OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Olivia Waite writes queer science fiction, fantasy, historical romance, and essays. She is the romance fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

FORMAT/INFO: Murder by Memory will be published by Tordotcom on March 18th, 2025. It is 112 pages long. It is available in ebook, hardcover, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: When Dorothy Gentleman, ship's detective, wakes up in a body that isn't hers, she's more than a little annoyed. After all, she's supposed to be retired, her mind resting in the ship's Library until she decides to print a body again. And even if she'd chosen to wake up, she should be in a fresh body all her own. But there's been a murder on the ship, and what's worse, someone is deleting the memory archives from the Library itself - something that should be impossible.

Murder by Memory is a fluffy fun little appetizer that left me longing for a deeper dive into this world. The mystery itself is pretty straight forward. Dorothy goes from point A to B to C in fairly quick succession, following the clues on a mostly linear path. It's not going to scatter red herrings on your trail or give you a cast of suspects to consider. In fact, the mystery is less about the Who than it is about the Why and the How.

Instead, I was much more intrigued with puzzling out the ship the murder takes place on. The H.M.S. Fairweather is on a thousand year journey to a new planet. But with the technology to back up a person's mind, it's not a traditional generation ship; there isn't a constant turnover of populace because a person can simply print themselves into a fresh body when their old body gives out. This opens up a whole host of fascinating societal questions that Murder by Memory only barely begins to touch on, but it was enough of a glimpse that I wanted to know more.

I was also impressed by the way the author quickly sketched out her core cast of characters, from Dorothy herself to Ralphie her well-meaning but not always sensible nephew to his mysterious bartender boyfriend. They don't have deep backstories given the length of the novella, but I got enough of a sense of them that I wanted to spend more time with them, as much as I wanted to explore the ship.

CONCLUSION: Murder by Memory is like an episode of a weekly crime procedural. You'll know most of the beats, but you'll enjoy it anyway for the comfort of the familiar, and you'll want to return the cozy cast of characters. As this is the start of a new sci-fi mystery series, I'm definitely looking forward to more adventures in this world, but I do find myself wishing this were a main course instead of a snack.

  

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Sylvie Cathrall writes stories of hope and healing with healthy doses of wonder and whimsy. She holds a graduate degree in odd Victorian art and has handled more than a few nineteenth-century letters (with great care). Sylvie married her former pen pal and lives in the mountains, where she dresses impractically and dreams of the sea. 

FORMAT/INFO: A Letter to the Luminous Deep was published by Orbit Books on April 25th, 2024. It is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats. 

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: One year ago, a disaster struck the underwater residence known as the Deep House, leaving its two inhabitants, E. and Henerey, presumed dead. After a year of grieving, E.'s sister Sophy and Henerey's brother Vyerin begin to investigate the events that led to their siblings' death. Sifting through correspondence between the many individuals involved, the two begin to uncover a much more ominous mystery than they expected.

A Letter to the Luminous Deep is a charming underwater tale that ultimately dragged too much to keep me hooked. This is a very slow-paced affair, told largely through letters written in the style of the late 1800s. This is certainly a difficult form of novel to pull off. For one, there are occasional moments where the author has to do some narrative contortions to explain why certain events or conversations were put to paper. While I understand the necessity in order to convey certain key information to the reader, it does strain the credulity a bit in some places.

That said, there were also numerous ways the narrative structure worked. I did enjoy the subtle ominous foreboding that builds up over the course of the story. Certain innocuous observations of things that are "off" in the world begin to create an unsettling pattern, especially as we have a rough idea of how events end. Several people each have a piece of the puzzle, but it's only in assembling those pieces by collecting these letters that they (and the audience) start to see the whole picture.

I also liked the slow romance between the two characters of E. and Henerey. Each is a shy or reticent person for various reasons. Through the letters, however, we can see two people being understood in a way they haven't before. The use of aborted "first drafts" of letters also lets us see a little glimpse of their respective nervousness as they try to fumble through how to address a person they've developed feelings for, even though they've never met in person.

The author has also built up a fascinating maritime culture. Some calamity 1000 years ago left this fantasy world with minimal inhabitable land. As a result, whole peoples live one boats or floating collectives. As our focus in this story is on the colleges and scholarly life of these people, most of the details do remain frustratingly out of sight, but perhaps not unreasonably. The people writing the letters are focused on their own narrow slice of life, not on the workings of society as a whole.

CONCLUSION: While I did enjoy my read of A Letter to the Luminous Deep overall, I found it struggled to hold my attention towards the end. The narrative structure of letters just dragged events out. We have a good idea of what happened some thirty pages or so before the ending, with the rest of the characters trying to catch up through their long-winded missives. As someone who struggles with slow books, ultimately this just didn't click for me. While the set up for part two of the duology is intriguing, this tale simply isn't my cup of tea.

  

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Richard Swan is a critically acclaimed British genre writer. His debut fantasy novel, The Justice of Kings, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. His other work includes the Art of War and Great Silence trilogies, as well as short fiction for Black Library and Grimdark Magazine.

Richard is a qualified lawyer, and before writing full time spent ten years litigating multimillion pound commercial disputes in London. He currently lives in Sydney with his wife and three young sons.

FORMAT/INFO: Grave Empire will release on February 4th, 2025. It will be available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: Renata Rainer's job is a joke. As ambassador to the Stygion mermen, she largely has given up hope of ever being useful, given that the mermen want nothing to do with humans. But when two monks arrive claiming to have lost contact with the afterlife, suddenly Renata finds herself in the midst of a critical mission. The Stygion are some of the world's foremost arcana practitioners, and it's up to Renata to verify if recent portents do indeed herald an apocalyptic event known as the Great Silence. But Renata's not the only one interested in the Great Silence - and there are those who want help along the end of the world instead of stopping it.

Grave Empire is a haunting, harrowing journey that envelopes you in its atmosphere, while asking readers for patience in experiencing the actual payoff. This is a story of three individuals scattered across an empire who are realizing that a Very Bad Thing is coming. One is unraveling the secrets of a mysterious plague, another must travel through a warzone to consult with magic practitioners who can shed light on an ancient prophecy, and another is investigating strange reports on the frontier of the empire. Each story is compelling and unsettling, as our characters come to understand just how very wrong things are.

And yet when the dust settled, it felt like all that had been accomplished was learning that yes, a Bad Thing is coming and it is a VERY Bad Thing. The nature of the Great Silence is absolutely a satisfactory threat, and I look forward to seeing how our characters try to handle it, especially as some dominoes began tipping at the end of our story. But this first book is essentially all table setting. Here is the empire, here are the characters, here is the state of the mortal plane, here are some of the weird things that are happening. Will we explain how these weird things are tied together? Not really.

I do want to touch on the relationship between the Empire of the Wolf trilogy and this new The Great Silence trilogy. You do not need to have read the first trilogy to enjoy this new series; the events of Empire of the Wolf are as removed from the characters as the Napoleonic Wars are for us. Those events were definitely a big thing that happened, but they don't inform the characters' day to day lives.

The writing here is also more accessible than the previous trilogy. The first series was told first-person memoir style, while this new one is told across three third-person POVs. I think it also reflects the difference in tone between the two stories. Whereas Empire of the Wolf was a more personal journey of an individual caught up in world-shaking events, Grave Empire feels a little more big picture, a view of how several nations will grapple with a new threat.

CONCLUSION: I want to be clear, overall I really enjoyed Grave Empire, even if the ending left me a bit underwhelmed. I remain hopeful that the second book in this trilogy is going to take everything in the first book and use it for a fantastic sequel. In reading the first trilogy set in this world, I was lukewarm on book one, and then the sequel was one of my top reads the following year. Given how monumentally unsettling the nature of the Great Silence is, I think there's every chance this series will follow in its predecessor's footsteps.