Subtitled: A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation

If you adore the New Dr. Who series, this is the book for you. It’s NOT Dr. Who, but it has many similarities. I’ve no idea who came up with what ideas first (or if that really matters), but you have your British Indiana Jones-type investigator for the Queen, who is being kept alive past her expiration date in our universe with a funky steampunk style life support system concocted by a genius “M” type ...Read More

Books 1-3: Dead Until Dark, Living Dead in Dallas, and Club Dead.

Harris certainly knows how to write a fun female protagonist. Sookie Stackhouse is waitress. She’s unschooled, doesn’t have a typical education, but has a lot of people smarts. Why? Sookie is a rare human telepath in a world filled with vampires who’ve come out of the coffin, were-people (who have not) and other supernatural creatures/goddesses, etc.

It’s a world that’s cock-eyed, but what saves it is Sookie’s point of view, ...Read More

C’mon-admit. Everyone likes a break now and then from those hot-and-heavy, sex-laden, deadly-serious Urban Fantasy books, right?

Here’s your perfect relax on the beach or escape the office series. Erroneously labeled as chick lit when it was marketed, this series features Katie Chandler, a small town Texan transplant to the Big City of New York.

All her life, Katie has noticed odd things happening around her. But, because they could be ignored (more or less) in her small town, she thinks that ...Read More

Gate of Ivory opens up on the only known world in the galaxy that has magic. Science can’t explain it, and there’s no reason for it.  It Just Is. Super rational anthropology student Theadora from Pyrene is stranded on Ivory, earning money telling fortunes with her deck of cards.

Thea is a gem.  She’s pragmatic. She’ll take stories as payment for work done. She has faults. She is not athletic. She counts money like a miser, totaling paid transactions down to ...Read More

The Dead Girls’ Dance (Morganville Vampires, Book 2) in the Morganville Vampire series by Rachel Caine…wow. It’s marketed as a young adult book.  Amazon even suggests it for 9-12 year olds! I’ve read some of Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden books so I knew that Caine knows how to deliver the plot-goods. And in this book? Did she ever.

The main heroine is 16 year old genius Claire who has moved into a house in the town of Morganville and out of ...Read More

Mary Janice Davidson’s mermaid series Sleeping with the Fishes (Fred the Mermaid, Book 1) is fantastic. It’s set in Boston (SQUEE!) and features the New England Aquarium quite prominently.Her delightfully snarky half-human protagonist Fred is a marine biologist utterly resistant to the charms of Thomas, the water fellow at the NEA, and Artur, the mer-prince who’s come to woo her. These delightfully silly three must combine forces to save the Harbor from becoming a poo-filled wasteland. Dude. Most romance novels ...Read More