Mixed Genres & Mixed Reviews (Mixed Drinks Optional)

March over and so is the whole ‘March Madness thing.  It’s a lot more reliable than crocus as a sign of Spring. Clocks have been pushed ahead and we have daylight at 7PM again.  Allergies aside, I like spring.  Blossoms start appearing on shrubs and trees, daffodils, hyacinths, and forsythia bloom and my taxes get done by my accountant.  Yippee.  Spring ain’t for sissies.

Neither is reading voraciously as I do.  Thank heavens for Amazon and its sales. The nice thing about their 4-for-3 promo is that I can try new series and new authors and not feel bad when I get a book I don’t like.  Hey, not everyone likes everything.  Most reviews on Amazon showed readers loved An Appetite for Murder by Lucy Burdette, I didn’t.  I sent a review to PBS for their book blog but it likely won’t show up there for months.  I basically didn’t like the lead character.  Her personality annoyed me.  I’m the same way about Wendy Roberts’ Ghostdusters mysteries, I just don’t like them.  They aren’t badly written or anything, just ……. well, annoying to me.  Despite that, I had waited patiently to get a copy of the first book she wrote back in 2005 for Red Dress Inc, Dating Can Be Deadly, through PBS.  Well it finally made it thru the US postal system and I read it this week  I’ll start my reviews there.

• Title:  Dating Can Be Deadly
  
• Author: Wendy Roberts
• Type:  Contemporary paranormal mystery
• Genre: Chick-lit mystery
• My Grade: B- (3.8*)
  
• Rating:  PG – 13
• Length and price:  Novel – 80,000+ words – price varies
• Where Available:  Available from used book sellers, including Amazon, Alibris, Half.com
• FTC Disclosure: rec’d through through an online book swap site

As I noted above, I can’t get into Wendy Roberts’ Ghostduster mystery series, but I wanted to read Dating Can Be Deadly, so I had it wish listed on PBS for the past year and finally got a copy.  Light, amusing, entertaining and far more enjoyable for than her Sadie Novak Ghostdusters books.  Worth a read if you can find a copy.

Recent Reads – A Mixed Bag of Brief Reviews

I’ve been hauling in deliveries from Amazon almost daily – like a true book addict looking for fix.  I have no defense, some authors are ‘must have’ even at hard cover prices, and many trade paperbacks would take forever to get through a book swapping site, then there’s the lure of the 4-for-3 promotion that extends to unreleased titles on pre-order.  What can I say, I’m just weak.

For the first time in awhile, I read some erotic romance.  With so many of the ebook authors moving from small press publishers to major print houses, I ended up trying 3 new to me authors at Siren.  Keep in mind, the current popularity of m/m, f/f, and BDSM books cuts way back on what I might read.  Not opposed to them and many good ones have m/m or BDSM elements, they just don’t have a lot of interest for me.  With what I did buy, the results were not encouraging.  In print, yet another anthology came up, meh!, another a cut average thanks to good wring – and there were two winners – Cipher by Moira Rogers and Jory Strong’s Inked Magic!  YEAH!!!!!   I had other winners too -  in the mystery category Boca Daze by Steven M. Forman, in the historical cozy category The Cocoa Conspiracy by Andrea Penrose, and in the noir Urban Fantasy category Aloha from Hell by Richard Kadrey.

First up are the Erotic Romance ebooks and print books:

• Title:  Cowboy Commandos Seduce Their Woman (Wyoming Warriors 3)
  
• Author: Paige Cameron
• Type:  Contemporary erotic romance
• Genre: ménage
• My Grade: C (3.0*)
  
• Rating:  NC-17
• Length and price:  Short/ Category Novel – under 60,000+ $5.99
• Where Available:  Available online at Siren
• FTC Disclosure: purchased through an online publisher bookstore

I know, the title should have been a dead give away.  I bought it anyway.  Actually, it was the pick of the litter, even though the shopworn plot has one used so many times, by so many authors, it embodied trite.  Still, the characters had some personality and  for a short novel, it managed a beginning,  middle, and end.  The sex was OK, but not really pulse racing.

New Releases: A Mixed Bag of Genres

Well, I’m still busy reading away, but life does interfere with my plans.  I did enjoy a few good books.  Barry Eisler got close to being back on track with a new John Rain thriller.  Laura Resnick has another chapter in the Esther Diamond series with Vamparazzi – one of the BEST titles this year!  Vicki Lewis Thompson continues her amusing paranormal romance books and .  No, none are stunning blockbuster books, but all were above average and really good reads.

• Title:  The Detachment
  
• Author:  Barry Eisler
• Type:  Action thriller
• Genre:  John Rain and Dox get drawn into another adventure
• Sub-genre:  Manipulation, deception, and the impossible is all too plausible
• My Grade: B- (3.8*)
  
• Rating:  PG-13
• Length and price:  Novel – about 90,000+ $8.25 to$12
• Where Available:  Available at most bookstores and online
• FTC Disclosure:  purchased from an online book seller

The best news, John Rain, one of the BEST characters developed by any author in the past decade, is finally back.  So too is his Dox, his sniper friend and sometimes partner.  Barry Eisler had lost much of the edge that appealed to me with his two Ben Treven books, both of which I found disappointing.  He seems to recapture much of his old magic in The Detachment, though the plot is more obvious than those in his far more twisty and better written early books, and Col ‘Hort’ Horton is not in any way an admirable, or fundamentally honorable person.

Rain has broken up with his girlfriend and Mossad operative, Dehlia.  She refused to leave intelligence agency and he found he could not live with her job – or maybe he was just bored.  As always, he returned to Tokyo, living quietly and going just one place he might be associated with – the Kodokon.  He notices two Americans watching from the stands.  When he catches the them quickly checking the next night, he knows he’s been found.  His response is classic Rain – he leads there where they want to go, lulls them and then kills them both.

But it was a setup and the men pawns that were deliberately sacrificed to catch Rain on camera and blackmail him into doing a job for Col ‘Hort’ Horton.  In LA Hort tells Rain there’s on oligarchy ready to create domestic terrorism in such a way that suspending the Constitution and granting extraordinary powers to the President and Executive Branch of Government seems the only logical course of action.  He uses the very real slow erosion of rights and privacy that the Patriot Act and various government entities – from ICE to TSA to the NSA have already created as a way to get citizens accustomed to a ‘new reality’.

Is Fall Finally Here? Short Reviews for Rainy Days

Wow, the past 7 weeks have been wet.  I feel like we should be building an Ark or  two – or three.   More rain is predicted for this weekend.  I swear, I walk outside and it smells like mold and mildew.  Leaves are falling, but not not much color is showing.   It looks like once again the spectacular fall color may go missing thanks to rain and unseasonable temperatures and humidity.  Well, it’s not like we can do anything about the weather, it is what it is.  But football has started (yes, I’m a fan) regardless of the temperatures, so I get entertainment while I read.

I did get an unexpected treat from a friend on Paperback Swap – a hard to find book by author Kris Neri.  Loved it and wish she’d written more in this series.  It’s hard, really, how many good writers never get a chance at a bigger audience.  One did – H.P.Mallory’s Josie Wilkins series got picked up by Bantam and will go mass market early next year with the third book in the series, Witchful Thinking.  I have it on pre-order  at Amazon.  I have a LOT of books on pre-order thanks to their 4-for-3 sale.  Mysteries, paranormal, romance, thrillers, you name it – and I’m anxiously awaiting a number of them, but a few good ones have arrived, so here we go, short and sweet.

• Title:  Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble
  
• Author:  H.P. Mallory
• Type:  Paranormal/fantasy
• Genre:  Josie Wilkins Series, Bk 1 – Every little thing you do is magic
• Sub-genre:  Unrest and contentions in the magical underground
• My Grade: B- (3.7*)
  
• Rating:  PG-13
• Length and price:  Novel – about 80,000+ $11-$12
• Where Available:  Available at select bookstores, online, and used
• FTC Disclosure:  purchased from an online book seller

One minute you’re a sort of successful psychic in LA running a psychic shop with your best friend Christa, and than tall dark and handsome walks into your life and turns it upside down.  Rand Balfour is a warlock of considerable years and he, like other magic users, is looking for a witch that had been prophesied.   Much to the everlasting shock of Jolie Wilkins, that’s her.  Initially, all he asks for is a reading, something she’s usually really good at.  And he pays well too.  Then he comes back for a second one.  He’s convinced Jolie is the one he’s looking for and offers her a job.  He needs to know what happened to his client.  They go go to the house and to Jolie’s eternal shock, she doesn’t just raise a ghost, she brings the dead back to life.

Word spreads in the underground community of magic users.  A ragged and unkempt man approaches her to bring back the groups leader.  Hesitantly Jolie agrees and brings back the alpha of a werewolf pack, she earns their loyalty – of course, she didn’t know they were werewolves when she did it.  She also earns the unwanted attentions dangerous head of the LA magical community and the attentions of a very handsome vampire.

Suddenly, Jolie has to choose who to serve the LA ‘queen’, who is one scary babe, or go to Rand.   Jolie and Christa head to England and the safety of Rand Balfour and his offer to take on Jolie as his apprentice of sorts.

The relationship between Rand and Jolie never stands a chance because Rand won’t let it, despite their mutual attraction.  He retains a cold distance that she doesn’t understand.  I did find that part a bit annoying along with Rand’s casual control of Christa.  It was as if his moral compass no longer fully functioned.  In general terms, Christa is the typical self-centered LA Babe to Jolie’s ‘quiet mouse’ and she has trouble with Jolie suddenly becoming far more important.   The queen is evil and Rand is the emotionally cool and remote man – so the character’s are not exactly original, but the plot works pretty well.  Not as well as the Southern Witch series by Kimberly Frost, but it the various plot lines made sense and kept the readers interest even when the characters got annoying and childish.  The story arc was well paced, if predictable in it’s general outcome.  Some of the secondary characters were more original than the main players.

Was Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble worth the nearly $12 price tag?  Well, no.  It was a good read and I did buy the next in the series, Toil and Trouble (which I found had an annoying plot device and have yet to finish), but I’d say enjoy a price break and buy the far less expensive e-book.  You can download to Kindle software to your computer if you don’t have the device.  (I don’t.)  The e-book is $4.  If you want a print copy, try waiting to see if Bantam publishes Book 1 and 2 in mass market.

Three Short Reviews: Recent Releases – Thriller, Paranormal UF, Paranormal Cozy

It seems good thrillers are few and far between, so when a decent read does come along, it scores really well with the genre fans.   I’m probably as guilty of that as anyone, but I did enjoy this book.

• Title:  Buried Secrets
  
• Author:  Joseph Finder
• Type:  Suspense thriller
• Genre:  Nick Heller Book 2 – finding a kidnapped teen for billionaire family friend
• Sub-genre:  Fae, vamps, shifter and their coming out of the closet
• My Grade:  B+ to A- (4.0*)
  
• Rating:  PG-13 to NC-17 due to intensity
• Length and price:  Novel – about 100,000+ $14-$17
• Where Available:  Available at most bookstores
• FTC Disclosure:  bought from an online bookstore

Joseph Finder has a keeper with character Nick Heller.  Buried Secrets has the kind of action, tension, and surprising twists that a really good thriller needs.  It was a tough book to put down.  The pacing was steady and fast as the plot unfolds, with twist after twist.

Nick Heller has reason to be grateful to Marshall Markus, an old family fried who was one of the few who helped his mother when Nick’s father went to jail for financial crimes and their country club life disappeared.  When Markus calls, Nick immediately responds.  Alexa, the teenage daughter of the billionaire, has been kidnapped and buried alive.  (Heller really makes it realistically creepy and plays to one near universal fear of being buried alive, with a sadistic sociopath and a tough, badly frightened teen.)  Alexa had been kidnapped before, but this is different, this is beyond a simple kidnapping for ransom.  Markus is adamant in refusing FBI help – and it becomes obvious why, the FBI want his on securities fraud and the SAIC of the investigation will do ANYTHING to make his case, including risking a teenage girl’s life.

Nick quickly learns one thing, everyone is lying, including his client, and Boston’s movers and shakers will do anything to keep their own secrets buried.  From the drug dealing son of a South American diplomat, to Alexa’s step-mother, to her supposed ‘best friend’ – daughter of a lying US senators, to Russian mobsters, no one is willing to tell the truth.  But everyone threatens him.

In classic lone wolf with friends style, Nick Heller calls in favors and technical help, as hunts for the hiding place of Alexa’s grave.  Exciting, slightly improbable, but overall, a great suspense thriller read.  The one part that failed, was Alexa’s reaction after everything was over.  It was a real weak spot for me.  The other issue was a lack of character development with Nick Heller, but Nick was not the focus of the story, so it’s a minor complaint, and boilerplate secondary characters who were kind of predictable and trite.  I just wish Nick was more fleshed out and the other characters a bit fresher.

Is Buried Secrets worth $14-$18 at a discount?  I thought so, but books like these are not reread material, so hardcovers are not good investments.  You might want to borrow it from you library, or wait and buy the paperback.  Highly recommended for all suspense thriller fans.

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Three New Paranormals and a Paranormal Cozy

• Title: Grave Dance
  
• Author:  Kalayna Price
• Type:  Paranormal UF/alternate reality
• Genre:  A witch who is more than a witch and those who want her – or just want her dead
• Sub-genre:  Serial killers, witchcraft and Fay queens make for a heady mix
• My Grade: A(4.8*)
  
• Rating:  PG-13
• Length and price:  Novel – about 100,000+ $7.99
• Where Available:  Available at most bookstores
• FTC Disclosure:  purchased from online bookstore

Book 2 of the Alex Craft series was even better than Grave Witch, a real surprise.  All too often, the second book is a bit weak, but here the complex plot and world building just got better.

It’s been a month since the events in Grave Witch where Alex Craft discovered her father was fae and her a faykin (part Fae).  Shehas pretty much recovered from her adventures, and reconciled with the fact that Falin, the ‘man’ she took for a lover, is, in fact, the lover of the winter queen – and Queen’s Knight sworn to her service.  Learning she was more than half Fey, was a shock.  Finding out she can rip holes in the fabric between the planes is a lot scarier.  Death, or the soul collector she thinks of as Death, saves her life yet again, and this strange relationship that started years ago draws her to this man.

The problem with 15 minutes of fame is, it brings out the nuts – including a human who wants Alex to open a portal to the aether so his witches can feed off the energy to make charms – and make him even richer than he already is.   And then there’s the feet.  A lot of them.  And the Fey who lives in the swaps who wants them to be left alone because of the evil associated with them.   And who the hell keeps sending these constructs to attack her – constructs that have the souls of the dead?

Four Super Short Reviews: Mixed Genre

Having a broken wrist caused a real bad attitude, and FINALLY, I’ve made it to therapy.  Now the ulnar nerve is having fits.  SIGH!  Back in the splint off and on, and I still have the problems with blood flow.  One stupid little fall.  A non-event.  What a pain in the rump.   Still, the enforced idleness came when a bunch of books I’d been waiting for got released.

• Title: Dead on the Delta
  
• Author:  Stacey Jay
• Type:  Paranormal UF/alternate reality
• Genre:  noir style paranormal mystery
• Sub-genre:  killer faries, drug runners, and family secrets on the bayou
• My Grade: B- (3.8*)
  
• Rating:  PG-13
• Length and price:  Novel – about 90,000+ $7.99
• Where Available:  Available at most bookstores
• FTC Disclosure:  purchased from online bookstore

This was a semi-original story by a new author.  If certain backstory elements and world building had gelled just a bit better, this could have been an A.  The writing style and quality lacked some polish, but the atmosphere was there.  The story is centered around the murder of a small girl, thought to be one of a string of such murders, and it hits close to home for Annebelle.  Annabelle Lee, is seeking forgetfulness and oblivion at the bottom of the bottle way too often, but her unique talents – she’s one of the rare immunes who won’t die from mutant fairy bites – her affair with the too-good-to-be-true boyfriend, police detective Caine Cooper, and the appearance of ex-fiance Hitch as an FBI technical expert with his female partner/agent – who is his current fiance, was kind of too much coincidence for one book.

Annie keeps reminding herself she’s just a special kind of crime scene technician,med school dropout, and someone who deserves to be punished.  Her determined efforts at self-destruction for an incident in her past, are at odds with her unwanted sense of obligation to the murdered child.  the story unwinds rather like a choppy homemade movie, without smooth segues and criss-crossing various plot elements in a distracting style.  The ending brings an interesting twist, not so much to the crime, but to what happens to Annabelle and what she will become.

Was Dead on the Delta worth $7.99?  Yes – for any fan of the noir style.  The writing is no match for authors like Lawrence Sanders or Dennis Lehanne, but a decent read.  I just hope the authors style smooths out a bit in future.

Book Review: Hard Bitten by Chloe Neill

• Title: Hard Bitten
  
• Author:  Chloe Neill
• Type:  Paranormal UF/alternate reality
• Genre:  Chicagoland Vampires; Female vamp works to save her House from political disaster
• Sub-genre:  Death and intrigue in Chicago
• My Grade: A-  (4.5*)
  
• Rating:  PG-13
• Length and price:  Novel – about 90,000+ $9-12, list price $15.00
• Where Available:  Available at most bookstores
• FTC Disclosure:  purchased from online bookstore

Four Short Reviews: Assorted Genres – Paranormals, Mystery, Thrillers

Some new, or at least recent releases, in various genres.

• Title: Tangled Threads
  
• Author:  Jennifer Estep
• Type:  Paranormal UF/alternate reality
• Genre:  Female assassin helps others while she gets ready to avenge her family
• Sub-genre:  Magic is alive and well in Ashland
• My Grade: C+ to B-  (3.5*)
  
• Rating:  PG-13
• Length and price:  Novel – about 90,000+ $7.99
• Where Available:  Available at most bookstores
• FTC Disclosure:  purchased from online bookstore

Book Review: Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

In the Urban Fantasy genre, Sandman Slim was one of the most hyped UF/fantasy debuts of 2010.  Author reviews are worthless, but when William Gibson and Charlaine Harris agree and the professional reviews are kind, it was worth a try.  Unfortunately, like most hyped books, this one doesn’t live up to its press, though it was a quick, fun read.

• Title: Sandman Slim
  
• Author:  Richard Kadrey
• Type:  Paranormal UF
• Genre:  Revenge tale of a live human returned from Hell
• Sub-genre:  Magic and death is alive and well in LA
• My Grade: C  (3.0*)
  
• Rating:  NC-17
• Length and price:  Plus novel – about 100,000+ $7.99 with discounts available
• Where Available:  Available at most bookstores
• FTC Disclosure:  purchased from online bookstore