Ricky Pine's Blog, page 26

Review: Dead Mountain

Dead Mountain by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The latest mystery for Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson is quite an adventurous one, once again tackling some mysterious deaths high in the mountains - this time, in the Manzano Mountains of central New Mexico. Tackling a cold case - in more ways than one - of dead missing hikers in one of the highest caves in the range quickly leads to Nora running afoul of the long arm of the corrupt law, as a nastily racist sexist...

Review: Diamantine

Diamantine by Andrew Rowe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Keras's little side story of capturing the Six Sacred Swords continues, with the lit-RPG world now taking on a lot of inspiration, as Rowe says, from shōnen manga and anime and their tournament arcs. He specifically cites the Hunter Exams from Hunter x Hunter and the Chunin Exams from Naruto, so yeah, now I can see where Rowe gets a bit of his long-term storytelling style from. I never really grew up on shōnen manga or a...

Review: Immortal Longings

Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Normally I'm more than willing to go to bat for Chloe Gong, especially given the absurd and irrational hatedom she gets from Book Twitter types. But for this, her adult debut (when her previous books are pretty much YA in marketing only), inspired loosely by Antony and Cleopatra instead of Romeo and Juliet for Secret Shanghai, and set in a densely packed cyberpunk twin city inspired by the infamous Kowloon Walled C...

Review: Seven Devils

Seven Devils by L.R. Lam and Elizabeth May
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's a shame it took me three years to read the first of L.R. Lam and Elizabeth May's sci-fi collaboration series - for a number of reasons, mainly that my hometown library in California never acquired it in the time of Covid, and then I moved to a town that didn't acquire it either, and Multnomah County and Fort Vancouver Libraries never acquired it themselves for the longest time...but I digress. Here...

Review: The Torch that Ignites the Stars

The Torch that Ignites the Stars by Andrew Rowe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Arcane Ascension series continues with a detour to another land on this vast continent of mana and magic, where Corin, Sera, and all their friends and allies are taking a break between school years to do some independent study, as it were. There could really be some hidden treasures in the secret magitek labs, some cures for various maladies our heroes may suffer, some hints about where the next...

Review: The 9th Man

The 9th Man by Steve Berry
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The first book of a projected trilogy (at least) spinning off from Berry's signature Cotton Malone series, I'm afraid this one doesn't give a particularly strong first impression of Luke Daniels as a character. By Berry's own admission, Daniels is like a younger and more impetuous Cotton Malone, but after years of reading Malone's stories, Daniels just comes off shockingly incompetent, the worst student Malone could hav...

Review: Six Sacred Swords

Six Sacred Swords by Andrew Rowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ahh, here's a nice little change from Andrew Rowe. After two meaty paper bricks in the Arcane Ascension series, here, Rowe shifts focus to Keras with a sort of prequel spinoff, presented as a story which Keras tells while on a long ride abroad with Corin and company at the end of On the Shoulders of Titans. It's a much shorter book than the first two Arcane Ascension novels were, and is a hell of a lot of fun to r...

Review: Light Bringer

Light Bringer by Pierce Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No spoilers for Light Bringer, but spoilers for previous Pierce Brown books will appear herein. You've been warned.

"Our sun floats in darkness attended by moons made of trash."

And with that, Darrow once again proves himself the Imperator of Opening Lines.

Four years ago, we all thought Pierce Brown was only going to give us one more book after Dark Age in the Red Rising Saga, but after that book proved to be such a "F...

Review: On the Shoulders of Titans

On the Shoulders of Titans by Andrew Rowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While seeing me read this second book of Arcane Ascension at work, my coworker Tory, who recommended this author to me to begin with, would go off on tangents about the various connections between this series and others from Mr. Rowe. After reading this book in its entirety, I can see why - the ending to this one is slightly more concerned, especially right on the last line, with setting up a spinoff more...

Review: The Clearing

The Clearing by Simon Toyne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ahh, now this is more like it. The second Laughton Rees mystery by Mr. Toyne dips slightly back into his fantasy roots, while also specifically going for the sort of folkloric West Country vibe that influenced Tolkien. (No seriously, there’s a lot of hobbit and orc jokes throughout this book, even in the internal monologue lament of an Earl whose historic house would require repair work from a very old fashioned blacks...