04/27/2015
Urban fantasy fans who place a premium on humor are most likely to enjoy Kadrey’s seventh Sandman Slim novel (after The Getaway God). Slim, aka James Stark, is one of the nephilim—half human, half angel—who’s working as a PI in Los Angeles. His powers are pretty impressive; before the book begins, he’d killed “a weasely fragment of God who, if he’d lived, would have ruined the universe.” That, understandably, has annoyed the angelic host, who joins a lengthy roster of Stark’s foes. Thwarting Stark’s hope of returning to more mundane cases, Kadrey gives him another daunting challenge: someone dragged Death into a human body and cut out his heart, killing him, and Stark’s boss, Julie Sola, wants him to find out whodunit. Julie hopes that finding Death’s killer will restore some normalcy, as after the assault “no one is dying anywhere.” There’s little sense of menace or looming darkness, but plenty of over-the-top entertainment. Agent: Ginger Clark, Curtis Brown Ltd. (July)
This July sees the release of Killing Pretty, the seventh installment in Richard Kadrey’s fiendishly inventive noir-tinged urban fantasy series Sandman Slim. This fact either fills you with delicious anticipation—another anti-heroic adventure of our favorite back-from-the-dead magician hellbent on revenge!—or it should, because you’re about to pick up the first book, because you read that whole “anti-heroic back-from-the-dead-magician-revenge” part.
For over a decade, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog and Tor.com, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s can’t-miss new SF/F releases.
It can be startling to discover the universe existed prior to your own introduction into it (not to mention that it might go on existing after your exit). One of the biggest challenges we all face as SF/F readers is dealing with the immense number of books we haven’t read—particularly those that are a part of a (undoubtedly) […]
In any long-lived book series, authors face the challenge of living up to their readers’ expectations (and their own past success). But how to keep things fresh without losing the elements that made the series stand out in the first place? Over the course of six novels, Richard Kadrey has taken his character Sandman Slim (a.k.a. James […]
A war ends, an interstellar conflict looms, and knights ride dinosaurs—must be this week’s new releases in SF/F.