The hero of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, Harry Dresden, is a unique protagonist. I consistently find him to be a character that I can relate to.
As a wizard, he taps into unusual powers (do I do that? Hmm), which in itself is intriguing. But most of all he is a guy trying to do the right thing in a world full of wrong things and surrounded by people who consistently misunderstand what he’s doing.
Butcher creates a supernatural world that is both intriguing and scary. There are fairies who will charm you to death. There are sexy vampires whose real appearance you don’t want to see. And there is the council of wizards, whom Harry seems to rub the wrong way, with potentially fatal results.
Now in hardcover from the New York Times bestselling author of The Dresden Files.Harry Dresdens faced some pretty terrifying foes during his career. Giant scorpions. Oversexed vampires. Psychotic werewolves. All par for the course for Chicagos only professional wizard. But in all of Harrys years of supernatural sleuthing, hes never faced anything like this: the spirit worlds gone postal. All over Chicago, ghosts are causing troubleand not just of the door-slamming, boo- shouting variety. These ghosts are tormented, violent, and deadly. Someoneor somethingis stirring them up to wreak unearthly havoc. But why? And why do so many of the victims…
Boothman is not a well known author but he should be. Stormy Weather is a collection of short stories and musings that cover a wide range of genres.
I love the unexpected twists, the great variety and above all the humor, sometimes slapstick, sometimes exquisitely dry, and always uniquely Boothman. These stories include a psychic detective, a mysterious TV channel leading into a disturbing world, a nameless assassin who does the right thing when others can’t, a strange artifact on a distant asteroid, and a series of “news snippets”, including Nasa Captures Shots of Happy Face on Sun. There is literally never a dull moment in this book.
The Overstory is really a masterpiece of literary construction. It took me a while to get into it, as the beginning seemed like a series of random biographies, but it does come together as Power weaves the story.
And it comes together in amazing and unimaginable ways. I was moved by the real-world sense of sadness for how humanity treats the environment and specifically trees. Powers brings us into the slow, millennial consciousness of the trees themselves and shows us a rather tragic picture of what happens when those with a conscience try to do what is right.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
An Amazon Breakthrough Novel Quarterfinalist, Death by Haggis is a tongue-in-cheek detective novel inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the "opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels." Until the day Jane Hamchester walked into his squalid office, the highlight of Detective Sam Barlow's life had been a particularly good tuna sandwich. Now he is charged with trying to save the life of the only woman he ever, uhm, thought was really swell. His only problem is that there are no clues, other than the nonsensical utterances of a dying man. Barlow's desperate search takes him first to Scotland and then to the Aegean. But time is running out. Not only for Jane but for the human race.
