Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire in Black and Gold, and I'm disappointed. Beyond the insect-kinden concepts, this book is pretty much standard fantasy lite fare...

Check the blog for the full review.

Patrick
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com

Just finished R. Scott Bakker's The Judging Eye, and it's everything fans could hope for!

Hard to put down, and that's a fact!!!

Check out the blog for the full review...

Patrick
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com

Just finished K. J. Parker's The Company.

Intelligent and well-crafted, as crazy as it sounds think about a cross between Neil Gaiman and L. E. Modesitt, jr.

Check the blog for the full review.

Cheers,

Patrick
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com

Just finished Paul Kearney's excellent The Ten Thousand. Good pace, grim setting, superior characterization, bloody battles -- The Ten Thousand is Paul Kearney writing at the top of his game. The novel is a brutal and uncompromising tale of warfare and survival written by one of the most underrated ...

Just finished Brent Weeks' debut, The Way of Shadows. This book piqued my curiosity when I was told that it was similar in style to Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. And yet, though Brent Weeks' fantasy debut does bear some resemblance with Lynch's, The Way of Shadows has a lot more in common ...

Just finished David J. Williams' The Mirrored Heavens . This scifi/cyberthriller yarn is a definite frontrunner for my "Unexpected Surprise of the Year" Award. If Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, and William Gibson had ever teamed up to write a book, this is the sort of thing they would have com...

Just finished Glen Cook's first Black Company omnibus, Chronicles of the Black Company, and I love it! I now understand what Erikson meant when he said that Cook brought the story down to a human level by dispensing with the cliché fantasy archetypes. And it's obvious Cook was a huge influence behin...

Just finished Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone. Sedia set up the bar pretty high with The Secret History of Moscow, and her latest work doesn't quite live up to the expectations generated by its predecessor. While The Secret History of Moscow delivered on all fronts, one reaches the end of The...

Just finished reading the Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy anthology. The short stories are as disparate as the authors who wrote them, and the pièce de résistance is, of course, Patrick Rothfuss' "The Road to Levinshir," a novella-length piece which will appear in the forthcoming The W...

Just finished David Louis Edelman's Multireal. As was the case with Infoquake, the book is a superior read. Moreover, if the final installment lives up to the expectations generated by its predecessors, this series could well be the best thing ever published by Pyr. That's saying something! The Jump...

Hi there, Just posted my review of Steven Erikson's eagerly anticipated Toll the Hounds on the blog. It's the slowest-moving installment of the series by far, though the ending will completely blow your mind! The book review is spoiler-free, but I do enumerate the principal storylines, much like I d...

Just finished Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains. It's no secret that fantasy became nastier and more violent in recent years. Dark and brooding epics have irrevocably altered the genre, or so it seems. Had it been released a decade ago, The Steel Remains would have made quite a splash. In 2008, how...

Just finished Ian Cameron Esslemont's Return of the Crimson Guard. I was extremely eager to sink my teeth into this book! Regardless of what some people might say, Night of Knives was more novella than novel, and as such it prevented us from fully evaluating Ian Cameron Esslemont's potential and tal...

Just finished Naomi Novik's Victory of Eagles . Although Novik's latest is as fun and entertaining as the previous four Temeraire novels, there seems to be a few hints that the series might be losing a little steam. To say that Victory of Eagles is disappointing would be a lie. And yet, with Novik &...

All I can say is: Read Neuropath!

Patrick
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com

Just finished Jeff Somers' entertaining The Digital Plague . If you're looking for a balls to the wall, non-stop action, cyberpunk/noir science fiction adventure with dark humor and a high body count, look no further. Somers' The Digital Plague should definitely scratch that itch! ;) Check the blog ...

Just finished Brian Ruckley's Bloodheir . Ruckley fans will be pleased to learn that the author delivers once again in this second volume of The Godless World trilogy. Hence, if you enjoyed Winterbirth , chances are that you won't be disappointed by Bloodheir . By the same token, if you were put off...

Well, if he keeps this up, Sergei Lukyanenko will soon become one of my favorite speculative fiction authors! I found The Night Watch impressive when I read it last year, and The Day Watch lived up to the high expectations generated by its predecessor. Indeed, urban fantasy doesn't get much better t...

Just finished Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish. . .

Disappointing, to tell the truth. Although the main protagonist is interesting, as a whole The Last Wish doesn't rise above most media tie-in fiction out there.

Check the blog for the full review.

Patrick
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com

Just finished Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year . A compelling blend of mystery and speculative fiction, The Shadow Year is a wonderful read. A relatively short work, weighing in at about 300 pages, but a satisfying reading experience nonetheless. I doubt that younger readers will get as much out of it...