Giovanni

Giovanni is a fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the more sinister stories of the Horror genre. He enjoys nerding out about sci-fi, but also fears the upcoming Robot Apocalypse. 

 

See my more of my Past Picks Here.

 

Giovanni's Staff Picks:


Pre-Order Now Badge
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins By P. Djèlí Clark Cover Image
$20.99
ISBN: 9781250767042
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Tordotcom - April 23rd, 2024

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins have three rules: A contract must be just. Only the Contracted can be killed. Once a contract is accepted, it must be carried out. Eveen learns there should be a fourth rule: Never commit to a contract without knowing your target. Without this fourth rule, Eveen finds herself in an impossible situation. She's been contracted to kill a target, but without knowing who the target is or who contracted her. As the night progresses, she faces her own fellow assassins and even her god. A fast-paced thrilling fantasy that will leave you wanting more.


Staff Pick Badge
Ghost Station By S.A. Barnes Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9781250884923
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Tor Nightfire - April 9th, 2024

For fans of the Expanse series, but on a much smaller scale. Dr. Ophelia Bray has dedicated her career to helping those suffering Eckhart-Reiser Syndrome, or ERS, a form of madness with violent, often deadly,  hallucinations. While traveling with an exploration crew for on-site therapy, she encounters a terrifying kind of sickness that no one has any experience with, or that has lived to report back. While its symptoms are similar, this seems to spread among the crew at an alarming rate. Isolated on a frozen planet, Ophelia and the crew of the Aeschylus must find a way to work together, or never see their loved ones again.


Pre-Order Now Badge
Mal Goes to War By Edward Ashton Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9781250286314
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: St. Martin's Press - April 9th, 2024

Mal (short for Malware and definitely not a robot), has an unusual fascination with the monkeys and their conflicts. Currently, the puritanical Humanists are trying to overthrow the government and destroy all modded and augmented humans, whether they are combatants or civilians. Full of wit and humor, Mal's adventures planet-side introduce him to all types of players from both sides. Mal will encounter both Humanists, Federals and even other Silico-Americans (AI) with their own agendas in the conflict. Perfect for fans of Scalzi and Pratchett. 


Pre-Order Now Badge
Diavola By Jennifer Thorne Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9781250826121
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Tor Nightfire - March 26th, 2024

YES!! This is exactly what I want in a haunted house/possession story. As if family vacations aren't stressful enough, add in an extended and extremely dysfunctional family. Toss in some poltergeist activity in a 500 year old Tuscan Villa, and you have yourself a perfect horror story. Jennifer Thorne beautifully blends dysfunctional family drama with classic haunted-house elements and a tragic backstory within this half-millennia old villa, home of countless tragedies and deaths over the centuries. 


Pre-Order Now Badge
The Tainted Cup By Robert Jackson Bennett Cover Image
$28.99
ISBN: 9781984820709
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Del Rey - February 6th, 2024

Agatha Christie meets HP Lovecraft with a foul-mouthed Sherlock Holmes. Bennet brings us another uniquely imagined empire with its own troubles and internal struggles. Dinios Kol is a engraver, an altered person who can recall everything he sees with perfect clarity. His superior, Ana Dolabra, is a brilliant, if eccentric, investigator. Together they must unravel a conspiracy they don't yet understand. The means of murder is most unusual, and the victims seemingly have no connection. All this while titanic monsters from the sea encroach on the land, threatening all who live in the empire. 


Pre-Order Now Badge
Your Shadow Half Remains By Sunny Moraine Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9781250892201
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Tor Nightfire - February 6th, 2024

Another sensory-style horror novel in the vein of Bird Box and A Quiet Place, where the eyes trigger a homicidal response. Riley has survived two years without seeing another human face. Until she has a new neighbor move in down the road. Ellis is new, a link to a world Riley thought she left behind long ago. But this closeness, this connection, could be dangerous, very likely deadly. But is it already too late for Riley? How can you trust your own mind if it has already broken? A brief, yet pulse-pounding thriller with an unreliable narrator who can't even trust her own memories.


Pre-Order Now Badge
The Tusks of Extinction By Ray Nayler Cover Image
$26.99
ISBN: 9781250855527
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Tordotcom - January 16th, 2024

Years ago, I read about scientists discussing reintroducing the Wooly Mammoth back into nature through cloning and gene splicing and creating a herd in Siberia, one of the most remote and cold places on the planet, most resembling the vast icy plains the mammoths once roamed thousands of years ago. Ray Nayler brings that experiment to life in this book. Not only does he reintroduce the mammoth to Siberia, but also outlines the complications and problems such a task would create. With ivory still in demand and an animal that has no experience of living in this modern world,  how can we ensure the mammoth isn't driven to extinction all over again?


Staff Pick Badge
System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries #7) By Martha Wells Cover Image
$21.99
ISBN: 9781250826978
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tordotcom - November 14th, 2023

Set just after the events of book 5, Network Effect, Murderbot is once again stuck on a planet keeping humans from doing stupid things, like staying on said planet with alien contamination or selling themselves into slavery to another corporation. Between fighting off rogue agro-bots and other SecUnits, Murderbot is suppressing the ever-present existential dread and trying not to feel things, like emotions. Just another adventure with Murderbot and its humans!!


Staff Pick Badge
The Pale House Devil By Richard Kadrey Cover Image
$17.99
ISBN: 9781803363899
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Titan Books - October 10th, 2023

Kadrey blends a pulp noir feel with a gruesome haunted house/occult theme. Neuland and Ford are partners in a particular field of extermination. To call them assassins wouldn't be quite right, though they do kill for money. However, they only kill evil. So when a wealthy patron hires them for a job, they stumble into completely new territory. And the evil in Pale House isn't the only evil lurking in the neighborhood. For old men have dreams of defeating death and living forever. 


Staff Pick Badge
Red Rabbit By Alex Grecian Cover Image
$28.99
ISBN: 9781250874689
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tor Nightfire - September 19th, 2023

Rose Nettles wanted a simple life as a school teacher in Philadelphia. Instead, she ends up wife to a simple farmer in Kansas. After her husband, Joe Mullins, passes, she finds three strange men and a child over her husband's grave. Thus begins the harrowing journey across the American Prairie in pursuit of the Witch of Burden County, Sadie Grace. Full of adventure, magic and a fair bit of cannibalism, Red Rabbit is a thrilling tale about loyalty, family and finding your own way in a world that challenges your very survival.


Staff Pick Badge
Vampires of El Norte By Isabel Cañas Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593436721
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Berkley - August 15th, 2023

Vampires of El Norte is as much a story of independence as it is about folklore and life in the Southwest. The creatures depicted as vampires are much more akin to wild animals or spirits of the desert than the  cloaked and caped figures we often see in media today. Magdelena "Nena" Serrano was attacked by such a creature as a child. Her best friend, Nestor Duarte, fled, believing her dead and him the cause of such a terrible attack. But fate, and war, bring them back together after nine years apart. For there are more dangers than El Cuco haunting the lands of the Serrano Family Ranch.


Staff Pick Badge
Mister Magic: A Novel By Kiersten White Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593359266
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Del Rey - August 8th, 2023

Do you want to feel old? Because this book will make you feel old. But in the best possible way. We all have that one show we were all obsessed with as children. To be on that show was the opportunity of a lifetime. But as we get older and more stories are told about children's programming, we see the darker side of the coin, where abuse and manipulation were rampant, and those once-innocent children develop into damaged and dysfunctional adults. But in Mister Magic, these damaged adults get a chance to confront their abusers and change the magic into something truly wonderful.


Staff Pick Badge
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon By Wole Talabi Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780756418267
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: DAW - August 8th, 2023

This book opens up immediately with adventure and A magical car chase. Shigidi was a misshapen and ugly little nightmare god working for one of Africa's Spirit Corporations. Until he meets Nneoma, a succubus and freelance agent who takes whichever spirits she pleases, when she pleases. She remakes him into something so much more powerful and gifted, taking on gods and monsters equally. This is definitely a great read for fans of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and James Marlon's Black Leopard, Red Wolf.


Staff Pick Badge
A Harvest of Ash and Blood By D. J. Molles Cover Image
$29.99
ISBN: 9798212027274
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Blackstone Publishing - August 8th, 2023

A Harvest of Ash and Blood is a brutal military fantasy exploring the divide between being a good soldier and a good man. Does the excuse, "just following orders" justify acts of violence and atrocity? Does it justify genocide? What if everything the church and state told you was a lie? This is what Lochled Thatcher must come to terms with in his third campaign to Leftland to harvest Tickers, a race of beings with supernatural telekinetic capabilities, whom the church deems less than human and tainted by demons. 


Staff Pick Badge
Boys in the Valley By Philip Fracassi Cover Image
$26.99
ISBN: 9781250879035
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tor Nightfire - July 11th, 2023

This was not what I was expecting when I first picked it up. It was SO MUCH BETTER! The story switches between perspectives, so we get a bigger, more comprehensive picture of St. Vincent's Orphanage for boys. Peter, the oldest and longest resident of the orphanage is on the path of Priesthood, under the gentle guidance of Andrew, aka, Father Francis. But things take a dark turn when the sheriff turns up with a man in need of medical and spiritual healing. Things do not go well and something is unleashed in the orphanage, infecting the boys, turning brother against brother, child against man. Fast paced and dark, this is a fantastic read for fans of films such as The Exorcist or The Omen.


Staff Pick Badge
Shadow Drive By Nolan Cubero Cover Image
$26.99
ISBN: 9798212018524
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Blackstone Publishing - July 11th, 2023

Ooof, this was a wild ride. Just when you think you know what's going on, there's another layer, another lie, deception, story, to be revealed. Set in Louisville, KY, Gabe has several properties he renovates and rents out. But when he rents out 8160 Shadow Drive to an older woman desperate to have the house, he unknowingly gives her the keys, only to have his whole life and everything he knew from the past two years completely turned on its head. This is a fast-paced, twisty thriller with just more and more to uncover until the very end.


Staff Pick Badge
The Devil's Playground: A Novel By Craig Russell Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780385549011
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Doubleday - June 20th, 2023

Craig Russell delivers again with another thrilling and unique historical horror novel. This time, the backdrop is Golden Era Hollywood, where one of the world's most famous faces  is discovered in very compromising circumstances and even the city's top fixer is chasing shadows. Everything revolves around what promises to be the greatest horror film of all time, and rumors abound that the film is cursed, adding to its appeal. Chock full of secrets and scandal, The Devil's Playground is a perfect read for fans of mysteries and Old Hollywood alike.


Staff Pick Badge
Battery Life By Brennan Gilpatrick, Gregory Lang Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9798200813339
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Blackstone Publishing - May 30th, 2023

Battery Life is a wild Mad-Max-Meets-Dante's-Inferno thrill ride set in the post-apocalyptic American west. Virgil is the oldest and most famous Junkie in the Yard, able to procure rare and valuable junk to trade for water, food and Battery, the only medicine keeping him, and everyone on the surface, alive. Diane is the sole survivor of a space station, Cradle, that crashed to the surface. When Virgil finds her in her escape pod, he knows she is the biggest treasure he could  have ever found, because she's CLEAN. He will serve as her guide in the radioactive wasteland, and she his protection. But things are never so cut and dry in the Junkyard.


Staff Pick Badge
Witch King (The Rising World) By Martha Wells Cover Image
$28.99
ISBN: 9781250826794
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tordotcom - May 30th, 2023

Kaiisterron is the Fourth Prince of the Underearth, known as The Witch King and a demon of the Saredi Grasslands. After waking up disembodied with his corpse in a tomb at the bottom of the ocean, Kai has to piece together what happened, how he ended up dead, and where his friends and allies are. Witch King is a compelling story of a demon, a witch, and a conspiracy to overthrow the current ruling government. But who is behind this conspiracy? And where are his allies? Who killed Kaiisteron the Witch King and entombed him at the bottom of the ocean?


Staff Pick Badge
The Battle Drum: A Novel (The Ending Fire Trilogy #2) By Saara El-Arifi Cover Image
$29.99
ISBN: 9780593356975
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Del Rey - May 23rd, 2023

The Battle Drum is the second in El-Arifi's Ending Fire Trilogy. Sylah and Anoor have separated, each on a quest of their own to unravel the many secrets and lies the empire has been founded on. While Anoor tries her best to live up to her title as Disciple of Strength, Sylah travels to the Ghosting outpost and across the ocean to a strange new land with strange new people, discovering there is more to the world than she had ever been told. Meanwhile, Anoor is swept in a murder investigation, where she is the accused. Loyalties will be tested and truths will be revealed in The Battle Drum!


Staff Pick Badge
The Warden: A Novel (The Warden Series #1) By Daniel M. Ford Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9781250815651
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tor Books - April 18th, 2023

For fans of Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and any other Tolkien-esque Fantasy world, The Warden is a must-read. Aelis is the daughter of a noble house, but she didn't rely on her status to graduate from three colleges to become a Warden. Truly skilled and intelligent as she is, she is not happy about her posting in Lone Pine, a backwater farming village on the edge of civilization. Yet there is more to this sleepy little village than first meets the eye. Ancient magics are stirring and it will take everything Aelis has learned to combat this strange new threat.


Staff Pick Badge
The Scourge Between Stars By Ness Brown Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9781250834683
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tor Nightfire - April 4th, 2023

This is a perfect, fast-paced and easy read for fans of the Alien franchise and space horror. Jacklyn "Jack" Albright is first mate on the Calypso, an interstellar vessel limping its way back to Earth after a failed colonization attempt on a distant planet. Hundreds of years from home and surrounded by the cold and uncaring void, Jack has a hard time keeping her crew in line during the captain's unexplained absence. And they somehow picked up a hitchhiker that is tearing its way through the hull and crew alike. Definitely one to read with the lights on and the door closed...


Staff Pick Badge
Antimatter Blues: A Mickey7 Novel By Edward Ashton Cover Image
$28.99
ISBN: 9781250275059
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: St. Martin's Press - March 14th, 2023

Mickey Barnes has had an easy two years since he walked out of the Creepers' labyrinth bluffing his way out of being an expendable and making a deal with the indigenous locals. Now winter approaches and the colony needs the antimatter stored in the bomb Mickey buried in a hole and left beneath a pile of rocks... Not his best plan, but what could go wrong? Turns out someone found the bomb and now Mickey has to actually negotiate and ensure the survival of not only the colony, but the creepers as well. He may not be the best man for the job, but he's all they've got. What could possibly go wrong?


Staff Pick Badge
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: A new fantasy series set a thousand years before The City of Brass By Shannon Chakraborty Cover Image
$32.00
ISBN: 9780062963505
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Harper Voyager - February 28th, 2023

Chakraborty returns  to the fantasy scene with the beginning of a new swashbuckling fantasy trilogy. Amina al-Sirafi is a mother, a sailor, a smuggler, and most famously, a notorious pirate. But she left that life behind with the birth of her daughter, Marjana. But when a wealthy widow tracks Amina down and threatens to reveal her location to old enemies if the old pirate doesn't track down her wayward granddaughter, al-Sirafi sets out on what she hopes will be one last adventure with a huge payout. Full of adventure and magic, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is a wonderful historical fantasy based in medieval Arabia.


Staff Pick Badge
The Cage of Dark Hours (The Five Penalties #2) By Marina Lostetter Cover Image
$29.99
ISBN: 9781250757470
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tor Books - February 14th, 2023

Lostetter returns to the world first introduced in The Helm of Midnight, a world where time is literally money, magic belongs to the gods, and enchanting a person is supposed to be impossible. But as Krona tries to chase down the cause of several deaths with strange marks, she finds herself entangled in a plot among immortals and beings straight out of myth and darkness. A Cage of Dark Hours brings us familiar faces and introduces us to a couple new ones, as well. A thrilling and intriguing addition to this dark fantasy.


Staff Pick Badge
The Cradle of Ice (Moonfall #2) By James Rollins Cover Image
$29.99
ISBN: 9781250766748
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Tor Books - February 7th, 2023

With stunning illustrations in the vein of Brandon Sanderson and massive world-building, The Cradle of Ice is a must have for epic fantasy lovers. In the follow-up to The Starless Crown, Nyx and her companions must venture into the frozen wastes of Urth, seeking a beacon that could help prevent Moonfall and set the planet to its rotation. Meanwhile, Prince Kanthe journeys into the heart of the Klashean Empire in order to bring peace between the two kingdoms. Each will encounter new lands, form new alliances, and work to prevent the coming apocalypse. Yet neither will finish this journey unscarred, or even whole. 


Staff Pick Badge
All Hallows: A Novel By Christopher Golden Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9781250280299
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: St. Martin's Press - January 24th, 2023

It's Halloween night, 1984, and Parmenter Road is gearing up for an unforgettable night. While the neighborhood kids get ready for Trick-or-Treat and the adults get ready for their own fun, four strange children in old costumes seem to be in trouble from who they call the Cunning Man. But who is this Cunning Man? Who are these kids that don't belong? Secrets are revealed, relationships are torn apart and new ones are formed, family bonds are put to the test. At times nostalgic and haunting, All Hallows is a true Halloween Treat. 


Staff Pick Badge
How to Sell a Haunted House By Grady Hendrix Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780593201268
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Berkley - January 17th, 2023

Everyone is haunted in some way or another. Every family has its secrets and its trauma. Some things are better left buried. And some things refuse to be forgotten, taking on a life of their own. After Louise's parents are killed in a car crash, she must return home and take care of affairs, all the while clashing with her younger brother, whom she has viewed as a constant dependent and drain on her parents. But her brother is the least she has to worry about when something in the house decides it does not want to be cast aside like all the other discarded memories of her family's past.