The Masuda Affair (Severn, 11/1/ 2010)  is the seventh book in I. J. Parker’s series about Akitada Sugawara, a minor official at the Ministry of Justice in Heian Kyo, capital of 11th-century Japan.  Akitada comes from a noble family that has fallen upon hard times.  He is a clever and persistent sleuth, who is sent to solve politically sensitive cases, sometimes undercover.  Over the course of the series Akitada marries and rises in rank.  Now senior secretary in the ministry of justice and mourning the death of his young son from smallpox, Akitada meets a beaten and starved little boy and is drawn into the tangled affairs of the cursed Masuda family.  These classic historical who-dunnits with a well-drawn exotic setting are written by a retired American university language professor.

–posted 11/1/2010

Now here’s a trend:  authors as detectives–Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and others.  Stephanie Barron’s premise is that a cache of lost Jane Austen papers, which purportedly shed light on the “lost years” of Jane’s life, has turned up on a Maryland estate.  These letters document, in “Jane’s” own words,  a series of detecting adventures.  Barron does an excellent job of imitating Jane Austen’s style, and intriguingly links real people with their fictional alter-egos, for instance Jane’s mother looks and sounds a lot like Mrs. Bennet (of Pride and Prejudice).   Jane’s latest adventure is Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron (Bantam, 9/2010),  in which Jane and brother Henry journey to Brighton where they run into Lord Byron, who is accused of murder when a young girl is found dead in his bed at the King’s Arms.

–posted 10/31/2010

I just discovered this term in Wikipedia and I love it. It perfectly describes a phenomenon I didn’t have a word for. Link rot is the reason we don’t always include live links in eSequels. We list website addresses that you can try, but don’t blame us if they don’t work. Link rot may have set in–the link has changed, or shut down, or is otherwise unavailable.

–posted 10/26/2010

If you haven’t caught up with the novels by Malla Nunn, do so immediately.  Her first book A Beautiful Place to Die (Atria, 2009) was compelling, suspenseful and rich with the complexities of life in Apartheid-era South Africa.  It starred Detective Sergeant Emmanual Cooper who investigates the white suspects in the fatal shooting of an Afrikaner policeman.  Nunn was born in South Africa and now lives in Australia.

Let the Dead Lie (Washington Square, 4/2010) follows Cooper, who is now an undercover agent documenting police corruption on the docks of Durban Harbor.  When he finds the body of a white slum kid with his throat slit, he is accused of the crime and becomes the prime suspect in two subsequent murders.

–posted 10/25/2010

Christopher Fowler has written thirty novels and 10 volumes of short stories as well as television scripts, graphic novels and an autobiography titled Paperboy (Bantam, 3/2010),   a very funny memoir about his boyhood love of reading and his quirky, non-reading parents.  He has won all kinds of awards, including the British Crime Writers’ Last Laugh  award.  In the US, he is best known for his humorous Peculiar Crimes Unit Mysteries featuring elderly Scotland Yard detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, a series now up to nine volumes.  Bryant and May are wonderful examples of the mis-matched pair of detectives, a sub-genre with a long and honorable pedigree going back to Sherlock and Watson.  Many of their cases might also be listed under the “locked room” sub-genre that also has a long history.

Volume 1 of the series has an unusual beginning.  It starts with the death of the 80-year-old Bryant in an explosion, then flashes back to Bryant and May’s first case, set during the London Blitz in 1940.  Bryant and May off the Rails (Bantam, 9/2010) is the latest book in the series.  The geriatric pair has one week to recapture the famous King’s Cross Executioner, who was apprehended earlier, but escaped from captivity.

–posted 10/17/2010

Here is a controversy I’ve missed until now.  There is a woman named Harriet Klausner who has reviewed a phenomenal number of books on Amazon.com–over 15,000!  She was the #1 ranked reviewer for Amazon until Oct. 2008 when they changed their ranking system.  How can one person really read and review so many books?  On average 6 books a day?  And like them all?  She gives them all 4 or 5 stars.  Well, that’s the question.  People are now doubting her authenticity,  suggesting that she works for Amazon, or that she is making a good living selling all those review books.  The two links below give a fuller story.  And before you ask, no eSequels.com doesn’t get free review copies.   And while we do read a lot of books, we don’t claim to have read them all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Klausner

http://www.daytondailynews.com/o/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/booknook/entries/2007/03/29/the_mysterious_harriet_klausne.html

Oh, and by the way, most the reviews on AllReaders.com seem to have been written by Harriet Klausner, Resident Scholar.

–posted 10/17/2010

City in Shadow (Severn, 2010) is the fourth book in the Hidden Manhattan series by Evan Marshall.   The series is set in New York City and stars Anna Winthrop, who is the supervisor of a Sanitation Dept. garage.   Now there’s a new occupation  for an amateur detective.  Like many amateurs,  Anna has a handy boyfriend,  Santos Reyes,  an officer in the  NYPD,  who helps with access to police records and the rough and tumble side of detection.  City in Shadow begins when Anna picks up a scrawled note pleading for help as a beautiful young woman flees the neighborhood in a city cab.

–posted 10/11/2010

After a period of giving priority to other series,  author Lois Bujold has returned to her Miles Vorkosigan character.  CryoBurn (Baen, 2010) is the first Vorkosigan novel in eight years, and series fans are rejoicing.  Miles Vorkosigan is clever and brave, but undersized, deformed, and insecure, i.e., not your typical science fiction hero.  Naturally he didn’t get accepted into his planet’s space academy.  But he signs up with the Dendarii mercenaries, eventually becomes leader of Barrayar and marries his beloved Ekaterina.  Set in a far future universe, the series starts three hundred years before Miles’s birth and has carried him to the age of 39 so far.   What began as a somewhat light-hearted space opera has deepened into a world-building saga, with fully developed characters and a touch of humor.

Not being a science fiction reader myself, I had never read Bujold.  But I was intrigued by what she said in a recent interview.  She denied writing stories that teach her readers morals or political views.  She wants to entertain them.  “When I think about the reader at all,  I prefer to imagine Ms. Average Reader as a 40-year-old children’s cancer hospice nurse just home from a bad day at work.  She doesn’t need me (or any other wittering writer) to teach her all about the human condition.  She needs someone to hand her a drink.”

–posted 10/5/2010

Reviewers are calling Dennis Lehane’s new novel Moonlight Mile (Morrow, 2010) a sequel to Gone Baby Gone (Morrow, 1998).  But there was a book in between the two.

Prayers for Rain (Morrow, 1999) takes place after Gone Baby Gone and before Midnight Mile. A technicality, perhaps, but not if a reader wants to follow the relationship between Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.

At the traumatic ending of Gone Baby Gone Angela leaves Patrick.  Prayers for Rain tells how and why they get back together.  In Midnight Mile, they are married with a child.

Recently I’ve been thinking that I should have named my book and this database Series Fiction rather than Sequels. It’s too late to change now.  Our “brand,” as the marketing savvy like to call it,  was set 28 years ago with the publication of the first edition of  Sequels by ALA in 1982.

What enormous changes have occurred since then (I compiled the first edition of Sequels on 3 x 5 cards–can you imagine!)  So it’s not surprising that the meaning of the words sequels and series has morphed a bit.  But it still surprises me how many of today’s most popular authors write series fiction.  Series authors now dominate the best-seller lists.  That wasn’t always the case.  “Branding” is to blame, no doubt.  We shouldn’t even have done it to cattle.

–Janet Husband, posted 10/3/2010