Incryptid, by Seanan McGuire
I finished all of the remaining Incryptid novels, and they are great at telling a good story while keeping an eye on the larger storylines for the series. Especially once the stories kick over to Antimony, who gets a little more of the magic-related storylines and world building back-story, they kick into high gear.
Also, at some point I realized that “Magic for Nothing”/“Tricks for Free”/“That ain’t Witchcraft” were plays on the Dire Straits song, and I kept wondering what jokes I was missing in the rest of the titles.
The Aleph Extraction by Dan Moren
This is a sci-fi heist book, and it’s great. It’s the third book in this universe by Dan Moren (preceded by The Caledonian Gambit and The Bayern Agenda), and they’re all sci-fi Cold War-style spy thrillers. For whatever reason, this one is called book two. I suppose the first one was technically a prequel.
In this one, there is a semi-mythical (perhaps alien?) mysterious metal tablet that has been purchased by a notorious gangster, and everybody wants it. Our heroes are a spy group working for a shadowy branch of the government, and they need to figure out how to steal the tablet right from under the gangsters nose. So, you know, standard spy stuff.
The Grace Of Kings by Ken Liu
This book was a goddamn delight. It’s a story told in a island chain on the verge of the industrial revolution, and the revolution that unites an empire. The main two leaders of the revolution are two men who are total opposites, and initially become friends.
It’s a fantasy story, in the same sense as early Game of Thrones or something where gods and magic exist but are mostly in the background. But there’s also a lot of scientific thought and innovation - both airships and submarines play a pretty key role in the plot.
It’s definitely long, though. Structurally it reads like two separate novels, and the trade paperback clocks in at over 600 pages.
Next up: maybe Blight of Blackwings, or the next Dresden Files book. Which somehow turned into two Dresden Files books when nobody was looking.