Derek

OMG!

I generally do not go for Urban fantasy, but this one was a freebie from tor.com.

I laughed. I howled! I cried. (Only because I laughed so hard...)

So, “Sin du Jour” is a catering company with only two rules. The first, “We don't serve werewolves” (and incidentally, they don't serve Werewolf....). That endears me to them, because I'm so over werewolves, and fae, and vampires...

What they really are is the in-house catering for a US diplomatic branch that brokers agreements with the supernatural creatures that humans don't want to know we live with. The plot revolves around being required to serve “Angel” to seal a deal between two clans of “Demons”, and the chefs not being comfortable with that. But, while the story mentions the supernatural creatures, they're never central. This is really about people and how they cope. Some well, some poorly—and some completely off the wall!

I'll be reading more of Matt Wallace.

One thing David Weber is rarely, if ever, accused of is not paying attention to detail. In fact the biggest complaint I see is that he tends to infodump huge amounts of unnecessary detail.
So, I was amazed to see that Weber failed Relativity 101. “but the countergrav unit only reduced her apparent weight. It didn't do a thing about her mass, and any object fell at over thirteen meters per second per sec­ond in Sphinx's grav­ity, which meant she would hit the ground just as fast and with just as much mo­men­tum as if she'd had no coun­ter­grav at all.” Shame, David. Acceleration is mass. If the “countergrav” could keep her above the ground when it was working properly, then it was cancelling all groundward-acceleration: and therefore mass. And weight is just the force acting on a pair of masses.
Honestly, though, it didn't affect my enjoyment. It's just nice to catch him in an off-moment!

I've had this on my e-reader... well, since two e-readers ago! And I just never got around to it. 
I'd never heard of the author, which was one reason why I hadn't managed to get it to the top of my reading list, and once a book gets beyond about the tenth-most-recent book on my e-reader it has a tendency to get lost.
So, when I finally did start it, I was pleasantly surprised. There's a slight similarity to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, so I re-read that next, and I must say Matthew Hughes comes out ahead.

Short and fun.

I have a pretty large vocabulary, so usually when I don't know a word, I look it up. I thought about it, but I'm rather glad I didn't this time.

When I finished the story, I'd enjoyed it. It was sweet and clever. But then I looked up the word... and laughed aloud!

An interesting story with a clever premise, but I do wish Weber could stop politicizing. “...the Eu­ro­pean class sys­tem had never re­ally caught on in North Amer­ica de­spite the best ef­forts of its own left­ist politi­cians.” Puh-lease. It's not the leftist politicians who are so class-oriented.

Surprisingly enjoyable, considering I'd decided not to read any more of Ringo. I usually find him thoroughly pedestrian. 

Forgettable. As in, I've already forgotten all the details.

Surprisingly fun

I couldn't manage to find a point to this.

I'm afraid I don't understand Jessica Churchill. She's murdered, saved by aliens, and then she murders the aliens.

All I can say is “ungrateful bitch!”

Nevertheless, it's a powerfully written story, and you don't have  to like, or even agree with,  the central character to appreciate the strength of the writing.

One quote says it all: “don't fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here.”

Ugly. Creepy. Impossible to forget. In a short story, Yu managed to nail everything that Charlie Jane Anders completely botched in [b: All The Birds In The Sky 25372801 All the Birds in the Sky Charlie Jane Anders https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429225322s/25372801.jpg 45119441]

Simply the most brilliant story I've read this year.

I refuse to tell you anything about it, because I think everybody should approach it with no preconceptions beyond “most brilliant story I've read this year.”

As the blurb says, "sardonically funny". But that's all it's got.

I'm not sure why I liked this as much as I did. 
I don't like these “civilization divided into gangs” stories, perhaps because I have yet to find a convincing description of how it could happen (Malka Older's Infomocracy is perhaps the closest), and the story is riddled with inconsistencies, such as the idea that you could go for lunch half a world away from where you work, when vehicles are only able to travel at a little over 1000km/h. You'd need to do twenty times that to  make that work!
Nevertheless, Palmer's writing is mesmerizing, and I'll probably read the sequel.

ugh.I can't decide whether this is supposed to be an homage to [b:Disc World 34497 The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1; Rincewind #1) Terry Pratchett https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407111017s/34497.jpg 194190] or to [b:Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser 57950 Swords and Deviltry (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #1) Fritz Leiber https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347418591s/57950.jpg 449577], but the characters are neither as funny as [a: Leiber 23001 Fritz Leiber https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1423163995p2/23001.jpg] nor as well developed as [a: Pratchett 1654 Terry Pratchett https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235562205p2/1654.jpg]'s.I'm quite fond of Flint's stories, but this is a huge fail.

Very disappointing. I tried this  because I've been thrilled with Atkins' continuation of Robert Parker's “Spenser” series.
However, apparently he can channel Parker, but not Hammet.

Cultural appropriation isn't high on my list of unforgivable crimes, but cultural appropriation written badly certainly is. 
Rape as a plot device is something that should only be used after a great deal of thought. Which isn't in evidence here.
Not worth the time I invested.

Simply terrible.

Not, in my opinion, nearly as good as Colleen McCullough's Rome novels, but because it covers some of the same events from a different viewpoint, quite interesting nonetheless.

Unfortunately, there's very little intersection. McCullough's tales focus on Julius Caesar (and his family), who is almost a bit character here, while Harris's focus on Cicero who is more than a bit character in McCullough's but far from central. otoh, perhaps that's entirely intentional on Harris's part. As McCullough wrote in the introduction to the first volume that was specifically about Julius Caesar, it gets hard to write fiction when the facts of the man's life are so well documented. It would be even harder for Harris to write fiction that covered the same ground that she had ploughed  so well.

I quite often found Harris's tone jarring. It seemed too "modern". To be fair, perhaps McCullough's is just as modern, but because she was Australian, it seemed less so to me.

As always, synchronicity struck. I read the line "...Phoenicians whose ancestors had been priests of Tyrian Melcarth,..." while drinking a Maltese (Malta was once a Phoenician colony) wine called Melqart.

Really, really, creepy.
And, not to mention, excellent explanation of why H.P. Lovecraft was a horror writer and a misogynist. 

This series starts strongly: the original two Norton books were better than I remembered. [a:Lyn McConchie 66725 Lyn McConchie https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] took it pretty quickly downhill. Her first was decent, the second so-so, and this one is really pretty bad. Nobody's actions are believable (especially the unknown person who leaves the least responsible character a spaceship in his will...), and they spend far too much time debating how to get around this civilization's version of the “Prime Directive” instead of thinking about why there might be such a thing in the first place.I really hope the series is over now...

As always, a delight.

Reacher is smart, tough, and funny. And his sergeant, Frances Neagley, is smarter, and probably just as tough (though not as funny).

I still can't figure out though why one of the bad guys, considered a liability by badder guys, was assassinated in Ukraine... the location adds nothing to the plot and makes no sense.

Quite a bit better than [b:Software 274043 Software (Ware, #1) Rudy Rucker https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388312090s/274043.jpg 2910608], but wtf? [b:Software 274043 Software (Ware, #1) Rudy Rucker https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388312090s/274043.jpg 2910608]'s Boppers have evolved. Instead of needing to be supercooled they can run at room temperature. And they have a plan to put a robot intelligence into a human body. But humans have a plan to put a “chipmold” into Bopper bodies, that will kill off the AIs. Who'll win? Neither, of course...Suddenly we have “moldies”. Yet another kind of Bopper. How did that happen? You won't find out here.

Really badly dated. Surely Rucker's Boppers weren't even believable in 1982.