The Prisoner of Limnos by Lois McMaster Bujold

The Prisoner of Limnos: A Fantasy Novella in the World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold --- 256 pages

The sixth volume in McMaster Bujold's entertaining Penric and Desdemona fantasy novella series picks up immediately after the ending of of the previous Mira's Last Dance.

Temple sorcerer and demon host Penric and the widow Nikys Khatai seem to have found refuge in the duchy of Orbas, where Nikys brother, the irascible but brilliant  General Adelis Arisaydia has been offered a command in the Duchy's army.

Penric and Nikys however have still not reached an understanding despite their obvious attraction to each other. Nikys is still mourning the sudden loss of her first husband, and  ambivalent about beginning a new relationship --- especially considering the chaos demon that Penric is bound to host for the rest of his life as a temple sorcerer in the service of the Fifth God, the Bastard.

But when Nikys receives a letter saying her mother has been kidnapped and is being held hostage in Cedonia by her brother's sworn enemies, she instinctively turns to Penric for help. After all, if Penric managed to smuggle Nikys and Adelis to safety in Orbas, surely he and his demon, Desdemona, can rescue her mother from a locked cell in a forbidden sanctuary on the inaccessible cliffs of a closely guarded island?

And if Penric succeeds in this impossible quest, will Nikys finally agree to marry him?

A quick and charming story with characters who are three (possibly four) dimensional, appealingly human and very entertaining. I do recommend reading the novellas in order, starting with Penric's Demon, so as not to miss one jot of the fun!

Click HERE to read the * review in Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from fantasyliterature.com

Click HERE to read the review from readingreality.net

Dark Tide Rising by Anne Perry

Dark Tide Rising: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 289 pages

This is the 24th entry in Anne Perry's atmospheric Victorian mystery series featuring William Monk, Commander of the Thames River Police, and his wife Hester, a nurse who volunteered to serve with Florence Nightingale on the front lines of the Crimean War. 

Kate Exeter, the wife of a wealthy London real estate developer, has been  kidnapped in broad daylight from a riverside walk in Battersea Park, witnessed by her cousin and confidante Celia Darwin.The kidnappers have demanded an enormous ransom, which her frantic husband Harry Exeter has barely managed to scrape together in the 24 hours allowed him. Exeter has been directed to bring the ransom to a meeting place deep in the waterlogged and sinking slums of Jacob's Island, and he asks Monk to accompany him --- to insure that he finds the right spot and gets his wife safely away after the money is handed over. Monk, who still suffers flashbacks from when Hester was kidnapped --- Corridors of the Night (2015) ---  takes five of his most trusted officers, hoping that once Exeter and his wife are safe, he and his men can return to track down the kidnappers. But on the night of the exchange, all their careful plans go disastrously awry when Monk and his men are brutally ambushed.

Who is to blame for what went wrong? Monk must face the terrible suspicion that one of his own men betrayed his plan to the kidnappers. Now he and his men have a murder to solve, but tensions mount because no one knows who can be trusted. Then a bookkeeper for the banker who helped Harry Exeter raise the money for the ransom approaches Monk with her suspicions that money has been quietly disappearing from a large trust fund that Kate Exeter was due to inherit within a year. Suspicions that point to Kate's cousin and trustee, Maurice Latham; to the bank manager, Roger Doyle; even to Harry Exeter himself.

Anne Perry at her best, with several overlapping mysteries to solve: kidnapping, murders, embezzlement and betrayal.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

All the Little Liars by Charlaine Harris

All the Little Liars: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery by Charlaine Harris --- 229 pages

After a considerable hiatus, Harris returns with a ninth book featuring her intrepid small town librarian sleuth.

Aurora is about to embark on a whole new life with her second marriage to mystery and true crime writer Robin Crusoe, and a baby on the way at long last. But all that marital and maternal bliss gets put abruptly on hold when Aurora's fifteen-year-old half brother Phillip (who came to live with her to escape the fallout of his parents' catastrophically failing marriage) suddenly goes missing along with two of his friends, Josh and Joss, and an eleven-year-old girl named Lisa they were giving a ride home after soccer practice.  It's bad enough that the four kids seem to have vanished into thin air, but the ante gets upped considerably when another friend of theirs is found dead in an alley. Then Clayton Harrison, the spoiled son of a wealthy local family abruptly disappears, and his girl friend commits suicide.

Phillips as the new kid in town, and known to have a troubled past, is immediately suspect, but Aurora knows her half brother is a decent boy and fights to defend him in absentia.  She's convinced that all of this has something to do with the three girls who have been bullying Lisa. One of the bullies is Clayton Harrison's younger sister.

As time passes, Aurora becomes convinced the police are looking in the wrong places. She's been thinking furiously, and suspects the kids are being kept under wraps right there in town, in the last place anyone would suspect.  And she's determined to find out, because Aurora is convinced that the long this mystery goes on, the less likely there will be any happy ending.  Christmas is coming, and she wants her brother back.

Charlaine Harris writes mysteries that start out like a cozy, but end up something a little more Southern Gothic in tone. This one however seems a little stale.

Click HERE to see the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read the review from the Criminal Element Blog.

The Angel Court Affair by Anne Perry

The Angel Court Affair: A Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novel by Anne Perry --- 273 pages

I am a fan of Anne Perry's Victorian mystery series, both the Pitts, and the William Monk books, so I am sad to say I was disappointed in The Angel Court Affair, the thirtieth book in this series of Victorian police thrillers.

The premise was intriguing: a charismatic and controversial evangelist comes home to England to preach her unsettling new doctrine. At a time when the world is already reeling from social, scientific, and political turmoil, some people are desperate for a new revelation to guide them, while others see established belief as the last bastion of defense against chaos.

Is Sofia Delacruz the saint her followers exalt, or a charlatan as her detractors --- including her estranged cousin --- claim?  Unfortunately, Sofia is kidnapped early in the proceedings, and becomes only a shadow character fleetingly glimpsed throughout the remainder of the novel. Thomas and Charlotte (who has unfortunately become pretty much a minor character in the series since Thomas took command of Special Branch) and their daughter Jemima spend interminable pages lamenting their disillusionment with conventional religion.

The story only regains its direction when Thomas turns to Lady Vespasia and her new husband, Victor Narroway (Thomas's former mentor), for assistance. With their help Thomas finally discovers the connection between Sofia and her abductor. Fraud is indeed at the root of the crime, but not religious fraud.  Thomas and Victor race against time to find the place where Sofia is being held prisoner before the abductor disposes of her.  

Click HERE to read a review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read a review from the LDS website Wheat and Tares which casts some light on the religious aspects of the plot.

Click HERE to read comments on GoodReads.

 

The Kindred of Darkness by Barbara Hambly

The Kindred of Darkness: A James Asher Vampire Novel by Barbara Hambly --- 248 pages

This is just the fifth book in Hambly's vampire series; she started about twenty years ago with Those Who Hunt the Night. After the first two books there was a long hiatus before she picked up the series again.

For those who like their vampires in the classic tradition (as opposed to those contemporary teen angst vamps) Hambly writes the kind of horror that sends shivers down your spine and keeps you awake in the dark.

Oxford don James Asher is a philologist and folklorist with an extensive knowledge (painfully acquired) of the legend and lore of the Undead. His wife Lydia forsook her gilded cage as the daughter of a wealthy Victorian family to study medicine. The two of them have narrowly survived dangerous encounters with vampires in London, Europe, Russia and China, but after the birth of their daughter Miranda, they promised each other such adventures were behind them.

Until the night the Master Vampire of London kidnaps Miranda and her nursemaid to force Lydia and James into helping him discover the lair of a renegade vampire who is challenging the Master for control of the London Nest.

With the lives of their daughter and the innocent maid at stake, Lydia searches frantically for evidence that will reveal the intruder vampire's hiding places. At the same time she must act her part in her young cousin's formal debut into London high society, so that no one suspects she and James are trying to discover what lies behind this rivalry for control of the London vampires --- and locate where Miranda and the maid are being held captive.

James learns that an ancient book, The Kindred of the Dead, said to describe methods for destroying vampires, is at the heart of the struggle between the Master and his rival. Meanwhile Lydia, in desperation, has summoned the assistance of Don Simon Ysidro, the vampire who first drew the Ashers into the fell world of the Undead --- where nothing and no one is who or what it appears to be and above all, where no human in his right mind should trust the word of a vampire.

Hambly writes a great story, and the James Asher novels (as well as all her other novels, encompassing historical fiction, mysteries and fantasy) are highly recommended.