New Year’s Eve was spent with our best friends, Ignited Moth and Mr. Moth at a mutual friend’s (from book club!) wedding. We had a nice dinner out, attended the party, celebrated midnight together and then promptly opened presents because we couldn’t wait until the morning. (That was followed by a Mario Kart tournament and us not going to bed until 4 am.) It was a fantastic way to bring in a new year and the Moths truly spoiled us.
Here’s my book/comic haul from the both of them:
I am so pumped about all of these and don’t know where to begin. I did start the new year with a different book from any of these for my first read of the year because I had been planning that for about a month but I’m sure that I’ll hit up one of these beauties next.
Travel between planets is relatively easy. Therefore, aliens, werewolves, vampires, and all manner of creatures and humanoids can show up at anytime, anywhere, on any planet.
Dina Demille is an innkeeper on Earth. Inns are neutral territories. Innkeepers do their best to remain neutral so long as it doesn’t threaten their clientele. People come to them for sanctuary and protection.
Dina’s inn was once abandoned and almost decayed beyond repair. She’s been nurturing it back to health for awhile now but with only one resident, the process is slow going. With limited money coming in, she can’t provide it with all the materials it needs to rebuild itself. (The inns themselves are considered sentient by some. They have a symbiotic relationship with their keepers.) So, when trouble comes in the form of creatures killing neighborhood dogs, the local werewolf giving her attitude and warrior vampires showing up, demanding to be let in, Dina must decide whether to get involved. If she doesn’t, her inn may never earn a higher rating from the Council, which means more business, or she does and ruins the reputation herself. A bit of a catch 22. Piss off a faction of beings who can report her or have the secrecy of her inn exposed before she can make something substantial of the inn?
I enjoyed the hell out of this. It’s short, yet full of world building and action packed. I liked Dina and her little dog creature, Beast. I loved the concepts of the inns and the healthy helping of science fiction thrown in with magic. There is a possible love triangle beginning but even that cannot deter my enjoyment.
“The banker was crucified on the wall of his Wall Street office,
fountain pens rammed through both wrists, an Armani Jesus.”
Well hello there. You have my attention.
When that’s your opening sentence to the story, you just know
you’re embarking on a dark and gritty ride.
Laytham Ballard was born a Wisdom, as his grandma called him. It ran
in the family. She tried her best to instill the whole, “With
great power comes great responsibility,” thing in him, but
sometimes, life throws more at a little boy than he can handle. With
lots of power swirling within him and a broken heart, Laytham lashed
out on a level no normal parent has to deal with. He raised the dead
and caused a slaughter.
That was only the beginning of his moral down slide. He spent his
life hunting other people in the Life and building a legend of
himself as the biggest bad ass in town. It doesn’t matter how dirty
he has to fight to build that image, he’s sold half his soul
already.
Even villains have their own strange loyalties, so when one of his
only friends is dying, he makes a promise to avenge his wife’s
brutal death. The one thing his friend was never able to do while
living. But the target hasn’t been seen in nearly 11 years, and has
some very big friends that Laytham will have to get past first. He’ll
have to use every trick in his book to find him and then, will he
even have the power to take him down?
It really hurts your pride when you doubt just how bad ass you are.
This is a dark urban fantasy with an anti-hero that you can’t trust but you also, can’t wait to see what he does next.
I was having a werewolf itch, so I perused some books that I already
own and this was one of the options. It also had witches, another
favorite of mine, so I sat down, ready for some good paranormal fun.
Lizzie and her witch familiar, Belle, moved and opened up shop on a
werewolf reservation. Things are pretty quiet for a couple of months
until Lizzie is asked to use some of her psychic ability to find a
missing teenager. The quest leads to murder and the discovery of an
extremely powerful villain. Lizzie helps the local werewolf Ranger
(werewolf police) investigate and attempt to stop the bad guy before
more people die.
Extreme lack of werewolf. Sure, the love interest is a werewolf, but
the wolfiest he gets is sniffing the air and one howl, maybe two.
And Judas Priest, the amount of showers I had to read about Lizzie
taking. I get it, you’re cleanly, let’s move on. Twice a day
showers is a bit obnoxious and took up entirely too much of the
story. If the showers were axed, there would have been more room for
character development or world building.
I’ve read the first books to a couple of Keri Arthur series now and
honestly, the main characters are all very similar. I feel mostly in
appearance but in personality too. I have yet to be impressed with
any of the series and this one is the same. It’s not bad but not
something I’m likely to continue reading unless I’m bored and my
options are limited.
“Good
thing I was a lying, untrustworthy bitch. ‘Cause there was no
fucking way I was letting this shit go. Not as long as I was the one
being slammed in the news. Both the zombie mafia and the rebel zombie
alliance could suck my white trash undead ass.”
In
her first life, before becoming a zombie, Angel Crawford was a loser.
Now however, she’s working very hard at improving herself. After
all, she could live a very long life provided she doesn’t run out
of brains or get decapitated. She
has a pretty steady relationship with a cop, her boss at the morgue
enjoys teaching her and thinks she has great potential and her
relationship with her dad is even improving bit by bit.
Then, a masked man forces his way
into the morgue at gun point and steals a cadaver. She doesn’t
resist….much because she knows there are cameras covering the
entire property.
With luck much like her old life,
the cameras haven’t been functioning for several days and so
nothing is caught. The people who work directly with Angel believe
her, but the higher ups that are running election campaigns have to
lay the blame on someone since they have nothing to go on but Angel’s
word. Her old life is brought to the forefront of the newspapers and
she’s made to look like a drug addict who fell off the wagon and
now some poor victim’s family doesn’t have a body to bury.
Even her boyfriend Marcus, thinks
that she’s remembering things wrong or doesn’t know exactly what
she saw. Thing is, she isn’t that junky bitch anymore and no one is
going to treat her like it. If no one else knows what to do about it,
she’ll figure it all out herself. She might be a high school
dropout, but that was in a life that didn’t count.
Virtually on her own, a little help from friends here and there, she discovers that someone is experimenting on zombies. That someone convinced her old friend Ed to deliver zombie heads to them for research by fueling his hate of zombies he blamed for his parents death. But, it’s beginning to look like that person would like to have a ‘live’ zombie to experiment on and they know about Angel.
One of my favorite urban fantasy series of all time has come to an
end. This was literally one of the books that sparked my interest in
the genre and now that it’s over, it’s so very bittersweet.
(Slomo said it best.)
After centuries of running, hiding, surviving and causing general
chaos, Atticus O’Sullivan is facing Ragnarok. He caused it, so he
must also try to prevent it from succeeding and destroying the earth.
While he is fighting with the ‘good guys,’ he’s made many
enemies there and the feeling that he won’t walk away from this
battle even if they win, is riding his conscious.
While Atticus handles Ragnarok, Granuaile and Owen fight battles on
other parts of the planet. Granuaile fights alongside the Monkey Kind
in Taiwan, while Owen globe hops helping out where the planet needs
it. He makes a super cute sloth friend in South America while
convincing a vengeful nature goddess that destroying all humanity
won’t save the earth.
Ragnarok was a very intense battle scene and I loved how everything
played out. The multiple pantheons coming together to battle Loki and
Hel was an exciting concept that worked beautifully. If there was
ever a series that married various mythologies with such coherency,
this was it and a large part of why I’ve loved it for years.
The ending was something that I really did not expect, which adds
huge bonus points when you cannot predict something you’ve been
involved with for a long time. I cannot honestly tell you if I’m
sad or not about the way it ended. Maybe a mix of both. While it
wasn’t what I was hoping/expected, it definitely fit.
This will remain a series that I highly recommend to people for the
foreseeable future. Whether you’re looking to dip your toes into
fantasy or specifically urban fantasy, or love mythology, or
paranormal, or action and adventure, there is something here for
everyone.
I’m always skeptical when something says it’s required reading before moving on with a series. (Also, it tends to annoy me. I don’t like when novellas become ‘required’.) In this case, it’s true. There are some relationship shake ups that you’ll have no clue about if you skip this.
Enough complaining about forced reading. (I know, I’m SO tortured. How dare someone force me to read.) This is a rather fun collection of short stories regardless. They are told from different perspectives. There is a story from Granuille and a couple from Owen, along with our MC Atticus.
Despite my bitching, I love when the short stories are about Atticus during times of historical significance and how he affected them. I think if I had to pick a favorite for this collection, it would be how he met Shakespeare and saved his life, Goddess at the Crossroads.
I read Singh’s first book in her Guild Hunter series years ago and really enjoyed it at the time. Rarely am I in the mood to read romance so when I found this at a used bookshop for $0.50, I thought I’d give the series a try.
There were aspects of this that I really enjoyed. The emotionless
race of Psy and the network they linked their conscious to for
information was a pretty fascinating premise and I could read about
it for hours. I will always remain a sucker for shapeshifters so
combining the two races and the hierarchy of the world they live in
was another reason I should love this series. I even enjoyed the
burgeoning relationship between the two main characters, and many of
the side characters as well.
BUT, the gratuitous sex scenes just interrupted the more interesting
parts of the story. I wouldn’t have minded that in and of itself
but I didn’t particularly like the sex. I think a lot of it had to
due with the naivety of the female MC. I guess I like a female that
knows what she wants and has no problem demanding it of a man.
Unfortunately, after taking a peak at the summary of the next book, this is one of those series that each book focuses on a new couple and that just isn’t something I dig. Once I get committed to characters, I like to stick with them. If the series continued with the characters we were introduced to in this series, I would at least give the second book a shot, but since it doesn’t, I don’t think I’ll be continuing.
I received this copy from the publisher via Netgalley in an exchange for an honest review.
The
Final Days of Magic was the most
solid installment in the trilogy, which is a good way to end a story.
In my reviews of the previous
books, I complained that the author appeared to skip important parts
or explanations and it left
the feeling of an incomplete story. I’m happy to report that seems
to have been cleared up in this addition.
Our
three witches, Alice, Evangeline and Lisette have for the most part,
gone their separate ways again. Each trying to both
heal but prepare for whatever the world throws at them next. They
don’t have to wait long until they’re tested by the dark force
that wants back into their realm.
This
time the action felt much more fleshed out and kept me entertained.
There were definitely some dark moments for some of the characters
that provided a more emotional connection. However, the deaths of a
couple of characters felt a little rushed and we were not given
proper time to mourn them.
Overall,
this series was entertaining and provided a great atmosphere with
interesting characters. It’s hard not to love a story set in New
Orleans with witches, but I’ve seen it fail before. The author
clearly spent a lot of time researching history, the occult and magic
and it really paid off.
She looked over the menu at her daughter. “How about this Ed
Gein Bar-B-Que? That sounds good!”
“That name’s familiar,” Paul said. “I think he was a
governor or something.”
A diner called Zodiac Lodge with entrees named after serial killers,
may be a business venture that R.S. Belcher should look into. There
are larger take-aways from this book but this may, perhaps, be my
favorite.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Belcher is the master
of genre mash-ups. The Brotherhood of the Wheel comes off as a
mix of horror, grimdark and urban fantasy. It’s a blend that worked
together and in my humble opinion, an ample dosing of horror that
should throw him the leagues of King and Koontz.
The United States transportation systems are the perfect hunting
ground for all manners of killers. They provide access to victims,
hiding places to commit their crimes and dumping grounds galore. Both
evil humans and paranormal predators stalk these interstate super
highways, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
Where there are horrors, there must also be heroes who lead the fight
against evil. That is the purpose of the Brotherhood, a secret
organization tasked with protecting the innocent. They are police,
taxi drivers, truckers, bikers, etc. They come together from all
walks of life to take down serial killers, rapists, and human
traffickers.
Something ancient and hungry is working it’s way free into the
world, turning children into mindless monsters and using human
sacrifices to increase it’s power. It hides away in a hidden town,
not on any map. The residents there are captive, they cannot leave to
find help and the monster’s minions lurk about, prepared to make
their lives a living hell for trying.
A renegade cop, biker, trucker, and a book worm are the only ones on this thing’s tail after looking into multiple missing teenager cases and it may just save all of humanity if they can take him down.
cupcakesandmachetes 