relevant to you.

     Desert Magick is an urban fantasy about a white witch with a complicated, mystical family. She’s stalked by a mysterious ghost-like figure, and needs to resolve a mystery of a Native American power centered in the mountains. The characters are engaging, the writing proficient and breezy. This is a book written for readers of this column. You’ll love it.

Here’s one, set in Texas, about modern Texas Rangers. It came to me via the Amazon Vine program. Strong Enough To Die by Jon Land. Little mysticism in this straight action-detective novel, except for some hints at an ancient Mexican heritage. These are mundane characters, solving a mundane murder mystery with a lot of soul growing pains involved. It illustrates the effect of Neptune.

Dying By The Sword by Sara D’Almeida is another in her Musketeers Mystery series, rewriting the Dumas novels in an alternate history. It’s spooky how I believe D’Almeida’s Musketeers are real, more real than Dumas’s. I reviewed these novels and the much more mystical alternate-history novels D’Almeida wrote under the name Sarah A. Hoyt in my August, 2009, column. Wallow in them!

Nancy Holzner sent me an advance reading copy of her novel Peace, Love, and Murder. Many authors send me review copies, but few are this good. The main character is a man named Rainbow who grew up in a hippie commune, ran away to join the Army and was disowned for it. He’s home now, but the commune is now a subdivision, and his parents are gone. He resists seeing the mystical dimension underlying his problem, and I think there has to be a sequel!

I met Alex Bledsoe on Twitter, and at my request he had his publisher, Tor, send me The Sword-Edged Blonde and an advance reading copy of the direct sequel