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Check them out here. If you’re not sure where to begin, may I suggest either The Friendship of Mortals or the short story collection Tales from the Annexe, the latter of which includes one of my all-time favorite Halloween stories. Both are free as part of this sale.

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This is a mystery about a detective tracking down a clown who is scheduled to perform at a local boy’s birthday party. The clown, who is also the boy’s uncle, has suddenly vanished with no explanation, and the boy hires Detective McKeever to find him.

Of course, Detective McKeever is only 8 years old, so this makes it hard for her to conduct an investigation. But she’s resourceful and plucky and, like any kid, doesn’t know any better. So, naturally, she finds herself involved in all sorts of comic misadventures, from infiltrating clown meetings to spying on cheating air hockey players. It’s full of all the zaniness we’ve come to expect from Shatzer’s books.

What really makes the story work is McKeever’s seriousness and her annoyance at the refusal of adults to ever take her seriously, which as often as not she turns to her advantage. It’s a fun story that captures how the world seems to a kid.

Remember McGorgol and Hockney at the Guano Island Hotel? That book was a fun take-off on mystery tropes with bird detectives. There’s something similar going on here, with kids acting out the roles of a noir mystery. Having incongruous characters enacting a familiar set of tropes is a good recipe for comedy, and Shatzer, master of humor that he is, uses it well.

Devoted Shatzer fans, of which I am one, and hopefully I’ve managed to persuade a few more, will no doubt enjoy this latest addition to his body of work.

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I’m a sucker for stories with amnesiac protagonists. Mostly, this is because of video games like Planescape: Torment which uses this device to create a sprawling, philosophical tale of self-discovery. After that, I was hooked on the idea of a story about someone who can’t remember their own past, and so I was happy to see that this novel, by the great Kevin Brennan, uses this device.

Jack, the protagonist of Yesterday Road, suffers from a form of memory loss that causes him to forget almost everything he knows each day. All he really remembers is that he’s looking for his daughter, who he thinks is named Linda, and that he needs to head “back east.” Other than that, it’s pretty much a blank slate for him after a day or two.

Along his odyssey, Jack meets plenty of interesting characters who help him on his vague quest, from a 31 year-old man with Down Syndrome to a middle-aged diner waitress. He also meets some less than savory characters as well, including drug dealers and carjackers. All of it leads to a wild road trip–there’s always a road trip in Brennan tales–that goes to a lot of places, both physically and spiritually. There is plenty of humor and plenty of tragedy in these pages; and Brennan’s gorgeous prose evokes all the emotions flawlessly.

Whenever people ask me to define literary fiction, I point to Brennan’s works. To me, he captures what it means to tell a story that fits no specific genre, but instead lets the reader meet people and learn their stories, almost like reading an account of something that really happened. He is a master of the craft, pure and simple. And Yesterday Road contains some of his finest work. A story that asks us to empathize with and understand some deeply wounded but resilient people, to get to know them, and to share in their world.

It’s all fiction, of course. But Brennan makes it feel real. It’s like magic, and when you read Yesterday Road, and follow Jack as he tries to recover some of his memories, you’ll find some of your own bubbling to the surface. Like Warren Zevon once sang, “We had to take that long, hard road / to see where it would go.” Every book really is the reader’s as much as it is the writer’s, but it’s the writer’s job to know what words to use to draw the emotions out of us. And Kevin Brennan can do it with the best of them. Yesterday Road is unforgettable and deserves to be widely read.

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In addition to Richard Pastore’s books as posted yesterday, today I learned that Peter Martuneac’s zombie apocalypse trilogy is also free on Kindle now through Thursday. These are dark, emotionally powerful, and ultimately rewarding stories of characters grappling with trauma. Highly recommended for fans of post-apocalyptic fiction.

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Richard Pastore’s books are free on Kindle this week to celebrate his birthday. The Devil and the Wolf and Perseus Kills His Grandfather are both highly entertaining blends of humor, fantasy, and mythology.

You can read my review of Devil and the Wolf here and my review of Perseus here.

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I heard about this book via Chuck Litka’s blog, I’ve been reading thrillers lately and it was free on Kindle, so I figured I would check it out.

I have to say, I liked the beginning: instead of the standard “starting with a bang,” as authors are advised, it opens in the most mundane way possible: with the protagonist, Prof. Reid Lawson, giving a lecture on history to a class of sleepy students.

It proceeds calmly enough, with Prof. Lawson then heading home to his two daughters for game night. Only after that does the plot kick into gear, when the professor is kidnapped by a couple of thugs, demanding to know who he is.

I like this style. I appreciate getting to know characters, seeing them at ease, before we dive right into the action. So, credit to the author for starting off this way.

This is a thriller, though, so there’s plenty of action. It soon becomes clear that Lawson has been implanted with an experimental memory-altering chip. Once it is removed, memories of his past as an uber-lethal CIA field operative begin to come back to him, along with glimpses and hints of a massive conspiracy he had been on the brink of unraveling before his mind was wiped.

This sets up a globe-trotting and violent adventure, as Lawson is forced to try to uncover his own identity as well as the massive terror ring he’d been about to foil.

None of this is super-original, and I can think of a number of instances where all the tropes in this book have been used before.  But, you know what? It didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story. Like George Lucas once said, “They’re clichés because they work!”

The basic concept that Lawson, despite seemingly being a mild-mannered college professor, is actually a trained professional killer, reminded me of something Kingsley Amis said in the James Bond Dossier I reviewed the other week. He said that part of the appeal of Bond was the idea that he looked like an everyman; that beneath the unremarkable features of any average accountant or shop clerk there lurks a Heinleinian “Competent Man.”

Granted, the book isn’t perfect. I know it’s said to add realism, but I really don’t think it’s plausible that anyone, even a trained special operative, will be able to instantly tell the exact model of weapon every single one of his enemies is wielding at a glance. Obviously, a working knowledge of weapons is a requirement for the job, but this seemed a little extreme.

Reid took up the AK. How many rounds were fired? Five? Six. It was a thirty two-round magazine. If the clip was full, he still had twenty-six rounds.

Wait.

Wait just a damn minute.

I’m sorry to do this to you. I really am. If this book weren’t so intent on giving us the details about what weapons everyone is carrying at all times, I would probably just let it go. But seriously, if you’re going to write about weapons with great specificity, watch this video first.

Now, why am I so hung up on this, you ask? Well, the fact is that I used to use the terms interchangeably too, until one day someone explained the difference to me, and pointed out that ten seconds of searching the internet would have saved me from such a sloppy error.

“But ‘magazine’ is such a mouthful,” you object. “No one is gonna say, ‘where’s my magazine’ in the heat of battle!”

True enough. In that case, use the abbreviation “mag.”

IRL, it probably will never matter for most people. But, if you’re going to write a thriller that leans heavily on talking about the details of weapons, you should probably go ahead and look up the relevant terminology.

Incidentally, this provides me a great chance to rebut another of Amis’s points about description. Once you start down the path of describing everything in great detail, you are under more and more pressure to get things right. And if you get something wrong, then irritating pedants like me will start whining about it in our reviews.

Whereas, if you leave things vague, there’s more leeway for things like this. You could just say, “he put a clip in the rifle.” Some rifles do use clips. Admittedly not many, and especially not many made in the last 50 years or so. But still.

I’m not actually saying that everything can be left vague. But when you describe something in detail, make sure you know what you’re talking about, or you will defeat your purpose.

Still, these petty complaints aside, this is an enjoyable thriller. I recommend it, clips and all.

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This is a military sci-fi novel that follows a combat programmer named Kerry Sevvers. Sevvers is an elite technical specialist, who controls multiple AIs at once, including one that is illegally modified to remove normal safety restrictions. This one he keeps secret from his superiors, since revealing it would result in his discharge.

In order to keep his secret, Sevvers volunteers for a high-risk mission with a Marine unit fighting “raiders”; which are alien beings that attack human colonies. Although he is a master of AI drones, Sevvers has not faced front-line combat before; though he does have personal trauma from his childhood that drives him to hate the aliens they are fighting.

Sevvers struggles to get along with some members of the unit, and also to keep his unrestricted AI secret. As the mission grows increasingly dire, he is forced to take more and more risks, putting both his job and his life in jeopardy.

The book is well-written and fast-paced. At times, I struggled to conceptualize clearly how Sevvers’ AIs work. This, though, is probably an accurate depiction of how such a strange mixture of man and machine would feel. It’s more than a little creepy, but I think it’s supposed to be.

The book made me think of Halo, Mass Effect, and the Star Wars: Republic Commando series. Anyone who enjoys military sci-fi should check it out.