I loved the vibes of this book. A sci-fi world with a grungy-cyberpunk feel? A slew of crime families and a corrupt corporatocracy in charge of the one settlement on an inhospitable plant with a secret sentient race? Oh and the vast majority of the cast are women and non-binary characters? Uh, yes please a thousand times over! “Persephone Station” is just on the right side of hard science fiction, meaning that it’s not Andy Weir levels of math and science but more than just a hand wave of “nano technology” to explain things. And while I loved the military-like action of this high-stakes adventure, often times those same action sequences I so enjoyed came at the detriment to character and plot building.

What happens when a murder occurs in the afterlife? That, in a very broad nutshell, is the premise of “Valhollywood” where an up-and-coming actor suddenly finds himself to be a resident of the afterlife, where the populace are the famous and infamous. The story is an homage to the authors love of Golden Era film wrapped up in a noir murder mystery with a very heavy sprinkling of spiritualism—maybe too much, but more on that in a second. Jake, still grappling with the fact that he’s dead and rubbing elbows with Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, and Ava Gardener, finds himself suddenly thrust in a whodunit murder mystery when one of Valhollywood’s residents actually dies ahead of fading as her fame dwindles to nothingness. Solving that murder and unraveling how it happened was where this novel truly shined! Unfortunately, the detour this book makes left something to be desired.

It’s been a while since I read the first book in the Witchlands series, and as such, a lot of the fine details were lost to me when I started “Windwitch”. Silly me thinking there would be some kind of recap in this book to start. “Windwitch” starts pretty much the moment that book 1 ended, so we’re being plopped right back into the center of a really explosive (heh) scene. If you’re like me and can’t remember a lot, will be left to play catch up for a while in terms of remembering all the various characters and their political alignments. Good news is, not much gets progressed in terms of the overall series plot that was semi established to begin with. “Windwitch” felt like its own contained story separate from everything else in this series, which I have… mixed feelings about.

Continuing in the footsteps of its predecessor’s epic fantasy, with its robust political machinations and warring factions, “Kinship of a Dragon” follows up almost immediately after “A Dragon Called Blood”, the first book in the Blood History series. And, just like the first book, the second book in the series is a chonky boy! Understandably so given the several plot lines the author continues from the first book, but the strongest plot points this time around barely involved our main characters, Corbin and Blood, at all. Corbin’s story is rather simple in comparison: he and his dragon are still trying to exist despite the hatred aimed at them for what they are, and keeping their lady love and her mother from being kidnapped. They fend off assassins sent after them, but the big, sweeping world changing events that occur in this book are handled by one of the (many) side characters this time around.

If you’re looking for a futuristic semi-dystopian where country disputes are settled through Olympic-style virtual sporting events played to the death (kind of like the Hunger Games), but with a distinctly “Matrix” vibe to it, well, that’s “MegaDeath” in a nutshell. In this futuristic version of the world, the global pecking order is decided every 4 years through a series of virtual simulator competitions which have replaced all wars. Sounds kind of nice, except the losing team dies and there’s something very fishy going on with the bets people make around these top athletes, and the Control system that puts on these virtual games. That’s where our main character, Megan, comes in. She is the elite of the elite when it comes to dominating in these games, but she doesn’t play for glory. She plays because she is in such intense anger and grief that she wants these games to punish her. That’s really compelling, but, unfortunately, Megan spent too long being an unlikable character to really get me invested in her, or the conflict.