The Commission — (2006-2013) Publisher: Contemporary fantasy adventure. An ordinary young woman finds a haunting and dangerous world of demons and shapeshifters on the streets of modern day London. Urban fantasy in one of the world’s greatest cities. Rhian, a girl from the Welsh valleys on the run from tragedy and herself, finds a new home in the modern East End of London, where the world’s largest financial center spins a web of money and power from glistening towers of chrome and glass. Beneath the digital façade lurks the old East End where the layers of two thousand years of dramatic and violent history slide over one another like glaciers, spilling out in avalanches that warp the real world. As bodies begin to litter the East End streets, The Commission dispatches its best enforcers to deal with the situation: Karla is not human, and Jameson left his humanity behind in pieces in Northern Ireland and Afghanistan. Rhian makes new friends, dangerous friends; and where Rhian goes, the wolf is always in her shadow, just a heartbeat away. Among the bankers and traders of the East End walk demons in human form and who is to say which are the monsters? London is a magical bomb waiting to explode and somewhere a fuse is hissing.

Into the Hinterlands — (2011) David Drake and John Lambshead. Publisher: #1 in a new series from a military science fiction master with over 3 million books in print. A young hero comes of age in the crucible of war and galactic struggle. When Allen Allenson, scion of a noble family that has fallen on hard times, gets a mission to roust the power-hungry Terrans from a ‘wild’ star sector where they’re encroaching, he jumps at the chance to show his individual worth, improve his family’s fortunes — and gather enough lucre to make a good marriage. But the wily Terrans are not so easily persuaded by a young colonial they think of as a ‘rube.’ Worse, ‘Riders,’ the beings who naturally ply the wilderness between the stars, are playing their own deadly political games — against the Terrans, against the colonials, and against one young greenhorn commander in particular: naive young Allen, whom they figure they can manipulate to do their bidding. The one thing nobody has counted on is the fact that Allen, while young and inexperienced, and much to his own amazement, happens to be a hero in the making.