Category Archives: Books

The Malevolent Seven – Sebastien de Castell

Irreverent, foul-mouthed fun is the order of the day with Sebastien de Castell’s The Malevolent Seven, an action-packed fantasy romp in which a mismatched group of mercenary wonderists (i.e. dangerous, largely unhinged wizards) find themselves in the unlikely position of having to save their world. And not even getting paid! After their last mission goes spectacularly, messily wrong, sort-of-friends Cade Ombra and Corrigan Blight take on a new job that they hope will keep them out of trouble for a little while. Recruiting a handful of fellow war mages (and a dog…ok, a jackal) along the way, little do they know that they’re actually going to be facing up against appalling odds, bargaining with angels and demons, and generally getting caught up in the machinations of the powerful beings that battle eternally over the mortal realm.

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Terror World – Cath Lauria

The second novel in Aconyte Books’ Zombicide Invader range (zombies in space!), Cath Lauria’s Terror World offers another fun, horror-tinged slab of sci-fi action which sees a disparate, multi-species team brought together to investigate an ancient distress signal on a remote world. In true SF zombie fashion, when they arrive on Sik-Tar the team discovers an ancient spaceship full of strange mysteries and unanswered questions, which soon turns into a deathtrap when the long-dead bodies of the original crew start coming back to life in horrifying fashion. Before long, what began as a scientific mission becomes a frantic scramble for survival in the face of rampaging alien-mold-monsters (otherwise known as Xenos) and a fracturing team.

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Silver Nitrate – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexican horror movies, golden age cinema and Nazi occultism combine to great effect in Silver Nitrate, another fantastic novel from prolific, genre-hopping author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. In 90s Mexico City, horror movie-aficionado Montserrat is a sound engineer fighting to keep her place in the male-dominated industry, and Tristán is a washed-up soap actor struggling to find work in the wake of a tragic accident. When the two friends meet once-famous horror movie director Abel Urueta, it doesn’t take much for them to agree to help him complete an unfinished film of his, the ‘lost’ movie that essentially ended – and maybe cursed – his career. As they learn more about the origins of the film and its occult subject matter, and the other parties originally involved in it, they find themselves caught up in a dangerous new world where film and ritual combine.

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Ascension – Nicholas Binge

With Ascension – published by Harper Voyager – Nicholas Binge has gone big and delivered an epic, cinematic experience, a speculative thriller blending big ideas and intense personal stakes. Told in epistolary format by way of somewhat disjointed letters written by the protagonist – Harold Tunmore – to his niece Harriet, it’s the tale of a man both losing his mind and finding himself. A renowned physicist, among other things, Harold is recruited by a shadowy organisation to assist with a secretive scientific project: a vast, impossible mountain has appeared out of nowhere and a group of brilliant minds are tasked with understanding what it is, how it can possibly exist, and what its implications might be. As they scale its towering sides in search of answers, it exerts an inexorable pull on each of them, testing them in ways they couldn’t expect and placing them in danger they couldn’t imagine.

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Have You Decided On Your Question – Lindsey Croal

Out now from Shortwave Publishing, Lindsey Croal’s novelette (somewhere between a short story and a novella) Have You Decided On Your Question plays out a Sliding Doors-esque ‘What If’ scenario to a darkly logical conclusion. In a not-so distant future Edinburgh, Zoe reluctantly agrees to visit AltRealTech – or ART – for a ‘personalised therapeutic experience’, a technological simulation that allows her to revisit a moment from her past and experience what might have been. Initially suspicious of her housemate’s assurance that it will help her out of the slump she’s currently in, that first session soon snowballs into an obsession with the life and love she could have had, leading Zoe down a dark and dangerous path.

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Velvet Was the Night – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Set in Mexico City in the 70s, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s historical noir Velvet Was the Night – her seventh novel, released in 2021 – is tale of two very different people struggling for identity in a city wracked by political turmoil. In the wake of disrupted protests and violence on the streets, tensions in Mexico City are running high. When Maite, an unhappy secretary who spends her free time reading romantic comics and collecting records (and occasionally stealing little trinkets from her neighbours), agrees to feed her neighbour’s cat for a few days, little does she realise the peril she’ll soon be in, or what it will do to her. Dangerous men are looking for her neighbour, Leonora, and one of them – a Hawk named Elvis, who prefers music to violence – finds himself drawn to Maite even as he struggles to understand his role, and who he wants to be.

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Dragonfire – James Swallow

The follow-up to 2022’s Firewall, James Swallow’s Dragonfire is his second novel in Aconyte Book’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell range of high-tech thrillers, and another gripping, action-packed page turner. Set after the events of both Firewall and the game Ghost Recon: Wildlands (specifically the ‘Operation Watchman’ mission, according to the author’s note), it sees Sam Fisher sent into North Korea on a typically high-risk mission to prevent a dangerous weapon from falling into the wrong hands, only for the mission to go badly wrong leaving Sam captured by ruthless enemies and disavowed by his own people. Ignoring orders from a Fourth Echelon wracked by political manoeuvring, Sam’s daughter Sarah risks her own life to bring him back, and between them the two Fishers start to unveil a plot that threatens to destabilise the global status quo.

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Untamed Shore – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Originally released in 2020 on a small press (Agora Books), Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s fifth novel now has a much-deserved wider publication (in the UK via Jo Fletcher Books), giving more readers the opportunity to enjoy this dark, slow-burn noir set in Baja California. Viridiana is a dreamer, determined to find her way out of her dull life in Desengaño and into something brighter, worried that if she doesn’t then she’ll find herself swallowed up by the tedium of her family and small-town life. When she begins working for a trio of wealthy American tourists, she’s quickly swept up in the glamour and romance of their lives, enchanted by the possibilities that life with them might offer. When one of the Americans dies though, Viridiana finds herself tangled up in a dangerous game that she’s not sure she’s prepared for, and forced to choose who she really wants to be.

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Secrets in Scarlet – edited by Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells

Leaving Arkham behind and venturing out into the wider world, Aconyte Books’ Arkham Horror anthology Secrets in Scarlet – edited by Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells – brings together nine authors with globetrotting tales of occult adventure, ancient mysteries and sinister clandestine organisations. Following government agents, artefact hunters, art thieves and more, these nine stories gradually build up a picture of competing agencies, cults and secret societies all searching for objects with the potential to unlock terrible powers, though whether to use those powers or prevent them from falling into the wrong hands remains to be seen. Some stories feature protagonists actively involved in this dangerous search, while others are merely caught in the middle, but one thing unites them all – the consequences of failure are utterly deadly.

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The Lies of the Ajungo – Moses Ose Utomi

Moses Ose Utomi’s fantasy debut The Lies of the Ajungo is a short, beautiful, heart-rending novella set in an Africa-inspired world of magic, monsters and manipulation. In the city of Tutu’s birth, the City of Lies, everyone aged 13 or older must sacrifice their tongue in exchange for a pittance of water from the powerful Ajungo Empire, enough to keep the city just about alive. Days before his 13th birthday, Tutu bravely ventures out from the city in search of water, determined to return a hero and save his ailing mother. Out in the Forever Desert he meets unexpected friends and dangerous enemies, and grows into himself as a man. The truths he learns, however, reveal the true darkness behind the City of Lies and the realities of the Ajungo.

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