James Nicoll Reviews

Ilona Andrews’ 2014 Burn For Me is the first volume in their¹ Hidden Legacy series.

PI Nevada Baylor isn’t the logical choice to nab a dangerous killer like Adam Pierce. After all, the cops are already trying to track down and kill Pierce for murdering one of their own. She is, however, the ideal solution to a vexing problem for Montgomery International Investigations. The company has to keep their clients, the wealthy Pierce clan, happy without risking agent lives. Or at least the lives of their own agents. Time to outsource the problem, to a small PI agency that owes MII money. A little genteel blackmail and Nevada finds herself stuck with an assignment that will likely end in one of two ways: failure and the collapse of her family’s agency, or failure and the loss of her own life.

Pierceisn’t just a narcissistic killer with a terminal case of affluenza. He is one of the most powerful, and dangerous, pyrokinetics alive².

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C. J. Cherryh’s 1978 The Faded Sun: Kesrith was her fourth novel and the first in her Faded Sun trilogy. It would have been a fine choice for my Because My Tears Are Delicious to You series … save for the trifling fact that I managed to overlook it until the 1980s, after I had stopped being a teenager. 

The alien Regul are fighting a losing war with the human Federation. That is, mri mercenaries are doing so, on behalf of their Regul clients. The mri are in many ways difficult: aloof, easily affronted, and inflexible — but they are extremely effective warriors. The Regul have nobody but themselves to blame for their losses. The Regul are bad bosses, the sort who insist on taking a hand in matters they do not understand, then blaming and punishing subordinates for the ensuing setbacks.

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Daniel Keyes (1927 – 2014) had a long career as a writer … but he is best remembered for one piece, his story ​“Flowers For Algernon.” First published in short story form in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, it won a Hugo in 1960. Following a television adaptation, the original story was expanded into a Nebula-winning novel, then turned into a film. A partial list of the other adaptations may be found at the bottom of this review.

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, strove his whole life to be a productive member of society. Frustrated with his illiteracy, he signed up for an adult education class, where he struggled to master (in his thirties) skills others had mastered as children. Impressed by Gordon’s determination, his teacher Alice Kinnion recommended Gordon as an experimental subject to Drs. Strauss and Professor Nemur.

It was a fateful decision. 

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