James Nicoll Reviews

Alone With You in the Ether: A Love Story by Olivie Blake (October 2023)

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes an intimate and contemporary study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you’re not broken. 

CHICAGO, SOMETIME – Two people meet in the armory of the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. 

But this is not a story about endings. 

For Regan, life is a finish line of mutually assured disappointment. Her method of coping with the dreariness of existence is to project herself into imagined multipotency, spinning new threads of destiny with every impulsive decision she makes. For Aldo, life is a plague of constancy – a structure of rules and formulas that keep him going, without which the entire frame of his existence would collapse. 

For both of them, life is a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability, until six conversations with a stranger form the variable that glitches the entire simulation. 

Vamp by Loren D. Estleman (November 2023)

Renowned film detective Valentino is on a quest to help restore The Comet, an extinct drive-in movie theater, and his trail leads him to Leo Kalishnikov, who requests a favor first―rid him of a blackmailer from his shady past, and he’ll gladly hand over the money that The Comet needs. 

With only an uncashed check for a clue, Valentino embarks on a treacherous path to save not only The Comet but the last remaining print of the 1917 film Cleopatra , which has been lost for over a century. The film is somewhere in Los Angeles, and Valentino is willing to risk it all to find it. He must navigate the shady underbelly of Hollywood once more, in a dangerous adventure that threatens not only his career―but his life.

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske (November 2023)

In A Power Unbound by Freya Marske, it’s a race against time as the magicians try to solve the Last Contract before their enemies. But to succeed, Lord Hawthorn must accept help from reluctant ally Alan Ross. 

You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo (August 2023)

Just when they thought they were out…

TwiceFar station is at the edge of the known universe, and that’s just how Niko Larson, former Admiral in the Grand Military of the Hive Mind, likes it. 

Retired and finally free of the continual war of conquest, Niko and the remnants of her former unit are content to spend the rest of their days working at the restaurant they built together, The Last Chance. 

But, some wars can’t ever be escaped, and unlike the Hive Mind, some enemies aren’t content to let old soldiers go. Niko and her crew are forced onto a sentient ship convinced that it is being stolen and must survive the machinations of a sadistic pirate king if they even hope to keep the dream of The Last Chance alive. 

System Collapse by Martha Wells (November 2023)

Everyone’s favorite lethal SecUnit is back. 

Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize. 

But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!

Yeah, this plan is… not going to work.