I happened upon this book while futzing around with my book tracking package. While testing, I asked it “what books by Sherri Tepper don’t I have?” and it said “this one”.
So I bought it, and it wasn’t until I had it in my hands that I realised that I’d already read it before. And that I hadn’t much liked it, I think?
I mean, the “A. J. Orde” pseudonym is probably why bookiez messed up…
So I wasn’t going to re-read it, but eh, what the hey. I’ll give it a go.
I remember absolutely nothing of this book, so I’m wondering if bookiez was right and I was wrong — I’ve never read this before?
Perhaps it’s just that these two covers are kinda similar? And I’ve definitely got the other book.
And also — what’s up with using a pseudonym if you’re going to put the real name on the cover as well? My guess is that these books weren’t selling a lot, and Sheri Tepper was a pretty successful author, so they tried to goose the sales of the last books in the series by including her name, because:
The first couple books didn’t do this at all.
Anyway, how is this book? It’s pretty bad.
It’s almost 300 pages, but it only has plot for (and I’m being generous here) 200. So Tepper goes into her isn’t-modern-life-awful harangues at the drop of a hat. And this is often fun in her science fiction books, but somehow here, it’s all kinda dreary. Like the above, where she has a gay character go on for pages about how horrible the concept of “cruising” is.
And the mystery… we’ll, there’s two intertwined mysteries, and they’re both completely preposterous. And not in a good way. They’re just stupid. The solution makes you go “er… wat.. wat… no? wat” the entire time.
Oh, and they spend 40 pages speculating what the word “ice” could possibly mean (in the context of “something that’s very valuable”). Yeah.
I’ve read (just about?) all of Tepper’s books, and when she’s on a roll, they’re really, really entertaining. When she’s not, they can get pretty bad. This is one of the latter ones.
Long Time Dead (1994) by A. J. Orde (buy used, 3.83 on Goodreads)