Nyxnissa so Dasheem or Nyx has fought as a soldier, been an ex-government assassin and done a stretch in prison. She has turned her disreputable past into a living as a sought-after bounty hunter and problem solver of awkward problems people want to go away. She does not work alone, collecting an equally disreputable, but competent crew to help her in her work.

Nyx is a brilliantly imagined character. She is full-on, ruthless, outrageous, but this merely reflects the unforgiving war-ridden world she lives in. To those on the outside of her inner circle Nyx appears uncouth and very unpleasant. To her crew she is equally verbally unsavoury, but they know she is also someone they can rely on, particularly when it comes to straight talking and not leaving any man or woman behind.

Nyx’s world is one where bugs are deployed by magicians. The bugs are used in the same way we would any technology for intelligence gathering, protection or computer hacking. It is a fantastical world set in a desert world where only the powerful and tough survive. A world where people like the hard-living Nyx are unlikely to make old age.

Nyx and her team have a family structure and like all families argue, fall out and misbehave, relying on the matriarch figure of Nyx to pull them all together. A particularly nice touch is Nyx’s very conventional sister Kine, who matches Nyx’s obscenities and tough talk with a firm and determined dignity, because she understands that despite the emotional wall Nyx puts up, she still needs that connection with her sister. Though poles apart their connectedness is clear.

The team’s escapades are told through a series of stories with tenuous links between them. Within it we are introduced to Nyx’s motley, but extremely efficient and lethal crew. Each of which has their own special skill. Rhys, the magician, Taite, the com tech, who works on the surveillance and hacking into communications, Anneke, who is superb with weapons, but a bit of a loose cannon, and Khos a shapeshifter.

We also meet people from Nyx’s past, which to say was colourful is an understatement. It is a past which comes back to haunt her and test even Nyx’s skewed moral compass.

To say this book is one of my comfort reads might seem strange, but each story played out in my head like a film in which there is much to take in visually, as well as the superb banter between Nyx’s surrogate family. The first story had me so sold on Nyx and her motley crew, I just wanted to take time out and enjoy their adventures. I hope this is not the last I read of Nyx.

The Body Project and The Heart Is Eaten Last are both great stories, whilst the other three were just okay. There is nobody quite like Nyxnissa so Dasheem so it’s always enjoyable to spend more time with her.

For those unfamiliar with Kameron Hurley’s Bel Dame Apocrypha (God’s War, Infidel, Rapture), Nyxnissa so Dasheem (a.k.a. Nyx) is a hard-drinking, hard-fucking mercenary with sliding scale morals, working mostly as a headhunter on the planet Umayma, as the never-ending holy war between her home nation of Nasheen and their rival Chenja drags on. True to Hurley’s cacophonous approach to sci-fantasy worldbuilding, the details of the Bel Dame universe sound outrageous to the ear (insect-based technology?!?) but function with such an earthy coolness and insistent internal logic that they come off as realism. Hurley’s new book in the Bel Dame canon, Apocalypse Nyx, is a five-story cycle set in the time between the first and second novel of the trilogy; the stories are all standalones, though they are arranged chronologically and certain themes and character arcs thread through the book, giving it a satisfying, unified feel.
In “The Body Project”, Nyx and her team are on a job when they come across the mutilated corpse of Jahar, a former squad mate from Nyx’s time at the front. The problem is, Jahar should already be long dead – Nyx was there and blames herself. Nyx pretends to be a bel dame to get access to the building Jahar’s head is swinging from, only to cross paths with a long-estranged frenemy named Anneke who has her own reasons for investigating Jahar’s death. Then the real bel dames show up.
Anneke has joined the team by the time “The Heart is Eaten Last” begins, as Nyx takes a job hunting down domestic terrorists who are bombing weapons plants in southern Nasheen. Nyx’s estranged sister Kine comes calling, and her magician Rhys is finally getting sick of Nyx’s shit and starts looking for employment elsewhere, and a shapeshifter named Khos joins the team. “Soulbound” finds Nyx and the gang investigating a smuggler moving contraband in dead bodies when they come across a woman dissecting corpses while looking for the “seat of the soul”. The shortest work in the collection is “Crossroads at Jannah”, where Nyx is hired to retrieve some discarded data casings from an acid lake before they dissolve – a job that ends up being far more dangerous than it sounds.
The nightcap to all this madness, and the best of the five stories, is “Paint it Red”. With the rest of her team taking some downtime, Nyx tries to take a day off, but Mahir, a fellow former inmate shows up to call in a favor, and hijacks Nyx for a smash-and-grab job while providing distressingly little in the way of details. The details don’t come until much later, when it leads to someone from Nyx’s past.
Nyx isn’t always an easy sell as a protagonist; she’s an objectively terrible person, but then Hurley tends to build worlds where only terrible people have fortitude/resources/luck to survive the day. In Hurley’s stories, the environment, culture, commerce, etc. is relentless in placing demands on your time, your mind, your body. Nyx’s coping mechanisms – drinking and fucking – are nothing new, and little changes in her temperament from the opening page to the last. This is a predictable feature of its placement within the canon of the trilogy – Nyx can’t really grow as a person any more than the space between God’s War and Infidel allows, and it’s doubtful Hurley would want her to anyway. Fans show up for the fatalistic prose, acid-tongued banter between hard-bitten mercenaries, over the top violence and female-centered action storytelling - Apocalypse Nyx delivers on all those fronts.

This is a collection of five short pieces and can be read as an intro to the world of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha world, which began with God's War. I confess I have only read the first two stories, slightly over half the book. I've seen Nyx described as 'painfully hard to like' and I'd go with that description. Her answer to everything is to smash heads (or maybe hack them off), and by the time I'd read the first two stories I needed a rest. Nyx is a former Bel Dame, a government assassin turned bounty hunter. She's seen a lot of gore, and contributed greatly to the body count, but she's damaged, and like her surroundings, she's angry, grim, and bloody. She has a team, but she's not sure she can count on them and, what's worse, she's not sure if they can count on her. I will go back and read the other three stories in thius collection, but I need to decompress first.

Nyx is a bounty hunter in Nasheen, which is stuck in a never-ending religious war with neighboring Chenja. The world building is a fascinating mix of magic and technology, mostly based on insects – a character breaks apart a fire beetle to start a fire, for instance, and bug bits and secretions are used to do everything from power cars to make bullets. Nasheen society is matriarchal, and also draws heavily on the Muslim religion, with mosques on every corner and the calls to prayer dividing up the day. Nyx’s team is a mishmash of the dregs of society, and it consists of Taite, a young com tech; Anneke, a hired gun who likes carrying around guns almost as big as herself; Rhys, a Chenjan bug magician, able to control swarms of bugs; and Khos, a bulky shape shifter. An ex-soldier and ex-assasin, Nyx’s existence consists mostly of bounty hunting and then drinking away her past, and the others on her team go along for various similar reasons. She’s deeply flawed, prickly, morally grey, and kind of a bitch, so of course I loved her. This anthology doesn’t have much of an overarching theme – it’s more of a series of heists that outline Nyx’s character and her relation to her team. While the first two stories are novella-length, the last three are short stories, and all of these were previously published on the author’s Patreon.

“Plotting?” he asked.
“You know me well enough to know I don’t think any of this shit through beforehand.”


“The Body Project” – ★★★★ – While out on a bounty hunt, Nyx and her team find a dead body – and a head floating in the window of the building several stories up. She quickly realizes it’s one of her former military team members, and someone who should already have been dead. Nyx, out of obligation to her old team member or some other whim, decides to investigate, and is drawn into a mystery that will endanger her current team.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’m in the market for a shifter anyway. You know anyone?”
The man raised his brows. “You’ve brought a dead shapeshifter here, which you admit was killed in your own basement, and want me, a shifter, to recommend a good shifter to you?”
“Yeah,” Nyx said.”


“The Heart Is Eaten Last” – ★★★★★ – This was my favorite of the bunch. Another job, another pretty woman lying to Nyx, another chance to get her whole team blown up. Nice and twisty, with some seriously messed up moments!

“We are discussing the plan we need to come up with to finish the job that we contracted for.”
“We should have just stolen her leg,” Taite said.
“Fuck you and the fucking leg,” Nyx said.”


“Soulbound” – ★★★★ – An easy job to round up some on-the-run magicians turns into an excursion into the disputed territory between Nasheen and Chenja. Surprisingly hilarious and action-packed.

“This is the hell you made yourself. I’d ask what you have to punish yourself for, but I’ve already seen enough in my time with you to justify every bit of this.”


“Crossroads at Jannah” – ★★★★ – A bit more background on some of the bug technology, another confrontation between Rhys and Nyx.

“You did me a favor in prison,” Nyx said. “I clear my debts.”
“I saved your life.”
“Sounds like a favor, doesn’t it?”


“Paint It Red” – ★★★ – Nyx, minus her team. An old prison friend calls in a favor, and Nyx joins her crew for a heist. A good story to end the anthology with, as it reaffirms the family that Nyx has drawn around herself, and that she’s not as morally bad as she’d have you think.

As a first introduction to Nyx, I think it works pretty well, and it definitely made me interested in picking up the rest of the books in the series to see more of Nyx and her team. Recommended for fans of kickass flawed heroines and grimdark SF&F!

I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

In a world of bugs, magicians, and war, Nyx uses her skills as an ex-government assassin in her role as leader to a team of bounty hunters. She’s good at solving other people’s problems—especially if doing so involves punching people in the face—and she doesn’t shy away from morally-ambiguous choices.

I really like this gritty world that’s turned Nyx into such a hard-drinking, hard-sexing, hard-punching mess. Magicians control biology, specifically bugs, in the name of a religious war in a gritty, punk post-apocalypse. The insect technology is far-reaching, with ground-up beetles powering cars, a communication network based on bug pheromones, and even in Nyx’s body, ehich was rebuilt after her time at the front. Shapeshifters dodge the draft by permanently remaining in animal form.

Four novellas make up this book, each adding a layer of texture to Nyx as she takes one action-packed job after another. But it’s the characters around Nyx that really give the story heart. Rys, the religious magician and group’s moral compass, is always frustrated with Nyx, but only because he cares for her. Combined with the always-high sharp-shooter Anneke and the exotically massive shapershifter Khos, this team never gets out clean.

Highly recommended as a fun adult action-packed scifi with a scoundrel protagonist. I’ve read Hurley’s The Stars are Legion, and am surprised how different this story is!

Five shorts in the Bel Dame Apocrypha universe following the exploits of the catshit crazy former Bel Dame Nyxnissa so Dasheem (soulless and nihilistic, daughter of Bakira so Dasheem, collecting bounties, bodies and f*cks) in the generations long war raging on between Nasheen and Chenja. Dark, apocalyptic dystopia in a world run on bugs and magic. Not for the faint of heart or queasy, but the characters will stick with you long after reading.

3.5 stars.

There was a lot to like about this book (slash collection of short stories?) - it's written well, the characters are interesting and unique, and the world was really fantastic (set in a Middle Eastern-esque world and full of assassins and heists). It was an enjoyable read and made me interested in reading the rest of the series.

Nyx's character development was a bit of a sore spot for me, however. For most of this book, I was rooting for her to start making some changes in her life, even if they were minor ones. But I kept reading and Nyx kept going through the same motions she had in each story in the collection - getting annoyed with her team, lusting after someone in her team, making it clear that she doesn't care about her team members at all, barely completing the job, and sleeping with someone to blow off some steam. Each story had a unique job and some unique aspects to it, but the changes fell flat because Nyx was approaching each situation as exactly the same person. Finally, at the very end, Nyx experiences what could be counted as change, but it's unclear whether this is actually a chance for her to become a dynamic character, or just a new revelation of the character she already is. I would have loved to see some more changes and new experiences across the stories, but each story felt similar and that made it somewhat less enjoyable as I continued to read.

All that being said, this is a really great collection of heist and assassin-for-hire stories and is great fun for SFF-interested folks to read.

Apocalypse Nyx is the latest installment in Hurley's Nyx series with each installment functioning as a short story which continually adds a bit more to the bigger universe. Reading the novel, I have to say I'm a bit in between. On the one hand, it seems that the author thinks a story improves the more cussing is included (I thoroughly enjoyed The Stars Are Legion and this is the second book of hers which I read), this might either be because Hurley is greatly influenced by David Gunn and his style of writing, or this just might be her own style. On the other hand, the low regard she has of her male characters eerily hints at tones of sexism.

Either way, I'm certain there are those who do enjoy reading her work as there are those who enjoy reading proper fiction crafted by the likes of Peter F, Hamilton, Matthew Reilly, Joanne Harris, and the like.

This was truly a great introduction to the Bel Dame Apocrypha world and characters. I have never read anything in that series, but I didn't feel like this book which covers five short stories between books 1 an 2 spoils much. Rather, I believe it is intended to serve as additional backstory. These stories follow Nyx as she assembles her crew and they pursue bounties that invariably go horribly wrong as Nyx's plans unravel around them. It is a gross world, full of magic bugs used for every purpose, and a dark world where murder is acceptable. It is also a lot of fun to read.

Kameron Hurley is yet another one of those authors that I've read and heard a lot about. She has a regular column that appears in Locus magazine, where she writes about, well, just about anything. Up until now, her Locus columns are the only items of hers that I've read. I wasn't quite sure where to break in with reading her fiction; THE STARS ARE LEGION is her most recent novel and highly thought of in the field, so I've thought about starting there. The Bel Dame Apocrypha - a trilogy consisting of GOD'S WAR, INFIDEL, and RAPTURE, didn't seem like it was for me. Now that I've read Apocalypse Nyx, however, it may be time to at the very least add GOD'S WAR to my to be read list.

Apocalypse Nyx is a collection of five novellas in the Bel Dame Apocrypha universe. Nyx - full name Nyxnissa so Dasheem - is the titular character of the stories. She is a bounty hunter, a former Bel Dame, a sort of government assassin. Now Nyx and her team take jobs for money. She typically retrieves items, but sometimes she ends up solving problems. But just about all the time, the job is nasty, dirty, and bloody. And so is she.

The setting for the stories is a planet engulfed in what seems to be a never-ending war. The place is so dystopic it you'd find a picture of it next to the word dystopia in the dictionary. Or maybe you'd find a picture of it in an article that is trying to define apocalyptic. This place is mean and, well, weird. Bugs that seem to be everywhere and do everything, from power modes of transportation, to heal injuries under direction of magicians (mysterious people who demonstrate unusual powers in an otherwise (somewhat) rational world), to act as all sorts of weapons. There are shape shifters too. Nyx's band of misfits includes these and a couple of others, a young communications technician as well as someone who should probably be thought of as a sharp shooter.

Nyx is a dubious character at best. Her methods are, well, less than savory. She is violent and angry. She is trying to survive in the world, while at the same time trying to make it a better place. She gets involved in straightforward retrieval jobs, as well as morally questionable tasks, and manages to get involved in the middle of a dispute between members of a powerful family. She's just trying to do the best she can in a world that is out to get everybody. She has a nasty reputation, and, as I gather from these stories, the reputation is well deserved.

Still, deep down underneath that facade, there appears to be a decent person just dying to get out. If she were your manager at work, you'd quit in a heartbeat. She is mean and heartless, and on the outside doesn't seem to care about the people in her employ. The job may come first - after all, the money is the most important thing when you're trying to survive in this world - but the people that help you complete that job are important. On the surface, she doesn't care about her team. She constantly threatens them with bodily harm or expulsion from the team. But when the team is in danger, she just can't bring herself to follow through on her threats. It seems to me that she was damaged during her life as a Bel Dame, but doesn't want to admit it. Rather, she goes through life projecting a bravado that seems to be hiding something deep inside.

As I said, there are five stories in this collection. The first two are my favorites; "The Body Project" and "The Heart is Eaten Last" are more than a bit violent and brutal, but like all the other stories in this collection ("Soulbound", "Crossroads at Jannah", and "Paint It Red") there are morals to be told and lessons to be learned, both by Nyx AND the reader. Each one will have you walking away thinking that you didn't see that coming.

Even though this book is being released in the summer, this is not light summer reading - unless you like your beach reading with a healthy dose of blood, violence, and snarky dialogue. If you do, then this book is for you.

This is a tough review to write. See, I loved the world Kameron Hurley created, but I deeply disliked our protagonist. Yet Nyx is the product of that word. So that awesome world building that I found so fascinating produced a protagonist so unlikable, that I actually wished the bad guys killed her before the end of the book.

The planet Nyx lives on isn’t Earth, but it was colonized by people from Earth, who brought with them their religion, their problems, and their conflicts. This is a harsh and unforgiving world: the radiation from its suns produces all kinds of cancers in populations too poor to live behind protective barriers reserved to the elite. Most of the planet is a desert and resources are hard to come by, so nations are in a perpetual war against each other.

It’s a war without rules or boundaries, where radioactive and chemical weapons are used so often, most border towns are contaminated beyond repair, and locals don’t even take cover during daily air strikes.

Nyx lives in a nation that has been at war with its neighbor long before she was born and will still be waging that war long after she dies. Everyone is conscripted into the army when they reach adulthood, but the amount of time men and women serve is different. Women go in for two years and assume most of the command posts. Men go in for 30 years and are considered cannon fodder. Most never come back from that war, or come back broken beyond repair.



Nyx experience unnameable horrors in that war and even perpetrated some of them. She was so badly injured that she had to be “remade”, which means that over 80% of her body isn’t hers anymore. Worse than that, she has been mentally damaged as well. She has severe PTSD and survivor’s guilt. She has vivid nightmares and flashbacks to her times on the front line and she can be unpredictable in those moments. Well, no, I take that back, you can pretty much guarantee that she would lash out with extreme violence.

She chose to think only about her own survival and not get attached to anyone or anything. She is harsh and abrasive, downright violent at times with both her enemies and her partners, and she wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice them all to save her own skin.

I understand why Nyx is the way she is. At the beginning of the book, I even empathized. After all she’s been through, it would have been surprising if she wasn’t messed up in her head. My problem is that Nyx doesn’t change. This book consists of three novellas presented in chronological order, and Nyx stays the same unlikable abrasive self through all of them. There is no character growth, no redemption arc, not even a hint that she might mellow or start giving a shit about her companions.

I can stick with an unlikable protagonist as long as there is some hope for character growth. I might not like them, but I can stay invested if I saw an effort to better themselves and overcome their past. Unfortunately, there is no such hope for Nyx.

My other problem with Nyx is that she never faces her problems head on. She never stops to discus them with her companions and try to work out a solution like most adults would do. She chooses to lash out and run instead, then drown her frustration in alcohol until she passes out. Every single time. After the second or third time Nyx bailed and got drunk instead of just talking through the problem, I lost the little respect I had left for her… as well as my investment in her story.

So nice world building, Mrs. Hurley, but I won’t be sticking around for the next book unless Nyx starts growing.

PS. I received an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Nyx is a battered war vet turned mercenary. She has a knack for getting into trouble, though she mostly gets out of it again. The concept is interesting, with many things (weapons, healing, communications, etc) achieved through the use of bugs. Each chapter reads more like a short story, with a fair amount of repetition of basic information about the team at the beginning of each. Overall, decent but not exemplary.

Apocalypse Nyx is a collection of five short stories set in the Bel Dame Apocrypha universe. The world building was an interesting mesh of ideas—technology takes on the form of bugs within a Middle Eastern-inspired setting—and the cast of characters is diverse. Nyx herself is hard to like, and I actually sort of admire the author's confidence in having a main character so irredeemably coarse inside and out. It was entertaining seeing how she clashed with her teammate Rhys, someone who'd skew more towards the morally good end of the spectrum. There are plenty of entertaining action scenes throughout each story as well.

I didn't realise this was part of a larger series, which left me a bit jarred when I initially started reading, but I think fans of the series will enjoy this.

[This review will be up on my blog, acquadimore.wordpress.com, on 05/26]

Apocalypse Nyx is a collection of short fiction from the Bel Dame Apocrypha universe. These stories are set before most of the events in God's War and follow Nyx and her squad on various missions in which they risk their lives.
I liked this collection more than the actual book. My favorite aspects of God's War were the characters and their dynamics, more than the plot (which wasn't that surprising) or the worldbuilding (which I didn't love).

The Body Project - ★★★½
Nyx is investigating the death of a man she once knew at the front.
In this story we see how Anneke became part of Nyx's squad, which was really interesting. My favorite part of this was definitely Nyx's and Rhys' banter (it killed me). The worldbuilding is still disappointing and I don't think that's going to change - I'm not sure what's going on with Nasheen's foreign politics because there are too many countries, all of them stereotyped. So much wasted potential, but I'm here for the characters and not that.

The Heart Is Eaten Last - ★★★★
This one had some seriously creepy parts. The heart scene - the scene that gave the title to this story? - was awful in the best way possible and I totally understand Rhys. I would have liked this story more if it had been shorter, but again, I liked it more than the book. It's about a failed Bel Dame trying to frame Nyx, and Khos joining Nyx's team.
Rhys and Nyx's not-relationship is more developed in these stories than in the book (I guess it helps to have more quiet scenes, they kind of got sacrificed in God's War).

Soulbound - ★★★★½
Nyx and her squad meet a woman who is dissecting bodies to find their souls.
This was fast-paced and short and hilarious and exactly what I wanted from this collection. I love all the characters now - I almost feel like they work better in short fiction than in novel format.
This is a story about souls and believing and what war does to faith when faith drives the war. I really liked how the religious themes were explored in this story (I didn't love what God's War did with them because again, wasted potential, but this was perfect).

Crossroads at Jannah - ★★★
Finally some more details on the biopunk insect technology! Another of my minor problems with God's War was how little detail we got on the bug sci-fantasy system, which is probably the most interesting aspect of the worlbuilding.
The story itself didn't have much depth and it was kind of predictable, but I really liked the ending.

Paint It Red - ★★½
Nyx can't rest even on her days off, because someone is either always trying to kill her or asking her to repay some kind of debt.
This felt unnecessary. I'm reading this book for the squad dynamics, not for Nyx to go and fight with other people I don't care about. But the f/f/f threesome was almost worth it.

Average rating: 3,5 stars

Kameron Hurley is a master world builder and her characters are, as always, a great mix of fierce, funny, and well-rounded. I didn't realize this was part of a larger series, so I was a little hamstrung in that regard, and yet I still felt like I grasped the plot for the most part--a single-volume compartmentalization that not all SFF writers are very good at. I'm looking forward...to going backward to read the rest.

Kameron Hurley delivers with this set of five novellas from the Bel Dame Apocrypha series. Each of them centers around Nyx, who is--well--Nyx.

The book follows the various jobs that Nyx and her crew take on. Mainly, though, the focus is on Nyx herself as she struggles with a leadership role.

To put it lightly, Nyx is not the easiest person to love. She is almost completely selfish. For example, in one scene a crew member saves someone's life and leaves something valuable behind; Nyx berates them for not getting the valuables first and going back to see if the person was still alive. She is incredibly stubborn and gives off a vibe that she doesn't really care about the majority of her crew as individual people. She just cares that she has a crew. Yet Nyx is competent and acknowledges were weaknesses. Doing something about her shortcomings, though? Nah. And while she will leave a crew member to die if it benefits her in the short run, she still does depend on them. Her character is excellently written, along with the others.

Another positive about this book is how it incorporates grimdark and new weird elements (bugpunk, for example) seamlessly in the world. Nyx's moral seems to be, "A job is a job. If it pays well, take it." The world is full of morally grey characters. Nyx might be extreme, but her crew isn't innocent either. And despite the perspective being mainly hers, the other characters are still well developed.

A minor issue is that parts of the stories felt a little too slow. This will vary with taste, of course. However, these few sections (in the entire book) slightly threw off the pacing for me. I found it tended to happen just after the job was accepted but before the job actually started. Like I said, this is a minor issue.

I confess that I haven't yet read God's War, so perhaps I spoiled myself for something there. However, I truly feel that this collection stands on its own very well. I devoured this book, and I'm pretty sure it ate a little piece of my heart, too.

[I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

I think these short stories would be a great place to start for someone who hasn't read any Nyx books. They give you an overview of the incredibly original world Hurley has created and Nyx and her team.
But, as someone who has read all of them, I was excited to read more about Nyx and her team. I was not disappointed. We need more Nyx!

A dark and gritty collection of stories centering on mercenary jobs by an eclectic crew brought together by Nix, a former bel dame "soldier". Centered on an alien planet that has a continuous war, where technology can rework their broken bodies. A fascinating nano/bug technology that goes from "bug" bullets to bugs for fuel. Quick read, realized this was part of a series, but was a good standalone as I haven't read the others.

Apocalypse Nyx is a selection of short stories starring the titular Nyx. Once a member of the Bel Dames, a brutally effective group of government assassins. Nyx is now a bounty hunter – though she’s lost none of her skillset. Or her attitude, as she guides her team of bounty hunters through the vicissitudes of life on a world wracked by war and magic.

Lets talk about that world for a minute. It’s one defined, at both the personal and macro levels, by conflict. Nyx’s nation has been waging war with one of its neighbours for what feels like generations. In pursuit of victory, they’ve used guns. Bombs. Espionage. Tailored viruses. Genetically engineered bugs. As have the enemy. All this has led to large portions of the country being uninhabitable. It’s also led to almost the entirety of the male population doing mandatory military service in fantastically lethal war zones, with a very low life expectancy. Socially, this is a world run by women, because all of the men are either fighting, or dead.

Of course, the world is broken, which makes everything a bit more difficult. It’s a world of faith – one where the call to prayer goes out on schedule, and where mullah’s are in competition for the attentions of the faithful. But also one which encourages a loss of that faith, in tragedy, in pain, in loss.

Then there’s the insects, and the magicians. The insects – well, they’re all over the place. This is a world which has embraced bio-mechanical and genetic engineering. Where the world as a whole is a tapestry of the waste of human potential, the sheer inventiveness here – of killer wasps, of spy-bugs which are actually, er…bugs, of ichor which can be used to build an arm – lets in a little creativity, a little humanity. Of course, that creativity is being used to create wasps big enough to be used as a swarm of guard dogs, but that’s Nyx’s home for you. There are these little sparks of ingenuity, of hope, of purpose, wrapped within an occluding sense that they’ve all been misused; that things are broken or decaying, systems and artefacts both, but only due to the hubris or neglect of people.

It's a vividly drawn world, to be sure. In its hopes for and expectations of humanity, it carries a raw emotional punch. Watching Nyx drive past an abandoned homestead, shattered by bio-bombs, or see a family struggling to survive in a desolate, dangerous landscape, caring for a war veteran now catatonic from the experience – it’s a punch in the gut. It may make you feel pain, sadness, or a bubbling frustrated rage, but it will definitely make you feel something.

What Nyx seems to feel, mostly, is a kind of quiet self-loathing, mixed with frustrated anger and pride. One of the ways this presents, both to her colleagues and to the reader, is by not taking any crap from anyone. Nyx is damaged, sure, but I don’t read her as broken. She’s aware – perhaps far too aware -of her flaws, digging into them, making a nest in her own refusal to engage, in a world which encourages that disengagement by, well, being terrible. Much of what we might see as emotional growth is in the subtext – as she cares for her team, whilst also being prepared, or indeed encouraging herself to abandon them. They, or she, are liabilities, failures and monsters with whom emotional connection can only end in disaster. Nyx constructs a wall around an emotional core, maybe out of fear, maybe out of awareness of her own lethal nature, maybe because she thinks she’s poison, or maybe because emotional vulnerability is so often met with cruelty. In between the drinks (and there are a lot of drinks), Nyx is smart, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But she’s a complex character as well, not only an arse-kicking heroine, awesome as that is, but a complex individual, masking their thought and their hurt under something else.

You may be here to watch Nxy shoot some fool in the face with a shotgun, before disarming his two mates, breaking their necks, wiring a building to explode and stealing a priceless artefact under covering sniper fire. And you will not be disappointed. But you may be here for the quieter, sadder Nyx, who sees a relationship with one of her team as dangerous, who isn’t able to reach out, who matches affection and connection with abuse and frustration. Both are equally real, equally true.

I won’t get into the details of the stories in this collection, to avoid spoilers. But there’s a lot of great stuff here. There’s tense heists, to be sure. Then there’s comedy of errors, as Nyx’s team of badasses runs their own sense of competence up against reality. There’s moments that hint toward a larger agenda, and a lot of great background. If you’ve ever wondered how Nyx’s team got together, how they stayed together, then there are stories here to answer your questions. If you wanted to see more of the world, the bug bombs, the endless, society-breaking war, the glimpses of high technology wrapped in an enigma – there’s some of that, too. If you want to see Nyx and the gang kicking arse and taking names, painting the walls with blood, then drowning the memories in alcohol – this is one for you.

It’s fast paced sci-fi action, absolutely. It’s got enough blood and guts to satiate and satisfy, yes. But it’s also a thoughtful collection, one which gets us further into the characters heads, one which isn’t afraid to get the reader thinking about the way pain and hurt can make us act, and isn’t afraid to explore larger issues.

If you’re new to Nyx, this may be a good place to start, taking place before the current series of which she’s the star. If you’re already a fan, this adds some wonderfully bloody, emotionally sharp texture to an already intriguing world and characters – get on it.