Wexler, best known for his gunpowder fantasy series The Shadow Campaigns, takes on the the LitRPG genre with this humorous tale about a human woman who is summoned into a fantasy world as a savior, but winds up failing and dying horribly. Repeatedly. However, she's determined to not only be on the winning side, but also to get herself chosen as the Dark Lord themself. Davi has approximately two months to recruit some Wilder followers and cross most of the map before the convocation that will choose the next Dark Lord. After her many lives. and deaths, she knows every inch of the human Kingdom, including the location of the nearest camp of Wilders, but she knows almost nothing about the Wilds themselves. Or how the convocation actually chooses a Dark Lord. No problem. After all, what's the worst thing that can happen? She'll just find herself back in an ice cold pond listening to a doddering old wizard's long winded speech again and hope she doesn't make the same mistake again. Yes, there's a lot of dying, a lot of swearing, lots of sex off screen, and thousands of confused Wilders along the way.

Since Carl and Donut were able to overcome the complexity of the 4th floor by creating group chats that helped the crawlers share information, the AI that runs the world dungeon has responded by making some adjustments. The 5th floor is now a myriad of unique instanced zones (bubbles) and no new groups can be formed by the crawlers. The crawlers themselves will be evenly distributed across the bubbles, and since Carl and Donut are two of the highest level crawlers, that means they will be sharing their bubble with a bunch of I-can't-believe-these-idiots-are-still-alive n00bs. Each bubble has 4 quadrants within it (air, land, water, and subterranean) and each one has a challenge that must be overcome before the crawlers can move on to another one. Carl and Donut wind up starting in the air quadrant, which is good since cats and water don't mix, but that is just delaying the inevitable for Donut. Before Donut finds herself submerged, they first have to deal with the Dirigible Gnomes, who are using their insanely designed aircraft to bomb the hell out of camel like race that lives beneath them.

After bringing the corruption of her former boss at the San Francisco office of The Protectorate to light, and getting him fired, Alma Bellrose is dismayed to learn that a famed demon hunter will be replacing him. She knows that they keep tabs on her and the changeling she once saved from execution, Sebastien, so to distract The Protectorate she agrees to go undercover at a week-long party hosted by well-known witches. Right off Alma knows something is wrong when she doesn't see any fae on the property, a sure sign that a "demon", or more correctly, a possessing spirit is present. But seriously, all of these people are behaving suspiciously, except the actual "demon," and it's not long until the bodies start to pile up, starting with the hostess apparently committing suicide.

Carl and Donut are both on the newly introduced leader board, but like everything else in the dungeon, that comes with a downside. Everyone in the top 10 now has a bounty placed on their head encouraging the other crawlers to take them out via PvP. Of course, the leader board is just another way for the alien corporation running this apocalyptic game show to make money, and various sponsors now vie for the rights to each crawler. Carl and Donut both get sponsored, which opens up the possibility of sponsor and fan provided loot boxes, which they are both going to need. The 4th floor is known as the Iron Tangle, and it was clearly designed to disorient the crawlers. It is a mess of a multi train underground railway system with numerous tracks and junctions that intersect in an unpredictable way. Each group of crawlers arrives on the floor in a train filled with monsters, and more monsters get on and off the train each time it arrives at a new station. It makes you wonder what happens if the train gets to the end of the line?

There is no shortage of single witches struggling to get by in the urban fantasy genre and I admit that I picked up the first book in this series because Barnes and Noble offered it for free. I went on to buy the other five books because they were better written than most and Galway put some real creativity into her magical world of witches and fae creatures. Alma Bellrose is about as disgraced as a witch from such an old and powerful family can get and thought moving to Silverpool, which is hidden from the mundane world and most witches because of the magical pool that attracts all types of fae creatures, would keep her under the radar as far as the Protectorate is concerned. That might have been more successful if she hadn't dated Silverpool's Protector, but considering that he dated almost every woman in town it wouldn't have been a problem if he didn't wind up dead on the bridge leading in and out of town. Alma tries to solve the murder just to get the Protectorate agents out of town before they realize that her father the infamous thief and the changeling she refused to kill when she her self was a Protectorate agent are both hanging around. Investigating the mystery will force Alma to quit hiding away and actually get acquainted with her town and it's residents. She finds oddities like the big box store that always has just what you're looking for no matter how unlikely and a nascent witch who has no idea what she is or that the magical world exists at all.

Dungeon Crawler Carl covered the exploits of Carl and Donut as they barely managed to survive the first two levels of the world dungeon that now inhabits Earth. It also revealed the rules by which the dungeon operates and how the crawlers themselves progress and grow within it. It was established that the dungeon crawlers would get to pick their race and class when they reached the third level of the dungeon and that is exactly where this book starts. Yes, that's right, the crawlers will get to pick a race, which means most crawlers will no longer be human after their choice. The choices available to each crawler will differ based on the stats and skills they progressed on levels 1 and 2, which means a lot of specialization will be occurring. Both Carl and Donut have a myriad of choices available to them, but Donut absolutely plans to remain a cat, so her race choice is a foregone conclusion. Because why would a cat ever want to be anything else?

Welcome to the Weary Dragon Inn with its problem solving innkeeper Bev (that's short for Beverage Wench) and the quirky people of Pigsend. Shortly after a brutal civil war, a woman wandered into Pigsend with no memories and was taken in by the former innkeeper. He trained her first as a beverage wench, hence the name, and a few years later she inherited the inn. Pigsend is a dull seeming village that hides more than a few secrets, and keeps running afoul of the new Queen's investigators. Everyone in the village knows that one of the butchers can easily carry an entire cow and that the baker's mother made magically delicious muffins. Sadly, the new Queen uses those of magical blood that she finds useful and executes the rest. When mysterious sinkholes start appearing all over the village, including under Bev's front door, Bev finds herself volunteered to investigate despite having several guests at the inn. It's obvious that Bev's guests are rarely who they say they are, and that successfully solving one problem only gets her stuck dealing with every mystery that comes along. Oh and of course, most of the residents are going to complain about how she goes about it.

It's two in the morning, and Carl quickly puts his leather jacket on, along with his girlfriend's pink crocs sandals, just before running outside wearing only his boxers. He has no idea why her damn cat, Princess Donut, chose that moment to run out into the cold, but it's a show cat and worth more than Carl makes in a year, so he better go get it. That's when the world as we know it, comes to an end. An alien race has arrived and instantly destroyed every structure on the planet, transforming the destroyed matter into a worldwide, eighteen level dungeon full of monsters for an intergalactic game show. Everyone that was in a structure is already dead, and everyone outside now had a choice to make. Find a dungeon entrance within an hour and take their chances in the dungeon, or try to survive outside in a world with no structures remaining. It was way too cold for Carl and Donut to remain outside, especially the way Carl was dressed, which meant they had no choice at all.

Exploring what it means to be human is an established sci-fi trope, especially in any book with sufficiently advanced androids; however, Human After All certainly takes a unique approach to this subject. The android population rose up against their oppressive masters (humans) decades ago, and they won the war easily. Now the androids rule the Earth and they have formed their own societal structures, but are they any better at stewarding the planet than their human predecessors? Not really. They seem to have learned a lot of our bad habits, and when a new "virus" starts to spread throughout the population, essentially turning them into android zombies, the new masters of the planet find their own existence in jeopardy. This is the backdrop that challenges the main character Freeman, the most advanced artificial life form ever created, to explore his existence and the nature of his humanity.

The Ambit is an older ship, and only well known because its captain is the AI named Eoan. Not many people are willing to take a chance on an AI captain, so there are only two crew members, Saint and Nash, who are basically outcasts themselves. They work for the Guild, that neutral entity that keeps the peace between the big corporations and their settlements on the Fringe of human space. Guild Rangers are known for their fierce loyalty to their missions, so Saint is willing to greet his old friend Jalsen with a bullet in the back when he is wanted for desertion. It isn't looking to be a pleasant ride back to the Core Spiral to turn Jalsen over to the Council of Captains when the AI captain, Eoan, picks up a distress beacon. It comes from a failed terraform planet and investigating it results in finding a whole lot of dead bodies before finding the dying programmer who sent the signal. Anke was here to gather information about the failed terraform because she suspects it was a viral code used to kill the colony by the corporation who owned it. If she's right, this is at least the third time the Deadworld Code has been used, and she begs the crew of the Ambit to help test the code fix she's working on. It really shouldn't take long and then they can take Jalsen in, but would there really be a whole book if everything went that smoothly?