Friday, July 27, 2012

What is D.B. Jackson reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: D.B. Jackson, author of Thieftaker.

His entry begins:
What I am reading now, and what I have been reading recently are closely related. I have just started reading Shades of Milk and Honey, by award-winning fantasist Mary Robinette Kowal. I'm only a short ways into the book, but already I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

I should pause here in the dual interests of full disclosure and larger context, to say that Mary and I are friends, and so I am predisposed to like her work. But more than that, I came to Shades of Milk and Honey with a feeling of some inadequacy. You see, Mary's work is written as a sort of fantasy homage to the work of Jane Austen, and...[read on]
About Thieftaker, from the publisher:
Boston, 1767: In D.B. Jackson's Thieftaker, revolution is brewing as the British Crown imposes increasingly onerous taxes on the colonies, and intrigue swirls around firebrands like Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty. But for Ethan Kaille, a thieftaker who makes his living by conjuring spells that help him solve crimes, politics is for others…until he is asked to recover a necklace worn by the murdered daughter of a prominent family.

Suddenly, he faces another conjurer of enormous power, someone unknown, who is part of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of power in the turbulent colony. His adversary has already killed—and not for his own gain, but in the service of his powerful masters, people for whom others are mere pawns in a game of politics and power. Ethan is in way over his head, and he knows it. Already a man with a dark past, he can ill afford to fail, lest his livelihood be forfeit. But he can't stop now, for his magic has marked him, so he must fight the odds, even though he seems hopelessly overmatched, his doom seeming certain at the spectral hands of one he cannot even see.
Learn more about the book and author at D. B. Jackson's website and blog.

D.B. Jackson is also David B. Coe, the award-winning author of a dozen fantasy novels.

The Page 69 Test: Thieftaker.

Writers Read: D.B. Jackson.

--Marshal Zeringue