INCOMING

• A. A. Aguirre, Bronze Gods. An Apparatus Infernum novel, the first in the series of steampunk detective novels.  Janus Mikani and Celeste Ritsuko are the most successful pair in the Criminal Investigation Division.  Assigned to find a missing heiress, the girl is instead found murdered, her body charred to cinders.  "It soon becomes clear the bogeyman has stepped out of nightmares to stalk the gaslit streets, and it's up to them to hunt him down."  "A. A. Aguirre" does little to hide the fact that the author is Ann Aguirre.
• "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust), The Jackson Trail.  Western.  First published as "The Giraldi Trail," a four-part serial in Western Story Magazine (6/11/32-7/2/32).  Giraldi was a character in The Killers, a book that Faust published in 1931 under his "George Owen Baxter" pseudonym; to avoid confusion about the pen names, publisher Dodd, Mead changed the character's name to "Jesse Jackson" (where have I heard that name before?) for their 1932 book edition; Five Star Books changed the character (and title) back to Giraldi when they reprinted the book in 1999.  The book has also been published as The Outlaw Trail.
• Celeste Lasky, Ghost Stories of the Estes Valley, Volume 1.  A chapbook of eighteen stories, supposed (hah!) true, told to the author by residents of the Estes Valley in Colorado.  I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, as well as folklore and tall tales.
• Jeff Gelb & Michael Garrett, editors, Stranger by Night.  The sixth in the long-running Hot Blood series of erotic horror anthologies.  Eighteen stories.  Judging from some of the other books in the series that I've read, this one probably contains a healthy mix of excellent tales and some clunkers.
• Adrian McKinty, Hidden River.  Alexander Lawson, forced to resign from Northern Ireland's police force in disgrace, learns that his high-school girlfriend has been murdered in Denver.  Lawson goes to Colorado to investigate and soon the bodies pile up, while Lawson is hunted by both Colorado and British police.  This one sounds very familiar and I may well already have a copy; I'll find out later this year when I finally get around to cataloging my books.
• "P. J. Parrish" (Kristy Montee and Kelly Montee),  An Unquiet Grave.  A Louis Kincaid mystery.  Kincaid is bi-racial cop turned P.I.  An infamous sanitarian is about to be razed, along with its long-forgotten cemetery when it is discovered that the body in Claudia Olsen's grave is that of an unknown person who had died horribly.  This one won the 2007 Shamus and Thriller Awards for Best Paperback