Well, winter is drawing to a close but not without some departing drama in extreme cold, some snow, wild thunderstorms (and power outages) and general irritation – which kind of beats tornados any day. On the upside, March isn’t far away and I wasn’t on the flight where a disgruntled flyer peed on a passenger – which is likely good for him and me, because he would have been castrated (by me) and I would be in jail now instead of reading and reviewing books. Now if laryngitis would just strike all presidential candidates on both sides, I might actually begin to recover from football withdrawal ………….. but it’s unlikely. Come on all you bio-geneticists, surely you can manage a simple ‘SHUT THE HELL UP POLITICIAN’ virus easily spread by rubber chicken dinners. We the people would be forever grateful. I can’t promise to shower you with great wealth, but I might share my dried figs with you and I won’t pee on you.
On the book front, it’s been kind of a mixed bag of mediocre across all genres. Disappointing, really, especially when some of the releases were long delayed. Really loooooooooong delayed. Anyway, where we go:
This book was delayed multiple times thanks to the author getting lost in the conference, fan-faire swirl and then health problems. Still, it was such a good series I hung in there and waited (OK, not really patiently) for her 4th book. I dearly wish I could say it was worth the wait. It wasn’t.
It starts off prosaically enough with Alex getting called to go to police HQ to raise a ‘ghost’ that was murdered. And everything goes sideways. This is not helped by the fact she can no longer trust the man – well Fae – she was falling for, Falin Andrews, a knight of the Winter Court who now is charged by his queen to live with her to convince her to become one of the court. Alex is a very rare plane weaver and all the courts want her – what she finds out is she actually NEEDS them.
At her birth, her father charmed her to protect her from the courts. He won’t even acknowledge to which court he owes his own allegiance. A but after the near disaster at the morgue, he sends for her to explain why her powers are diminishing. She needs a line to the Fey to feed her energy. Without, she’ll die. She gets an offer from the King of Shadows, but Falin drags het back to the Winter Court so she can heal and keep the queen from going mad.
Alex has little choice, she needs a source of power, but feels she needs more information before choosing a court, something she never thought she’d have to do. So for solving the mystery of the murder at the court, Alex demands a year of freedom with a line of energy to keep her alive.
The story seemed to progress at a snail’s pace and there was not real progress in character growth or plotline beyond what little happened right at the beginning. No big revelations. No shocks. No major plot points resolved. Just ……. OK. She gets a year reprieve. It only took 300+ pages.
Grave Visions gets a C (3*) rating. It felt like a filler book, not an essential piece of the over-arching plot. The story was a lethargic as Alex and the mad queen was over-played to an annoying level. It’s still on sale at Amazon for $6.47, but it is a buy for hardcore fans only. It’s a book that can wait till used copies or library copies are available.
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Yes – I snagged an ARC of Stiletto, the long awaited sequel to Daniel O’Malley’s brilliant book, The Rook. This is where the effusive praise should start, but won’t, because man, was this sophomore outing a tough slog.
At a hefty 500+ pages it had only 300 pages of story, The first 10%+ of the book was a detailed rehashing of the origins of the Grafters and their view of what happened on the Isle of Wight. It was dull – not kind of dull, mind-numbingly dull. Then, much to my everlasting disappointment, this becomes not the ongoing story of Myfanwy Thomas, but a story of the Checquy/Grafter merger. This explains why the book was changed from Myfanwy Thomas, Bk 2 to Checquy Files, Bk 2.
Finally, our two protagonists emerge, Pawn Felicity Clements and Odette Leliefeld, both 20-somethings one from the Checquy and other the many times great-granddaughter of Graaf Ernest, one of the founders of the Grafter’s.
O’Malley proceeds to tell several concurrent stories from multiple points of view. Odette and the fact the Grafters are hiding the fact they have a group of dissident young Grafters, called The Antagonists, after them to stop the merger, and Felicity who has been raised to be suspicious and distrusting to the point of irrationally hating the Grafters. In all of this, various side detours are taken on the history of other characters and Myfanwy puts in a quick appearance, as do some new, and fairly unknown members to the Court. The book, however, centers around Odette and Felicity. The plot is convoluted, which served O’Malley well in The Rook with essentially a single narrator – Myfanwy past and present. Here, the story loses much of its strength because of the flip-flopping and then dragging Ernst and Myfanwy back in and throwing in a rabid paranormal who is committing random acts of murder by growing pointed crystals that impale dozens of people at once.
Got all that? Oh yeah, The Antagonists – they are Odette’s best friends.
While the pacing went slow, fast, slow, fast, even, O’Malley seemed most comfortable and polished when writing about Myfanwy. His prose and clarity of thought was less certain and more inclined to be repetitive when trying to write Odette and Felicity. Of the two, Odette seemed to become the most complete character at the end. But the book was NOT in the same class as the far more refine, creative, original, polished, and fascinating story told in The Rook. While fans will praise and swoon, be warned, Stiletto NOT on the same level. I did, however, like the final chapter where O’Malley seemed right at home.
The flaws here are the kind of things you see in the second book by an epic historical fiction or fantasy author where they did not have the luxury of time, or maybe inclination, to polish a work to a fine gem or even develop a plot that moved seamlessly through the tale. It’s choppy and seems to take occasionally pointless detours. Stiletto gets a C+ to B- (3.7*) and suggested read for The Rook lovers. It does not have enough to recommend it for any price over $15, so if you can wait, do so, or order while it’s still sale priced.
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The stand-alone thriller by Eisler had good and bad points – but the bad outweighed the good for me. The God’s Eye View is about an NSA spy program that was not approved by Congress as it violated Constitutional rights, but because it can be created, it IS created. Now the Head of the NSA has weathered the whole Snowden fiasco, but has a new problem on his hands, so the General, with his next in command, a man he saved from a burning vehicle during one of our Mideast wars, warns him that the smart analysts who caught the current problem needs to be on the team, but could prove a threat to the potential uncovering of the secret program.
Evelyn Gallagher is uncomfortable around General Remer and his ruined face, but as Director General Anders aide, he ran the office. Eve’s new program found a link between a journalist and an operative in Turkey and now she will have a high profile place with some of the ‘inner circle’ at NSA to investigate things. The two guys in question both die – seemingly in accidents. Now the two killers sent after the journalist and ‘rogue’ NSA officer are both working for General Anders. The giant of a man, Manus, is deaf …… and by golly, wouldn’t you know, Eve’s son is deaf too! OK, can everyone see where the plot goes after Anders assigns him to watch Eve? Huh? Anyone? Yeah, me too.
On the plus side, the whole ‘secret spy system’ God’s Eye View is plausible and Eisler used many of the documents released by Snowden, whom he obviously admires, as the foundation for his concepts. On that level, the book succeeds. The characters and plot do not. But what really tore it for me was the closing scene where Remer, who has stepped into his old boss’s job, makes up the name of a new ‘less intrusive program’ and the committee approves it. Does anyone remember the closing scene in the first Jason Bourne movie where the CIA guy is testifying and says, “We’ve closed that program down, but we have new a new program, Blackbriar.” I swear it was a direct lift of that scene.
The God’s Eye View is scarily real one level and frustratingly banal on another. Eisler basically blew it on the characters and predictable plot, which is a shame given how well he did with all the technology aspects and their impact on just how far the government is overstepping Constitutional limits. I’d love to give the book a high rating for core plot, but how he played it out with his characters, stops that. The God’s Eye View gets a C+(3.5*) and could have been so much better had he just used a less predictable and rather shallow group of characters. Purchased from Amazon. If you MUST read it, but or borrow the ebook. It’s not a keeper.
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Lisa Shearin’s third outing of her UF series, SPI Files, is The Brimstone Deception. There’s a new drug in town and taking it lets ordinary humans see through the glamours that all the paranormal citizens cast to get along in life. Of course, seeing demons, pixies, dragons, and trolls is not the trip they planned on.
Makenna ‘Mac’ Fraser is trying to have a nice, semi-romantic (maybe) lunch with Rake Danescu – a rich goblin (They’re very handsome, but have oddly colored skin.) who brought the powerful talisman to NYC that set off all the events in Book 2, The Dragon Conspiracy. Unfortunately, her highly suspicious partner, Ian Byrne, decides to take his own date, Kylie O’Hara, a dryad. The two men …… males ……… glare and taunt right up until a human goes crazy and starts yelling about all the supernatural creatures in the restaurant. While Mac might be interested in going up in flames with Rake Danescu – maybe – a guy screaming about monsters and knocking over a Bananas Foster carts setting the place on fire was NOT what she had in mind.
In the following melee as sups run for the door right along with humans, Rake makes a gracious, but hasty rear exit. Kylie, Ian, and Mac stay and work with the cops, one of whom was Ian’s former partner and a sup himself. And a dead guy ….. well, sup suspect at a very posh apartment, Sar Gedeon, a drug dealing elf lord who got exiled, but apparently back – and very dead. At his super posh NYC address, they find goblins and the mistress of the not so dearly departed and a portal opened by a demon or black magic – the smell of brimstone.
Shearin handles her light, but interesting, plot with her usual deft humor combined with plenty of action for Mac and Ian and everyone else, including Rake. I like her writing and humor, but her books are short, easy reads with relatively straightforward mystery type plots with enough twists to be both interesting and fun. I give The Brimstone Conspiracy a B- (3.8*) and a suggested read to all Shearin fans and a suggested series to those how like their UF with a touch of humor. Purchased from an online bookstore.
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