A Ghost in the Machine (by Caroline Graham)

This is either a cozy (a sub-genre of mystery) or a satire of cozies, depending on which blurb quotes you believe. It has the requisite cast of a dozen beautifully drawn dysfunctional characters (a proper cozy gives everyone enough unpleasant tendencies to be a murderer) -- but the book is pretty much just about them and their antics, and very little about the actual mystery. Though it's a "Chief Inspector Barnaby" mystery, the inspector himself doesn't come on for real until about page 275, and there's not a whole lot of detecting. On the other hand, some of the blurbs say the book is more like Dickens than Christie, and I guess Dickens didn't obsess about the detecting most of the time, either. I deduct half a star for the Afterword, which is something of a traditional "what happened to everyone else later?" chapter, but which wraps up a point of the mystery, and also introduces a completely new and out-of-genre plot. Three stars.

Forests of the Night (by S. Andrew Swann)

This is the first of the Moreau Trilogy, which is sort of cyberpunk with uplifted animals (the "moreaus"). More bio than cyber, but the feel is the gritty dark future dystopia. The atmosphere is pretty good, it's a decent mystery/thriller with noir flavor. And it's very amusing that the main character, an uplifted tiger, is a "morey". But it just didn't grab me very hard, probably because cyberpunk/dystopia never does. Paranoia and greed are some of the less compelling emotions for me, and they tend to permeate the genre. The book contains the whole trilogy, but I only read the first one. Three stars - really nothing wrong with it, just not so much my genre.

The Sun Sword trilogy: The Broken Crown, The Uncrowned King, the Shining Court (by Michelle West)

I read the first book of this trilogy once before, when it first came out. And then I went to look for the other books Michelle West had written, confident that they would cover the previous adventures of some of the characters that appeared in the book. As it turned out, I was mistaken. Still, that is the thing that strikes me most about this series, especially the first book. Nearly every character, even the ones who appear only briefly, are written with the weight and backstory of main characters in a book of their own. There are a couple of characters who appear for maybe twenty pages (in a 700-page book), and carry with them something like the Darkest Road subplot from Fionavar. They come on, announce their tragic plot, embellesh it a little, and then go off on their Darkest Road, not to be even mentioned again for hundreds and hundreds of pages. It's an incredible feat of concentrated world-building and character-building, as if the author spent a decade constructing the setting and characters (or maybe running RPGs in it!) and eventually started the story well after the characters had lives of their own.

There are two main places in the book - the Dominion, somewhat Arabian-Nightsesque, and the Empire, more standard-medieval-fantasy (though for me, they are very much 'al Jabar and Avan). But to reduce them to such short summaries is to do an injustice to the previously mentioned astounding world-building. I very much appreciate the subtle politics and casual cruelty of the Dominion, like a mention in passing of a minor battle of wills between one man and the first wife of his harem, in which the husband demonstrates that he is not to be casually interrupted in his study by having the slave his wife has sent to him, executed. It's just a sentence or two, not particularly emphasized - this is not anything to be particularly remarked upon in the Dominion, it is just how such messages are politely conveyed. The harem dynamics and internal politics are exquisite. The betrayals are painful and chilling. Much of the angst does have the exaggerated Guy Gavriel Kay feel of "This is, o, the most piercing angst imaginable, unendurable and yet it must be endured or all is lost", but then, I like that, myself. There are really perfect moments of shining glory, also Kay-like.

These are not necessarily the books for everyone. They are not fast-moving, though I wouldn't call them dull either. There's a lot of people talking to each other with important things implied rather than stated - if it were any more in that direction, it'd be Cherryh and I wouldn't be able to understand what they meant. So no skimming here - it took me a couple of weeks per book, which is a lot for me. I don't like the character of Evayne, who seems to be too much of an inexplicable deus ex machina (especially without a previous set of books to justify the role). And I am never quite sure that I understand the parts of the plot that I am supposed to understand, let alone the parts that are still supposed to be mysteries.

As of the end of the third book, I discover that these are not, in fact, a trilogy. They are a six-book series, and Amazon is now sending me the second set of three. I am never going to finish these things. So I'm just publishing this set of reviews now, so that jdbakermn and marcusmarcusrc don't think I've forgotten about them entirely. I am going to give the series four stars, though it does have its six-star moments and two-star areas of complete confusion.

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