Kristine Kathryn RuschBesprekingen

Novella giving the Recovery Man's back story and telling part of the story from "The Recovery Man" from his point of view.

I enjoyed it, but not much point if you haven't read the main story.

Going through Paloma's old case files, Miles finds a reference to his deceased daughter and Callisto, somewhere she'd never been. What had Paloma known?

An intriguing mystery with some side characters I'd like to see more of.

On his return to the Moon after a vacation, Miles Flint receives a message from his mentor begging for his help. When he arrives at her apartment he finds she has been murdered and he is one of the main suspects. His investigation uncovers some disillusioning aspects of Paloma's past.

Whenever I put this down I felt no strong urge to pick it up again. The Bixians were not present enough to be interesting aliens and without them it was a fairly run-of-the-mill mystery.½

When a body is uncovered during construction work in Sahara Dome on Mars, it provokes a crisis in Human-Disty relations which can only be solved by finding out who died and why, a crisis which is only made worse by subsequent discoveries at the site.

I like the fact that the author's aliens really are aliens, part of cultures which are perhaps logical on their own terms but which we can't really understand. However, there were lots of references to earlier events in Flint's and DeRicci's careers only some of which I recognised.

Captain Sisko from Deep Space Nine visits the Captains Table and tells the tale of his visit to Mist space. It's the tale of a part of space inside space. I enjoyed the tale.

The Voyager stops at a planet that looks like it's full of abandoned shuttles. Voyager needs parts, so an away team is sent to see what can be scavenged. The planet turns out to not be abandoned and the away team is captured. I found the book to be enjoyable and an easy read.

This book serves as a great example of why I usually don't like reading books that comprise a long series, particularly when I'm coming to it in the middle. There were a boatload of characters, most of whom had appeared in previous books, each of whom had an extensive backstory there. The plot here revolved around incidents that had occurred in other books. There are some details that might have been covered previously, but don't get mentioned here. (This story takes place on the Moon. But no mention is made about the rate at which things fall or how people walk. Do they have artificial gravity? She never says.)
All that said, this is still an enjoyable book. Rusch is a good writer. I just need to catch her in a non-serial mode.

This was really cute and I enjoyed the twist on the classic fairy tale.

I liked this one better than the first one. I gave the first one a 4 but it was just barely. The science fiction was good but the mystery struggled. This one the mystery really worked for me. I much better blending of the two genres. I like the multiple story lines and the fun way they all pull together.

This book really does read like a fairy tale, in every sense of the word. It's whimsical, at times charming, and often unbelievable. But it also drags, focuses too much on the battle between "good vs. evil" and doesn't offer any surprises. I'll have to hand it to the author though, she does spin some fairy tale cliches on their head. I liked that Nora was the ultimate heroine, and not the perfect Sleeping Beauty like I'd expected. And the introduction of a modern woman's wants, needs and viewpoints into what's otherwise a pretty straight-forward romantic fairy tale was good for a few smiles. But ultimately, the characters never engaged me. I was bored with the book and struggled to finish.

Not true to the end

This story got going pretty well, weaving together several different cases in a pretty compelling way. Unfortunately, this led up to a series of errors that reached total plot pileup at 80%. DNF

Special Mention for Night of the Hogtied Alien - Stefon Mears

Good collection of short stories (mostly very short, with one longer novella at the end). Part of a storybundle themed around elves these are perhaps more generically 'fae' then elf particularly. Certainly not tolkein's elves. The novella was written under the author's romance pen-name and picks up soul-mate themes, when one of Santa's little helpers is attracted to a human who's trying to do their best.

Cute little story

I thought I would like this more than I did. The story premise is pretty fun - diving shipwrecks in space, including a lot of world building that seems rightly borrowed from scuba diving here on Earth. The characters are also likable enough and fairly well-drawn, from the cynical Boss down through her motley team of co-divers.

On the downside, the storytelling is a little too simple and straightforward. The relationships and setups are easy to anticipate. The 'science' in this fiction is completely made of handwavium (I would have even preferred some pseudo-techno-blather a la Star Trek). The politics, which are the backbone of what passes for suspense, is about as deep as what George Lucas provides in Star Wars. Meh.

Still, there were some surprises and some pleasures. The descriptions of ships, space stations, diving tech and future life are well done. I may still read the additional stories in this series to see if things get more interesting.

A young woman asks Miles Flint to find her Disappeared mother and "sister".

This novella was less gripping than the full-length novels and I also found the world-building less engrossing.

After Miles Flint accepts a case and reunites parents with their Disappeared daughter who has been pardoned for her crimes, the whole family is murdered. DeRicci finds evidence linking the family with Flint and they end up on opposite sides of the investigation.

Just as gripping as the previous books in the series but I can't help wonder now that Armstrong City has narrowly escaped an epidemic and suffered an explosion which breached its Dome, whether they will continue to allow Flint to operate in this closed, vulnerable environment.

Regrettably, although the number of accidental deaths of participants in the Moon Marathon is declining, they still do occur. However, this death is murder. Meanwhile, Miles Flint is unsure whether to accept his first case as a fully-fledged Retrieval Agent, although the potential client, a lawyer from a firm Paloma frequently worked with, is very persistent.

The different threads came together nicely in this exciting case which kept me up way past my bedtime. In the shadow of Covid, the story of a genetically enhanced lethal cold virus does of course have more resonances than it did in 2004.

Miles Flint has finally been promoted to detective on the Armstrong Lunar Base police force only to find that his first cases involve human fugitives from alien justice.

A great opening to this series. Although the focus is on the humans we do get to understand the aliens' reasoning. I wonder if later in the series we will see aliens fleeing what they see as an unfair human punitive system.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like this book when I dove into it (forgive the pun). It turned out that it grew on me. The first part of the book definitely feels like a completely different story from the second, and it even had inklings of space horror -- something which I appreciate and find too little of. That it was an explainable phenomenon disappointed me a little, but I still enjoyed the twists and turns the book took.

An interesting kind of touristy shipwreck exploration, history and amateurish archaeology, led by someone who is cautious to a fault, occasionally fearful, nonviolent, frustrating and who tries to be a good, safety conscious manager, but who occasionally gets caught up in her own desires. Someone who is, in other words, human. I appreciated how down-to-earth the whole thing was.

Cool. Worth the read.

Newly developed, portal technology time travel is still dangerous and incompletely understood. A team of historians is sent back to uncover the mystery of the murdered princes but their team is infiltrated by a thief.
This was a novella- really almost a short story, and it feels like the prologue to a longer story,

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is the mistress of dictation technology, allowing her to write faster than most of us can think. Her Retrieval Artist series now includes 15 novels and several between-the-numbers shorter pieces. Anniversary Day begins a new multivolume story arc that deals with well-organized terrorism on the Moon’s vulnerable domed cities. Once again, desperate police work and crazy data analytics are needed to save what is left of the day.

I love her books. They're light fun reading.

Writer, know thyself.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't really enjoy anthologies as much as I used to. This one was decent, although I mostly came for Red As Snow, as one does, and I enjoyed that story quite a bit.