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 Jacob Heppleman is back on U.S. soil after fighting for Uncle Sam in Europe in the Second World War. Heppleman finds a different world, one that he needs to get a grip on, fast, if he's going to survive. Before the war, Heppleman eked out a living as a hack writer, supplying stories to the pulp magazines, but now the pulps have been going out of business, with direct-to-paperback books taking their place. Heppleman can't scrape together enough dough to buy a pawnshop typewriter, so he steals one instead, but without the pulps, his paycheck before the war, who will he write for? The head of a new publishing company, Blue Devil Books, assures Jacob that there's a hot market in the drugstore racks for tawdry crime novels - sold as much (or more) for their covers as for the stories - and that Jacob should be one of the primary in-house writers. Jacob becomes the unlikely best-selling author who takes great pride in his authenticity - which comes from his befriending several un

Somehow I missed the first two books in this trilogy, but if you're going to come to a series late, reading the ending is the way to go. Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos is a janitor. She and her crew were trained to clean spaceships, not to fight battles. But a war is on the rise and Mops and her crew are in the thick of it, fighting not only for themselves, but for all of humanity. This is one time they don't want to get flushed down the toilet. I really like a good, humorous scifi story and it's been awhile since I really got a good laugh while reading some good scifi (Adam Christopher's Raymond Electromatic Mysteries series a few years back, and before that we're probably talking Spider Robinson or Ron Goulart). Seriously ... janitors stuck fighting a war with aliens? It's a great set-up and fortunately author Jim C. Hines develops it well. The cast of characters are really delightful. They're funny, unique, and very easily identifiable. Typically I would say t

 Maier is a German detective, a former war correspondent, who is hired to track down the heir to a Hamburg coffee empire. The hunt will take Maier into some of the darkest corners of Cambodia where he will encounter many horrifying, historical figures that Cambodia might otherwise prefer to keep secret, such as the White Spider, a Nazi war criminal who reigns over an ancient Khmer temple deep in the jungle. Maier will uncover an event of mass murder that is far from over and he realizes that he will have to be the one to stand up and stop the murderer before more innocent lives are lost. It's been about nine years since I read the second book in this Maier Mystery series and I'd been hoping to get back and read this first installment.  It's hard to play catch-up when there are so many great new books released every year! As with my reading of the other volume in the series, I'm impressed with the character of Maier. He seems like the epitome of the anti-hero. While he&#

 1936. Lena Aldridge is a singer/dancer/actor, of mixed race, for whom life is not looking up. She's singing, but in a back-street basement club. Her lover, a married man, has left her. She's been kicked out of her apartment space, and to cap it all off, there's been a murder at the club. She's ready for something positive to come her way so when a stranger approaches and offers her a starring role on Broadway and first class passage for a cruise on The Queen Mary , Lena accepts the offers. But while aboard the ship there's a death that suspiciously resembles the murder at the club and Lena wonders if she is somehow connected. By the description, this book is exactly the sort of book that I've been enjoying reading the last few years ... historical fiction, borderline jazz era, theatre and music, mystery.  What's not to love? But the book rather let me down. The plot is complicated - which is a good thing, for me, in a mystery (as long as it is traceable, an

I am always interested in fiction that relates to music so when I saw this book in a local used book store, I bought it. It's been on my shelf for years, but while on an extended vacation, this was one of the books I decided to bring along. We are in Austria in the 18th century. Nannerl is Wolfang Amadeus Mozart's sister. Mozart has been estranged from the family, including his sister for many years.  Nannerl received a letter from Mozart's wife telling her that Wolfang was dead. In the letter, Nannerl learns that before he died, her brother believed he had been poisoned and would, indeed, die soon. Nannerl goes to Austria to pay her respects to her brother and to learn what really happened to him. She discovers a world of conspiracy and scandal and must walk a careful path so as not to be taken in by unscrupulous rivals or secret police. The blurb for this book sounds really tremendous. A historical drama with lots of intrigue surrounding one of the greatest figures in mus

I've been a fan of Conan and the Conan stories since the 1970's when I found the Lancer editions of the Conan books in used book stores. The character keeps coming back, through reprints, new stories, and new comic/graphic novel interpretations. This fourth graphic novel volume, based on comics written by Mathieu Gabella and Julien Blondel with art by Anthony Jean and Valentin Sécher takes two of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard ("Beyond the Black River" and "Hour of the Dragon") and brings them to full-color life in these new retellings. In "Beyond the Black River," Conan, the only white man to have crossed the Black River into Pictish territory and come back alive, rescues Balthus, a peasant about to be fiendishly killed by the Picts. The pair then head off into the country to warn some colonists - the last community of civilization in the territory - and together they might stave off the powerful sorcerer Zogar Sag who is pulling t

 The first thing that strikes me, of course, is the similarity here to the Amazon Prime series, Mozart in the Jungle . Classical music, a big city orchestra, and the wide variety of relationships going on off stage. And, yeah, that's okay with me.  I liked Mozart in the Jungle (the TV series) and I enjoyed While the Music Lasts . The book follows a variety of people, connected by the Orchestra of London, and their lives and loves, accomplishments and failures, desires and disappointments. Isabel Bonner is viola player with the Orchestra of London. She's in her thirties, insecure, and hops around from bed to bed until she meets and focuses completely on an older, married man - a cellist with the orchestra. Mirabel Felton, a horn player, is raped by the orchestra conductor. She dies in an accident and her will surprises Elaine Brown, her best friend, as it wills all her fortune to Elaine ... as long as Elaine will leave her jerk of a husband. There is also a concert-going heires

 I'd been hearing a bit of buzz about this book and so I was quite looking forward to it. 1912, Vancouver Island. Eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew has crossed the Atlantic by steamship. He enters the Canadian wilderness, open to exploring and taking in what he might see when he hears the haunting sounds of a violin echoing in an airship terminal.  Something that definitely should not be. Some two hundred years later, writer Olive Llewellyn of the second moon colony is on a book tour on Earth. Her novel, a bestseller about a pandemic, contains a strange passage about a man in an airship terminal, playing his violin for spare change when a forest grows up around him. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a detective, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, is hired to investigate something strange happening in the North American wilderness. What he finds is something that can't possibly be true, a blending of time that could seriously damage the timeline as we know it. When I write

 I'm afraid to admit that I was not familiar with the Baba Yaga legend or myths, but that's part of the reason I was interested in reading this.  The name sounded familiar, but I'm quite sure I've never read anything about the old witch. It helped to see that the introduction was from Christina Henry - and author whose work I quite enjoy. All the stories in this book are by female authors. "Today’s leading voices of women-in-horror," is how the Goodreads blurb reads but I am not familiar with any of the authors in this collection other than Henry, who only wrote the introduction. Certainly I wouldn't expect to know all 23 authors, but to not know any ...? Maybe "leading voices" is pushing the hyperbole a bit? I felt as though I got a pretty good picture of who Baba Yaga is within the first couple of stories and I was able to enjoy the variations presented here. As with almost any anthology, there were stories I enjoyed, stories I didn't care

 Take Harry Dresden from the uber-popular Dresden Files series and put him in a 'sleaze' novel from the late 1960's (ala my recently reviewed Man From O.R.G.Y. series) and you get something akin to Hex-Rated by Jason Ridler. It's the 1970's and James Brimstone is a newly licensed Private Investigator in Los Angeles. Brimstone was at one time a child magician and a soldier in Korea. He's tough and has an amazing charisma - such that every woman wants to sleep with him and those that do will swear that he's the best lover they've ever had. And to top it off, he's got some supernatural skills which makes him impervious to a lot of otherwise potential damage. In his first official job, Brimstone takes on a case of an actress whose face is horribly scarred and she begs for his help.  He can tell there's something supernatural behind this and that he's the right man for the job. In general, I liked the pulp feel to this book, and the 'sleaze&#