Tag: Fantasy (Urban)

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Starter Villain by John Scalzi

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Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place.

Charlie’s life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.

Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.

But becoming a supervillain isn’t all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they’re coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

It’s up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.

In a dog-eat-dog world…be a cat.

 

MY REVIEW

A Whole Treat

Scalzi knows how to create imaginary worlds where an every-man protagonist moves through the “crazy” with grace and common sense to the amusement of his readers. Starter Villain is a perfect example of his mastery of the humor science fiction genre. I wish his worlds featured women with more agency, but I understand the author is basically doing a self-insert into the fantasy world so the main character will be male for him based on his usual style of writing.

Starter Villian is a fun, light-hearted romp with all the cool gadgets and villains of James Bond. Plus a layered plot, complicated characters, and dense world-building which is only noticeable after the fact when you go “I need to make this review longer, was the book actually good, not just enjoyable?” So yeah, the icing is pretty and the cake is fantastic.

Quincy Harker Series books 15-17 by John G. Hartness

Carl Perkins’ Cadillac (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 15)
Inflection Point (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 16)
Conspiracy Theory (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 17)

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Where do you go when you’ve saved the world but given up everything and everyone you love in the process?

The home of the blues, of course! Quincy Harker has retreated to Memphis to lick his wounds and get started on building a new life for himself. He’s determined to be a normal guy (almost) living a (mostly) normal life working as a bouncer in a (not even a little bit) normal bar. But it all goes sideways when someone asks for his help with a little demon problem.

Harker knows there’s no such thing as a little demon problem. He’s right, of course, because his demon problem includes hellhounds, dragons, djinn, angels, artifacts, secret government agencies, and a high school prom. This could absolutely be Quincy Harker’s most dangerous outing yet, and that’s before we even mention the explosions!

 

MY REVIEW

A lot of action in a longer format for Quincy Harker. It’s nice not to wait between installments – getting a whole plotline at once.

Quincy has gone off on his own – and that may not have been his best decision. You would think after the archangel quest and going to hell-and-back nothing would be out of Quincy’s power range. But he did the quest and hell-basket with a team, his support system of friends and associates. Being on his own leaves his back open and his sides without wingmen (and for a guy that hangs with angels, missing wingmen is a big deal).

Evil has come knocking in the blue’s city of Memphis. Can Quincy knock it back without his normal support system or is a whole lot of people going to die?

 

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His uncle has been kidnapped.
A shadowy government agency is torturing cryptids in his city.
His Sanctuary has been revoked from the one place he could drink safely.
There’s a medusa at the mall.
A fairy princess might have just summoned an Old One in a public park.

Quincy Harker really wishes he’d just stayed in Memphis.

But he didn’t. He came home, to find out that a secret government agency has gone rogue and kidnapped Luke, along with literally dozens of other cryptids, faeries, lycanthropes, and monsters. Now Harker and his crew have to rescue Luke and take down a massive government conspiracy while keeping escaped monsters from destroying Charlotte!

There are times in a person’s life when they know that nothing will ever be the same. This is one of those times.

This is Quincy Harker’s Inflection Point.

MY REVIEW

“Inflection point” is a mathematical term for when the graph changes direction. It is also likely a song – Mr. Hartness likes song titles – and I went searching and there were several songs by this title. I’m going to stick with the mathematical term.

Inflection point where Quincy Harker stops running away from love and its potential loss and accepts Becks. We will see if this sticks – Quincy has had a long history of painful loss, so wincing away from the potential pain is deeply engrained in his personality and may not be removable no matter how much he loves Rebecca.

Inflection point in the change of government relations with the paranormal world. Up until now governmental policy has been hiding the paranormal from the greater community. It’s seemed to have changed to eliminate everyone everywhere. Not the best public relation choice, but genocide has always been preferable and more effective in the long run than hiding the truth on a government scale. Not that I think Quincy Harker and the greater Shadow Council is going to take this change in tactics laying down. Many of the Council members were shaped by times of war – they can slip back to being the monsters of the dark facing off against the monsters in the light if they have to.

Inflection point of rescuing Luke. Whether what is rescued is sane enough to function is a different inflection point. Could Quincy put down Dracula if he had to?

Inflection point of demons and angels as allies and enemies, and things that they love, and things that they fight … together.

Lots of things happening in this story. The new style of full novels instead of novellas hasn’t slowed down the fights per word at all. Or profanity. Or found-family.

Action-packed, Inflection Point does not turn around what you expect from Quincy Harker Demon Hunter. Monsters, Mayhem, and Magic Maxed-out.

 

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There are rogue government agents hunting supernatural creatures all over Charlotte. There’s a bloodbath in the parking lot of a demon bar and a massacre at a shopping mall. There are protests and tear gas and riot cops and somehow Quincy F’n Harker is the one stuck in the middle of cops, monsters, and DEMON agents trying to keep them from tearing his city apart.

And now there seems to be a traitor in their midst. Couple that with the revelation that Harker’s guardian angel might have an ulterior motive, and you’ve got a web of deception and intrigue that can only be CONSPIRACY THEORY.

MY REVIEW

This Quincy Harker gave me chills, and not for the normal non-stop action (which is here) or the monsters (which is here) or the magic (which is here).

It is the torn-from-the-headlines topic of police excessive force during demonstrations in the Charlotte area. I think Mr. Hartness wrote this novel either as (1) a therapy session for what happened in Charlotte in June 2020 or (2) a reminder of what happened so we never forget those who protect may need to be protected from when they go off the reservation.

Thing is fiction has to make sense and the June 2020 riots didn’t. The shooting with paint balls to the face (deadly on normals) make sense against a glowing and invulnerable Quincy Harker. The making people disappear in prison. Police having military level weapons and tanks. The shutting down of peaceful memorials and then herding the people into a kill-zone they could not escape while having tear gas launched at their bodies (not at the feet) and being hit by rubber bullets. All of that has to make sense and build with the story – and the author does this.

I wish the same could be said about the same actions which happened in real life. It been nearly two years and I still remember the horror I felt watching it all unfold real-time on people’s cell phones.

Never forget.

At the same time, the author does a good job of showing that the protectors, police and federal government, also are good guys. The badge on the cover with the black stripe explains the respect and sadness shared over the loss by our men in blue.

As a fictional story, Conspiracy Theory works within the greater history of Quincy Harker and is action-pact demon hunting goodness for the Urban Fantasy fan.

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The Brotherhood of the Wheel by R.S. Belcher

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In 1119 A.D., a group of nine crusaders became known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon–a militant monastic order charged with protecting pilgrims and caravans traveling on the roads to and from the Holy Land. In time, the Knights Templar would grow in power and, ultimately, be laid low. But a small offshoot of the Templars endure and have returned to the order’s original mission: to defend the roads of the world and guard those who travel on them.

Theirs is a secret line of knights: truckers, bikers, taxi hacks, state troopers, bus drivers, RV gypsies–any of the folks who live and work on the asphalt arteries of America. They call themselves the Brotherhood of the Wheel.

Jimmy Aussapile is one such knight. He’s driving a big rig down South when a promise to a ghostly hitchhiker sets him on a quest to find out the terrible truth behind a string of children gone missing all across the country. The road leads him to Lovina Hewitt, a skeptical Louisiana State Police investigator working the same case and, eventually, to a forgotten town that’s not on any map–and to the secret behind the eerie Black-Eyed Kids said to prowl the highways.

 

MY REVIEW

Templars meet Teamsters

quote from chapter 1: “Apparently … Triple A has some kind of black ops division.”

So I was reading the anthology “The Weird Wild West”, going through the “about the author” section. Mr. Belcher’s book title of “The Six-Gun Tarot” caught my eye so I went looking and ran across this gem.

Each of the first four chapters are dedicated to introducing a new group of characters, after that the stories start to merge, with the first chapter intense enough to make me buy the book.

The bikers use a lot of R-rated language.