Saga Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

A sci-fi/fantasy about the people who inhabit a world and have wings, and their mortal enemies who inhabit their moon and have horns.  They’ve been at war for as long as anyone can remember, pitting science and magic in their fighting.  But having tired of the destruction of their own homes, it has become a proxy war waged throughout the universe.  One of the horned people is captured and held prisoner.  He lends a book to his female, winged guard and is broken out of jail as a result.  They escape and go on the lamb and have a child.  This is something both sides have always told their people is impossible.  As a result, professional assassins are hired to find them and kill them, except to bring the child back discreetly.  There’s a one-eyed novelist who writes the inciting book, there are mere-people who are reporters, trying to get the story published, there are bat-winged people trying to prevent this, a humanoid assassin who is in love with a spider woman assassin and who’s sister is also an assassin, a cat who can tell if someone is lying, a dog who sneezes sleeping darts, people who are part robot, a robot child, and the narrator, the offspring child that everyone wants to find.  Not safe for work – there are a lot of pornographic images in the artwork. (54 issues in this volume)

Redemption by David Baldacci

Amos Decker is visiting the graves of his wife and daughter when a man he helped put in jail for life without parole comes up to him and asks Amos to clear his name.  He has terminal cancer and only days to live.  He’s been let out of prison because the system does not want to pay for his health expenses.  That evening someone kills the man.  Decker decides to look into it against direct orders from the FBI.  The only people to talk to are the wife of one of the original murder victims and the man’s daughter.  But as Decker picks at the lives of these people from thirteen years ago,it seems like everyone Decker talks to ends up murdered.  And the real secrets behind it all is almost unbelievable.

Bootleggers Daughter by Margaret Maron

Deborah Knott is appalled by the utter disregard for mercy as she watches her least favorite judge declare the toughest possible sentence on a black man.  She decides to run for a judgeship herself.  A young woman whose mother was murdered when she was just an infant wants to pay Deborah to find out why her mother was killed.  Between her campaign and asking around about the incident that had happened 18 years ago, other people begin to die.  In the end, Deborah figures out who and saves the girl again.  But she loses the election.  However her least favorite judge is felled by a stroke, and her father calls in some favors to get her appointed to take his place.

Cockroaches by Jo Nesbo (3/10)

Harry Hole is brought out of his drunken stupor to go close a case in Bangkok where the Norwegian Ambassador was found murdered in a disreputable hotel.  He doesn’t really want to go, but he had some celebrity from his last case and that’s who they want to handle this one.  He’s supposed to just clean-up and call the case unsolvable.  But of course, that’s not how Harry operates.  He needs to find out who really killed the Ambassador, and other parties that seem to drop like flies.  In the end, at great personal risk and cost, he nails the bad guy and wakes-up later in a hospital, recovering.  But now that the case is closed, he has to try to seek oblivion again – only this time in an opium den.

The Killing Fog by Jeff Wheeler

A fantasy in an Asian-like land where magic is real and when it is used, it draws the killing fog.  A practitioner of marshal arts sees her own parents murdered and her grandfather killed.  She escapes by hiding and grows up in a neighboring dojo.  When her group is hired to find a legendary city beneath the ice, she accidentally awakens a spirit who is the former emperor and he wants to rule once more.  Only he can use magic and is not hurt by the fog, though his enemies are not immune.  Our girl is the one to fulfill a prophecy, but the only way she can defeat him is to sacrifice herself beyond to wall where no one returns.

Liar, Liar by James Patterson & Candice Fox

In this episode, our heroine, Detective Harriet Blue is wanted as a rogue cop, going after a serial killer who has murdered indiscriminately, then killed her brother after setting him up to take the fall for several deaths he did not cause, and trying to kill her temporary partner.  He’s after doing the same thing to her and using a psychologist as his gopher to blame or cause her own death.  It’s intense with no let-up throughout the whole book.  It goes from dark to bleak and never comes back.