Books read, April 2011

[ellarien]

C. J. Cherryh, Betrayer (Foreigner 4.3) -- Always good to spend time with Bren Cameron and friends^H^H^H associates, but one would have liked a little more resolution for the end of the trilogy, and I really hope the (other) aliens put in an appearance before too many more books go by -- it's been six, now, with only occasional reminders that they exist.

Jane Lindskold, Nine Gates -- Chinese-flavored fantasy, middle book of a trilogy. Intriguing and reasonably satisfying; if there's a giant plot hole I haven't spotted it yet.

Seanan McGuire, second of the October Daye series, with mysterious killings in a fearie-owned software company. Diverting travel reading, not very deep. (It's on the e-reader and I'm too lazy to go check the title; Artficial something, I think.)

Michelle West, City of Night, second of the House Wars series. Which I haven't quite finished yet, but I'm only a few pages from the end. I'm a little frustrated with this series; I've been waiting since (I think) 2004 to find out what happened to Jewel Markess and her den *after* her thread was unceremoniously dropped in the last volume of the Sun Sword series, and instead we get, apparently, three fat volumes of backstory about their childhood and adolescence, with this volume having a fair bit of overlap with events in Hunter's Death. Still, it's an engaging enough story, though the suspense is somewhat lacking given that we already know pretty much who was alive ten years later and who wasn't.

Barbara Hambly, Dead and Buried, a welcome return to the Benjamin January series of murder mysteries set in the free colored community of 1830s New Orleans. In this one, the body of an old friend of January's (white) friend Hannibal mysteriously turns up in the coffin of a colored man.


Also I finally made it to the end of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, which was ... odd. Pages and pages and pages of (quite powerful) description of a dead body sitting undiscovered overnight, after most of a book of meandering anecdotes leading up to that moment, and then -- wham bam happy ending in about two pages.