Monday, February 22, 2016

INCOMING


  • Bruce Bethke & "Vox Day" (Theodore Beale), Rebel Moon.  Gaming tie-in novel.  In 2069, The United Nations have finally brought about peace on Lunar colonists are not buying into the idea.  Day is the controversial founder of the Rabid Puppies whose hard-right views seem to encompass mysogeny and racial and religous intolerance.  It will be interesting to see whether his philosophie carry over in this book.
  • Emmet G. Coleman, editor, The Temperance Songbook.  Just what the title implies, a collection of temperance songs, many of them written by Coleman.  A reprint of the 1907 edition subtitled "A PEERLESS COLLECTION OF TEMPERANCE SONGS AND HYMNS FOR THE WOMEN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION, LOYAL TEMPERANCE UNIION, PROHIBITIONISTS, TEMPERANCE PRAISE MEETINGS, MEDAL CONTESTS, ETC."  The first song is "Little Armor-Bearers," which has the note "as sung by Guy and Ethel Coleman, aged 6 and 4 years."  It then moves on to such songs as "Breaking Mother's Heart" and "Crape on the Door of the Licensed Saloon."  Sadly, 1907 was far too early to have included The Chad Mitchell Trio's wonderful "The Song of the Temperance Union."  Hard cheese, that.
  • "Desmond Cory" (Shaun Lloyd McCarthy), Trieste.  A "Johnny Fedora Espionage Assignment."  British and Italian agents believe they have captured the spy who tried to turn Trieste over to the Communists, but Johnny Fedora discovers they have got the wrong man and the diabolical operative is still at large.  The debonair British secret agent Fedora predates James Bond and a number of critics preferred him to Bond.
  • Robert Cowley, editor, What Ifs? of American History.  Speculative essay collection.  Seventeen eminent historians imagine what might have been, from "Might the Mayflower Not Have Sailed?" to 'What If Watergate Were Still Just an Upscale Address?"
  • Doris Miles Disney, The Magic Grandfather.  Mystery novel.  "They had found a Way to live together, those two whose twisted relationship had led to death, revenge and horror.  They seemed almost friendly, sharing the same house, being polite in front of the neighbors."  The MacFadden paperback blurb writer does not believe in the Oxford comma.
  • David Everitt, Rustler's Blood.  Western novel from a writer I'm not familar with.  "To claim the stolen silver, Cajun lee faced a showdown with the Claibourne gang!"
  • Roger Elwood, Bloody Winter.  A thriller in the OSS Chronicles series.  OSS agent Stephen Bartlett must stop a clandestine Nazi scheme to bring the United States to its knees.  Elwood was a "Super-anthologist" who flooded the science fiction market with some good and many mediocre books, and left the field to write Christian thrillers of dubious merit.
  • John Farris, Soon She Will Be Gone.  Psychological thriller.  Sharan Norbeth enters the mysterious world of the billionaire Trevellian family.  Will she become another in a line of beaautiful women to vanish into oblivion?
  • Brian Garfield, The Villiers Touch.  A novel of money, sex, power, and the Wall Street jungle.  Garfield is the author of Death Wish and the Edgar-winning Hopscotch.
  • Ray Garton, Frankenstorm.  Horror.  An experiment out of control is spreading virus and no one is safe.  Garton won the World Horror Convention Grand Master award in 2006.
  • Lee Goldberg, My Gun Has Bullets.  A Charlie Willis mystery.  Willis is an ex-cop turned Hollywood troubleshooter.  The multi-talented Goldberg is an author, screenwriter, producer and publisher (of Brash Books).  It seems everything he touches turns to gold.
  • Roland Green and John F. Carr, Great King's War.  Sciencce fiction, a sequel to H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalan of Otherwhen.  Calvin Morrison of Pennsylvania continues his fight on a parallel Earth.
  • "Emma Lathen" (Mary Jane Latsis and Martha  Hennisart), Murder Without Icing.  A John Putnam Thatcher mystery.  Thatcher's company, Sloan Guaranty Trust, is sponsoring telecasts of the cellar-dwelling New York Huskies hocky team.  Suddenly the huskies have a winning streak and Thatcher is faced with two corpses.
  • H. Beam Piper, The Worlds of H. Beam Piper.  Science fiction collection edited by John F. Carr and containing the last ten known Piper stories that had not previously been available.
  • "Jack Vance" (John Holbrook Vance), The Face and The Book of Dreams.  The fourth and fifth books in the author's Demon Princes series dealing with the vengeance of Kirth Gerson on five evil planet-slayers.  Gerson faced the first three demon princes in books published from 1964 to 1967; it then took another twelve years before eagerly awaited fourth book to appear.

3 comments:

  1. I like Brian Garfield's books and I'm glad I haven't read them all yet. I see many new names in your list and I will have to look them up.

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  2. There's a lot of good reading on the list this week, Prashant. And probably a few clunkers, too!

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  3. I wouldn't have touched the Beale after the Puppy mess.

    I have an Emma Lathen about 2/3 finished that I set aside for short story February, but will continue soon.

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