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The fourth of five books in the Quadrail series. Frank Compton and hybrid sidekick Bayta are off across the galaxy to the Filiaelian part of space. I mentioned in my review of Odd Girl Out that the Compton versus Modhri in a battle on the train motif was looking a little tired. Zahn realised this and the Domino Pattern is a classic murder mystery on a train, Orient Express style, though not stealing any significant plot points except the issue of murder in an isolated conveyance. The ongoing plotline of the series stays initially in the background of this book, while the denouement nicely links back to events in the first book. The plot hangs together well and in addition to the twists and turns in the murder mystery of this book, there’s a couple of interesting developments in the ongoing series that sets up the finale to come.

The third installment of the “Trains in Space” sequence see Frank once again confronted by a murder (almost) on his doorstep. Barely has he got home from the last adventure but he finds a beautiful woman waiting in his house – having broken in. Having ejected her he’s then called to her murder scene, since she stole his gun which puts him under suspicion. There follows the usual routine o on-planet and on-train shenanigens between Frank and his arch-enemy the Modhri. Once again there’s plenty of action and a few twists in the tail. it is, however, getting harder for Zahn to retain the tension of the onboard adventures. The limiting factor of the trains was an interesting one in an SF setting to start with but it’s now getting quite restrictive for this action-adventure series. Still good, but there it’s getting harder to sustain, I think.

The sequel to Night Train to Rigel continues the adventures of Frank Compton, the interstellar Quadrail system and his sworn enemy the Modhri group mind. In this installment, further machinations by the progenitures (OK, the Shonkla-raa they’re caled in this universe) are revealed and despite the “Third Man” reference in the title, this is a bit more of a Maltese Falcon than anything else. A bit of breaking and entering, a 1%er getting beaten to death on a train (we pretty much know who from the start, so this is a “whydunnit” rather than a “who dunnit”). Enough plot twists to create the Monaco Grand Prix circuit, with a few bits of paranoia thrown in. If you like the first, it’s definitely worth keeping on with these.

I’m not caught up yet with reviews, but this one is fairly easy to do since, in the best “Blue Peter” tradition, “Here’s one I prepared earlier”. I first read and reviewed this book when it came out and re-reading the review, my views didn’t change on a second reading. It’s still tightly plotted, with a great background, nice characters who get rounded out. Plus, “Trains in Spaaaaaace!”

Original Vector Review:

Night Train to Rigel is, as the name suggests, something of a homage to the hard boiled detective novel. Unlike many such pastiches, however, this one involves a real Space Opera background to go with the cliches of the beautiful woman, the convoluted plot twists and the gun play.

We start with the almost-obligatory corpse. Not only is this in complete keeping with the hard boiled genre, but it provides the staple start to the story with the hero knowing a lot less than everyone supposes (allowing the author to keep us as well as the main character in the dark) while providing the other characters with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust. Frank Compton is an engaging principal character whose own present agenda is kept nicely hidden from the reader while his background and character are revealed in just enough detail to flesh him out. His James Bond antics are believable given the sacked government agent background, and his connections at the highest level of this multi-lifeform society provides enough clues and red herrings to keep the reader guessing about the main plot until the end.

In fact, the whole book is a nicely judged balance of detail and broad brush, explanation, obfuscation and revelation. Building not just a single new world but a number of them, complete with fast than light transit system between them, would be enough for several books this long for many authors but Zahn presents a mostly convincing past, present and potentially holocaust-riven future in a mere 350 pages while bringing the plot along at a fair clip. In scenes reminiscent not just of books from the forties but a whole sub-genre of movies, too, a substantial chunk of the action takes place aboard a nicely imagined interstellar train service, allowing for the usual sense of isolation yet urgency this provides.  In a nod to his own inspirations, even, the principle character realises the parallels between his own situation and classics such as The Lady Vanishes.

The final expose of the plot is a satisfying explanation of the underlying mysteries of everyone involved, while the bad guys are given both justification and a measure of pathos to round things out, while the good guys have their own moral dilemmas and secretes, so neither side are cardboard cut-outs.

We may see Frank Compton back on the interstellar rails again at some point in the future, gumshoeing his way around the galaxy, but then again after saving not one but several space-going civilisations, how could he top this? Given the skill with which Zahn presents a whole new world in one reasonable length volume, he could go on to a whole new setup each time.

Definitely worth catching if you like any or all of rip-roaring space opera adventure stories, hard boiled SF or futuristic train travel.

This is the fourth and very newly released Laundry novel. Unlike The Fuller Memorandum, Amazon Japan had it available pretty much as soon as it was published in the US. Normally I’d have re-read the series before going into this one but as those reading my book blogging know I’ve already re-read the sequence this year.

This time, Bob is up against a US televangelist. As with Fuller Memorandum, this deviates from first-person storytelling. This time, even more so. I remember Charlie struggling with how to tell the story he wanted to tell within the constraint of a first person “memoir” narrative but where the narrator in question is being moved into a management role and therefore lacking direct experience. The end point of this conundrum is deftly handled, but I’ll leave you to find out how he deals with it yourself.

This is, as usual, a well-written piece and a worthy addition to the Laundry Files. It is, though, not as scary as The Fuller Memorandum. I had to think hard to work out why. I think the problem is that both the bad guy and the “reveal” in TFM twist things around a lot and in particular the identity of the bad guy works well with the Buffy Principle (real life is scarier than monsters). This time the bad guy is a US televanglist. These guys are horrible, creepy and scary to begin with, so I at least am already inured to the horror of their actions.

Not that this isn’t scary, but it’s a different sort of scary. As CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN approaches, Bob’s scary life is getting scarier, including the fact that he’s not in control any more. Well, he is in control, but in the same way that a navigator in a rally car is in control, rather than the way a driver is in control. Now he’s got to set tactics and policy and wait for the results.

Interestingly, as I blogged about before, there are some interesting parallels with the Simon Canderous series, that come through even more so when the reality behind Mahogany Row is revealed. Not that I think either author is cribbing from the other – they’re just writing from a similar playbook style, I think.

If you haven’t read the Laundry, and aren’t totally freaked by Lovecraftian horrors (written into algorithmic science fiction) then what are you waiting for?

I’ve got way behind on my book blogging again recently, so a catch-up post for a series instead of dealing wth them all separately.

More urban fantasy again. The main character of this one is a former low-level thief and grifter with a talent for psychometry: the ability to psychically read the history of an object. He’s recruited to the New York Department of Extraordinary Affairs and does his best to go straight, though he still uses his talent to make extra money on the side, just without crossing the lines. There are some shades of the Laundry Files, with much more of an American slant to it, of course. The eldritch horrors of cultists, zombies, ghosts, vampires and sundry other bumps in the night are counterpoised with budget constraints, huge towering piles of paperwork, the Mayor’s Office of Plausible Deniability and management training courses.

In the first installment Simon Canderous, the aofrementioned psychometrist, has to deal with cultists gone mainstream: the Sectarian Defense League (cultists with a good PR agent) are planning some nasty shenanigans from their office in the Empire State Building and during a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the meantime they send a fomer temp now benefits-enabled office worker to spy on and perhaps assassinate Simon. That works out well for him since they turn on her when she fails, and since she was only ever in it for the dental coverage she also turns, to him in more ways than one.

In the second installment, Simon’s past catches up with him and one of his former criminal associates gets him mixed up in something which seems just criminal at first but turns out to be intimately linked to the previous case. In the process Simon falsely triggers a vampire alert, but right at the end does encounter a vampire being tortured by the bad guy by being kep in vaporous state and unable to reform.

This turns out to be a major plot element of installment number three where we find out ust why vampires hadn’t been seen in the city for over two years. It’s not that they were gone, it’s that they have turned into a different sort of nasty. I’m rather unsure of this turn. It nicely pays off a mystery about SImon’s partner’s past which was introduced in the first book, but it’s a bit cliched these days to have vampires turn non-evil, but also the idea that  vampires who spent centuries being blood-thirsty vicious beasts should be forgiven is morally rather dubious. I don’t think he quite pulls this off.

The fourth installment slightly reminds me of Jim Butcher’s “Proven Guilty” in which much of the action takes place at a Horror movie convention. This one starts with the death by supernatural causes of a professor of film at NYU, who turns out to have been a partner of Simon’s boss thirty years before. The main plotline is quite nice in this one, but I think the personal denouement at the end may mean this series ust jumped the shark – the whole vampire girlfriend thing is very hard to get right and too easy to screw up badly.

I’ll see what the next one is like, but this may have gone off the rails at this point.

The second Eddie LaCrosse novel following up The Sword-Edged Blonde. This is a slightly more assured book in style than the first. It’s a nice continuation of the character development while telling a fairly different kind of story. The magical mcGuffin of the first was a maybe-goddess incarnating amongst humans. This time it’s the perhaps mythical dragons of legend come back to haunt the waking world of “private sword jockey” Eddie. Some wry commentary on modern life slips in amongst the fantasy tropes here, adding a little bnit more depth to some pretty good escapism. Definitely worth a look if you like classic fantasy crossed with hard-boiled detective noir.

Finally I think I’m up to date on my reading again. Just in time to go on another short business trip with long flights so I’ll probably be right behind again by the weekend, though.

This is an unusual sort of book these days. A fantasy detective set in the classic medieval fantasy world. Unliek Glen Cook’s long bestselling series, the elves and dwarves aren’t in evidence (so far) in this one, although there is a goddess and an immortal.

Another first book, but it’s solidly written and the combination of hard boiled wisecracking and fantasy tropes works pretty well. The main character is interesting and sufficiently tortured by his past to justify the interest. The personal and plot reveals along the way are satisfying and logical though not always obvious. A nice debut and I’m now onto the sequel (this was a re-read of the first before diving into that one).

The modern-day urban fantasy has more or less driven this kind (Tamara Siler Jones and Simon R Green has both done nice previous examples, alongside the Glen Cook Garrett Files which appears to be perhaps finished with Gilded Latten Bones) out of the market, which is a shame as I like the juxtaposition of hard boiled and sword and sorcery.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing, though other examples are better ones to start with (Simon Green’s Hawk and Fisher particularly, if you haven’t tried it out before.

The third Morris and Chastain Investigation is more of a standalone than the first two which formed a duology, really. A demon wants tobecome president of the US, and another bunch of demons want to stop him. Morris and Chastain end up investigating and runnning into the spoiler team the opposing demons sent along as well as the possessed presidential candidate. Given the slate running for the Republican nomination this year, one would wonder if this weren’t a lightly veiled commentary on that race, except this was published well before it started in earnest.

This has a nice leavening of black humour in it. The first two had a few attempts but Gustainis finally gets the note right in this one, I think. Again, some shades of The Jennifer Morgue, in the interplay between the revived assassin sent by the demons to take out the possessed candidate and his succubus handler (ad boy, does she handle him). Still only for dedicated UF readers, but the series continues to improve.

No crossover howlers in here.

The second Morris and Chastain investigation closes the circle on the hanging plot lines from the first book. This was clearly in the author’s mind when he wrote the first one and they may even have been a single book in original conception, but separated out to set up and characters and because it would have been way too long.

In general this is a better written book than the first. Gustainins is clearly improving as a writer and finding his feet with the characters and the world. However, there is a big flaw in his world-building in that he succumbed to the temptation to tie in to another contemporary series. Despite the Dracula-link with Morris, that’s not too constraining because Dracula is so light on details of the undead and other aspects of that world’s weirdness. However, clearly influenced by Jim Butcher’s approval and willingness to allow it, Morris and Chastain visit Chicago on a fool’s erran trying to catch up with Harry Dresden (not mentioned by name) and hang out in Mac’s bar (mentioned by name). Now, I’m a big fan of the Dresden FIles, but this was a mistake. The Dresden Files has a significant and well worked out mythology behind it and Chastain’s White Witch is simply too powerful for that universe. She’d have to be a member of the White Council. Plus, the White Council would certainly be on the case of the main story here – the rich bad guy trying to summon up Satan into the world, in a very James Bond-villain way. I’m slightly reminded of The Jennifer Morgue, actually, with the JB motifs running through.

So long as I forget the side trip to Chicago, this is a worthwhile follow-up and kept me interested enough to get the third. Still only for the die-hard urban fantasy fan, though.