Lowball edited by George R R Martin & Melinda M Snodgrass

Decades after an alien virus changed the course of history, the surviving population of Manhattan still struggles to understand the new world left in its wake. Natural humans share the rough city with those given extraordinary—and sometimes terrifying—traits. While most manage to coexist in an uneasy peace, not everyone is willing to adapt. Down in the seedy underbelly of Jokertown, residents are going missing. The authorities are unwilling to investigate, except for a fresh lieutenant looking to prove himself and a collection of unlikely jokers forced to take matters into their own hands—or tentacles. The deeper into the kidnapping case these misfits and miscreants get, the higher the stakes are raised. There is little denying that Game of Thrones has made George R R Martin a household name. The books and the television show are massively, insanely popular and rightly so.  I’ll admit that though I thoroughly enjoy my visits to Westeros, and all of its political machinations, I have always had more of a soft spot for Martin’s other magnum opus, the Wild Cards books. Since the late nineteen eighties, this ongoing series of mosaic novels, that Martin edits with Melinda M Snodgrass, has cleverly reinvented the superhero genre…