The Star Tablet – MarzAat
Review: The Star Tablet, Jay Casselberg, 2005. Cover by Christian McGrath Private eye Jack Stein doesn’t even have a client in this one. About two years ago, Billie, the girl Stein resc…| MarzAat
Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that evoked my childhood in South Dakota so strongly. Violent American Indian movements. Hippies. Communes. Underground houses. I didn’t say nostalgia. That’s a “wistful affection for the past”. Essay: Home Sweet… Continue reading →| MarzAat
And, so, I return to the Mack Reynolds-Dean Ing series of “collaborations” with a posthumous novel about immortality from a man who died at age 66. Review: Eternity, Mack Reynolds with Dean Ing, 1984. There’s not much going on in… Continue reading →| MarzAat
Never heard of this one before I saw it on the shelf at Midway Books in St. Paul, MN. I originally picked it up because it has coverage of the North American fur trade, but that’s only a small part… Continue reading →| MarzAat
And we’re at the end of the Jack Stein, psychic investigator, series. Review: Wall of Mirrors, Jay Caselberg, 2006. Just as this series isn’t really about solving crimes, it also isn’t really about alien contact though that’s been a theme… Continue reading →| MarzAat
Review: The Star Tablet, Jay Casselberg, 2005. Cover by Christian McGrath Private eye Jack Stein doesn’t even have a client in this one. About two years ago, Billie, the girl Stein resc…| MarzAat
I return to the Jack Stein science fiction private eye series. Review: Metal Sky, Jay Caselberg, 2004. It’s been two years since the events of Wyrmhole. Jack Stein and Billie, now 14 years old, have moved from the corrupt city… Continue reading →| MarzAat
It’s more Dean Ing, not the last I need to read but the last one in the review backlist. Review: Blood of Eagles, Dean Ing, 1987. In some ways, this is the most conventional of all the Ing novels that… Continue reading →| MarzAat
Review: The Skins of Dead Men, Dean Ing, 1998. You won’t get any exotic aviation tech here unlike Ing’s more well-known mainstream thrillers, but you do get a pretty entertaining story of action and romance. Teresa Contreras is vacationing in… Continue reading →| MarzAat
Essay: Deathwish World, Mack Reynolds with Dean Ing, 1986. It’s 2086, and what’s a poor Wobbly supposed to do? Ninety-five percent of the population is unemployed in the United States of the Americas which covers all the Western Hemisphere. The… Continue reading →| MarzAat
It’s this month’s piece of weird fiction being discussed over at LibraryThing. Don’t recognize the author’s name? Well, that’s because it was either a one-time use of a penname or Humphreys was a one-time published author. This story has found… Continue reading →| MarzAat
Somewhat tiring of science fiction versions of detective stories, I decided to complete my Dean Ing reading project in a rather haphazard fashion since I needed to fill a few gaps in my collection …| MarzAat
Visiting the used bookstore in my wife’s hometown, I came across this book. I’m not fond of psychic detective stories – or psychic stories of any kind, but I picked it up based solely on the Stephe…| MarzAat
Delayed, but here is the subject of this week’s subject of discussion by the Weird Tradition group over at LibraryThing. Review: “The Two Musics”, Michael Cisco, 2024. Illustration by Natalie Foss …| MarzAat
A bit of a new format for this one. The books to be reviewed keep piling up. Since our detective narrates all these, there’s no point pretending his survival is ever in doubt. And you and I would b…| MarzAat
Contributor David Hambling sent me a review copy of this one. As usual, it jumped the review queue. Review: Tales of Shub-Niggurath, 2025. Cover by David Dodd There’s an obvious motif and plot elem…| MarzAat
Essay: The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer, Jean De La Hire, trans. Brian Stableford, 2007. Cover by Denis Rodier From Paris to the mountains of Bavaria, from the Bermuda Archipelago to the North Pole, two m…| MarzAat
Yes, it’s time for another one of these. These are all part of the Sanctum Books reprint series. Like the Bantam Books reprints, they don’t publish the original pulp series in order. The (usually, …| MarzAat
Review: Terms of Service, Elliott Scott, 2021. Cover by Miblart Down the mean streets of Neotopia goes a poor man, an honorable man, with a disgust for sham and a contempt for pettiness and i…| MarzAat
This is another one I found just browsing Amazon. Review: Rim City Blues, Elliott Scott, 2020. Felix has a dream. He wants to be a big city detective like Phillip Marlowe. So he leaves his ru…| MarzAat
I didn’t know Adam Roberts wrote two science fiction private eye novels until I somehow came across them on Amazon. I’ve been impressed by the short fiction I’ve read of Roberts, but I’ve read none…| MarzAat
Electric Midnight whetted my appetite for more cyberpunk, and I came across the Amber Payne series. Review: Streets of Payne, Jeff Brackett, 2013. This is a fairly effective cyberpunk novel. …| MarzAat
I’ve been keeping odd hours lately, the kind of time that uses the energy for thinking a new post needs. I have been reading though, reading 1,052 pages of glorious prose and engulfing stories. It …| MarzAat
Many decades ago, before I started reading science fiction regularly, my preferred reading when young was Alistair Maclean novels and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I don’t read many thrillers or…| MarzAat
