The blurb on the cover of THE GOOD SON calls the novel “smart, entertaining, and beautifully made.” And despite the fact that the ripped-from-the-headlines summary of the book doesn’t suggest that Gruber’s latest will live up to this promise, it does.
THE GOOD SON follows the story of Sonia Bailey, a controversial Muslim writer, as she heads back to Pakistan and her in-laws to host a conference on finding peace in the Middle East through psychology. When she and her fellow conference attendees are taken hostage, her son, Theo, goes on a mission to save her.
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Jack Rogan’s debut novel certainly doesn’t read like an author’s first mystery, deftly combining the supernatural — or preternatural, or simply the natural, but the unknown — with a decent amount of smuggling, FBI drama, deception, sex and blood and gore, if not necessarily in that order. Sound like the perfect combination for a read-it-in-one-day thriller? It is, and I did.
THE OCEAN DARK sets itself apart from your typical cop thriller from the get-go: A group of fishermen smuggling guns through the Caribbean sets a rendezvous near an unknown and uncharted island. When they arrive at the specified location, they find the shallows filled with decades worth of shipwrecks — sailboats and schooners, cruise ships and fishing boats. The sound of strange songs across the water seems to predict doom and gloom — rightly so, because soon, all but one of the sailors are dead.
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Edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, SWORDS & DARK MAGIC: THE NEW SWORD AND SORCERY presents an impressive collection of fantasy stories from some of the most well-known authors in the sword-and-sorcery subgenre.
As with almost all anthologies, the contents vary greatly, with some providing the action-packed swordplay promised on the cover, and others leaving the reader slightly disappointed — or worse, just downright confused. Despite the unevenness of the tales, the editors have chosen a solid assortment of completely original stories and new tales within an existing fantasy world.
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John Connolly’s THE WHISPERERS starts off with promise: In Iraq, a museum full of ancient and valuable artifacts is ransacked, and millions of dollars of precious items are stolen. One such item is ominously reported to cause its owners to hear whispers after prolonged contact …
Fast-forward to the present day, when Iraq War veterans are back home in Maine, and the newspapers are starting to report more and more suicides. These deaths are chalked up to PTSD, but P.I. Charlie Parker thinks there is more to it than that. When he is carjacked, tortured and humiliated for information, the case turns personal as he attempts to find out what, exactly, is being smuggled across the Canadian border and why these soldiers are dying.
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There is a school of thought that proposes all literature be considered only on its own merit, with no regard to the how or why of its creation. Such a school, however, would fail to appreciate the clever approach to a new story collection from Tor, METATROPOLIS.
The five stories in METATROPOLIS, edited by John Scalzi, were originally written as audiobooks, released on Audible.com in 2008. The audiobook was successful, and subsequently printed in a limited, small-press edition of 2,000 copies. Tor is now releasing the work for the first time in a general trade format, and fans of the post-recession-apocalypse genre should rejoice at that.
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