Books Received in April 2016

My thanks, as always, to the publishers who sent me review copies this month.

Dawn of Procyon by Mark Healy - A flawed but entertaining book.  You can read my review of it here. 

A distant planet. A deadly secret.

Seventeen years after it began, the interstellar war has taken its toll: the inhabitants of Earth are desperate to find a way to defeat the Argoni, a merciless and horrifying alien race.

Light years away from the fighting, mechanic Landry Stanton lives a peaceful, mundane life on the desolate planet Procyon A, and that’s just the way he likes it. But when an unauthorized trip to the other side of the planet leaves him shipwrecked and stranded alongside a hostile alien that wants him dead, Landry discovers a terrifying secret: the Argoni threat is greater than anyone back on Earth imagined.

With his oxygen and water running out, and with no way to warn the United Earth Marines, Landry’s lonely fight for survival becomes a battle for humanity itself.

Battlestorm by Susan Krinard - This is the third book in Krinard's Midgard urban fantasy series, which starts with Mist.

Centuries ago, the Norse gods and goddesses fought their Last Battle with the trickster god Loki and his frost giants. All were believed lost, except for a few survivors...including the Valkyrie Mist, forgotten daughter of the goddess Freya.

But the battle isn't over, and Mist--living a mortal life in San Francisco--is at the center of a new war, with the fate of the Earth hanging in the balance. As old enemies and allies reappear around the city, Mist must determine who to trust, while learning to control her own growing power.

It will take all of Mist's courage, determination, and newfound magical abilities to stop Loki before history repeats itself.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer - I'm about half way through this book and it's... interesting.  It comes out May 10th and I expect to have my review of it up that day.

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...