A. A. Aguirre’s (Ann and Andres Aguirre’s) Bronze Gods is a little off in some ways while being immensely interesting in others. Its first issue is… structural I guess. There’s this weird periodic absence of descriptive text, as if whole paragraphs of background flavor have been spontaneously excised with little regard to the holes left behind. The other complication is that the protagonists feel as though they’re being railroaded into an unnaturally deep relationship, which ends up particularly hard to ignore considering this has been written by a husband/wife team. Those two problems aside the book is a fairly engrossing window into a new setting.
The fifth book in M.L.N. Hanover’s (Daniel Abraham’s) Black Sun’s Daughter series, Graveyard Child, is just as entertainingly unique as the previous four. It just has a certain flavor, a dash of the bizarre depicted in a remarkably believable manner that ends up working on every level. That all the previous plot points have been tied together into a basically complete whole here is just icing on the cake.
E. S. Moore‘s Kat Redding series (To Walk the Night, Tainted Night, Tainted Blood, & Blessed By A Demon’s Mark) is rather severely flawed. The first book is not bad, merely average vampire-centered urban fantasy. Even so it has some annoyances in its penchant for branding (Honda DN-01) and the overuse of “I” coupled with a staccato sentence structure; “I did this. Then I did that. All the while I was thinking about what I would do when I got to where I meant to go.“. Just distracting. The second and third books however… those are actively unpleasant to read.