Author: Kirsten Barger

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Epeolatry Book Review: Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

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Title: Murder by Memory
Author: Olivia Waite
Genre: sci-fi mystery
Publisher: tordotcom
Publication date: 18th March, 2025

Synopsis: A mind is a terrible thing to erase…

Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.

Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.

Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes…

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

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Title: The Daughters’ War
Author: Christopher Buehlma
Genre: action and adventure fantasy
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Publication date: 25th June, 2024

Synopsis: Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure from Christopher Buehlman, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief.

The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.

They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.

Now, our daughters take up arms.

Galva ― Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill ― has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.

The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted ― not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Fiasco, Uncharted Hearts Book 2 by Constance Fay

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Title: Fiasco: Uncharted Hearts, Book 2
Author: Constance Fay
Genre: Sci-Fi Romance
Publisher: Bramble
Publication date: 24th June 2024

Synopsis: Equal parts steamy interstellar romance and sci-fi adventure, Constance Fay’s FIASCO is a perfect wild romp amidst the stars.

Cynbelline Khaw is a woman of many names. She’s Generosity, a cultist who never quite fit in. She’s Bella, the daughter who failed to save her cousin’s life. And then there’s Cyn, the notorious bounty hunter who spaced a ship of slavers.

She’s exhausted, lonely, and on her very last legs―but then a new client offers her a job she can’t refuse: a bounty on the kidnapper who killed her cousin. All Cyn has to do is partner with the crew of the Calamity, a scouting vessel she encountered when she was living under a previous alias. One tiny little issue, she’s been given an additional bounty: deliver the oh-so-compelling medic, Micah Arora, to the treacherous Pierce Family or all her identities will be revealed, putting her estranged family in danger.

Hunting a kidnapper doesn’t usually mean accidentally taking your sexy new target to dinner at your parent’s house, a local mystic predicting you’ll have an increasingly large number of children, or being accompanied by a small flying lizard with a penchant for eating metal, but, as they field investigative hurdles both dangerous and preposterous, Cyn and Micah grow ever closer. When a violent confrontation reveals that everything Cyn thought about her past is wrong, she realizes that she has the power to change her future. The first part of that is making sure that Micah Arora is around to be a part of it.

 

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Epeolatry Book Review: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Title: Service Model
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Genre: Sci-fi
Release Date: June 4, 2024

Synopsis: Murderbot meets Redshirts in a delightfully humorous tale of robotic murder from the Hugo-nominated author of Elder Race and Children of Time.

To fix the world they must first break it, further.

Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service.

When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away.

Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose.

Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Charybdis by Suzanne Craig-Whytock

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​Title: Charybdis
Author: Suzanne Craig-Whytock
Genre: Psychological Thriller; Woman Sleuth
Publisher: Jane’s Studio Press
Date: 28th February, 2024

Synopsis: When Greta Randall stumbles across a rare volume of Victorian poetry in a local antique market, she could never have imagined that it would take her on a journey through time. The secrets she discovers along the way may shed light on the book’s mysterious young author, Louisa Duberger, but at what peril?

Award-winning writer Suzanne Craig-Whytock is the author of four previous novels, Smile, The Dome, The Seventh Devil, and The Devil You Know, and two short story collections, Feasting Upon The Bones and At The End Of It All, as well as the humour collection What Any Normal Person Would Do. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals, and she regularly publishes essays focused on life’s absurdities under the pen name ‘Mydangblog.’ She is also the Editor of DarkWinter Literary Magazine, an online journal which publishes short stories and poetry from both emerging and established writers, as well as the founder of DarkWinter Press and Baxter House Editions. Charybdis is her fifth novel.

Praise for Charybdis:

“Monsters come in many forms — from mythological jealousy to Brontean obsessive misfires of the mind. In Suzanne Craig-Whytock’s beautifully crafted literary mystery, the past and present are swept up in a whirlpool of their own making as a modern-day English literature student attempts to unravel the dark secrets and desires of an obscure Victorian Canadian poet.” Rod Carley, author of RUFF. Twice long-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima

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​Title: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Author: Ananda Lima
Genre: Horror Short Stories, Fantasy Anthologies, Contemporary Horror
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Date: 23rd July, 2024

Synopsis: Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry―Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima.

“An astounding new voice.” ―ERIC LaROCCA • “I love it so much.” ―KELLY LINK • “Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound.” ―JOHN KEENE • “Incredible. Truly wondrous.” ―KEVIN WILSON • “Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny.” ―GWEN KIRBY • “Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built.” ―JULIA FINE

At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.

Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging―and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.

With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”

A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!

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Epeolatry Book Review: Rogue Sequence by Zac Topping

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​Title: Rogue Sequence
Author: Zac Topping
Genre: Action Adventure
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Date: 4th June, 2024

Synopsis: It’s 2091 and independent contract companies around the world are producing genetically modified soldiers…to be sold to the highest bidders.

Ander Rade is a super-soldier, a genetically engineered living weapon, and has been dutifully following orders since he gave himself to Xyphos Industries’ Gene-Mod Program several years ago. But when a mission goes sideways, he’s captured, imprisoned, and forced into brutally violent fighting pits for the better part of the next decade…until agents from the Genetic Compliance Department of the United American Provinces appear in the visiting room.

Things have changed since Rade was captured. Shortly after his incarceration, the World Unity Council banned human genetic engineering and deemed all modified individuals a threat to society. Overnight, an entire subculture of people became outlaws simply for existing. But instead of leaving Rade locked behind bars, the GCD agents have come with an offer: Freedom in exchange for his help tracking down one of his former teammates from that ill-fated mission all those years ago.

It’s an offer Rade can’t refuse, but he soon realizes that the situation is far more volatile than anyone had anticipated, and is forced to take matters into his own hands as he tries to figure out whose side he’s really on, and why.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Tidal Creatures by Seanan McGuire

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Title: Tidal Creatures
Author: Seanan McGuire
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Publisher: Tordotcom
Publication Date: 4th June, 2024
Synopsis: New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire takes us back to the world of the award-winning Alchemical Journeys series in this action-packed follow-up to Middlegame and Seasonal Fears.

Every night, a Moon shines down on the Impossible City…

All across the world, people look up at the moon and dream of gods. Gods of knowledge and wisdom, gods of tides and longevity. Over time, some of these moon gods incarnated into the human world alongside the other manifest natural concepts. Their job is to cross the sky above the Impossible City—the heart of all creation—to keep it connected to reality.

And someone is killing them.

There are so many of them that it’s easy for a few disappearances to slip through the cracks. But they aren’t limitless.

In the name of the moon, the lunar divinities must uncover the roots of the plot and thwart the true goal of those behind these attacks—control of the Impossible City itself.

At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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