Gwendy's Final Task by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar (2022) Cemetery Dance

Dr. Strangelove in space.  A lot more years have passed – Gwendy is in her 60s and knows she is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s.  The man in the button hat visited her and returned the button box again.  He’s giving her one final task to perform – to rid the world of the button box.  The only way to accomplish such a task is to send the box into interstellar space.  So, she returns to politics and runs for the Senate – and wins.  Once there, she makes the friends she needs, not only in the Senate, but at NASA and the NSA.  She gets bills passed to finance participation in the new much larger space station and to help billionaires to develop a multi-passenger trip to the station.  Then on the maiden flight, she gets a seat and smuggles the button box with her along with a small nuclear-powered rocket.  But it’s not going to be easy.  A billionaire is also on the flight and he is connected with aliens who want someone to press the black button on the box and destroy Earth.

I don't usually read a series back-to-back. But this was wonderful fun to read the Gwendy books.

Gwendy's Magic Feather by Richard Chizmar (2019) Cemetery Dance

It’s years after Gwendy had the button box and returned it to the man in the bowler hat.  Gwendy’s had some spectacular success as a novelist, then she decided to run for Congress – and she won.  She’s also gotten married to a reporter who is away on assignment a lot.  Then, then man in the bowler hat returns, kind of.  He’s placed the button box in her file cabinet in her office in Washington D.C.  How he got it past security is another question.  It’s Christmas and she’s gone back to her hometown in Maine to spend time with her mother, who has cancer, and her father.  At dinner, her father gives her a present of the old white feather she used to call her magic feather.  She makes a wish that her mother would get better.  She also gives her mother a couple of the chocolates from the button box.  Her husband returns home and Gwendy feels all is well.  The next day, her mother’s doctor calls to inform everyone that the cancer seems to have completely gone.  Was it the feather, or the chocolates from the button box?

Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar (2017) Cemetery Dance

Gwendy is about to go into high-school and she's tired of being teased about her weight.  So, she runs up the Suicide Stairs every day, trying to change her looks and her life.  A Mr. Farris, in an out-of-date grey suit and a bowler hat, chooses to help her by giving her a button box.  It's not full of buttons, it has buttons on top.  Different colored buttons that correspond to the continents, plus a red button and a black button.  The red button will do whatever she asks.  And we don't have to be told what the black button could do.  It also has two levers; one will occasionally dispense a mint condition 1891 Silver Dollar.  The other dispenses very small, extra fancy, highly detailed chocolates in the shape of animals.  She consumes one chocolate a day.  She hides the button box to keep anyone else from finding it and hitting the buttons.  But she's still just a teenager and is frightened of the responsibility the box represents.

The Match by Harlan Corbin (2022) Grand Central Publishing

Wilde, who was found surviving in the woods as a child, now grown and still living off the grid, sent in a saliva sample to see if he could track down the parents who abandoned him.  Now, he's getting hits from this.  He's also getting pangs of jealousy over the wife of his best friend, even though the friend has been dead for years.  But what is real, and what is only in his imagination?  He tracks the man who is supposed to be his father, only the man and his family disappear shortly thereafter.  He tracks a cousin, only to find he's not really his cousin, but this one became a celebrity, and he too has disappeared.

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb (1995) Spectra

The bastard child of the King-in-waiting is brought to his people as a six-year-old to raise.  He starts living in the stables with the man who received him, there he discovers an affinity with animals, able even to use their minds.  His foster father punishes him for this.  Everyone calls him Fitz (Old English for the bastard son of).  Then after his father abdicates and moves away, then dies, Fitz is trained by the King's assassin, himself the King's bastard.  His father's wife decides to return to the capital and see to him being trained in courtly arts.  A chance is given him to learn Skills, which he blows in a magnificent display, though what really happened was planned by the teacher.  Then Fitz is sent to spy on a remote wedding of the current King-in-waiting using his brother, the youngest Prince as proxy.  Though the real plan is to assassinate the King-in-waiting and the King so the youngest Prince will inherit the position.  Only Fitz surprises everyone.