Andrew Liptak’s February book selections give you a nice opportunity to be an armchair tourist in some pretty exotic locales (“Visit distant planets, conspiracies, and galactic conflicts!”)

Just as important for diligent book fans, Andrew catches us up with some of the more intriguing ongoing fantasy series. So without further ado, let’s see what he has for us this month.

Tarnished City by Vic James ( Del Rey, 416 pages, $25 in hardcover/$10.99 digital, February 6, 2018)

Vic James began her career last year with The Gilded Cage, in which the world belongs to a class of gifted magical aristocrats. In the next installment of her Dark Gifts trilogy, an uprising has been crushed, and protagonist Abi Hadley’s brother Luke has been framed for the murder of Parliament’s Chancellor Zelston. She goes into hiding, and after her brother is condemned to a remote estate, she hatches a plan to save him. Publisher’s Weekly says that readers will “appreciate the multifaceted complexity of James’s world and its lively, determined characters.”

We covered the opening volume, Gilded Cage, back in April.

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages, $27 in hardcover/$12.99 digital, February 6, 2018)

In 1997, a family is murdered. The suspect, an ex-Navy SEAL, vanishes without a trace — along with one surviving daughter. NCIS Special Agent Shannon Moss is determined to track him down and return the girl. Moss isn’t your typical agent, though. She’s an undercover time traveller who can investigate multiverse strands: potential futures branching off from the present. She discovers that the killers are a team of missing astronauts who were part of a black ops time travel mission, and she has to figure out how the nature of their mission figures into the horrific murders. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp is working on adapting the book for a film, and Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying that it’s a “darkly poetic and profoundly disturbing glimpse into the potential last days of humankind [that] will surely haunt readers’ dreams long after the book is finished.”

Echoes of Understorey by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor Books, 352 pages, (February 13, 2018)

The next installment of Thoraiya Dyer’s Titan’s Forest series follows Imeris, a woman who has trained to become a fighter and aims to compete against her divine sister. But when she fails to kill a body-snatching sorceress, she sets off to find redemption. She’s then recruited to hunt down a magical beast in a Hunt for the Ages, a challenge that will put all of her skills to the test.

We covered the first novel in the series, Crossroads of Canopy, last January.

Read Andrew’s complete February recommendations at The Verge.

Some of Andrew’s more interesting recent articles include:

Andrew Liptak Selects the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of 2016
Andrew Liptak on 16 SF and Fantasy Novels You Don’t Want to Miss in January
Andrew Liptak on 33 SF and Fantasy Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2017
Andrew Liptak on 23 Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels to Read this March
The Verge on 39 SF, Fantasy, and Horror Novels to Read in April
Andrew Liptak on 39 SF, Fantasy, and Horror Books to Read in June
Andrew Liptak on 16 SF, Fantasy, and Horror Books to Read in July
Andrew Liptak on 18 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read this January

See all our coverage of the best new books here.