For your reading pleasure, this week our very own Alma Boykin has released a new Familiars book, and long-time commenter Old NFO has a new western out. (I beta-read it and helped write the blurb, so I’m biased, but it’s good! And historically accurate!)
Learnedly Familiar: Familiar Tales Book Seventeen
Where do you file a Missing Meister Report?
Something is moving. Arthur Saldovado, Lelia, and André defeated ancient evil, but mysteries remain. And worse – Arthur’s name-sake is learning how to drive! Who needs abyssal creatures when you have teenagers, school-yard spats, and retail woes to worry about? Certainly not Lelia Chan Lestrang.
When André’s mentor disappears, Lelia braces for the worst. Trouble’s coming, as bad perhaps as the evil that drew her and André together. But she has a few surprises of her own now, including allies in very strange places. With very strange senses of humor.
Return to a Familiar world, full of adventure, bad puns, dark music, magic, shedding lemurs, and domestic chaos.
Showdown on the River: The Bell Chronicles Book 1
Rio Bell is leading a cattle drive up the Goodnight Loving Trail to Fort Laramie. It’s his first time as trail boss, but with trusted hands and hard work, he expects to be back in Texas by late September though fire, flood, or rustlers bar the way!
He didn’t count on a range war.
They didn’t account for the Rio Kid…
And he sure as hell didn’t count on the girl showing up!
If you missed it and want more fantasy, Sarah has re-released the first three in her Shifters at the Diner series, and Cedar Sanderson has released an absolutely adorable picture book with Jimmie Bise Jr: One Hungry Werewolf!
And if you want lighthearted harem fic, no picture so this stays safe for all sorts of working environments, a friend (and regular attendee at group dinner and beta reads) John VanStry has a new release this week, too! Dan’s Inferno, Book IV: Vengeance
Hey, any book that comes with a warning like this is bound to make me laugh.
WARNING: (Is it really a warning if I’m telling you what you want to hear? Hmm, good question that, but well, there’s always the chance you came here without reading the first three books. Hey wait! You didn’t read the first three books?! Shame on you! Go read them!) And for the rest of you, this books is, like the rest, full of all sorts of kinky demonic sex, raunchy people, doing raunchy things, and enjoying it! Sex! Violence! Threesomes, Foursomes, Fivesomes! (what comes after five?) and lots of hot demon girls.
What have you read lately that you’d recommend?
Mad Genius Club 
Witch Hat Atelier #7!
By Kamome Shirahama. After the first six of course, because like most manga, this is a story in volumes. Magic, wonders, perils, and a character showing things we had not imagined.
Richard Thompson Ford’s _Dress Codes_. It’s a history of, well, not fashion and style per se, but of how society interpreted fashion, and the roles it played. The book is a bit too post-modern in some ways, but is a very readable academic monograph, with lots of primary sources.
I just reread Olan Thorensen’s Destiny’s Crucible series. I was planning on just the first book for “how does he handle appearing on a new world?” research and got sucked into the whole thing. [There is a certain author, whose name starts with “Up”, that makes my “sort by author Z-A” list have many pages before seeing how “Thorensen” is spelled.]
In an “also bought” list, I saw book four of Laurance Dahners’ The Stasis Stories. Book three was a woke travesty – and I was not the only reviewer to say so – so I was bit skittish. He seems to have recovered. I updated my book three review to “pretend this book was never written and move to the next one”.