We are no longer taking review submissions.

Also, the website will be going down in December, so if you’d like, please archive the mp3s that you enjoyed.

Our email seattlegeekly@gmail.com will still be up, if you need to contact us.

Thanks again!
–Shannon & Matt

A lot of people have been asking us if having another person working with us would have made a difference. The answer is that of course having another person would have helped, but it probably would have just delayed the inevitable. We actually did try and bring on a couple of guest reviewers for books and music but it really didn’t work out. What it came down to was that it isn’t really fair to harass people about deadlines and production when all you are offering them is the opportunity to do work for free.

In order to keep the podcast going we would really have needed a person who’s full time job was being a producer; lining up interviews, coordinating events and conventions, keeping track of review material and all that. In addition having a graphic designer and a website designer on staff would have helped as well. Unfortunately none of that was really viable economically. We didn’t mind putting our time into the podcast because this was our pet project but we couldn’t really expect anyone else to indefinitely volunteer for the hours and hours it took to do this every week or even every two weeks.

Because of the response we’ve been getting we are looking in to ways to keep the Event Calendar going, we will still be twittering as Seattle Geekly, Shannon will still have her personal twitter @askageekgal and you can follow our book recommendations on GoodReads. We are also encouraging people to call our voicemail line (206)201-2352 and leave a message to be played on our final podcast on May 12.

Thanks again for all the kind words and support.

(If you are looking for the Episode #97 show notes, they are right here and, no, that is not the important announcement)

There is no easy way to do this, so here it is; We have reached the point where we are going to have to lower the curtain on Seattle Geekly. The demands of producing the show have exceeded our available resources, both financially and in terms of time. This is a heart rending decision for us and one that we did not come to easily.

I’m sure it seems that this is coming out of nowhere but the fact is this has been brewing behind the scenes for quite some time now. We went through a list of changes we could make in order to keep Seattle Geekly going but what it came down to was the fact that if we scaled it back to the point where it would be sustainable it would no longer be the show we wanted it to be and it wouldn’t be something we could be proud of producing. After long debate we decided we would much rather end at a high point and have the legacy of Seattle Geekly be people wishing we had kept going and done more than keep pushing on and leave a trail of disappointing shows before we petered out at the bitter end. The first rule of show business is “always leave them wanting more” and while we aren’t exactly in show business we felt it still applied.

In addition to the question of the resources required, there have been a few things recently that brought home to us the fact that, no matter how much work we put in to the show, at the end of the day we are still just another podcast and blog in a vast ocean of podcasts and blogs. We are proud of the work we’ve done and constantly amazed by the enjoyment people seem to get out of what we do, but we realized that in the grand scale of things the two of us putting down this project was not going to be the end of the world even for our most dedicated fans.

We said when we started the podcast that if we connected one person with one book, movie, TV show, game or event that they would not have otherwise found that it would be a success and we have had more success in that department than we ever could have imagined. The opportunity to see people geek out over things they found through our show is going to be the hardest thing for us to give up.

We want to thank everyone for all the kindness we have been shown over the past two years and apologize deeply to all those who are feeling like we have let you down. The wonderful thing about new media, though, is that if you decide that there is a geeky podcast/blog shaped hole in your world you can start one! We haven’t done anything here that anyone else couldn’t do at least as well, if not better.

Once this announcement goes out we are going to be unplugging ourselves from the internet for a bit. We’ll be back to answering e-mail and twitters and such in a couple of days, we will be having our last hurrah at Epic Game Day this Saturday and we’ll be back to put out one final show in two weeks. We’ll be keeping the website up and the past podcasts available for download until the end of the year.

We will not be dropping off the face of the planet after this. We have been participating in the geek community all our lives and we will continue to do so. You will still see us at various geeky events around the region and you can still come up and say hi to us if you are moved to do so. The only difference will be that instead of being Shannon and Matt from Seattle Geekly we will just be Shannon and Matt, two geeks from Seattle.

The short version is that I loved it. Every aspect of the game lived up to the standards that people have come to expect from Valve. I was playing it on an approximately three year old PC (that wasn’t top end when it was new) and it still ran smoothly and looked amazing. The voice acting, especially Stephen Merchant as Wheatley, was very good and the writing kept the same snarkiness and irreverence that made the original game such a standout.

The basic premise of the game hasn’t changed; you get your portal gun and use it to maneuver through an increasingly difficult series of test chambers. Many of the same techniques that were used to solve the puzzles in the first game still work but the addition of new elements, repulsion and speed gels, catapulting platforms, hard light bridges and the like, kept it fresh enough that it really felt like a new game rather than just a Portal expansion. If you enjoyed Portal I can’t think of a single reason that you would not thoroughly enjoy Portal 2.

The question is, though, does the single player campaign by itself justify the $50 retail price and, much as I enjoyed the game, unfortunately I have to say that it does not. While the single player game is definitely longer than the original Portal, I was still able to finish it in just a couple sittings. I do highly recommend picking the game up, but if you have absolutely no intention of ever playing the co-op mode, I would wait until Portal 2 goes on sale and pick it up then. $50 is a lot to ask for ten to fifteen hours of gameplay.

For myself, in spite of my aversion to multi-player, I do intend to try the co-op mode but I am going to wait until I can schedule time to play with a friend rather than risk the vagaries of random partners from the internet.

Portal 2 is available now on Steam, XBox 360 and PS3.

The big convention weekend has come and gone and, as far as I can tell, Seattle survived! Attendence numbers for Sakura-Con and Norwescon were both impressive, though on very different scales. Sakura-Con topped out at over 19,000 and Norwescon had it’s largest convention ever with 3,600 attendees. We spent the whole weekend at Norwescon and had an amazing time which we will be talking about in some detail in this week’s podcast!

The Monday News is under the fold.

Books

• The British Science Fiction Association Award winners were announced this weekend at Eastercon. The winners are:
  • Best Novel: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
  • Best Short Fiction: ‘The Shipmaker’ by Aliette de Bodard
  • Best Art: Cover for Zoo City by Joey Hi-Fi
  • Best Non-Fiction: ‘Blogging the Hugos’ by Paul Kincaid

• The winner of the Philip K. Dick Award was also announced this weekend at our very own Norwescon. The award went to The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder, with a special citation to Harmony by Project Itoh. The award cerimony was live-streamed to the Internet for the first time ever this year and the response was good enough that it will most likely be streamed again next year.

• Last but not least in awards news, the Hugo nominees were announced this weekend at a joint ceremony held at Norwescon and Eastercon. The nominees include:
  Best Novel
  • Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
  • Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
  • The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
  • Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
  • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

  Best Novella

  • “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010)
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
  • “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All New Tales, William Morrow)
  • “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s, September 2010)
  • “Troika” by Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines, Science Fiction Book Club)

  Best Novelette

  • “Eight Miles” by Sean McMullen (Analog, September 2010)
  • “The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010)
  • “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s, July 2010)
  • “Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s, December 2010)
  • “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone (Analog, September 2010)

  Best Short Story

  • “Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed, June 2010)
  • “For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010)
  • “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, November 17, 2010)
  • “The Things” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010)

  Best Graphic Story

  • Fables: Witches, written by Bill Willingham; illustrated by Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
  • Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
  • Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)
  • Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, written and illustrated by Howard Tayler; colors by Howard Tayler and Travis Walton (Hypernode)
  • The Unwritten, Volume 2: Inside Man, written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross (Vertigo)

  The full list of nominees is available at the Worldcon 69 Website.

• Amazon announced in a press release that “Library Lending”, a new feature launching later this year, will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States. Kindle Library Lending will be available for all generations of Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps. No specific release date was given.

Comics

• Greg Rucka announced in an audio interview with Stumptown Trade Review that he will be creating a new steampunk webcomic. Titled Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Ether the comic will feature art by Eisner Award winner Rick Burchett and will be a “steampunk, pirates, western thing” with airships, floating islands, gunslingers and sword fights. Rucka said that this was planned to be an ongoing series and that he hoped to launch in July.

Tabletop

• WizKids has announced the upcomming release of a series of Street Fighter Heroclix. The series will include a starter pack with Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, Blanka and Guile and will also have 21 additional Clix including M. Bison and E. Honda. , the starter set will retail for $19.99 and individual figures will be priced at $2.99. The Street Fighter set will, of course, be compatable with the entire HeroClix line and is scheduled to be in stores this August.

Video Games

• Sony’s PlayStation Network has been down since Wednesday due to “an external intrusion.” The netwrok was not crashed but was turned off by Sony in order to “conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of network services going forward” according to the announcement on the Playstation Blog. As of this morning the network remains down and the most recent entry posted by Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media Patrick Seybold says that “I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time” as far as when service might return.

Game of Thrones premiered on HBO last night. You don’t have to worry about any spoilers here though. I can’t really talk about the show since, due to my ridiculous day job schedule Monday mornings, I was not able to stay up and watch it. What I can talk about is the genre snobbery in the mainstream press reviews.

Disdain for genre fiction is certainly nothing new. The Culture Show on the BBC recently aired a special titled ‘The Books We Really Read‘ that was so dismissive of genre fiction that it prompted a letter of protest signed by 85 science fiction, fantasy and horror authors ranging from Iain Banks to Michael Moorcock. Authors like Margaret Atwood have spent their entire careers fighting against having their work classified as “science-fiction” no doubt in some part because of the stigma attached to the label by critics. Given that, it isn’t surprising that some reviewers have been pretty contemptuous of the Game of Thrones premiere.

The New York Times review is particularly bad. The reviewer praises HBO for shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood and Big Love but goes on to say that “when the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga ‘True Blood,’ things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters.” So real world = good, vampires or fantasy setting = bad. Got it.

The review also criticizes Game of Thrones as being “boy fiction” to which HBO added sex and romance “as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise,” an accusation so egregious that George R. R. Martin took the rare step of responding to the critic

I am not going to get into it myself, except to say

1. if I am writing “boy fiction,” who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?
   and

2. thank you, geek girls! I love you all.

The worst part of the review is that it fails to do any kind of actual review of the show itself. The reviewer talks about how expensive it was to produce, complains about the fantasy setting, explains how the show came to be on HBO, makes a couple of cracks about the use of invented languages, takes a swipe at D&D players and makes her laughable and vaguely sexist “boy fiction” comment all with virtually no discussion of what the show is actually about.

As I have mentioned before, in spite of the rising popularity of geekdom, the easiest way to prove your cool cred in the mass culture is still to make fun of the nerds and that is pretty much all the New York Times is doing with this review. Game of Thrones is something geeks would like, therefore it can’t be any good.

I will be watching Game of Thrones at the earliest opportunity and since I am both a boy and a D&D player I anticipate enjoying it thoroughly

The Monday News is under the fold.

Comics

• the 2011 Stumptown Comic Art Awards were presented at Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland over the weekend. The winners are:
  Best Artist: Emily Carroll, His Face All Red
  Best Writer: Aaron Renier, The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  Best Cartoonist: Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
  Best Letterer: Johnny Ryan, Prison Pit #2
  Best Colorist: Emily Carroll, His Face All Red
  Best Publication Design: Michael DeForge, Spotting Deer
  Best Anthology: Studygroup 12 #4, edited by Zack Soto
  Best Small Press: I Want You #2 by Lisa Hanawalt
  Best New Talent: Michael DeForge
  Reader’s Choice: Pang, the Wandering Shaolin Monk by Ben Costa
  Director’s Choice: The Sixth Gun, by Brian Hurtt and Cullen Bunn, published by Oni Press

Manga

• Manga publisher Tokyopop has announced that they will be shutting down their North American publishing division as of May. Founder Stu Levy put a posative spin on the closure in a post on the Tokyopop website saying “our community has fought the good fight, and, as a result, the Manga Revolution has been won –manga has become a ubiquitous part of global pop culture.” Tokyopop’s film and television projects and European operations, including the German publishing program, will not be affected by the North American office closure.

• Anime News Network is reporting that Fruits Basket creator Natsuki Takaya will launch a manga series called Liselotte and Witch’s Forest starting this May. Takaya wrote Fruits Basket from 1998-2007 and the series was published in the U.S. by Tokyopop starting in 2004. The new series “centers around Liselotte — a girl who, until now, has lived a different life from others on the very easternmost tip of a country.”

MMO

• Developer Bigpoint announced in a press release that their browser-based Battlestar Galactica MMO has passed the one million subscriber mark since the open beta started in February. The game centers around space combat and allows players to fly missions either as Cylons or Humans and has story based PvE missions as well as strategic PvP battles for resources. BSG Online is free to play with optional microtransactions.

TV

• Farscape creator Rockne S. O’Bannon created something of a stir with a tweet on Saturday. The tweet, saying only “Great meeting at Syfy yesterday. New project. HUGE. New series. Very excited. Very, very excited” has created a lot of speculation about what the nature of this project is and how huge it could be. Farscape ran on *shudder* SyFy from 1999 – 2003, was plagued by changes in time slots and was finally cancelled by the network due to the show’s high production cost. We will be watching for further developments on this.

• We mentioned a few weeks ago the rumors started by SGU producer Joseph Mallozzi that if the ratings were good enough for the final episodes of the show that an SGU movie was not out of the question. Well those hopes have now been pretty definitively dashed by an announcement by executive producer Brad Wright at this weekend’s Creation Stargate convention in Vancouver. Airlock Alpha reports that Wright told an audience at the convention that financing for future Stargate projects had fallen through, partially because of the recent bankruptcy and financial restructuring at the show’s studio home MGM. *shudder* SyFy officially canceled the series in December and the last episode is scheduled to air in May.

I wanted to start out with some local news that I am excited about – Hello Earth is bringing back Outdoor Star Trek this summer and you could be a part of it! Straight from the press release:

Open call for actors for Outdoor Star Trek project.

Hello Earth is a grass roots community enterprise formed with the intention of presenting free entertainment in outdoor spaces. Last year’s inaugural Star Trek episode, “The Naked Time,” was a great success and this year will be even more spectacular.

Needed: Actors to fill all roles (except Kirk and Spock), which will be cast without regard to the gender or race of the original series characters. We are not looking for impersonation. We are looking for creative people who want to be part of the process both on and off stage.

Auditions: Sunday, May 1st from 1-3 pm OR Monday, May 2nd from 7-9 pm

Location: Stone Soup Downstage, 4029 Stone Way N.

Auditions will consist of cold readings. Please be prepared to stay for the entire time; we may not need you for that long but we will be holding callbacks after hearing everyone.

Performances will take place on July 23, 24, 30 and 31 and August 6 and 7 outside at Blanche Lavizzo Park.

Please contact us at helloearthseattle@gmail.com with any questions, or if you wish to help with the production in another capacity.

Last year’s production of ‘The Naked Time’ was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to see what they are going to do this year. If you have ever aspired to be on stage this would be a great way to take the plunge.

The rest of the Monday News is under the fold

Awards

• This year’s class of inductees to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame have been announced. Artists Vincent Di Fate and Moebius, author and editor Gardner Dozois and professional iconoclast Harlan Ellison will be inducted in a ceremony as part of the Science Fiction Awards Weekend, June 24-26, here in Seattle.

Books

• The nominees for this year’s Scribe Awards have been announced. The Scribe awards are presented by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and “acknowledge and celebrate excellence in licensed tie-in writing—novels based on TV shows, movies, and games”. Of particular interest to the geek set will be the nominees for Best Novel (Speculative Fiction) which are:
  • Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon by Matt Forbeck and Jeff Grubb
  • Star Trek: Mirror Universe: The Sorrows of Empire by David Mack
  • Star Wars: Force Unleashed II by Sean Williams
  • Supernatural: Heart of the Dragon by Keith R.A. DeCandido
  • Warhammer: Bloodborn: Ulrika the Vampire by Nathan Long

  The full list of nominees can be seen on the IAMTW website. The winners will be announced this July at San Diego Comic Con.

Comics

• The 2011 Eisner Award nominations have been announced. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola was nominated for a total of five awards including Best Single Issue (or One-Shot), Best Limited Series and Best Cover Artist. John Layman and Rob Guillory’s series Chew was nominated for Best Continuing Series, Best Writer (for Layman) and Best Penciller/Inker (for Guillory). The surprisingly long complete list of nominees can be seen here. The Eisner award winners will also be announced this July at San Diego Comic Con.

–

Happy Birthday, Shannon!

<3

- Kick off your week with a roundup of the geek news you may have missed -

Putting together the first news post after April Fools Day is always a challenge. There were some great stories out there this week but many of them turned out to be not-so-much true. One of my personal favorites was the story from Comic Mix about Warner Brothers lawyers handing out cease and desist orders to people with “unlicensed” tattoos of DC comics characters. This, in my mind, is how you do it right. The story was juuuuuust plausible enough that it really gave me pause. Think Geek also did a fine job again this year with their lightsaber popsicles and the Angry Birds pork rinds.

I’ve done my best to sort through and find some actual news stories but if something in here seems too good to be true it probably means someone’s joke slipped past.

Books

• The short list for the first Terry Pratchett Anywhere but Here, Anywhen but Now First Novel Prize has been announced. The six nominees are:
  • Postponing Armageddon by Adele Abbott
  • The Platinum Ticket by Dave Beynon
  • Half Sick of Shadows by David Logan
  • Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan
  • Lun by Andrew Salomon
  • The Coven at Callington by Shereen Vedam

  The winner will be chosen by Sir Terry Pratchett and four other judges and announced at a party to be held on May 31.

Comics

• IDW Publishing announced at Wondercon this weekend that they have acquired the rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and would be publishing new TMNT stories along with reprints of the original Eastman and Laird comics. Comic Book Resources is reporting that IDW’s take on the Turtles will be based on the original series but there was no comment on whether or not Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird themselves would be involved in the relaunch. The new series is scheduled to debut this Summer.

• According to an official press release, Too Much Coffee Man creator Shannon Wheeler has signed a three-book deal with BOOM! Studios. Wheeler will be publishing Too Much Coffee Man: Cutie Island & Other Stories and a follow up to I Thought You Would Be Funnier as well as an all new graphic novel titled Grandpa Won’t Wake Up under BOOM!’s BOOM! Town imprint. Grandpa Won’t Wake Up and Cutie Island & Other Stories are scheduled to be out this year and the I Thought You Would Be Funnier follow up will be out in Spring 2012.

Movies

• Warner Brothers released four minutes of footage from Green Lantern into the wild. This is a “condensed version” of the footage that was a huge hit at Wondercon. Enjoy!
  

Tabletop

• Twilight Creations’ Deadlands boardgame may finally make it in to stores. From their website;
  

  After many delays we are happy to announce that Deadlands: Invasion of Slaughter Gulch (affectionately known as DL2) is at the printers. We expect to have it sometime in late May. We think you will find that it was worth the wait.

  The game, which has been listed as “coming soon” since 2009, has players vying for control of a frontier town and the supply of “ghost rock” in the surrounding area.

TV

• The BBC continues to crank up the hype for the new season of Dr. Who with a new extended trailer that was released into the wild on Friday. Enjoy!
  

With the relocation of the Seattle Geekly HQ safely behind us and a brief break in the convention schedule we’ve been able to catch up a bit on our reading. We have reviews of three books this week; Shannon reviews Other Kingdoms by Richard Matheson and Matt reviews Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente and Dark Jenny by Alex Bledsoe.

Other Kingdoms is the newest book by renown genre fiction author Richard Matheson, perhaps best know for I am Legend. It’s been close to ten years since his last published work, so this one has been highly anticipated.

The story is narrated by octogenarian Arthur White (aka Arthur Black) about his time in 1918-1919 in a magical “Other Kingdom” in northern Britain. The story starts having Arthur seeing the last of World War I, and being told to go to Gatford, the hometown of someone he saw die in the trenches. What Arthur doesn’t realize is that his life in Gatford will include witches, fairies, griffins and other fairytale creatures.

Supposedly written in 1982 by Arthur White, the narrator brings up differences between the early 1900’s and the “modern” time. It’s almost as if you’re reading a journal rather than being told the story.

It’s obvious that Matheson is a skilled storyteller and his style comes through strong in this book. The language and cadence of his words are there just as they were in I am Legend and his other works. This is one of those books I would’ve loved to read on my Nook, to look up words for me.

Many genre fiction authors, including Stephen King and Dean Koontz, have named Matheson as an influence,. If you’re a fan of Matheson this would be a great one to pick up. If you haven’t read any of his work, pick this up then go back and read his earlier books.

Other Kingdoms by Richard Matheson was published Tor and is available in hardback with a cover price of $24.99

Deathless is Catherynne M. Valente‘s tribute to, and re-interpretation of Russian folklore. Many of the figures that appear will be immediately recognized by anyone familiar with Eastern European fairy tales but the setting has been updated to the early 20th century. It tells the story of Marya Morevna, a young girl growing up in St. Petersburg in the time immediately before the Communist revolution of 1917. Marya is unique among her sisters in that she is aware of the magical world that still exists around and behind everyday reality. She sits at her window and watches as a series of birds drop out of the sky to become young men intent on marrying her sisters, she speaks with the domovoi, or house spirits, that live in her family’s home and she unintentionally summons Likho, a spirit of bad fortune in the form of an of an old, one eyed woman, who gives her a book containing the history of the mythological world around her.

Marya’s adventures take her through the tumultuous post-revolutionary period in Russia all the way through World War II in the real world and through a sometimes violent and frightening courtship with Koschei, the Tsar of Life in the fairy tale world. The troubles of real-world Russia are mirrored in the fairy tale world where Koschei is locked in an endless war with his brother Viy, the Tsar of Death. Marya is faced with the choice of abandoning her humanity and living out her life in the fairy world or betraying her friends and loved ones and remaining human.

Catherine M. Valente does an amazing job of giving Deathless the feel of a traditional folk tale, both through language and the structure of the story. She also does a good job of providing context and exposition for those of us that might not be as familiar with Russian history and folklore as we might be. I did feel like I might have gotten more out of the book if I had known the mythology better, but I certainly didn’t have any trouble keeping up with the story in spite of my lack of knowledge.

Put Deathless on your list. It is an original novel with strong roots in traditional storytelling and it is an extremely enjoyable read.

Deathless by Catherine M. Valente was published by Tor and is available in hardback with a cover price of $24.99

Dark Jenny is the third of Alex Bledsoe‘s Eddie LaCrosse mysteries. The books are a hard boiled detective novels in a fantasy setting. The protagonist, Eddie LaCrosse is a former mercenary turned “sword jockey”, a sort of medieval private investigator, who solves mysteries for his clients for twenty five gold pieces a day plus expenses. LaCrosse has all the characteristics of the traditional noir detective, he is an honorable man in a dishonorable profession with a clear and uncompromising moral code. The big difference is that in addition to dealing with the usual gangsters and femmes fatales he has to deal with magic, knights and nobles.

The Eddie LaCrosse novels so far have been written as stand alone stories with a small cast of recurring characters. Dark Jenny starts with LaCrosse receiving delivery of a coffin, sent to him by a figure from his past. The story is told mostly as a flashback to LaCrosse’s time investigating a murder in the kingdom of Gand Braun, a Camelot-like oasis of peace and justice in an otherwise chaotic world. The plot borrows heavily from Aurthurian legends but with enough twists that even those familiar with the mythology will still have a couple of surprises.

The mystery is very well written. I think it is probably quite a challenge to write a murder mystery set in a world where magic is a possibility but Bledsoe pulls it off. There are elements of magic in the story but they are incorporated well without being too deus ex machina.

The problem for me came in the combination of fantasy and noir. Both elements of the story were elegantly written but mixing them together was a little jarring at times. A lot of the dialog is very modern sounding with lots of contemporary slang and phrasing. It kind of put me in mind of the movie A Knight’s Tale with Heath Ledger and it’s medieval story set to a modern soundtrack. Fortunately the mystery in the book was compelling enough that I kept turning pages in spite of rolling my eyes at some of the more rough patches in the mix.

Dark Jenny was a fun, fast read and if you can get yourself caught up in the story enough to overlook some of the anachronisms it is entirely worthwhile.

Dark Jenny by Alex Bledsoe is published by Tor and is available in trade paperback with a cover price of $14.99