Well, I feel like I should do another pass through this, but
the heck with it, at least it's actually timely this month since
I'm still on vacation. You can ignore all the missing and repeated
words.

As usual the links (except for the Sabitini) are Amazon affiliate
ones that could in theory earn me something if you enter the store
through one.

====

Airship Privateers (Secret of the Old Ones Book 2)
by Blaise Corvin
https://amzn.to/4ccxq6C

As I mentioned in my review for Book 1, I had decided at the time
that although it was "ok", I wouldn't seek out Book 2. What changed
my mind was pretty shallow: I thought the whole "airship" thing
sounded pretty cool. In the event, it didn't have a lot to do with
the plot, and was handled pretty pedestrianly, so again I would
just rate this one as just "ok".

In some nebulous near future, "The Secret Of The Old Ones" is an
immersive RPG (think "Ready Player One" on steroids) which has taken
the world by storm. There is in fact good money to be made by
running a crack gaming team and broadcasting your adventures. Trent
Noguero is one such player, and has made a level breakthrough
(partially through his strategy of always going for "luck" points
when apportioning his wins) which makes his team the one to watch.

However he is gradually coming to think that all is not quite as
it seems when the violence of the game leaks into his everyday life,
as do his in-game abilities. In the meantime, a new side has joined
the game world, identifying as non-human characters (something we
can't help but think is true in real-life as well though Trent has
not quite gotten there), and a host of questions that really should
have been asked in Book 1 has surfaced, and the answers (to the
extent they are yet known) are not reassuring...

This is a very short book, about novella length, competently but
not compellingly written, and advances the meta-plot much less than
I would like. I am back to thinking I will not pick up Book 3,
though I would not rule out being once more shallow.

In my view if you want a Lit-RPG series about game bleed-overs into
real-life, I would go with Cale Plamann's "Tower Of Somnus" books.

Tested by Temptation (Tracking Trouble Book 5)
by Lindsay Buroker
https://amzn.to/4c5wGAe

Arwen having retrieved for him the lost Galaxy blade, her timelost
half-dragon hoped-for lover Azerdash, has bowed to what seems to
be fate and has left to lead a rebellion while Arwen is left to
deal with fallout from her mother's people's plots in the Seattle
area, her increasing involvement with the magical community and the
increased and the unwanted attention from the Dragons Azerdash's
apparent intentions have drawn.

This is the final book in the second of Buroker's connected series
set (mainly) in Washington state that I have read, and in the end
I liked it much less than the books following the Half-Dwarf
house-flipper Mattie. Half Dark-Elf tracker, archer & baker Arwen
is just not that compelling a character to me. She has too much
going on to fit into her timeline, especially baker-wise, and her
fitful romance with the half Dragon, Azerdash never really heats
up satisfactorily due both to Buroker's contrived humorous cock-block circumstances whenever anything sparks, and the, in my view, unwise
emphasis on his prior wanna-be ex. But worst, I think, is the fact
that the story of Azerdash's quest to overthrow the Dragon rule on
all the know worlds demands an epic scope which the setup of these
books with their small casts and (heretofore) largely personal
stakes just can't service. This requires a cheat ending and
personally I felt it required Azerdash to act in a despicable manner
which left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing.

Dark Covenant: A Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Harem (Dread Knight Book 3)
by Sarah Hawke
https://amzn.to/3AftWTt

Dread Knight Duncan Keene, now unexpectedly a Paladin of the god
Aodar (who is apparently in dire straits, but trying to help as
much as he still can) has made some progress against the zombie
apocalypse which has consumed his old order, or perhaps it would
be more accurate to say he has learned more about it, which is a
start. He has also used his new abilities to reclaim his first
love from the evil which had claimed her these past few years and
has installed her with the rest of his harem in the Capital while
he, they, and the rest of the power structure try to figure out how
to counter attack before the Corrupted leadership on the zombie
side is able to deploy the old war machines once more, consuming
the souls of whole villages to power them. Unfortunately this is
not straight forward due both to normal politics and jockeying, and
the unexpected inroads the Corrupted have made into the ranks of
his allies. Although the path ahead is not clear in the short run,
I believe I do see the way forward for Duncan to ultimately unite
his allies, though he has not yet.

As usual for Hawke, this is well written & plotted, though of course
with a lot of sex.

Frigid Magic (Ard's Oath Book 3)
by Bruce Sentar
https://amzn.to/4dnjKXA

When last we saw "Four Sphere" mage Ard, he, his harem, and other
party members were hanging out in the coastal North, ostensibly
hunting corrupted mages and pirate nests (and in fact actually doing
that) but mostly staying out of the Capital and the schemes of the
Royals, most notably the First Princess.

That is now getting more difficult, especially with Ard having lost
the tenuous support of the Second Prince, and the ongoing war going
badly and heating up. Ard is continuing to grow into his magic,
and is learning a bit more about his heritage, and the Big Picture
(Greek gods are involved, though how Ard's world relates to Earth
is unclear). In the meantime, he has built a mountain fortress
(which has a boys' clubhouse feel which makes his harem roll their
eyes), manifested a spirit horse which apparently very much like
his father's abilities, and is learning things about himself,
especially in relation to the sociopathic harem member foisted on
him by the First Princess which he's not sure he wants to know.

In the end, I would have liked a bit more forward progress here.
To some extent this book felt like wheels spinning before actually
coming to grip with the main issues of the setting. Still it was
entertaining enough, and I will pick up the next one.

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.

Captain Blood (aka Captain Blood His Odyssey)
By Rafael Sabatini
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1965

When I was growing up, before the VCR era, it was pretty unusual
to see an old movie more that once, but I was fortunate enough to
catch Errol Flynn's "Captain Blood" at least three times, and it
was one of my favorites. That being the case, I wanted to like the
Sabatini novel it was based on more than I actually did.

Peter Blood is a peripatetic Irishman, trained in medicine, who has
knocked around the 17th century world having an improbable number
of adventures for his rather young age. Now, fate has washed him
up in Bridgewater England, once again practicing medicine just as
the Duke of Monmouth makes his fatal move against the Crown. Summoned
to treat a noble wounded in the ill-starred battle, Blood finds
himself caught up in the Bloody Assizes, and sentenced with transport
to Barbados under an indenture of ten years hard labor -- a virtual
death sentence. Once there, his physician's skills do make his lot
somewhat better than expected (the Governor has gout...), and his
owner's comely daughter is a breath of fresh air, but things are
still pretty miserable, and he contrives a plan to escape to a
nearby Dutch colony. This plan is cut short by Spanish treachery,
and the ensuing chain of events leads inexorably to Blood becoming
a pirate, and then a notorious one. In the meantime, the political
gears are grinding in France, Holland & England...

As I mentioned, I wanted to like this book, but in the end I really
couldn't. Flynn's Blood, at least as I remember it, was a doer,
put in bad circumstances but never a prisoner of them. Sabatini's
Blood was very mopey and pussy-whipped and often seemed to drift
into situations rather than fling himself into them. Even the
escape plan I mentioned above actually originated with the other
doctors on Barbados who very much wanted Blood gone. Sabatini was
also prone to gloss over the action-adventure parts of the plot and
instead spend time on Blood, as I intimated above, moping around
and letting his followers down. He also threw into occasional odd
and unwanted first person interjections and commentary.

Finally, while you can see the genesis of the movie's bravura final
scene in the book's final scene, it does not rise to the same level
at all, having dismissed the love-interest several pages earlier,
totally undercutting the final confrontation.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8w4hj4
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)