Wow! It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update on my current in-progress reads, so I’m going to give you a quick rundown on the books I’ve completed since my last post.
(Bear with me, the easiest image to screenshot sorts by Most Recent first._
I’m still working my way through the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald, and I’ve finished listening to The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, Dress Her in Indigo, and The Long Lavender Look since August. This is one of my favorite series’. It follows along the lines of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, a loner (or character with few select friends) who helps people who have no one else to turn to. Though McGee is in it for the money, when possible, he has several “cases” where he doesn’t get any payment.
As a fan of the Urban Fantasy genre, as well as being a bit of an Anglophile, the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch is right up my alley. I’ve been reading the novels, starting with Midnight Riot, for several years. Recently, I discovered that the graphic novels for the series are not, as is common, comic books of the novels, but short stories that have relevance in the larger series. Once I found that out I realized I needed to catch up and promptly purchased six of the seven available graphic novels, and pre-ordered #8. They’re all available on Comixology, if that’s your preferred format, but these links are all for the hard copy:
Body Work
Night Witch
Black Mould
Detective Stories
Cry Fox
River Weed
With the work I do for Chris Kennedy Publishing, I have to keep up on several series. So I completed six books over two series: Blue Crucible (Benjamin Tyler Smith) and The Island of Doctor Laroue (Chris Kennedy & Christoper Woods) from the Fallen World series; and The Dark Before the Light (Tim C. Taylor), One Minute to Midnight (Tim C. Taylor & Chris Kennedy), High Mountain Hunters (William Alan Webb), and The Gates of Hell anthology from the Four Horsemen Universe. Both Fallen World and 4HU are shared universe with several of the authors taking time to write in each.
And I can’t forget Waveoff by Chris Kennedy, which is the final novella in Season One of the Murphy’s Lawless series, which takes place in Charles E. Gannon’s Caineverse (Caine Riordan series).
One of the potential problems with a series is that the author typically knows how it’s all going to end. Unfortunately, Richard Kadrey has told us there is only one more book after his most recent Ballistic Kiss to finish out the Sandman Slim series. I’ll be sad to see this one go. It’s one of those series where I good with pre-ordering it sight unseen.
After many years of waiting, we got two Dresden novels from Jim Butcher this year, Peace Talks and Battle Ground. To be fair, it’s clear they are part one and part two of the same “book,” but it also meant that we got a lot of Dresden to make up for the dry spell. Both books are excellent, with some unexpected surprises in Battle Ground.
If you’re a fan of noir mysteries and science fiction, you should definitely check out Second Chance Angel by Griffin Barber and Kacey Ezell, which follows Ralston Muck, human, and Angel, AI, as they try to find out what happened to Angel’s host, Siren.
I’ve also been trying to whittle away and my TBR (to-be-read) list so I was able to cover The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft, a C. Auguste Dupin Collection by Edgar Allan Poe, Chasing Red by Kevin Ikenberry and Nick Thacker, Have Keyboard, Will Type by William Alan Webb, and the audio of Love Life by Rob Lowe.