Looking back over the year, and going through the reviews I've
posted, I think the following are my best RI 2024 books.

These are in more or less chronological RI order, not rank order.

==
Butcher seems to have really slowed lately. I believe he's had
some family shakeups. That said, when he *does* come out with something,
I have really enjoyed it:

Warriorborn: A Cinder Spires Novella (The Cinder Spires)
by Jim Butcher
https://amzn.to/42pw2dw

The Olympian Affair (The Cinder Spires Book 2)
by Jim Butcher
https://amzn.to/3SH9cek

Just as Butcher eased back into the "Dresden Files" with a novella, "Warriorborn" leads off his return to the world of the "Cinder
Spires".

Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster is a "Warriorborn" lieutenant in the
service of Spire Albion. It's been so long since the first Cinder
Spires book that I can't recall if the Warriorborn were introduced
there or not, but basically they are semi-weres: stronger & faster
than normal humans, and also more subject to impulsive and instinctual behavior. War is brewing in the setting, and the Spirearch is
concerned that he hasn't received vital intelligence from the new
Albion colony at Spire Dependence, so he sends Benedict and a "dirty
dozen" team of Warriorborn criminals to asses the situation and do
whatever it takes to retrieve a dispatch case.

Arriving by airship and dropping in stealth Benedict's team finds
that it's not a case of the Spirearch's agent being held or killed:
The whole spire has been massacred by unknown and apparently
impossible means. Perhaps the war has started, but as far as anyone
knows, Spire Aurora has no weapon that could have done this. As
it develops, there are witnesses who it is vital to bring back to
the Spirearch along with the dispatches, wherever they are, but
that won't be easy in the hellscape of a ruined Spire, the hostile
native life of the Spires setting, and enemy action. At least
Benedict understands *that* part of it..

This was a very satisfying return to a setting I really enjoy. I
would say the only nit was a speech given by Benedict's (convict) second-in-command, an excellent character, which did not have the
payoff I expected later.

_The Olympian Affair_ takes up directly after "Warriorborn", and
Benedict continues to feature, but the three main characters here
are Auroran Colonel Renaldo Espira, a Warriorborn in a society less
friendly to such than Spire Albion, Albion Captain Francis Madison
Grimm Captain of the AMS Predator, the Spirearch's personal ship,
and Albion Lady Abigail Hinton, scion of an important Ablion merchant
House, and the Spirearch's personal representative to the diplomatic
goings-on at Spire Olympia.

What are the goings-on? Well, war with Aurora is coming, may already
have arrived, and Albion is going to need all and any allies it can
get. The conference is full of backstabbing, sometimes in a literal
sense, and Lady Hinton is having a difficult time of it. Not helping
matters is that her lover, Albion's most famous duelist has also
been sent to Olympia, with strict instructions not to duel *anyone*
while his Auroran counterpart is also there and is determined to
provoke same. Helping matters even less is the fact that Abagail
finds herself involved in a duel of her own, and the menace from
Spire Dependence is bearing down on everyone despite all Espira can
do to stop it.

I really like the Cinder Spires setting. Its quasi-Elizabethan
characters all live turned-up-to-eleven lives, fighting harder,
loving larger and friending stronger than in our own workaday world.
We get a few new pieces of information on the setting in this book,
which tend to make me think I was wrong in my initial assumption
that it takes place in the same multi-verse as the "Codex Alera"
books. We also get an interesting twist at the end of the book
which puts in in the mind of a similar turn in the first of McClellan's
"Glass Immortals" books. I also like Butcher's portrayal of having
cats as allies: It doesn't help as much as you might think.

==
The Andrews are generally rock-solid, and if I would rather have
more Inn Keeper or Kate books, the HL books are quite good as well:

Emerald Blaze: A Hidden Legacy Novel
by Ilona Andrews
https://amzn.to/3SZKfto

Unsurprisingly as it's an Andrews, this was the standout of the
month. Like the "Edge" books, the "Hidden Legacy" books are a bit
more romance-y than the "Kate" books, but not a lot much more so --
there's always plenty of plot and action and very little sex by
current standards.

The Hidden Legacy books take place in a world very much like ours (realistically, too much like ours, in the same way the Marvel
Universe is too much like ours, but that's not the focus here),
except that a couple hundred years ago a serum, since ruthlessly
suppressed, was discovered which gave people (those whom it did not
kill..) something extra. Call it "magic", or call it "super-powers",
but the gifts largely breed true leading to a semi-overt system of
great houses, Byzantine house politics and marriage alliances all
co-existing, mostly, with a mundane government of nation states and
ordinary humans.

The series follows the doings of Clan Baylor, a new house, who make
their living as private investigators, and the books are first-person
narrated by different sisters who are leading the house at the time.
After eldest sister Nevada stepped down (for reasons that weren't
quite what they seemed), the last couple books have been told by
Catalina Baylor, whose Siren powers have kept her from relationships,
as she can never be sure she's not influencing her suitor. Well,
there was that one time..

Currently she has quite a bit on her plate. Apart from ordinary
investigations like finding stolen therapy monkeys, someone is
suddenly trying to kill Clan Baylor, the Warden of Texas, whose
covert deputy she is, has dumped a potentially world ending murder investigation on her, the first non-human intelligence has arisen,
and it's not friendly, her evil grandmother is trying to make
Catalina her creature, and you know, that one time? He'ssss Baaack!

As always with the Andrews, there's humor, action, relateable,
grounded, characters, and high stakes. You don't have to have read
the previous books to enjoy this one, but why wouldn't you?

==
I might rate this one as the most-fun book I read this year.
You wouldn't give it to your maiden-aunt, but Davi will keep
you listening while she reddens your ears & talks them half off:

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying
(Dark Lord Davi Book 1)
by Django Wexler
https://amzn.to/3VRC7fZ

I first encountered Django Wexler with his Flintlock-Punk series
The Thousand Names. Well, this is completely different, but just as
good.

Davi (if she has a last name, she has apparently forgotten it) thinks
she is from Earth, and was probably a nerd, but now, after over a thousand years of lives, she has trouble remembering anything about her first life.

All she knows is that her troubles started when she regained consciousness
in a scummy pond in the woods where a wizard pulled her out and announced
that she was the chosen one prophesied to save the human kingdom from
the marauding "Wilders".

She could just never figure out *how*. Every path she took led her to death (often prolonged & painful) at the hands of "The Dark Lord", exiting life
with the Kingdom falling and reawakening in that damn pond.

After several hundred lifetimes, she has had her belly-full of it and decides that *this* time things will be different. To start with, while she always dies at the hands of the Dark Lord, it's not always the *same* Dark Lord,
so there's obviously some kind of choice point out there somewhere: Why not Dark Lord Davi? She kills and robs the wizard and sets off into Wilder territory. It takes her a half dozen quick & painful trips back to the
pond before she figures out how to make a Wilder band accept her (it helps
that unlike most humans, she can eat the magical Thaumite stones as Wilders
do) and set out on her path to Dark Lordship. In the beginning she is
helped by her general knowledge of the shape of coming events, but past
that, she must depend on her ability to wing it (aided by the fact that
despite her odd and devil-may-care aspect, she is smart and vastly experienced) and judge character.

Not that she's perfect at that, the knowledge that she's probably heading
for an early and protractedly painful death have made her prone to take pleasure where she can find it, and while she knows that she probably shouldn't sleep with the help, the understanding that she will be around to face the consequences this time comes a bit late to her.

Still she has, against all the odds, increased the size of her little
band and made it to the Conclave. Well, every now and then, a dog
catches the car -- now what?

This book is one of the most fun I have read this year. Davi's story
is told in snarky first person, with the most footnotes(*) I have encountered since _Happy Hour of the Damned_ (more than Vance, for sure). She is
shielded somewhat from the full realization of all her betrayals by her conviction that everything will "reset" with no-harm-no-foul, and when
she comes to see that might not be the case this time, it does give her
pause, but fortunately does not dampen her narrative for more than a few
pages.

We are promised that Davi's story is a duology, and I am quite looking
forward to the conclusion.

(*) Actually this is one of the first (fiction)cases I have found where
reading in hardcopy would clearly be superior to reading on Kindle.
I often found that by the time I got to the actual footnote page, I had
forgotten what the reference was to.

==
I have now read (though not yet reviewed) book 2, and this continues
to be a very fun series. As I said somewhere, Aaron has really come
into her own:

Hell For Hire: Urban Fantasy Action with Witches and Demons
(Tear Down Heaven Book 1)
by Rachel Aaron
https://amzn.to/3zDevEk

Remember Gilgamesh? Turns out he was a real guy, and the saga we have was
only the half of it. In the end he defeated the gods of Sumer, occupied
their paradise, and put scales on the eyes of most of humanity so that
they could never see magic nor be any threat to him.

As part of his conquest, he enslaved all the demons of paradise and established cabals of sorcerers & warlocks (dependent on him for their magic) to
enforce his will. The only independent magical force left in the world
are the Witches of Blackwood, and they live at Gilgamesh's sufferance
only because they are useful.

It's obviously not something the Witches are happy about, especially since
the bargain that keeps them sort-of free involves rendering their sons
to become warlocks.

In point of fact, its something that one of those said sons is unhappy
about unto the point of rebellion. Adrian Blackwood figures that if
he is to make a move, he must establish his own Blackwood on the west
coast, well away from the witches of New England in order to try and
minimize the fallout on them. It's a move more likely to fail than not.
He's a young witch, and he has to start a forest in secret and try to
bring it to magical maturity before its noticed, something he has
no experience in doing, and while he can afford to hire some security,
he only has enough actual cash for one month pay.

Bex is a demon, and the head of said security. Reincarnated many times
over the ages, she has been leading a futile rebellion against Gilgamesh,
and freeing the odd demon whenever she could until she was grievously
wounded in a battle with one of Gilgamesh's sons. Now she runs her team
as mercenaries, trying to keep them fed as her dreams of doing anything
better have crashed around her. Taking a contract with a Blackwood witch
was a welcome surprise (as was the fact that the "witch" was [good looking] guy) as to the limited extent that any rebellion exists anymore, the Blackwood would be on her side. Soon it's clear though that Bex doesn't know all of Adrian's secrets, and he has no idea about the deepest of hers...

To my mind Aaron continues to get better with each series. Early on she
had a tendency to over-explain her magical systems, but she has that well
under control here, and doing something with Gilgamesh and Sumerian demons
is a bit of a nice switch up from usual UF tropes. She also has a knack for writing complementary heroes & heroines who each bring something to the
table that the other does not. Her romances tend to be rather slow-burn,
but I don't think there's any doubt where this relationship is headed.
There's still plenty to do after the partial victory in the final battle
here, so I would expect probably two more books, which I will follow.

==
This is an odd one to put on the list. I can't call it a "good" book,
and it goes down some blind alleys, but given my personal Golden Age
reading history, I'm very glad to have finally read it:

Have Trenchcoat -- Will Travel
by E. E. "Doc" Smith (Author), Lloyd A. Eshbach (Introduction) https://amzn.to/4dpJoL6

Doc Smith invented "Space Opera" with _The Skylark Of Space_ and
perfected it with the epic Lensman series. That's enough to put
him near the top of the SF pantheon, and to make me me wish he had
devoted less time to his day job, but apparently Smith himself
wanted to try other things from time to time. This book is a
collection of his non-SF fiction, and is, I believe, the only
appearance of these stories.

The major work here is the novel _Have Trenchcoat, Will Travel_,
which is not Smith's title. Apparently he wanted to call the book
_The Hunky Eye_, with 'Hunky' being antique ethnic slang for
'Hungarian'. The book opens like a classic noir tale when a
mysterious dame wanders into a down-at-the-heels PI's office wanting
help with the fallout of the schemes of her no-good-louse husband.
I have to say that from that opening, things do not develop as I
expected. It turns out that Matyas Ferenc Nagy is not your average
PI and in fact has a cold-war intelligence background as well as
being a defrocked Hungarian count and a world class athlete, and
it turns out the dame is his equal though she doesn't know it yet
and the mystery gradually turns into the backdrop for an alpha/alpha
love story. In fact, it is kind of all over the place, dropping
in asides about gang warfare, knife technique in the French demi-monde
and a sequence where both leads play the nobles they more or less
actually are for plot reasons I was never entirely clear on. Out
of the pulps and in the era of Spillane, the lead couple get to
actually have sex more than Smith heroes generally do (I always
thought bachelor Lensmen were probably virgins) though there is a
belated and rather puzzling pull-back when when the memory of
no-good-louse surfaces again, and the mystery sort of transitions
away from "how did he get away with this huge swindle and where's
the money" to "can we prove he's dead?". None of this stops the
book from being entertaining, but for me the big flaw is that neither
of the leads (or the third that develops) are ever in any real
danger. They are never captured and have to do a daring escape,
or in a pitched battle they might not win, pretty much every encounter
goes their way. Presumably Smith tried to sell this (it is a
"finished" book) and didn't. If he had, I think an editor would
have suggested he tighten the focus and add some real challenges
for the leads.

The publisher's introduction places the book in the early 60s, but
I suspect it might have been earlier than that, as the failed
Hungarian revolution would have certainly been mentioned had it
happened yet, and some of the social mores seem more post-war than
late 50s. The introduction also speculates that elements of the
book inspired the Family D'Almbert story, but to me the more obvious
resonance is to Storm Cloud's story, especially the episode where
he and his lover infiltrate a casino while playing a sham game of
chess. I will also add that there are echoes of Kimball Kinnison's
battle with Thionite (a surprisingly moving scene), and that the
love story seems very Heinleinesque at times, though I suppose the
inspiration is probably in the other direction in that case.

The second story in the collection is "Motorsickle Cop" a slight
tale of derring-do on the Nevada highways that brings to mind the
motorcycle sequence in the bridge chapters of the re-written
_Triplanetary_. In this case a Higway Patrol hero has the chance
to stop the getaway car from a murder/robbery if he can get ahead
of them over some nearly bike-impassable terrain. There's nothing
wrong with the story, but it's not particularly compelling either.

"Nester Of The Caramints" is Smith's try at a Western. The publisher
suggests from the address on the manuscript that it dates to a place
Smith was living in the 30s, so it would have likely been written
for the Western pulps, and like van Vogt's Western deals with cattle
rustling. The place is Montana and the time is the end of the
frontier era when the free-range is being broken up by settlers
with actual legal titles to their lands. The changes aren't accepted
by everyone, and the story follows the cowboy agent of a proto
rancher sponsored detective agency who is tracing the disappearance
of his (literal) predecessor and of course disappearing cattle, and
a pretty settler's daughter. On the whole, I think I like van
Vogt's "Ride In, Killer!" better as setting a monster story as a
Western is a bit different, but this is perfectly serviceable -- I
wonder if Smith tried very hard to sell it.

Finally, there is another love story, "Full-Time Nurse" which follows
the adventures of a black-listed (doctor got handsy..) nurse as she
falls into the orbit of an extraordinary patient, whom the odds say
will be dead before the end of the year... There is some interesting
social mores stuff here that feels very antique now, and I'm not
sure what the market would have been, but the publisher suggests
the inspiration may have been Smith's own medical issues.

The only major Smith here is the novel, and while it has issues, I
did find it entertaining and am glad I read it. The shorts are unobjectionable, but you won't miss much if you stop after Nagy's
happy ending.

==
For some reason, I hit this one before the first of Hamilton's
"mature" Captain Future tales, but it works just fine regardless.
If you read the paperback pulp reprints from the 60s, you know the
setup, but not what Hamilton could do within it when he let loose:

Captain Future #22 Children of the Sun
by Edmond Hamilton
https://amzn.to/4cYJ1Xs

Here's one from my review hiatus of last year that I wanted to get out.

Curt Newton, aka Captain Future started out as a pulp hero, sort
of a future Doc Savage. Like Savage he had a crew of bickering
side-kicks, went on done-in-one adventures, and was pretty much the
same book to book. Most of those short books (one appearing in
each issue of "Captain Future" magazine) were (mostly) written by Space Opera pioneer Edmond Hamilton, and there were 20 of them before the
magazine folded.

I don't know if it were Hamilton's idea or an editor's request, but
that wasn't the end of Captain Future with Hamilton bringing
Curt Newton back for a number of novella length "mature" adventures
in other magazines with this being the second such. And good heavens,
it's a winner, a marvelous story.

One of Newton's scientist friends is missing, and the crew tracks him
to Mercury (this is still the habitable Solar System), a place they
have been before. On-planet, the clues all lead one way, and when they
find the scientist's fate, Curt must decide whether to follow and try
to bring him back or not. In the event he does try, and it's
an emotional roller-coaster of a journey with an ending that wrings
out everybody.

You can sense the differences from the pot-boiler pulps immediately.
Newton's famous ship, The Comet, is battered and pitted, the crew
are all serious, and are all given real things to do, there is no
"villain" and no fights though there are certainly heroics, and there
is no pat happy-ending though it is a satisfying one.

Bravo, Mr. Hamilton.
==

Aside from specific reviews, I continued down the harem adventure rabbit-hole during 2024. Some of it, predictably, pretty bad, but I continue to enjoy
Sara Hawke's harem & hot-adventure tales. She writes both fantasy & space opera books that would be above average without the sex. I continue to
try LitRPG as well, and would say that Cale Plamann's Tower of Somnus books continue to be solid. As for MilSF, Jeffery H. Haskell's "Grimm's War"
books are solidly entertaining if not perfect.

==

There were also a few disappointments during the year. I thought the usually reliable Lindsay Buroker hit a rough patch with her magical Seattle books,
and I in particular didn't really like the Arwen subsequence or how it
ended. Also, after loving the movie, and letting the book sit in my SBR
for many years I was completely underwhelmed with Sabatini's _Captain Blood_. Go see the Flynn instead.

==

A number of authors aside from the usual suspects continued missing in action this year. In particular "Luke Sky Wachter" with the Spineward Sectors
books, and J A Sutherland with the next Alexis Carew book. Haven't seen anything definite about Wachter, but apparently Sutherland is depressed
and blocked. Hope the New Year looks up for both.

==

Things to look for in 2025: The next Glass Immortals book, maybe? Hopefully? --
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

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