James Nicoll Reviews

In a posthuman virtual world sealed off from the ruins of Earth, the idyll is shattered by an arachnid invasion.

Designed in imitation of a harbor town in southern Europe, the Realm of Summer is just one of the zones within the virtual resort known as the Costa del Número. It has been more than a thousand years since human guests stopped coming to the Realm, leaving the AIs alone in their endless summer. But now all that has come to a sudden end, as an army of mysterious Spiders begin reducing the town to nothing. As night falls, the few remaining AIs prepare for their final, hopeless battle… War between the virtual and the real begins in book one of the Angel of the Ruins series.

It was hard enough running O’Reily’s – the coffeehouse that doubled as a halfway house for young monsters transitioning back to the regular world. Dylan, as a revenant who’d once been a monster hunter, was all too familiar with their problems, so he didn’t mind the work. And when a soul-ripping barghest tried to stake out Central Park, well, taking care of that was his job too… while he kept searching for his wife Anna, who had vanished five years before.

But after something destroys half of Paris, magic seems to be going wild, and what should have been a straightforward hunt almost gets him and his vampire friend Angelus killed. Dylan is torn between the lure of the dead past that ensnares almost every revenant, the mundane yet vital responsibilities to the people he cares for, and the deadly threat of magic unleashed.

Far away, leanan sidhe Keenan Murray must escape his vampire masters, discover his lost past… and that discovery will link him irrevocably to Dylan O’Reily.

When two old enemies of Oz returned, more powerful than before, only Polychrome, the Rainbow’s Daughter, escaped, to bring her father an enigmatic prophecy. The only hope for the heart of Faerie is a lone traveler from the mortal world, who must become a weapon such as Faerie has never seen — and whose victory may cost more than defeat.

Only a psionic can survive battle with another psionic. And human psionics become megalomaniacal monsters. These two truths were drilled into everyone in the Reborn Empire.

But… Commander Sasham Varan had survived a Zchoradan psionic attack… and because of this, Prime Monitor Shagrath brought him into a top-secret project to create a stable human psi.

Then a chance flaw in the treatment shows Varan that Shagrath is no hero, but a malevolent, inhuman being bent on the destruction of the Empire. With the help of ​“Vick”, the alien scientist who invented the psionic treatment, Varan manages to escape, and send a single, cryptic message to Taelin Mel’Tasne, one of the Five Families and Varan’s best friend.

Now on the run, branded a rebel and a murderous psi, Varan’s hope to save the Empire – and perhaps the Galaxy – rests on his own determination and still-untested powers, two alien scientists with their own agendas, the mysterious trader named The Eonwyl… and Taelin Mel’Tasne’s faith in his friend.

Blending fast-paced military science fiction and space opera, the first volume in a dynamic trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Praxis, set in the universe of his popular and critically acclaimed Dread Empire’s Fall series — a tale of blood, courage, adventure and battle in which the fate of an empire rests in the hands of a cadre of desperate exiles.

It’s been seven years since the end of the Naxid War. Sidelined for their unorthodox tactics by a rigid, tradition-bound military establishment, Captain Gareth Martinez and Captain the Lady Sula are stewing in exile, frustrated and impatient to exercise the effective and lethal skills they were born to use in fighting the enemy.

Yet after the ramshackle empire left by the Shaa conquerors is shaken by a series of hammer blows that threaten the foundations of the commonwealth, the result is a war that no one planned, no one expected, and no one knows how to end.

Now, Martinez, Sula, and their confederate Nikki Severin must escape the clutches of their enemies, rally the disorganized elements of the fleet, and somehow restore the fragile peace — or face annihilation at the hands of a vastly superior force.