INCOMING

More incoming than I've had recently, thanks to a local thrift store.

• Greg Benford & Larry Niven, Shipstar,  SF novel, the sequel to 2012's Bowl of Heaven.  The recent theorizing about a giant construct around a star some 1480 light years away just adds a bit of interest to this "big dumb object" novel.
• Daphne du Maurier, The Breaking Point.  Suspense collection with nine stories of "men and women caught at critical points of their lives."
• Ernest Haycox, New Hope.  Western collection with seven stories (from Colliers, 19333-8) about the freighting town of New Hope in the Nebraska Territory.  This collection is rounded out with three additional western stories from the pulps in the early Thirties.
• Marvin Kaye, editor, The Fair Folk.  Fantasy anthology published by The Science Fiction Book Club in 2005, subsequently winning a World Fantasy Award in 2006.  Contains six original novellas about fairies by Tanith Lee, Megan Lindholm, Kim Newman, Patricia McKillip, Craig Shaw Gardner, and Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder.  Kaye, the author of 15 novels, is better known today as an editor, having compiled 29 anthologies and having been the editor of H. P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and Weird Tales.
• Philip Ketchum, Gun Law.  Western.  Framed Aor the murder of his best friend, Lee Isobel escapes from jail and goes looking for vengeance.  
• William Le Queux, Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo.  Le Queux was a popular British writer of thrillers during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, publishing over 200 books (by my count there were 187 novels, 24 short story collection, and 20 works of non-fiction -- a hefty body of work).  Several of his books were phenominal best-sellers. This one was (again, by my count) his 98th novel, published in 1921 and subtitled "A Mystery of To-Day."  Le Queux himself was a fascinating combintion of egoism, exaggeration, and paranoia.  Although born in London to an English mother, his father was French; coincidently (?) the villains in many of his earlier novels were the French.  This villainy was transferred to the Germans in later books.  Le Queux feared assasination by the Germans and demanded protection from the Metropolitan Police, which denied him, saying he was "not a person to be taken seriously."  LeQeuex also claimed to have read a manuscript by Rasputin in which the Russian mystic claimed Jack the Ripper was a Alexander Pedachenko, a Russian doctor who committed his muders to embarrass Scotland Yard.  The edition of Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo that I picked up was an early undated (probably early 20s) U.S. reprint.
• Charlotte MacLoud, King Devil. Romantic mystery.  Before starting her best-selling mystery series about Peter Shandy or Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn, Charlotte MacLeod penned a number of stand-alone mysteries.  This one, published in 1978, was her fifth.  In 1908, young Lavinia Tabard has to go to live with her rich cousin Zilpha.  Zilpha's hobby of buying and restoring old houses leads to a mystery about a seven-year-old disappearance.
• Anne Perry, editor, A Century of British Mystery and Suspense.  Anthology of 32 British mystery/suspense stories first published in the Twentieth Century.  "British" is used somewhat loosely here: Ngaio Marsh (from New Zealand) and John Dickson Carr and Michael Z. Lewin (both from America) have stories here.  Still, a pretty good selection of familiar and unfamilar tales.  Perry evidently edited the book for The Mystery Guild and the book is copyrighted by Perry and Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books.
• Mike Resnick & Robert T. Garcia, editors, Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Fantasy anthology with eleven tribute stories to the imagination of ERB.  Here are stories about Tarzan, Barsoom, Pellucidar, and Venus, as well as stories about the Moon Maid, Poloda, the Mucker, and Apaches.  A feast for ERBophiles!  The one contribution not original to this book is a short novel by Resnick which had originally been published by a small press fifty years ago.
• Jonathan Strahan, editor, Fearsome Journeys:  The New Solaris Book of Fantasy.  Fantasy anthology with a dozen original stories by contemporary writers.