January's recommendation: Blood and Iron, by Elizabeth Bear.
There's always a slight awkwardness about getting to know an author, and then picking up their fiction for the first time. If it turns out I don't like it, I end up feeling a little weird, even though acquaintance or even friendship is no requirement that I also read a person's stuff. Perfectly good people may write fiction I have no interest in.
Which is all prefatory to me saying that I was pleased to find that I did, in fact, like Blood and Iron. It's urban faerie fantasy, which is always a good start with me, but I admit to having apprehensions about the prose. Bear is one of those authors who keeps a very close eye on her language, trying to avoid casual, overused patterns and find more vivid and interesting ways to say things, and frankly, that doesn't always work for me. Sometimes it just feels stiff, mannered, too self-conscious. Which happens sporadically in Blood and Iron, but for the most part she's become comfortable enough in her own style that it flows well, and the clever phrasings are engaging rather than obtrusive.
And it does just fine on the level of story. Bear nails Faerie, as far as I'm concerned, playing handily with the many variants of stories about it, the notion that all the stories are true. (Also the songs and everything else.) Things there feel resonant. That resonance then carries over to the mortal world, but in different ways, and she also achieves the trick of making modernity seem as rich and mythical as anything out of the past, thereby avoiding the nostalgia that often makes faerie fantasy seem a little shallow.
The primary story-related flaw is one I've seen Bear herself acknowledge, namely, her reluctance to be too explicit in telling you what's going on. It reminds me somewhat of Dorothy Dunnett, an author I very much had to learn to read; with Dunnett, the trick is figuring out how the things she's saying bend around the shape of the thing she's not saying. (Frex, she'll tell you everything else going on in a scene except the fact that one of the characters is bleeding out and about to fall over. Then suddenly he falls over, and you go "buh?") Reading Blood and Iron, sometimes it felt like characters were having Meaningful Conversations, only I couldn't quite tell what they were about. Some of that's a flaw of attention on my part, no doubt, but there were times when I wished the characters would be a little less opaque.
But the opaqueness didn't throw me out of the story, and as with Dunnett, I may well learn to love it. Blood and Iron is one of Bear's Promethean Age works, and the first I've read -- actually, I'm not sure how much is in print and how much is on its way -- anyway, they involve Faerie and Hell and werewolves and all manner of familiar things rendered with loving detail and then turned just a few degrees askew. They also involve the Promethean Club, a society of mortal mages who, at least in this novel, are concerned with the overthrow of Faerie. The nice thing is that both the Fae and the Prometheans are cool, so you don't quite want to see either side lose (though my sympathies, for various reasons, were more on the side of the Fae). The world would be far less interesting if deprived of Faerie, perhaps, but since they're not what you would call friendly or kind, fighting against them might still be a good idea.
The book leaves some threads dangling; there are more coming, but I'm not sure how closely they will tie together. This one stands mostly on its own, despite those dangling threads. If, when I read the later ones (and I do intend to do so), I end up recommending them, they'll probably get their own statements, rather than an addendum to this one.