Tag Archives: thriller

Zero Days

Posted on June 20, 2024 by smellincoffee

Jack and her husband, Gabe, are professional security analysts — pen-testers, red-teamers. Their job is to test the security measures of companies, both digital and physical, to find weaknesses. After one case goes a little sideways and Jack is briefly … Continue reading →

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Tiger Chair

Posted on June 11, 2024 by smellincoffee

War. War never changes. Oh, the execution of it changes — spears become rifles, scouts on fast horses are replaced by drones and mining photos for GPS data — but the horror of it remains, as does certain truths like … Continue reading →

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The Store

Posted on May 3, 2024 by smellincoffee

At a last huzzah in New York, surrounded by former writers who the modern economy has made superfluous, Jacob and Megan announce to their friends that they are doing the unthinkable: they’re joining The Store. The Store dominates the American … Continue reading →

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Cemetery Road

Posted on December 27, 2023 by smellincoffee

Marshall McEwan (who is not Marshall McLuhan, disappointingly) ran away from small-town Mississippi to become a journalist in D.C. He found great success there as  a talking head on what passes for TV news, talking down with great condescension about the place … Continue reading →

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Murder by Other Means

Posted on October 5, 2023 by smellincoffee

Tony Valdez is a dispatcher. In a world where people who die of natural causes stay dead, but people who are killed by others magically appear back in bed, his job is to intercede when people are dying from accidents … Continue reading →

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The Dispatcher

Posted on October 2, 2023 by smellincoffee

Imagine Zachary Quinto, known as nuSpock or “that quiet guy in Margin Call who tells Jeremy Irons the bad news”, doing an impression of Heath Ledger’s Joker. Got it? Okay, good, because that was my favorite part of this novella. … Continue reading →

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September 2023 in Review

Posted on October 2, 2023 by smellincoffee

September was a quieter month for leisure reading than the last have been, in part because of grad school — I’m constantly reading articles related to information science for class, both the assigned pieces and those I can find connected … Continue reading →

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Killing, fictional and otherwise

Posted on August 29, 2023 by smellincoffee

Lately I’ve gotten into the bad habit of getting almost to the end of the book, and then saying — “Okay, not enough of that to take to work, I’ll start a new one and then finish the other one … Continue reading →

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Warcross

Posted on August 20, 2023 by smellincoffee

Emika Chen is a young woman, desperately in debt because a past criminal record makes it impossible for her to obtain the kinds of work that she’s developed skills for. What’s she’s good at coding and hacking, and these days … Continue reading →

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Day of Atonement

Posted on August 18, 2023 by smellincoffee

Over a decade ago, young Sebastião Fox was spirited away from Portugal, a freshly-minted orphan. His parents destroyed by the Inquisition, Sebastião came into the care of the now-aged Benjamin Weaver, London’s most accomplished thieftaker. After coming of age and … Continue reading →

Posted in historical fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments