Recent Reading - 2024

Click the occasional spoiler buttons only if you wish to see plot-revealing material.

2024-07-28
Apostles of Mercy
470 pages
Ellis, LindsayLindsay Ellis

Cora Solano and Jude/Ampersand, the alien for whom she serves as human interpreter must deal with a pod of Ampersand's sister species, the physeterines, on Earth. The physeterines are well hidden until a tragic, fatal encounter with a village in the Philippines . Ampersand fears them and must face his worst memories of them.
Highly Recommended

2024-07-23
Dark Sky
252 pages
Box, C.J.C.J. Box

At the "request" of the governor, Joe Pickett takes a snooty, rich, often reviled, social media billionaire on an elk hunt. It isn't long before the hunting party becomes the hunted. The billionaire's steady online posts suddenly stop. Joe's family fears the worst.
Highly Recommended

2024-07-19
Truth of the Divine
494 pages
Ellis, LindsayLindsay Ellis

Aliens no longer a state secret when they appear at a Supremacist Rally in California. Cora protects her alien friend, Ampersand. Cora's "whistle blower", and still estranged, father continues to push his personal agenda, even if it harms his own family more than it already has. The book has a lot of suicide ideation and self-harm depiction. Read with caution.
Highly Recommended

2024-07-15
Axiom's End
370 pages
Ellis, LindsayLindsay Ellis

Aliens on Earth? Not according to the US Government. Cora is convinced her estranged father's claim of a government cover-up of a "meteor" event is all about his being a celebrity. She's embarrassed by his insistence that his "conspiracy theory" is actual Truth. Then Another meteor event happens and suddenly Cory's close family, mother, younger brother and even younger sister is in the thick of a brand new alien contact.
Highly Recommended

2024-07-08
Provenance
307 pages
Leckie, AnnAnn Leckie

Attempting to get the upper hand on her brother is the habit of lifetime for Ingray. She hares off her home world of Hwae seeking her mother's potential approval. Forces beyond her control immediately set her on a rollercoaster ride trying to avoid all kinds of interplanetary and intercultural disasters.
Highly Recommended

2024-07-02
Translation State
322 pages
Leckie, AnnAnn Leckie

What is a human when genetic modification is possible? How does that play into the range of genders that are possible? What does it matter when a tenuous treaty is all that prevents an alien threat to all participants in that treaty? Three characters in this novel represent the effort to find out.
Highly Recommended

2024-06-26
Afterwar
453 pages
Saintcrow, LilithLilith Saintcrow

Afterwar presents a horribly, all-too-plausible future of a second civil war in the USA. American Nazis elected to power have predictable, disgusting results for "immies" and "degenerates" with death camps. It was terrifying to keep reading, but could not bear to put it down.
Highly Recommended

2024-06-20
Dark Angel
319 pages
Sandford, JohnJohn Sandford

Computer hackers, Russian trains, Invasion of Ukraine and Letty Davenport needs to figure out how to keep Washington politicos out of sight.
Highly Recommended

2024-06-15
The Investigator
349 pages
Sandford, JohnJohn Sandford

Senator Colles (R, Florida) seconds his young intern/clerk to the Department of Homeland Security, in part because she wants to start something new, and in part because she's smart. It also turns out, Letty Davenport is lethal, too.
Highly Recommended

2024-06-05
Toxic Prey
300 pages
Sandford, JohnJohn Sandford

Lucas joins forces with his adopted daughter, Letty Davenport, combining the efforts of the US Marshall Service and Department of Homeland Security. There's a very credible threat that a medical doctor has combined virus strains to weaponize them to save the planet by killing up to 80% of worlwide population to save the planet from the scourge of humanity.
Highly Recommended

2024-05-18
The City Inside
213 pages
Basu, SamitSamit Basu

Near future, fractious Delhi, India is the setting for this gritty look at what social media influencers might realistically be like very soon. Joey, a capable young woman works as a Reality Controller to package and distribute the life of her long-time friend, Indi, revealing many real bits of his life in his near-constant online feed, but enhancing many other aspects to steadily garner more attention on the "Flow". She's not the ultimate boss, though, She must not only handle the performers in Indiri's semi-real life, but be sure that the funders and Flowco's owners are happy.
Highly Recommended

2024-05-01
The Secret
267 pages
Child, Lee and Andrew ChildLee Child and Andrew Child

Reacher is a sidelined captain in the Army MP service. He's assigned to a taskforce because a scientist is murdered, one important to the US military effort. He is joined by an FBI agent, and others who are similarly being set up to take the fall if they cannot catch the killer before a whole list of scientists are murdered.

This is not one of the best of Reacher series of books. While it fills a gap in the storyline of Reacher, it lacks the punch of earlier works, perhaps because Andrew Child isn't the storyteller that his brother is/was. If you are a fan of the series, do read it, but I hope you find it more interesting than I did.
Mildly Recommended

2024-04-22
Judgment Prey
392 pages
Sandford, JohnJohn Sandford

When a federal Judge is murdered, along with his two young sons, all available agencies get involved, city police, state police, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), the FBI, and not to be overlooked the local federal Marshalls. Virgil Flowers represents the BCA because U.S. Marshall Lucas Davenport has successfully worked with Virgil before. Both are recovering from serious injuries from their last case together, one where two FBI agents actually got killed. Lucas an Virgil do their best to work the periphery of the Judge's murder case. Naturally, they find more than they hoped for and wind up being the reason for progress when all the other agencies are stuck in first gear.
Highly Recommended

2024-04-25
Of Friction (Book 1 of Altered Earth Series)
309 pages
Lee, S. J.S. J. Lee

The governing leaders of Earth have scheduled a summit meeting, attempting to keep the peace between normal humans and "the Altered", modified humans who have been developed through genetic engineering which gives them extraordinary levels of strength, endurance and technology-enhanced neurological abilities. After much conflict between altered and (unaltered) humans, there's some hope of achieving a treaty to allow the conflict to end, or at least drop down to a simmer. Military Command draws together a mere squad of human soldiers to do a reconnaissance of the southern continent. All does not go according to plan.

The author has set up an interesting framework, but seems to be trying to use vocabulary which they got from a thesaurus while not really understanding the words' nuances of meaning. Some of the logic of the book is weak, too. There are other books in the Altered Earth series, but I don't think I'll bother to read them.
Not Recommended

2024-04-24
Moon's Knight
386 pages
Saintcrow, LilithLilith Saintcrow

Nightmares, a ravening beast chasing her through a city park while Gin takes an evening walk, through a gate and into an impossible place, a world of dreams and Faeries.
Recommended

2024-04-14
Lost Cause
386 pages
Doctorow, CoryCory Doctorow

In Burbank, displaced American refugees are coming, and residents are divided. Some want to welcome the victims of forced displacement as a result of climate change. Fires, floods, reduced coastal land, etc. Others want nothing but armed resistance to giving up their sovereignty to unwanted rabble.
Recommended

2024-03-22
Blade (Inverted Frontier Series #4)
332 pages
Nagata, LindaLinda Nagata

Highly Recommended

2024-04-28
Needle (Inverted Frontier Series #3)
332 pages
Nagata, LindaLinda Nagata

Lazuri's "silver" power is under Urban's control, and with a version of Clemantine in charge of the second Chenzeme courser, the human explorers continue inward toward the next apparent remnant of intelligent activity.
Highly Recommended

2024-02-15
Silver (Inverted Frontier Series #2)
393 pages
Nagata, LindaLinda Nagata

After encountering the immensely powerful being Lazuri who used them to escape from his cold, dark prison, the band of human explorers feel they must visit the ring-shaped world from which Lazuri had been banned, in an attempt to find how his power was thwarted, and maybe gain an advantage over him.
Highly Recommended

2024-02-01
Edges (Inverted Frontier Series #1)
286 pages
Nagata, LindaLinda Nagata

Light years of travel, mostly in electronic stasis, human survivors choose to journey back toward their point of origin, fabled Earth, reversing the paths of interstellar expansion. They instantiate into freshly generated physical avatars to experience parts of their journey and strive to evade the ancient, AI-controlled, implacable, genocidal ships known as Chenzeme coursers whose enmity toward all intelligent biological life has driven humans into hiding in a remote star system called Deception Well.
Highly Recommended

2024-01-15
The Candy House
282 pages
Egan, JenniferJennifer Egan

Stories of overlapping lives, some successful, others less so, follow down the years years after tragedy encounteredd by a group of college friends.
Mildly Recommended

2024-01-05
Otters in Space
169 pages
Lowd, Mary E.Mary E. Lowd

Uplifted by the long-departed humans of Earth, intelligent cats live under the paws and laws of the dominant, uplifted dogs of Earth. When given the chance to escape into otter-controlled space, going up the space elevator, Kipper pounces on the chance.
Lightly Recommended

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Authors List

This year's authors in alphabetical order with duplicates removed.
It may not be very useful to anyone, but was good for ongoing JavaScript practice.
How it was done (in part)