NY: Berkley, 2008.
This is the second in Bowen’s most recent mystery series and it’s not bad — as long as you’re not expecting hard-boiled noir, shoot-outs, car chases, or the Mafia. Lady Georgiana of Rannoch is the half-sister of a duke and while she has the Swiss private school education and the social contacts, she has barely a shilling to her name.
NY: Baen Books, 2002.
This is, I think, the eleventh in the “Miles Vorkosigan” series, set a year after Miles’s marriage to the young widow, Ekaterin Vorsoisson, and they’re making a galaxy-wide honeymoon tour while their first two kids slowly incubate back home. (Pregnancy isn’t the dangerous physical trial it used to be.)
NY: Baen Books, 1998.
Over the life of this very enjoyable series, Miles Vorkosigan has seen action throughout the wormhole nexus, in one way or another. The major inhabited worlds — Cetaganda, Jackson’s Whole, and Earth itself, as well as his home world of Barrayar — have each had their own novels. The venue this time is Komarr,
NY: Baen Books, 1996.
If you’re a fan of the Miles Vorkosigan space-opera novels (and there are lots of them out there), you’ve gotten used to the essential psychological dichotomy between the necessarily proper and staid (relatively speaking) heir to the Barrayaran countship on one hand and the “Little Admiral” in charge of the Dendarii Mercenaries, who operates with the brakes and governors off. But this book constitutes a major change in Miles’s life.
NY: Soho Press, 2010.
The newly promoted 1st Lieut. Billy Boyle, special low-profile criminal investigator on the staff of his distant cousin, General Eisenhower, gets assigned to cases that are much different from those he would have drawn as a young police detective back in South Boston. This is his fifth case and it’s January 1944, only a few weeks since the end of his adventures in Northern Ireland.
NY: Baen, 1990.
By internal chronology, this is the fourth novel in the “Miles Vorkosigan” series but only the second one about Miles himself. In Warrior’s Apprentice, the young Miles — who is under four-foot-nine, with very brittle bones, as a result of a genetic-toxin attack on his pregnant mother — can’t meet the physical requirements for entrance to Barrayar’s military academy, so he goes off on his own in quest of adventure. And ends up, entirely accidentally, at the age of seventeen, with his very own mercenary fleet and a new, very different identity as “Admiral Naismith.”
NY: Soho Press, 2010.
This is the fourth outing for Lieut. Billy Boyle, special wartime criminal investigator for his distant cousin, Dwight Eisenhower, and this time — unlike his first three adventures — he ends up far from the front as well as far from home. But he’s still very close to the battle lines.
NY: Avalon, 1957.
Russell was well-known in the 1940s & ’50s as a writer of superior pulp science fiction (he won the first Hugo for a short story in 1955), but he never really quite made the first team. He’s not much read these days, and that’s rather a shame.
NY: Soho Press, 2007.
Billy Boyle was a young Boston cop, just promoted to detective, when the Pearl Harbor attack catapulted him into the army. He’s also (supposedly) a distant cousin of Gen. Eisenhower, and his intention in the first book of this entertaining series was to use that connection to land a nice, safe spot on the security detail at the War Department — but instead, he found himself at Uncle Ike’s headquarters in London, dodging air raids.
NY: Soho Press, 2006.
It’s always nice to discover a successful new mystery novelist, especially when the setting is also unusual. The title character here is a Boston Irish cop who is in his early twenties when the U.S. is swept into the War by the attack at Pearl Harbor, having just made detective a few days before.
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
