Today on the author blog, Leland Lydecker reviews the second novel by author Leighton Dean.
The aptly-named Save Our Souls follows pilot and Captain’s son, Ford, and his family, the crew of the freighter Jian Seng, as they fight to survive in the face of an unholy trinity of catastrophes. The seemingly lifeless ship that barreled into their craft is only the first salvo of a universe that seems intent on eliminating the crew of the Jian Seng in the most unpleasant ways possible.
Friday evening found me crowded into a shed with a motley group of individuals. The shed was attached to the back of a slant-roofed little house tucked into a steep hillside a few miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. The crowd included everything from grey-haired retirees to stay-at-home moms to workers in grimy Carhartts, and even a few professional transporters like myself. Chatter wandered between the heavy snow load, predictions of when the first willow blooms would be out, and speculation about whether the coming summer would be as poor for pollen collection as the last one was.
At the back of the shed, an elderly gentleman with wild white hair handed out buzzing cages; each sturdy 4 inch by 16 inch by 12 inch enclosure contained a queen and roughly 5,000 of her subjects, totaling 4 lbs of bees. (Bees are sold by weight rather than number for reasons of expediency.) This particular bee dealer is the only one in Fairbanks, supplying hundreds of backyard beekeepers in the area.
I’ve been transporting bees for over a decade now, but rumor has it this will be the bee dealer’s last year. That may mean the end of my yearly bee run, or it may mean a much lengthier run down to Delta Junction or Anchorage to meet another dealer. For now, I collect 8 lbs of bees, wrap their cages in my jacket, and climb up a crude staircase to the dealer’s parking area. Now comes the fun part.
Welcome to the Madhouse chronicles the adventures of Dr. Grace Lord as she begins her residency aboard the medical space station Nelson Mandela. Plenty of challenges are in store, from eccentric surgeons to a dangerously manipulative psychiatrist to an alien super-virus, but Dr. Lord is not entirely on her own: she soon finds an unlikely ally in Bud, an android gifted with artificial intelligence.
In fact, Bud is more than just sentient: he feels human emotion. And from the moment he lays optical sensors on the extremely talented, smart, and beautiful Dr. Grace Lord, he falls madly in love with her.
Today on the author blog, I’m going to do something different. What follows is the first page of a short story that will be released as part of an anthology this summer. Hel’s Fury is set in Fairbanks, Alaska, in a dystopian near future. And yes, the spelling is deliberate.
As Fairbanks Police Captain Nathan Spencer waded through the soggy snow toward the crime scene, a growing sense of dread supplanted his annoyance at being called out first thing on a Monday morning. Dozens of other pairs of boots had already made the same journey, clearing a wide path from the parking area to the underside of the nearby Steese Highway bridge.
To his right the Chatanika River rushed by, muddied by year-round mining operations upstream. A forest of scraggly black spruce marched off into the pre-dawn dimness on the far bank. To his left, a handful of Alaska State Trooper SUVs and several Fairbanks Police cars sat in the parking lot of an abandoned campground. Ravens circled overhead.
A FPD detective named Henriksen met him at the edge of the highway overpass, expression grim.
“This had better be good,” Spencer snapped. “I’m going to be pissed if you called me all the way out here just because someone strung up a couple more drunks.”
The detective grimaced. “These weren’t drunks. That’s why I called you. These are some of ours.”
This week on the author blog, Leland Lydecker reviews The Genocide Game. A megalomaniac billionaire with an automation fetish plots to wipe out ninety-eight percent of the world’s population, and it falls to Stan– pick-up artist guru and self-proclaimed word-nerd– to save the world.
To be more accurate, Stan bumps into Raven, a scientist on the run from her job in the billionaire’s R&D lab, and offers to help her. Pretty soon they’re both on the run from Ferguson’s comically inept goons, racing to reveal the existence of a genetically engineered super-virus before Ferguson can unleash it on the world.
Although it sounds like a cool premise, The Genocide Game has some unfortunately fatal flaws. Let’s start with Stan.
I have had the honor of knowing and working with many extraordinary women over the years. (Obligatory shout-out to my mom, who taught me about equality, civil rights, and treating people decently regardless of their color, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation. She also introduced me to science fiction and turned me into a life-long C.J. Cherryh fan.)
Amazing women are all around us, and chances are they have touched all of our lives in some significant way. They’re public defenders who keep the innocent from going to jail. They’re courageous civil rights advocates who don’t let threats stop them from pursuing the truth. They’re extraordinarily patient, skilled surgeons. They’re compassionate paramedics.
The first book in the Akrad’s Legacy series, Akrad’s Children follows siblings Dinnis, who always believed his father would return to save him, and Ista, who embraced the teachings of the cruel sorcerer who held them prisoner. Caught up in their story is Mannok, the siblings’ half-brother, crown prince of Tamra and heir to the throne of Akrad’s enemies.
While I’m not generally a fan of stories about young adults struggling to find their place in the world, this tale is so beautifully written and the characters so adeptly portrayed that I found myself really enjoying their story. I would even go as far as to say that Akrad’s Children is a classic in the making.
Today on the author blog, Leland Lydecker reviews Armand Rosamilia’s Dirty Deeds.
I get paid to erase problems.
Did your extramarital affair produce an unwanted complication? Family problems? Just want to enjoy your midlife crisis by yourself?
That’s where I come in. For a fee I’ll take care of it. A big fee.
Dirty Deeds is a crime novel with a twist– and not the kind you’d expect. The protagonist is an aging hitman with a big secret: he spirits away the children he’s been paid to kill, setting them up with an adoption agency that places them with loving new families. Or at least, so he thinks.
I stumbled across this tweet the other day and found myself wondering, why shouldn’t I sneer at books that soared to popularity by appealing to the lowest common denominator? Why would I care what makes them tick?
If you’re the kind of author who doesn’t care about the quality of their work nearly as much as becoming famous, you may be thinking “I agree with this tweet! What’s the magic formula that makes inexplicably popular books so successful? And how can I apply it to my own writing?!” In that case, here’s the breakdown.
Continue reading “Tackling More Questionable Writing Advice”
Welcome to the Holy City at Summer’s End. The border with the Otherworld is razor thin. Shadowfest is coming. Malevolent spirits and monsters roam. Dark forces are plotting to seize power. The past has come back to haunt Brona the Apothecary and Aurelian the Investigator. Revenge can be a double-edged sword, as Morven the Mage once discovered. And Death may be the least of their worries…
In Shadowfest, author D.J. Reid spins a clever murder mystery out of Celtic and Greco-Roman myth and folklore. It’s a delightfully complex tale, with endearingly well-rounded characters, hidden motives, eldritch magic, and mythical creatures galore.