Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
I don't know if you bothered to pick them up back when I was doing all those KDP freebie posts, but they frequently featured offerings from Pip Ballantine & Tee Morris, who write the apparently reasonably-popular Ace-published Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series, for which you can see a fairly comprehensive official website with a character guide and lots of blurbed praise and subgenre awards listings.
If you happened to skip the tie-in story collections they were giving away, there's still two freebie shorts by the co-authors available. Only one of them is a steampunk, but the other is a zombie tale which should give you a taste of their style.
Linkage for: Silver Linings (a Ministry mystery set in Egypt, according to the tags), Daddy's Little Girl (apocalyptic zombie short), free to all @ Smashwords
And quite probably someone might be able to do the Kindle-lending thing so you could try any of the former freebies you missed out on if it turns out you're interested in reading more in that universe.
Disclaimer: I have not read these particular books, or for that matter, anything from the authors yet (and if I did, that Shakespearean elf fantasy would be the one I tried first). But people do seem to like them a lot.
More personal recommendation, since IIRC you love zombies as well as wanting to try out steampunk: Cherie Priest's ( Wikipedia, ISFDB) imaginative and enjoyable Clockwork Century series, which combines them both in a western setting and keeps getting awards.
(I read and quite liked the 1st novel in a Hugo Voter Packet and ended up buying it via a Humble Bundle later, so if you got HB's eBook Bundle #2 you might already own it; and I also individually purchased a novella when Weightless Books was having a sale. If you're morbidly curious, here's my vintage non-spoiler review of the 2nd novel in the What Are You Reading? thread in the RR forum a few years ago.)
Not cheap, considering they're out from Tor, but there are tie-in novellas which are out from Subterranean Press and therefore couponable via Kobo, making the entire series available DRM-free. |
Thank you for these recommendations.
I'm just now getting into steampunk, which I find has a fresh sense of humor in some of the stories I'm reading.
I'll check out the titles you mention and buy the first one in the series.