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1 week ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks
This week sees the 80th anniversary of V.E. Day, and here in the UK, there have been fly pasts and street parties (blighted by the weather, of course) to celebrate. Following on from the excellent Under a Fire Red Sky, published last month, Usborne Books has brought us another first-class children’s novel set in World War 2. Shrapnel Boys by Jenny Pearson is compelling from first page to last, and a fine addition to the genre.
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2 weeks ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks
Long-term readers of my reviews will know I’m a massive fan of the Rabbit Factor books by Antti Tuomainen. The books were a great blend of mirth, mystery, and math. The lead character was an actuary who combined crime solving with pedantic statistical accuracy. Two unlikely bedfellows that produced an impeccable read. Now, Tuomainen is back with The Burning Stones. There’s no actuary, but there is more murder; this time, the CEO of a successful sauna company.
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2 weeks ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks
Three people linked through time. A tale of human destruction across 200 years. This is the frame upon which Down in the Sea of Angels is woven. One strand opens on the eve of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, another in 2006, during the dot.com. The final strand takes place in 2106, after a climate crisis has ravaged the world. Each strand is linked by a jade teacup brought to San Francisco by Chinese immigrants, but what else joins these three stories through time?
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3 weeks ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks
When you’re in the fortunate position of being sent books to review, unexpected titles sometimes turn up on the doorstep. Under a Fire-Red Sky by Geraldine McCaughrean is well outside my usual science fiction-fantasy wheelhouse, but she’s an award-winning author, about whom I had heard lots but never read. I vowed to put that right, and I’m so glad I did. Under a Fire-Red Sky will be a likely contender for my book of the year. Our story opens in 1939 with Europe on the verge of war.
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1 month ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks |Jonathan H. Liu
I Am Raven is the follow-up to Alastair Chisholm’s I Am Wolf. It picks up almost immediately where the action left off. In this book, Chisholm reveals many answers to the questions posed in book one. We learn more about the Brann, Coll, and the world they inhabit. A new implacable villain appears. This is a direct follow-up to I Am Wolf and should not be read without reading that book first.
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1 month ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks
“Ten strangers. An old dark house. A killer picking them off one by one.” So starts the blurb of C.B. Everett’s The Other People. Throw into the mix a missing girl who needs to be saved and you have the recipe for a dark and compelling thriller. The Other People is a riff on the classic And Then There Were None format. Ten people wake up in an old stately home. A woman, Amanda, interrupts their dinner to tell them that they must save a girl from a serial killer.
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1 month ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks |Garth Sundem
“Ten strangers. An old dark house. A killer picking them off one by one.” So starts the blurb of C.B. Everett’s The Other People. Throw into the mix a missing girl who needs to be saved and you have the recipe for a dark and compelling thriller. The Other People is a riff on the classic And Then There Were None format. Ten people wake up in an old stately home. A woman, Amanda, interrupts their dinner to tell them that they must save a girl from a serial killer.
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1 month ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks |Tom Fassbender |Rory Bristol |Ken Denmead
Douglas Adams once made an excellent joke about telephone booth sanitizers – science fictional cleaners doing an important job that went unnoticed. Now, A.G. Rodriguez has given us Johnny Gomez, a janitor or “Space Broom” on an interplanetary cruise ship. He’s a man who spends his days deep in drudgery and alien excrement. When Johnny stumbles on a small “data-chit,” his life becomes dangerously interesting. The brown-stuff he’s wading through becomes more metaphorical but a lot more deadly.
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1 month ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks
All Better Now is the new YA novel from Neal Shusterman. As he has demonstrated with his Unwind and Scythe series, Shusterman is the master of hi-concept science fiction. In All Better Now, the premise is simple: What if the world was hit by another pandemic? More than that though, what would happen if surviving the pandemic made you happier? “Crown Royale” is sweeping the globe. It kills about 1 in 20 people, but those who survive experience utter contentment.
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1 month ago | 
geekdad.com | Robin Brooks |Jenny Bristol |Ken Denmead |Tom Fassbender
As Dissolution opens, Maggie wakes up in a hospital bed, next to a man who wants to hear her story. Her memory is hazy but she gradually pieces together what has happened to her. The mysterious man, Hassan, helped her break her husband out of a care home. The home, Hassan tells her, was not helping Stanley’s dementia but causing it. But where is Stanley now? In between Maggie’s revelations, we see snippets of Stanley’s early life.
