Next Up in Beloved Speculative Series from TOR!

For me, it takes a certain amount of faith to read an ongoing series – I need to either know that I will feel satisfied after each installment, or I need to trust the author has a plan for the following books, which will stick the landing eventually. I absolutely trust T Kingfisher to do one or the other, and luckily, the next up in her Sworn Soldier series, What Stalks the Deep comes out today!

What Stalks the Deep

As has previously been addressed, I am a big fan of T Kingfisher’s work. In the Sworn Soldier series, our point of view character is Alex Easton, whom we grew to love in What Moves the Dead, a retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and with whom we got scared witless all over again in What Feasts at Night. As long as you remember Alex, I don’t think you need to reread the first two to dive into this new book, and frankly, if you are willing to be a little bit in the dark about references to past experiences, I bet you could read this one fresh.

In What Stalks the Deep, Alex goes to America to help old pal Dr. Denton, whose cousin seems to have gone missing down a possibly haunted coal mine. Alex investigates the disappearance in this West Virginia setting somewhat unwillingly, meeting a new cast of characters and being confined to small, dark, subterranean spaces. It has just as creepy and just as satisfying of a resolution as the previous installments in the series.

This Fall you can also look forward to Queen Demon by Martha Wells, which continues the Rising World series; A Mouthful of Dust, the sixth book in the Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo; and Brigands and Breadknives, a sequel to Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes. Thanks, TOR Publishing Group, for keeping us all going with reliable speculative series in these trying times. More on each of these beyond the cut!

Queen Demon

Queen Demon by Martha Wells comes out on October 7th. We rejoin immortal demon Kai and his family basically where we left off at the end of Witch King. Like in Witch King, Queen Demon alternates between narrating a pivotal time in Kai’s past, and a current intrigue. Since Kai and so many of his loved ones are immortal, many of the players in the stories of the two timelines are the same, but the mortals and the political landscape have changed drastically.

I strongly suggest rereading Witch King before diving into Queen Demon for reminders about the complicated history of Kai, his sequential bodies, his beloved Ziede and her wife Tahren, and their different alliances and tensions across the different lands and eras.

Queen Demon is enjoyably immersive, and I found myself particularly loving the dialogue—these characters know each other so well, it is fun to listen in. While the ending of Queen Demon is exciting, it is definitely open-ended for a further installment.

A Mouthful of Dust

Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle is a group of books which each tell an adventure of Wandering Cleric Chih and their bird companion, Almost Brilliant, as they travel around gathering stories for their order. In A Mouthful of Dust, which comes out October 7th, Chih and Almost Brilliant arrive at a town that had suffered a terrible and famous famine. Seeking stories to record about this time, they uncover the truly terrible things that people will do when faced with hunger. Like all the books in the Singing Hills Cycle, it’s a balance for the reader between enjoying spending time with Chih and Almost Brilliant, and being creeped out and dismayed by the sordid things they learn. A Mouthful of Dust is the 6th book in this series, which can be read in any order.

Brigands and Breadknives

Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes ushered in a new era of explicitly cozy books in fantasy settings, and then Bookshops and Bonedust delivered a prequel of equally cozy proportions. Brigands and Breadknives picks up after Legends and Lattes, with Fern, the foulmouthed and loveable bookshop owner from Bookshops and Bonedust, moving in next door to her old pal Viv, setting up a new bookshop in the city right next to the new coffee shop.

Fern, however, almost immediately freaks out about her life path and winds up on a journey with a famous elf warrior, seeing the sights, braving the perils, and bonding with both the elf and the elf’s charge, a goblin with her pockets full of chaos. The goblin, in fact, is Zyll, from Baldree’s free-to-read short story “Goblins and Greatcoats!”

There are a lot of likeable characters and fun settings in this one, which I found to be the best-paced of Baldree’s books so far. Brigands and Breadknives comes out November 11, and thus your Fall cozy reading times are pretty well sorted!