Edge of Apocalypse-Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

Edge of Apocalypse

Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

Zondervan, Apr 20 2010, $24.99

ISBN: 9780310326281

Joshua Jordan was a hero taking unbelievable chances with his life for the country he loved.  When he retired from field work he became a weapon designer trying to still protect the United States from threats outside and inside the nation.  In the Atlantic, a North Korean boat has nuclear missiles aboard.  Due to failed communication with his superiors at home, the admiral launches the weapons a

Two of the missiles head towards New York City; Jordan has minutes to activate the Return to Sender laser guidance system that sends a missile back to its launch site.  The counter operation proves successful, but the media questions the consequences while the White House and Senate demand he turn over the Return to Sender system to Senator Stratworth and his committee.  When he refuses to give it to anyone outside of the Pentagon as he fears anyone else will sell it for oil and credit. The President and Congress use the media to go after Joshua.  Joshua soon learns he might be a target as Iran, North Korea and Russia as well as allies want the system and will go to any length to get it.

Taking place in the near future in which America is short on cash as a new growing dust bowl threatens Midwest agriculture, corruption permeates the government, Joshua and two secret cabals try to bring back the country to what is once was.   Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall provides readers with an exciting thriller as the United Sates is on the Edge of Apocalypse while the hero must deal with the possibility of biblical Armageddon and saving his nation.

Harriet Klausner

Hard Magic-Laura Anne Gilman

Hard Magic

Laura Anne Gilman

Luna, May 2010, $14.95

ISBN 9780373803132

Recent college graduate Bonnie Torres joins New York-based Private, Unaffiliated, Private Investigators (PUPIs) a forensic magic investigative firm.  She and the other PUPIs practice magical spell-casting as they prepare for their first field case.

The Chicago police ruled that septuagenarian Charles and Patty Reyboern committed vehicular suicide.  Their daughter Rose rejects the official determination of the causes of her parents’ deaths as each was healthy, financially secure and liked one another; no motive appears for their killing themselves.  She hires PUPIs as she refuses to accept what the cops concluded.  Although not ready, the inquiry is assigned to Bonnie and her team.  They follow clues some of a magical variety while interviewing friends and family of the deceased.  Soon they begin to agree with their client that murder made to look like suicide occurred.  As they interrogate suspects, someone uses magic to take out the team, but Bonnie and company survive the spell-casting assaults.

Laura Anne Gilman explains Bonnie was a bit player in the Retrievers saga when she got a starring role in the anthology Unusual Suspects (see Illumination); Hard Magic is her first lead in a novel.  She proves capable as the heroine holds the exciting private investigator urban fantasy together.  Fast-paced, readers will enjoy the return to the world of the Cosa Nostradamus starring a naïve rookie (total opposite of the Retriever veterans) whose investigation makes for an entertaining magical whodunit.

Harriet Klausner

Song of Scarabaeus-Sara Creasy

Song of Scarabaeus

Sara Creasy

Eos, Apr 27 2010, $7.99

ISBN 9780061934735

The ultra top secret government agency the Crib deploys a “biocyph” technology to terraform the planet Scarabaeus.  However, something goes terribly wrong and the planet is dying.  Leadership of the Crib has no idea why and besides deploying the cover-up seeks explanations.  The Crib raised orphan Edie Sha’nim because she possesses the innate talent and augmented with appropriate training and brainwashing to program biocyph seeds.  Edie knows what caused the genocidal snafu.

The Rebel Fringe colonies seek their freedom from the iron fist of the Crib’s clutches know of her.  Agents kidnap Edie and link her “telepathically” to Finn even as they want her to help them prevent the biocyph seeds annual deactivation.  Edie fears telling Finn and the Rebels what she knows as she inadvertently played a key role in the destruction of Scarabaeus.

Song of Scarabaeus is a terrific outer space science fiction romance with the emphasis on the science extrapolated from current trends.  The planets add to that feeling of being out in deep space with their strange extraterrestrial surfaces while the lead coupling leashed together mentally is attracted to one another but each has to find a way to separate what their leaders programmed from what their hearts demand.  Sara Creasy provides a winner with the lamenting haunting Song of Scarabaeus.

Harriet Klausner

Honeymoon Of The Dead-Tate Hallaway

Honeymoon Of The Dead

Tate Hallaway

Berkley, May 4 2010, $14.00

ISBN: 9780425234129

Married couple bookselling witch Garnet Lacey and vampire Sebastian leave Wisconsin for the Twin Cities’ airport as they plan to fly to Transylvania for their honeymoon.  However, while waiting for their plane to take off, Garnet sees a frost giant sitting on the wing. Her efforts to warn authorities lead to the pair removed from the jet while Homeland Security looks at them like their crazy and perhaps dangerous.

Garnet suggests they stay in Minneapolis-St. Paul where his wife once lived.  She reluctantly agrees although she left town in a hurry after stealing the boyfriend of her BFF; that guy still has her love spell haunting him.  Garnet is abducted while an anti-vampire group stakes out Sebastian. This is a honeymoon in separate hells.

The key to this superb urban fantasy is Garnet’s transgressions as a youthful witch makes the heroine and, by extrapolation as the prime player of the Hallaway mythos, this book feel plausible.  As her past catches up with her Sebastian has his own woes.  With a great twist to the ending, fans of the saga (see Dead If I Do, Romancing the Dead, Tall, Dark & Dead and Dead Sexy) will relish Honeymoon of the Dead, forlorn and forgotten.

Harriet Klausner

The Map of True Places-Brunonia Barry

The Map of True Places

Brunonia Barry

Morrow, May 4 2010, $24.99

ISBN: 9780061624780

When Zee Finch was a child in Salem, she watched her mother commit suicide.  Zee became a juvenile delinquent stealing boats, which led to her nickname “Trouble”; her father lived in his own bubble not realizing how much trouble his daughter caused.  Ten years after her last theft, Zee turned her life around becoming a psychotherapist working with the internationally renowned Dr. Liz Mattei and is engaged to a Boston Brahmin.

Zee’s perfect life implodes when her patient Lilly Braedon kills herself, which brings up buried memories of her mom committing suicide in front of her.  With a need to leave Boston, she heads to Salem where she sees first hand how ill her father is; Zee avoided the truth that her dad also hid from her as to the severity of his Parkinson’s disease.  However, he needs her now as his companion Melville just left.  As father and daughter struggle to finally move on together passed the pivotal moment that led to the omissions and strains between them; Zee throws away her life plan seeking The Map of True Places in her relationship with her dad.

Returning to the Salem of The Lace Reader with some characters from that book appearing in this one, Brunonia Barry provides her fans with a profound complex relationship drama as the past impacts the present and the future.  Out of love and grief, Zee and her dad learned to conceal key things from one another which only further separated them when they needed each other for closure.  Making the case that in family relationships that honesty is the best policy for the long run, Ms. Barry provides a thoughtful tale that will have readers reflecting on their lives.

Harriet Klausner

Mr. Arkadin AKA Confidential Report-Orson Welles

Mr. Arkadin AKA Confidential Report

Orson Welles

IT (HarperCollins), Apr 6 2010, $13.99

ISBN: 9780061689031

Just after the war, Chesterfield smuggler Guy van Stratten and his girlfriend Mily find the dying man with a knife in his back near their boat the Queenie.  Marcel Bracco tells them to find Gregory Arkadin if they want to make a fortune.  The cops arrive as Bracco dies, but also look on board the Queenie where they find the illegal contraband.  Guy spends the next three months behind bars.

After his release, Guy searches for and finds Mily who works on board Arkadin’s ship.  However, Guy also learns the great international financier has a daughter Raina and knows she is the best ticket to get to her father and subsequently a lot of money though he remains unsure how.  Guy maneuvers a dance with Raina and a ride to Marseille.  Guy meets Arkadin who hires him to find out who he was before arriving in Zurich in 1927 with 200,000 Swiss francs.

Although the novelization of the Welles’ unfinished movie (as described by John Parker in the forward: apparently there were several versions but none finished by Welles) is an intriguing character study starring individuals who are shady and most often on the wrong side of the law.  Although the tale is slow at first, once Guy and Raina meet, the action picks up until a final confrontation.  Fans of Orson Wells will enjoy this entertaining reprint of a 1950s thriller as his antiheroes work post Europe with a capitalist need at the bottom line at all costs.

Harriet Klausner

Sham Rock-Ralph McInerny

Sham Rock

Ralph McInerny

Minotaur, Apr 13 2010, $24.99

ISBN: 9780312582654

Because of the recession, financial adviser David Williams returns to his ala mater Notre Dame to visits his son attending classes there and to inform the university’s administration he cannot afford to finance a new building as he promised.  As David visits, another alumnus sends to the school’s associate archivist a box filled with newspaper clippings and various other sundry including the confession of a murder and burial of the victim, another student from the class of 89 Timothy Quinn, who had vanished two decades ago.

The school leadership, having used retired private investigator Philip Knight to work sensitive cases before, asks him to look into the Quinn situation.  With the help of his brother Catholic Studies Professor Roger Knight Philip begins his inquiry starting with a look back to 1989 when the “Trinity” of David, Timothy and Patrick were rivals and buddies.  Upon digging up the corpse, the siblings realize the case is much more convoluted than they expected.

The latest Knight brothers Notre Dame investigative tale (see The Green Revolution) is one of the better entries in what is a fun lighthearted private detective series.  The story line is fast-paced from the moment the archivist opens the box and never slows down as Philip with Roger assisting him begins the inquiry into what happened in 1989 only to find a much bigger case on their hands.  Ralph McInerny, who died in January, provides a strong Fighting Irish academic mystery.

Harriet Klausner

Dead Head-Rosemary Harris

Dead Head

Rosemary Harris

Minotaur, Apr 13 2010, $24.99

ISBN: 9780312569945

In Springfield, Connecticut, gardener Paula Holliday is shocked when the news explodes that one of her clients whom she was considering a partnership with, Caroline Sturgis, is actually Monica Jane Weithorn, who escaped from prison over a quarter of a century ago.  Monica Jane had been convicted of drug dealing, but has since straightened out her life becoming a wife and mom as a pillar of society.

Now the “Fugitive Mom” is going back to prison to complete her sentence and probably more for her escape.  Caroline’s stunned husband Grant tells Paula his wife is a stranger, but needs to know who turned her in to the authorities.  Knowing that Paula has solved cases (see The Big Dirt Nap and Pushing Up Daisies), he hires her to investigate; she accepts as she can use the money with the economy still tanked and besides she is curious too.  Her friends Police Sergeant Mike O’Malley and reporter Lucy Cavanaugh also wonder who.

Based on headlines from a few years ago, Dead Head is a terrific amateur sleuth though it is the parallel look at the life (past and Present) of the Fugitive Mom who makes this an exhilarating character driven tale.  Fast-paced in both eras, readers will be as spellbound as Paula and the rest of Springfield are comparing Dead Head Monica Jane with family matriarch Caroline.

Harriet Klausner

Ghosts And Echoes-Lyn Benedict

Ghosts And Echoes

Lyn Benedict

Ace, Apr 272010, $7.99

ISBN: 9780441018703

Miami based private investigator Sylvie Lightner continues to grieve deaths she caused like that of Michael even if she simply saved the world (see Sins and Shadows).  She knows she needs to get back to work handling paranormal cases, but that is easier said than done when you are responsible for the death of others.

Still she goes to her South Beach store Shadows Inquiries to see what havoc her partner Alexandra Figueroa-Smith caused even as her backbrain snipes at her.  Sylvie rejects as clients witches, werewolves, demons and others as she has pissed off enough of them for several lifetimes.  However, she reluctantly agrees to handle the case of Chicago police officer Adam Wright who shows up while she is doing surveillance.  A husband and father of a six years old son, he says he is either possessed or crazy as he died but came back with an otherworld hitchhiker.  She explains not her thing as she is good at breaking and destroying not surgically removing parasites from a host as her approach is kill the host and the parasite is gone.  Still she agrees to help him after he mentions Anna D the succubus who hates her referred him.

The key to this terrific urban fantasy is the world of Benedict seems genuine as the heroine works the Magicus Mundi cases.  Fast-paced, fans will relish Sylvie’s efforts to send that other soul back to the beyond.  Readers will enjoy this fine paranormal private investigate thriller with a great late twist as the tough detective works the abnormal beat.

Harriet Klausner

Magic On The Storm-Devon Monk

Magic On The Storm

Devon Monk

Roc, May 4 20210, $7.99

ISBN: 9780451463272

A Hound searching for the practitioners of illegal magic use, Allie Beckstrom continues her training with the Authority.  Obviously she is one teacher’s pet as her lover and soul mate Zayvion Jones is a prime instructor in her magical skills education.  Allie believes she contains a segment of her late father’s soul because she hears him “speak” in her mind.

The Authority leadership concludes a treacherous magical tsunami is heading towards Portland that will destabilize magic activity; it will take a powerful cohesive team to restrain it and hopefully contain it if scattering proves impossible.  Allie and Zayvion are a major part of the wildstorm counteroffensive unit; but neither the professor nor the student realizes the worst treachery is from within the Authority.

The latest Allie Beckstrom urban fantasy is a terrific entry as all magical hell is heading to Portland where the lead couple on the front prepares for the “war” while seditious acts occur within the Authority hampering the efforts to prevent the deadly perfect storm.  Allie has come a long way since she learned of Magic to the Bone; as her heart and soul has found her other while she learns to control her paranormal skills.  This is a strong tale, as the magical world of Devon Monk seems genuine.

Harriet Klausner