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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for November 2019

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some October books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fantasy, gaslamp fantasy, sword and sorcery, paranormal mystery, paranormal romance, fantasy romance, time travel romance, science fiction romance, planetary romance, space opera, military science fiction, military fantasy, dystopian fiction, alternate history, Steampunk, horror, vampires, ghosts, gods, aliens, space marines, planet killers, gladiators in space, virgin sacrifices, crime-busting witches, autumn on Mars, the afterlife in Amsterdam and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Arkhel Conundrum by Sarah Ash:

“But what happened to Gavril and Kiukiu after Children of the Serpent Gate? When is the sequel coming out?”

Readers have been asking me this question ever since Book 3 of The Tears of Artamon was published – and at last I’ve had the chance to provide an answer in Book 4: The Arkhel Conundrum.

Azhkendir, land of snow and shadows, harbours many secrets – and a powerful ancient winter deity is awakened when a foreign mining company begins to strip out the rare mineral resources beneath the mountains. Old clan hatreds are stirred up. The High Steward of Azhkendir, Lord Gavril, and his wife, Spirit Singer Kiukiu, hope to seek help from the Emperor Eugene. But their onetime enemy turned ally is distracted by his competition to build a flying machine. Is someone from their past trying to destabilize the fragile peace of the empire? Or are there supernatural forces involved? The Magus, Kaspar Linnaius, may have the answers…but he has disappeared and no one knows where he is or how to contact him.

God Given, Book 1 by Odette C. Bell:

“Every god will hunt you. They will not stop. There will be nowhere safe on the face of this planet. From now until the day you die, you will have to run.”

Those were the words that started everything. Casey was once normal – now she’s the most important piece in a game for the world.

She’s dragged into the realm of gods. It is violent, it’s tortured, and at its heart is a man she’s never been able to forget.

 

The Temple of the Snake God by Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert:

It was supposed to be an easy job. Go in, grab the eye of the idol and get out.

But the temple of the snake god Tseghirun turns out to be unexpectedly busy, when Thurvok, the sellsword, and his friends, Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, the sorceress Sharenna and Meldom’s sweetheart Lysha attempt to steal the eye. Not only is there a ceremony going on at the temple, no, the cultists are also about to sacrifice several young girls to the snake god Tseghirun. And so what started out as a simple heist quickly turns into a rescue mission.

This is a short story of 6200 words or approximately 22 print pages in the Thurvok sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

Honourable Enemies by Cora Buhlert:

Once, Colonel Brian Mayhew was the deputy commander of the Republican Special Commando Forces. But now he’s gone AWOL to take out crime lord Rick Santerna, the man who murdered his family.

Mayhew’s quest for vengeance brings him to the rim world of Maciste, where he runs into his former protégé Mikhail Grikov, now wanted as a traitor and deserter for eloping with enemy soldier Anjali Patel.

Mayhew knows that it’s his duty to bring in Mikhail and Anjali. But with Santerna hot his tail, he finds that he needs their help.

Mikhail and Anjali know that Brian Mayhew is a threat to their freedom and their new life together. But now they are faced with a hard choice. Should they risk their lives to help a man who could condemn them both to death or should they let Mayhew die in the Great Arena of Maciste?

This is a short novel of 57000 words or approximately 200 print pages in the “In Love and War” series, but may be read as a standalone.

Planet Killer by Lindsay Buroker:

Casmir has survived against impossible odds, and now he longs to return home. But an invasion force is blockading the Kingdom’s wormhole gate, and it would be suicidal to fly through it now. Worse, his family and friends are stuck on the other side, with hostile forces attacking their home world.

The only way Casmir can help is to find out who’s behind the invasion… and convince him to stop.

But Casmir isn’t known for his ability to strong-arm people, and this is one enemy who won’t be won over by his friendly demeanor. As he soon finds out, he must face the very rich and very powerful person who’s been trying to have him killed for months.

Tooth and Blade by Shad Callister:

Desperate young warriors fighting for gold and glory in a land filled with monsters.

The warriors of the Tooth and Blade will fight for Ostora, to protect the people of this new land from the dangers that stalk it. Somehow, if they live long enough, they hope to find a place for themselves here.

But the future of these fighting men is anything but certain, and Captain Pelekarr of the cavalry must work quickly with Damicos of the foot soldiers to establish the fledgling company’s reputation. The Kerathi military has pulled out, and the barbarian tribesmen are massing for battle while huge monsters lurk in the trees.

If the Tooth and Blade can fight their way past all this, they’ll become legends. But how many will die trying?

Before the Darkness by April Canavan:

Never stand in the way of fate.

Winter gave up on the human realm after she lost the love of her life. Being a witch didn’t stop the pain, and neither did the enchanted sleep she put herself in. She wakes up to a whole new world, and a mission given to her by the Mother of All.

Help two people fall in love.

Sarah’s a mortal, and Zander…well he’s the next in line for the vampire throne. As they welcome the attraction between them, Winter’s faced with a dilemma. Fate has other plans for Sarah and Zander. Winter finds herself having to choose between two impossible situations: let the love blooming between Sarah and Zander thrive now and destroy their worlds, or Winter can come to terms with the fact that no one escapes their fate.

Beauty by Stacy Claflin:

Chase Williams is desperate to find Penelope Jackson, and the only shot he has is by locating a specific mirror. Even then, his chances are slim. He can’t operate it, so she’d have to tumble through it to his exact time.

Penelope has been traveling through various years in her history in search of her parents’ killers. She’d been with the agency so long, she can hardly remember life before. She relies on her trusty mirror to take her to the times and places she needs to go.

Then one day, she stumbles out into a strange new place… and meets a man who clearly knows who she is. But she’s never seen him before—of that much, she’s sure. Unless her future self has? The possibilities are too numerous to count, and the implications could be disastrous. Is this man trustworthy or out to get her?

Giving her heart over could be the only way to find out for sure. Or it could lead to her ultimate demise. And maybe the destruction of time as we know it.

Hollow Heart by Ben Eads:

Welcome to Shady Hills, Florida, where death is the beginning and pain is the only true Art…

Harold Stoe was a proud Marine until an insurgent’s bullet relegated him to a wheelchair. Now the only things he’s proud of are quitting alcohol and raising his sixteen-year-old son, Dale.

But there is an infernal rhythm, beating like a diseased heart from the hollow behind his home. An aberration known as The Architect has finished his masterpiece: A god which slumbers beneath the hollow, hell-bent on changing the world into its own image.

As the body count rises and the neighborhood residents change into mindless, shambling horrors, Harold and his former lover, Mary, begin their harrowing journey into the world within the hollow. If they fail, the hollow will expand to infinity. Every living being will be stripped of flesh and muscle, their nerves wrapped tightly around ribcages, so The Architect can play his sick music through them loud enough to swallow what gives them life: The last vestiges of a dying star.

Crimson Yuletide by Rachel Ford:

Autumn gone off to sleep

And winter her secrets no more keep

Rises he from the deep

Flesh to flay and flesh to eat

Twelve days of Christmas. Twelve days of terror and death.

An ancient evil prowls the quiet streets of Wixcombe. An old man is murdered in the town square. Children disappear in the night. Villagers report sightings of Krampus, the Christmas demon.

For siblings Nan and William Fitzgerald, the season began with a promise of new loves and Christmas magic. But they find themselves in the eye of the storm when their godfather becomes the prime suspect in the killings.

To protect both the women they love and their village, the siblings must discover Krampus’ true identity. But they might not like the answers they find…

Wicked Decisions by Lily Harper Hart:

Ivy Morgan is getting married, which means she needs a dress. Now that she’s finally embraced the idea of planning for the wedding (rather than just enjoying the marriage and honeymoon) she’s gung-ho to check things off her list.

The local dressmaker Zelda Morris has just the thing for Ivy. Before she can show it to her, though, she’s murdered in the back of her own store … while Ivy waits for her to return to the storefront. Unfortunately for Ivy, because she didn’t hear a thing, that makes her a suspect.

Jack Harker isn’t happy with the turn of events. He knows Ivy is innocent but he’s in a precarious position. If word gets out that he’s protecting his fiancée, then the Michigan State Police could take over the investigation, and he’s worried they might fixate on Ivy. That means he has to dig deep for answers … and what he finds is troubling.

It seems Zelda was only one of a multitude of women dating local lothario Henry Spencer, a man who has more girlfriends than brains. One of those girlfriends happens to be Ivy’s aunt, Felicity Goodings, which means the long eye of the law falls directly on both of them.

It’s up to Jack and Ivy to untangle a mess of motives and suspects, which include her beloved aunt. That causes issues with Ivy’s mother, who is loyal to her sister to a fault.

It’s a tense time, and it only gets worse when Ivy decides to embrace her magic and use it to solve the case.

There’s a killer on the loose and Ivy might be a target because she can’t keep her nose out of trouble. She needs to discover a killer, avoid this individual’s wrath, and continue planning her wedding if she wants a happily ever after.

It’s going to be a tall task.

A Riddle in Bronze by Simon Haynes:

Ghostly goings-on in Victorian London…

An elderly professor and his daughter advertise for an expert bookkeeper. Instead, they employ a naive young man with very little experience.

But what if keeping the books is not the real reason they hired him? What if they have an ulterior motive?

London, England, 1871.

When I applied for a position with Professor Twickham and his daughter, I lied about my qualifications.

As it turns out, they lied about the job for which I was applying.

Had we not been so untruthful with each other, there might have been fewer night terrors stalking the inhabitants of the City.

Fewer unexplained disappearances.

Fewer deaths.

Now, nobody is safe from the creeping horrors we’ve unleashed.

With no time to spare, we face an impossible task: we must discover the mysteries in metal in order to right this wrong.

But is it already too late?

Floodtide by Heather Rose Jones:

The streets are a perilous place for a young laundry maid dismissed without a character for indecent acts. Roz knew the end of the path for a country girl alone in the city of Rotenek. A desperate escape in the night brings her to the doorstep of Dominique the dressmaker and the hope of a second chance beyond what she could have imagined. Roz’s apprenticeship with the needle, under the patronage of the royal thaumaturgist, wasn’t supposed to include learning magic, but Celeste, the dressmaker’s daughter, draws Roz into the mysterious world of the charm-wives. When floodwaters and fever sweep through the lower city, Celeste’s magical charms could bring hope and healing to the forgotten poor of Rotenek, but only if Roz can claim the help of some unlikely allies.

Set in the magical early 19th century world of Alpennia, Floodtide tells an independent tale that interweaves with the adventures.

The Towering Flame by Robert I. Katz:

Once, long ago, the Empire of Mankind spread among the stars, but the Empire fell into civil war and anarchy, leaving every human inhabited world across the galaxy to go its own way.

Today, after two thousand years of isolation, the Viceroy rules over seven nations on one long-abandoned planet. He alone possesses any vestige of the technology left behind by the vanished Empire and he uses it to rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove.

But below the surface, ambitious men are struggling for power and rebellion is simmering.

Terence Allen is the third son of a wealthy father. Terence is satisfied with his life. He has few responsibilities, fewer challenges and little desire to change.

Terence Allen is an unlikely catalyst for rebellion, but Terence’s destiny changes the moment he sees Thierry Jorge Garcia striding toward him one night at the Summer Fair in Varanisi, the Viceroy’s city. Thierry, the heir to a long-standing military tradition, will let nothing keep him from pursuing Irina Archer, the woman he had known and loved as a young man in far-off Cathay, the woman who is now Terence Allen’s fiancée.

The feud that results will have repercussions far beyond the borders of the city, as the seven nations seethe with conspiracies, rumors and strife. A war that has been brewing for over a century is coming, a war that will upend the foundations of both men’s world.

Witchin’ Around the Clock by Amanda M. Lee:

Witches are descending on Hemlock Cove and the town is gearing up for mayhem. Bay Winchester is ready to cover the event for her newspaper, and is excited to see faces she hasn’t interacted with in more than a decade.

Then the unthinkable happens.

The local blacksmith shop catches fire and Bay and her cousin Thistle risk death to try and rescue the owner. Unfortunately, they’re too late, and the man is unable to be resuscitated. Not only that, but it wasn’t the fire that killed him. No, he was murdered.

Bay can’t shake the feeling that something bad is about to happen. Harbingers of the feathered variety are filling the sky … and threatening attack. Dark magic is at work, and someone is plotting multiple deaths.

It’s up to Bay and her family to save the day, and they have to do it before cousin Clove gets married on the summer solstice. It’s a big day for the family, and a big moment for Bay. She’s the center of attention as the clock ticks down, the weight of the world on her shoulders.

The Winchesters won’t sit back and wait for a fight to come to them, they’ll go after the fight … and this is no exception. As death comes calling, they will answer.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. Love, marriage, death, and destruction are about to collide. You won’t want to miss a thing.

Blood of the Prime: Spark by Erin MacMichael:

New bonds, new abilities. Will they be enough to change the game?

Rhys’s fiery union with Karra brings seeds of change rippling through his awareness. No longer afraid of Biak’s harassment, he uses the bizarre connection between them to launch his own quest to stop the reptile.

When Biak unleashes his war on the Maians, he encounters some unexpected surprises. Certain that the young pilot is interfering with his campaign, his obsession with Rhys escalates into rage and his strikes into Maia and Alcyone become brazen and deadly.

While the fleet meets Biak’s assaults head-on, Rhys travels with Karra to a geometric city in the Dreamcore where he senses the invisible presence of the T’nari League, a legendary group reputed to be fighting the Drahk. Driven to connect with the slippery League, he leads his family and friends on a journey to unlock the power of sexuality, blood, gold–and choice.

–”I’m just a match to light the fire. Before we’re done with this ride, we’ll all be up in flames.”

Sad All Over by Gideon Marcus:

I want to doff my hat in memory of an event that pummeled the nation. I don’t think any of us have any difficulty remembering the terrible events of Dallas that day. But shortly thereafter, as Beatlemania was sweeping the nation in the wake of the Fab Four’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, the dark part of my brain came up with a way that November 22, 1963 could have been even worse.

 

 

Haunted Hearts by Christine Pope:

His prison lives in his very bones. She holds the key that could free him… or break him.

Elena Salazar doesn’t exactly have permission to house-sit, but she’s sure her cousin Ava won’t mind the not-quite break-in. After all, Ava would want her to feel safe. And free. Two concepts Elena’s still adjusting to after eleven years a prisoner in her own home, thanks to her terrifying ability to summon demons.

She manages to make peace with the resident ghost in Ava’s house, but she has to do some really fast talking when a tattooed, tautly muscled warlock shows up with Ava’s keys in his hand and deep-seated pain in his troubled eyes.

The Salvadoran Escobar clan is healing under new primus Gabriel’s leadership. But no one is likely to forget that the cruel former primus used Alessandro Escobar and his fearful gift as a weapon, unwilling though he was. When Gabriel sends him to Ava’s house for an extended “vacation,” Alessandro packs his bags with a heavy heart.

No one warned him the house was already occupied.

Elena is beautiful, skittish, fragile, with a demon for a friend and a nervous habit of hiding behind her books and her art. Alessandro drinks in her sweetness like water from a desert spring. But if he dares reveal who he is, what he is, the key to her heart could vanish, leaving him the lonely prisoner of his gift.

This time, for good.

Doll Crimes by Karen Runge:

‘It’s not that there aren’t good people in the world. It’s that the bad ones are so much easier to find.’

A teen mother raises her daughter on a looping road trip, living hand-to-mouth in motel rest stops and backwater towns, stepping occasionally into the heat and chaos of the surrounding cities. A life without permanence, filled with terrors and joys, their stability is dependent on the strangers—and strange men—they meet along the way. But what is the difference between the love of a mother, and the love of a friend? And in a world with such blurred lines, where money is tight and there’s little outside influence, when does the need to survive slide into something more sinister?

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

Charon’s Song by the Skolion Authors Collective:

A collection of stories by the Skolion Authors Collective.

In the Greek myths Charon is the ferryman who helps the dead across the rivers that separate the lands of the living from the underworld. Like Charon, each writer in this collection is a guide and guardian. Some of their stories are gentle and hopeful, some tell of betrayal and despair. There are tales set in the future of our Earth, or in magical realms of fantasy. Every story helps us look fearlessly into the face of death.

Step into the boat, gentle reader, and join us on this journey through the dark.

Stories by: Laurie Janey, Nerine Dorman, Cristy Zinn, Tallulah Lucy, Icy Sedgwick, Toby Bennett, Suzanne van Rooyen, Yolandie Horak, Masha du Toit, Cat Hellisen

Edited by Masha du Toit and Nerine Dorman

Autumn on Mars by SMA:

Tripp doesn’t know who he is, how he got here, or why this gorgeous man with dark eyes is the only familiar thing in sight.

But he does know this:

It’s Autumntide on Mars and love is in the air!

—Embrace the wonders of Fall in this dreamy and evocative MM seasonal romance—

Louisa May Alcott meets the science fantasy of Ray Bradbury!

Tripp is a young employee of the Division, corporate authority in the Crater region. Reserved and sardonic, he’s inexplicably drawn to Dolan—a goofy, enthusiastic romantic with a body made to remember.

But it’s not just strong arms pulling Tripp toward this onyx-eyed man. Both colleagues are victims of amnesia caused by their recent interplanetary re-assignment. Though they don’t even recognize themselves, they’re driven by intense chemistry that feels too familiar to be coincidence …

With work suspended for the month-long Autumntide festival, can Tripp let his walls down and learn to love—even when he’s a stranger in his own head?

Experience the festivities as two lost souls find each other—again—under the ochre skies of Autumn on Mars.

The Journey by SMA:

The Routine’s dominion is cracking. Can Owen pick up the pieces in time to save humanity?

Step into the realm of the Routine once again in this sensually adventurous continuation of the Twisting Fates saga.

A MIND-BENDING SCI-FI ADVENTURE CONTINUES

It’s not every day you fall in love and get sent to assassinate an AI god.

Dispatched to discover the truth about the missing colony on Mars, Owen finds allies in unexpected conditions, and explores the depths of new love.

But nothing can be taken for granted under the AI’s shadow. The Routine is dangerous, and the man Owen is sleeping next to every night might be its most vicious secret weapon.

Cut off from the world, the young Initiate must confront the strength in his own heart—and be prepared to lose everything. What awaits them on Mars, and can he really trust his new allies? Each discovery leads closer to the truth, but there’s one fact Owen will never forget:

The Routine is lying to us all.

Join the journey as Owen pursues the secrets of the Routine—and learns the endless bounds of love and his own desire.

An immersively mysterious sci-fi romance adventure that spans the solar system!

Helter Witchelter by Lotta Smith:

A haunted mansion in a beautiful town… A chilling ghost awaiting for his next prey… Throw in a newbie witch realtor!

Fio Valentine is starting to settle into her sometimes vexing job in the Haunted and Hexed Properties Management Department of Quest Realty, but when her friend Suze invites her on a weekend trip to Santa Barbara, she’s less than excited about visiting yet another haunted house.

Rumored to be hosting the ghost of a wealthy businessman, the mansion could hold a clue to the disappearance of Chris Adams, the older brother of her foxy boss Jack, and since Jack has decided his current assignment is too dangerous for her, Fio takes Suze up her offer, her spirit animal Champ in tow.

Can Fio solve the mystery of the ghost in the garden and earn some points with Jack at same time? Find out in Book Three of the Witches Guide to Haunted Properties.

Night Raiders by James David Victor:

All the universe’s answers lie in the depths of space where it’s black as night.

Anders and Dalia have escaped and now know who the real enemy is. Their only chance to stop them is to venture into the depths of space that can steal a man’s soul. And sanity. They soon learn that there are more players involved and none of them are likely to care if they succeed or fail. Can they find a weapon that can defeat the Throne or will they fall to the raiders from the dark reaches of space?

Night Raiders is the third book in the Memories of Earth space opera series. If you enjoy stories in fantastic worlds of aliens, space travel, and genetic engineering, the Memories of Earth series will be right up your alley.

Into Bones Like Oil by Kaaron Warren:

“A tale of creeping dread … Recommended.” —Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater and The Murders of Molly Southbourne

“Dark, disturbing, visceral” (5 stars) —NB Magazine

In this gothic-styled ghost story that simmers with strange, Warren shows once again her flair for exploring the mundane—themes of love, loss, grief, and guilt manifest in a way that is both hauntingly familiar and eerily askew.

People come to The Angelsea, a rooming house near the beach, for many reasons. Some come to get some sleep, because here, you sleep like the dead. Dora arrives seeking solitude and escape from reality. Instead, she finds a place haunted by the drowned and desperate, who speak through the sleeping inhabitants. She fears sleep herself, terrified that the ghosts of her daughters will tell her “it’s all your fault we’re dead.” At the same time, she’d give anything to hear them one more time.

Fate by Kirsten Weiss:

Something wicked this way comes…

Witch Jayce Bonheim has spent the last four months waiting for a horde of dark magicians to come to town.

Now, they’ve arrived, embedded in a traveling circus.

And they’re bigger and badder than this ex-party girl could have imagined, wreaking havoc wherever they go.

But when a murder rocks her small town, Jayce must stop the chaos. Walking a tightrope between dark spells and past regrets, can Jayce stop a murderer and stop these magicians from transforming the world forever?

Silver Search by Rock Whitehouse:

It’s been just six months since the unprovoked, brutal attack on Inoria that killed tens of thousands. The enemy has paid a price in the deep-space skirmishes since but seems in no mind to retire. But, what, in fact, is the enemy mind? What, in the end, do they want?

Carol Hansen and her Antares shipmates are going back to solve the mystery they found at Beta Hydri, taking a retinue of academics with them.

David Powell survived Sigma’s battle, dragging that battered ship to safety. Now promoted and on Columbia with his old friend Dan Smith in command, a new role, indeed, a new life, begins for him.

Joanne Henderson’s Intrepid continues its silent mission among the nearby stars, while Natalie Hayden and Ben Price begin to find connections beyond what happens inside a Sentinel.

But back at Fleet HQ, there is growing frustration about how to run a war when a light-year-per-day just doesn’t seem nearly fast enough.

Mary van Amsterdam and the Tragically Dead in Recovery by M.P. Wilhelm:

Now that Mary van Amsterdam is dead, she can finally live.

The Amsterdam Afterlife empowered Mary, in a way she’d only dreamed of in the living realm. She’s devoted herself to the Tragically Dead in Recovery—quirky dead animals, struggling to come to terms with the trauma of their untimely deaths. Their macabre appearance and occasionally prickly personalities reflect each one’s painful demise. Just when Mary thinks she has a handle on things, her eccentric sanctuary comes under attack by a rogue soul reaper who threatens to upend her posthumous ambition.

Mary has her own emotional baggage. Mortally separated from her friends and family, she’s moving on. There’s little time for reflection on her past. Her hands are full, supporting a troubled dead horse on his Deathday, and making a journey to Prague to rescue a newly deceased raven. Troubles multiply when Mary finds herself face-to-face with the stalking menace, reopening painful emotions from her tragic time among the living.

Can Mary stay on track and protect her vulnerable companions?

Follow Mary and her menagerie of misfits, as she discovers new, mystical abilities to manage the new, menacing threat. Will this change the course of the Amsterdam Afterlife forever?

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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for November 2019

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some October books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have harboiled mysteries, cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, animal mysteries, culinary mysteries, historical mysteries, regency mysteries, jazz age mysteries, 1940s mysteries paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, adventure thrillers, action thrillers, medical thrillers, legal thrillers, spy thrillers, police officers, private investigators, FBI agents, amateur sleuths, lawyers, murdered judges, murdered vicars, terrorists, spies, cults, crime-busting bakers, crime-busting witches, crime-busting realtors, crime-busting witch realtors, suicide sonatas, hijacked drones, mayhem and murder in country mansions, hospitals and the circus, in Florida, the Appalachians, Napa Valley, Hollywood, Washington D.C., the Cotswolds and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

A Simple Country Killing by Blythe Baker:

Death, and Helen Lightholder, return to Brookminster with the murder of the village vicar. As Helen investigates the ghastly crime, she soon finds herself a suspect of the local police. To clear her name and protect her friends, Helen must discover the truth and outwit a devious killer.

But Helen’s personal life is not without its own mysteries and one of them continues to stalk her in the shadows…

 

 

Fall’s Killer Vintage by Anne Celeste Burke:

In wine country, a federal judge is murdered and Aunt Lettie’s old friend, Judge Colin Brinkley, quickly becomes a suspect.

Lily, Austin, and her friends are excited about the Calla Lily Winery vintages entered in the fall Taste of Napa Challenge. The event turns out to be more challenging than anyone imagined when a fire ends the awards ceremony before the winners are announced. The plot thickens when police become concerned that one of the wines entered in the competition may have been a killer vintage. The U.S. Marshal Service is on the job, but when Aunt Lettie’s old friend becomes a suspect, Lily and her friends are soon caught up in the mystery too. Is the murder of a federal judge about trouble at a winery, the judges’ cases, or something more personal? Join Lily and Austin as they try to discover who’s responsible for murder, arson, and fraud.

A Jolly Little Murder by Beth Byers:

December 1925

Violet Wakefield is determined to dive into the holiday and enjoy every occasion. She’s going to see the live nativity, listen to Handel’s Messiah, and attend the Nutcracker ballet. She’ll cover her house in all the holly and lights. In fact, Vi wants nothing more than to put up the largest Christmas tree she can locate and stuff it with gifts. ??She little expects, however, to stumble across a crime in action. When she gets pulled into the madness, her biggest concern isn’t the crime, it’s keeping Jack from committing a holiday homicide.

Kicked to the Curb by Joanna Campbell Slan:

Life in Paradise isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Cara Mia Delgatto feels like she is drowning in problems!

Stuart, Florida. Her ex-husband is refusing to pay their son’s college tuition (as promised), her sister is pulling mean pranks, and her old boyfriend has broken her heart…again. And that’s just the personal stuff.

She’s also concerned about keeping the cash register ringing at the Treasure Chest, her store specializing in upcycled, recycled, and repurposed goods.

An important media event goes sadly wrong and Cara’s famous temper gets the better of her. Then a prying reporter turns up dead, practically in Cara’s backyard. Could the reporter’s murder have anything to do with a century’s old blot on Florida state history, the infamous Dozier Boys School? Suddenly, Cara’s personal problems seem trivial compared to the abuse and murder of hundreds of innocent boys.

Kicked to the Curb is the charming second novel in the Cara Mia Delgatto cozy mystery series. If you like witty heroines, former flames reconnecting, and Florida’s beautiful Treasure Coast, you’ll adore Joanna Campbell Slan’s captivating tale.

Art Attack by Mike Faricy:

Careful what you wish for . . .

PI Dev Haskell runs into Kristi McKenzie, his old high-school flame. Amazingly, she needs help . . .

Her artist husband has been missing for over half a year – and she’s never contacted the police!

Turns out he’s the guy she dumped Dev for way back when.

Her previous fiancé died under suspicious circumstances . . .

Dev begins his search but keeps coming up with more questions.

One thing is clear, someone is definitely on a mission to KILL Dev Haskell!

The Shield by Ken Fite:

When terrorists hijack weaponized military drones, a former government agent must team up with the people he swore he’d never work with to find the hijackers before they unleash the drones on DC.

 

 

 

 

Fatal Limit by Inge-Lise Goss:

A Murderer Is Loose In The Hospital

Dora Stephens can’t refuse this case.

When she witnesses Sheila, the aunt of her best friend, stagger out of the hospital and die from a traffic accident, Dora’s private eye instincts kick in. Something’s not right. Sheila had no known enemies… but someone wanted her dead.

Digging into the circumstances of Sheila’s death leads Dora on a devious path where she encounters lies, drugs, betrayal, and infidelity. She uncovers another mysterious death and stumbles upon a dark secret kept by some of the hospital’s top staff and privileged doctors.

Sheila was not the only nurse who had an affair with the hospital’s star surgeon. Would one of her romantic rivals stoop to murder? Or had she learned too much about the well-kept dark secret?

Wicked Decisions by Lily Harper Hart:

Ivy Morgan is getting married, which means she needs a dress. Now that she’s finally embraced the idea of planning for the wedding (rather than just enjoying the marriage and honeymoon) she’s gung-ho to check things off her list.

The local dressmaker Zelda Morris has just the thing for Ivy. Before she can show it to her, though, she’s murdered in the back of her own store … while Ivy waits for her to return to the storefront. Unfortunately for Ivy, because she didn’t hear a thing, that makes her a suspect.

Jack Harker isn’t happy with the turn of events. He knows Ivy is innocent but he’s in a precarious position. If word gets out that he’s protecting his fiancée, then the Michigan State Police could take over the investigation, and he’s worried they might fixate on Ivy. That means he has to dig deep for answers … and what he finds is troubling.

It seems Zelda was only one of a multitude of women dating local lothario Henry Spencer, a man who has more girlfriends than brains. One of those girlfriends happens to be Ivy’s aunt, Felicity Goodings, which means the long eye of the law falls directly on both of them.

It’s up to Jack and Ivy to untangle a mess of motives and suspects, which include her beloved aunt. That causes issues with Ivy’s mother, who is loyal to her sister to a fault.

It’s a tense time, and it only gets worse when Ivy decides to embrace her magic and use it to solve the case.

There’s a killer on the loose and Ivy might be a target because she can’t keep her nose out of trouble. She needs to discover a killer, avoid this individual’s wrath, and continue planning her wedding if she wants a happily ever after.

It’s going to be a tall task.

With Killer Views by CeeCee James:

Stella O’Neil has found a treasure of a house to list… a house possibly full of treasure, that is. Her new listing belonged to a man who died from a seemingly innocent accident. He also was embroiled in a bank investigation involving missing property and many enemies. The rumors have gone wild and people will stop at nothing to search it out.

If keeping treasure hunters out of her listing and avoiding being killed wasn’t enough drama, Stella has finally found her mom and a way to rescue her. With the rest of her family in place, and the neighbor and a hunky policeman friend to help, she’s determined to get her mom out. But someone is just as determined to stop her, even through murder.

Stella has come this far fighting to unite her family. She won’t stop until she’s finished. But will she regret it?

The Suicide Sonata by B.V. Lawson:

Can a piece of music be cursed?

When a young marine biologist is found dead of suicide, his father can’t believe he took his own life and hires Scott Drayco to prove it was murder. But what of the strange song found with the young man’s body—the same song linked to a piano sonata that led to a wave of suicides in 1930s Hungary?

As Drayco digs deeper, he finds even more unusual aspects of the case not easily explained: the victim’s missing cellphone; his “Gang of Five” friends and their interest in the Akashic Records spiritual philosophy; and the gun used by the victim that was mysteriously stolen from a friend’s car.

Drayco fears a tragic incident from his own past may be clouding his objectivity. After all, the facts point to suicide, case closed. But when Drayco starts suffering from depression himself after playing the sonata, can he really be sure of what’s real and what’s imagined?

The Suicide Sonata is the fifth installment in the acclaimed Scott Drayco mystery series, a finalist for the Shamus, Silver Falchion, Daphne, and Kindle Book Awards.

Witchin’ Around the Clock by Amanda M. Lee:

Witches are descending on Hemlock Cove and the town is gearing up for mayhem. Bay Winchester is ready to cover the event for her newspaper, and is excited to see faces she hasn’t interacted with in more than a decade.

Then the unthinkable happens.

The local blacksmith shop catches fire and Bay and her cousin Thistle risk death to try and rescue the owner. Unfortunately, they’re too late, and the man is unable to be resuscitated. Not only that, but it wasn’t the fire that killed him. No, he was murdered.

Bay can’t shake the feeling that something bad is about to happen. Harbingers of the feathered variety are filling the sky … and threatening attack. Dark magic is at work, and someone is plotting multiple deaths.

It’s up to Bay and her family to save the day, and they have to do it before cousin Clove gets married on the summer solstice. It’s a big day for the family, and a big moment for Bay. She’s the center of attention as the clock ticks down, the weight of the world on her shoulders.

The Winchesters won’t sit back and wait for a fight to come to them, they’ll go after the fight … and this is no exception. As death comes calling, they will answer.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. Love, marriage, death, and destruction are about to collide. You won’t want to miss a thing.

A Treacherous Performance by Lynn Messina:

Having inexplicably nabbed the Duke of Kesgrave, twenty-six-year-old spinster Beatrice Hyde-Clare is determined to marry him at once and no amount of handwringing from anxious family members, worried friends and well-meaning acquaintances will convince her to delay. Except…maybe she is a little swayed by her uncle’s efforts to make amends for treating her with cold indifference during her childhood. And her aunt’s concern about the growing scandal around her unfortunate habit of unmasking murderers in the middle of society events isn’t entirely unfounded.

And then there’s the truly unfathomable appearance on her doorstep of the former Miss Brougham, the spiteful heiress whose cruel taunts derailed Bea’s social career. Remarkably, the society matron has a mystery to solve and knows Bea is the only person who can help her. A dead grandfather, a missing jewel, a cryptic letter, an opportunity to condescend to her archnemesis—the case seems simple enough.

And yet somehow it all goes terribly, horribly wrong.

Game of Shadows by R.J. Patterson:

Titus Black wasn’t the trusting kind of guy, even for a black ops agent. And when he ventures into Russia to bring home a missing scientist, Black learns some information that makes him question everything he’s known to be true about his director, J.D. Blunt.

Meanwhile, Black and the Firestorm team uncover a treasonous plot from one of the most powerful men in congress. As Black’s worlds converge, he must thwart an assassination attempt or face dire consequences, including the end of the very organization that keeps his country safe from terrorists of every kind.

Eclairs and Extortion by C.A. Phipps:

Marriage, Menace, and Murder!

Is it just coincidence that a body turns up in the park the same day as Maddie’s mom arrives in Maple Falls?

And who is the dark stranger wandering about on the streets of her home town?

Preparations for a surprise seventieth birthday celebration for Gran are jeopardized when Maddie’s absentee parent shows up unannounced. Devoted to her grandmother, Maddie won’t allow her mom to ruin things like she usually does.

With three generations at logger-heads, a murderer to find, and a party to organize, life is about to get crazy.

If you love your eclairs with a side of mystery, click the buy button today!

The Maple Lane Mysteries are light, cozy mysteries featuring a quirky cat-loving bakery owner who discovers she’s a talented amateur sleuth.

Let Me Go by Willow Rose:

What if a stranger told you that she believed your child is about to be killed? What if that woman was an ex-FBI profiler with a disputable reputation?

Would you believe her?

Eva Rae Thomas is chasing down a vicious killer, but no one will believe he even exists. If there are no unexplained dead bodies or missing persons, then how can there be a killer on the loose?

What they don’t understand is that the perfect murder is the one that doesn’t look like murder.

Can Eva Rae convince local law enforcement to help her with this case before the killer strikes once more? Or will she have to take matters into her own hands – again?

LET ME GO is the fifth book in the Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Series and can be read as a standalone.

Doll Crimes by Karen Runge:

‘It’s not that there aren’t good people in the world. It’s that the bad ones are so much easier to find.’

A teen mother raises her daughter on a looping road trip, living hand-to-mouth in motel rest stops and backwater towns, stepping occasionally into the heat and chaos of the surrounding cities. A life without permanence, filled with terrors and joys, their stability is dependent on the strangers—and strange men—they meet along the way. But what is the difference between the love of a mother, and the love of a friend? And in a world with such blurred lines, where money is tight and there’s little outside influence, when does the need to survive slide into something more sinister?

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

Blind Justice by Rachel Sinclair:

A prominent Hollywood A-List actor is killed on set.

It wasn’t an accident.

But the wrong woman stands accused.

Bianca Giancomo is a beautiful, and blind, music composer. The first woman to win an Oscar for best original score, she is well-respected, with a story that is made for Hollywood. She grew up poor, and handicapped, and had to teach herself how to play and compose music.

Now, however, she is simply Bianca Giancomo, accused murderess. Her lover, Chris Jenkins, was working on set with a prop gun when he was killed. It turns out the gun had actual bullets in it. Bianca is arrested for his murder when the authorities discover just how tumultous her relationship was with Chris.

Bianca had motive, means and opportunity.

Emerson Justice takes Bianca’s case, and finds that there are much more sinister elements afoot. Somebody wanted Chris dead, alright, and, when Emerson finds out why, she is shocked. And her own life becomes endangered.

Helter Witchelter by Lotta Smith:

A haunted mansion in a beautiful town… A chilling ghost awaiting for his next prey… Throw in a newbie witch realtor!

Fio Valentine is starting to settle into her sometimes vexing job in the Haunted and Hexed Properties Management Department of Quest Realty, but when her friend Suze invites her on a weekend trip to Santa Barbara, she’s less than excited about visiting yet another haunted house.

Rumored to be hosting the ghost of a wealthy businessman, the mansion could hold a clue to the disappearance of Chris Adams, the older brother of her foxy boss Jack, and since Jack has decided his current assignment is too dangerous for her, Fio takes Suze up her offer, her spirit animal Champ in tow.

Can Fio solve the mystery of the ghost in the garden and earn some points with Jack at same time? Find out in Book Three of the Witches Guide to Haunted Properties.

Rising Spirit by Wayne Stinnett:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, Jesse McDermitt has rebuilt his island in the Content Keys far better than it was before the storm. The task was enormous, but so was his need to make things better.

Unbeknownst to Jesse, an environmentally conscious woman from his past has stumbled onto a drug manufacturing cartel in Virginia while working on a pollution mitigation problem. The cartel responds by sending someone to murder people Jesse cares for. A contract killer stalks the woman all the way to Miami, leaving bodies in his wake.

With the help of an old flame in the FBI, Jesse goes to the snow-covered Appalachians to get to the root of the trouble; an unscrupulous prosecutor and dirty sheriff, who are producing LSD on an unbelievable scale.

Is Jesse out of his element this time? Can he protect the people he cares for most? It’s a race against time and Mother Nature to find a killer stalking the quiet neighborhoods of Coconut Grove.

Fate by Kirsten Weiss:

Something wicked this way comes…

Witch Jayce Bonheim has spent the last four months waiting for a horde of dark magicians to come to town.

Now, they’ve arrived, embedded in a traveling circus.

And they’re bigger and badder than this ex-party girl could have imagined, wreaking havoc wherever they go.

But when a murder rocks her small town, Jayce must stop the chaos. Walking a tightrope between dark spells and past regrets, can Jayce stop a murderer and stop these magicians from transforming the world forever?

ill-fated by Jody Wenner:

When Shana’s father joins a cult, she tries to find someone, anyone who will help her. Unsuccessful, she takes on the monumental task of fixing it herself. Eventually, she gets some support from the families of the other followers. Adding to her problems, the person she connects with the most is the leader’s son. She figures that’s the worst of it, until the rest of the group is found dead, and her dad is charged with eleven counts of first-degree murder and arson. With the trial looming, everything starts to nosedive as new revelations about the cult and their bizarre philosophies come to light. Shana’s confidence in her dad begins to waver. Maybe he isn’t a victim after all?

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Cora is elsewhere once again and shares a recipe

Yes, I will eventually post another post here. And in fact, I am currently working on a longer post about the latest reiteration of the science fiction versus fantasy debate that has broken out in the genre. I also have a new release announcement coming.

Today, however, I am guestblogging elsewhere yet again. I’m over at The Homepunks, a site chock full of recipes, household, gardening and DIY projects and tips for a more sustainable lifestyle run by Jen and Kate of the Skiffy and Fanty Show, one of my favourite SFF podcasts.

So head over to The Homepunks and check out my family recipe for delicious cider-pickled pumpkin. You know you want to.

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Cora is elsewhere yet again and recommends some books

As the title indicates, today I’m elsewhere on the internet again, namely at File 770, where I’m one of eighteen reviewers and fans from different European countries recommending their favourite recent-ish SFF books from their respective countries. The project was initiated by Bence Pintér from Hungary.

So if you always wanted to try some speculative fiction from Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain or Ukraine (plus Bulgaria in the comments), check it out.

And by the way, if you’re waiting for an e-mail from me, please be patient, because I’m very busy at the moment, so non-urgent e-mails occasionallyhave to be postponed.

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Cora time travels to 1964 and checks in on Perry Rhodan

Today, I’m over at Galactic Journey again with an article on the latest developments of Perry Rhodan – in 1964. It’s a follow-up to my earlier Perry Rhodan article from last July.

In addition to the latest developments in Perry Rhodan’s Solar Empire, you can also see some historical photos of East German pensioners visiting the West for the very first time as well as of the Bremer Freimarkt, featuring Anton Schwarzkopf’s awesome Sputnik ride, which unfortunately was already long gone by the time I was old enough to be taken to the Freimarkt. But I got lucky and got to ride Anton Schwarzkopf’s Zeppelin in the very few years it was touring.

I have taken a bunch of photos of this year’s Freimarkt and will post them, when I get around to it. Meanwhile, enjoy this video of the 1987 Freimarkt. I remember all of those rides well and rose most of them at some point. Except for Skylab and the Ranger, which were a bit too scary for me at the time. I eventually got to ride a Ranger years later and the ride actually looks much worse than it is. Unfortunately, I never got to ride the Skylab, because it was gone – sold off after two accidents, none of which were the ride’s fault – before I could get my courage together. And since the only surviving Skylab in the world is in Columbia, I doubt I will ever get my chance.

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First Monday Free Fiction: Loot

Welcome to the November edition of First Monday Free Fiction. To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on every first Monday of the month. It will remain free to read on this blog for one month, then I’ll take it down and post another story.

[image error]November is the month for remembering the dead, so here is a humorous crime story set in a cemetery. You can read “Loot” both in a standalone edition and as part of the crime fiction collection Murder in the Family. “Loot” is based on a true story, by the way, which happened to an elderly lady of my acquaintance.

So prepare to accompany Eudora Pennington to the cemetery to bury a loved one and watch pursesnatcher Jack Slater get his comeuppance in…

 

 

Loot

Katrina hadn’t been well for quite a few days. She didn’t eat, she didn’t drink, she didn’t want to go outside, she scarcely stirred from her basket in the bedroom. She did not even enjoy sitting in her favourite spot on her owner’s lap anymore.

Eudora Pennington had been very worried. After a sleepless night, for both her and Katrina, she finally decided to call the vet. The vet came, examined Katrina and then told Mrs. Pennington frankly that there was nothing he could do. Old age was finally taking its toll. The best thing would be to put her to sleep.

Eudora Pennington had refused, of course. If you spent seventeen years with a pet, you didn’t just have it put down, once it became old and ill and useless. It was inhuman and simply wrong. And this was what she told the vet. The young man just shrugged and left. He hadn’t helped Katrina, in fact he hadn’t done anything except making Mrs. Pennington angry and he’d charged her twenty-five pounds for the privilege, too. Typical, those young doctors of today were interested in nothing but money.

But though Eudora Pennington was unwilling to let her sole companion of the past seven years go, the fluffy white Persian cat died peacefully the following night anyway. Mrs. Pennington was heartbroken. Katrina was the only friend she had left, after all, the only living creature to share the loneliness of a large empty house. Her husband Albert was long dead, and they’d had no children. And they’d always had preciously little contact with the relatives on either side. So all that had been left after Albert’s sudden death seven years before were a few friends and the neighbours who dropped in every now and then. And Katrina, of course. But now Katrina was gone as well.

The morning after Katrina passed away, Philip, Mrs. Pennington’s neighbour, came over to offer his assistance. Mrs. Pennington liked her neighbours. They were good people and had always been there for her, when she needed help. But that morning Philip wanted to take Katrina away. And Mrs. Pennington knew only too well where he would take her. He’d take her to the knacker’s. And Mrs. Pennington knew only too well would happen to her then.

“I will not have my poor Katrina end up as glue or as meat and bone meal,” she told him.

Philip had been very understanding. He assured her that he knew how she felt, though he was pretty sure that they did not actually make glue out of dead animals anymore. And meat and bone meal had been banned over that mad cow scare years ago. And he really wished there were some other way. But unfortunately it was forbidden to bury pets in the garden or anywhere else except at designated pet cemeteries.

The idea of a pet cemetery had crossed Eudora Pennington’s mind. Katrina would have a decent grave there, complete with a headstone and flowers. It was what Mrs. Pennington wanted for Katrina, what her trusted companion deserved. But unfortunately there was a grave problem. Pet cemeteries were very expensive. Too expensive for Mrs. Pennington’s small pension.

For two days, Eudora Pennington brooded over what to do with poor Katrina’s body. She considered simply burying Katrina in a nice corner of the garden or in a pleasant spot in the woods. But that was forbidden, just as Philip had pointed out. Besides it might poison the groundwater or something like that. To be honest, she didn’t quite understand all that. All she knew was that burying Katrina in the garden was against the law and Mrs. Pennington didn’t want to get in trouble with the police. She had always been a law-abiding citizen, after all. No, she would have to find another way. Then, on the second night after Katrina’s death, she had an idea.

There was one place where she could give Katrina a decent burial without accidentally poisoning the groundwater. And Katrina would have as nice a grave there as she would have had at a pet cemetery. What was more, she would even rest in the company of somebody who had cared for her almost as much as Eudora Pennington herself had.

Mrs. Pennington would simply take Katrina’s body to the cemetery and bury her in her husband’s grave. Albert would have liked to have Katrina with him. And this way, Eudora Pennington could visit the graves of both her loved ones at the same time. It was the perfect solution.

Of course, it was illegal as well. The cemetery was for humans, not for pets. But Mrs. Pennington had paid for that burial place, and a ridiculously high sum, too, for such a little plot of land. That grave belonged to her and she had the right to do with it as she pleased and to bury whomever she pleased in there.

Once she’d come to this solution, Eudora Pennington set out the very next morning to carry it out. Carefully, she wrapped Katrina’s body in a plastic bag. Then she put the plastic bag into her handbag, the big one of brown leatherette which she always used when she went grocery shopping. Finally, she took a shovel, a rake and a watering can and set off for the cemetery.

On her way she stopped once more to buy some pansies. Albert’s grave needed new flowers anyway, the old ones were dry and faded. Besides, if she were planting flowers, simply slipping Katrina’s little body into the grave would look entirely inconspicuous.

Thus prepared, Mrs. Pennington set out to bury Katrina.

***

Jack Slater spent a lot of time hanging out on cemeteries, purely for professional reasons. However, he was neither a priest nor a gardener nor a gravedigger nor an undertaker. Jack Slater was a thief, a pursesnatcher who stole the handbags of little old ladies. And there were plenty of little old ladies at Shady Grove Cemetery.

And little old ladies tended to be careless, particularly on cemeteries. Most of the time, they were so busy planting flowers and watering them, picking up snails and fallen leaves or simply sitting on benches, lost in memories of some long dead loved one, that they did not pay attention the large handbags they invariably carried. That was Jack Slater’s chance.

Even better, people on cemeteries were usually lost in their own private grief, so they never looked at each other, never paid attention to what was going on around them. Therefore, nobody ever noticed Jack Slater, nobody was ever able to describe him. A thief could not wish for a better turf.

Of course, it was thoroughly rotten, vile and evil. What crime could be more heinous than breaking the holy peace of a cemetery and snatching the purses of grieving old ladies? But everybody had to make a living somehow. And to Jack Slater this seemed as good a way as every other.

Besides, he was only taking from those who could afford it. Old people had money. In fact, people over sixty were the richest group in the entire country, so Jack had read in a newspaper he’d found on the bus. It all had to do with wars and hyper-inflations and how there hadn’t been either in such a long time that nobody lost any money anymore unless they were really stupid. But the ones that were not stupid just kept on amassing wealth. And old people, being old, were the richest of all. Jack Slater didn’t pretend to understand it all, but he got the gist of it. Old people were rich, and when they died, their heirs would become rich. The next generation would be a generation of rich heirs, so the newspaper headline had said.

Unfortunately, Jack Slater was not the heir of anybody, much less of anybody rich. For some reason, his parents and grandparents had missed the memo on amassing wealth for their heirs. Which meant that Jack Slater would never belong to that new generation of rich heirs. Therefore, it was only fair if he balanced the scales a bit by relieving those rich old people of some of the money before they could bequeath it to their heirs.

Armed with this justification cobbled together from half-remembered newspaper articles, Jack Slater roamed the cemeteries in order to take what he believed the world owed him. So far, he’d been quite successful. The loot had been varied, but mostly good. And he’d never been caught. The coppers had even put up signs warning of pickpockets. But people were never watchful on cemeteries and Jack did his best to look inconspicuous.

He always dressed nicely, when he went to “work”. Little old ladies tended to be so bloody judgmental of other people’s appearance. But if you looked proper, no one suspected you of being a crook. And so Jack always wore black jeans, a black shirt and a black jacket. He’d tried wearing a tie, too, but found that he couldn’t bind it the way it was supposed to look. On his feet were Chucks in the most boring black he could find. He’d tried wearing cowboy boots once, but he couldn’t run fast enough in those. And in his line of work speed was important. Furthermore, he always made sure to shower and shave and wash his hair before he went to the cemetery. And so, dressed as properly as he could manage, Jack went about his shady business.

When he roamed the cemetery, he always put on a very solemn expression. Sometimes he strolled along the gravel paths, pretending to look only at his feet. Occasionally he grabbed a watering can and pretended to water the flowers on a grave. And sometimes he just sat on a bench, seemingly lost in sad thoughts. Nobody noticed that he was surreptitiously watching his surroundings, always on the look-out for victims that promised good loot.

That day, Jack Slater sat on a bench enjoying the springtime sun, his legs stretched out before him. His face was hidden behind a newspaper, the Times Education Supplement unfortunately. Why did people never leave anything good like the sports pages on the bus? Still, it made a good disguise. Made him look smart and scholarly. And scholarly looking people were entirely non-threatening.

And so, while Jack was trying to make sense of an article on the higher education bubble, whatever that may be, he happened to notice a fat old lady in a camel hair coat. She was loaded down with a shovel, a rake, a watering can and a box of pansies. More importantly, she also carried a large dark brown handbag, which she clutched tightly to her chest. Surely, there was money in the bag. Perhaps even her pension. Those old birds tended to be so bloody stupid, getting their whole pension paid out in a single swoop. Still, she looked like a very promising catch indeed.

Jack watched intently over the top of his newspaper, as she stopped at a nearby grave, put down the rake, the shovel, the watering can, the pansies and finally also the large handbag. She picked up the shovel and stabbed it into the grave. The handbag was lying behind her in the grass, completely unattended.

This was the moment Jack had been waiting for. Soundlessly as a cat he crept between the gravestones, until he was directly behind the old lady and reached for the handbag. Alas, at that exact moment the old woman decided that she needed something in her handbag very desperately and reached behind her. When she did not find the bag where she had put it, she turned around and saw it in the hands of Jack Slater.

The old woman raised her shovel and opened her mouth to scream, but Jack did not wait for the shovel to come down and the scream to leave her lips. He spun around, still clutching the handbag, and ran as fast as his legs would carry him, jumping over several gravestones in the process.

“Come back, you villain,” the old woman cried after him, “There’s no money in there. There’s nothing in that bag that has any value to you.”

***

Eudora Pennington stopped in frustration, once she’d screamed herself hoarse. It was to no avail anyway. No amount of screaming would stop that punk. She slumped down in front of her husband’s grave, tears running down her cheeks, both from the exertion of screaming at the top of her lungs and from realising what she had just lost.

Mrs. Pennington’s screams might not have stopped the thief, but they did attract the attention of some other people in the vicinity and soon four or five of them were gathered around her to see if she was all right. They were all very sympathetic and completely outraged about the impunity of the thief.

A young woman dressed all in black with heavy make-up and earrings all over her face (Such a pretty girl, Eudora Pennington thought. Why did she have to disfigure herself like that?) called the police on her mobile and soon a young constable arrived to take Mrs. Pennington’s statement.

“We’ve been having a lot of thefts lately,” PC Higgins said, “We even put up signs warning the visitors.” He sighed. “You can never let down your guard these days, cause crime no longer stops at the cemetery gates. It’s a crying shame.”

Everybody agreed, from the retired mayor visiting the grave of his late wife via the Pakistani gardener to the girl all in black.

“So how much money was stolen, ma’am?” PC Higgins asked.

“Oh, he did not steal any money,” Mrs. Pennington replied. She opened her camel hair coat to reveal a pocket made from an old bedsheet sewn into the coat lining. “I always keep my money in here, ever since my Albert, god bless his soul, and I were robbed on a bus in Rome back in sixty-five.”

“That’s very clever of you,” PC Higgins said approvingly, “I wish everybody were that careful. It would certainly make our job easier. But what was in the stolen bag, ma’am?”

In spite of the situation Eudora Pennington had to smile. “You’d be surprised, Constable,” she said, “So will the thief.”

***

Still panting, Jack Slater bounded up the rickety stairs to his shabby flat. That had been too close for comfort. Damn that old bird for reaching for her handbag at the exact same moment Jack was trying to snatch it. And she’d tried to whack him with a shovel, too. So much for little old ladies being harmless.

Once inside, Jack Slater immediately flung himself onto an old green sofa and proceeded to examine his loot. The bag was dark brown, made of cheap leatherette that smelled of plastic and death. As for the design, that hadn’t been fashionable since World War II at least. Why, oh why did old people always have such ugly handbags? With all the money they were supposedly hoarding, would it kill them to spend some of it on a nice Prada or Gucci or Louis Vuitton handbag? Even an imitation, if they were real scrooges. Because there always was a market for designer handbags, real or fake, and no one ever asked where they came from. This ugly thing, however, was only good for the bin.

Well, hopefully the contents were better. So Jack opened the zipper. Immediately, a cloud of cemetery smell hit him, stronger than he’d ever experienced it before. Shit, it smelled as if something had crawled into that handbag and died.

Jack held his nose and looked inside the bag. The first thing he saw was the distinctive blue, white and orange design of an Aldi plastic bag. Probably the old bird’s groceries. He pulled out the bag and flung it rather carelessly on the sofa behind him. He would find out what he’d have for dinner tonight later. But right now, the other contents of the bag were far more interesting. So he examined the inside of the oversized bag and finally found a zipper. Side pocket. Bingo. That was where old people usually kept their money. Probably thought it was safer there. Yeah right.

But as he reached into the side pocket, all he found were two used bus-tickets and a faded library pass. No money. Jack Slater cursed and turned over that brown monstrosity of a bag. He found a lace-edged handkerchief, an imitation tortoiseshell comb, a half-empty roll of mints and a shopping list. No wallet, no chequebook, no credit card, no money. Nothing but junk. A whole day of work and all he had to show for it were some lousy groceries. Damn that old fossil.

To let out his frustration, Jack flung that hideously ugly handbag against the stained wall of his flat. Then he leaned back on the sofa and nearly landed on the plastic bag in the process. Curiously he pulled it on his lap. Might as well see what he’d have for dinner tonight. He just hoped the old lady wasn’t into health food or products for diabetics. That stuff tasted like crap. Jack should know — after all, he had eaten enough of it over the past year.

He sniffed at the bag. Whatever she’d bought, it smelled awful. Plus, she shopped at Aldi. Cheap, she was too. Still, maybe she had bought some meat, sausages maybe or perhaps even a frozen steak. There might even be a bottle of wine or, if he was extremely lucky, something harder.

His curiosity aroused, Jack reached into the plastic bag, when to his great surprise his fingertips touched something soft and fuzzy. He looked into the bag and saw nothing but thick white fur. Jack smiled. Perhaps the day’s loot was not as bad as it had seemed after all.

For there was no mistaking what the plastic bag contained. This was clearly a fur coat. Chinchilla or silver fox or something similarly luxurious by the looks of it. Of course, the market for fur coats was not what it used to be — screw those animal rights people. But a nice coat like this would still bring a good enough price. Perhaps he could even take it to one of those vintage fashion shops. Vintage was in — Jack had read it in a Fashion and Style supplement he’d found on the bus last week.

Briefly, Jack wondered why on Earth an old woman would carry a fur coat wrapped in a plastic bag around in her handbag at a cemetery on a warm and pleasant April day. Old people truly were weird.

But his attention quickly returned to more important matters, namely the loot, and so he proceeded to examine his prize. Gingerly, he reached into the plastic bag. His hand closed around the furry object to pull it out.

He held the day’s loot up to the light and immediately recoiled in horror. Disgusted, he dumped the furry thing on the floor. For there, in the middle of his fake Persian carpet lay the decomposing carcass of a furry white cat.

The End

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new story will be posted.

Check back next month, when there will be a new story available.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for October 2019

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some September books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fantasy, dark fantasy, Asian fantasy, paranormal fantasy, paranormal mystery, paranormal romance, fantasy romance, time travel romance, science fiction romance, space opera both gritty and cozy, military science fiction, dystopian fiction, Cyberpunk, sword and sorcery, fairytales, Renaissance magic, reality show demons, space pirates, space marines, bounty hunters, mercenaries, intergalactic cops, undead cops, crime-busting witches, tyrant slayers, literary characters come to life and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Star Pirate II: The Wrath of the Queen by Mia Archer:

Get the loot. Save the day. Get the girl.

That should’ve been Flynn’s happily ever after. It should’ve been a simple matter of selling off the haul from the greatest heist ever pulled in the civilized galaxies.

If only it were that easy.

It turns out selling off a stash of gems stolen from the most powerful and homicidal royal family in the civilized galaxies isn’t as easy as she’d thought. Sure there are plenty of fleets out there looking to take them off her hands, but they’re paying in turbolaser blasts and Flynn isn’t interested in selling at that price.

Her only hope is to get in touch with the mysterious Selevas Separtists and hope they’re stupid enough to buy her gems and paint the target on their back. The only problem? This is one rebel alliance that seems more comfy hiding out than they are in blowing shit up. What’s the most notorious pirate in the civilized galaxies to do?

Escape her mother. Strike out on her own. Get the girl.

That should’ve been Seleya’s happily ever after. All she wanted was to fade into obscurity and live her life far from the center of galactic power with the girl of her dreams.

Too bad the girl of her dreams is now the most notorious pirate the civilized galaxies has ever known!

Now she’s having the time of her life, but that life is always on the edge of ending thanks to the never ending battle fleets her mother is sending at them. Not to mention she’s discovering it’s a big adjustment going from the Selevas palace to a dingy modified pirate freighter where their idea of room service is fixing the food replicator!

A notorious pirate on the run. An exiled princess trying to find her place in this strange new world. All they have is each other, but that might just be enough to conquer galaxies!

Mementos and Memories by Cora Buhlert:

Once, Anjali Patel and Mikhail Grikov were soldiers on opposing sides of an intergalactic war. They met, fell in love and decided to go on the run together.

Now Anjali and Mikhail are trying to eke out a living on the independent worlds of the galactic rim, while attempting to stay under the radar of those pursuing them.

At a market on the tropical ocean world of Sentosa, Anjali and Mikhail come across a dagger for sale. This dagger is the signature weapon of the Imperial Shakyri Corps, and Anjali knows that no Shakyri warrior would ever willingly part with their dagger. So Anjali and Mikhail go in search of the lawful owner of the dagger and come across a long forgotten tale of forbidden love…

This is a story of 7300 words or approximately 25 print pages in the In Love and War series, but may be read as a standalone.

Forever, Lately by Linore Rose Burkard:

1816, England

Julian St. John needs a wife. An oath to a deceased guardian must be kept. Miss Clarissa Andrews, a vexatious beauty, has dangled after him all season but he has no intention of choosing such a she-devil.

Maine, Present Day

Author Claire Channing is desperate to write a bestseller to save her failing career. She moves into her grandmother?s abandoned cottage to write the book, but a local resort baron wants to raze the place. Without the deed, the clock is ticking on how long she can stay. She thinks she’s writing St. John?s story. But when she discovers an old prayer shawl and finds herself in his Regency world, she falls in love with him, a man she thought she invented! Miss Andrews, however, is also real—and she’d rather see Julian dead than in another woman?s arms!

Claire must beat the clock to prevent a deadly tragedy, but can love beat the limits of time itself?

[image error] Half a Dream by E.P. Clark:

Magic meets mystery in a Renaissance fantasy!

The dark gods of battle are cruel and capricious, and require sacrifices worse than blood.

It’s been four years since Giacomo, bodyguard to Prince Luca of Fiori, followed his charge down into the shadowy world of forbidden magic. When Luca disappears once again, Giaco must cast aside his disbelief and delve into the world of fortune-telling and shadow-walking in order to find Luca and bring him back to safety.

And beyond that, he must face up to his own worst fears. Everyone considers Giaco to be a hero, but he is about to learn the true meaning of heroism. More than his own life depends on it.

Set in a magical world inspired by Renaissance Florence, this fantasy thriller will appeal to fans of dark and urban fantasy, as well as paranormal and occult suspense. This 35,000-word novella is the second book in the Giaco & Luca series, but can be read as a standalone.

[image error] Return to Kapteyn’s Star by M.D. Cooper:

Tangel has decided the time is ripe for the ISF to strike out against the Hegemony. Given its significance, there is no better place to start than Kapteyn’s Star. With the Lantzer repaired, she gives the mission to Jessica and Sera. It should be a walk in the park….

 

 

 

Blink by David Delaney:

A thrilling prequel to the unputdownable Paragon Society Series

Fireball blasting battle-mages, shapeshifting soccer moms and a best friend who is more than happy to throw punches now and ask questions later—Wyatt Murphy is in for a supernatural thrill ride of reality-bending proportions.

If he can just avoid the school bully, survive the big dance and outrun blood-magic wielding bad guys, his night may turn out great.

Slaying a Tyrant by Mel Dunay:

Journey to the country of Jaiya, in a world not quite like ours. Here the humans wield magical powers and fight against an Empire which seeks to enslave them, but they share their world with insect people and trollfolk, and stranger things lurk in the shadows…

Vanti would be happy to spend her life in dance and choreography, but her family chooses her as their champion in a deadly gladiators’ tournament. To save her country from enslavement, she must defeat King Obiar the Conqueror and his magical powers. But will the brooding trainer named Gurion be her guide in the battle to come…or a dangerously handsome distraction?

Note: Tyrant is meant as a standalone with a “happily ever after” ending. However, the heroes in the later books in this series are descended from Vanti and Gurion, who are also the ancestors of some of the characters in the original Jaiya series. The romance is on the sweet side, but there is some violence due to the villains’ actions and the tournament in which the main characters fight.

Humanity’s Fight by J.J. Green:

Fighting for freedom from galactic tyranny

General Cherry Lindstrom is responsible for the defense of the colony world, Concordia. This last outpost of human civilization lives under constant threat of attack from hostile aliens who claim the planet as their own.

But decades have passed since the last assault, and the colonists have grown complacent. Thanks to the effects of time dilation, only Cherry and a handful of others remember the devastation wreaked on Concordia previously.

The Concordians don’t understand the danger the colony is in. Cherry must find a way to convince them and to build effective fighting force—before it’s too late.

Two galactic civilizations. One planet. Who will win?

Kiss of Eon by Anna Hackett:

When the vital alliance between Earth and the Eon Empire depends on her playing war games with an arrogant, infuriating Eon warrior, what could go wrong?

Terran Captain Allie Borden has her orders. Take her ship, the Divergent, and strengthen the alliance with the Eon by carrying out training exercises with the Eon warship, the Desteron. The only problem…one annoying warrior who gets on her nerves like nobody else. Forced to work with Second Commander Brack Thann-Felis, Allie finds her diplomacy skills stretched to the limit…and her body betraying her with a white-hot desire that’s getting hard to ignore.

Brack Thann-Felis is dedicated to his ship, his warriors, and his job. Watching his parents’ disastrous marriage has ensured that he will never mate or fall in love. Working with feisty, opinionated Allie tests his patience, but the more time he spends with the dedicated captain, the more he finds he can’t stay away from her.

As mysterious, dangerous sabotage events strike their ships, it becomes evident that someone wants their alliance to fail. They might have traitors among their crew and they both know it has to lead back to their enemy—the ravenous insectoid Kantos. Soon, Brack and Allie find themselves in a fight for their lives, with only each other to depend on, and a growing desire that will not be denied.

A Fistful of Demons by Lily Harper Hart:

Hannah Hickok is slipping into her new life as owner of Casper Creek – a cosplay western town – and newly-minted witch. She thinks she has everything under control … until demons come calling.At first, she’s not even certain what she’s dealing with. A freak accident claims the life of a father, leaving him exposed during a sudden sandstorm, and his son’s reaction (complete with glowing red eyes) leaves a lot to be desired.Cooper Wyatt, head of security for the resort, wants to believe her when she explains what she saw but it’s not exactly easy for him. As the evidence starts to mount, though, demon possession becomes the name of the game.As a new witch, Hannah has no idea what she’s supposed to do. That doesn’t stop her from wanting to be proactive. Unfortunately for her, the emergence of new powers – coupled with the realization that something beyond a simple demon possession is going on – quickly becomes overwhelming.The workers at Casper Creek are going to have to join together – maybe even enlist some outside help – to figure out all the answers and solve the ultimate dilemma.A young boy’s life hangs in the balance and Hannah is determined to make sure she doesn’t lose an innocent soul so early in her reign as Casper Creek’s head witch. All she has to do is survive until the end and then everything will be revealed.That’s easier said than done.

Shadow Magic by Jayne Hawke:

Looking for a kick-ass bounty hunter? You found her.

I’m the best at what I do. If a shifter goes feral, or a fae kills the wrong innocent, then I’ll be the one to hunt them down. It’s a dangerous gig, but I do what’s necessary to keep the roof over our heads.

Unfortunately, I’m at the bottom of the bounty hunter pay scale thanks to the need to keep my heritage hidden. If anyone ever found out what I am, and what I can do, the entire fae territories would be coming for my head. That means we live from pay cheque to pay cheque. So when the most dangerous fae in the country chooses me to help him with a case, I have no choice but to say yes.

Ethan Hale is a cu sith, one of the finest assassins in the fae territories. If he finds out what I am, he’ll have me begging for death. And yet, I accepted the job to work with him so I can figure out who’s stealing god magic and selling it. People are dying, and it’s down to us to put at end to it.

Now, I have to work alongside the sinfully-sexy fae while trying to keep my secrets under wraps. The closer we get to unravelling this mystery, the closer I am to losing everything. One wrong step and it’ll all be over.

Crown of the Sundered Empire by J.C. Kang:

Only the demon in Tomas’ glass eye can save his village.

It might cost him his soul.

In a broken land where conquerors dream of empires, Tomas dreams of a day when the townsfolk won’t taunt him. After all, he’s the fishing village kid with a misshapen face.

Only the Rune vendor’s daughter treats him well. To win her heart, he relies on a quick wit and local superstitions to convince her he has Diviner’s Sight.

But if he did, he would’ve foreseen magic-fearing invaders plucking out his mismatched eye.

Or the demon trapped in the glass replacement. It reveals a world beyond human vision, while whispering temptations in his mind.

Now, with his village caught between the advancing armies of the Sun God’s mortal descendants and His Chosen People, Tomas must use a combination of calculation, cunning, and demonic insight to maneuver the forces of his world against each other—prince against prince, princess against princess, army against army—or see his home crushed forever beneath the wheels of war.

But to do so carries a dire risk.

Because using a demon could condemn your soul.

Only the Lost by Amanda M. Lee:

Izzy Sage is settling into her new job, enjoying her new romance, and only has one thing on her mind: Choosing a new assistant to help her at Belle Isle’s death gate. All of that changes when the gate malfunctions. Instead of dragging someone over, though, it sends five people back.Years ago, a group of trainees disappeared while on a tour of the facility. There was no rhyme or reason to what happened and the higher-ups assumed they died during the malfunction. Five of them have returned though, and they haven’t aged a day.Naturally, the reaper world is buzzing with the news. Izzy, however, thinks something bigger might be going on. Her belief only becomes stronger when another creature shows up in the middle of the night and attacks.The malfunctioning gate is hiding a sinister secret, and it might just have something to do with what happened to Izzy’s parents so many years ago. Oliver has ties to the initial incident, too, and even though he knew the men way back then, he’s discombobulated by what’s happening now. When you add to that the arrival of Paris Princeton, Izzy has her hands full.Thankfully she’s not alone on the job. She has the Grimlocks to back her play … and serve as emotional sounding boards. Together, Izzy and the Grimlocks are neck deep in trouble and searching for answers. They need to find them before the unthinkable happens and they lose one of their own, because when the gate starts acting weird again, someone is going to have to cross over to the other side – face death itself – and reclaim the most valuable prize imaginable.Izzy’s life is about to take a turn. Somehow, she needs to stay on her feet to see it through. That’s easier said than done when death is your business but if anyone can make it to the other side and live to tell the tale, it’s Izzy.It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

[image error] Blood Harvest by Russ Linton:

Hunted by Death, one man will face the forces of Hell to get back home.

Former Baltimore cop Eustace “Ace” Grant is on a quest to find lost sorcery. An apprentice shaman, Ace walks the spirit realm in search of a cure for his terminal illness.

When asked to recover a Civil War sword, Ace finds traces of a magic more potent than he’s ever experienced. Forged in England by a smith in possession of the Primal Flame, the blade had been intended for a different battle entirely – the one at the end of time.

That battle upon us, it’s up to Ace to recover the sword. Without it, the world as we know it will be plunged into a nightmare. He’ll find the sword or die trying. That is if his ghostly mentor, Atofo, will only let go of his soul…

Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic by Catherine Lundoff:

Haunted houses. Vengeful spirits. Wronged women. A glimpse of a grim future and a visit to a terrifying past. Step inside for a taste of nightmare, a bit of the unexpected and a touch of the weird. 12 stories by award-winning author Catherine Lundoff including:

The Mask and the Amontillado

A Splash of Crimson

Bluebeard’s Wife

Duchess

Medium Méchanique

Miss Lucy’s Glass

Cherubim

Preserves

Haunted

Home Staging, with Phantasm

Firebird

The Temporary

Unfinished Business marks the launch of Queen of Swords Press “Mini” series. These books will be shorter books that feature single author short story collections or novella length works, each grouped around a single theme or shared set of characters. Essentially, they will function like a tasting menu to introduce authors to new audiences. This particular volume represents a sample of award-winning author Catherine Lundoff’s short horror, dark fantasy and weird stories in a mix of reprint and new work.

[image error] Once Upon a Rose by Lorri Mouton:

In this clean/sweet fairytale, a princess uncovers a plot against her kingdom and tries to stop it with the help of her friends.

 

 

 

 

[image error] The Brothers of Redemption by D.E. Murray:

The Journey You Start Isn’t The One You Finish

It’s 2165. The family is gone. The world is ruled by the ferociously competitive, hierarchical Council of the Brotherhood Orders. Sons are bred in cohorts created by Alphas and surrogates.

Half-brothers Jed and Max Kleer are middle-aged burnouts who share little except an Alpha and a mysterious, unbreakable bond.

When an abducted girl drops into Jed’s life, the brothers resolve to guide her home.

What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

The journey they start won’t be the one they finish.

[image error] The Sundering by Vanessa Nelson:

Nowhere and no one is safe.

Stripped of her rank and her calling by some of her most trusted friends, Yvonne is left shocked and bleeding.

Worse is to come. Not only are children still going missing, but she learns that the death of an old friend might not have been natural.

With old friendships torn apart, Yvonne must work out who she can trust if she is to find the truth.

The Sundering continues the story started in The Gathering. If you like your fantasy with plenty of mystery and magic, and a strong heroine, you’ll want to continue this fantasy series by Vanessa Nelson.

[image error] Unseen Voices by Christine Pope:

Project Demon Hunters is canceled…but apparently no one told the demons.

Knowing how the horrifying events that took place while filming Project Demon Hunters shook his friend Michael Covenant to the core, Will Gordon readily says yes to Michael’s request to be ready — as a friend and as an Episcopal priest — in case psychic Rosemary McGuire calls for help.

Rosemary doesn’t know exactly why the show was canceled…other than a demon murdered the show’s producer, and the network buried every scrap of harrowing footage under a ton of hacker-proof security.

When an independent filmmaker shows up at Rosemary’s metaphysical bookshop with tantalizing clues that a backup copy of the missing footage exists, she promises Michael she’ll call some crusty old priest “in a pinch,” and begins following a trail of impossibly tiny bread crumbs.

But that trail doesn’t just lead her somewhere. It leads something to Rosemary, alarming enough that she calls Michael’s priest friend…who turns out to be way younger and heroically handsome than she could have ever anticipated. But the heat between them may be no match for the demonic fire that grows hotter and more dangerous the closer they get to the truth.

Carpe Glitter by Cat Rambo:

A novelette from Cat Rambo, author of The Tabat Quartet. What do you do when someone else’s past forces itself on your own life? Sorting through the piles left behind by a grandmother who was both a stage magician and a hoarder, Persephone Aim finds a magical artifact from World War II that has shaped her family history. Faced with her mother’s desperate attempt to take the artifact for herself, Persephone must decide whether to hold onto the past–or use it to reshape her future.

 

Tetrarch’s Dilemma by Jaxon Reed:

Raleigh and his crew are tasked with guarding an outlying planet from enemy incursions, when they capture an old friend off a smuggler’s ship. The possibilities for an enormous sum of gold prove tantalizing . . . if they can survive the League Navy’s attempts at eradication.

Meanwhile the frontier planet of Halcyon stretches its wings, and pulls in support from Lute to begin a new planetary alliance. And Sergeant Wilcox teams up with Julia Thrall to help soften up the Republic’s next target . . . if the Ultima Mule can successfully port them in without detection.

Don’t miss the latest installment of this action-packed space opera serial!

The Frontier by Chris Turner:

Two space mercenaries face down crooks and corruption in the frontier worlds of the far future.

Yul Vrean visits his home world only to get embroiled in a corporate conspiracy to cheat a ranch owner out of his estate. Regers gets caught in the crossfires of a gang war over deadly alien contraband. Two unlikely allies on a much greater mission…

 

 

[image error] Challenge of Steel by James David Victor:

In a world of genetic engineering, fantastic aliens, and faster than light travel, conspiracies and the quest for unlimited power can still tear the galaxy apart.

Anders Corsigon has spent his life bringing galactic criminals to justice. When a bizarre murder turns into a string of assassinations, he has to run an off-books investigation to try and find a killer who is protected from the highest levels of the empire. In a world where genetic engineering and clones are real, he must find a truth that could cost him his life.

Challenge of Steel is the first book in the Memories of Earth space opera series. If you enjoy stories in fantastic worlds of aliens, space travel, and genetic engineering, the Memories of Earth series will be right up your alley.

[image error] The Collected A.E. Williams: Volume 1 by A.E. Williams:

For the first time, all A.E. Williams’ published works are available as one single volume!

This is the perfect gift for the science fiction reader, science nerd or irascible curmudgeon in your life!

Terminal Reset – The Coming of the Wave

The breakout science fiction novel that explores an alternate history where everyone one earth regresses forty years in age! Dr. David Harding and Dr. Tatania Golovonov must find a way to survive in a world gone mad! Regressed to teenagers, the two fight to find a way to reverse the effects of The Wave, a force from out of Time and Space. Filled with excitement and action, Terminal Reset will have you on the edge of your seat!

Terminal Reset – Return of the Wanderers

A strange spaceship enters the outer boundaries of the Solar System, returning from an eons long mission. But, who are the inhabitants and what do they want with Earth?

Taking place in the same universe as Terminal Reset, this story explores the implications of ancient civilizations and how they have affected our evolution. Mars isn’t just our neighbor in space! Another exciting tale for your science fiction enjoyment!

Rocket Surgeon

A.E. Williams essays on AGW, the Space Race, Hollywood and other tales to entertain and fascinate you! Get a behind the curtains peek at Relativity, rocket science, jet engine testing and other cool nerdy things that A.E. has done! Find out why the world probably won’t end tomorrow, but is sure to do so in the distant future! Travel in space and time and maybe learn a thing or two about our Universe. Climb aboard for another wild ride from the redoubtable A.E. Williams!

The Unholy Trinity Series

The infamous trilogy of cutting, biting satires that lampoon today’s headlines!

Second Coming – Jesus bets His half-brother, Lucifer that the bet God made with him regarding Job can be done, again, and better. The implications are breathtaking! Does the Big J wind up the victor? Or, does the Devil get his due?

Anno Domini – Jesus and Lucifer’s betting is getting out of hand! This time, Jesus bets that the souls of the most outstanding humans ever born can redeem Mankind from original Sin. But, there’s a catch! A Virgin Birth is part of the scheme, but maybe Jesus didn’t think everything through?

Imperius Wrecks – A satirical and humorous look at one possible future! A nightmare or a dream – you get to decide.

In the far distant future, a nun is tasked with ancient rituals descended from one man’s egotistical grasp for power and immortality. Could this really happen?

Filled with religious references, popular concerns of the day, and a cast of totally fictional characters, this satire puts a spin on current events that will have you spitting coffee all over yourself in shock, from laughing or pure unadulterated rage. You’ll be aghast at the content, the implications and the mirror held up to our world.

Come along as A.E. Williams once more pulls no punches as he slams the One Percent, Religion and Political parties of all stripes!

BULB by Bradley Wind:

If light records everything we do, can even shadows hide our secrets?

Imagine your entire life is available for review.

Imagine each day any event can be watched over and over again – your birth, your first kiss, your recent shower, that private itch – all replayable from any angle. Now imagine these can be viewed by anyone at any time.

Is a world where there is far less ego, little crime, and even the smallest moments are recorded and available publicly through the ‘Grand Archive’ a Utopia or a Dystopia? Traumatized by memories he does not want to recall, artist Ben Tinthawin is recruited by the enigmatic, Grand Archive creator Dr. Mamon, who seeks help for his nextgen designs to enhance the world. Ben stumbles across a secret revealing the doctor’s true scheme in all its surreal splendor and questions whether the doctor really is the benevolent soul he claims to be.As the paths of a broken man and a brilliant revolutionary cross, the world shifts and cracks start to appear. Even our most fundamental codes can be encrypted – or corrupted. If the wrong information is discovered, more than Ben’s life will be in danger of total shut down.

Prepare yourself for full exposure.

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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for October 2019

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some September books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have harboiled mysteries, cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, animal mysteries, historical mysteries, Victorian mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, action thrillers, psychological thrillers, spy thrillers, legal thrillers, disaster thrillers, police procedurals, romantic suspense, police officers, private investigators, amateur sleuths, lawyers, spies, thieves, assassins, cults, kidappings, heists, forbidden love, pregnant vigilantes, murderd Santas, crime-busting witches, crime-busting clock repairers, crime-busting hotel managers, crime-busting Jane Rochester nee Eyre, murders in small towns and big cities, in country manors and the circus, in New Orleans, Miami, Alaska, California, the Cotswolds and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Sand, Sea and a Skeleton by Cindy Bell:

Best friends, Suzie and Mary, love running Dune House, the majestic bed and breakfast on the beach, with their adorable, yellow Labrador, Pilot, by their side. They are enjoying living and working together and are looking forward to hosting a national walking group in Garber for a few days.

But when they stumble across a skeleton, they find themselves right in the middle of a baffling mystery. Who is the victim? Who is the murderer? And why? Then something from the crime scene disappears.

Suzie and Mary have to traverse a maze of clues and suspects in order to unravel the mystery. But will the trail lead the sleuths down the wrong path. They find themselves juggling running the bed and breakfast, their developing romances and helping crack the mystery.

Suzie and Mary walk straight towards danger. Will they be able to stay alive long enough to solve this perplexing whodunit?

What I Did For Love by Mickey J. Corrigan:

What happens when a teacher falls for her student?

After her seventeen-year-old student fails to live up to his potential in class, Cathriona O’Hale conducts a parent-teacher meeting with the boy’s widowed father. He is attractive, intelligent, and exceedingly wealthy, everything an unmarried middle-aged woman would normally find appealing. But O’Hale is not your average forty-something. She’s a wild card who has a crush on the man’s teenage son.

As the relationship between O’Hale and the man blossoms, she finds herself juggling father and son while battling the true source of her lust and forbidden love.

So when the father proposes, O’Hale has a choice to make –

Love or crime?

And when her decision is made, the consequences might just be deadly…

Swamp Santa by Jana DeLeon:

It’s Christmas in Sinful and Fortune is set to participate in all the local hoopla. A Christmas gala, caroling, and a sleigh ride are on the agenda. Murder is not. But when someone bumps off Santa, Fortune is aware a killer is lurking among the holiday cheer. But with no client and no reason to interfere with a police investigation, it looks as if Fortune, Ida Belle, and Gertie will have to sit this one out.Big and Little Hebert might be criminals, but they prefer no competition in their territory, especially someone brazen enough to kill a man at the Christmas gala. When they hire Fortune to investigate the man’s death, she gets her Christmas wish and Swamp Team 3 sets out to solve their final case of the year.

Guest From Hell by Mike Faricy:

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!

Roxy LaRue is in deep weeds…

She’s on the hook for 1.2 million.

Some not very nice guys want their money NOW!

Ever the gentleman, Dev Haskell offers to help.

The police are pounding on his door at two in the morning!

There’s a drive-by shooting on his front porch!

Someone firebombs his house!

Things quickly go downhill from there.

A Fistful of Demons by Lily Harper Hart:

Hannah Hickok is slipping into her new life as owner of Casper Creek – a cosplay western town – and newly-minted witch. She thinks she has everything under control … until demons come calling.At first, she’s not even certain what she’s dealing with. A freak accident claims the life of a father, leaving him exposed during a sudden sandstorm, and his son’s reaction (complete with glowing red eyes) leaves a lot to be desired.Cooper Wyatt, head of security for the resort, wants to believe her when she explains what she saw but it’s not exactly easy for him. As the evidence starts to mount, though, demon possession becomes the name of the game.As a new witch, Hannah has no idea what she’s supposed to do. That doesn’t stop her from wanting to be proactive. Unfortunately for her, the emergence of new powers – coupled with the realization that something beyond a simple demon possession is going on – quickly becomes overwhelming.The workers at Casper Creek are going to have to join together – maybe even enlist some outside help – to figure out all the answers and solve the ultimate dilemma.A young boy’s life hangs in the balance and Hannah is determined to make sure she doesn’t lose an innocent soul so early in her reign as Casper Creek’s head witch. All she has to do is survive until the end and then everything will be revealed.That’s easier said than done.

Letter of the Law by Cynthia E. Hurst:

Alfred Sutton’s past is catching up with him – in the form of the wife he thought he’d left behind twenty years earlier. But now she stands between him and the wealthy woman he wants to marry, and no one will emerge unscathed from this legal and marital triangle, least of all Sutton.

When Sutton collapses and dies on the street of a Cotswold market town, one of the eyewitnesses is clock repairer Jacob Silver. But what exactly did he see? Jacob and his wife Sarah join forces with the police to probe Sutton’s tangled love life and discover who has managed to commit a murder without leaving a clue behind.

Agent Assassin by Ethan Jones:

Can an assassin have a conscience?

While hunting for the truth about his past, former Russian FSB agent Max Thorne has lost any sense of innocence or hope. But striving for redemption, he joins the Special Operations Team, an elite international assassins team so secret even top level FSB brass doesn’t know it exists and so deadly that few leave alive.

Reeling from inexcusable mistakes and now working with even darker forces, Max is confronted with insidious choices and inescapable scenarios. With no way out, will Max be able to suppress his conscience to execute his harrowing assignments? Or, will he fail, putting his family in peril and betraying his own?

Join Max as he faces the darkness that is the secret service the only way he knows how … head on.

Savage Grace by Emily Kimelman:

The only thing more terrifying than taking a life is creating one.

The positive pregnancy test rocks my world harder than any bomb or bullet. Like the hurricane bearing down on Miami, it threatens total destruction.

I’m confident I can escape Miami, evade the mercenaries intent on killing me, and uncover the people who hired them. But telling the father I’m pregnant… raising a child…

I’m not cut out for motherhood.

I know I’ll survive. It’s everyone I love who dies.

That changes now.

The Hour of Fatality: A Jane Rochester Mystery by LeAnne McKinley:

Thornfield Hall is not the only mansion hiding a perilous secret.

Charlotte Brontë’s literary heroine, Jane Eyre, is newly married to Mr. Rochester, but her honeymoon bliss is marred when a dangerous outbreak of typhoid fever threatens her life. To escape their disease-ridden house, Mr. Rochester departs with her to the nearest refuge open to them: Ingram Park, home of the haughty and beautiful Blanche Ingram.

Jane isn’t expecting a warm reception from her aristocratic hosts, but she hardly anticipates a stranger on the garden path with a bullet wound in his chest—and an inexplicable confession on his lips. The residents of Ingram Park are concealing a secret, and at least one of them is willing to sacrifice a man’s life in order to hide the truth.

Aided by Mr. Rochester’s long experience, Jane must rely on her courage, wit, and intuition if she is to identify the vindictive shooter, or the next attack will surely prove to be fatal.

Snow Laughing Matter by Wendy Meadows:

Will Sarah fall victim to a deadly killer set on destroying her life? Or will she force herself to use her cop instincts to outsmart the riddles of a clown who turns laughter into screams?

While Conrad is away helping a friend in New York, Sarah and Amanda go see a circus that is visiting the small town of Snow Falls. Even though Sarah is sad because her attempts to become pregnant have yet to bear fruit, she decides to enjoy the circus show. After the show, Sarah and Amanda find a pie in Sarah’s jeep, and another one waiting at Sarah’s cabin door. Suddenly the fun night turns mysterious and dangerous. A killer has left a deadly message for Sarah to find.

Events turn worse when a circus worker is murdered. The killer’s style of murder tells Sarah exactly who he is. Sarah is torn, caught between the desire to walk away from being a cop and the need to catch a killer. The hunger to become a mother blocks her skill to think clearly. But after having a talk with Pete, Sarah gets back on track and begins to track down the killer. Only the killer has a new face and a completely new identity—along with a secret trick up his sleeve.

[image error] Dangerous Stakes by G.K. Parks:

After three months undercover, Detective Liv DeMarco isn’t any closer to closing her case. Her target, Axel Kincaid, is smart and ruthless. His forte – stealing cars. His temperament- violent. And his legitimate business keeps half the judges and city officials entertained, so collecting enough evidence to put him behind bars is nearly impossible.

But when a parking attendant is murdered and two exotic sports cars are stolen, all bets are off. There’s just one problem. Axel claims to have an airtight alibi, but there are more than a few holes in his story.

The only thing Liv knows for sure is someone is determined to get away with murder, and now the killer has set his sights on her.

Will she stop the murderous thief before he strikes again? Or will she become his next victim?

[image error] Murder in the Rain by Stephen Randorf

Baseball was not a sport Detective Bass understood, nor was he familiar with the fine art of the fashion industry, but when a small-time hoodlum’s body was pulled from a frozen river on a cold February morning, that he understood.

In this unsettling case of a murdered informant, one murder led to another, and passions heightened as Detective Bass closed in on kidnappers, gamblers, and a love-obsessed baseball player.

 

Men Like Us by Hollis Shiloh:

Ollie Boyd enjoys Jack Finley’s company, likes to make him laugh, and wants to work with him…and maybe something more than that. It sure is confusing to have these feelings for another guy, and in the homophobic 1950s, it’s not really safe.

Jack Finley finds time for Ollie, sure, but he’s just humoring a friend. He’s a tough private eye. He’s certainly not indulging secretly in a crush, no matter how attractive or charming Ollie might be. Jack’s smart and careful, and he’s been around the block. It’s hard enough to be who he is without taking on extra trouble.

But now Jack needs some help, after a botched Good Samaritan act leaves him broken in body and spirit. Ollie wants to be the one who’s there for him. He also wants to figure out these feelings—even if they mean he’s in pretty deep trouble.

A whole lot of bumps in the road—including blackmail and murder—might take these two down more dangerous streets than they’d guess…together.

The Trial by Rachel Sinclair:

A young boy dying of a lethal disease…

A corporation’s greed is the cause…

Avery Collins must get justice and possibly find the person who can save his life…

Avery Collins, social justice warrior, has a new case, only it’s not a criminal case.

Not yet, anyway.

12 year old Frankie Jamison is dying, and nobody quite knows why. Avery knows Frankie through Regina, as Frankie is the son of Lorinda, one of Regina’s best friends from the street. Lorinda has nothing in her life, nothing but her young son, and now she’s losing even that.

With nobody to turn to, Lorinda tells Avery her story, and Avery at first dismisses it. It’s a sad story, but what can she do?

But, with Regina’s persistence, Avery decides to look a little deeper. And what she finds is corruption and greed at the highest level. Not to mention a cover-up that goes higher than Avery could ever imagine.

Is there a chance that this young kid can find justice and a cure? Avery becomes determined to find out, while also being determined that the bastards who are behind this kid’s illness are brought to justice.

And Avery always gets justice, no matter how she has to do it.

The Big Crazy by Julie Smith:

August 29, 2005 – Doomsday: New Orleans is eighty per cent under water—no electricity, no phones, no 911 service, no rules. Facing the complete breakdown of systems and normality, New Orleans homicide Detective Skip Langdon is on her own to interpret and execute the only direction she’s given: Get out there and keep the peace.

With communications down and all emergency services on search and rescue, all Skip can hope to accomplish is helping the person right in front of her. More than once that person turns out to be Billy, a gutsy 15-year-old from Treme who’s in greater danger of being swamped by his chaotic home life than the Cat 5 hurricane Skip shelters him from.

When she escorts him home and discovers the scene of a possible homicide, homicide detecting must take a back seat to maintaining order—if not peace. Outrageous rumors are swirling, stirring up unrest, but what really bothers her is the one about a police department order to use the chaos as a cover for “cleaning up” by rounding up criminals and assassinating them. Now that just can’t be true. Can it?

But after she hears it for the third time, Skip teams up with the only cop in the city she’s positive she can trust, her former partner, movie-star handsome, kickass, praline-sweet Adam Abasolo. They may not be able to fix everything, but, as the bodies pile up, they are damn sure going to hit back at the guys who’re giving their department a black eye.

On any regular weekday, New Orleans lives up to its billing as The Big Crazy. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where the dirty cops and lunatics are running the asylum, author Julie Smith also takes us inside the actual asylum, Charity Hospital emergency psych unit, an unexpected oasis of comfort in stark contrast to endless amounts of ever-present filthy water and hordes of half-drowned people.

ill-fated by Jody Wenner:

When Shana’s father joins a cult, she tries to find someone, anyone who will help her. Unsuccessful, she takes on the monumental task of fixing it herself. Eventually, she gets some support from the families of the other followers. Adding to her problems, the person she connects with the most is the leader’s son. She figures that’s the worst of it, until the rest of the group is found dead, and her dad is charged with eleven counts of first-degree murder and arson. With the trial looming, everything starts to nosedive as new revelations about the cult and their bizarre philosophies come to light. Shana’s confidence in her dad begins to waver. Maybe he isn’t a victim after all?

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Old Directors Yell at Clouds – Pardon, Superheroes

This October seems to be “aging directors lash out at superhero movies” month. Martin Scorsese, director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Casino and others, fired the first volley during an interview to promote his latest film, The Irishman, which is – big surprise – a drama about gangsters, when he said:

“I tried, you know?” the director said when asked if he had seen Marvel’s movies. “But that’s not cinema.”

He continued: “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

My initial reaction to Martin Scorsese’s remarks was, “I could say the exact same thing about his films. I tried to watch them, I really tried, and I’ll never get the hours I spent sitting through Taxi Driver or Gangs of New York back. But I’m sorry, I just cannot connect with the kind of white dude arseholes who are the protagonists of Scorsese’s movies.” I may never have been a superhero, but I find Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow and the rest of the gang much more relatable than anybody in Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy or Goodfellas or Casino.

Also, Scorsese and his ilk don’t have a monopoly on cinema. Scorsese movies are cinema, Marvel movies are cinema, Star Wars movies are cinema, Casablanca is cinema, shitty sequels that no one ever asked for like Hangover 3 and Police Academy 6 are cinema, so bad it’s funny junk like Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Terminal Velocity or Beyond the Law are cinema (and some of the reviews for Beyond the Law are not nearly as bad as that movie deserves). The infamously inept Plan 9 From Outer Space is cinema. Even a hateful piece of Nazi propaganda shit like Jud Süß is still cinema. Many of these are not good cinema and some of them are extraordinarily bad cinema. Cinema is the medium, not a quality indicator. And quality is at least partly subjective anyway – see the positive reviews for Beyond the Law, which has been sitting on my personal “worst movies of all time” list for more than twenty years now. Though I seriously hope that there is no one out there who actually likes Jud Süß.

Scorsese later attempted to clarify his remarks and only succeeded in digging the hole even deeper. Apparently, Scorsese thinks that Marvel movies are amusement parks who are trying to invade movie theatres and that cinema owners should stop showing so many Marvel movies and show more “narrative movies”.

And we shouldn’t be invaded by it. So, that’s a big issue. We need the theater owners to step up for that to allow theaters to show more films that are narrative films. A narrative film can be one long take for three hours, you know. It doesn’t have to be a conventional beginning or end.

Scorsese contrasting superhero movies with narrative films is really rich considering that even the worst superhero movies still manage to tell coherent stories and that Marvel managed the feat of telling a serialised story over 23 films. Meanwhile in Scorsese’s films, things just randomly happen with no real regard for any rules of storytelling.

For example, in Taxi Driver (I told you I tried to watch his movies) I expected that the political candidate Robert De Niro’s character tries to assassinate would turn out to be connected to the child prostitution ring from which he tries to rescue a very young Jodie Foster, but those two threads never connect. But it was only when I sat through three hours or so of Gangs of New York, waiting for the climactic battle between Leonardo di Caprio and Daniel Day Lewis and their respective gangs, the battle the entire movie had been building towards, only for a battleship to show up, shell New York City and shoot all the combatants dead, that I realised that Scorsese cannot tell a story. The man has a great talent for visuals, but he cannot tell a satisfying story. Because no one sits through three hours of film that builds to a climactic battle, only for that climactic battle to be cut short of battleship ex machina. And indeed, the only Scorsese movies that tell satisfying stories are those where he has borrowed a story from elsewhere, e.g. Hugo, which is the only Scorsese film I ever enjoyed, or The Last Temptation of Christ where he borrowed from one of the most famous stories of all time, or The Departed, which won Scorsese an Oscar and borrows the plot from the vastly superior Infernal Affairs. That said, there is another Scorsese movie I kind of liked, namely his early attempt Boxcar Bertha. Okay, so it’s a typical late 1960s/early 1970s movie supposedly set during the 1930s, which looks nothing like the 1930s, but it’s entertaining enough. But even Boxcar Bertha has a weird and unsatisfying ending, where David Carradine is crucified against the side of a boxcar, because of reasons.

Francis Ford Coppola was the next to weigh in on superhero movies, when he said in an interview:

“When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration.”

“I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again,” the 80-year-old filmmaker said.

“Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”

Mind you, Coppola is still talking about Marvel movies, when he is calling them despicable, not about Nazi propaganda movies or their Soviet or American equivalent, which truly are despicable. As for audiences watching the same movie over and over again, that’s rich coming from the director who made three Godfather movies and recut Apocalypse Now umpteen times and somehow managed to make the movie worse every time (and I actually liked Apocalypse Now, when I first saw it).

Ken Loach, British director of socially conscious working class dramas, also felt the need to weigh in on superhero movies in an interview with Sky News:

They’re made as commodities like hamburgers, and it’s not about communicating and it’s not about sharing our imagination.

It’s about making a commodity which will make a profit for a big corporation – they’re a cynical exercise.

They’re market exercise and it has nothing to do with the art of cinema. William Blake said ‘when money is discussed – art is impossible’.

Now Loach doesn’t really fit in with Coppola and Scorsese, since he’s from another country and another continent, though he came up at the same time and all three directors focus a lot of the plight of the overwhelming white, overwhelmingly male working class, though Ken Loach’s characters are usually less awful. Also, I’m pretty sure that even if Ken Loach doesn’t care about making a profit, his producers do or he’d be out of a job.

Quite a lot of directors and actors affiliated with Marvel have weighed in by now, either with disappointment along the lines of “I like your movies and defended you against the haters about The Last Temptation of Christ, so why do you trash my movies without ever having seen them?” or with statements along the lines of “Well, they can say whatever they want and we can disagree.”

As I said above, taste is subjective and Scorsese, Coppola and Loach have every right not to like superhero movies, just as I have every right not to enjoy most of their movies. And if those directors had simply responded to the question how they feel about superhero movies with a simple, “Sorry, not my thing.” reply, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. But they decided to be condescending about it and so the internet blew up.

Somewhere in this debate someone also pointed out that Scorsese and Coppola really shouldn’t complain about superhero movies being all the same, considering that they have both made the same gangster movie over and over again. Whereupon someone else pointed out that while Scorsese and Coppola had both made several movies about organised crime, all of those movies were completely different.

Now of course, there is a huge spectrum of superhero movies. Superhero movies range from the charming goofiness of Guardians of the Galaxy to the grimness of The Dark Knight and Logan, from the childlike sweetness of Shazam to the raunchiness of Deadpool, from small stories like Ant-Man to huge universe-shattering spectacles like Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Nor are gangster movies all the same. The gangster movies of the 1930s (which I quite like) are completely different from those of the 1970s and 1980s, just as The Godfather, Goodfellas and Casino are all different from each other. However, if you don’t like superhero movies, all of them look the same and blur together into “this thing I don’t like”. And if you don’t like gangster movies, particularly the 1970s/80s auteur variety thereof, they all tend to blur together as well.

I don’t even exclude myself here. Now the “New Hollywood” era that lasted from approx. 1967 to 1980 and the equivalents in other countries such as the New German Cinema of roughly the same era is probably my most disliked movie era of all time. I’ve repeatedly tried to watch the highly regarded movies of that era, most notably as a budding teenaged cineast, and I inevitably disliked them. One or two movies might have been a fluke, but ten or twenty? Whatever it was that made critics praise those movies so highly, I just couldn’t see it. The protagonists were always arseholes who behaved abominably and became criminals because of reasons, they were inevitably played by unattractive men and they inevitably died at the end, usually shot down in a hail of bullets and a spray of Kryolan blood. There usually were women and some of them were even played by attractive actresses, but they played no real role except as a long suffering girlfriend/wife of the protagonist. Often, they died as well. The colour palettes were beige, washed out and ugly, supposedly historical movies looked nothing like the period they were supposedly set in. Even the entertainment movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s – the big Irving Allen disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno, the various dystopian science fiction movies of that era like Soylent Green or Rollerball, the German Johannes Mario Simmel adaptations, sappy romances like Love Story, action movies like The French Connection, Dirty Harry or Death Wish, musicals like Saturday Night Fever or horror movies like The Exorcist – were invitably ugly, depressing and dull with protagonists so unlikeable you wished they’d just hurry up and die already. Never mind that many of what are now regarded classics of the New Hollywood era – The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now – were genre films and often considered violent, disposable trash when they first came out.

Those movies often blur together, because the same few actors appeared in all of them – Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and if it was a dystopian SF film, Charlton Heston. The directors – Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino (whom I expected to weigh in, until I remembered that he was dead), William Friedkin, Brian de Palma – also blur together and I usually have to look up who made which movie, because I honestly cannot remember. After plenty of attempts to watch the so-called “New Hollywood” movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I eventually decided that some unknown brain virus must have infected the whole western world (because similar patterns can be observed in other countries) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, until it was cured when Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (both of whom ironically started out as New Hollywood directors as did Sylvester Stallone) came along and finally made good movies again.

My adult self has a view that is a bit more nuanced, though I still don’t like the movies of the “New Hollywood” or the “New German Cinema” era and never will. My adult self can see that many of those movies, particularly those by Scorsese and Coppola, have a lot of visual flair. And there are movies from that era that I like quite a bit (The Graduate, American Graffiti, many of the dystopian SF movies, some Italian wetserns, the Billy Jack movies and some of the cheap and trashy griendhouse and Blaxploitation movies of the time) and often liked even as a teen, only that I never realised that they played in the cinema alongside the movies I disliked so much. And even for many movies I don’t like, I can see what the appeal was once upon a time, because the action in 1970s movies was more dynamic than in earlier films, the violence was bloodier, the horror more visceral. Chase scenes like in French Connection, visceral horror like in The Exorcist or Carrie or blood baths like in Bonnie and Clyde or The Wild Bunch were not something that had been seen in movies before the late 1960s/early 1970s, though even by the 1980s, they had been eclipsed by the action and horror movies of that very action and horror heavy decade. As as so often, when you see the imitators first (or at least have heard of them, since I was too young to watch most of the 1980s action and horror movies in the theatre), the original pales in comparison.

As for the brain eating virus that infected the whole western world, that virus was simply television, more precisely colour television, since colour was the one thing that movies had that TV didn’t. For movie quality took a nosedive wherever television and particularly colour television reached a certain saturation point. This is why movie quality begins to decline in the US before it happened in Germany and elsewhere, because in the US TV reached its saturation point first. The end of the cinematic doldrums also happened at different times. The US begins to emerge from the doldrums by the mid 1970s, whereas in Germany they’d last throughout the 1980s. But it is a pattern that is observable throughout the western world and probably beyond as well. Indeed, when I asked my parents and other people who had been old enough to watch adult movies in the 1960s and 1970s just what possessed them to watch such awful movies, the answers were either “sex” (for softcore trash like the Schulmädchen-Report series) or “We didn’t watch those movies” (for pretty much everything else). For example, my Mom can recall watching Hitchcock, James Bond and Edgar Wallace movies as well as an endless stream of German Heimatfilme in the cinema, but she cannot recall watching any of the big name movies of the 1970s in the cinema or indeed anywhere at all. Because like many other people, my parents stopped going to the cinema at some point in the late 1960s and didn’t start going again, until I was old enough to be taken to Disney movies.

And as the numbers of theatregoers crashed and TV took over many of the bread and butter genres – westerns, cop dramas, musicals, family fare – young directors, often straight from film school, jumped in and filled the void. They were often given carte blanche and with hardly any strictures, they followed their personal visions and made whatever movies they liked. A handful of which were good, some of which were innovative and many of which were pretty bad. And the studios let those directors do whatever they wanted, as long as they made a profit. And with rapid inflation in the 1970s, which drove up ticket prices, they usually did. Until several of those movies grossly exceeded their budget (Apocalypse Now and most notably, Heaven’s Gate) and flopped, whereupon the studios took the reigns in hand again. Meanwhile, some of those young directors had hit by experimentation upon something that cinema could still do better than TV, namely the sort of spectacle (Star Wars, Jaws) you want to see on the big screen rather than on TV. And thus the blockbuster era began in the US.

So in short, the New Hollywood era was a transitional period where movies tried to find their role in a world increasingly saturated by television. A lot of experiments were tried, most failed, some were successful and others eventually led to something completely different than what their creators had envisioned, e.g. the action movies of the 1980s have their roots in semi-serious movies of the 1970s. Eventually, movies found their equilibrium again and the world moved on. However, the adoration for the New Hollywood movies among critics and self-proclaimed cineasts is still excessive, considering that the New Hollywood era only lasted a little over ten years and that a lot of the movies of that time have huge issues with regard to gender, race and violence. After all, a lot of New Hollywood movies are about conservative leaning white men violently destroying other white men as well as anything that is not a white man. The thing that horrified me most about Taxi Driver was the fountain of racist, sexist and homophobic remarks that came out of Robert De Niro’s mouth during his famous monologues. His character was clearly a horrible person and potentially murderous psychopath. Ditto for Don Vito Corleone and his family or the trio of soldiers from The Deer Hunter.

And I strongly suspect that part of the reason why we are seeing such a backlash against superhero movies now, led by directors who came up in a previous era, is because Scorsese, Coppola, Loach et all know that they’re long past their prime. All three of them were once innovators, but they have been making increasingly pale copies of the kind of movies that once made them famous for years now. The working class dramas of Ken Loach haven’t been new in a long time and in the era of Brexit I increasingly find that I don’t care what happens to those people. Martin Scorsese had become the butt of the joke that he’d never win an Oscar and when he finally won one, people wondered why he was still making movies. When the first trailers for The Irishman arrived, the most common reaction was, “Hasn’t he made that movie like three times already?” As for Coppola, the last movie he made that got any kind of attention was Bram Stoker’s Dracula back in 1992. The money is no longer flowing as freely either. Coppola’s magnum opus Megalopolis has been in development hell for years now and Scorsese had to go to Netflix to get The Irishman made.

Furthermore, as time passes the faults of the New Hollywood era are becoming increasingly apparent, as more and more people realise that the New Hollywood emperor has no clothes and never had any to begin with. Younger viewers and film students are no longer swallowing the dogma that those movies are great works of art and that anybody who says otherwise has no taste. Just as I didn’t swallow that dogma thirty years ago.

Because for all their flaws, today’s superhero movies are a lot more diverse in front and behind the camera, then the highly touted movies of the New Hollywood era, which were made by and for a very narrow slice of people. It’s no accident that directors, actors and characters of those movies are all white and male and either Italian-American or members of some other immigrant group (the characters in The Deer Hunter are all descendants of Russian immigrants). There are a lot of people who never saw themselves reflected in those movies – women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, people who are not American – and who likely never much cared for those movies either, because the big Scorsese or Coppola fanboys are mostly white dudes themselves.

Saladin Ahmed says it best in the following tweet:

and yes I guarantee that your True Cinema Auteur fave contributed to that garbage atmosphere????

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) October 24, 2019

Yes, superhero movies are still overwhelmingly white and male, but we get the occasional Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman and Aquaman in front of the camera and the occasional Ryan Coogler, Taika Waititi and Patty Jenkins behind the camera. As for why they are so popular at the moment, there are a lot of hot takes involving September 11, 2001, and people craving black and white morality and the general infantilisation of the US/the West. However, I think the answers are far simpler. For starters, the Marvel movies, which are the gold standard here, as well as the better examples from other studios are extremely well made and highly entertaining. Marvel movie always give you a good time and leave you feeling elated afterwards. Those movies also work, because they tap into decades of comic storytelling, distilling what made those stories so compelling to generations of readers and transferring it to a different medium (which many of the earlier pre-2000 superhero movies failed to do).

Superhero tales usually have a handful of core narratives which pop up over and over again. Marvel’s core stories are the story of the jerk with a heart of gold who must undergo an ordeal in the wilderness to learn that with great power comes great responsibility (Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange), the story of the hated outsider who nonetheless fights to protect a world who fears and hates them (Hulk, the X-Men, the Submariner and again Spider-Man), the story of the physically weak or disabled person who suddenly gains powers and uses them to make the world a better place (Captain America, Daredevil, Professor X), the story of the reformed villain who redeems themselves (Black Widow, Loki, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Rogue, Gamora, Nebula, Hawkeye in the comics) and the story of the band of lonely misfits who come together and become greater than the sum of their parts (Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Guardians of the Galaxy and every team book ever). Furthermore, the Marvel movies in particular have another core message that appears in every single movie, often explicitly stated in the dialogue, namely that it’s not the powers, the costume or the gadgets that makes the hero, but the person inside. It’s a message aimed at every single person in the audience that tells them, “You don’t need powers or a costume. You can be better. You can make a difference. You can be a hero.” Is it any wonder that we want to hear that message over and over again? Because considering the difficult times we live in, this is a message we need.

And now take a look at the messages that movies by Scorsese, Coppola, Loach, etc… convey. Their message is “Life is unfair and crap and you have no power.” Loach usually stops there, but Scorsese, Coppola and the rest of the New Hollywood bunch go one step further and add, “Because life is unfair anyway, you might as well stop following the rules and just take what you want and attack those who annoy you. Of course, you’ll probably get killed in the end, but did we mention that life is unfair?” And they honestly wonder why people no longer want to listen to that message over and over again?

Not that there aren’t plenty of issues with the current flood of superhero movies and the current era of cinema with its reliance on sequels, reboots and remakes in general. Disney’s market dominance is a problem, both with regard to their ability to silence or blackball creatives, though they eventually took James Gunn back, and with regard to their ability to just pull movies from the market and place them into their vault, as this article explains.

Now I am a comic fan of old and like superhero movies. And so the current golden age of superhero movies is a dream come true for me, where I finally get to see plenty of characters on the biog screen that I never expected to see there, in well made movies with excellent actors, great production values and stories that capture what made the movies so compelling. However, I also realise that not everybody likes superhero movies and I know the pain of cinemas being full of some genre of movies you don’t like. After all, I felt the same during the glut of westerns (and anybody who hates superhero movies should remember that the glut of westerns lasted from the silent era into the 1970s, i.e. almost fifty years

), the glut of Vietnam war movies in the 1980s (and WWII movies in the 1960s), the glut of gangster movies in the 1970s/80s (and the 1930s) or the glut of romantic comedies in the 1990s. Oddly enough, however, I never hear the usual suspects complaining about too many westerns or war movies or gangster movies, though romantic comedies, Star Wars knock-off space operas and even the mini-trend of YA novel adpatations approx. ten years ago all got dinged. Gee, I wonder why that is.

That said, the range of movies in the cinemas has become more narrow and yes, the focus on tentpoles and blockbusters is to blame for this. However, what’s being squeezed out are not the Oscar-baits and arthouse movies. Those still get made, though they may have to go to Netflix for financing. And Netflix will make sure that those movies are long enough in the theatres to be eligible for Oscars and other awards. Martin Scorsese will likely nab an Oscar nomination for The Irishman, though he probably won’t win. However, what it being squeezed out is the middle range of movies, the bread and butter entertainment stuff, that rarely broke box office records, but still made enough money to be profitable. What’s missing are the romantic comedies, the serial killer thrillers, the gritty cop dramas, the action films, the relationship and family dramas, the teen comedies, the soap operatic romances, the horror movies, the kiddie films that are not Disney, the science fiction movies that are not part of a franchise. There still are movies like that being made, but much fewer than there used to be. And many of them sink without a trace. And that is a pity, because enjoyable as Marvel movies are, there only are about two or three of them every year, plus maybe four or five other superhero movies (mostly DC based, but also non-Marvel movies about Marvel characters and the occasional independent), half of which will be bad, as well as a handful of non-superhero blockbusters (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Pixar/Disney kiddie movies, Harry Potter tie-ins, etc…), half of which will also be bad. That leaves a lot of room for other films.

But the fault here lies not with superhero movies, but with a filmmaking climate that is almost exclusively focussed on blockbusters and tentpoles on the one hand and awards bait on the other and ignores the middle ground. And the ones suffering are not the Scorseses, Coppolas and Loaches. After all, their place in cinema history is assured. No, the Scorseses, Coppolas and Loaches of the future are the ones suffering, because with the whole middle ground of movies breaking away, they never even get a chance. But the solution is not fewer superhero movies, but more other movies and a greater variety of them.

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Time Travel, Bond Rip-offs and the Fashion for Folksy Rural Themes in the 1960s

Blogging has been light over here for the past two weeks or so, but today I am over at Galactic Journey again, where I review the post-apocalyptic novel Davy by Edgar Pangborn in a double post together with Victoria Silverwolf, who reviews No Man on Earth by Walter Moudy, an author I’d never heard about before today. According to ISFDB, Moudy’s career was brief. In addition to his lone novel, he published a handful of short stories in the mid 1960s in the SFF magazines edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli. After a promising start, he vanished from the SFF scene and died much too early at the age of only 43. And in fact, one thing I have noticed since I started reviewing for Galactic Journey is how many SFF authors died much too young.

Davy is the first novel that I ever read by Edgar Pangborn, though he had a respectable science fiction career lasting from the late 1950s to the 1970s and wrote mysteries and crime fiction for the pulp under a pen name (which no one seems to know) before that. Davy was a Hugo finalist in 1965, losing out to Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer by only four votes in one of the more baffling Hugo races of all time. Now Fritz Leiber has written many stories and novels I love, but IMO The Wanderer is a lesser work (Jason Sacks, who reviewed it for Galactic Journey, was not impressed either) and I’ve never understood why it won the Hugo, since it’s not even the best Fritz Leiber work of 1964 (“The Lords of Quarmall” is better, though it’s a novella rather than a novel), so I found it hard to believe that The Wanderer was the best science fiction novel of 1964. I initially assumed that 1964 was simply a weak year for science fiction novels (it happens), but Davy – though not without flaws – is definitely better than The Wanderer and The Whole Man by John Brunner seems to be better, too. Not sure about the fourth finalist, The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith, which is better known as the first half of Nostrilia these days.

Edgar Pangborn’s works are still in print, but nonetheless he seems to have fallen somewhat into obscurity. Part of the reason may be that post-apocalyptic nuclear war stories are no longer as popular as they once were. Older examples of the breed also suffer from having become obsolete futures, now that a) we know more about the effects a large scale nuclear war would have, and b) a large scale nuclear war is much less likely than it was pre-1989, though more likely than it was around approximately 1995. It’s also interesting that when I think of nuclear war stories, I usually think of the complete downers of the 1980s – stories like Threads or The Day After, where everybody dies horribly – and less of the earlier, slightly more optimistic stories of the 1950s and 1960s. But while other post nuclear war tales of the period such as A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, On the Beach by Nevil Shute (which is of course an “everybody dies” downer, as the entire population of Australia commits suicide), The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett or “That Only a Mother” by Judith Merril (or, for a filmic example, Dr. Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick) are all considered classics these days, Davy remains somewhat obscure, probably because even though it shares some themes with the others, it’s not really a typical nuclear war story at all. The fact that the sexual politics are badly dated doesn’t help either. And in fact, science fiction from the 1960s is often worse in terms of how sexual relationships are portrayed than earlier works. Because the earlier works usually didn’t have any sex at all or only highly euphemistic descriptions, whereas stories from 1960s do depict sex, but are often highly problematic with regard to issues like consent, gender and sexual orientation. Unlike many stories from the period, Davy is not offensive, but the novel does have some eye-roll worthy moments.

After reading Victoria’s review of No Man on Earth, I was struck by how there were certain similarities between the two books aside from the fact that they both happened to be science fiction novels published in 1964. Both novels are science fiction novels that don’t feel very science fictional, both are post-apocalyptic of sorts, even though nuclear war is but a distant memory, and both start out in low tech settings in the Eastern US, where superstition is strong. Victoria compares No Man on Earth to Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories from the same period (and of course, Davy also spends a significant part of the novel as a wandering musician just like Silver John), while I compare Davy to 18th century (set) works such as Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones (which has a hugely successful film adaptation in 1963) and The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth.

It certainly seems as if there was a mini trend of folksy, rural SFF in the early to mid 1960s, as evidenced by Davy, No Man on Earth and the Silver John stories, which all date from this period. This trend may have been part of a larger cultural interest in folksy, rural settings and stories as well as modern reimaginings of 18th century works. After all, the Tom Jones movies came out in 1963 and The Sot-Weed Factor came out in 1960, based on an 18th century poem by Ebenezer Cooke. The early 1960s were also the heyday of rural set US TV shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres as well as the Tammy films and TV series. So yes, there’s definitely a general cultural trend there that spilled over into science fiction, though I’m not quite sure what it means. The popularity of rural set TV sitcoms in the US in the 1960s is usually considered a mental retreat to a highly idealised, simpler, more wholesome time as well as pandering to white rural audiences in the US, which is probably also why none of these shows ever made it to Germany (not that German viewers didn’t long for simpler, more wholesome times, but they preferred to see them in their own country), except for Tammy, which ironically wasn’t even a hit in the US, though it was seemingly perpetually rerun on German TV well into the 1980s.

But while the rural US sitcoms of the 1960s may have been wholesome – and grossly offensive, at least based on what little I have seen of them, since they make fun of the people they thought were their audience – the positively bawdy reimaginings of 18th century literature such as Tom Jones or The Sot-Weed Factor were anything but. Davy is not wholesome either – and neither are the Silver John stories, for that matter. So what’s going on here? Did SFF tap into the early to mid 1960s fashion for folksy stories old and new from the rural US and subvert it? Whatever the reason, it’s certainly interesting. I’m also very interested now whether more folksy SFF stories will pop up at Galactic Journey in the future.

Coincidentally, I just realised that I completely forgot to link to last month’s Galactic Journey article, where I go a bit into current events of 1964 (the one millionth migrant worker came to West Germany and Martin Luther King visited Berlin) and review two German movies which came out within three weeks of each other in the late summer and early fall of 1964, namely the Edgar Wallace movie The Ringer and The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse. I already reviewed The Ringer from a contemporary POV on this blog a few years ago, but my Galactic Journey article offers a 1960s perspective.

These days, The Ringer is usually considered the high point of the Edgar Wallace series – a movie that has been much derided (like all the Edgar Wallace movies), but is still beloved and highly watchable and frequently rerun on TV. Meanwhile, The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse marks the end of Artur Brauner’s Dr. Mabuse series of the early 1960s (there were four more filmic outings for Dr. Mabuse up to 1990, but none of them is considered part of the official series) and is generally considered one of the weakest films in the series.

The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse is usually considered a James Bond rip-off. I had also wholly internalised the narrative that The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse is a Mabuse film pretending to be a Bond film to the point that I never questioned it, especially since there are so many parallels to the Bond movies. After all, Death Ray has a dashing secret agent, a devious villain (and Mabuse is one of the most devious of them all), beautiful women, an “exotic” setting, a super weapon, underwater fights – all elements we know from the Bond movies. Besides, the 1960s were littered with Bond rip-offs, some great (The Avengers, The Prisoner, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), some okay (Death Ray falls into this category) and many forgettable (the Kommissar X movies or the Matt Helm movies, which recently got dragged up again, because Sharon Tate happened to be in one of them). In many ways, the spy novels, movies and TV shows of the 1960s are the anti-thesis to folksy rural stories discussed above.

However, when reviewing The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse for Galactic Journey, I also happened to check the release dates for the Bond movies and realised to my suprise that there had only been two Bond movies – one of them the atypical From Russia With Love – shown in Germany by the time Death Ray came out, while Goldfinger had its UK premiere on the exact same day as Death Ray (as did Winnetou 2, which not only kept Karin Dor from appearing in either The Ringer or Death Ray and also likely contributed to Death Ray underperforming at the box office) and wouldn’t be shown in Germany until January 1965. So when Death Ray was made, there was no James Bond series. There were only a movie and its sequel with a third in production. And while many elements seen in Death Ray – the extensive underwater fights and scenes, the mysterious island, the superweapon that can eradicate whole cities – have popped up in the Bond movies lots of times, they all appeared later. Underwater fights are mainly associated with Thunderball, which came out more than a year after Death Ray, though The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only also have extensive underwater scenes. And while Dr. No‘s radio beam (and I had to look up what Dr. No’s weapon actually did, since I mainly remember the world’s most stylish nuclear reactor) is a bit similar to Dr. Mabuse’s death ray, the superweapons from Diamonds Are Forever, which came out in 1971 – seven years after Death Ray, and The Man With the Golden Gun, which came out in 1974, a full ten years after Death Ray, are much more similar, as is the killer satellite from Golden Eye (1995). So what’s going on here then? How – short of time travel – could The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse borrow from Bond movies, which hadn’t even been made yet? And no, the Bond novels aren’t the answer, because the Bond movies in general are very loose adaptations and the ones in questions all have next to nothing in common with the source material apart from the titles.

The answer is that the influence wasn’t a one way street. Yes, The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse was clearly influenced by the two Bond movies that had appeared to date. However, the Mabuse series – and the Edgar Wallace movies, for that matter – also influenced the Bond movies. Considering how many actors appeared in two or even all three series – Gert Fröbe and Karin Dor, most notably, but also Ilse Steppat, Christopher Lee and Ingrid Back – it’s clear that the Bond producers were familiar with the Mabuse and Wallace movies, for how else would they even have found Gert Fröbe, Karin Dor or Ilse Steppat? So it’s no surprise that themes and plot points from the Wallace and Mabuse movies would also show up in the Bond films and vice versa. And indeed, Death Ray didn’t invent the underwater fight scenes we now associate with the Bond movies either – they first show up in the 1962 Edgar Wallace film The Inn on the River, which has a remarkably similar plot to the 1988 Dutch thriller Amsterdamned, whose speedboat chases through the canals of Amsterdam borrow heavily from the Bond film Live and Let Die as well as from the Alistair MacLean adaptation Puppet on a Chain.

The Edgar Wallace movies and to a lesser degree the Dr. Mabuse movies of the 1960s are often dismissed as fluffy entertainment these days and glossed over even in histories of West German postwar cinema. This is a huge mistake, for not only were those films extremely popular and usually well made, they were also influential way beyond the limits of German cinema.

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