Shores of Night

Reviewed by Emilia Etherheart The third book in "The City of a Hundred Rows" series, this review is based on the electronic version supplied by Angry Robot. What has gone before ... Book One (City of Dreams and Nightmares) introduces our heroes - Tom, a street nick (urchin) and Kat, a fellow street nick but older, wiser and tougher. Tom gets lost in the lower levels of Thaiburley, the city of a hundred rows, and Kat is employed to return him to his rightful level. As they make their way across the city they find all is not well, uncovering plots against both the city and the Prime Master, leader of the city. Book Two (City of Hope and Despair) introduces a new enemy, the Soul Thief, a nightmare from Kat's childhood. We learn more of Kat's background, the political structure of the Heights, and how daily life works in the under-city. At the end of the book the two companions have separated, Kat staying in Thaiburley and Tom going north to the Citadel of Thaiss. Bo...

The first of the Temeraire novels by Naomi Novik is, if I were forced to use one word to describe it, charming. Set in a well imagined world, during the Napoleonic War, where dragons coexist and are trained by humans (or maybe its the other way around) to serve as messengers, fighting dragons and so on and so forth the novel takes a naval captain and promptly drops him into an alien situation when he captures a French frigate and discovers a dragon egg in the hold. The characters are well realised and the dragons, in particular, are beautifully written and well wrought. The relationships they have with their riders is particularly interesting and Novik's dynamic is well thought out, if perhaps slightly flawed. The conflicting natures of the dragon corp and the navy are well illustrated and set out, with the navy perhaps winning out slightly over the dragon riders in terms of discipline and kindness. If the book does have a flaw its that the twist is too obvious; it really didn...

Back to work today (so naturally I'm blogging... perhaps not my wisest move). I managed to do a little reading over my break and thought I'd post some reviews (as much to get more posts on the site as anything else). First up we have Victorian Undead 2: Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula (with a slight detour through Jekyl and Hyde), an alternate Victorian world where the great detective deals with various undead threats (the first series had a zombie outbreak in London with Moriaty as its mastermind). Ian Edginton has a fairly good handle on Holmes and Watson's voices and his world building is logical and ties in to the first miniseries. Importantly his Holmes joins the investigation of Dracula's appearance in Britain with a sensible reason for doing so rather than simply being shoehorned in, and Edginton ably contrasts the logical methods that Holmes employs and Van Helsing's faith based perspective. It's not perfect, there are places where the narrative jars a li...