The SF Site: Featured Reviews Archive

The reviews are sorted alphabetically by authors' last name -- one or more pages for each letter (plus one for Mc). All but some recent reviews are listed here. Links to those reviews appear on the Recent Feature Review Page.

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Cynnador by Patrick Welch
reviewed by David Hebblethwaite
What's so unusual about this book then? For a start, although it takes place in one of high fantasy's traditional settings -- a mercantile city in desert lands -- the story is complete in a single volume of under 200 pages, which is pretty rare in itself these days. More than that, the structure is unusual: the first 40 pages comprise a prologue and thirteen "preludes" before the main story starts.

The Casebook of Doakes and Haig by Patrick Welch
reviewed by Steve Lazarowitz
The setting is an alternate history in which the thirteen colonies that formed the original United States never managed to break away from England. Broadenings the gulf between this book and your typical mystery is the fact that one of the two partners of the Doakes and Haig Criminal Investigation team is a leprechaun.

Westchester Station by Patrick Welch
reviewed by Steve Lazarowitz
Robert Winstead finds himself in Westchester Station, an inter-dimensional train station. While waiting for a train he's not sure will ever arrive, he runs into a number of invariably unforgettable characters, including a graffiti artist that paints natural disasters, a panhandler asking for a most unusual kind of donation, an inventor who doesn't realize his inventions can't work, mental acrobats, a man who watches ghost trains and much much more.

The Body Shop by Patrick Welch
reviewed by Steve Lazarowitz
The title story is a novella that takes us into a rather odd near-future where a man named Egerton is in the business of building bodies for dead people. He uses a bit of surgery and a bit of voodoo to accomplish feats that normal medicine can never hope to match. The tale twists and turns, at times most unexpectedly. In addition to the "title track," there are 16 other stories in this horror collection. All are well worth reading.

The Thirteenth Magician by Patrick Welch
reviewed by Jonathan Fesmire
The story starts in a tavern, a somewhat typical fantasy location, but its uniqueness is soon apparent. Daasek, the protagonist, is there to murder a perverse magician. He is not the villain, however, but the tortured anti-hero, driven by an external force to go from town to town, killing the wizards he encounters.

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