Book Log 2/2009 - Heart of Valor

Tanya Huff: The Heart of Valor
8/1/09

One from my comfort reading pile because Tanya Huff rarely disappoints and – indeed – this is another page turner. I’m not particularly into Military SF, but I like Torin Kerr, Huff’s rough, tough Marine sergeant. She’s already had two outings in ‘Valor’s Choice’ and ‘The Better Part of Valor’ both of which I read in a Huff-binge when first I discovered her a few years ago. She’s a storyteller with an eye for detail, a good insight into character and thoughtful world-building. One of the things that both attracts and repels me about Mil-SF is the alphabet-soup language. Did the NCO stay with the VTA or did she go back for the remains of the PFC? And when the gunny is off duty in the SRM should she be thinking about the CSO or worrying about getting the KC-7s safely back beyond the ZP? Combine this with a large cast of characters – some from previous Valor novels – that includes three different races sporting unfamiliar name types and my head is in danger of exploding. I can just about keep up, carried forward by the tremendous pace of the action, but I do have the occasional WTF moment! Despite the totally believable but sometimes hard-to-remember military dialogue there’s a good mystery in this book. A training exercise gone wrong turns into a nightmare and newly promoted Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, (only there as a temporary aide to Major Svensson who is on a field-test to work out regrown body parts after major battle trauma) has to more than babysit a bunch of untried recruits when the expected test scenarios turn lethal. In the end it’s all fall-out from something that happened in the last book. There’s a new Torin Kerr book out in a few months – Valor’s Trial – and I look forward to seeing where the overarching story arc takes us.

Book Log 2/2009 - Heart of Valor

Tanya Huff: The Heart of Valor
8/1/09

One from my comfort reading pile because Tanya Huff rarely disappoints and – indeed – this is another page turner. I’m not particularly into Military SF, but I like Torin Kerr, Huff’s rough, tough Marine sergeant. She’s already had two outings in ‘Valor’s Choice’ and ‘The Better Part of Valor’ both of which I read in a Huff-binge when first I discovered her a few years ago. She’s a storyteller with an eye for detail, a good insight into character and thoughtful world-building. One of the things that both attracts and repels me about Mil-SF is the alphabet-soup language. Did the NCO stay with the VTA or did she go back for the remains of the PFC? And when the gunny is off duty in the SRM should she be thinking about the CSO or worrying about getting the KC-7s safely back beyond the ZP? Combine this with a large cast of characters – some from previous Valor novels – that includes three different races sporting unfamiliar name types and my head is in danger of exploding. I can just about keep up, carried forward by the tremendous pace of the action, but I do have the occasional WTF moment! Despite the totally believable but sometimes hard-to-remember military dialogue there’s a good mystery in this book. A training exercise gone wrong turns into a nightmare and newly promoted Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, (only there as a temporary aide to Major Svensson who is on a field-test to work out regrown body parts after major battle trauma) has to more than babysit a bunch of untried recruits when the expected test scenarios turn lethal. In the end it’s all fall-out from something that happened in the last book. There’s a new Torin Kerr book out in a few months – Valor’s Trial – and I look forward to seeing where the overarching story arc takes us.

Book Log 3/2009 - Iron Kissed

Patricia Briggs: Iron Kissed

Patricia Briggs is rapidly establishing a place on my top ten list of fiction writers I will read unconditionally. This is another from my comfort-reading booklist that came courtesy of a self-Santa order to Amazon. I gulped this book down in two sittings (and only took a break because by 6.00 a.m. I thought I should try and get a few hours sleep). At less than 300 pages it’s a quick read – quick too because of the roaring pace – but Briggs never sacrifices character for either plot or pace.

This is the third Mercy Thompson book. Mercy is a self-employed garage mechanic with a history degree. She is also a walker, a Native American shape-changer, maybe the last of her kind, whose other form is a coyote. Raised by werewolves, she knows just how deadly they can be and in the last two books, ‘Blood Bound’ and ‘Moon Called’, we saw Mercy getting drawn into the increasingly violent world inhabited by werewolf, vampire and fey as well as humans who can barely comprehend what they’ve only recently begun to be aware of. As a coyote amongst wolves she’s an outsider, as a walker amongst humans she’s an outsider, as a non-fey amongst fey she’s so far outside that she’s on a different world, but when she has her nose in the engine of an old VW she’s entirely at home. Her life is complicated by the fact that she must decide between two loves, both werewolves: her old flame Samuel and the alpha of the local pack, Adam, who makes her blood boil for two entirely opposing reasons. Briggs werewolves are not nice. Bad-tempered doesn’t even begin to cover the barely-held-in check killing rage that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. It makes them grouchy, to say the least, but they are entirely three dimensional characters, swinging – sometimes wildly – between human and wolf.

In this book Mercy’s friend and mechanic-mentor, Zee, an ancient fey with the ability to work iron, is accused of a (human) murder he didn’t commit and it seems as though the rest of the fey are happy enough to let him take the (fatal) fall for it as long as it means the law doesn’t come snooping around their reservation. Mercy’s stubborn loyalty draws her in to a dangerous hunt for the real killer that brings her into closer contact that she ever thought she wanted with the world of the fey and causes conflict with and between her two potential werewolf lovers (remember those tempers?). It’s time to choose between Samuel and Adam, but how can she choose when she loves them both? It may not matter in the end because after some close brushes with death in the form of a Kelpie Mercy’s eventual discovery of the real killer puts her in mortal danger of the worst kind. By the time she’s been through the wringer she’s going to need a lot of love an understanding. From a werewolf? Yeah, right!

Highly recommended (but read the others first) and then order the next, Bone Crossed, due later this year.

Book Log 3/2009 - Iron Kissed

Patricia Briggs: Iron Kissed

Patricia Briggs is rapidly establishing a place on my top ten list of fiction writers I will read unconditionally. This is another from my comfort-reading booklist that came courtesy of a self-Santa order to Amazon. I gulped this book down in two sittings (and only took a break because by 6.00 a.m. I thought I should try and get a few hours sleep). At less than 300 pages it’s a quick read – quick too because of the roaring pace – but Briggs never sacrifices character for either plot or pace.

This is the third Mercy Thompson book. Mercy is a self-employed garage mechanic with a history degree. She is also a walker, a Native American shape-changer, maybe the last of her kind, whose other form is a coyote. Raised by werewolves, she knows just how deadly they can be and in the last two books, ‘Blood Bound’ and ‘Moon Called’, we saw Mercy getting drawn into the increasingly violent world inhabited by werewolf, vampire and fey as well as humans who can barely comprehend what they’ve only recently begun to be aware of. As a coyote amongst wolves she’s an outsider, as a walker amongst humans she’s an outsider, as a non-fey amongst fey she’s so far outside that she’s on a different world, but when she has her nose in the engine of an old VW she’s entirely at home. Her life is complicated by the fact that she must decide between two loves, both werewolves: her old flame Samuel and the alpha of the local pack, Adam, who makes her blood boil for two entirely opposing reasons. Briggs werewolves are not nice. Bad-tempered doesn’t even begin to cover the barely-held-in check killing rage that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. It makes them grouchy, to say the least, but they are entirely three dimensional characters, swinging – sometimes wildly – between human and wolf.

In this book Mercy’s friend and mechanic-mentor, Zee, an ancient fey with the ability to work iron, is accused of a (human) murder he didn’t commit and it seems as though the rest of the fey are happy enough to let him take the (fatal) fall for it as long as it means the law doesn’t come snooping around their reservation. Mercy’s stubborn loyalty draws her in to a dangerous hunt for the real killer that brings her into closer contact that she ever thought she wanted with the world of the fey and causes conflict with and between her two potential werewolf lovers (remember those tempers?). It’s time to choose between Samuel and Adam, but how can she choose when she loves them both? It may not matter in the end because after some close brushes with death in the form of a Kelpie Mercy’s eventual discovery of the real killer puts her in mortal danger of the worst kind. By the time she’s been through the wringer she’s going to need a lot of love an understanding. From a werewolf? Yeah, right!

Highly recommended (but read the others first) and then order the next, Bone Crossed, due later this year.