Since it's Halloween season, I suppose I should read some horror fiction. Dark Dance is one part Mervyn Peake, one part Edgar Allan Poe, one part Anne Rice, and 100% Tanith Lee (please don't check my math). It tells the tale of Rachaela, who is drawn to the remote country home of the Scarabae, her ancestral family. Their only purpose in life is to prolong their lives and continue through the countless ages, occasionally mingling with humans to ensure the continuation of their bloodline. Now Rachaela is entwined in their dark designs and even darker desires. Classic gothic horror tale, with a creepy house, an even creepier family, and one of the creepiest children in fiction.

I have a fairly large collection of Star Trek novels. Most of them are episodic stories told in novel form--the adventures of the Enterprise crew when they aren't gallivanting around the galaxy on the small screen. This one is a prequel novel of sorts, as it relates the tale of the very first mission of the starship Enterprise under the command of Captain Robert April and his executive officer George Kirk, father of the most famous starship captain in history, James Tiberius Kirk. During a rescue mission, the Enterprise is diverted off course during warp speed and ends up deep in Romulan space. At this point, the Federation fought a war against he Romulans several decades ago, but still don't know what they look like. Now George Kirk and Captain April need to repair the damaged Enterprise and escape Romulan space before another interstellar war breaks out.

This series of books is loosely based on short stories written by Arthur C. Clarke many decades prior. With Clarke's blessing, Preuss has woven together a few different storylines into a space mystery. Clarke himself was skeptical it could be done well, but acknowledged that Asimov had done it already with his Caves of Steel mysteries involving a human cop and his robot partner.

The best way to describe this series is Black Widow is thrown into the world of The Expanse and must solve an overarching mystery across time and space involving Prometheus. That's the gist of the series. The first book is mostly a conventional heist plot set on a space station.

For reasons lost to the mists of time, I don't have the middle three books of the series, but I do have the concluding book, which does a pretty good job of explaining the middle books and wrapping up the series as a whole. An ancient conspiracy has been plotting for centuries to find out what's going on around Jupiter, but only recently has humanity developed the technology to go there in person and investigate. The lesser-known moon of Amalthea has been emitting more energy than it absorbs from Jupiter or the sun, which should be impossible. This is actually based on real-world observations of Amalthea, though as far as we know it's a natural--if not fully understood--phenomenon. Within the context of the story, it's clearly NOT a natural phenomenon, as other signs indicate it's most likely extra-terrestrial of some sort. Now Agent Sparta must discover what's going on, what's at stake, and who's trying to benefit from or sabotage her mission.