INCOMING

• Steve Brady & Frank Roderus, Murder Revisited.  True crime.  "Lying Bob" Grantham had staged his own murder several years ago and now he has vanished again and his abandoned canternr is discovered covered in gore in the parking lot of Tampa's International Airport.  Was this another scam, or has someone finally got to "Lying Bob"?
• Richard Lee Byers, The Haunted Lands, Book II:  Undead and Book III:  Unholy.  Gaming (Forgotten Realms) tie-in novels.  A "vicious civil war fraught with undead and powerful magic."  Now I just need the first book.
• C. J. Cherryh, The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh.  SF collection of 29 stories and novellas, including Hugo-winning "Cassandra."  This volume includes Cherryh's collections Sunfall (1981) and Visible Light (1986), along with many other tales.
• John Connolly, The Black Angel.  A Charlie Parker thriller.  PI Charlie Parker joins the search for a vanished young woman and soon "discovers links to a church of bones in Eastern Europe, a 1944 slaughter at a French monastery, and to the myth of the Black Angel -- considered by eviI men to be beyond priceless.  But the Black Angel is not a legend.  It is real.  It lives.  It dreams.  And the mystery of its existence may contain the secret of Parker's own origins."  I'm a big fan of Connolly and of Charlie Parker.  The boks sing and Parker reminds of a mix of Repairman Jack, Dave Robicheaux, and Jack Taylor.
• Janet Evanovich & Lee Goldberg, The Chase.  A Nicholas Fox/Kate O'Hare thriller.  This time around, a corrupt White House chief of staff steals a rare Chinese artifact from the Smithsonian, threatening U.S./Chinese relations.  It's up to Fox and O'Hare to steal it back.  Evanovich and Goldberg are both top-notch authors and it's good to see them working together on this series.
• J. F. Gonzalez, Survivor,  Horror novel.  It was supposed to be a romantic weekend for Lisa and her husband but her husband ended up arrested and Lisa was kidnapped.  The kidnappers don't want a ransom.  They want Lisa to star in their homemade snuff film.  Sometimes it pays to stay home on weekends.  This one has been optioned for a motion picture.  Gonzales was a rising star in the fields of horror and dark suspense when he died in 2014 of cancer at the much too young age of 50.
• Cathy Hapka, Lost:  Endangered Species.  TV tie-in novel.  An early novelization of a show I loved.  The showrunners kept throwing in so many plotlines and surprises that they didn't know how to tie up all the loose ends, but it was fun while it lasted.
• Edward Lee, The Black Train and Slither.  Horror novels.  Running behind a historic bed and breakfast is railroad track.  At night the rooms of the house whisper and you can hear the sries of the things chained to the prison cars of The Black Train.  This one is a revvised version of Lee's limited-edition 2007 book Gast.  In Slither, a new subspecies of the trichinosis worm appears and this one is thirty feet long instead of a few millimeters in length.  Things are not looking too good for a zoological expedition on a certain deseterted tropical island.  No, not good at all.
• Adrian McKinty, Hidden River.  Crime novel.  Disgraced former policeman Alexander Lawson is hired by the family of his high school girl friend to investigate her murder.  This requires Alex to travel from Northern Island to Denver.  "Bodies begin to ;pile up, and soon Alex is wanted by both the Colorado cops and the British police."  He's on the run and the murderer is closing in.  McKinty is oneof the best of Ireland's current crop of crime writers, which means he's very good indeed.
• Norman Spinrad, The Druid King.  Historical fiction.  Vercingetorix of Gaul versus the Roman legions of Julius Caesar.  Spinrad may be better known for his controversial science fiction such as Bug Jack Barron and The Iron Dream, but he tells a good tale no matter what he writes.
• Charlie Stella, Charlie Opera and Eddie's World.  Crime novels.  Stella's novels of underworld crime are noted  for their sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.  Think George V. Higgins without a Boston accent.
• James Swain, Grift Sense.  A Tony Valentine mystery.  This is the first of at least nine books featuring the retired New Jersey cop with a special talent for ferreting out casino cheaters.  Richard Robinson and others have sung Swain's praises over the internet, so it's near  time for me to get on the bandwagon.