Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence

Mark Lawrence is one of those authors that I've meant to review for a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed his debut Prince of Thorns after picking it up as an impulse buy from the Science Fiction Book Club what feels like eons ago. When the SFBC didn't offer the subsequent books in the series, I allowed my OCD need to have all the books in a series in the same format stop me from reading the rest of the series. I know it's weird but I promise, I'm mostly sane. So when the first installment of his second series Prince of Fools hit shelves, I snatched it up. Then life took a turn for the busy and I stopped reading almost entirely. Fast forward almost a year, and here we are.

Prince of Fools has everything I loved about Prince of Thorns with a much more relatable protagonist than teen sociopath Jorg Ancrath, so readers with more delicate sensibilities can rest a bit easier. Lawrence's tersely elegant prose and well crafted characters are in full evidence and the world building is just as effortless as readers of The Broken Empire have come to expect. I suspect some of that is due to the connection to the previous series, Though my long gap in reading Lawrence as well as having not finished the previous series (a situation I expect to remedy in the coming months) rendered all but the most obvious connections meaningless to me. Even as a standalone, Prince of Fools is a joy to read and readers who haven't read the previous series can start here with no significant disadvantage. Just dive in and enjoy, I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

Breach Zone by Myke Cole

Reading Myke Cole's newest novel has become a bit of a New Year's tradition for me. Fortress Frontier was the first book I read in 2013, and Control Point was one of the first of 2012. This year has been no different, Breach Zone was my first novel this year and it certainly set the bar for the rest of the year. It's been awesome to watch Cole's career and work evolve over the last few years and he really knocks it out of the park with the conclusion to the Shadow Ops series. While I was expecting improvement over his last effort, Cole delivers a novel so much better than his last that there is no doubt that he's earned his place as one of the most watched authors in the genre. With pulse hammering action around every corner this novel could have become just a sequence of strung together set pieces with magic and missiles flying, but Cole layers the narrative with hard truths about duty and service, community and redemption. Breach Zone has a giant heart inside its bruised and battered chest and that's the real key to its success.