Category Archives: Books

Ben Aaronovitch‘s Broken Homes (Rivers of London #4)

 Peter Grant and partner Lesley May are at the Folly practicing their magic skills and researching an Oxford dining club called the Little Crocodiles. Magic — Lesley is doing more careful, disciplined, and therefore somewhat more skilled work than Peter. … Continue reading

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The ultimate country breakfast food: Scrapple

Scrapple is classic country breakfast food, best when fried in bacon grease and served hot with honey or maple syrup on top. For more authenticity, top with sorghum molasses. You can get a debased version of this without the pork at places … Continue reading

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Ben Aaronovitch’s Whispers Under Ground audiobook (Rivers of London #3), Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, narrator

When Peter Grant’s young cousin, Abigail Kamara, drags him and his colleague and fellow magical apprentice, Leslie May, to a railroad track running under a school playground, they do find the ghost. But the ghost is no threat, and doesn’t … Continue reading

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Barbara Monajem’s Lady Rosamund and the Plague of Suitors

Lady Rosamund and the Plague of Suitors is the third in Monajem’s charming series of Regency mysteries featuring Lady Rosamund, a young, beautiful, seriously uptight young English widow, and a popular-yet-anonymous Scots caricaturist and … private detective? government agent? We … Continue reading

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Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace

“I am still learning how to write a novel,” Arkady Martine says in the Acknowledgements at the back of her second one – and second in the Teixcalaan Empire series – A Desolation Called Peace. Seeing as how her first, … Continue reading

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Roger Zelazny’s The Dead Man’s Brother

This long-lost little gem of a thriller from the great Roger Zelazny starts with a bang. Er, well, with a body on the kitchen floor. With a rather substantial knife sticking out of it. The kitchen floor (and knife) belong … Continue reading

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Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man

There is a fundamental implausibility to easy crewed interstellar (or even interplanetary) space travel that nonetheless remains a seductive idea even in our wiser and more cynical and weary 21st century. The future may indeed be robots all the way down … Continue reading

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Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire

Mahit Dzmare has been chosen to represent her world as Ambassador to Teixcalaan, the galactic superpower. Her “world” is tiny Lsel, a space station housing some 30,000 souls, affiliated with no planet, which controls a small sector that’s rich in … Continue reading

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Roger Zelazny’s Eye of Cat and Isle of the Dead

The protagonist of the first short novel in this omnibus – which is in fact Eye of Cat – is William Blackhorse Singer, a Navaho born in the 20th century, and still alive and fit and healthy, almost two centuries later. … Continue reading

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Ben Aaronovitch‘s Tales from the Folly: A Rivers of London Short Story Collection

This is a collection of short stories, including some “moments,” short pieces that Aaronovitch doesn’t want to call stories, set in the Rivers of London world. Not all of these stories feature the major characters in the novels. Several feature side characters … Continue reading

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