Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of this before. LibraryThing, a free personal library management site, has been around for a while. I believe it even predates GoodReads, but it wasn’t as flashy or as easy to use, so it didn’t take off as well. But you know, it’s still around and constantly improving its game. In some ways, it’s better than GR, now that the great Zon has taken over. Signing up is free, and the platform has gotten much easier to use, though still a little difficult to navigate, in comparison.
Anyway, earlier this year, they started Early Reviewers, a new program where authors and publishers can offer new titles to reviewers anywhere up to six months after publication. This month we have only one title on offer, but snap it up. It’s a good one!
Phoenix Precinct by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Humans and elves, dwarves and gnomes, wizards and warriors all live and do business in the thriving, overcrowded port city of Cliff’s End, to say nothing of the tourists and travelers who arrive by land and sea, passing through the metropolis on matters of business or pleasure—or on quests. The hard-working, under-appreciated officers of the Cliff’s End Castle Guard work day and night to maintain law and order as best they can.
A fire in the neighboring city-state of Barlin has resulted in hundreds of refugees pouring into Cliff’s End, forcing the creation of a new neighborhood—Albinton, which everyone calls “New Barlin”—and a new police precinct—Phoenix Precinct. Violence against the refugees is on the rise. Lieutenants Danthres Tresyllione and Torin ban Wyvald are called to the latest act of brutality, which has resulted in a vicious murder. But what appears to be a simple hate crime turns out to be far more complicated, as Danthres and Torin’s investigation leads them to corruption in the Castle Guard—and in the castle itself!
An all-new adventure of the Cliff’s End Castle Guard!
Keith R.A. DeCandido is a white male in his late forties, approximately two hundred pounds. He was last seen in the wilds of the Bronx, New York City, though he is often sighted in other locales. Usually he is armed with a laptop computer, which some have classified as a deadly weapon. Through use of this laptop, he has inflicted more than fifty novels, as well as an indeterminate number of comic books, nonfiction, novellas, and works of short fiction on an unsuspecting reading public. Many of these are set in the milieus of television shows, games, movies, and comic books, among them Star Trek, Alien, Cars, Summoners War, Doctor Who, Supernatural, World of Warcraft, Marvel Comics, and many more.
We have received information confirming that more stories involving Danthres, Torin, and the city-state of Cliff’s End can be found in the novels Dragon Precinct, Unicorn Precinct, Goblin Precinct, Gryphon Precinct, and the forthcoming Phoenix Precinct and Manticore Precinct, as well as the short-story collections Tales from Dragon Precinct and the forthcoming More Tales from Dragon Precinct. His other recent crimes against humanity include A Furnace Sealed, the debut of a new urban fantasy series taking place in DeCandido’s native Bronx; the Alien novel Isolation; the Marvel’s Tales of Asgard trilogy of prose novels starring Marvel’s versions of Thor, Sif, and the Warriors Three; short stories in the anthologies Aliens: Bug Hunt, Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, The Best of Bad-Ass Faeries, The Best of Defending the Future, TV Gods: Summer Programming, X-Files: Trust No One, Nights of the Living Dead, the award-winning Planned Parenthood benefit anthology Mine!, the two Baker Street Irregulars anthologies, and Release the Virgins!; and articles about pop culture for Tor.com and on his own Patreon.
If you see DeCandido, do not approach him, but call for backup immediately. He is often seen in the company of a suspicious-looking woman who goes by the street name of “Wrenn,” as well as several as-yet-unidentified cats. A full dossier can be found at DeCandido.ne
KRAD: Aleta lothLathna was just supposed to be a guest star in a single story, “Catch and Release” in Tales from Dragon Precinct. I was rather caught off guard to realize that she was going to pretty much force herself to become a major supporting character.
KRAD: One of the things I put into Mermaid Precinct to set Phoenix Precinct up was to have a population influx of refugees from Barlin, which suffered a major fire that displaced a chunk of its population. While the difficulties in integrating the refugees into Cliff’s End was a subplot in Mermaid, it’s front and center in Phoenix, and is inspired by anti-immigrant sentiment that you’ve seen throughout history, from ancient Greeks referring to non-Greeks as “barbarians” to the way Italian, Irish, and Asian immigrants were treated in this country when they first got here (it’s not widely discussed, but the biggest single mass lynching in American history wasn’t of African-Americans, but of Italians in New Orleans in 1891) to recent poor treatments of American immigrants who are Muslim or who come from Latin America.
KRAD: I have three other original series running. One is an urban fantasy set in New York that features monster hunters called Coursers. There’s one novel, A Furnace Sealed, with Book 2, Feat of Clay, due out next year, one novella, the Systema Paradoxa book All-the-Way House, and short stories in Liar Liar, Bad Ass Moms, and Devilish and Divine
. One is a cycle of urban fantasy short stories set in Key West that involve rock music, SCUBA diving, Norse gods, folklore, and beer drinking, the first batch of which were in the collection Ragnarok and Roll: Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet, and more of which will be out next year in Ragnarok and a Hard Place: More Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet. And I’ve written one novel (The Case of the Claw), three novellas (Avenging Amethyst, Undercover Blues, Secret Identities), and three short stories (in With Great Power, The Side of Good/The Side of Evil, and Tales of Capes and Cowls) in the Super City Cops series, about cops in a city filled with superheroes—doing for superheroes what the Precinct books do for fantasy.
eSpec Books 