Tales from the Circle

  Any Minor World by Craig Schaefer follows Roy - a sort of private detective/"hired muscle" who is approached by a bit of a suspicious client. Despite his misgivings, he takes the job and goes after a dead writer's unfinished manuscript and begins to unravel a mystery surrounding this author's books. The mystery brings him up against a legendary criminal network and introduces him to Lucy Langenkamp, an art restorer who once wrote a cancelled comic. As they struggle to survive the crazy adventure that springs up around them, Roy and Lucy slowly grapple with their own pasts as well. It's a well-written book with a very distinctive noir/pulp vibe to it.  Before I go on, I have to comment on the descriptions. I'm usually someone who doesn't enjoy/gets bored by descriptions, but I found the ones in this book to be well-written. They're interesting and paint some very vivid pictures that enabled me to imagine exactly what some of these characters and place...

I think probably the first self-published book I read was Hugh Howey's Wool, which I found on my library's online ebooks collection. Ever since then I've been slowly reading more and more self-published stuff. There are a variety of reasons for this including but not limited to: I've pretty much exhausted my local library's Fantasy and Sci Fi collection When you're looking outside the library (aka, having to buy the books you read) self-published works are a lot more affordable (seriously, the prices of trad published ebooks are ridiculous) and there are often free works that are excellent I've found a lot more variation and creativity in self-pub works and a lot less of the tropes I got tired of. For example, I'm much more likely to just find a fantasy work that doesn't contain a love story shoehorned into it in Self-Pub works... My forays back into traditional publishing and the "classics" or super famous SF&F have not sati...