FURIES OF CALDERON, BY JIM BUTCHER

Jim Butcher, the author of the Harry Dresden urban fantasies, has created an astonishing new series with wonderful characters. I generally don't like medieval fantasies, but I couldn't put this one down. On Alera people can harness the elemental powers of air, wind, earth, fire, metal and water, in forces called furies. Almost everyone controls at least one fury. Tavi, an apprentice shepherd, is a freak--he has no furies at all. It's especially galling since the harsh life in the mountainside valley of Calderon depends on furycrafting. Tavi and his uncle Bernard, the Steadholter of Bernardholt, are searching for lost sheep when they are attacked by the Calerdon's hereditary enemy, the barbarian Marat. The gravely wounded Bernard is carried back to his Steadholt by his fury. Tavi's aunt Isana, a powerful watercrafter, heals Bernard, but nearly dies herself.

Tavi has to rely on wits and strength to help his Steadholt fight the Marat, who grossly outnumber them. With his courage he gains aid from Doroga, a breakaway Marat tribal leader, and by the end of the book he and Doroga's daughter Kitai are unwilling allies. In an awards ceremony Tavi, his uncle, his aunt Isana, and Doroga are highly honored by the First Lord Gauis Sextus. (But everything Gauis does has political overtones...)

I've finished the second book so far, and can't wait to get the third.

EARTH MADE OF GLASS, by JOHN BARNES

In the 24th century man has created over a thousand new cultures in space, most of them artificial, idealized recreations of extinct Earth ones. Almost all the good real estate is gone, and new cultures battle for marginally habitable worlds. One of these is Briand, with heavy gravity, extreme heat, and a poisonous atmosphere. The only land masses available are Greenland sized islands which rise up into breathable air.

But the real hellishness of Briand is not its climate, it's the ethnic violence of its two cultures, the resurrected pseudo “Maya” and the poet culture of the Tamil.Although the two cultures are viciously opposed, they have each created beautiful cities. It's as though Bosnians built the Sun Palace, and the Serbs the Taj Mahal. A volcanic explosion has destroyed most of the Maya space and they are wedged into part of the largest Tamil city; acts of violence are more common here than in any other inhabited world

Into this volatile situation come Giraut and Margaret Leones, career diplomats who struggle to keep the planet from wrenching apart into outright war. They soak up each culture and entreat each side to seek peace. Margaret and Giraut's marriage is similarly being wrenched apart and neither can communicate with each other. As the Science Fiction Chronicle wrote, “the ending is both surprising and unsurprising, and to understand that paradox you'll have to read this exciting novel for yourself.” The novel is achingly beautiful and one which will remain with me for a long time.

ANONYMOUS REX, by Eric Garcia

Raymond's Chandler's Simple Art of Murder. “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Or, down these means streets a dinosaur must go. In this quick-paced witty novel, Vincent Rubio is a noir-style California private eye with a bad herb habit. He's also a Velociraptor in disguise, one of the 16 species of dinosaurs which have survived the great extinction and insured their future existence by secretly moving into the human world. In a wildly complicated plot Rubio must avenge his dead partner and solve the murder of Raymond McBride, a prominent Carnatour entertainment mogul. There's a dame with secrets, lethal minions, forbidden love between different dinosaur species, and a terrible basil addiction to fight. Garcia has created a wonderful world about hiding and coming out, and the one regret is that he can sustain it in only three books.

INSIDE JOB, by Connie Willis

In the novella *Inside Job,* Connie Willis effervesces with wit and humor. The tale of a professional skeptic, Rob, his beautiful researcher, Kildy, and the medium they hope to debunk illuminates the whole credulous Hollywood landscape which surges after each new psychic offering. Willis shines a light over the addictions of those false hopes, from aura cleansing to psychic liposuction to prior-life chiropractic (the present back pains are due to trauma suffered working at the Pyramids or Stonehenge, don't you know).

Rob spends his professional life battling these swindlers, and he offers amazing insights in the history of various forms of spiritualistic fraudulence. For example, Uri Geller, the 1970's psychic who could supposedly bend spoons with his mental powers, was exposed as a fraud--by Johnny Carson, on the Tonight Show. Carson had been a stage magician in his early career, which was something Geller forgot.

Then a funny thing happens on the way to debunk the medium--and it's a wry, intelligent twist negotiated with expertise and poignancy. The writing is as clear here as a stream in a Japanese garden, with each curve and stone placed so perfectly the effort is invisible. *Inside Job* has become an instant favorite of mine.

I wish the same could be said of Willis' *D.A.*, which seems to be a short story published alone in novella form, with the same dust jacket artist as *Inside Job.* *D.A.* is a mildly amusing little work which might elicit a smile in a short story collection while you thumbed over it for something better. The illustrations, which appear to all be drawings of Willis herself, are so cutesy they gag. I'm hoping she only wanted to take a little breather from her normally thoughtful, more serious output. This is the writer, after all, who took five years writing the dark novel *Doomsday Book,* about the Black Plague. But no one who ever met Willis through *D.A* would be compelled to seek any more of her writing. Back to the grindstone for you, Connie, and please create something special again, like *Inside Job.*

TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG, by Connie Wills

Fifty years in the future, Ned Henry, an exhausted time travel researcher, desperately needs to escape obsessive billionaire heiress Lady Schrapnell. Ever since Lady Schrapnell discovered that her great-great-great-great grandmother “Tossie” Tocelyn Mering's life had been changed forever by a visit to Coventry Cathedral she has crusaded to rebuild it down to the smallest detail. The original Cathedral was destroyed by fire in a German bombing on November 14, 1940 In her relentless drive to recreate the immense structure, she donates millions of dollars to the time time research department of Oxford and then brutally co-opts the researchers into multiple time trips scouring history for the cathedrals' lost relics.

Ned gets sent to the Victorian era to recuperate briefly, but he doesn't get any rest. After a trip up the Thames in the Jerome K. Jerome manner, he rendezvous with another time-lagged researcher.. The pair endeavor to locate Lady Schrapnell's latest quarry, the bishop's bird stump. It's a hideous wrought-iron sculpture, but it's authentic, and Lady S. must have it.

. The search for the sculpture, making sure Tossie stays on the right path to meet her future husband, and incidentally preventing the collapse of the space-time continuum never overwhelm the increasingly sleep-deprived researchers. Lady S. has scheduled a huge consecration ceremony and the pair's window for return is closing.

Willis combines a time travel Victorian comedy of manners with a love story and mystery. Her powerful narration blends all these elements into a finely polished triumphant whole