20. Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds

In a distant future, where faster than light travel does not exist, habited planets are strewn throughout the galaxy and are isolated except for their nearest neighbors given the time and distances that need to be traversed to link them up.

Ultras, humans who have, er, evolved/altered themselves, to live on light-hugger ships that travel the great distances, are even more isolated, as they can have no real ties on planets where they might not return for hundreds of years.

An obsessed archaeologist, who had gone to one planet where there are ruins of one of the few alien civilizations they’ve discovered existed, is haunted and driven by the disastrous consequences of his experiences there, which no one really understands. Nor, really does he seem to understand what happened to him. Still, he wants to go back there, to discover the truth about the Amarantans if he can.

Meanwhile, someone has hired an assassin to kill him, and she’s gotten herself aboard a light-hugger ship to come for him.

And, why, given how hospitable the universe seems, given what humans have learned about it, are there no other alien cultures, but only the husks of destroyed alien civilizations?  What’s happened to them all?  Where are they? 

A very complex and rather grim universe is depicted with all the obvious failings of humans still present and affecting humanity’s civilization.  Will we, can we, ever learn?

First of a series.

19. The Gauguin Connection–Estelle Ryan

I particularly love two kinds of ‘thrillers’.  Those about chasing down archaeological artifacts (on Earth or elsewhere) and art heist/forgery. Perhaps I watched the Thomas Crown Affair too many times, but I do love art thieves and forgers, probably because of necessity they have to be pretty educated and the crime is generally more about putting something over on others rather than just an attempt to gain filthy lucre

At any rate, I did love this book. And the main character, a high-function autistic woman, is terrific. She’s smart, she has her life organized and feels fulfilled. She has a job reading people for a high priced insurance company who mainly insures art.

She reads people’s expressions and body language in order to tell if people are lying or to understand how they are interacting, if they are hostile to one another, or are cooperating.

She’s asked by law enforcement and her boss to help when an artist is found murdered by a weapon that was stolen from a European law enforcement agency.

Then the thief, throwing her well structured and safe life into a tailspin, breaks into her house and asks her to help him stop more artists/forgers from dying.

I can’t wait to get to the next book in this series.

18. The Bone River–Megan Chance

A woman is brought up by her father to be an ethnologist, then when he dies more or less handed off to his assistant. She marries Junius because that is what her father wants, and she loves the wild and rough life of Northwest Washington coast in the 1800s.

She thinks herself happy until she finds a mummy, decides to study it and it begins talking to her.

This is the second book of Megan Chance’s I’ve read. She’s wonderful at evoking eerie atmospheric settings and here she is wonderful with it. You can almost feel the cold constant rains and the water in your books as you gather oysters and relics.  You can almost hear the dead speaking to Leonie as she fights to retain her scientific ideal even as her body is struggling with her dreams and her voices.

She veers toward romance for a bit, but I’m willing to forgive that bit because of the strength of the atmosphere she evokes.

17. The Alexander Cipher–Will Adams

Daniel Knox is a down on his luck archaeologist stuck in Egypt where he’s radioactive and cannot work on any dig. So he takes a job as a dive instructor for a notorious gangster so he can earn enough money to pursue his own quest for anything having to do with Alexander.

When Knox, knowing better but doing it anyway, defends a young woman from the gangster he suddenly finds himself pursued across Egypt,

Meanwhile, several other people suddenly come upon clues that might lead them to Alexander’s tomb. Knox, hiding out with an old friend in Alexandria, passes himself off as a diver gets a job at the dig.

Certainly not fine literature but this is the sort of thriller I really enjoy. Archaeology, ciphers, clues and a race to find a tomb.

I couldn’t put it down and will definitely try book two of the series.

16. Hammered–Kevin Hearne

 

Our favorite red-headed druid has to pay the piper.  He’s called on friends to help him and now he has to take his friends to Asgard to kill Thor, as he’s promised for their help.

I wasn’t as enamored of this book as I have been the previous two, but will continue the series to follow his adventures and to hang out with Oberon, best dog in the fictional universe. Also, to see how Druid Child does.

Lots of bad things happen in this book and I’m sure the consequences will hammer our druid as a result.

15. The English Assassin - Daniel Silva

Second in the Gabriel Allon series.  Gabriel, an art restorer and ‘retired’ spy is approached by his former boss at Mossad and asked to make contact with a Swiss Banker who has contacted Israel and asked for a clandestine meeting, which is set up as a normal meeting to discuss the restoration of one of the man’s paintings.

But when Gabriel arrives to meet this man, he finds him dead. Things quickly escalate and Gabriel finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy and the target of an English assassin.

14. The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks

The second book of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, is startlingly different from the first one. The first, told from the viewpoint of someone outside the Culture, who hates it, was a rousing and crazy space opera. This book is instead a ‘comedy of manners.’

It follows the adventures of a Culture man whose entire existence revolves around playing games. Any game, any challenge, he will take on. So when Special Circumstances asks him to travel to another civilization and represent the Culture in a game that is the major be all and end of of that world, he agrees.

Fascinating world building, complex characterization, and terrifically detailed ideas on the clash between two worldviews that are entirely at odds and struggling to understand each other.

13. In the Bleak Midwinter–Julia Spencer-Fleming

First in a series, Claire is an Episcopal priest, Russ is the chief of police of an upstate New York small town. When a baby is left on the steps of Claire’s church, she helps the police track down who the baby’s mother is. But then murder raises its ugly head and Claire keeps finding herself having to support affected parishioners as well as helping the police with their inquiries.

I liked the set up. Claire is a brave, determined and smart woman. Russ is a police officer who is willing to listen to Claire’s input and act on it when he thinks it merits consideration.

However, there are a couple of REALLY DUMB THINGs that happen in the book, mostly done by the supposedly intelligent Claire that really pissed me off.

Also, I’d solved the mystery by about Chapter 2.

But I enjoyed the setting and the personalities so I’ll probably try at least one more in this series.

12. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

Parzival is the avatar for a young high school student. His life is a misery (as are so many others) and like so many others is ‘real’ life is in the OASIS, an online immersive world. When the creator of that world dies, his avatar announces that he’s leaving his unbelievable fortune to whoever can find three keys and the three gates they open.

Five years goes by with millions of kids trying to solve the first clue, in competition with a massive real life organization who wants to win the contest and take control of OASIS and start charging everyone to log on which would make kids like Parzival be unable to access the game.

Then Parzival has a breakthrough. He solves the first clue and suddenly he isn’t only competing for the prize, but fighting for his life against a corporation that will stop at nothing to win the contest.

A great fun read, lots of 80s nostalgia.  Not just gamer nostalgia but music, TV series, movies and books as well.

11. A Rule Against Murder - Louise Penny

Fourth book in the Armand Gamache Three Pines series, finally a murder happens in Quebec that isn’t in the tiny village of Three Pines. I was beginning to wonder….

Armand and his wife Reine-Marie are on vacation at a lodge hidden deep in the Quebec woods on a pretty lake.  They go there every year for a few weeks, and this time they are there to celebrate their anniversary.

A wildly eccentric extended family arrives and under Armand’s nose, one of them is killed.

As usual the mystery and the killer are relatively minor factors in the book, the focus being on the psychology, the links, and the philosophy of the characters, Armand front and center.

I enjoy the series but am not a rabid fan as some folks I know are. They’re interesting and a little bit different in focus so I’ll keep reading them.