Behind Blue Eyes

We Men of Ash and Shadow by HL Tinsley My rating: 4 of 5 stars #SelfPubFantasyMonth Review now live, at Grimdark Magazine We’ve all heard the phrase, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” and I’d have to say this is good advice. The best artwork in the world won’t make a story engage the reader. What a great cover can do is catch the eye and stand out in an unending sea of books. We Men of Ash and Shadow did this for me, as one evening I was scrolling through social media and my attention was caught by the wonderful book cover. This got my attention enough to read the blurb, and I was immediately hooked. “It was the most highly recommended venue the city had to offer. It was called the Ring O’ Bastards and it had the lowest patron to murder victim ratio in a five mile radius.” That’s the opening paragraph to this fine novel. Within moments, I knew I had stumbled on something special. HL Tinsley didn’t disappoint me as I read further. Right away we are ...

The Original by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I received a copy of the audiobook from the publisher through NetGalley. This was fun. I've been a fan of Brandon Sanderson for years, though I'd never read anything by Mary Robinette Kowal. As a collaboration, this was great.. In a not-too-distant future, we follow the story of a recently revived Holly. She can't remember what happened, but soon learns that she was a clone. Her Original apparently murdered her husband, and the authorities wanted Holly to track down her Original to bring her to justice. By justice I mean kill her. Holly's reward would be then to replace her Original and settle back into "normal" life. As expected, this is a grand adventure as Holly pieces together clues and uses her personal enhancements to survive and learn the details of this strange case. Of course, it's not all in black and white.... Oh, I almost forgot to mention it, but I lo...

From Cold Ashes Risen by Rob J. Hayes My rating: 5 of 5 stars Review now live at Grimdark Magazine All good trilogies come to an end. It’s something that we are sad to see, yet we can’t turn away from that final entry in a series even if we wanted to. From Cold Ashes Risen is no different. We’ve come a long way in the saga of Eskara Helsene and while we can’t wait to see how it turns out, it’s a bit bittersweet that it will be over soon. And in the case of our narrator, Eska, a little scary too. “I could feel the fear, and it was delicious.” In my review of The Lessons Never Learned by Rob J. Hayes, I made a comparison to The Empire Strikes Back , in that as a middle-of-trilogy installment, it was a somewhat uncommon occurrence that it didn’t lag in the middle. In many (if not all) ways, Empire was the best of the (original) Lucas trilogy, and I felt that Lessons could be that in The War Eternal . I was half right. My original comparison holds...

Ash and Bones by Michael R. Fletcher My rating: 4 of 5 stars Review now live at Grimdark Magazine Smoke to Ashes, and Stone to Bones… Here we go again, continuing the saga where Fletcher introduced us to the world of Bastion in Smoke and Stone . Ash and Bones is the second novel in his City of Sacrifice series, and here we start to see a little more of the sacrifice part of the series title. In my review for Smoke and Stone I went into how intrigued I was with the unique worldbuilding and magic system employed by Fletcher. He certainly continues that, digging deeper into the mythology and the machinations of the Gods that rule Bastion. “…those who blasphemed against Bastion’s sacred laws would be offered up to the gods. The gods fed well.” Once more we get the shifting point-of-view chapters from our two characters on opposite ends of the struggle, Akachi and Nuru. They survived their first squaring off at the end of Book One, where Mother Death...

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher My rating: 5 of 5 stars 4.5 stars. It wasn't perfect, but it was the Dresden Files. After so long, that just felt good. As usual, James Marsters and his narration was spot on. View all my reviews

The Lessons Never Learned by Rob J. Hayes My rating: 5 of 5 stars Review now live at Grimdark Magazine The Lessons Never Learned is Book Two of the War Eternal trilogy, that began with the fantastic Along the Razor’s Edge . “Opinions are like children. Those who have them want them to be special, rarely realizing they are just as dumb and ugly as all the others.” With this in mind, I’ll go forth with my review. Now, before we start to worry that The Lessons Never Learned will suffer from middle-book syndrome as so many bridge novels in trilogies seem to do, let me state right here that this is not the case. I would actually compare this more to the classic Empire Strikes Back level of middle-books, the perhaps rare case where the bridge is better than the ends. I don’t know (yet) if it’s better than Book Three, but I would venture to say that if you enjoyed Book One, you will like this at least as much. Eskara Helsene and her companions have esc...

Along the Razor's Edge by Rob J. Hayes My rating: 5 of 5 stars Review now live at Grimdark Magazine “Handshakes are a dangerous business in some parts of the world.” This quote from Along the Razor’s Edge stuck with me, though Hayes meant it in a different light than how it pertains to most of us in this Covidic world right now. Still, it was no less deadly, as it turns out. Our protagonist in this novel, Eskara Helsene, is quite the anti-heroine. She’s one of the world’s most powerful battle sorcerers, yet as our story gets underway, she’s as helpless as a baby mouse, and not much bigger. See, Eskara was on the losing side in a great war and through her defeat by treachery, she has lost access to her power Sources and has been cast into the Pit, where thousands of “scabs” toil alongside her in their unending task of digging. Digging deeper and farther, and to what end no one knows. Of course, it’s not that simple. There are politics and power ...