Seattle social worker Rose Samson wishes for a fairy godmother for the city that is filled with so much pain and suffering and ends up with silver haired Felicity Fortune who helps with people bedeviled in modern fairy tales. Sno whose fashion model stepmother hires a hit man who is later turned into a toad. Hank and Gigi whose mother abandons them in a shopping mall where a pedophile who builds elaborate gingerbread houses finds them and abducts them.
Scarborough, winner of the Nebula award for Healer’s War exhibits her grand storytelling skills and the contemporary venue make this a charmer.

Ivan Smetski at age 10 is renamed Itzak Shlomo and told he is really Jewish as his family attempts to leave the Soviet Union. As things work out they don’t get out when they thought they would and end up visiting a relation who lives on the edge of the Carpathian mountains where Ivan sees a wondrous site when running through the forest. It appears to be a beautiful woman sleeping on a hidden pedestal in the middle of a perfectly circular chasm guarded by an unseen monster rustling under a fill of leaves. As Ivan grows to scholarly manhood in the US he is always haunted by the encounter and when working on his dissertation he has the opportunity to return to what is now the Ukraine he hurries leaving a fiancée behind. Finding the place in the forest again he uses his track skills to temporarily defeat the bear under the leaves, to leap to the pedestal where he kisses and awakens Sleeping Beauty. She turns out to be Princess Katerina of Taina who was under the spell of Baba Yaga. As they cross the now visible bridge off of the pedestal Ivan finds that he has ventured into the year 980 which works to his benefit as he is a scholar of fairy tales and folklore as well as proto-Slavonic. Ivan does not fit in well in the tenth century but when they need to return to the 1990s Katerina discovers that he is not week just different. When they return to Taina they are armed with knowledge of gunpowder, distilling (for Molotov cocktails) and power spells made by Ivan’s mother. The blending of the fairy tale with time travel and of course with the questions of religion and faith that a Card book would not be complete without make for an enchanting tale. It makes me want to read The Magic Egg and Other Tales from Ukraine by Barbara J. Suwyn 1-56308-425-2.

With action occurring on many fronts and a full panoply of characters A Game of Thrones makes for a complex challenging but definitely worthwhile experience. The Starks of Winterfell are a happy family with Eddard, Lord of Winterfell serving as Guardian of the North for the Seven Kingdoms. His illegitimate son Jon saves a litter of direwolves that seem linked to the family having the same number of male pups as sons and female pups as daughters as well as one outcast albino pup who becomes his own companion. When Eddard goes to the capital as the King’s Hand the family is thrust into the political machinations of the evil queen. Impossible to sum up in this space rest assured that this is the epic fantasy to read. Jumping from one exquisitely depicted character to another and one fully realized setting and situation to another the Seven Kingdoms are set for a mighty fall. The seasons of undetermined length sometimes lasting for years and a menacing presence beyond a giant frozen wall to the north betide a dire future. This is the first in a proposed six volume series.

Dr. Thomas Purdue is a strange bird, living in a separate but attached home to that of his wife, with seemingly nothing but time on his hands to collect music boxes. When his pal Hugh’s wife is murdered and a major bad guy named Vince LoPriore ends up with Hugh’s vast collection of musical snuff boxes, Purdue plans a sting of the first order. Assembling a motley group of music box aficionados and cons he plans the perfect retribution towards LoPriore. The last chapter that ties up all the loose ends is somewhat tedious but over all it is a good read.

Suddenly released after four years in a maximum security prison because a police detective has recanted his testimony, Christina Welles is in New York trying to establish a new life for herself and hiding out from crime boss Tony V. With an astonishing capacity for numbers and an uncommon cleverness, she was the only one of her gang who had been captured when unloading a truckload of stolen airconditioners. The recanting cop has gone out to Orient Point on Long Island and informed her boyfriend, former body builder Rick Bocca, that she is being released so he goes to NY to try to find her. Charlie Ravich, a multi-millionaire involved in the telecommunications industry in China and an ex-POW is trying to find some way to achieve immortality. His only son died of leukemia and his only daughter is barren. To keep his genetic line from dying out he is advertising for someone to have his child. There is no doubt that Christina and Charlie will come together and when all is revealed a sadistic toady of Tony V.’s has removed the plates and screws from Charlie's spine as well as cutting off Rick’s left arm, all in a bid to find a couple boxes of missing money.

A very clever thriller that is more than deserving of the critical acclaim heralding it.

Lucia del Mar, a beautiful world class ballerina and Rashid al-Jazari, a high tech Moroccan inventor/businessman leap into a marriage when it is the only way to save her after they have been kidnapped together. Adjusting to life in his family’s harem she befriends an AI he created who along with a virtual reality suit that infuses the body of the wearer with nanotech, the VR experience allows touch, smell and taste to manifest. After deciding to leave him they are attacked and she must use VR to help defeat the villains knowing that in the wrong hands this wonderful technology could wreak havoc on the world.

The worlds of hard SF, ballet, and a contemporary harem are written with fascinating detail. While providing a provocative romance tale, Asaro never stints on the science in her science fiction.

A philosophical house painter takes his life in his hands to rescue a psychotic employee who is poised to make a swan dive off an impressive roof while his wife develops an extreme phobia when taking her agoraphobic best friend to a psychiatrist. The master of suspense once again creates an edge of the the seat page turning reading experience as Martie is beset by the most terrifying phobia of all, a fear of oneself, as she imagines herself doing despicable things. But as the young couple try to puzzle this out they find they are up against one of the most hideous, heinous, and horrific villains ever written. Kudos to Koontz for writing such first class exiting entertainment.

Ben Pecos is the new sleuth to watch on the Southwestern scene . In his first mystery he teams up with Julie Conlon, a television reporter to solve a series of mysterious deaths on the Tewa Reservation. This is one I’m hanging on to for a future rereading.

Could quantum teleportation work as a type of time travel to take people to parallel universes? As always Crichton writes a riveting tale, this time with a group of archaeologists sent back to the 14th century to try to extricate their leader from the past in which he is trapped. Not quite Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, but all the same, terrific time travel entertainment and fascinating historical detail.