author : Jane M. Lindskold

Karen Saber is an expert xenolinguist with a very shady past, currently engaged in a blood feud to avenge her murdered mentor, when her world is turned upside-down by a strange message. When she finally decodes it, a shocking genocidal conspiracy is revealed, and she has to work with the very people she has vowed to kill, in order to save an alien race.

It makes such a refreshing change to read a story without intrusive expository lumps and gobs of background description to slow the flow. There is plenty of back-story here, but it is uncovered crumb by crumb, or left implicit, in a way that only adds to the tension. And the technique of writing in the present tense, which I found mildly distracting at first, works well to emphasise how Karen is dislocated from her past self, and is living very much in the present.

Karen is an interesting protagonist. Her straightforward blood feud is thrown into disarray as she fights to save the Xians, a task that she feels at best only partially competent to perform. Her dismay and discomfort as she is forced to work with the very people who murdered her mentor, in order to achieve a greater good, is well drawn. And all the characters are complex -- Karen and her colleagues may all have done bad things, but they are also trying to do their best by the Xians, and the Xians themselves aren't entirely saints.

The mystery of the Xians' communication is fairly obvious to anyone who reads SF, but the story is very well told and certainly sucked me along. [I started reading part way through a flight, surfaced briefly as we bumped down onto the runway, but only really noticed my surroundings again when the other passengers began taking off their seatbelts and standing up to disembark!] The three alien races are well-drawn: each have their different distinguishing characteristics, yet the individuals of each race are also believably diverse in behaviour and motivation. And after so many SFnal felinoids, it is interesting to have a race of intelligent gerbil-like creatures.

Smokey is the best whore on the planet Arizona, making extra money from the secrets she learns from her clients using her hidden telepathy. Everything is fine until the day she senses an alien presence in the mind of her latest client. The next thing she knows, she and her daughter are fleeing for their lives, and end up with the Underground, a hidden force of psionics fighting the alien invaders. As she joins the fight, she gradually learns to come to terms with her past. But it is her daughter who might hold the key to their victory.

A decent page turner, and some good world building, but there are too many coincidences driving the plot, too many loose ends, and the final resolution is a little too easy.

After a disaster destroyed her home when she was small, Firekeeper has been raised by the Royal Wolves in the northern forests, and considers herself a member of the pack. But when a party from the south comes searching for the lost settlement, the pack decides she should contact them. The party is looking for a lost royal heir, and Firekeeper, accompanied by her friends, the wolf Blind Seer and the falcon Elation, soon finds herself enmeshed in human politics.

As Firekeeper learns to become human, we get to see the culture clash, both from her point of view, and from the humans'. There is a curious lack of tension, because the reader learns very early on that Firekeeper is not the heir, and so we know the actual heir will be one of the rest of the cast of characters -- we know this is not a classic "Lost Princess" story. The political wranglings have many unexpected turns, many of the characters develop in unexpected ways, and there is good closure to this first part of story. But we also learn there are much deeper things to come, as the humans will one day have to come to terms with the intelligent northern wolves, so there are lots of threads to lead into the sequel.

Feisty American Jenny Benet, recently orphaned, arrives in Victorian England to stay with her Uncle Neville, only to discover he is about to embark on an archeological trip to Egypt, to uncover a secret burial site he was forced to abandon many years earlier. She persuades him to take her along. Even before they reach Egypt, mysterious happenings occur, warning them off their chosen path, and once there, things take a more sinister turn. But it isn't until they find the ancient burial ground that things start getting really weird.

And things don't start getting weird (that is, SFnal) until page 384, when they do so extremely rapidly. Up until then, this can be read as a real world archaeological adventure story, with an excellent feeling of place and time. After then, it is wonderfully fantastical. And that sudden change feels a bit peculiar.

But it's all well written, and a good page turner (even before it gets weird!) -- my slightly low rating is due simply to the long wait for the fantastic, which then lasts for the remaining scant 114 pages.