Remember when you were in high school and your buddy who read the same kind of stuff you did came up to you in the hall between classes and shoved a book in your hand and said, "You gotta read this! It's great!"?
Well, that's what I'm doing with VIN OF VENUS. I'm shoving the e-book into your virtual hand and saying, "You gotta read this! It's great!"
As much as I love both hardboiled crime fiction and swashbuckling Sword and Planet adventure, I probably never would have thought of merging the two. Luckily, Paul D. Brazill, David Cranmer, and Garnett Elliott did think of it, and the result is this collection of several short stories and a novella that form the first part of a series I hope will run for a long time.
The title character wakes up missing his left arm, his left leg, and his memory. Some people try to help him, but naturally, sinister forces are at work, too, as Vin (that's the only name he knows himself by) tries to find out who he really is and what happened to him. Along the way he's haunted by dreams of himself living another life, one of sword-swinging adventure on the planet Venus before a catastrophe turned it into the unlivable planet it is now.
The authors do a great job of moving back and forth between the two storylines and dropping hints and clues about what the truth really is. And even more impressively, the hardboiled thriller elements and the fantasy elements are handled with equal skill, so that both ring true.
VIN OF VENUS is really entertaining, and I'm looking forward to finding out what happens next. In the meantime, if you haven't picked this one up, I highly recommend that you get in on the beginning of this saga.
