Synopses & Reviews
FIRST IN A BRAND NEW URBAN FANTASY SERIES
Because Im an inbetweenerand the only one anyone knows of at thatthe dead turn to me when something is askew between them and the living. Usually, its something mundane like a suicide gone wrong or someone revived that shouldnta been.”
Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Deads most unusual agentsan inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life thats missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kinduntil he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death.
One inbetweener is a sorcerer. Hes summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and theyre spreading through the city like a plague. Theyve already taken out some of NYCODs finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworldwhich would destroy the balance between the living and the dead.
But in uncovering this mans identity, Carlos confronts the truth of his own lifeand death.
Review
“A damn good read. All the best dark urban fantasies are about matters of life and death.
Half-Resurrection Blues takes that to the limit. A hard-core, hard-driving fantasy, following the adventures of a most singular man who is both dead and alive and tasked with solving the problems of the dead and the living and everything in between. Except, of course, nothing is ever that simple. Daniel José Older takes aim at a whole bunch of familiar targets, and hits them hard in new and interesting ways.”—
New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green
“Olders spectral noir is as real as fresh blood and as hard as its New York streets. A Lou Reed song sung with a knife to your throat.”—New York Times bestselling author Richard Kadrey
“Half-Resurrection Blues is so many things at once: a mystery, a suspense, a supernatural thriller. The world Older builds is familiar and alien, and it's so vividly imagined and rendered that the reader believes the contradictions, embraces them, loves this world of ghosts, demons, magic workers, and half-alive men and women. This is a fantastic beginning to what will surely be a fantastic series.”— National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward
“Daniel Jose-Older is here to save your soul. But he might just terrorize it first. Half-Resurrection Blues is the first novel of a fabulous talent, one who mixes the spectral and the intellectual with skill. This book is smart and gripping, funny and insightful. It kicks in the door waving the literary .44. Be warned, this man is not playing.”—Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
“In Half-Resurrection Blues, Older has created Noir for the Now: equal parts bracing, poignant, compassionate, and eerie. A swinging blues indeed.”—Nalo Hopkinson, Nebula Award-winning author of Sister Mine
Synopsis
The author of Half-Resurrection Blues returns in a new Bone Street Rumba Novel a knife-edge, noir-shaded urban fantasy of crime after death.
The streets of New York are hungry tonight...
Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an
agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York s ghostlier problems. This time it s a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn s Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals and is bound to take more.
The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie's botanica, where she worked. But the closer they ve gotten, the more she s seeing the world from Carlos s point of view. In fact, she s starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that because whatever is bringing out the dead, it s only just getting started."
About the Author
Daniel José Older is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and composer. He facilitates workshops on storytelling, music, and antioppression organizing at public schools, religious houses, and universities. He co-edited the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History and his short stories and essays have appeared in Tor.com, Salon, BuzzFeed, the New Haven Review, PANK, Apex and Strange Horizons.