“The world didn’t leave us much, but it left enough. Enough to remind us that maybe, just maybe, we still matter.” Perhaps, but the novel Seeker by Glenn S. Robertson would indicate that we are a long way from what we once were. The world...

The Russia-Ukraine war continues, but Russia’s progress is stalled, and victory looks distant. Keen on Russia’s future in the war, Colonel General Gennady Chuikov, officially declared deceased, summons Major Tomas Arshavin of Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) to propose a strategy dubbed the Barca Maneuver. Through...

Mona “Ripper” Ripple and her crew, Karcass Five, take center stage in Jarrett Brandon Early’s Lovestruck Maggot, plunging readers straight into the rugged, alien world of Kalderra. The planet itself is unforgettable: glowing subarashi trees rise from volcanic calderas, a huge violet moon looms overhead,...

In The Orphans of Nilad by Erich and Daniella Sanchack, driven by a sealed letter, EoC leads Kaida, the blue-eyed barbarian Dinger, and the half-elf Kekron ashore to Nilad, a mountain town shrinking under fear after miners vanish, and strange messages begin appearing in the...

Athena Technologies is creating a computer system called God’s Eye, which allows all the alphabet agencies of the US to have equal access to the same information. Some people in the government believe this is too much information to have access to and want the...

Death and destruction are dished out to the syndicate that decided to eliminate their top assassin in the entertaining novel, Bunny Slippers, by Matt Peterson. MARI is an international organization of hired killers, and Bunny has worked for them for decades. When Bunny chooses to...

In Don Stuart’s Descartes' Shadow, born during the Cascadia disaster, Ellie Frye Carver grows up on Vashon Island with unanswered questions about her mother’s death and the father she never knew. Her closest confidante is Patrice, an advanced artificial intelligence who first enters her life...

In Larry Weindruch and Richard A Yach’s Get Maggie, Nicolas Pavlovich leaves Chicago with a large sum of stolen cash and his daughter Maggie, hoping distance will keep them out of reach of the men hunting him. Miami offers only a brief pause. Old grievances...

In Tilly Hornsby’s Guardian of the Depths, when marine biologist Kaia Jones inherits her grandparents’ secluded cottage in a private Scottish cove, she expects solitude and a place to continue her work on the sea. Instead, repeated visits from a mysterious woman arriving by rowboat...

In Alexandria Prescott’s Maelstrom of Innocence, book one of The Maelstrom Trilogy, on the night of 7 December 1941, Harper Miller attends an embassy reception in Tokyo with her father, Ambassador William Henry Miller, expecting only a diplomatic ceremony. By morning, news of Pearl Harbor...