Alas, our time has ended.  And what a beautiful and heartbreaking way.  This was an ending and a beginning.  It was almost as tear-inducing as the final tweet for Pratchett:  ALAS, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER, writ all in caps in the voice of Death.  The most devastating part — aside from the one I dare not spoil — was the afterword detailing the four or five stories Pratchett had planned that will never see the light of the Disc.  I’m sad that it’s […]

Just the other day I was commending one author on keeping his twenty-some-odd series book fresh, and here we’ve got another long series with a great lead character — the enigmatic FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast — with the opposite problem.  They simply don’t seem to know what to do anymore.  They’ve got this mishmash of Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes and Relic that just sort of studders around, making poor choices and landing on a cliffhanger so cheesy, I suspect Pendergast bungeed to the bottom […]

Something wonderful finally came out of George R.R. Martin’s house of goddamn lies.  I was promised more Dunk and Egg, and did not get it.  Instead, I got a sampler platter of some amazing genre scattered tales of badass womenfolk.  As with all collections, it bulged my to-read pile significantly as I became aware of the glory that is Megan Abbott and Joe R. Lansdale (well, he I knew, but this was the straw that f–king broke the f–king camel’s back, c–ksucker.)  I also fell […]

If Connelly wanted to mic drop on his entire LA noir career — the intersection again of his sixth Mickey Haller (The Lincoln Lawyer) and eighteenth Harry Bosch — he could have done it right here.  What’s so amazing about this series is the evolution: of his detective, of the city of Los Angeles, of the LAPD.  At one point in the novel, Bosch stares down the barrel of a gun, and I actually thought Connelly was going to do it.  To ice Harry, put […]

These write-ups are steadfastly becoming less about the content and more about the building woe of the impending ending of the series.  And as this is the last official City Watch/Ankh-Moorpork novel, as the final novel takes us to Lancre and The Chalk and Tiffany Aching, it really does feel like a finale.  The only bright light on the horizon is the upcoming television series, The Watch, which will hopefully carry the legacy.

Wendig’s one of my favorite prolific authors, but the Mookie Pearl books aren’t my favorite.  It’s his version of heaven and hell, with daemons living beneath the earth and digging their claws into mankind.  Mookie’s an enforcer for a powerful family, who are part of the colored pigment drug trade, and he essentially rips the world asunder in the last book.  In this sequel, he’s dealing with the consequences of all of that, trying to do right by his daughter.  It’s a solid series, but […]