In The King of Attolia, we learned that Eugenides friend Sophos, the heir to the kingdom of Sounis had been kidnapped by rebels and then had disappeared. In A Conspiracy of Kings we find out what happened to him. (Essentially, he manages to jump directly from the frying pan, into the fire, yet manages not to get burned too badly.)

A Conspiracy of Kings opens with Sophos and the magus managing to make contact with Eugenides in Attolia.

(I took care to give no obvious spoilers about the story)

Title: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #6 - And another thing... (on Librarything)
Author: Eoin Colfer
Format: paperback
Pages: 340 pages for the story, some ten more with comments by Eoin Colfer and a timeline and such.
Year published: original 2009, my edition 2010
Language: English (= original language)
ISBN number: 9780141047720
Reason for reading: I had read the previous 5 parts and I liked Eoin Colfer's other books (mainly the Artemis Fowl series). My review of book 5 is here.

Back cover text:
Arthur Dent led a perfectly ordinary, uneventful life until The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy hurled him deep into outer space. Now he's convinced a cruelly indifferent universe is out to get him.
And who can blame him?
His life is about to collide with a pantheon of unemployed gods, a lovestruck green alien, a very irritating computer and at least one very large slab of cheese. If, that is, everyone's favourite renegade Galactic President can get him off planet Earth before it is destroyed.... again.

First alinea of the "Introduction" (skipping "Foreword" which is actually part of the story as well already):
So far as we know... The Imperial Galactic Government decided, over a bucket of jewelled crabs one day, that a hyperspace expressway was needed in the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy. This decision was rushed through channels ostensibly to pre-empt traffic congestion in the distant future, but actually to provide employment for a few ministers' cousins who were forever mooching around Government Plaza. Unfortunately the Earth was in the path of this planned expressway, so the remorseless Vogons were dispatched in a constructor fleet to remove the offending planet with gentle use of thermonuclear weapons.

Review:
here!

Book Review
Title: Rot & Ruin and Dust & Decay
Author: Jonathan Maberry

I review children's books for my job. I rarely read books that strike a spark in my attention span. Even more rarely do I come across a volume of a series that makes me want to read prequels or sequels. That was not the case when I began reading Dust & Decay by Jonathan Maberry. A zombie book? Really? And it was really thick. I wasn't looking forward to it. But then I started reading it. And I read it the next day and I wanted to read more and more. And I wanted to read the prequel. So I stopped by B&N last weekend and picked up Rot & Ruin. I finished them both quickly.

Read the rest on my journal

Assassin's Curse is a tough, short-paced short story adventure of the center pair of Lindsay Buroker's captivating The Emperor's Edge novel series. Fans of the series, especially A+S shippers, would not want to miss it! At least, I for sure loved every minute of reading it. :-)

Then why only 4 of 5 stars?
It's because Assassin's Curse suffers from a typical "established series in between short story illness": the indecision of whether to include all the details necessary for freshly visiting readers or to accept that it is an in between story catering to established fans and leave out the established background where it doesn't connect to the actual plot.
The result of this indecision are "info dumps" esp. in the first part of the story that are not enough for new readers to appreciate the characters (and their treats & quirks), while tempting an established fan to jump a few lines. Interestingly, the later part of the story doesn't suffer from this. Background details here (the supposed lineage of the current emperor, for example) are used skillfully as plot device and are also expanded to greater depth. Lovely so, I may add.

So much about style, but what about content?
It's not even 12.000 words, read yourself!
No really, I don't want to summarize a short story. It would give too much away imho. However, since only two of the five main characters star in this, I think it might be nice to have the other three say their thoughts about the events:

"Following heavily armed thieves onto a cursed island is not prudent." ~ Books.

"There's something wrong with a man, when it takes a shot to the back to make him hug a beautiful woman." ~ Maldynado.

"Whatever." ~Akstyr.

~~~

You can find Assassin's Curse as an ebook for example here on Smashwords.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has a lot in common with one of those writing exercises where you take a picture and write a story about it. In this case, we have a novel based on a number of old photographs involving trick photography. The story spun from the photographs is one of temporal shenanigans, people with mysterious magical abilities and tentacle monsters.

Our Hero is a young man named Jacob who has spent most of his childhood hearing fantastical tales from his grandfather about the orphanage where he grew up.

My over all view of the book is that I liked it, but wasn't very sure of the worldbuilding.