Stories of the Raksura, Volume 2: The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below by Martha Wells

Note: This review will contain mild spoilers for the RAKSURA novels.

Here is the second volume containing the novellas and short stories written by Martha Wells to accompany her BOOKS OF THE RAKSURA. I really enjoyed the first volume, Stories of the Raksura, Volume 1. I liked the tight and focused nature of the novellas and short stories and thought they were actually, for that reason, better than the novels.

Stories of the Raksura, Volume 2 (2015) contains:

The Dead City — (RAKSURA story #0.3, published in 2017, takes place before Read More

A Ghostly Light by Juliet Blackwell

A Ghostly Light is seventh book in Juliet Blackwell’s HAUNTED HOME RENOVATION MYSTERIES series. Like her WITCHCRAFT MYSTERIES series, each of these novels is a solid cozy paranormal mystery featuring pleasant characters and an enjoyable San Francisco setting. Fans of either series who don’t care that the books follow a formula should be pleased with A Ghostly Light.

This time Mel is renovating a lighthouse on an Island in San Francisco Bay, though she’s having some trouble due to her newly acquired fear of heights. When a murder occurs, Mel’s friend Alicia is charged and taken into custody. To exonerate Alicia, Mel must find the real killer. She’ll do this with some amateur detective work, some help from her f... Read More

Widow’s Web by Jennifer Estep

Widow’s Web is book seven in Jennifer Estep’s ELEMENTAL ASSASSIN series. I wasn’t too impressed with book six, By a Thread, but I continue to read the series because I’ve already purchased most of the books at Audible and, even though I recognize the problems with the plot and the writing, the truth is that I like Estep’s setting and characters well enough that I don’t mind reading the books in order to get them reviewed for FanLit. Based on the high marks the series gets at GoodReads and Amazon, I’m guessing that many readers are perfectly happy to overlook the little “issues” I’ve mentioned in previous reviews. Clearly, the formula is working for Estep.

In this seventh installment, Gin and her friends are back in Ashland Tennessee after a disastrous vacation during which Gin saved another damsel in distress, s... Read More

When Will You Rise: Stories to End the World by Mira Grant

A novella set in the universe of the NEWSFLESH TRILOGY is the first, and the longest, of the two stories that make up Mira Grant’s When Will You Rise: Stories to End the World. Anyone who hasn’t read the NEWFLESH TRILOGY is likely to be a touch lost in “Countdown,” but not entirely: it is the story of the beginning of a plague, one inadvertently engineered by scientists and activists intending to do good, who instead wind up killing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.

The story is set in the year 2014, with a Denver doctor checking up on his favorite patient, Amanda Amberlee. Amanda had been diagnosed with cancer when she was 13, but now, at age 18, she’s getting ready to attend prom. A cure has been constructed from the Marburg virus, one of the most deadly viruses known t... Read More