October 5, 2017

It look longer than I had hoped, but I finished reading The Flame Bearer, the latest installment in Bernard Conwell’s excellent Saxon Tales series about the founding of the kingdom of England in the early tenth century. Here’s my review. For ten novels – that’s right, ten – we’ve been waiting for Uhtred to reclaim…

July 10, 2017

After a brief vacation and a near month-long hiatus from the blog, I’m back today with a review of Liberty Boy by Irish author David Gaughran. It’s the first book I’ve read about Dublin that didn’t involve Vikings (who founded the city way back when), and one I highly recommend. Liberty Boy is a well-paced,…

May 13, 2017

I’ve been away from the blog for longer than normal because I’m spending most of my free time editing the sequel to Enoch’s Device. I always keep reading, however, and recently finished The Templar’s Cross: A Medieval Mystery by J. R. Tomlin. Here’s my review. The Templar’s Cross is an intriguing whodunit set in fifteenth…

April 28, 2017

On Sunday, Starz will premiere American Gods, based on the fantasy bestseller by Neil Gaiman. From the trailers, the show looks amazing. But it will be pretty damn hard to exceed the novel. Here’s why. By the time I finished American Gods, I felt the same way I did when I finished Stephen King’s The…

February 24, 2017

While I’ve been writing about Black Sails, a prequel to Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, today I’m posting a review of Robert Masello’s The Jekyll Revelation, a story based on another of Stevenson’s famous tales. The Jekyll Revelation is a clever play on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr….

December 28, 2016

For my final post of 2016, here’s my review of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Unholy Night. I had hoped to write this before Christmas, as the book is somewhat pertinent to that event, but alas holiday shopping and work got in the way. Yet as they say, better late than never . . . I may never…

November 28, 2016

Today, Fresh-scraped Vellum is one of the final stops on the blog tour for Written in the Ashes, a wonderful historical fantasy by author K. Hollan Van Zandt. It’s published by Harper Collins and available here. I was also lucky enough to interview Ms. Van Zandt, and that interview follows my review of the novel….

September 23, 2016

I recently finished Dead Man’s Reach by D.B. Jackson, the fourth book in his Thieftaker series. The book turned out to be another excellent installment in Jackson’s historical fantasy tale set in Colonial Boston. Here’s my review. Dead Man’s Reach presents another mystery for Ethan Kaille, a thieftaker whose job involves hunting down thieves and…

August 18, 2016

Isn’t this Throwback Thursday? In honor of this fairly recent tradition, I’m re-posting my 2012 review of one of the greatest works of epic fiction I’ve read in a long, long time . . . For several years now, I’ve been interested in medieval Spain, and about a quarter of my first novel takes place in…

August 3, 2016

Every once in a while I’ll reread one of my favorite novels for inspiration, and this summer that read was The Archer’s Tale by Bernard Cornwell. It reminded me how much I loved his Grail Quest series, and how pieces of it helped inspire my first novel, Enoch’s Device.  I consider The Archer’s Tale to be a…

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