Black Gate

I first met Tina Connolly at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego in 2011. She was charming, witty, and very entertaining — precisely the kind of person you want to follow around to all the good parties. I tried this enthusiastically for a while, until someone from the con committee patiently explained to me that this was called “stalking” and was, like, illegal.

Fortunately, Tina Connolly is also a very talented writer. And reading her novels (I’ve discovered) is exactly like hanging out with the author at a great party. The same sparkling wit, the same penetrating intelligence. Except, unlike at parties, I can pause the conversation to look up words without looking stupid.

Tina’s first novel Ironskin was an historical fantasy set in an alternate version of early 1900s England, and was nominated for a Nebula Award last year. The sequel Copperhead has finally arrived, and it looks just as delightful as the first volume.

Helen Huntingdon is beautiful — so beautiful she has to wear an iron mask.

Six months ago her sister Jane uncovered a fey plot to take over the city. Too late for Helen, who opted for fey beauty in her face — and now has to cover her face with iron so she won’t be taken over, her personality erased by the bodiless fey.

Not that Helen would mind that some days. Stuck in a marriage with the wealthy and controlling Alistair, she lives at the edges of her life, secretly helping Jane remove the dangerous fey beauty from the wealthy society women who paid for it. But when the chancy procedure turns deadly, Jane goes missing — and is implicated in a murder.

Meanwhile, Alistair’s influential clique Copperhead — whose emblem is the poisonous copperhead hydra — is out to restore humans to their “rightful” place, even to the point of destroying the dwarvven who have always been allies.

Helen is determined to find her missing sister, as well as continue the good fight against the fey. But when that pits her against her own husband — and when she meets an enigmatic young revolutionary — she’s pushed to discover how far she’ll bend society’s rules to do what’s right. It may be more than her beauty at stake. It may be her honor… and her heart.

Copperhead was published by Tor Books on October 15th. It is 318 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover, and $11.99 for the digital edition.

You’d think that, after nearly 40 years of collecting science fiction and fantasy, I’d be accustomed to looking past the cover while on the hunt of promising new books.

Naaah. Good covers are underrated, and great covers can tell you a more than a simple plot summary. And Watcher of the Dark has a very intriguing cover indeed, featuring a fabulously detailed Lovecraftian horror dominating a bone-strewn alien landscape, while a sinister blind man looms over the whole affair, plotting his evil… wait a minute.

Is that blind guy the hero, exorcist Jeremiah Hunt? My. He’s definitely got a certain style (click the image at right for a bigger version.) This is even more intriguing than I thought.

New Orleans was nearly the death of Jeremiah Hunt, between a too-close brush with the FBI and a chilling, soul-searing journey through the realm of the dead that culminated with a do-or-die confrontation with Death himself.

Hunt survived, but found no peace. When he performs an arcane ritual to reclaim the soul of the magically gifted, beautiful women who once saved him, he must flee the law once again, to the temporary sanctuary of Los Angeles, city of angels.

In L.A., Hunt must contend with Carlos Fuentes, who sees in the blind exorcist a means to obtain the mystical key that opens the gates of Hell. Fuentes knows Hunt’s weakness is his loyalty – to the woman he loves and to another supernaturally gifted friend – and threatens to torture them in order to get Hunt help complete his dreadful quest.

…

Read More Read More