Winters’ beautiful The Last Policeman series, if you’re one of those readers/listeners who wait for a series to be concluded before beginning, hop in now these are fantastic books and audiobooks, and this is a fantastic conclusion to a really, really damn good series. And all the while, Palace struggles with doubts: what if his sister was right, what if there is a chance that this rogue scientist can alter the path of the asteroid? He re at the end of Ben H. Here in World of Trouble, Winters brings the scope both back to pinpoint - much of the main action occurs in a small Ohio town’s police headquarters and its immediate surrounds - but with a pullback zoom in hand for both time and place as we see Palace following the clues which led him to, in the final days of the countdown, embark on a thousand-mile bicycle trip across towns graded variously red (avoid: psychopaths) to places largely unchanged, to scenes of mass suicide. (Of course there is more going on: his sister is already up to her ears in anti-conspiracy conspiracies to save the world from an asteroid which will kill everyone.) In Countdown City, Palace ventures further afield, seeing regional responses to the imminent catastrophe first hand from universities gone Utopian to remote state park wilderness survivalists. In The Last Policeman, Palace is investigating one crime in one town, his home town of Concord, New Hampshire. The scope of this series has grown ever more epic. Dick Award nominated Last Policeman trilogy - sees Detective Hank Palace bicycling through Ohio, looking for his sister, hoping to reunite before everything ends. Winters (Quirk Books and Brilliance Audio) - the third and concluding book in Winters’ Edgar Award winning and Philip K. Why was this a bit surreal? World of Trouble: The Last Policeman, Book 3by Ben H. 410, and the sampling of an old friend’s home-brewed beer. Winters concludes with World of Trouble, and I had the surreal experience of listening to it while criss-crossing the small towns of Ohio on a road trip to the midwest, which included stops at the old family farmstead, teaching my son to shoot an air rifle at another rural family home while cousins shot their first. See you in August for the next roundup, including reviews of Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land and Lou Anders’ Frostborn. Speaking of interviews, I hadn’t yet seen Cory Doctorow’s interview at by narrator Malcolm Hillgartner, so while it may not be new, it’s new to me. Out since 2011 in digital audio - and my pick that year for best new audiobook of the year - the book of time travel (of a sort) and rock-and-roll won the 1994 World Fantasy Award, and really is a wonderful book and audiobook. In other news and such, I have a fantastic narrator interview to pass along: Jeff VanderMeer interviews Bronson Pinchot for Vulture - it is a fantastic, fantastic, in-depth interview. One bit of good news, however, is the appearance of new library CD and MP3-CD editions of Glimpses by Lewis Shiner, read by Stefan Rudnicki.
But! I’m frustrated to note that the “seen but not heard” listings include Max Gladstone’s Full Fathom Five and are headlined by Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman - there’s a fantastic UK audiobook edition of Tigerman out since May, but it looks like we’ll have to wait until November to get a US audiobook.
And! Just in time for the movie adaptation, Joe R. Beyond the picks, there are more trilogies concluded (Hannu Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeur, Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy), more next books in a series (Melissa Scott and Jo Graham’s Order of the Air series, Mark Hodder’s Return of the Discontinued Man), and a fantasy classic come to audio in advance of the author’s return to the series (Robin Hobb’s Fool’s Errand), along with Rebecca Makkai’s The Hundred-Year House, a pile of Robert McCammon, William Dufris reading Isaac Asimov’s Robot trilogy, new collections (Ben Bova read by Stefan Rudnicki and company, David Drake read by Christopher Grove), Tim Pratt’s The Nex, and The Golden Compass director Chris Weitz’s fiction debut, The Young World.
Winters’ The Last Policeman trilogy, new standalone epic fantasy, magical realism, near-future sf, comedic high fantasy, CornPunk, and a Kickstarter-funded anthology of megamonster invasion. JULY 9-29, 2014: Covering three weeks worth of releases in mid-to-late July, with picks including a terrific ending to Ben H.