INCOMING

Happy Leap Year Day everyone!

• Ben Aaronovich, Midnight Riot.  Horror/mystery.  The firsst of five (with a sixth coming in June) books about Peter Grant, a London cop who can speak to the dead.  "Now, as a wave of brutal and bizarre murders engulfs the city, Peter is plunged into a world where gods and godesses mingle with mortals and a long-dead evil is making a comeback on a riding tide of magic."
• Todhunter Ballard, Dark Kill.  Western collection of a novel and a novella.  The novel is Railroad Doctor, which appeared as a four-part serial in Ranch Romances in 1953; the title novella is from a 1956 issue of Western Magazine.  Ballard was a popular mystery and western author with over a thousand magazine credits, more than a hundred novels, and over fifty scriptwriting credits under a variety of names.  A Spur Award winner, Willis Todhunter Ballard was the cousin of mystery legend Rex (Todhunter) Stout.
• Michael Flynn, In the Country of the Blind.  SF novel,  A revised and updated version of Flynn's 1991 award-winning debut novel.  "In the nineteenth century, a small group of American idealists managed to actually build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and use it to develop Cliology, mathematical models thaat could chart the likely course of history.   Soon they were working to alter history's course as they thought best."  This 2001 edition also includes a long, detailed article on Cliology.
• Frederik Pohl, The Voices of Heaven.  SF novel.  Manic-depressive Barry di Hoa is shanghaied from the good life on the Moon to find himself on a colony planet eighteen light years away.  Throw in some interesting aliens, political shenanigans, and colonists who think suicide is cool and you have the fate of the colony at risk.  Can Barry -- in his manic mode -- stop it?  Pohl was one of the most influential people in the science fiction field, working as an agent, and editor, and a prize-winning author.