Release Week: 22 March 2022
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Release Week: 22 March 2022
Posted on 2022-03-22 at 12:00 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
PICKS:
The Bone Orchard By: Sara A. Mueller, read by Ell Potter for Macmillan -- "A fascinating whodunit set in a lush gothic world of secrets and magic - where a dying emperor charges his favorite concubine with solving his own murder, and preventing the culprit, which undoubtedly is one of his three terrible sons, from taking control of an empire."
Don't Know Tough By: Eli Cranor, read by the author for Recorded Books -- "In a tiny Arkansas town, high school football is religion, and there will always be people who will go to any lengths to protect their faith - even murder."
French Braid: A Novel By: Anne Tyler, read by Kimberly Farr for Random House -- "From the beloved best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present."
The Shadow Glass By: Josh Winning, read by Colin Mace for Recorded Books -- "A debut horror-fantasy, The Shadow Glass is Dark Crystal meets About a Boy in London, a race against the clock to stop bloodthirsty puppets from taking over the world."
Curfew By: Jayne Cowie, read by Patience Tomlinson, Celine Buckens, and Olivia Poulet for Penguin -- "Think The Handmaid's Tale but with the women in charge, set in a world where all men are electronically tagged and placed under strict curfew, and the murder investigation threatening to undo it all."
The City of Dusk By: Tara Sim, read by Nikki Patel for Orbit -- "This dark epic fantasy follows the heirs of four noble houses—each gifted with a divine power—as they form a tenuous alliance to keep their kingdom from descending into a realm-shattering war."
The Impossible Us By: Sarah Lotz, read by Olivia Dowd, Clifford Samuel, and Paul Tyreman for Penguin -- "Bee thinks she has everything: a successful business repurposing wedding dresses, and friends who love and support her. She’s given up on finding love, but that’s fine. There’s always Tinder. Nick thinks he has nothing: His writing career has stalled after early promise, and his marriage has disintegrated, but that’s fine. There’s always gin. So when one of Nick’s emails, a viciously funny screed intended for a non-paying client, accidentally pings into Bee's inbox, they decide to keep the conversation going. After all, they never have to meet. But when their efforts to meet in real life fail spectacularly, Bee and Nick discover that they’re actually living in near-identical but parallel worlds."
Beat the Devils By: Josh Weiss, read by Fred Berman for Grand Central -- "An inventive crime thriller set in an alternate United States during the height of the Red Scare - with shocking parallels to America in the 2020s."
The Oceanography of the Moon: A Novel By: Glendy Vanderah, read by Brittany Pressley and Zachary Johnson for Brilliance -- "After the untimely deaths of her aunt and mother, young Riley Mays moved from Chicago to her cousins’ Wisconsin farm. Here she found solace in caring for her extraordinary adoptive brother, exploring the surrounding wild nature, and gazing at the mystical moon - a private refuge in which she hides from her most painful memories. But ten years later, now twenty-one, Riley feels too confined by the protective walls she’s erected around herself. When a stranger enters her family’s remote world, Riley senses something he’s hiding, a desire to escape that she understands well."
Death Game Quality Assurance by Andrew Rowe, read by Dina Pearlman, Travis Baldree, Yoshi Amao, Andrew Call, Fiona Rene, Judy Alice Lee, Adam McArthur, and Jalen Gilbert for Audible Original Stories -- "Working as a quality-assurance grunt in the gaming industry sounds like fun, right? You get to play the coolest new games before anyone else. And all you have to do is to find, reproduce, and report bugs before the last pixel is locked in and the games are launched to an eager public. Sure, there’s the unpaid overtime, the office politics, and the ever-present threat of layoffs. But you get to game! But when a small third-party testing team is assigned to work on Blade Skill Online—a highly anticipated virtual reality MMORPG—they quickly find that some bugs are more serious than others, and some truly insidious features are "working as intended". If our intrepid QA team wants to survive the launch cycle, they're going to have to break this game. Hard."
BACKLIST WATCH:
- The Ones That Got Away: Stories By: Stephen Graham Jones (2010), read by Rich Miller for Tantor -- "A boy's summer romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who's exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he can't stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't the disaster, but who she's shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won't, trade for one night of sleep. From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake-oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there's no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows."
SERIES WATCH:
Kingdoms of Death: Sun Eater, Book 4 By: Christopher Ruocchio, read by Samuel Roukin for Recorded Books -- "The fourth novel of the galaxy-spanning Sun Eater series merges the best of space opera and epic fantasy, as Hadrian Marlowe continues down a path that can only end in fire." (Technically delayed to Thursday for some reason, but it's my pre-order this week!)
The Liar's Knot: Rook & Rose, Book 2 By: M. A. Carrick, read by Nikki Massoud for Orbit -- "A clever con artist, a legendary vigilante, and a dashing crime lord must fight to free their city from the clutches of a dark and ancient magic."
Raiser of Gales: Vampire Hunter D, Volume 2 By: Hideyuki Kikuchi, illustranted by Yoshitaka Amano, translated by Kevin Leahy, and read by Paul Boehmer for Tantor
The Hidden Kingdom: Kingdom of the White Sea, Book 3 By: Sarah M. Cradit, read by Kimberly M. Wetherell for OrangeSky -- "A kingless crown will fall. A crownless kingdom will rise."
INDIE WATCH:
The Ghosts of Thorwald Place By: Helen Power, read by Rachel Fulginiti -- "Rachel Drake is on the run from the man who killed her husband. She never leaves her safe haven in an anonymous doorman building, until one night a phone call sends her running. On her way to the garage, she is murdered in the elevator. But her story doesn’t end there. She finds herself in the afterlife, tethered to her death spot, her reach tied to the adjacent apartments."
Lost Soul: A LitRPG Cultivation Series: The Tian Trilogy, Book 1 By: V.A. Lewis, read by Emily Woo Zeller for Podium -- "Death is a disease, and there is only one cure. Tian, a Cultivator at the precipice of ascension, is thwarted in her quest for immortality. Defeated, she escapes to another world with Levels, Classes, magic, and monsters. She becomes a Lost Soul. Her core begins to dwindle, but she does not abandon her goal. Working with a group of rebels in this new world, she opposes the unkillable tyrant Galgom to learn his secrets. Against his army of machines wielding laser guns and laser swords, she will cultivate her new powers, achieving Feats as she seeks her antidote: Immortality."
MOST MISSING:
The Adventurists: and Other Stories by Richard Butner (Small Beer Press) -- "Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she’s become the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There’s the historic house, where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel under your old high school, and couldn’t resist going to see where it led. Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them. You might want to get out of the way."
Utopias of the Third Kind by Vandana Singh (PM Press/Outspoken Authors) -- "One of contemporary SF’s most original and compelling voices, Vandana Singh is a professor of physics who weaves the ancient wisdom of her native India and the hard truths of quantum science into stories that speak to the complex wonders of today’s world. This collection includes both her fiction and her report on the Utopian experiments that are finding new ways to save our unraveling dystopia."
Comeuppance Served Cold by Marion Deeds (Tordotcom) -- "Seattle, 1929—a bitterly divided city overflowing with wealth, violence, and magic. A respected magus and city leader intent on criminalizing Seattle’s most vulnerable magickers hires a young woman as a lady’s companion to curb his rebellious daughter’s outrageous behavior. The widowed owner of a speakeasy encounters an opportunity to make her husband’s murderer pay while she tries to keep her shapeshifter brother safe. A notorious thief slips into the city to complete a delicate and dangerous job that will leave chaos in its wake. One thing is for certain—comeuppance, eventually, waits for everyone."
Born for Trouble: The Further Adventures of Hap and Leonard by Joe R. Lansdale (Tachyon) -- "In Edgar Award winner Joe R. Lansdale’s newest Hap and Leonard story collection, the boys are back with more righteous ass-kickings, highly improbable adventures, and disastrous fishing trips."