The 4th book in the Gideon series is best yet. In fact, each seems better than the last.

This thriller reminded me of the film Alien. It could be categorized science fiction.

1. Gideon’s Sword
2. Gideon’s Corpse
3. The Lost Island
4. Beyond the Ice Limit
5. The Pharaoh Key

[Warning: BEYOND THE ICE LIMIT is the sequel to THE ICE LIMIT.

While BEYOND is a stand-alone novel, we want to warn potential readers that the copy below contains serious spoilers for THE ICE LIMIT, for those who wish to read that book first.]

That thing is growing again. We must destroy it. The time to act is now …

With these words begins Gideon Crew’s latest, most dangerous, most high-stakes assignment yet. Failure will mean nothing short of the end of humankind on earth.

Five years ago, the mysterious and inscrutable head of Effective Engineering Solutions, Eli Glinn, led a mission to recover a gigantic meteorite–the largest ever discovered–from a remote island off the coast of South America.

The mission ended in disaster when their ship, the Rolvaag, foundered in a vicious storm in the Antarctic Sea and broke apart, sinking—along with its unique cargo—to the ocean floor. One hundred and eight crew members perished, and Eli Glinn was left paralyzed.

But this was not all. The tragedy revealed something truly terrifying: the meteorite they tried to retrieve was not, in fact, simply a rock. Instead, it was a complex organism from the deep reaches of space.

Now, that organism has implanted itself in the sea bed two miles below the surface—and it is growing. If it is not destroyed, the planet will be doomed.

There is only one hope: for Glinn and his team to annihilate it, a task which requires Gideon’s expertise with nuclear weapons. But as Gideon and his colleagues soon discover, the “meteorite” has a mind of its own—and it has no intention of going quietly…

PrestonChild.com

The Women (2024) by Kristin Hannah is one of the most popular books of 2024.

Intense.

I’d forgotten just how IDIOTIC was the Vietnam War.

The tragedy that befalls Frankie is multilayered, though all of it can be traced back to the moment she impulsively volunteers to be an Army nurse in Vietnam.

Before she knows what’s happened, she’s 2nd Lt. Frances McGrath, arriving at a 400-bed hospital 60 miles from Saigon.

… Frankie has no understanding of what horrors await her.

Her first full day in-country, after helicopters swoop in carrying dozens of gravely injured men, a medic hands her a boot and, when Frankie realizes a foot is still inside, she vomits and then tells anyone who will listen that she’s made a huge mistake.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she gasps.

Washington Post review (subscription)

Kristin Hannah is a story teller of the highest level — something like Nora Roberts.

They both started as Romance novelists, but Hannah is most famous now for her historical fiction.

On the other hand — the first half of the book I enjoyed a lot. Edutainment.

The second half is more of a bland Romance. I quickly grew sick of Frankie’s problems. And finally jumped ahead to the last chapter.

Kristin Hanna lives on Bainbridge Island, WA.

Author Kyla Stone specializes in apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.

I’d call this series Young Adult — though there are some painful scenes. I fast forwarded some.

It’s a bit cheesy and predictable, too.

The author seems too enamoured of firearms and gun fights.

The story starts with a shocker.

In the dead of winter in Michigan, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack destroys the U.S. power grid.
No electricity. No cars or phones. The country is plunged into instant chaos.

But for Hannah Sheridan, it’s the best day of her life. For the last five years, she’s been the captive of a sadistic psychopath–until the EMP releases the lock of her prison.

Battered but not broken, she emerges from her underground cell into a hostile winter wilderness with nothing but the clothes on her back and her determination to survive.

Book 1 does have one of the better trailers I’ve seen so far.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Edge of Collapse: Box Set Books 1-3: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

This box set contains the first 3 books and a short prequel:
Chaos Rising
Edge of Collapse
Edge of Madness
Edge of Darkness

Good marketing. You can download the box set from a library for free. BUT need to pay for subsequent novels in the series.

Surprisingly, you can listen to most of the books FREE online on Kyla’s YouTube channel.

Very well written. Super original.

Though I didn’t like her subsequent book, Yellowface — Babel is great.

BUT it would have been better if half as long. In fact, you could read just the first half of Babel and be impressed.

Rebecca F. Kuang is only age-28 as I post. An American, born in Guangzhou, China.

She has degrees in Sinology from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and University College, Oxford, and is currently studying at Yale.

Kirkus said it was “ambitious and powerful while displaying a deep love of language and literature“.

I’d never thought much about the art and science of translation before.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution won the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Babel is set in an alternative-reality 1830s England in which Britain’s global economic and colonial supremacy are fuelled by the use of magical silver bars.

Their power comes from capturing what is “lost in translation” between words in different languages that have similar, but not identical, meanings.

Silver bars inscribed with such ‘match-pairs’ can increase industrial and agricultural production, improve the accuracy of bullets, heal injuries, and more.

To harness this power, Oxford University created the Royal Institute of Translation, nicknamed “Babel“, where scholars work to find match-pairs.

… focused on four new students at the institute, their growing awareness that their academic efforts maintain Britain’s imperialist supremacy, their debate over how to prevent the Opium War, and the use of violence.

Class obsessed England needs diversity in Babel to optimize Silver production. 😀

Friends in this book thrown together as outsiders: Robin from China, Ramy from Calcutta, Victoire from Haiti, and Letty, a white British admiral’s daughter.  (In our reality, women were not invited to be students at Oxford until 1879.)

The administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards, held at Chengdu Worldcon (in China), ruled Babel not eligible for nomination without further explanation.

 A later report based on emails shared from the awards’ administrative panel revealed that the book was likely ruled ineligible in an attempt to avoid running afoul of Chinese censorship laws

The 3rd — and best so far — book in the Gideon series.

1. Gideon’s Sword
2. Gideon’s Corpse
3. The Lost Island
4. Beyond the Ice Limit
5. The Pharaoh Key

Still absurd and impossible. But more entertaining.

Gideon Crew–brilliant scientist, master thief–is living on borrowed time.

When his mysterious employer, Eli Glinn, gives him an eyebrow-raising mission, he has no reason to refuse.

Gideon’s task: steal a page from the priceless Book of Kells, now on display in New York City and protected by unbreakable security.

Accomplishing the impossible, Gideon steals the parchment–only to learn that hidden beneath the gorgeously illuminated image is a treasure map dating back to the time of the ancient Greeks.

As they ponder the strange map, they realize that the treasure it leads to is no ordinary fortune. It is something far more precious: an amazing discovery that could perhaps even save Gideon’s life.

Together with his new partner, Amy, Gideon follows a trail of cryptic clues to an unknown island in a remote corner of the Caribbean Sea. There, off the hostile and desolate Mosquito Coast, the pair realize the extraordinary treasure they are hunting conceals an even greater shock-a revelation so profound that it may benefit the entire human race . . . if Gideon and Amy can survive.

PrestonChild

Quite good.

13th book in the very popular Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths. 

Ruth is a forensic archaeologist who assists the police from time to time with investigations. 

The Night Hawks, a group of metal detectorists, are searching for buried treasure when they find a body on the beach in North Norfolk.

… he turns out to be a local boy, Jem Taylor, recently released from prison.

Ruth is more interested in the treasure, a hoard of Bronze Age weapons.

Nelson at first thinks that Taylor’s death is accidental drowning, but a second death suggests murder.

Nelson is called to an apparent murder-suicide of a couple at the isolated Black Dog Farm. Local legend talks of the Black Shuck, a spectral hound that appears to people before they die. …

The 3rd novel (2024) by an excellent author, Alex Michaelides.

This is a murder mystery — and also literature. The writing is excellent.

That said, for me the story wasn’t all that compelling. I really didn’t care about any of the characters.

This is a tale of murder.

Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it?

Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex-movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closest friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island.

I tell you this because you may think you know this story …

It had all the necessary ingredients for a press sensation: a celebrity; a private island cut off by the wind…and a murder.

We found ourselves trapped there overnight.

Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge.

What followed was a game of cat and mouse ― a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered.