I tend to turn to McMaster for my romance reads when I’m on vacation. It’s not planned, it just always tends to happen that way. Her books are always fast, rather light despite the fantasy elements, and always enjoyable. “Heart of Fire” is no different on the score. We follow Freya, an outcast amongst her people for her mismatched eyes and the power she hides, who is desperately trying to care for an ailing father when the dreki, a type of dragon native to Iceland folklore, steals a ram she needs to survive. As the only person to ever challenge the dreki in his lair, he’s instantly intrigued and goes about pursuing Freya. McMaster uses their pursuit as a way to show the reader this new world she is introducing for her series. And, for the most part, she does a great job of teasing out the world building amongst a lot of steamy angst and tension. Until she just… stops?

“The Nine Minute Diner” is a fascinating concept—a novella that focuses on the brief moments before a fatal robbery in a diner from the perspective of the sixteen patrons there at the time. As each person gives their account of events, they explain to the police recorder how the events of their life brought them to that particular diner on that day just before the traumatic events occurred. It’s up to the reader to decide how reliable each narrator is when they both give their account of the crime, and the events of their life up to that moment. While each of the sixteen characters have a distinct personality, not all were necessary as it tended to spread the unifying incident between each character far too thin.

Harrow does a lovely job making the actual house that is Starling House become a living, breathing entity that seems to care for the unwanted things in Eden, like Opal and Arthur. Coiled up within the house is a mystery as to who the Starling’s are, and why they are so steadfast on never ever letting the coal company, run for generations by the Gravely family, have access to their land. But loneliness is an insatiable beast of its own, and when two lonely young adults find themselves in the same orbit, one small act of kindness unleashes the very thing the Wardens of Starling House have been tasked with keeping at bay for generations.

“Voided” has a super strong start: a skilled space fighter pilot is plucked from incarceration with the promise of freedom if she can complete a mining run that will help turn the tide of a war that their side is badly losing. In a nutshell, that’s what this book is about, or, what it starts out being about. The longer Nena works on this massive space ship, the more other elements come into play: the rights of sentient AI constructs, mysteries around what the commanders of this fleet are actually trying to accomplish, and a harrowing bargain with an ancient race that feels rather Faustian the more the reader learns.  All of those subplots get interwoven into a fast-paced military space odyssey that makes the world feel rich and full. “Voided” would absolutely scratch whatever itch a lover of hard science fiction could have. But, personally, all the plots that “Voided” attempts to address just needed more time to marinate for me.

I love a good family mystery that spans generations. Throw in the creepy, small-town vibes where everyone knows each other and keeps mum on the darker aspects of this small town locked in time, and you already have the makings of a very spooky, and atmospheric thriller. But then add some ghosts and unsolved murders on top of that? Perfection. Or, mostly perfection. In “The Sun Down Motel” the story goes between a flashback and flashforward narrative between Carly (the present) and Vivian (the past) to uncover the spooky goings on of Fell, New York, and the Sun Down Motel as a whole. Both Viv and Carly have fairly tragic lives, but the one thing Carly clings too after the loss of her mother, is finding out what happened to her aunt who disappeared in 1982. While, Vivian, desperate to find herself after her parents’ divorce, lands in Fell where she immediately gets sucked into the mystery of several murdered women, and the run-down motel she works at connection to all the dead girls.