INCOMING

• Mike Carey, Dead Men's Boots.  Supernatural thriller, the third featuring ghost hunter Felix Castor.  Castor's "getting involved with a brutal murder case that has all the hallmarks of a long-dead American serial killer...while fighting for the life -- if not the soul -- of his demon-possessed friend. Raffi.  to top it off, Castor can't shake the feeling that his [...] problems are related.  turning to succubus Juliet and zombie data-fence Nicky for aid, this overworked ghost hunter may fit the pieces together before someone rips his throat out.  Or not."  Carey wrote one of my favorite comic book series, Lucifer, and I wanted to try one of his novels.
• David Stuart Davies, Forests of the Night.  Historical mystery. Sherlock Holmes expert Davies explore a London that is no longer gas-lit but is just as dark.  "By all accounts, Pamela Palfrey was plain and painfully shy -- the sort of girl that few people miss in the best of times.  And with Nazi bombs nightly raining down on London, and hundreds dying every day, these aren't the best of times.  this is particularly true for Johnny Hawke, who lost an eye -- and his dreams of a military career -- to an accident in basic training.  Though he has set up shop as a private investigator, Hawke is doing little more than nursing his feeling of inadequacy until the Palfreys hire him to find their missing daughter.  It soon becomes clear that Pamela was nursing some secrets of her own, and Hawke's passion for the case deepens as he comes to sympathize with the young woman's dreams -- which, like his own, appear to have been painfully thwarted."
• David J. Schow, Gun Work.  Crime thriller.  "Life isn't always cheap south of the border -- some lives are worth a million dollars.  That's what the Mexican kidnapping cartel was demanding for Carl Ledbetter's wife.  So Carl reached out to the one person he knew with a chance of saving her, a deadly man whose own life he's saved in the sands of Iraq.  It was time to call in some favors.  Because some situations call for negotiation, but some...call for gun work."  Schow is best known for his works in the horror field and for the screenplays for The Crow and two Texas Chain Saw Massacre films.  He was also one of the six writers who contributed to the modern-day pulp adventure novels about "Gabriel Hunt."  Gun Work was published by Hard Case Crime, so it's a guaranteed good read.
• Charles sheffield, Cold As Ice.  SF novel.  "Twenty-five years ago, there was a great interplanetary was in the solar system.  It was a suicidal spasm in which terrible weapons were created and used; in which nine billion people were killed.  The rivalries that led to the was are not gone.  And a few of those deadly weapons remain -- some stillorbiting the sun in the debris of destroyed ship; some delibertely placed in storage."  The first book of a trilogy, Cold as Ice was nominated for the 2005 Kurd Lasswitz Prize when it was translated in German.