It's Subtraction!

August 7, 2017
Elsworth’s debut is a capable, if familiar, take on revolution in space and what comes after an empire falls. Jaqi is a smuggler barely surviving on the edges of what remains of the interstellar Second Empire. Araskar is a hero of the resistance, which has recently toppled the empire. Both men are products of crossbreeding programs started by the empire and stopped by the revolution. Neither is prepared for the cold reality of the new regime, which promises freedom but delivers only death. Elsworth’s writing is workmanlike, and his characters are consistent, though not original. The story is fast-paced but relies on happenstance and good luck, which limits the agency of his protagonists. Body horror and hand-to-hand combat are substituted for high-energy combat. This first volume primarily sets up the narrative that is to come, and leaves too many threads dangling for the conclusion to be satisfying. Agent: Sara Megibow, KT Literary.

August 7, 2017
This “weird west” novel from McGrath (the author of several romance novels as Vicki Essex) features vivacious heroes with tricks up their sleeves but suffers from a key villain presented as a flat caricature of power-hungry evil and from a setting grounded in fantasy and SF tropes that never quite find coherence. After the werewolf bandits of the Crowe gang make a targeted attack on 17-year-old Hettie Alabama’s family, killing her parents and kidnapping her sensitive younger sister, Abby, Hettie becomes the wielder of the mage gun Diablo, which takes a year from her life with each kill. Along with “Uncle” Jeremiah, who has been keeping the gun hidden from the omnipresent Pinkerton Agency, sharpshooting healer Ling Tsang, and bounty hunter Walker Woodroffe, Hettie heads from Montana to the Mexican border to find Abby, though rescuing her may mean giving up control of the gun. Although plot hooks set up a planned sequel, Hettie and her colleagues finish this story without deep enough personal connections to fully gel them as a group. Ages 14–up. Agent: Courtney Miller-Callihan, Handspun Literary.

August 7, 2017
The story line of Freed’s disappointing sixth Cordell Logan mystery (after 2016’s Hot Start) feels like old hat. Logan, a former government assassin who now runs a flight school in Rancho Bonita, Calif., gets a visit from Layne Sterling, a CIA agent with the agency’s Casualty Assessment Matrix. That unit reviews the deaths of retired employees to determine whether foul play by a U.S. enemy was involved. One such death has just occurred: Rico Perris, who worked for the Company as an analyst for 32 years, died when he drove his car off a cliff in a blizzard near Denver. Perris was among those assigned to the Red Lancer task force responsible for looking into rumors that rogue CIA operatives were part of a plot to kill J.F.K. Since another task force member died a month earlier, Layne’s bosses are concerned that someone is silencing people who knew too much. The likable Logan faces numerous perils with his usual cool, but even conspiracy buffs are unlikely to find the plot twists satisfying. Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.

August 7, 2017
Houarner (Dark City) employs beautiful storytelling without much of a story in this short work. By the time Aini was eight years old, she and her parents had long since left the world of skyscrapers and televisions behind to wander through a vast trackless desert on a quest for the group called the Caravan of Dreams. After her parents give her to a passing caravan as part of their quest, Aini discovers that her storytelling enthralls the living and the dead, animals and djinn, in a starkly unforgiving and otherworldly land where the Caravan of War, the Caravan of Healing, and the Caravan of Death all trade. Aini’s journey is dreamlike, wrapped in prose as ethereal as her stories (“their laughter danced over the sand like lost scarves in the wind”), but also languid; little happens or changes except the details and scope of her tales, which have more substance than the surrounding reality. Readers who enjoy stories in which the telling of the journey is more important than the destination may appreciate this one. Agent: Jack Byrne, Sternig & Byrne Literary

August 7, 2017
In Conrad’s fourth entry in the world-hopping Historian Tales series (after 2015’s The Price of Loyalty), the flippant narrator, an unkillable being called the Historian, watches as a military mastermind, Colonel Daws, confronts an incursion of refugees from a parallel world enslaved by gods. The outraged deities follow their former slaves and target their new home for destruction. Daws and other stereotypical characters—a plucky rebel leader, an emotionally repressed genius, a ruthless and competent henchman—try to stop them, using only biochemical weapons, as Daws’s version of Earth has no metal-based technology. Unable to affect the course of events, the Historian instead provides a steady stream of irritating comments. Conrad’s worldbuilding is thoughtful, highlighting an interesting contrast between the humans’ technology and the gods’ seeming magic. But the plot has more loose threads (such as an unresolved coup triggered by the colonel) than tightly woven ones. If the characters were not so flat, the whole would better stand the strain.

August 7, 2017
Eden’s third entry in her Longing for Home series (after Hope Springs) revisits the frontier town of Hope Springs, Wyo., in 1871 as a nearly blind Englishwoman falls for the brother of her latest student. Cecily Attwater, who is gradually losing her eyesight due to a progressive illness, travels across America assisting those with diminished vision. Her latest assignment is to help Finbarr O’Connor, a young man who was blinded in a fire. Finbarr is incredibly resistant to her offer of assistance, and his older brother Tavish and many other members of their Irish community dislike Cecily because she is English. Tension between Cecily and Finbarr spurs the novel forward, and the emotional moments shared between them are one of the novel’s primary strengths. Readers who enjoy romances with greater depth of feeling and less detailed love scenes will likely fall for this book. Agent: Pam Howell, D4EO Literary.

August 7, 2017
As the queen of the empire of Azzaz—a nascent, fictional 15th-century West African nation—Malika grapples with internal rebellion, Chinese invaders, and mounting insurrection from her Council of Five, the representatives of the country’s five provinces. On the battlefield, Malika can take out five rebels with a single swing of her sword (and a jaguar with a well-placed kick). And she’s just as assured when facing questioning from her council, though readers also see her struggle with how best to show strength, which comes to a head with the arrival of the king of Atala, Malika’s secret husband, who possesses supernatural wind-based powers. Okupe balances exposition, plot progression, and action within each chapter, providing a smooth introduction to the machinations and mythologies of this world (interspersed notes touch on the real-life inspirations behind Azzaz). Befitting the story of a fierce, confident queen who rules from the front lines as much as from her throne, Kalu’s cinematic artwork is dominated by battle scenes but also highlights the empire’s landscape of sand, rocks, and forests, as well as the cultural diversity of its people. Ages 12–up.