The Chief of State of the New Republic, Leia Solo, is kidnapped and taken to the remote, barren planet of Nam Chorios, whence the lethal Death Seed plague has been released across the sector. Luke made his own way there, seeking his lost girlfriend, Callista. Han and Chewie, Threepio and Artoo are separately trying to rescue Leia.

Your first reaction on seeing a Star Wars novel might be to sneer, as mine was. But I knew Barbara Hambly to be a competent writer of fantasies, science …continue.

Inspector Çetin İkmen is called to a remote village in Cappadocia when a 20-year-old mummified body is found. The case is tearing the village apart. Back in İstanbul, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman in­ves­ti­gates an in­creas­ing­ly violent series of male-on-male rapes.

Nadel clearly knows Turkey well, bringing to life characters from different social classes without pa­tron­iz­ing them, showing Turkey in its complexity. The story was well crafted, weaving the two strands together to highlight tension. Pace a pet peeve of mine, the two cases did not suddenly, magically become related by the end of …continue.

For his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry visits his wife's grave and enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces. The CDF remake him and his peers into su­per­sol­diers with decades of experience in enhanced bodies. Their mission is to protect the human colonies and to take new worlds. It's an alien-eat-alien multiverse (sometimes literally) and the habitable planets are much contested.

Scalzi owes a debt to Robert A. Heinlein (ac­knowl­edged at the end of the book). The wise old man, the citizen soldier, enduring love, youth re­gained—­some of RAH's favorite topics. Too, it owes …continue.

An Irene Adler book; earlier than Spider Dance.

Suicidal sailors with ornate tattoos, an odd sealing wax, and lost treasure. All these lead Irene, her husband Godfrey Norton, and Nell Huxleigh to Monte Carlo. Irene, with a little help from Sarah Bernhardt and the Crown Prince's betrothed, takes Monaco by storm. Sherlock Holmes finds part of the trail, but completely misses the bigger case.

Fluff, but en­ter­tain­ing fluff.

A paedophile chained up an eight-year-old boy's parents, then took the boy and killed him. DI Jack Caffery finds the case par­tic­u­lar­ly stressful: his brother was abducted and never found when they were boys. His girlfriend is falling apart too.

Part thriller, part psy­cho­log­i­cal study, part police procedural. Hayder ratchets up the tension as the internal and external pressures on Caffery grow.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

The Last Light of the Sun takes place in the Dark Ages of a parallel world. The Erlings (Vikings) raid the Cyngael (Welsh) and Anglcyn (Anglo-Saxon). A young Erling flees indentured servitude and becomes a raider, following in the footsteps of his estranged father. A Cyngael prince dies in an Erling raid and is taken by the Queen of the Fairies; his brother is drawn to another fairy; he will enter into a reluctant compact with the Anglcyn when they are …continue.

A conman publisher visits a writing circle in Chichester and gets their hopes up. Soon, he is burned to death in his cottage. Other arson-murders follow.

In the first half of the book, the story is primarily told from the viewpoint of the newest member of the writers' circle, Bob Naylor, who starts in­ves­ti­gat­ing, egged on by some of the others. In the second half, it becomes a police procedural, as seen by Detective Chief Inspector Henrietta Mallin, who takes over the case.

The Circle is a whodunnit in the classic vein, with …continue.

The district nurse is murdered in a Danish seaside resort. The police arrest the local peeping tom, a dimwitted young man. Detective-Inspector Jonas Morck has his doubts. Morck and his partner, Einarsen, are locked in a permanent good cop–bad cop routine. Eventually, Morck in his quiet, methodical, yet insightful way, will find the real killer.

Alban McGill has a strained re­la­tion­ship with his extended family, the Wopulds, maker of Empire, one of the world's best­selling games for more than a century. They are being drawn together at their remote Scottish estate, Garbadale, to decide whether to sell the company to a large American company. His cousin Sophie will be there, the one he's loved from afar for twenty years, since their affair was forcibly broken up.

Banks weaves together multiple strands of Alban's life, the torrid adolescent love affair, his mother's early …continue.

Book #5 in the Merchant Princes series, sequel to The Merchants' War.

The U.S. Government have become really pissed off with the world-walking Clan, and send a small nuke into the Gruinmarkt. It misses the clan but takes care of the new king who was waging war on them. Miriam is pregnant with a royal child and manages to parlay that into being crowned queen-widow. The con­ser­v­a­tive faction in the Clan view the nuke as a deadly insult and want revenge.

This is another heady mixture of feudal intrigue, U.S. …continue.