Harold Coyle’s Trial by Fire is about a…. second Mexican-American war? Uhh? Oh, it was published in 1992. That explains everything. Besides the (long) setup and (shorter) conflict, we get one of the most controversial cheap thriller characters beginning here: Female infantry commander Nancy Kozak, who has a less than ideal reputation among Coyle’s readers. Sadly, the book once against reinforces my view of Coyle as a one-hit wonder whose Team Yankee, magisterial as it was, could not be exceeded or equaled by any other book by the same author. It’s a weird anti-Goldilocks mixture of either too ..read more

Blood of the Ancients Like Jerry Ahern, John Schettler decided to take the Kirov series into outright science fiction. Gone are the purely terrestrial squabbles, replaced with sci-fi spaceship battles against aliens and, in this case, an attempt at a John Carter of Mars Homage in Blood of the Ancients. Although much of the book takes place on Earth as the ancient “Sons of Ares” change the past in secret alternate history, this is obviously John Carter through and through. The issue is that Schettler is not the most inherently suited to write this kind of flowery planetary romance. It would be ..read more

Midnight Ops Midnight Ops is the latest Duncan Hunter book by Mark Hewitt . It is also not just the worst in the series but the worst “thriller” novel that I’ve read. Ever. At least as of this post. And I do not mean this lightly. Having read literally hundreds of these books, I’ve reached the point. So the Amazon blurb mentions a defecting F-22 that flew to North Korea as the MacGuffin. Well you will be “glad” to hear that it takes two thirds of the book to even reach that point at all. And then it goes back to what it was previously doing. What was it doing? Political rants. I’d say it’s lik ..read more

Resplendent A collection of previously published short stories, Resplendent is Stephen Baxter at both his best and worst. It covers the Xeelee universe from start to finish, in every time and every era. The good news is that Baxter gets to show off his worldbuilding. The bad news is that Baxter gets… to…. show… off… his… exposition. Besides the infodumps, one big problem is that what the main characters do has to be ‘relevant’ somehow. You can’t just have Bill the monopole gunner getting killed, he has to fire the shot which changes the tide somehow. This Great Man-ism is at odds with the weav ..read more

Northern Fury: The Nordkapp Affair (note: I got permission to read this book pre-release for the sake of a review). This fairly short novella to the Northern Fury epic is a side story about a Norwegian ferry at the beginning of the war. It has to try and evacuate people from what could become a warzone (spoiler alert: It does). While a simple plot, it’s a very suitable one. One thing I particularly liked was keeping the “camera” focused entirely on the ship itself and a running tally of its status. Whereas a lot of “Big War Thrillers” understandably show the big war, something as focused as th ..read more

Clue As proof that movies based on bizarre IPs are not a new thing, 1985 saw the release of a film based on the board game Clue. Thankfully the board game has a basic plot of “murder mystery”, which the movie uses. It ends up killing a lot more than Mr. Boddy. This movie is not “good” by any means, but it falls into the category of “a lot better than it could have been” and is perfectly fun for a time waster. Its multiple ending gimmick at least tries to be experimental and interesting (it was intended to have different theaters show different ‘definitive’ endings). And the John Morris score i ..read more

Super Mirage 4000 Finally translated into English, this is a look at what was to France what the Avro Arrow was to Canada, the TSR-2 was to Britain, the Lavi was to Israel, and the Osorio tank was to Brazil. (Or what the AMX-32 and AMX-40 tanks were to… France). It’s what you’d expect from a small coffee table book whose sources came from inside the program: A combination of knowledge and bias, mixed with tidbits without being the deepest. This isn’t a bad thing if you know what you’re getting into, and the plane is certainly worthy of such a book ..read more

Rust Skies TK Blackwood delivers another World War III treat in Rust Skies. I loved the unusual-for-Fuldapocalyptic standards location in Turkey (which was, after all, one of the few direct NATO-USSR borders). I also liked the timely political dilemma about an enhanced American military draft, which is both plausible and interesting. It does stuff a lot of plot and characters into a small package but rarely overwhelms and never feels bad. The big “problem” is that it ends on a cliffhanger. Oh well! I’ve done it myself, so I guess I can’t complain ..read more

Nothing Lasts Forever Sidney Sheldon’s Nothing Lasts Forever is the worst book of his I’ve read since The Other Side of Midnight. The story of female doctors in a California hospital, romance, drama, and of course murder, it has all of his weaknesses but very few of his strengths. Namely it’s overloaded with the “pop” part of “pop epic” while totally lacking the “epic” part. It’s less pretentious than Midnight but otherwise has the same problems. His female main characters are simply wicked or shallow instead of ambitious and powerful. That combined with low stakes and a decided lack of intere ..read more

One of several things responsible for my slowdown in reading, writing and blogging has been the Conjurer mod for Noita (previously reviewed here). The problem with Noita was that it had excellent and complex interactions, an incredibly customizable magic system, and more… thrown into a punishing roguelike. Even respawning mods didn’t really solve the latter problem for me, as it just still felt like luck and brute force. Enter Conjurer, which turns the entire game into a silly sandbox. It’s great for getting the hang of wand mechanics… and just seeing what happens when you pour lava on things ..read more