Books

SOULMATE is the sixth in L.J. Smith’s Night World series as a teenager tries to convince her baffled psychiatrist (a great supporting character) that there’s some horrifying reason she’s writing herself ominous warnings by automatic writing. Before long, she learns she’s been the third point of a triangle involving the First Vampire and First Bitten Vampire which has led to her dying in incarnation over and over again (which it’s implied has something to do with why so many supernaturals are suddenly falling for humans). Good.
THE PERILS OF PEACE: America’s Struggle for Survival After Yorktown by Thomas Fleming looks at how state rivalries, personal ambition and greed and the ineffective efforts of the Continental Congress threatened to sink the peace that George Washington won at Yorktown. A very good look at how England, America and France all struggled to get out of the war with a win but no real idea how to do that; interesting, showing George III a much more hands-on monarch than I’d realized (he comes off as the Prime Mover against letting America go, with Edmund Burke as the main voice of the opposition). Good.
BPRD HELL ON EARTH: Russia by Mike Mignola and Jon Arcudi has the BPRD’s Kate and Joachim going to Russia to help their Russian counterparts (this follows up on one of the stories in Abe Sapiens: The Devil Does Not Jest) investigate a city of zombies and caverns of corpse flesh, only to suspect (correctly) the Russians are playing their own game. Not the best in the series, more setting up for future plots than a story in itself.
That being said, it’s still more impressive than Todd DeZago’s and Craig Rousseau’s The Perhapanauts: First Blood (edited to get the title right), in which a special ops team including Bigfoot, a psychic, a ghost and a chupacabra investigate and take down supernatural threats. Very much a formulaic by-the-numbers story for all the weird trappings.