There are certain settings that present a higher difficulty level for authors. Not that it’s easy to write a book even when the setting lends its heft to the narrative, but an old Victorian house looming behind iron gates for a horror story or a glittering high-rise for a locked room mystery certainly do some …

At this point it’s hard to write a review of a T. Kingfisher novel—not because of the pace of publication, though that is breakneck (four books this year! Four!), and not because of the quality of the prose, which is unwaveringly compelling, or even the narratives, which are consistently innovative. It’s the rare combination of …

Grappling with the philosophical reality of clones is a trope as old as sci-fi. Teaming up with them comes up a lot. Killing them, too. But outsourcing killing your clones to another clone is a new one, and with a book a fun as Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf, I’m. Here. …

Anji Kills a King wastes absolutely no time. With a title like that there’s no reason to beat around the bush, but Evan Leikam doesn’t even bother with setting the scene before we’re watching Anji coping with cleanup and escape. It’s bold, it’s striking, and it makes for a pulse-pounding introduction to the land of …

Every time a new Robert Jackson Bennett book comes out, I read it way too fast and then feel something I mostly otherwise feel after eating an entire bag of Cadbury mini-eggs: not regret—never!—but longing to return to the start, to experience the whole thing over again. I want to have both the anticipation and …

It’s not really the done thing, but in talking about The River Has Roots, the first offering from Amal El-Mohtar since she co-authored This Is How You Lose the Time War with Max Gladstone, I have to first at least mention Margaret Atwood. Or really, I have to mention Atwood’s famous “Spelling” poem, which so …

Adam S. Leslie, you’ve written quite a book. Lost in the Garden is like a dream I had and forgot, and then Leslie went and excavated it. I don’t know how he did it, but this is whimsy without twee. It explodes the manic pixie dream girl trope without doing harm to the eponymous girl: …

You know the drill. You drew your weird cousin in the family Secret Santa, but all you know is she likes books, and now it’s too late and/or awkward to ask her for specific titles, because shouldn’t you know more about your own cousin? (No. She is full of secrets on purpose.) As a high-ranking …

Ever wanted to ride a hurricane without leaving your home? That’s kind of the experience of reading The Sky on Fire, both figuratively and, in a couple of instances, also literally. This is a pulse-pounding novel that never stops chasing bigger and bigger storms, beginning with a fugitive hunt but somehow escalating from there to …

We love to see a good old fashioned space spook-em-up. It’s the foundation of many, many franchises across all types of media, and Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes draws from these predecessors while still managing to tread new ground in a skin-crawlingly fun way. As Geekly Inc.’s resident mystery lover (really I just love to …