Disclaimer: Darwin Garrison, the author of For Conspicuous Valor, is a friend and a reader of this blog.

A novelty in publishing which has come in with the e-book, almost unremarked, is the e-story. Where we used to go to the pulp (and slick) magazines for our short science fiction, today we can often find such stories at low prices for downloading to our Kindles or Nooks. The downside is that, in the absence of traditional editorial apparatus, we’re often not sure whether we’ll be getting good work or vanity-published dreck.

For Conspicuous Valor is good work.

The main character is Megan Williams, a 17-year-old girl growing up on a farm on a distant earth colony planet. The daughter of a war hero killed in combat, she dreams of being a Ranger herself, fighting the “Pexies,” or “Post-Expansionists,” a ruthless enemy that seems to be analogous to the Communists of our time.

As the story begins, she is babysitting her younger sister and baby brother when a genetically-engineered “direfox” sneaks into the yard and drags her brother off. Megan pursues them at a run, followed by her one-legged uncle Nate, who has been looking after the family. The peril is overcome, but Megan doesn’t cover herself with honor.

Her decision, later that evening, to go out and hunt the direfox down on her own leads to a frightening discovery and a night of personal testing.

My only problem with the story rises from my personal objection to the idea of women in combat. Other than that, the story is well-told and engaging, the characters realistic and multi-layered. I enjoyed it, and recommend it for all readers.

I have to assume that Lise McClendon, author of Nordic Nights, must be of Norwegian ancestry, partly because “Lise” is the Norwegian way to spell the name, and partly because her wry depictions of Norwegian-American (and genuine Norwegian) characters in this pleasant mystery novel are spot on.

It would be ridiculous to make plagiarism accusations, but I thought the parallels to my own novel (in a different genre), Wolf Time, were remarkable. As in my book, the home town (Jackson Hole, Wyoming here) is visited by a prominent Norwegian cultural figure (here a painter named Glasius Dokken), and the action comes to revolve around the discovery of a rune stone related to the Kensington Rune Stone of Minnesota.

But here the hero is Alix Thorssen, Jackson Hole art gallery owner. She has agreed to help organize the titular Nordic Nights festival, a civic winter celebration. Her own gallery will be the site for the display of an epic set of murals on Viking themes, painted by Dokken. But the first night of the festival, Dokken is murdered in a hotel room (not his own), and Alix’s stepfather is accused of killing him. Alix’s own suspicions lean toward a mysterious fortuneteller from Minnesota who claims to read mystic meanings in runes.

In my experience, mysteries written by women tend to be rather different from mysteries written by men, and I generally avoid the former. I picked this one up because of its Scandinavian themes, and I thought it was both well done and accurate in its research in things Scandinavian (even things Viking). Scandinavian reserve as a character trait is a constant, serio-comic theme. Still, it read like a women’s book to me (I was frequently disturbed by Alix’s disregard for her own safety), so I mainly recommend it for female readers.

Mild cautions for language and sexual situation apply, but most readers (especially female readers) will find a lot to enjoy in Nordic Nights.

First of all, the disclaimer: Although I didn’t get the book free, I should probably note that Ric Locke is a Facebook friend, and has been giving me helpful advice on e-publishing, at which he has been (very deservedly) successful.

I have good and not-so-good things to say about Temporary Duty, but I’ll start with the good.

Considering its length and its price ($2.99 for the Kindle book), Temporary Duty is one of the best reading entertainment values you’ll find today. It’s quite long, and it’s simply lots of fun. If you go back far enough to remember the sheer pleasure of the old space opera novels, like Heinlein’s juveniles, that same pleasure is here in abundance—the wonder of space, the fascination of exotic aliens and strange cultures, the excitement of human ingenuity applied to interstellar challenges. You’ll have a good time reading this book.

For the negative… well, I’ll leave that for further along.

The time is about 40 years in the future. There have been big changes in the world. A terrorist war and a financial collapse have turned America into a highly regulated, rigidly stratified society. The American military mirrors that stratification. There’s very little mobility between the upper and lower ranks.

So when history’s first alien contact occurs, and the aliens—the mercantile Grallt—ask for an advance party to prepare quarters on their ship for the humans who have contracted to join them on their merchant voyage, the Navy asks for two initial volunteers. They are to be lowly Petty Officers, and their duties will be simply to clean the place up and make it ship-shape. Still, John Peters and Kevin Todd are eager to volunteer, partly for the adventure and partly for the (seeming remote) possibility that they’ll be able to better their prospects. Continue reading Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke →