There was a big launch this week because she's Open Road Media's
featured frontpage author (link goes to her catalogue page, since the feature bit will eventually die.)
I must say, though I was rather apprehensive when I'd learned they were picking up her backlist*, they seem to have priced Hambly's books more sanely than their other offerings and done a fairly decent job with the formatting and typo-hunting, at least going by the Kindle samples I downloaded to check after the launch announcement.
Incidentally, they're cheapest at Kobo where they're couponable.
But not at Kobo Canada, where the price discrepancy is absolutely insane, as someone tagged the list price at 19.99 before discounts, whereas in the Kobo US store and the Amazon & Sony & B&N for both the Canadian and US versions, the base list price is 9.99 before discounts. I don't think the Canadian dollar is worth half a US one anymore.
Anyway, she's one of my favourite authors and I highly recommend her works.
Though I'd have to say that
Search the Seven Hills (ancient Roman amateur sleuth),
Dragonsbane (dragons, of course),
Bride of the Rat God (20s Hollywood + Manchu demons),
Those Who Hunt the Night (Edwardian vampires), and the Darwath Trilogy (parallel world crossover) are probably the best for new readers to start with.
Plus the Benjamin January series which is available via Random House but not couponable in Agency countries (but worth it anyway).
The other series are mostly good too, but I think these are the ones with the best combo of entertaining story and excellent writing to get into first, with settings that have a broader appeal to people who aren't looking for a particular type of story.
Finally, she also writes entirely new novellas in some of her popular worlds and sells them DRM-free (but single format only) at $5 a pop off
her website along with some previously printed short stories, if anyone's interested.
Caveat emptor:
A Night with the Girls can be had considerably cheaper via the
Chicks Ahoy! omnibus at Baen's Webscription. And for less than double the asking price of
There Shall Your Heart Be Also, you can get the
New Orleans Noir anthology it was originally printed in, and a slew of other stories beside.
* Open Road was the same company which declared that it would like to break Amazon's $9.99 e-book bestseller pricing standard — in favour of $14+ e-books for the mostly midlist authors they'd scooped up — and did just that for all of Alan Dean Foster's old paperback
Spellsinger series and most of their other authors.
Though to be fair, some of their backlist authors are fairly high profile acclaimed literary types like Iris Murdoch and Pat Conroy, I believe.