The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch

The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch --- 136 pages including an Interview with Ben Aaronovitch

A novella that fits between Foxglove Summer and The Hanging Tree in Aaronovitch's wonderful Rivers of London series combining fantasy, mystery and police procedural.

It's hardly surprising that a city of great antiquity like London would have more than its share of ghosts. Some of them even ride the Underground; but rarely do they interact with mortal commuters. So when the police start getting reports about aggressive specters confronting passengers on the Metropolitan Line, the authorities summon PC Peter Grant and his supervisor, Inspector Nightingale, of the Specialised Assessment Unit aka The Folly. With the assistance of Peter’s teenage cousin Abigail (spending the summer as an intern at The Folly to keep her out of trouble) and Jaget Kumar of the British Transport Police, they take to the trains hunting ghosts to try and get to the bottom of this mystery.

The problem though, is that their witnesses' memories of these encounters fade away within minutes. And the ghosts themselves, if they can be tracked down and confronted, disintegrate on the spot. But with sheer dogged persistence, eventually Peter pieces together enough clues to hypothesize what could be causing this behavior. And soon they have confirmation. A young woman has disappeared. If Perter's theory is right, her life is in imminent danger. If Peter is right, only he and Nightingale have the necessary skills to find and rescue her before it's too late.

Another suspenseful and comic adventure in urban fantasy.

Click HERE to read the review from Publisher's Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Locus Magazine.

Click HERE to read the review from the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviews blog/

Day Shift by Charlaine Harris

Day Shift: A Novel of Midnight, Texas by Charlaine Harris --- 307 pages

Charlaine Harris is the best selling author of paranormal mysteries with Southern settings. She's probably best known for her Sookie Stackhouse stories, which were the basis for the popular television series True Blood.

This is the second book in a new series (Harris says it will be a trilogy, but if it turns out to be as popular as Sookie, who knows?) set in the small town of Midnight, Texas. How small? Midnight is so small you would miss it if you blinked. The people who live in Midnight like it that way; they shun attention and don't encourage passers-through to linger

Manfred Bernardo chose to settle in Midnight for just that reason. He's a psychic who does most of his business online or by phone, and prefers to keep a very low public profile otherwise. Manfred and the readers were introduced to the rest of Midnight's eccentric inhabitants in the first book in the series, Midnight Crossroad.

Manfred makes a trip to Dallas to meet with a select group of clients willing to pay handsomely for personal psychic readings. He stays in the exclusive Vespers Hotel in the affluent suburb of Bonnet Park. He's surprised to see his Midnight neighbor, Olivia Charity, having dinner with a couple in the hotel restaurant. When the same couple turn up dead in their hotel room the next morning, an apparent murder-suicide, Manfred wonders uneasily if Olivia had anything to do with it.

But Manfred soon has troubles of his own. That same morning, Manfred meets with one of his favorite clients, a wealthy widow named Rachel Goldthorpe, who wants Manfred to help her communicate with her dead husband, Morton. She's having increasing difficulties coping with their volatile and controlling son, and wants Morton's advice. But in the middle of their seance, Rachel collapses and dies.

The local police find a third sudden death at the same hotel on the same morning more of a coincidence than they are willing to accept. When it turns out that Rachel's very valuable jewelry is missing, her son accuses Mandred of theft and murder. . . and the fun begins.

Harris is an experienced writer, and she knows what small, fallen-by-the-wayside towns in the rural South are like. So even her wildest flights of fancy are solidly rooted in the mundane. It's that contrast that makes her characters and stories so entertaining and compels our interest. There are several other subplots in the book, and we learn a little more about the other inhabitants in the process.

It will be interesting to see what happens next in Midnight, Texas.

Day Shift by Charlaine Harris

Day Shift by Charlaine Harris - 320 pages
Midnight, Texas series Book 2 - Published May 5, 2015

I was fortunate to get an eReader advanced review copy from NetGalley to read this book pre-publication.

Harris continues fleshing out the world of the tiny town of Midnight, Texas and its eccentric residents.  Psychic Manfred Bernardo likes to keep a low profile and does most of his professional work online or over the phone.  A rare in-person working weekend in Dallas leads to murder and stealing accusations that threaten both Manfred and the sanctity of Midnight.  The town is further shaken up by the re-opening of a long derelict hotel by proprietors of unknown purpose.  Harris excels at populating her books with characters with troubled pasts and secret identities that are revealed slowly over time.  I was pleased to see this new series make connections to the characters from the Sookie Stackhouse universe so that world will live on too.

Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris

Midnight Crossroad: A Novel of Midnight, Texas by Charlaine Harris --- 305 pages

Now that Charlaine Harris has wound up her Sookie Stackhouse series it looks like she's ready to move on to new series of Southern Noir adventures.

I will admit I was not a big fan of Sookie, although I liked the books much, much more than the television series. But I have always preferred both her Harper Connelly and her Lily Bard series, so I was pleased to see minor but intriguing characters from those books turn up in the kick-off novel of this projected new series about the residents of a tiny little middle-of-nowhere Texas town who prefer to keep their idiosyncrasies to themselves.

Midnight seems like just the place for folks who want to keep a very low profile. But when Bobo Winthrop's girl friend Aubrey walks out of his life without a word of explanation or farewell, breaking his heart, it starts a chain of events that brings the law down on Midnight asking questions that nobody wants to answer.

The story starts slow, as we meet the residents of Midnight, but the pace quickens when Harris begins to peel back the layers of camouflage that protect their secrets. Harris has a way of combining the ordinary and the weird in unexpected ways, and leaving you wanting to know more.  I'm looking forward to another visit to Midnight.

Click HERE to see a trailer for Midnight Crossing.

Whispers Underground by Ben AaronovitchEach of

Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch --- 303 pages

This is the third volume in Aaronovitch's urban fantasy series The Rivers of London.
Each of Aaronovitch's novels has focused on a particular London neighborhood; in this one we get to explore the London Underground --- both the famous underground transport service and the equally famous underground sewers.

It begins when a wealthy American art student, James Gallagher, is found stabbed to death with a shard of old-fashioned pottery, at the far end of the Baker Street tube station. Constable Peter Grant of the Specialist Crimes Unit is called in on the case because the surveillance cameras in the station don't explain how Gallagher and his killer got into the station or how the killer got out after the murder. Peter is the apprentice of Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last registered wizard in England, and the SCU is only called in on "uncanny" crimes. The pressure is on  because Gallagher's wealthy and politically prominent father (a U.S. Senator) wants to know how his son wound up dead.

There are futher complications: Gallagher's slacker flatmate turns out to be Fae and as slippery as they come. An ambitious FBI agent (and a born-again Christian with strong views about magic and the supernatural) has been assigned to "assist" the Metropolitan police in their inquiries. Two of Mama Thames' demigoddess daughters are running an unlicensed rave club in the old tunnels. Then there's Peter's fellow constable and friend Lesley, badly disfigured in a previous encounter with the uncanny, trying to revive her once promising career by joining up with Nightingale and Peter.

A wonderful concantation of folklore, urban legend, fantasy and forensics.

Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris

Dead Ever After: The Final Sookie Stackhouse Novel by Charlaine Harris --- 338 pages

Fans of the best selling Sookie Stackhouse books (and the hit HBO series, True Blood, based on the books), will be saddened to know that Sookie's paranormal adventures with vampires, shapeshifters, faeiries, demons, witches, and an assortment of psychically gifted (or afflicted, depending on your point of view) humans have come to an end.

An escalating series of events have left Sookie feeling rather battered emotionally, but just as Sookie thinks her life can't get any more complicated she finds herself arrested for murder. Her friends rally to her support and soon discover evidence that indicates Sookie has been framed by someone --- or several someones --- who carry serious grudges against her.

Harris has done a fine job of winding up loose threads as Sookie learns to let go of the past and look to the  future with a little more patience and a lot more understanding of herself and other people (of whatever kind).