needs more demons?

In The Third Lynx, Zahn again puts agent Frank Compton (from Night Train to Rigel) through some of the classic noir detective paces in his unusual near-future setting, which prominently features interstellar trains. (One of several tropes Zahn explores this time around is the detective who finds himself unexpectedly a murder suspect; there are also [...]

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The nine stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are full of vivid, acute descriptions, like:
I had a studio apartment in the West Village, which people were impressed by until they came up for a look. The place was the architectural equivalent of a biscuit dough remnant, a two-hundred-square-foot waste shape of crannies and recesses left [...]

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In his introduction, Jacobs lays asserts that his participatory journalism draws on the tradition of writers like Nellie Bly and John Howard Griffin (the author of Black Like Me). But I would assert that he also belongs somewhere along the continuum of writers like Dave Barry and Mark Leyner, who blur the lines between the [...]

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Revamped is, like its predecessor Staked, a fantasy thriller very much in the mode of Hamilton’s Anita Blake series: jockeying for dominance between various supernatural entities is the prime mover of the plot, which features a lot of sex and violence, the latter even more copious and explicit than the former.
Lewis continues to exploit the [...]

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Rites of Spring Break is another frothy cocktail in Peterfreund’s Ivy League series, following Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose, and mixed up according to the same recipe which is roughly:

1 part coming-of-age novel (protracted)
1 part feminist subtext
1 part formalized presentation (every chapter has an “I Confess…” header; text incorporates ordered lists and the [...]

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Karen Novak’s creepy suspense novel Innocence impressed me on several levels. It has some vividly drawn characters, and a twisty plot that managed to surprise me more than once. It has an unusual structure, employing shifts of narrative perspective and chronology to build dramatic tension. And Novak’s prose evinces both an eye for interesting detail [...]

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Cycler has an inventive premise: for most of every month Jill McTeague is a more-or-less normal teenage girl, but for four days she physically turns into a male. (The novel doesn’t explicitly deal with how this came about, although it drops some clues. I suspect McLaughlin will address it directly in a future volume*.) Jill [...]

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Krakauer’s creepy, gripping book uses a brutal double murder committed by Mormon fundamentalists as a vehicle for exploring the convoluted history of Mormonism, with a special emphasis on the Mormon church’s ambivalent relationship over time with polygamy and with direct personal revelation. (I never knew, for instance, that although Joseph Smith practiced polygamy himself, he [...]

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Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict is the flip side of Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict: the earlier novel cast 21st-century Courtney Stone’s mind into the body of a young woman in early 19th-century England. This (much better) novel brings the unfortunately (if significantly) named Jane Mansfield’s persona forward to modern Los [...]

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Mostly I thought City of Ashes was a vast improvement on City of Bones. It had a few nifty surprises. The plot continues to echo elements from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Harry Potter series, and Star Wars, among other sources, but generally doesn’t draw enough from any one of those wells to feel overly [...]

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