kgbooklog

Carrie Vaughn, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand
Grand Central (2009) ISBN: 0-446-19953-2
Score: 4

The fifth Kitty Norville book, in which she goes to Las Vegas to elope. As usual, she does a show, runs into people who don't like what she is, and things get messy. A good volume of this series, though I thought the resolution was a bit too convenient (I would be surprised if the characters responsible are still alive when the next book starts). It didn't end with a cliffhanger as I was expecting; it seems that the publication delay of this book was so the events would still be fresh in your memory when reading the sequel (being published next month).

Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
Knopf (2008) ISBN: 978-0-307-26886-0
Score: 0

The first chapter introduces us to a post-apocalypse world and the members of the Haulage and HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (who are just as interesting and cool and exciting as they sound) as they're hired to save the world (again). Unfortunately, chapter two was a series of anecdotes from the main character's childhood (he seems to have grown up in an alt-hist 20th century), and it looks like the rest of the chapters are more of the same (I assume eventually the main narrative catches up with the first chapter). While the anecdotes were somewhat amusing, they didn't quite add up to a story, much less the story promised by the first chapter. I really should stop trying to read SF published by non-SF imprints.

Next Book: Michelle Sagara, Cast in Fury