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Happy New Year’s Eve… Eve! As usual, I use the last Friday of the year to do a recap of all the book reviews I wrote in the past twelve months.

In January I reviewed Phil Halton’s dark tale of life in Afghanistan, This Shall Be A House Of Peace. Then for vintage science-fiction month, I took on C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, followed by Eileen Stephenson’s Imperial Passions: The Great Palace. Another vintage sci-fi review ended the month, this time of Asimov’s Foundation.

For February I reviewed Zachary Shatzer’s Sorcerers Wanted. Next up was Sailing to Redoubt by Chuck Litka. I followed that up with a couple mysteries: He Needed Killing Too by Bill Fitts and G.J. Scobie’s techno-thriller, The Copernicus Coercion.

March began with more mysteries: Jacques and May Futrelle’s The Grinning God, followed by Sid Stark’s Permanent Position. Then, for the first time in Ruined Chapel history, a two-part review of E.K. Johnston’s That Inevitable Victorian Thing.

April started off with another Shatzer book, A Cozy Alien Murder, then pivoted to the dark fantasy On The Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger. Then I returned to sci-fi with Cheryl Lawson’s A Dark Genesis, followed by Jünger’s memoir, The Storm of Steel. I then wrapped up the month with Karen Traviss’ Boba Fett: A Practical Man.

I began May with Nicola McDonagh’s Crow Bones, and D.N. Meinster’s sci-fi political thriller Our Friends Upstairs. Then The Prospect, Kevin Brennan’s baseball novel and another Shazter book, the whimsical The Peculiar Disappearance of the Delightfully Incorrigible Percival Pettletwixt’s Extraordinary Monocle.

June started with my take on Amanda McKittrick Ros’ Irene Iddesliegh and Michael Burns’ sci-fi adventure Starship Hunters. Then I commemorated the anniversary of Waterloo with Tom Williams’ thriller Burke at Waterloo. I wrapped up the month with Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea.

July began with The Spirit of Cahir Mullach by Clayton J. Callahan, which is more of a Halloween book, but I couldn’t wait. After that, I reviewed Will Jordan’s Trial by Fire and Tammie Painter’s dark thriller Day Sixteen.

For August, I went with Maddie Cochere’s cozy mystery Sunshine Hunter. Next came Adam Bertocci’s paranormal romcom The Usual Werewolves and Chuck Litka’s humorous Lines in the Lawn. I rounded out August with the raunchy sci-fi adventure Passion Pirates of the Lost Galaxy by Seka Heartley.

September kicked off one of the best sustained runs of books in this site’s history. First up was the wonderful comic novel The Beach Wizard, the crown jewel in Shatzer’s body of work. That was followed up by Mark Paxson’s excellent short story collection Killing Berthold Gambrel. What can I say? I’d been dying to read it, and it was worth the wait. Next came two spectacular medical thrillers: Geoffrey Cooper’s Perilous Obsession and the magnificent Carrie Rubin’s Fatal Rounds. I wrapped up the month with Isabella Norse’s Halloween romance, Something Whiskered This Way Comes.

October began with Neal Holtschulte’s debut novel Crew of Exiles, then Tammie Painter’s The Ghost of Arlen Hall and a not-quite-a-review of Peter Martuneac’s adventure novel Mandate of Heaven. This was followed by another Shatzer short, A Cozy Halloween Murder. This best of all months concluded with Adam Bertocci’s masterpiece of a millennial Bildungsroman mixed with humorous Halloween hijinks, Samantha, 25, on October 31. Don’t take my word for it; Lydia Schoch liked it too.

November began with The Kill Chain, another G.J. Scobie techno-thriller, followed by the depressing Rhodesian Bush War tale Commando: Shoot to Kill by Peter Rische. To counter this, I reviewed Meredith Katz’s cozy The Cybernetic Tea Shop and another Martuneac adventure, Solomon’s Fortune.

For December, I reviewed another Bertocci tale, the fourth-wall-bending The Hundred Other Rileys and then the time-traveling epic Sunder of Time by Kristin McTiernan. I ended the month with two Christmas-themed books: Lights for Christmas: A Steampunk Conspiracy Christmas Story by C.O. Bonham and a final Shatzer book, A Cozy Christmas Murder.

Best wishes for a Happy New Year, my friends! Personally, I’m resolving to review a wider variety of books in 2023. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what all of my friends have lined up for the coming year!

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“A Steampunk Conspiracy Christmas story!” What magical words! How could anyone not read something with such a subtitle? What does this world need, if not more Steampunk Conspiracy Christmas stories?

This one is a quick read, telling the story of a girl who has purchased lights for her orphanage’s Christmas tree. A series of chance encounters lead her to more than she bargained for, including an encounter with some rather shady characters who are mixed up in the holiday business.

The story is very short, and as a result, there isn’t as much world-building as one typically expects from a steampunk story. Aside from a few touches here and there, it was most a standard Victorian-esque setting.

I did like the hints of a totalitarian government assigning people to jobs, as this carried just enough hints of dystopia to make it interesting, without overwhelming the rest of the story.

All told, this is more of a quick sketch than a fully-fleshed out tale. But still, it’s a tantalizing glimpse of what could be. Perhaps, we may dare to hope, it presages the dawn of a whole genre of Christmas steampunk conspiracy stories. Imagine bookshelves stocked with seasonal tales of this type. Imagine a whole channel, like the Hallmark channel, but dedicated to films in this genre. I could go on, but you get the idea.

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I don’t typically put content warnings on my reviews, but today I’m going to. There’s no way to talk about this book without talking about some pretty nasty stuff. The book includes some graphic descriptions of violence as well as plenty of swearing. It’s definitely not for anyone who is sensitive or easily-offended. Also, there are lots of racial slurs in it, although not the one you might be expecting. I can’t blame you if, in these troubled times, you prefer not to have your reading filled with such things.

It is a gritty and realistic account of commando raids, told in the first-person with startling immediacy. In great detail, the author describes the covert missions behind enemy lines undertaken by Rhodesian Light Infantry commandos.

Okay, here’s the deal: this book is supposed to be fiction. It’s in the “war fiction” category on Amazon. There’s a disclaimer in large letters at the beginning confirming its fictional nature.

But it does not read like fiction. I read enough non-fiction war memoirs to know what they’re like, and this reads just like one.

Moreover, it doesn’t have any of the standard features one expects in fiction, such as plot arcs or character development. The narrator mentions his comrades and their names and sometimes one or two minor personality traits, but they aren’t “characters” such as might be found in a novel. They are just guys who went on commando raids with him.

And there is no story, no three-act structure, or anything like that. It’s just a straightforward account of missions the narrator carried out, in chronological order.

If Rische just made all this stuff up from a combination of imagination and research, I’d have to say he did a fine job. It captures the feeling of reality with none of the artificiality of dramatic structure. But… I suspect that’s not what this book is.

Every so often, there’s a scandal where somebody writes something claiming to be a memoir, and it turns out to be largely fictional. (This is the most famous example that comes to mind.)

I struggle to think of a case of the reverse, where someone passed off a factual account as fiction. I mean, what would be the point…? Yet I have to wonder if that’s what’s happening here. It just feels too realistic.

And if it really is a work of fiction, and not a memoir, then it feels like a missed opportunity. Because the thing fiction can do that a memoir can’t is explore multiple perspectives and points of view.

The narrator of this book is not interested in doing that. Time and again, after describing some bloody attack on the enemy, he’ll say something along the lines of, “…but I didn’t feel bad about the brutality. The fact was, if we didn’t do it to them, they would be attacking innocent people.”

It never seems to occur to him that presumably his enemies are thinking the exact same thing. No doubt they could provide their own justifications for their actions, just as the narrator does for the RLI.

And this is of course the ugly logic of war: “do unto them before they do unto you.” And it makes a certain sense, once you are in such a brutal situation, but it is the logic of the vicious circle. At every point, each side’s most “rational” choice is to escalate, leading to utterly inhuman horrors.

Early in the book, there’s a section about the Rhodesian Air Force bombing an enemy camp. The pro-Rhodesia position is that it was a terrorist training facility. The anti-Rhodesia position is that it was a refugee camp. Even if, like me, you know nothing about the Rhodesian Bush war, this sort of dynamic will be familiar to anyone who has read about the Israel-Palestine conflict, or any of the United States’ recent “asymmetric” wars.

Our narrator, of course, believes 100% that it was a terrorist staging ground, and only that, and anyone who says different is just repeating enemy propaganda.

Well, as long as we’re subscribing to the idea that this is “just fiction,” sure, why not? But my sense is that in most real-life cases where things like this happen, it’s usually some combination of the two. A common tactic of the militarily weaker side is to place their agents among civilians, so the stronger side can’t avoid civilian casualties.

Even the wars that we look on as “good” wars have their share of incidents like this. No one really likes to think about it, but in any war, there is some expected amount of loss of innocent life. It’s “priced in,” as it were, when calculating the costs of war.

Do you feel a bit sick thinking about this? I feel pretty sick writing about it. As we should. It would have been interesting if the book had featured a little more introspection, a bit more musing about how the narrator and his beloved country became locked in an inescapable conflict that could only end badly. And did.

But there is no introspection here. Which, again, I would understand in a memoir much more than in a novel. As it is… this is a strange and depressing book. Which, I suppose, makes it an accurate account of how the war must have felt.

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This is a cybercrime techno-thriller about a hacker who finds himself entrapped in an elaborate blackmail scheme. He’s forced to recruit old friends from his past in an effort to save himself.

What I liked most about the book was the setting. It’s a classic cyber-dystopia, with omnipresent surveillance and ongoing threats of pandemics. The atmosphere was creepy and disturbing, without being distracting.

Also, the technical details of all the hacking and counter-hacking were well done. I could follow what was going on without getting bogged down in the details.

I did struggle with some of the characters, in particular the protagonist. Let’s just say that, while he is the victim of a crime, he is far from innocent of wrongdoing himself. This made it hard for me to feel much sympathy for him.

However, if you can get past that, the book certainly makes for a fast-paced and exciting page-turner. Also, that cover is spectacular, isn’t it? Makes me think of Ghost in the Shell a little.

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This is a fascinating, and at times challenging, sci-fi book. It tells the story of Beryl, a post-human entity–effectively, a god, or at least a titan–sentenced to be trapped on Earth in a sickly human body as punishment for his crimes against the post-human order.  The nature of these crimes is not apparent until later in the book, but it’s clear they strike against everything their culture values.

Wandering the nearly-desolated planet, Beryl eventually comes into contact with a woman named Fife, who has been happily living in a virtual reality pod for what amounts to innumerable “in-game” lifespans, honing her skills in all manner of simulations. When they finally meet “IRL” Fife is everything Beryl is not: plucky, optimistic, and competent. Beryl regards her as an “airhead gamer,” but reluctantly joins her “party,” seeing it as his best bet for escaping a planet he loathes.

Gathering two more lost individuals and one spaceship, they manage to depart the Earth, but doing so quickly draws the attention of the psst-humans who exiled Beryl in the first place. Unable to escape their godlike powers, he is forced to confront his past and try to find a way to atone for many mistakes.

It’s an interesting book about humanity and mortality. The most relatable and likable character is Fife, who never stops working to bring out the best in everyone she meets. I have to admit; I’d have preferred she be the protagonist over the often-morose Beryl. Still, she plays a pivotal part in the story all the same.

Now, I know this will sound a bit rich coming from me, the man who hates description and has been repeatedly and justifiably knocked for not including enough of it. But, I felt the book needed more description. Not a lot more, as that would bog things down, but just a little more to ground the reader in the world. Beryl and the other post-humans’ perceptions of reality are so alien as to be hard to comprehend. (It reminded me a bit of the visions of Paul Atreides in Dune.)

Still, I am the last guy to put down a book because it doesn’t have much description, so this isn’t a major criticism. If you like trippy, challenging sci-fi that encourages you to think about the nature of humanity, this is a good book to read. And especially if you are a gamer, as many of Fife’s observations from the world of simulations will feel familiar to veteran players of RPGs. Gamers and sci-fi fans should definitely give this one a try.

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This book would make a great movie! It would be like Jurassic Park meets Aliens, with a bit of Predator thrown in. Instead of making endless sequels and prequels and reboots, the movie people ought to try adapting a lesser-known story like this one.

“Okay, Berthold; slow down,” you say. “What’s this book even about?”

Well, it’s set in the 23rd century, and tells the story of Nick Dekker, owner of the reigning champion women’s soccer team, the Los Angeles Hawks. Dekker sees an ad for an interplanetary safari, and decides it would be an excellent off-season activity for his team. Although Britt Jewel, the team’s coach and also Dekker’s girlfriend, is not excited about big-game hunting, he convinces her to go, and the rest of the team soon signs up as well.

Things start off well. The Regulus, the spaceship which transports them across the galaxy, is full of top-tier amenities, including a gym where Dekker spends most of his time fulfilling a promise to Jewel that he’ll get back in shape. It’s almost like a luxury cruise.

Except, not quite. Dekker is troubled early on by the presence of military personnel, most notably Capt. Luke Webb, a veteran of the Deep Space Infantry, who commands a unit of extremely lethal experimental combat robots. Dekker, a former space marine himself, begins to suspect this is something more than just a vacation.

His suspicions prove justified. Not long after landing on the first planet, they encounter a hostile species of intelligent aliens, soon dubbed the “Gorgon.” In response to the threat, Capt. Webb conscripts all the Hawks players into military service under his command.

What follows is textbook military sci-fi: plasma rifles, high-tech combat suits and the aforementioned combat robots get thrown into action against an alien army.  Of course, I loved it.

Moreover, though they’re both fighting the aliens, there’s some real tension between Dekker and Webb. Dekker distrusts the dictatorial officer’s motives, given his repeated withholding of important military intelligence from the rest of the group, while at the same time treating them as his own fighting force.

I do have some criticisms of the book. First, there’s a little too much exposition at the front. Now, I don’t mind a book that slowly builds up a world, and I hate the modern trend of having to start every story off with a bang. So, I don’t mind this too much, but some readers might find it slow going.

Second, I have a few problems with how the dialogue is written. It feels very stilted at times, like a bit too much explanatory matter for the reader has been included. Also, Dekker has this habit of telling everyone to call him by his first name, to the point that with every person he talks to, he seems to have a conversation like this:

“Hi, I’m Nick Dekker.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dekker.”

“Please, call me Nick.”

“Okay, Nick.”

This got a bit repetitive after a while.

But, I enjoyed the story so much that I could readily overlook these issues. Like I said, I can easily imagine this being a movie, and it would be a really good movie. The problems with exposition would disappear, as that sort of material can be conveyed much faster with film. And, this book is the first entry in a series, so the movie folks can rest assured they have plenty of sequel material lined up already.

If you enjoy military sci-fi adventures, give this one a try.

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I’ve been hearing a lot about this series, The Book of Boba Fett. But, turns out it’s not a book. It’s a television series, on a streaming service I don’t have. Damn false advertising!

However, Boba Fett: A Practical Man is a book. And it’s by the author of the Republic Commando books, the first of which I enjoyed. So far, so good.

The book follows Fett after his escape from the Sarlaac, when he has assumed the title of Mandalore. He’s going around doing typical Mandalorian mercenary stuff, when who does he run into but the Yuuzhan Vong?

Okay, time-out. How many Star Wars fans even know who the Yuuzhan Vong are? Personally, I had heard of them only by reputation; this is the first piece of Star Wars fiction I’ve ever seen that includes them.

My gut reaction is, they don’t fit in. They are weird, vaguely Lovecraftian entities that shun all machinery in favor of specially evolved organic technology substitutes. The Mandalorians description of them as “crab boys” made me think of the Collectors from Mass Effect 2.

Fett realizes a Yuuzhan Vong invasion is going to be bad news, and so strikes a deal with them to help them fight the New Republic, in exchange for the safety of his people. Of course, he knows they will renege on the deal and attack the Mandalorians eventually, so the deal is negotiated in about as much good faith as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and Fett begins discreetly passing intelligence to his nominal enemies in the New Republic.

I’m about to go off on one of my rants about Star Wars lore. Be warned.

I hated the idea of Fett negotiating such a deal. Of course, it makes strategic sense, but the Mandalorians are all about bravery and valor. Yet, here we have Fett using deception and legal quibbles to save his bacon. This is not the honest, forthright, confrontational style that Mandalorian honor demands! They are lions, not foxes!

This leads me to a larger point, which concerns not just this book, but everything we thought we knew about this particular Star Wars icon. Namely: is Boba Fett actually overrated?

I’ve always thought I liked Boba Fett. But, pretty much everything I see him in, he never quite lives up to expectations. As I said, I haven’t watched the new series, but I hear bad things, including that Boba Fett becomes a secondary character in his own show.

Of course, the thing that makes Boba Fett cool in the original trilogy is that you have no idea who he is or what his backstory is. He seems tough and capable, but beyond that, you make up whatever story you want for him.

Which is why all subsequent attempts to flesh Boba Fett out fall flat. They’re never going to live up to what you imagine. (Probably my all-time favorite Boba Fett story is his appearance in Galaxy of Fear #2, City of the Dead. But, I read that when I was 8.)

Like Karen Traviss, I love the Mandalorians. Theoretically, Fett should be the ultra-Mandalorian. But, again, he falls short of the Mandalorian ideal, otherwise known as Canderous Ordo from Knights of the Old Republic.

Ordo is like a combination of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood. A tough-as-nails soldier who found steady work as a mercenary after the Mandalorian Wars, then used his underworld connections to forge an alliance with the Jedi Revan to defeat Darth Malak, then rebuilt the entire Mandalorian army. Meanwhile Boba Fett is most famous for being knocked into a hole in the ground by a blind man.

And so all writers who try to write Boba Fett are hamstrung by the fact that his documented actions are not half as cool as what everybody thinks he can do, and has done. Traviss is perfectly capable of writing good, solid Mandalorian warriors, as shown in the Republic Commando book, so I think the real issue here is the difficulty of reconciling movie Boba Fett with what we all want him to be.

Apart from the fact that (a) Fett isn’t a great protagonist and (b) the primary villains don’t really feel like they belong in Star Wars, it’s a decent book. There are plenty of battle scenes and stuff about Mandalorian culture. Traviss’ writing is mostly fine, although that issue with made-up words I mentioned in my Republic Commando review comes up again.

Also, there’s this:

Fett hadn’t come across anyone with ideas about taking over the whole galaxy before, unless he counted Palpatine.

Um… why would you not count Palpatine?

Anyway, that’s a minor point. This is a fun book for fans of the Mandalorians, even if only to compare how far they have fallen since the days of Ordo. But if you’re not a die-hard Star Wars fan, you’ll probably be lost.

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This is the second book in the Dr. Rowena Halley series, the first of which I reviewed here. This one picks up right where the first one left off in following the career of Rowena Arwen Halley, the Russian language Ph.D. struggling to navigate a brutal academic job market as well as her own desire for a relationship. But, her heart is torn between Alex, another struggling post-doc, and Dima, the Russian soldier-turned-journalist who broke up with her and sent her back to the U.S. while he continued reporting on conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

Dr. Halley has started a new one-semester teaching position, and from day one, is beset by annoyances, the most prominent of which is Jason, a student in one of her classes who wants to use her to help him fight a custody battle with his estranged Russian wife.

The start of the book is a bit slow, although it does give a good window into the dreary reality of academia. Where it really picks up is with the arrival of Rowena’s brother, Ivanhoe Elladan Halley, the rough-and-tumble Marine Corps officer recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, who comes to visit in the middle of the book. (Disregarding his parents’ decision to name him after Sir Walter Scott and Tolkien characters, he goes by “John” most of the time.)

John is my favorite character in the book. For one thing, his lines are pretty funny, especially his unsolicited blunt advice to his sister and his foul-mouthed contempt for her boyfriends, past and present. But he’s also a more complex character: a veteran who probably has PTSD but masks it with machismo, alcohol, and womanizing. He’s basically a good guy, but he’s been through some bad stuff, and it has taken its toll on him.

I won’t lie, the middle third of the book, in which John appears regularly, is definitely my favorite part. The ending suffers from some of the same issues as the beginning; namely, that it gives a very accurate portrayal of the current state of seeking employment in academia, particularly in the humanities.

There’s one other issue I have with this book. Unlike the first installment, which really was a mystery that needed to be figured out, here, the main conflict isn’t a mystery. The person who is obviously bad ultimately turns out to be… bad. Which is kind of a letdown. It’s not that exciting when at the climax of the story, a character turns out to be exactly who you thought they were.

But that’s okay. This is a character-driven book, more so than the first one was. The interesting thing is less about seeing where it all goes than how it gets there, and how it gets there is pretty interesting. Stark tackles a variety of social and geopolitical issues, from the overproduction of elites in American higher education leading to a glut on the academic job market, to the many ruined lives resulting from ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, to the destruction of society at the most fundamental level as a result of people lacking basic virtues.

So, don’t go into it expecting some kind of plot-twist filled mystery. Instead, read it as a commentary on the many deeply-rooted problems in modern society. Read that way, it paints a vivid and memorable picture.

[Audio version of this post available below.]

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Before I actually review the book, I have to share the story of how I found out about it. Recently, Peter Martuneac introduced me to the book website Shepherd. While reading about Shepherd and its founder, Ben Fox, I came across this interview Fox did with Phil Halton, which led me to poking around Halton’s site, which is how I discovered this book.

I’m telling you this story to illustrate (1) that Shepherd is cool and you should use it and (2) how I find books, which is generally to read a lot of authors’ blogs and pick the ones I stumble across.

But okay, so what is the book about? It’s a novel set in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. It follows a mullah who runs a madrassa in a remote and rural part of the country. The mullah struggles to instruct his students in Islam all while defending them, and the residents of the nearby village, from marauding bandits and brutal warlords who continually terrorize them.

The Mullah is a fascinating character: intelligent, wise, but also very harsh, and strictly adhering to the fundamental precepts of his religion. At times he seems quite sympathetic, at other times downright heartless; but no matter what, it’s hard to doubt his conviction.

Some of his students are dutiful and faithful, others are impulsive and reckless. But of course, one feels for all of them, growing up as they are in this brutal and war-torn environment.

This book is incredibly dark, and while it is a novel, there can be little doubt that events similar to those described took place, which makes it all the harder to read. It is gritty, unsparingly realistic, and disturbing. And at the same time, Halton’s prose is beautiful and haunting, which makes it all the more unsettling.

It’s not an easy or comfortable read, but it does give a westerner such as myself a great deal of insight into the recent history of Afghanistan, and how it came to be the way it is. Halton has also written a non-fiction history of the country, which I am considering reading as well.

This Shall Be a House of Peace is an unforgettable look at a region and a culture which, despite having been a focus of American geopolitical power for two decades, many of us know very little about.

[Audio version of this review available here.]

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This is a classic mystery, in the vein of Agatha Christie. We have a brilliant detective, Professor Edwin McGorgol, and his not-so-brilliant, but good-hearted sidekick, George Hockney. There’s a hotel full of suspects, snobbish rich types, a femme fatale, and an escalating series of crimes that put the pressure on them to solve it before it’s too late.

Oh… and did I mention they’re all birds? Well, they are. McGorgol is a sandpiper and Hockney is a seagull. All the characters are different types of fowl that suit their personalities perfectly. Also, the book is illustrated, which only adds to the charm.

And I have to say, while this is obviously designed for kids, the mystery was still well done. I’ve read mystery novels for adults where the solution was more obvious than it is in this one. I had my suspicions, but I was still eager to see how it would all play out.

But the best part of all is the afterword, where we get the story behind the story, of how it all came to be. That story really made me smile.

This is a short book, but it packs lots of lighthearted humor into a small space. It’s a fun read for all ages. I highly recommend it.

[Audio version of this review available below]