Stiletto

by Daniel O'Malley
583 pgs  (The Checquy series #2)

I had been eagerly waiting for Daniel O'Malleys follow-up to The Rook ever since reading it almost five years ago. His Brotherhood of the Checquy--England's secret government organization consisting of humans with supernatural abilities who protect the general populace from the supernatural--is a highly-entertaining creation, with the potential to be the basis for a long series of books.

At the end of The Rook, the Checquy was offered an alliance with the Grafters, their enemies for over three hundred years. The Grafters--an equally-entertaining creation of O'Malley's--is an organization consisting of alchemists who developed fantastical modifications for the human body, and surgically performed those modifications on each other in order to give them powers and abilities that a brief description of which by me wouldn't do justice.

As Stiletto begins, the Grafters send a delegation to the headquarters of the Checquy in London to work out the details of the proposed alliance. But the Grafters haven't been entirely open with the Checquy. They haven't informed them that a splinter-group calling themselves the Antagonists strongly opposes the alliance, and have already proven their willingness to use terrorist tactics in order to derail the process. The Antagonists have followed the Grafters to London and are laying the groundwork for their plans to ensure that animosity between the Checquy and Grafters continues for centuries to come.

When Rook Myfany Thomas, who strongly supports the alliance, learns of the existence of the Antagonists and their plans, she knows she may be the only one with the ability to stop them and allow the process to succeed. What proceeds is an action-packed story best described as a mashup between The X-Men and Men in Black.

O'Malley is an author that I'm very excited about. he only has two books published so far, but both of them demonstrate that he's an author worth checking out. His characters are well-developed and his stories are complex, fun, and entertaining. My only criticism is the nearly-five-year wait for book two. Everyone needs to buy both his books and give him the ability financially to quit his day job working for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and write full time. I can't imagine he'd like to continue working there a day longer than he has to. Here's hoping those days are numbered and he's able to focus solely on writing soon. Selfish of me, I know, but I'm pretty sure it's a win-win situation for everyone involved.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Glittering World

by Robert Levy
338 pgs

Michael "Blue" Whitley is a New York chef and restaurant owner. Despite his seemingly innate ability to create delicious food at his restaurant, he and his restaurant are struggling financially. He's heavily in debt and in desperate need for an influx of cash. Fortunately, one is within reach. Blue's grandmother recently passed away and left him her house in Nova Scotia.

Ignoring his mother's objections to him traveling to Canada to see the property he grew up in and overseeing its sale, Blue decides to drive up there with three of his closest friends. Blue hasn't been there since his mother took him and moved to the United States when he was five years old.

Arriving in the small community of Starling Cove where his new property is located, Blue and his friends quickly learn that there is something inexplicably different about the town. They learn that Starling Cove is an old hippie commune. One to which artists and social outcasts have flocked to for generations. There have been numerous instances of children who have gone missing from Starling Cove over the years. Some of whom never returned, but others did. Some of them walked out of the woods years later, naked and speaking incoherently about the "Other Kind," strange life forms that live under the mountain and the lake.

Blue learns that he was one of those children who returned, and he soon begins to feel drawn back to the woods.

The Glittering World is the debut novel by Robert Levy. It's strength is its creativity. The "Other Kind" are a unique variation of the mystical fae creatures present in fairy tales and other stories. But overall the book falls short. The story itself never struck a chord with me. I might check out whatever Levy writes next out of curiosity, but if it's more of the same, I'll be moving on.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman
178 pgs

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first novel Neil Gaiman has written for adults in quite a while, and even though the book is relatively short, it was well worth the wait. It's essentially a fairy tale for adults, and as any good fairy tale should, it contains elements of magic and fantasy, along with things that are most comfortable in the dark.

The narrator is a man, whose name I don't believe is ever revealed in the story, who has come back to Sussex, England where he grew up, to attend a funeral for someone close to him. After the service, as people are mulling around comforting each other, he's pulled enigmatically back to the property near where the house he grew up once stood. On that property is a small duck pond he's drawn to and as he's there, memories of his childhood and events that took place involving that pond begin to come back to him.

The pond is on the property owned by the Hempstocks, three generations of women who live there still and who he now remembers saved his life when he was a young boy. When he was seven he met Lettie Hempstock who told him she was eleven, but would not answer his question of how many years she had been eleven. He was somehow able to tell at the time that she had been eleven for longer than he had been alive.

On the night a lodger staying at the narrator's home commits suicide in their family car, Lettie takes the young narrator somewhere no normal human should ever be allowed to go. When they return, they're both unaware that a dark and dangerous power has hitched a ride with the boy. That power takes the shape of Ursula Monkton, who bewitches the rest of the boy's family but who terrorizes him. His only hope is the Hempstock women and the unworldly powers they possess.

It's a great story told by a fantastic writer. Gaiman possesses two qualities that make him one of the best at what he does: a tremendous imagination and the ability to tell a story in such a way as to communicate far more than what he puts down in words. Every time I've read something written by him, whether it's a graphic novel, children's picture book, short story or full length novel, I feel like I've just been told the most fascinating story I've ever heard.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The Rook

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley
(The Checquy series #1)

I love it when a book has a fantastic beginning. It immediately gets me excited for the ride I'm about to take. Daniel O'Malley's first book delivers with its opening line: "The body you are wearing used to be mine." Myfanwy Thomas has no memories of who she is or how she came to be standing in a London park, surrounded by bodies, holding a letter she apparently wrote to herself.

The book itself defies a simple description, but that's a good thing in this case. The letter Myfanwy is holding at the start of the book is the first in a series of many letters her predecessor wrote to herself knowing that she would soon need them to reintroduce herself to her own life. Myfanwy is a Rook, a high-ranking official in a Torchwood-style British agency called the Checquy that monitors supernatural and extra-terrestrial events in London. Members of the Checquy each have a set of extraordinary abilities that help them keep the United Kingdom safe from the continual threats that the general population is oblivious to. Myfanwy herself has the ability to tap into other peoples' minds and bodies and control them. While one of her counterparts, Gestalt, is a single person divided up into four different bodies (three male and one female) who controls all four bodies with one collective consciousness.

The letters reveal to her that someone within the Checquy is a traitor and is responsible for the erasure of her memories. She must somehow discover who that is, while simultaneously discovering who she is; all while dealing with an imminent invasion of Grafters.

The Rook is a lot of fun to read. It's part X-Men, part Men in Black, part Torchwood and Doctor Who. It got me with that opening sentence and I enjoyed every one of them that followed. O'Malley has been added to my list of authors to keep tabs on.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Domino Men

The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes

Last year I read Jonathan Barnes's first book The Somnambulist and quite enjoyed it. It's an urban fantasy novel by an author that I thought at the time had a promising future. After reading The Domino Men I'm even more convinced that Barnes is an author who is very likely to leave his mark on the genre.

The Domino Men is a sequel, but a very independent one. In fact, I'm pretty sure many people read it, oblivious to the fact that it was preceded by The Somnambulist. I guess I should describe it as a second book, which takes place in the same version of our world as The Somnambulist does, rather than say it's a true sequel. 

Many years ago, the queen of England made a deal with an unworldly being known as Leviathan. Contained within that pact, was the fate of every citizen of England. Now, Leviathan has returned to collect. Our narrator is Henry Lamb, an unassuming civil servant working as a file clerk at the Civil Service Archive Unit. Henry learns one day that his grandfather has slipped into a coma. As Henry goes to visit him in the hospital he begins to learn that there was much more to his grandfather's life than he had ever imagined. He learns that he was instrumental in a secret war that has been waged for years against members of the royal house of Windsor ever since the Queen's contract with Leviathan.

The Domino Men is another one of those books that would take longer to describe than it would to read. It reminded me a little bit of some of China Mieville's books, to try to describe them doesn't do them justice.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆