonist being attracted to a married man bothers you, especially if that protagonist is a priest, you might skip this series. But I will give it credit for handling the chemistry between the two leads in a very ethical way so far. My only complaint is that I’d like to see the police chief’s wife on camera, and given the same complex treatment of character that Clare and Russ have gotten so far. I may have to read farther in the series just to see if that occurs. For this installment in the meantime, four stars.

I’m long on record as getting a lot of enjoyment out of ‘s work, and Hands of Flame is no exception. It’s a fine conclusion to the Negotiator Trilogy, bringing some resolution not only to heroine Margrit’s relationship with the gargoyle Alban, but also to the humans close to her. Played off against the more personal relationship is the development of her station among the Old Races, with whom she has gained enough status that they’ve given her a new name: The Negotiator.

There’s some good solid intrigue here as Margrit is hauled in to mediate a deal between the selkies and the djinn–and at the same time, she’s pushed by the dragonlord Janx into trying to destroy her own brand new employer, Eliseo Daisani. Margrit is forced to delve into the history of these two longstanding rivals, and with Alban’s help, uncovers a secret neither the dragon nor the vampire knew.

The pace is fast; a lot of the time on the way through this book I found myself going “wait, what? Wait, what? Wait, what?” and having to process things I read twice. But this is not a bad thing. Just be ready to handle a lot of plot details thrown at you very, very quickly if you take this one on! And for gods’ sake, make sure you’ve read Books 1 and 2 first, else you will be very, very lost. Four stars.