Jim Butcher, First Lord's Fury; Sixth and final volume of the Codex Alera, in which Tavi and an assortment of friends and less reliable allies come back to their home continent to face invading monstrosities and resolve political intrigues. As with its immediate predecessor, this volume is much more a working out of things already set up than anything striking or innovative; it is somewhat lacking in surprise, veers unfortunately close to contrived, and there is less real cost to the protagonists than is entirely convincing. Plus, it has unduly much of Butcher's take on romance, which is both a fairly limited palette and not one to my taste.
Thomas Sniegoski, A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, Dancing on the Head of a Pin; Of adjectives to apply to a book about an angel who has made a life as an Earthly private investigator looking into the disappearance of the Angel of Death and ensuing risk of release of the Four Horsemen, "sweet" is not the first I would expect to come to mind. Yet the self-named Remy Chandler, formerly the archangel Remiel, manages to be so, largely because Sniegoski manages to write him as overflowing with love - for his dying mortal wife, for his adoring Black Labrador, for humanity as a whole - without quite going over the edge of excessive sappiness. Dancing on the Head of a Pin, which centres on attempts to steal a cache of particularly terrible weapons made for Lucifer Himself, is somewhat darker in tone, and unlike the first has an open ending suggesting much turmoil to come, but still retains that fundamental sweetness; the books have a nicely complex take on the mythos of the War in Heaven, though one that does invite awkward questions as to what precisely is God's motivation in this scene, and the overall effect is surprisingly charming. Highly recommended.
C.J. Cherryh, Tripoint, Finity's End; Two more Alliance/Union novels. Tripoint deals with the feud between the vengeful Marie Hawkins and Austin Bowe, members of different small Merchanter families, and Bowe's quasi-abduction of Tom, their son from the incident prompting the feud; it is another ferociously tense thriller. Finity's End takes place in a slightly different key; Fletcher Neihart is a lost son of one of the biggest Merchanter families, raised on Pell and among the native beings of Downbelow, who is reclaimed by the eponymous ship and has to adapt to shipboard society, while political matters move in an atypically hopeful direction. It is every bit as strong in character and plot while being at some levels just nicer than the rest of this series. Highly recommended.
P.C. Hodgell, Bound in Blood; The fifth physical volume of the Chronicles of the Kencyrath is the second part of Jame's adventures in military school, and it continues with more elaborate physical intrigue, metaphysical weirdness, and Jame coming a step closer to understanding her place in the larger scheme of things; the baroque and colourful plot centres around her discovery of and dealing with precisely what went wrong in her father's youth. Highly recommended.
Charlie Huston, No Dominion; Reread of the second Joe Pitt book, in which our protagonist follows the trail of a drug which can affect Vampyres north into Harlem, and the domain of the Hood, a black Vampyre clan who are culturally black first and Vampyres second. This all serves as a crash course for dedicated loner Pitt in the claustrophobic world of high-level Manhattan Vampyre politics. Recommended modulo high tolerance for violence.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Salute the Dark; Fourth volume of Shadows of the Apt. There is, as always in Tchaikovsky's complex fantasy world of insect-aspected human "kinden", another threat of Wasp invasion of the Lowlands, but the more interesting bits are elsewhere, with the Mantis warrior Tisamon's seemingly suicidal quest to the heart of the Wasp empire, and with that empire's internal politics. Complex and engaging, coming to a conclusion that would have made a quite plausible end for the series, and makes some fundamental changes in where it can go next. Highly recommended.
Naomi Novik, Victory of Eagles; Fifth Temeraire novel, in which the eponymous dragon is retired to a covert in Wales, while his captain Will Laurence is freed from prison by Napoleon invading Britain, and believed dead. This is the literary equivalent of a lowbrow summer blockbuster movie, relying on colour, spectacle, and purple passion to cover for ridiculous worldbuilding and a plot that always works out conveniently. Not recommended.
John Gielgud, An Actor and His Time; Adaptation into book form of a series of interviews Gielgud gave the BBC in 1978, reminiscing on his life and times in the theatre. It's mostly chatty, amiable gossip, with a regrettably small amount of Gielgud's insightful comments about the craft of acting; he seems to have scarcely a bad word to say for anyone met in a long, distinguished and varied career, though he did not think much of Bosie Douglas. Knowing from other sources that Gielgud was gay gives the book something of a feeling of carefully not looking in certain directions, though, and a lot of effort put into nonetheless seeming a coherent whole; while not talking about his personal life is an entirely reasonable choice, the book gains a tinge of sadness from the feeling that he felt he could not.
John Barnes, The Sky so Big and Black; Reread of Barnes' final (to date) Universe Next Door novel, set on Mars a couple of generations after the end of Orbital Resonance. The terraforming of Mars, fiercely defended against infectious memes from Earth, is reaching a point where independent prospectors are a declining way of life; the story is told by the teenaged Teri-Mel Murray, who has been prospecting with her father all her life, and by the psychiatrist counselling her in the aftermath of disaster. Although it comes to a relatively happy ending for the characters, the abiding feeling is that Barnes has a very low opinion of humanity.
Sean Stewart, Galveston; Novel set at the high tide of magic in the universe where its mid-20th century return to the world was depicted in Resurrection Man and its late-21st century ebb in Night Watch. Sloane Gardner, reluctant daughter of a ruling Galveston family, finds a glamorous other life in the perpetual Mardi Gras of Galveston's magical other city; the time she spends there leads to the arrest and exile of her embittered childhood friend, local doctor Joshua Cane, whose father lost his luck when he was ten years old. Galveston is powerfully characterised and beautifully depicted, though not what one might call cheering. Very highly recommended.
Robert Reed, The Remarkables; In the galaxy-spanning utopian human Realm, Pitcairn is a unique world, occupied by both its own indigenous sentient life, the Remarkables of the title, and a peculiar and close-mouthed human culture that has adapted to co-exist with them. Ranier Lu, the narrator, is one of eight off-worlders invited to join a passion, something between a migration and a rite of passage carried out by adolescent Remarkables; there are of course hidden agendas among all parties. The Remarkables possesses Reed's gift for the evocatively strange in full flower, without, as some of his other novels do, having pacing problems associated with periodic addition of new batches of weirdness. Highly recommended.
