Maria Isabella Boyd, a former Confederate spy, has been hired by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to capture Captain Croggon Beurregard Haniney, a runaway slave, who's been eluding authorities on both sides for fifteen years. Boyd is supposed to ensure a valuable Union shipment makes it ...
Overall, the book felt like a first draft. Characters didn't feel right, actions didn't mesh with characterization, flow through felt unbalanced. The setting is interesting, but it wasn't exploited. Things could have been easily renamed to make it fantasy, sci-fi, etc., with little change. It cou...
This is evidently the first in a brand new series and I am already a little too eager for the next installment. This book was so much fun, I couldn't put it down! Raylene is such a likable kind of vampire and I could feel myself relating to her on more than one level. In most urban fantasy, the v...
It's taken me forever to read this (I started it in May!), mainly because I like my paranormal books to have a romance subplot in them and this lacked one. However this still managed to grab my attention, which is why I've persevered instead of giving up. Admittedly my interest only grew enough f...
Having read 'Bloodshot' the 1st in this series, I was unsure whether to continue - I loved the 1st book, but didn't want to be disappointed by the sequel - I have concerns over the glut of vampire novels around, but luckily this series strays from the well trodden path - the fact of the main prot...
I look forward to new Cherie Priest novels ever since I first picked up 'Dreadnought' off my local library 'new books' shelf. This one, however, did not rock my boat. Maybe it was an attempt to appeal to a teen audience, but as in many books written for young readers, the teenage main character...
I didn't get on with the first Cherie Priest book I read (Boneshaker), but I enjoyed Bloodshot and Hellbent enough that I'm starting to try her other stuff. It seems like she can be a bit hit and miss, with me: I wasn't a big fan of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, either, but I enjoyed this short hor...
I really enjoyed this book. It’s one of those books that tends to give you a lot of questions and reveals the answers slowly as the story proceeds. I had trouble putting the book down both because the story was interesting and because I wanted to know all the answers.This is a paranormal-type s...
In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredib...
As a caveat, I found the description on this edition of the book quite misleading. Its tone is glib. Phrases like "task force" and "add in a hapless fire inspector who's just trying to get his paperwork in order" cultivates a tongue-in-cheek feel that made me expect a zanier book than Cherie Pr...
Toward evening, Mercy could pick out fires between the trees and on the intermittent peak. She wondered what they might be—troops or travelers or homesteaders—until the captain clarified through his overly loud speaking tube. “Down below us—oh! There’s one, just to the right. You see those little...
“Open up the trucks, and let’s start tearing this place down.” Gabe was usually the first to get moving, but this time, he hesitated. “I don’t know, Dahl. The trucks are heavy, and it was hell to pay bringing them up so far into the yard. Me and Dad were talking, and maybe we should suck it up an...
The mail moves slowly in these parts, if it moves at all. Gossip flies faster, but is less reliable. Even so, accounting for things which may have been told with exaggeration, this is what I’ve gathered.*** To begin with, people are killing coyotes. People always look to kill them, I know. To cat...
It was early—far earlier than he’d prefer to be awake, given the previous night’s adventures, but he’d never been able to sleep very long past dawn. In drips and drabs, the surviving guests came and went, taking coffee and toast, fruit and milk. Some sat down at the large round tables with a news...
This explains a lot about her, really. Seanan’s interest in plagues and pandemics occupies much of her spare time; the rest of her time is spent taking inordinately long walks and working on her various writing projects. She is the author of the Toby Daye series from DAW Books. The first, Rosemar...
It was also shiny with a glaze of moonlight and the intermittent sweep and flash of a powerful lamp scanning the water a few miles away. The lighthouse wasn’t for boats, not mostly. Not anymore. These days it guided the airships and their crews coming and going from Bainbridge Island, serving as ...
Borden MAY 2, 1894 I can’t rely on anyone anymore. Lizzie may as well have gone deaf to the bell; I suppose if I fired a warning shot or two into the ceiling, she might grow curious enough to come check on me. Maybe a shot in my own temple would be warning enough to bring ...