On Reading More

Since my cataract surgery, I’ve been doing a lot more e-book reading and just reading in general.  The problem I’m finding with e-books, aside the egregious formatting issues, crap editing, awful proofreading, and total lack of spellcheck (Or authors really DON’T know the difference between imminent and eminent or the fact a point is moot, not mute!) is that authors tend to write long novellas or very short books, under 200 pages, that leave characters undeveloped, no time for world building, secondary characters that have great promise become a flash-in-and-out shallow non-entity, and I’m left feeling like that should have been really good, but it ended up little more than a dog’s dinner of a slightly fleshed out outline.  Shallow, empty, unable to engage me completely the whole thing is little better than a piece of cotton candy in print.

Reading more has also shown the weaknesses of many highly acclaimed and/or bestselling authors.  Take Janet Evonavich.  Her most recent bit of fluff, Look Alive Twenty-Five was so bad I ended up skimming it.  Trite, reusing sentences and partial paragraphs in every damn book, predictable plots, everything a series that should have retired gracefully 15 books ago becomes, added the final insult – not one thing was truly funny.  Her fans will consistently overlook all these flaws and rave about Steph, Morelli, Ranger, and Lula – never looking at the downward spiral of the quality of the plots and increasingly absurd ‘set pieces’ designed as humorous skits within the book, but unrelated to the story.  Her fans are rabid, but sales are declining with quality.  Evanovich has made her millions, it doesn’t matter.  The stories can be on life-support and her ardent fans will buy and rave about them.  I get free e-books or I don’t bother.  Look Alive Twenty-Five – which gets a D- (0.8*) from me – wasn’t even in the review listing. Why?  Her fans just don’t care.  As the Bard would say, “There’s the rub.”

There are some real quality authors doing e-books at novel length, but the short attention span of readers seems to push publishers and authors into a short format.  Publishers of print books rarely give new authors a chance to build a following.  The result is astounding mediocrity.  Or as I said to my doctor, “Short and predictable.”  There is no greater condemnation than that.

It also says a lot about readers.  They will settle for a steady diet of bland ‘fast food’ books rather than take the time to find something worth the effort to read and be willing to wait for a well-crafted novel that is fully visualized and researched with three-dimensional nuanced characters and creative world building.  98% of ebooks are the equivalent of a fast food drive-thru window items thrown together by people who know nothing about food, managed by people who care only about time (not taste), owned by a soulless company, and consumed by people indifferent to anything except a quick refueling of their stomach.  The meal is forgettable and tasteless but they can claim they ate something resembling food.

Why this rant?  Well, as I said, I’ve been reading more, sometimes 15 books in a series in 3 days – yeah they’re that short!  You quickly realize that every genre has been infected.  UF, paranormal, and cozy mysteries have a pandemic of lousy books.  Not far behind are books that ‘borrow’ a character or element from a bestselling author and spin empty stories around them.  One of the worst offenders is The Jack Reacher Cases by Dan Ames.  Ghastly is giving them too much credit.  I began reading Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books before anyone knew who Lee Child was or heard of Jack Reacher.  Jack Reacher, like Robert B. Parker’s Spencer, became an iconic character.  Why Lee Child allowed the use of his character as a plot point is beyond me.  The books are so badly written and plotted (There was a PLOT????) they can’t even be called average.  AVOID THIS SERIES!  Oh yeah, avoid Diane Capri’s The Hunt for Jack Reacher series too.  She still hasn’t found a decent plot or a coherent story.

Seeley James, an action thriller writer of average or slightly above skill, start the Sabel Security series.  I had issues from book one but gave the author time to develop the characters and the over-arching plot.  I tell you, the whole concept was so OTT I struggled from book 1, but Book 5, Death and Secrets had me once again trying to figure out how to throw an ebook against the wall in outraged frustration.  The heroine is the owner of Sabel Security, a business started by her adopted billionaire father and named for her.  Pia Sabel isn’t just a former world-class Olympic soccer champion, she’s natural at security and working out arcane plots.  Yes, she even learns her REAL momma is now the evil VP of the US!  So a soccer champion heiress turned security company president and field operator (with zero experience) not only outwits all these super-villains, she looks great doing it and teaches kids soccer when she can!  BARF!  The books ranged from D to C+ (2-3.2*) and only if you suspend all credibility.  If you can get past Element 42 (good luck with that) it doesn’t get worse till book 4 and 5 and that’s where I gave up.

Now you know I had some good reads too.  Here they are:

Kill for Me (Victor, Bk 8) by Tom Wood gets a solid B+ (4.2*) recommended read from me.  Victor the assassin remains steadfastly in character through the series, adhering only to his own ethics while hunting and being hunted.  A fascinating character, not likable but not repulsive either.  Tom Wood does a fine job keeping his plots tight and interesting.  A recommended series for anyone who enjoys the anti-hero genre.

Fortune Furlough by Jana DeLeon sees Ida Belle, Gertie, and Fortune off on that long talked about vacation in Florida on a fictitious island called Quiet Key – which has a geographical description that seems to move it around but sounds like Sanibel/Captiva mixed with Little Palm Island (wrong location, right rescription) and Longboat Key (same problem).  Other than that, the plot is pretty good and there are enough laughs that you can enjoy the mystery of who killed the conman.  It gets a B- (3.8*) as it’s still not quite up to the early books but is an easy, fun read.

In a Badger Way is Shelly Laurenston’s latest shifter humorous romance and bless that author, she does make me laugh.  We were introduced to the MacKenzie sisters in Hot and Badgered that featured the oldest half-sister Charlie.  This installment features Stevie, the neurotic musical and scientific genius.  Stevie is not one of my favorite characters, but the book is fun and funny and loveable Panda Shen Li who we met way back in Bite Me.  Stevie decides Shen is her boyfriend.  He simply has little say in the matter, even after seeing what she shifts into.  But pandas are among the most easy-going shifters so, in many ways, Shen is Stevie’s best choice and truth be told, he’s not exactly averse to the idea.  Good fun with the usual slam-bang ending.  It gets a solid B (4*) and recommended read from me.

One of the series I gang read is still in progress, the Ascending Mage series by Frank and Rae Lea Hurt.  Book 1, Changeling Justice starts the story of Ember Wright, the younger daughter of two high ranking mages, her father who works with numbers for the Counsel, and her mother, a Class 5 Healer.  As a child, she shows no talents at all.  Come he testing day Ember is ready to declare herself a lost cause, but the man doing the testing is the most respected Investigator alive, called by one and all, The Legend.  While all mage tracks have 6 levels, Investigators have only 3.  And that is what Emmy is, an investigator.  The story starts with her apprenticing with The Legend himself.  They are chasing a culprit in a cemetery when Ember says the name of the person whose gravestone she tripped over – and calls forth his ghost.  Wallace knows she’s far more than a simple investigator and is carefully guarding her secret.  When she reaches Senor status in just 10 years, he sends her to Minot to do the census of Dru – mages and changelings and things go sidewise from the start.  Ember becomes relentless in her pursuit for justice and with her mentor so far off she finds another one in the cemetery and the real plot begins unfolding through Changeling Hunter and Buried Truth.  So far the series is getting B- to B (3.8 to 4.0*) from me and book 4 is on pre-order.  It’s a definite cut above the typical UF fluff.

OK, that it for now and I’ll try and do more series reviews in a month or so and update any here I’m still reading.

Annual e-Book Edition

Well, I may have been lax on posting, but not reading.  I made some finds and also found some lemons.  Most have been average.  I am reading nearly 90% e-books.  In part, this is due to the near-complete annihilation of mass-market paperback a publishers booting authors out the door.  Some authors seem to waver between self-publishing and finding a new print publisher to relieve the burden of self-promotion.  None the less I’ve found some offbeat goodies in large part due to BookBub.

These will be mostly short reviews as I have a lot to get through and I’ll look at series in an overall fashion.  Before I start my rants and raves, allow me to wish you all a belated Happy New Year!

Let’s start with light cozy style humorous mysteries:

Julie Mulhern wrote two books featuring Poppy Fields, Field’s Guide to Abductions and Field’s Guide to Assassins.  Then she stopped writing them, something I find really annoying.  She responded to my comment on BoobBub saying the death of a friend some years ago caused her to stop writing the humorous series but she planned to pick it up again.  If she does, this is a worthwhile series.  If not, skip it and move on.  Characters are good and of the outer edge of plausible, but the plots are decent for the genre.  A good choice for a lighter read.  My grade is B (3.8*) with the conditional recommendation as given above.  NOTE:  The author has finally restarted this series and book 3 is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Next up is Camilla Monk’s Spotless series.  There are 4 books ranging from somewhat interesting while being annoying to WTF??????  Ms Monk was apparently aiming for a kind of Lexi Carmichael style geek girl accidental adventure series and bombed.  Spectacularly.  The 4th book is a MOAB of epic proportions.  Spotless, Beating Ruby, The Crystal Whisperer, and MOAB Butterfly in Amber represent a perfect example of characters that are shallow, badly drawn, and hard to like, plots that are choppy, without logic, and by book 3 just plain annoying and in book 4 it makes you wonder if there is a satisfying way of burning an e-book.  The synopsis is best summed up a ‘STUPID’.  Grades from C-(2.8*) at the start and descending to hell from there, though I am limited to giving Butterfly in Amber an F (0*).  It deserves less.  AVOID THIS SERIES.

Thankfully, my brain did not turn to mush nor my IQ drop to drool level and I was saved by Marianne Delacourt’s Tara Sharp series.  Sharp Shooter, Sharp Turn, Too Sharp, and Sharp Edge so far.  Set in Perth, Australia and featuring Tara Sharp who has been blessed – or cursed – with the ability to see auras, although not always getting her reading of the auras right – proved by her terrible taste in boyfriends and current jobless state.  The dialogue quick and sharp, Tara is real and witty, and the plots are entertaining with enough tension to make them worthwhile.  The secondary characters are well drawn and offbeat.  There are some noticeable editing errors as the series moves on.  A chronic problem e-books that drives me nuts.  Still, they are fun reads but be warned, they are also filled with Aussie slang and have the rhythm of Aussie speech, so if you hate dealing with that, you might not enjoy them as much.  New entries are erratic as the author is mainly a sci-fi writer under another name.  My grades are C+ (3.7*) to B (4*) and they are a recommended read for those who enjoy Jana DeLeon, J. B. Lynn, or Josie Brown.

Speaking of Jana DeLeon, she published two new Miss Fortune books in 2018!  Reel of Fortune and Swamp Spook.  Both are good and everyone seems back in character but some of the tension is gone from the series making a shade less satisfying than most early books and with less snark.  Still, but get a B- (3.8*) and remain recommended reads.

Also back in the saddle, Julie Moffett finally put out a new Lexi Carmichael this year.  It centers around Slash’s past and Vatican politics.  Not her best, but it has some excellent moments and Slash and Lexi remain solid characters even though I found the plot on the lame and sentimental side.  No Stone Unturned left lots of stones unturned, so it gets a C+ to B- rating (3.6*) but is still a recommended read.

Finally, there was a find worth reading K. F. Breen’s DDVN world books featuring bounty hunter Reagan Somerset and vampire elder Darius Durant, the worst investigative team ever.  Written in the first person from Regan’s view, she’s tough, feisty, snarky, and just my kind of female lead.  Darius has his hands full and oddly, for an old vamp, he’s enjoying it.  Born in Fire starts the plot, Raised in Fire takes it up a notch, and Fused in Fire finds Reagan finally getting a grip on her powers.  All are excellent, but book 3 is a bit darker and less humorous.  You have it all, weres, vamps, mages, magic, and demons – and a brief appearance by Lucifer.  The books get solid B to A- (4* to 4.4*) with the first two being my favorites.  The author will be continuing this world using Vlad, the vamp elder, as a lead later this year.

Breen has done several other series, but none I’ve enjoyed as much.  Her current best selling Demi-gods of San Francisco, the 3rd and final book due this month, are pretty good, but they are more romance than UF adventure and the best character is a too-old-for-her-years teen with a sharp mind and smart mouth, not the lead characters.  I give Sin & Chocolate and Sin & Magic get C+ to B- (3.6* to 3.8*) for paranormal romance.  Decent choices for readers of the genre.

I read book one in her Chosen series and was bored stiff, so don’t assume her character traits and style carry over.  I speed read the Chosen series and frankly, there are better things to read that aren’t to damnably predictable.

The Librarian by Phillip Wilson looked right up my alley as a woman turned vengeance seeking killer against crooked cops.  Preposterous is the kindest thing I can say about the plot and characters.  On the plus side, it was fairly short, so the sheer magnitude of stupidity didn’t do permanent brain damage.  My grade is D- (1.8*) with the strong suggestion you just pass this by.

Hell Bent by Gregg Hurwitz is the latest installment of his Orphan X series, though he did release a new book this month.  Book 1 was very good, book 2 was annoying, and Hell Bent took the plot down a whole new road and rescued the series.  Evan Smoak has to fulfill the dying request of his old teacher and save his most recent student.  After the angsty and annoying Nowhere Man, this was back in top high-speed form as Evan tries to rescue and less than trusting teen girl from the kill squad that’s wiping out all traces of the highly illegal government program.  Exciting and well paced and Joey is a surprising plus in the plot.  My grade is B- (3.9*) for action thriller/assassin readers.  (I read the HC from Amazon)

The first 3 books of the Thirteen Realms series by Aussie author Marina Finlayson, Changeling Exile, Changeling Magic, and Changeling Illusion are better than average UF/Pnr Rom.  The story centers around 3 young women each with a tie to the Fae Realms.  The books are fairly well done, though Changeling Illusion seems choppy and not smoothly told, plus too predictable.  As a group, you get C+ to B- (3.3* to 3.7*) and each of the 3 females friends appears they will a trilogy of their story.  Best character, Yriell, the High King’s sister who lives outside the Realm disguised as a cranky old healer.  Her I loved.

Marriage Vow Murder is Book 9 in the Merry Wrath series by Leslie Lantry.  This has been an erratic series and the books, though short, somehow manage to screw up timelines and facts from previous books and leaves things just dangling.  Wrath is finally getting her big day, but the groom is missing.  Of all people, Merry goes to her sharp as a tack 4th-grade teacher and puzzle fanatic to get help with the clues to find Rex and maybe the solution to a hidden treasure.  If you can suspend all credibility, it’s kind of OK.  Best I can muster is a C+ (3.5*) well below the Amazon ratings.  Langtry scrambles her facts and timelines in every series.  She desperately needs a continuity editor.

And I close with a fairly reliable author, Jenn Stark with her latest The Lost Queen.  The second of 3 stand alones that tie with her Immortals of Las Vegas as Sara Wilde takes over as Justice for the Council.  Niki is still with her and the Magician is as remote and enigmatic as ever, though he seems to go full masochist here.  The Lost Queen is a very powerful witch but the real story becomes about the witch Danae and a spirit Myanya who seeks to inhabit the most powerful witch alive.  I’ll give this a B- (3.7*) and it’s a must read for fans of Immortal Las Vegas.

 

 

 

Another Round of Erratic Reads

Swear to heavens, authors need a kick in their collective butts.  I hate when a book is so boring it could be a sleeping pill.  The other thing I hate is plots so predictable I can tell what will happen after 10-20 pages.  It’s like most authors have gone BLAH and taken the easy road.

John Grisham wrote two excellent books – The Client and The Pelican Brief.  He’s lived off his reputation since.  There are a lot of writers like that.  Series writers get stuck in a character rut so deep there’s no way out.  The list is endless.  Smart authors limit their series to 3-5 books.  After that, the characters often go stale.

I started this entry back in early March, but colds and allergies and the weather got to me, and I was in a BAD MOOD for weeks.  I’ve also been dealing with dry eye and discovering some drops cause bad reactions for me, and the carpal tunnel in my right wrist is still there, some days really bad.  The problem with my eyes made reading ebooks hard, so I read a few DTB.  We’ll start a few that are a waste of time and move on from there.

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Having problems with insomnia?  Need a sleeping pill?  Don’t turn to drugs, try reading Camino Island by John Grisham.  I won it in a book swap game in hardcover, so it was easy on my eyes.  Generally, I give a book 30-50 pages before giving up.  I gave Camino Island over 100 pages before literally tossing it across the room.  OMG.  Tedious, boring, yawn-inducing, and uninteresting.  I can’t even remember a character.  I’m pre-disposed to like books set in Florida, but even that couldn’t save this dull mess.

Camino Island is supposed to be a ‘caper’ book, fun and fast-paced.  I’ve always loved caper books since way back in the days Ross Thomas and Donald Westlake had a blast with this genre.  The key to all good caper books is characters, snappy dialogue, misdirection, and very fast pacing.  All of these elements were absent in Camino Island.  If you have to force yourself to read 100 pages, it is NOT a good caper novel, it’s junk.

No grade, just a DNF and a piece of advice to avoid it – unless you need to take a nap.  Ross Thomas is mostly out of print as are most of Westlake’s, but The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie is a good example of ‘caper’ style book as are the first 3 in the Kipp series by John Sanford (originally published under his real name, John Camp.)

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Phillipa Bornikova wrote 2 really good Linnet Ellery books.  I waited over 2 years for Publish and Perish.  She didn’t jump the shark, she a double gainer with a twist over the Statue of Liberty.  The long build up to saving Linny’s lover John from Fae was not a dramatic climatic event.  It was as exciting as mopping the floor and happened so fast you got whiplash.  Oh, thanks to the shard in his eye the evil queen won’t remove, John still has no emotions.  Basically, he’s walking emotionally dead person.  It kept right on jumping double fips and reverse twists as it lept from one thing to another until the ‘big reveal.’  There are no words to fully describe how ludicrous it was.  I couldn’t believe she got it past a sane editor without a complete re-write.

Her ‘big reveal’?  Black Masons.  No, I’m not making that up.  Apparently, the author felt the need to drag National Treasure plotlines in and create White Masons (good guys) and Black Masons (NOT good guys) and dear old dad – is guess what?  Very touching.

The entire book was little more than a string of scenes of loosely held together by frayed bits and pieces to a flat-out stupid ending.  Shame on the editor for letting this garbage go to print.  Reading it risks permanent brain damage.  Worse, I paid for the blasted thing from an online bookseller.

My rating is a rare F (0*).  This is a HUGE disappointment and total waste of time and money.

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The most recent entry in the Elemental Assassin series did what too many publishers have done, changed a series from mass market paperback to trade size.  I bought the ebook on sale.  Venom in the Veins is a solid entry but a bit shorter than her other books.

Gin Blanco, AKA Spider the best assassin in Ashland, it trying to find out about ‘the Circle’ that ordered her mother killed.  And as the leader on Ashland’s Underworld, something she doesn’t want but is kind of stuck with, she’s always alert to other assassins trying to move up in the world and take her place.  But first, she and her foster brother Finn have to have dinner with Finn’s boss, a dwarf, at the swankiest place in town.  At least she doesn’t have to cook – but she’s wearing black just in case Spider has to come out and play.

Dinner was great, but Finn’s boss is attacked and we’re off piecing past and present together as Mab Malone’s belongings get auctioned off and the daughter of a female vampire/cannibal Gin killed as a teen still under Fletcher’s tutelage comes for her.  Interesting twist at the end.

Venom in the Veins gets a B- (3.8) as it’s pacing and twists were predictable since Estep never changes her formula in her plots.  Recommended series.

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Book 3 in the Orphan X series finds the man now called Evan Smoak AKA Nowhere Man, looking for the last protege of the man who trained him and acted as his surrogate father, Jack Johns.  Hell Bent pits Evan against an old nemesis, another Orphan who can’t forgive Evan for being chosen first and being better, Van Scriver.

Like the first two books, the pacing is fast and furious as the race is on to the find the last Orphan – Evan to save them, Van to kill them and Evan so the whole program can be closed down before it’s it’s found out.  But 16-year-old Joey isn’t an ordinary Orphan, Joey is a girl.  Evan gets there first, but she’s not trusting and Sciver is hot on their heels.

The action is relentless and Joey is well trained, but not trusting.  The uneasy alliance is based mostly on Jack’s Rules and slow bond of trust that builds while running from the well equipped and financed Sciver.

Greg Hurwitz can be uneven in his books, but he nails it here.  The reader is pulled headlong into the story and the 400+ pages just flew by.  The ending had an amazing and unexpected turn.  I bought this online in hardcover.

Hell Bent gets a solid B to B+ (4.2*) for an action thriller.  Smoak and Joey are well-developed characters, Van Sciver less so, but enough to give him depth, the shady secret group remained shady and secret, except Evan knows at the end where it came from.  Book 4 will be a must-read.

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Wilde Fire, Book 10 in the Immortal Las Vegas series is the final book in the story arc about the Arcane Council, Sara Wilde, and the war to keep the old gods out of this world.  Jenn Stark has slowly built a complex world of magic based on the Tarot and centered around Sara Wilde who starts as a relic hunter with a touch of magic and evolves into a powerful magic user and one of the Major Arcana.

In book ten, the Veil is finally torn and the battle rages and Sara is the lynchpin.  Her ally is surprising, so is her biggest enemy.  The denouement was great and has led to a spin-off series about former demons who are the only ones that can hunt and demons that end up on the Earthside on the veil.  (I started the first but wasn’t thrilled.)  Dixie and other characters get involved and the war brings the Connected out of the shadows all over the world.

I give Wilde Fire B- (3.9*) and strongly recommend reading the series in order and the overarching plot evolves in each book and it’s the only way the plot makes sense,

 

Where does the time go?

I’ve had a busy couple of months and I’m amazed at how the days slip away when retirement should be a long, boring nothing. Sometimes I wonder how I managed when my days were 12 hours long.  I’m starting this on Veteran’s Day so thanks a vet everyday!

 

And now Thanksgiving is over and you hardy shoppers are out bargain hunting while I hide at home.  I leave the weekend to folks with strollers, screaming kids, and bored husbands.  My days of massive gift buying are gone and I’m entering the, “I need to get rid of this crap!” stage.

I’m also entering the carpal tunnel years and ‘dry eyes’ years.  Annoying combination when using a computer.  Not to mention reading – ebooks and print.  SIGH.  One perseveres against such things and goes right on reading – brace on wrist and drops for eyes!  Typing is a bit more problematic, hence the delay.

Oh, if you didn’t get the memo – I HATE WINTER!  It hasn’t been cold, but here it is 5 PM and IT’S FREAKING DARK OUT!  I keep telling myself, “It’s not that late!”  It still feels like nights are forever!  (Days after I wrote that we got snow and single digit nighttime temps and days in the 20’s.  I should shut-up about nice weather.  I scare it so badly, it runs away.)

Well, I’m on my third wrist brace.  Here’s hoping it helps.  So, some quick reviews of the books I’ve been reading.

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White Knights by Julie Moffett – first book in a young adult series that spins off of her Lexi Carmichael books.  The same general premise with girl nerd set in the high school where Lexi went undercover and includes some of the characters from No Test for the Wicket.  Not bad, Lexi and Slash show up.  Angel Sinclair is the younger sister of Gwen who was a character in No Living Soul.  Sort of a watered down Lexi and a decent read for 14 and up.  (C+ to B- 3.6*) E-book and expensive paperback.  Stay e-book.

Everlasting, Maine

This is part of the Amazon version of the old Thieves World concept.  Create a place and characters and let different authors write books set there, each a basic stand-alone where previous characters may show up for cameo roles.  Rather than fantasy, these are light paranormal cozies by a number of well-known names.  All are e-book or expensive paperback.  Not worth the print price.

Dead Man Talking is book 1 by Jana DeLeon about a haunted lighthouse and lost treasure that someone is hunting for – and her aunt got injured in the process of stopping the thief.  Light roman and quick read.  Easy to figure out.  C+ to B- 3.7*

Witchful Thinking by Kristan Painter who has turned her own Nocturn Falls into an Amazon ‘Land’ book using the same multi-author technique.  In Witchful Thinking, book 4 in the series and may or may not be the last, the lead is by far and away the best.  Charlotte Fenchurch has found a grimoire, not just any grimoire, but one that can be opened and read by just one witch and it chooses that witch at the Everlasting library.  Charlotte saved when the head librarian tosses it out as just an old book, but in Charlotte’s hand’s it’s not.

Walker Black is a  leopard shifter that works for the Fraternal Order of Light – it’s always guys, right?  He attracted to Charlotte, not just because he thinks she has the book, but because she’s his mate.  Charlotte doesn’t know it, but a lot of people want her and that book.  A good plot, solid pacing moved along both the romance and mystery, and some of the better characters.  A solid B (4.1*) from me.

Fooled Around and Spelled in Love is actually book 3 but who cares.  Author Michelle M Pillow is far better known for her erotic romance, but is moving into other genres as the ebook houses publishing Romantica (lady porn) keep closing down.  Here she keeps it PG and fairly good, but a bit OTT with Aunt Polly and a magic camera.  About an average cozy read, nothing special.  A baker who is a great photographer and a bespelled camera and former citizen of Everlasting turned writer who can’t wait to leave till he meets Anna.   C+ (3.4*) though Amazon gives it a higher rating.

I haven’t read the final book, but I’ll let you know.  Another converted Romantica writer, Mandy M Roth is the author.

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No Regrets, the latest Lexi Carmichael installment lacked a lot of things – and many are regrettable.  It was almost painfully obvious in its plot, not very much fun, flat ending with the bad guys – especially The Father, who never was a developed character – and a few stray moments of classic Lexi humor to semi-redeem this otherwise blah book.  It starts with Xavier and Basia’s wedding (big miss in a chance for fun, pelican notwithstanding) and immediately moves to an improbable case for Andy, the COO of ComQuest, the company Xavier and Elvis Zimmerman work for.  Suffice it to say, in retrieving ComQuest’s newest invention – a sort of Trekkie tricorder that diagnoses diseases – Lexi lands at the same resort where Basia and Xavier are sharing their super, secret honeymoon.  (Somehow Lexi wrestles a crocodile on the ferry from St Thomas to Tortola.  Only problem, there are no crocs on St Thomas OR Tortola.  One does wonder where it came from.)  After only one lesson Lexi also successfully uses Krav Maga.   Sigh.

In creating White Knights for young adults, Ms Moffett seems to have given short shrift to this book and slapped No Regrets together using bits and pieces of others stories and tried to loosely, and ineffectively, link them in some coherent fashion.  It didn’t work.  My grade is C- (2.7*).  Forgettable and missable, but I suppose there are worse ways to spend a few hours.  E-book only.  I read an ARC.  It will be released later this month.

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Virgil Flowers, AKA ‘The Damn Flowers’, has a Minnesota winter mystery on his hands.  Two if you count the creatively altered x-rated Ken and Barbie dolls that seem to be coming from the same town of Trippton.  Trying to get answers on the dolls is tougher than getting answers on the murder – a woman frozen in a block of ice – hence Deep Freeze.  Of course, getting the crap beaten out of him by 4 women and ending up with what looks like a squid on his face to keep his broken nose in place does not improve his mood.  There’s some BDSM lite here and as usual, Sanford carries the plot with fair humor and wit.  Not as dark as his last few and interesting as he usually has Virgil chasing two things at once, and this is no exception.  Clever ending.

Deep Freeze gets a B- (3.8*) for traditional mystery fans.  HC only at this point so get it from the library or buy cheap used.  Got the book through a game on Paperback Swap.

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The first book of a new series by a writer not known to me is a chancy thing.  Still, it was a book exchange game and this looked interesting.  I was right.  The Drifter by Nick Petrie didn’t have the ‘blow you away’ impact of The Killing Floor by Lee Child, or it’s complexity, still, it had a lot in common.

Peter Ash is an Iraq and Afgan war vet who developed an odd version of PTSD – being in enclosed spaces causes him to hear a kind of ‘white static’ and get louder and louder till he gets a violent urge to get out.  The plot revolves around one of the men under his command who died by a purported suicide.  Ash comes down off his mountaintop and goes to investigate.

There’s some action but too much focus on his ‘white noise’ issue – to the point where it was annoying and at times distracted from the plot at just the wrong time.  Reacher is a force of nature and a trained investigator.  Ash is curious by nature, but not the kind of expert that Reacher is, though the author imbues him with certain ‘intuitive’ gifts.

The writing was good, the plot got a bit silly there at the end, but it was a decent, if derivative, read.  I give The Drifter a C+ (3.6*) and something that fans of Reacher might enjoy or be annoyed by.  I’ll likely try book two, but if the ‘white noise’ distraction remains disruptive, I’m done.

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From a Jack Reacher wannabe to the real thing, The Midnight Line was unexpected and kind of timely and Lee Child’s best book in a while.  Like most Reacher books, it starts off with him wandering a small town while waiting for his next way out – preferably somewhere warm, a LOT warmer than Wisconsin.  But seeing a West Point graduation ring, one that HAD to be earned by a woman given its size, in the window of a pawn shop, sets the plot in motion.  This is Reacher – the real thing – and the pawn shop owner tells him how the stuff in his shop REALLY gets there.  That sends Reacher not south to where it warm – but across the Great Plains determined to return the ring – and smelling a crime behind the whole thing.

But the pawnbroker made a call, and some guys are waiting for ‘Bigfoot’ in the tiny town.  Everyone makes mistakes and Reachers gets his next clue and the little rat who set him up gets killed by his boss.  So Reacher gets colder as he heads to Wyoming where he finds the ring’s owner living in a tent with some other ex-soldiers who the VA have kicked from the system despite obvious physical and mental issues, including severe chronic pain and mental issues.  This is Reacher.  He helps them ………… well I’ll let you find out.

Better than many of his recent books.  I could have done without the sex bit.  The Midnight Line get a B- (3.7*) from me.  Not his best, but the best of his most recent books.

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Janet Evonavich keeps this tired series limping along in Hardcore Twenty-Four.  Steph is still wrecking cars, sleeping with 2 men and eating at mom’s.  There’s also a giant boa constrictor named Ethel on the loose, raccoons raiding a broken down trailer, a naked bail jumper (no Vaseline this time), and sexy Morelli and Ranger.  And there’s always Lula.  And just for laughs, the enigmatic Deisel shows up and starts sleeping in her place.

Now you’d think with all this going on it would be fun, if not blessed by a coherent plot.  Laughs were few and forced.  The plot hectic and often in WTF territory.  Whole scenes are reruns from earlier books.  The Zombies are new.  Not real – but when your plot centers around a grave robber and stolen brains and a missing insane scientist who usually works for some secret government agency, well, let’s just say the plot needed work.  A LOT of work.  Starting with throwing it out and doing some more believable.

If you think you’d like X Files Meets Lucy and Ethyl, give it a try.  But please DO NOT BUY THIS JUNK.  Get it from the library.  Mine was loaned in ebook from a friend.  Free is good.  Hardcore Twenty-Four gets a D+ (2.4*) and a suggestion it’s for the desperate only.

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Book 2 in the Posie Parker series, The Tomb of the Honeybee by L.B. Hathaway is set in 1920’s London, an historical mystery in the Golden Age of mystery, was a decent read – except I knew who did it.  Still, the characters were good and the plot interesting with unexpected trips to France and Egypt thrown in.

It all starts when a distraught and somewhat disheveled Lady Violet Boyton-Dale arrives at her office asking her to take a case pro bono to find her famous adventurer brother Alaric Boyton-Dale.  She pleads with the reluctant Posie to come out to the manor for the weekend.  Nothing about the weekend feels right to Posie and soon she off to the South of France where her erstwhile boyfriend and business partner is supposedly staying with dear old dad while he recuperates from serious health problems.  She’s shocked to find him married to his ex-girlfriend to whom he lied about the large reward Posie got on her first case.  Posie proves tough and resilient and realizes she was lucky to have lost a chronic liar in Len, but frankly, it was all kind of – “Is it me, or does this whole thing seem odd to you?”.

Her search for Alaric is well done and finding him ends up putting them both at risk – and is a bit OTT.  As I said, I knew who did it but getting the confession is fascinating.

The Tomb of the Honeybee is a good read despite some holes in the plot and I give it a C+ to B-  (3.6*) rating.  Read in e-book and that’s what I would suggest.  Print is overpriced.

 Happy Holidays!

 

I’m BACK!

Yes, you have all been awaiting my return.  Or maybe not.  But I’m back!  And we the good, the bad, and OMG what the hell were they thinking?

I’m happy to report I can now see again – with both eyes.  Yes, it’s true.  You CANNOT see through cataracts.  I must admit to a certain feeling of persecution as my very blue-eyed dad never wore sunglasses and died at 85 cataract free.  My OLDER brother has hazel green eyes and also never wore sunglasses – and he’s CATARACT FREE!  Both spent/spend a LOT of time outdoors.  I have worn sunglasses – expensive polarized glasses – for decades and I’m the one with cataracts.  Gene pool lotto sucks.

Still, thanks to modern surgery, getting cataracts removed is stupidly expensive, but easy.  It’s the inability to see, and double vision, before, the two different focal points between, and the waiting on the healing to get results and news reading glasses, which I still need.  Then I have to get my driving confidence back.  It’s so nice that street signs are no longer blurry even wearing my distance glasses.  The downside, I might have the beginning of age-related macular degeneration, so add one more vitamin to the mix.  If you’re over 60, it’s actually a good idea.  PreserVision AREDS2 by Bausch & Lomb are recommended and I got mine on Amazon.

Between surgeries (2 weeks apart) I really couldn’t read much and frankly reading before had become a challenge.  But I’ve been playing catchup and plowing through print and ebooks.  So hoping you all had excellent holidays and are ready to check out what new – or at least new to me – in books!

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Big type, easy reading, mindless, predictable plot, short book.  Perfect for getting back in the game with my brain still in neutral.  Turbo Twenty-Three was better than her last book – which I remain convinced was written by someone else.  That’s it, that all the good to mention.

Evanovich is stretching her reader’s credulity more and more with each book as they get more and more like an I Love Lucy episode – but less funny.  Let’s face it, it’s tough to be Lucy and Ethyl packing chocolates, but she gives it a shot in an ice cream factory.  Sorry, that’s just visual comedy she can’t quite pull off.  Vaguely amusing is about it.

The plot is just painfully obvious, the trip to Disney was pointless except to give Ranger and Steph a reason to climb into bed.  And Ranger was insulted in the last book and this one she insults Morelli.

The eternally young Steph Plum has grown old, tired, and retreads dialogue and plots till you’re just so damn glad you got it through a book swap site and didn’t pay a dime is it a relief.  Frankly, a dime is about the fair price.

Turbo Twenty-Three gets a D+ to C- (2.5*) for a waste of perfectly good paper.  If it takes more than 3 hours to read, try staying awake more.  I know it’s kind of a snoozefest, but it’s fairly painless and you won’t be wincing at the continuity errors like those in her last book.  Highly missable and get it from your library.  Buying this is a waste of money.

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The new young adult Steampunk series by Shanna Swendson is a new genre for the humorous fantasy romance author.  Rebel Mechanics is the series and the book title is All is Fair in Love and Revolution.  Verity Newton is the ‘daughter’ of a Yale University professor who knows she’s not his own.  She is very well educated at 17 and gets a second class ticket to New York City to find a job as a governess.  In this world, England has kept hold of the colonies and conveniences are supplied by their ruling class, magisters, magic users who are titled and act pretty must like all aristocracy.  After being turned down for every job she interviewed for, she finds she must go into the heart of the magister area.  Much to her surprise, she is offered the job, complete with room and board.  Her charges youngish uncle bears a striking resemblance to the gang that held up her train and stole the crown’s money.

These improbable coincidences plague the book’s setup, including the way she meets the Mechanics. The plot is largely simplistic, Mechanics vs. Magisters, as the audience is young adult, and the prose matches that.  The pacing plods along at times and seems to race to cover her bald spots.  Verity is no fool and figures out both sides of the game but is now caught in the web while being governess to the grandchildren of the Duke who rules the city.  Set in 1888, it combines some historic elements with her Steampunk NYC, but at limes seems lacking the verve that make the best book have a sense of life.  I was always outside the story, never really engaged.

All is Fair in Love and Revolution gets high marks on Amazon, where I bought it for under $7 (but buy the ebook or borrow from the library -this is not a keeper).  Despite that, the best I can do is C- (2.8*)  It’s short and fairly fast read for an adult and not a struggle for kids 11 and up.  Not as well imagined as some of the recent Dystopian books and certainly no Harry Potter.  An uninspired read.

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Poison is the New Black is the most recent entry in the entertaining humorous mystery series Eat, Prey, Die by Chelsea Field.  In this, Izzy and her neighbor, overactive senior Etta, get involved in proving the innocence of Mr Black, the legbreaker who threatened Izzy in book one about paying off her ex-husband’s debt to some mob loan shark.  Turns out, Mr Black is just a family man trying to make a living after losing his job, house, and life savings caring for a sick wife and exceeding bright daughter.  Etta, convinced Izzy is a ‘honey trap’ for some secret government agency – not a Shade, a paid food taster highly trained to detect poisons, is convinced they can prove the cops are wrong.

She also has the assignment from hell, being a Shade masquerading as a PA to one of the obnoxious ‘Housewives of Beverly Hills’ type who is competing with other backstabbing females for a position in the annual nude calendar.  Apparently, poisoning the competition is a well-established tradition, all the while maintaining that brittle civility that masks bone-deep loathing among the rich and useless.  Another Shade – one that hates Izzy, is also on the job for another club member.  She makes Izzy’s life miserable.

Worse, her honey, the taciturn Connor, has become even more remote and she about ready to throw in the towel on him – except she needs access to his security company to help Etta and Mr Black.

Altogether a fun, fast-moving story that includes the Christmas short Taste of Christmas.  The author balances the 3 plots lines rather well, with a few bobbles here and there, but mostly dead on.  A good entry if a solid and entertaining series, one I recommend to anyone who enjoys a light, humorous mystery with well-done characters.

Poison is the New Black gets a B- (3.8*) and is recommended to fans of the Miss Fortune series, Whiskey Bayou series, and the Davis Way series.  I purchased the ebook online.

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We go back to Reacher’s past in the Military for this installment in the series, which was an improvement over the usual trope he’s kind of exhausted.  Night School is set in 1996 and takes place mostly in Europe.  It opens with Reacher finding himself sent to ‘school’ with just 3 other men, each coming off an equally highly successful case, one from the FBI and from the CIA.  Someone is trying to sell something for $100 million dollars – who, where, and what are the questions.  Lee brings back Sgt Neagley, who has made several appearances in the Reacher books past and present.

Each man in the class is briefed by members of the National Security Council.  This premise is off to a weak start and frankly, the plot is lame in many ways.  A high-level Iranian asset is at risk and these guys putter around Hamburg, but Reacher becomes convinced a murder in Hamburg is tied to the deal and does his usual off-grid independent routine with Neagley’s help.

The story complex, yet oddly flat and lifeless.  The bad guy – yes military – is no genius yet seems to defeat all the systems.  Even he is two-dimensional.  Yes, there are the usual fight scenes, yes, Reacher gets laid – and not by Neagley.  Yes, the day is saved.  And the whole thing was lackluster with occasional reminders of how good Child can be when he really tries.

Night School gets C- (2.8*) from me.  It good enough for a plane read or an evening’s diversion so long as you don’t ask for too much.  For fans only and borrow it from your library.  My copy of Night School came through the PBS book swap site and will go back out the same way.

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One Fell Sweep is once again one of the most original books I read in months.  Ilona Andrews’  Innkeeper series, of which this is book 3, just gets better and better.  I count it one of my top 5 series.  Unlike some, there is no over-arcing plot that must be advanced.  Each book is a complete story, the characters and secondary plot lines might move on a bit, that’s about it.

Ilona Andrews (a husband and wife team) started this series online on the author website.  A practice they continue.  But the final published book gets rewritten and polished and occasionally changed a bit.  You want to know how much I liked it? I bought the ebook AND the print book.

Dina DeMille’s Inn has been quiet since the ‘peace’ conference she hosted, but the sense of someone brushing her boundary wakes her and she goes to her balcony to find Sean, an alpha strain werewolf and neighbor/sort of boyfriend, is out and about.  He feels uneasy.  And they both soon know why.  A boost bike screams down her road, turns and comes back.  She hits it with EMP that kills the bike.  She and Sean just manage to hide the bike and it’s alien rider before her neighbor gets there.  Her anger at the disturbance is real, but when they get inside and she starts on the Ku rider, it’s lost when he gives her a necklace and a note with coordinates – to a hellhole in the Holy Anocracy – Kahari.  There’s nothing she can do but call Lord Arland Krahr, Marshall of House Krahr for help.  And she gets it – and him and his ship to take them to ‘the anus of the universe’ to get her sister Maude and niece Helen.

As usual, the rescue is the beginning and Arland is taken with Maud and decides to stay at the inn for a much needed ‘retreat’.

The story that unfolds is rich, complex and has multiple plot lines involving a race near the brink of extinction, the Hiru, seeking her help and in return offering her the chance to ask the Archivarius one question about her parents – who disappeared along with their Inn.  But they bring with them another race that declared a holy war on them for no know reason generations ago.  It’s the Hiru’s last chance at survival and the Draziri’s chance at reaching paradise.  Between them stands Dina, her Inn, Sean, Maud and daughter Helen, Arland, the ever-cunning Caldenia, Orro the drama king chef, and Wing the small Ku on a hero’s quest.

With a great story, humor, grief, fighting, adventure, and a touch of romance, this quirky group is as real as any characters you’ll meet.  One Fell Sweep earns an A (4.8*) rating and the whole series is highly recommended to lovers of original, well-plotted and written urban fantasy.

A Last Post and Then – A Long Break

I suspect you’ve noticed I’ve been posting less these last few months, in part due to repetitive computer issues and in part due to issues with my eyes.  Like most folks my age with light eyes I’ve had cataracts for years.  These last few months saw a marked changed in my vision and it is difficult for me to work on the computer for any length of time.

Yes, I am getting surgery on both eyes, but I have to wait for openings which put’s it out later than I had hoped.  Still, it will be good to get it done.  Hopefully, it will be drama free and mark the end of a very expensive year of car repairs, extensive dental work, multiple trips to the computer place (where I was mistaken for an employee), and ending with eye surgery.  Could have been better, could have been worse.

I’ve been on a spy/assassin/action thriller binge with multiple authors in various formats.  I belong to Goodreads and I occasionally post (in fits in starts) in two groups, The Orion Team, a group for fans of action thriller/spy/espionage type books and the VERY large Mystery, Crime, Thriller group.  I am almost never around the fantasy and paranormal groups I belong to.  The latest Mitch Rapp book, Order to Kill by Kyle Mills who took over for Vince Flynn and did a really spectacular job of The Survivor, the previous book in the series is reviewed below.  By comparison, I found Order to Kill …… well, average or slightly above.  My comment brought out Ryan – self-styled ‘The Rappologist” – a Mitch Rapp superfan who runs a blog dedicated to Mitch Rapp who took exception to my views.  So I did something I rarely do, I sent an email to the author, Kyle Mills.

Now I email my many political representatives and office holders in DC and tell them off or agree with them (can’t remember the last time that happened) and sent the email expecting ‘Thanks for writing’, canned reply of a similar nature.  But lo and behold, within a few hours Kyle Mills replied himself.  And not some rote response, but a thoughtful look at what books of his I liked and how I loved The Survivor, but not Order to Kill.  A part of his response was:

“My impression of the Rapp books is that he is a bit of a superhero.  Realism is less important than the fact that he be the master of his universe.  Part of that is shown through his actions and part is through the deference others show him.  Further, because The Survivor leaned toward the cerebral (in the context of the series) I wanted to do more of a pure action thriller this time out.”

I thought about his reply awhile and about what books I liked best and those that ended up annoying me and came to the conclusion I do prefer the cerebral thriller.  There’s plenty of action, but the characters are more nuanced, flawed, and human, so more relatable.  See, even a thriller teaches us something about ourselves.  And kudos to Mr Mills.

On to the reviews!

PS – Belle Chasse by Suzanne Johnson, the next in the Sentinels of New Orleans series is due out next week.  If I have a moment, I’ll post a short review before surgery.  Happy Holidays!

NOTE: All books purchased by me unless otherwise noted.

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Order to Kill has Rapp back in Pakistan works with the team of ex-Seals to locate the now mobile nuclear missiles the Pakistani Army is playing dangerous games with.  Then he is pulled away when the wife and son of the Louis Gould, the man who tried to kill him, are in jeopardy.  Apparently, the safe home in South Africa is breached by ISIS rebels led by a low-level Russian thug.  Rapp saves the day (of course) but feels this urgent need to get back to Pakistan.  He sends the mother and son to his house the one he’s he’s finally finishing so many years after the death of his first wife.  The best line in the book is the interior decorator who is increasingly frustrated by his non-responses to texts about things like countertops and threatens him with pink Formica if he doesn’t reply.

Then we go off the rails.  Mills’ Putin clone orders his best assassin to kill Rapp.  And the ‘Rapp is Superhero’ song begins.  It’s annoying beyond belief.  Everything in Pakistan will fall apart if Rapp is there and without him their operations are crippled?  Seriously?  He’s the ONE man who can see this and wreck the ‘big plan?  Maybe he should check with the Johnny Carson estate to see if his Carnac hat is available for sale.  All Rapp was missing was a clingy body suit and big red ‘S’ on his chest.  I just took what came next as shallow, predictable, and kind of tedious in that like a romance novel, the ending was never in doubt, just how he got there.  You couldn’t even hate the competent Russian assassin, who was just doing a job.  We can hate ISIS, but big deal.

What’s missing?  Well, there’s plenty of action and the pacing is excellent.  Mills knows his way around writing a thriller, but in trying to imitate Flynn’s later works where Rapp is less human and more a cartoonish, shallow, always right, he lost the nuance that he brought to The Survivor, what I thought was one of the best books in the series for some time.  That he deliberately changed the style to better match Flynn is precisely why I found myself annoyed with it.  I’d grown tired of Flynn turning Rapp into an almost inhuman superhero.  I did like Grisha Azarov, the Russian assassin and he has some potential for future books as he manages to get away from both Rapp and Russia.

If Mills sticks with this ‘superhero’ approach, I’ll likely quit buying after the next book.  It’s like a good, but unsurprising action movie rather than an intellectual challenge with action an integral part.  Plus Rapp is getting too old to be fully credible in plots that are all about physical challenges without the redeeming factors of human error or character flaws.  To his credit, he did leave Rapp with the widow and child now living in his house and not knowing how to handle things.

Order to Kill gets a C+ (3.4*) rating for me and will be loved by dedicated Rapp fans – 70% of whom gave it 5* on Amazon.  I found it tedious and annoying and actually a step back from the far better book, The Survivor.  There are far too many of the ‘James Bond’ superspy genre out there.  Shallow and to me, ultimately unsatisfying.  Read it if you are a Flynn fan.  I’m sure you’ll at least like it as it is was well written and paced and you like the ‘avenging crusader’ style of thriller.  If you’re NOT a huge fan, borrow it from the library, buy it used, cheap in about 6 months (or less as remainders are already down to $10 including shipping on Amazon) or hit the FOL sale in about 2 months when they start removing extras from their shelves.

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Scot Harvath, like Mich Rapp, is getting a bit long in tooth (this is book 16 to Rapp’s 15th – but Flynn’s death caused a break in time before a new author was selected) to be the only guy to do the job again, and again, and again.  Like Kyle Mills and Vince Flynn, Thor brings a sense of realism to his settings and action, but Foreign Agent lacked the originality of his earlier books and like Rapp, Harvath has become a bit too much – though Thor is giving him more humanity and a strong sense of his mortality.  The series is suffering from character fatigue.

Harvath, like Flynn, chose to go the route where action takes priority over over character and complexity of human nature.  The plot becomes the story and characters are stoically going through the motions of playing out scenes.  I give him credit for slowly developing the self-realization of his and the fact this cannot last.  Still, it’s almost cut a paste in parts from prior work.  Not a patch on Black List, which was excellent, one of his best.  This can be a trap when the protagonist must start confronting in changes age brings and the equally harsh realization that they want a life beyond the endless action, beyond being responsible for the whole world.

And it is that humanity, the flawed person, that makes characters go from good to completely memorable.  And it’s that element of the plot that raises a book from decent read to amazing.  Now you can do that with some other elements like he did with Black List, but that made the PLOT great, not the characters.  Here, the plot cannot push the book from average to amazing.  It’s a decent plot – and like Kyle Mills, he mixes Russians and ISIS are the antagonists against whom Harvath must match wits and killing skills.  But here the Rissian involved with ISIS is not an apolitical professional assassin like Mills’ Grisha Azarov, but a nutcase who hate Americans.

Again, no question Thor knows the area, the techniques, technology, and keeps things moving, but he’s at the ‘fish or cut bait’ point with Harvath.  Made a few books more, but his character is too old and fire that drove him is changing.

Foreign Agent gets a C+ to B- (3.5*) and will be a huge hit with action thriller fans.  It shows less prescience and tension than Black List, the book I now judge his others by.  Like all books in the action Thriller genre, the price on remainders drops like a stone pretty fast and you can get a HC new book delivered from an Amazon reseller cheaper than the paperback.  Or go buy it at the FOL sale or borrow it from the library.  It wasn’t worth the HC price, but I share this series, like the Rapp series with my brother, so off to him it goes.  Print only.  He and amy SIL do NOT do ebooks.

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Victor the assassin is back with another excellent installment.  Unlike characters like Rapp and Scot Harvath, Victor is a true anti-hero.  An assassin for hire with a certain code, the first priority being his own survival.  He trusts no one and leads an existence devoid of human ties.  But he keeps his promises.

A Time to Die finds Victor on a train to fulfill a contract for MI6 as part of deal they made.  But he’s not alone.  There are other assassins out to get him.  Someone has put a price on his head.  But Victor now has his focus divided between Rados, the worst of the many Balkan war criminals and mass murderers, now a crime boss, and those who are hunting for him.

Patience and attention to detail are what have kept Victor alive when most other assassins would have sought retirement and refuge.  But it also means someone sold him out and it can only be one person – the middleman who acts as the go-between Victor and is clients.  No time for that now, now he must find a way to dig deep enough into the criminal underground to find Rados who has evaded all who have sought to bring him to trial for war crimes.

It is a wonderfully twisted knot of a killer seeking to kill a killer while another killer is trying to kill him and the target that Victor ends up close nearly gets to live …….. but he seals his fate by causing Victor to break a promise.

Assassin novels are very different from ones where the protagonist is a hero fighting for a cause or belief and someone who has made his life about the art of killing and going unnoticed.  Victor is gray, he has limits, a personal code, but is morally flexible on some things.  He does not kill unnecessarily nor is he any kind of patriot.  Just a killer.  Complex and fascinating in his own way.

A Time to Die poses some interesting perspectives on the nature of true evil.  One of Tom Wood’s best and most mature from a plot and character perspective, with plenty of action and twists.  It gets a solid B (4*) and a highly recommended read for fans of early John Rain books by Barry Eisler, Solo by Jack Higgins, or Shibumi by Trevanian.  I’m not sure why this series is not more popular.  It’s really well done a Victor makes a wonderful anti-hero.

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I bought the ebook, Tokyo Black by Andrew Warren, the first in the Thomas Caine series, from Amazon through a Book Bub sale and figured I’d give it a try.  Tokyo Black is about an ex-CIA covert operative who got set up and is getting set up again by the same man.  Using an alias, he’s lived a comfortable and quiet life in Thailand’s resort area doing minor smuggling of designer knockoffs.  His partner sets him up with a narcotics rap and he lands in prison.  His was out is an ex-lover who needs him to some work in Japan, part of his old territory before things went sideways in the Mideast.

This setup moves quickly into the story where Caine is in Japan where he uses a favor owed him by a Yakuza boss to try and find out what’s going on.  Unlike most spy novels, this thriller is more tied to organized crime than national secrets or terrorist groups.  Sort of The Godfather meets John Rain – and I hope that didn’t give away the ending, which was well done.

The story is a really good, fast-paced read but not nuanced as I like my thrillers, just a personal preference in style.  Caine is a really good character and it will be interesting to see where this goes as he ends up agreeing to work freelance for the CIA.

Tokyo Black gets a solid B (4*) from me.  For lovers of the John Rain books, Gray Man series, and the Keller books by Lawrence Block.

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From well-crafted thrillers to mystery fluff with as much substance as meringue.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently wrong with fluff when it’s well done, which this is not.  In the tradition of Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, and James Patterson, we add Janet Evanovich, aging doyen (75 years old) of the increasingly awful Steph Plum books (once favorites of mine, 14 books ago), cooking up ways to ‘expand the brand’.  God, the money machine runs on her name.  The books are mostly written by her co-authors, but it is HER name that sells them.

Curious Minds is mildly original, very choppy, meant to have this brilliant and eccentric lead character (a copy of the TV series version of Elementary, except Emerson Knight has none of the flaws and is a LOT richer) and the ever reluctant female in the late 20’s trying to break into the financial world who is assigned to keep him as a customer of the financial house.  Riley Moon is the reluctant sidekick in his plans.

This is supposed to be funny, and apparently, some people found it so.  But a decade’s old scheme to replace the gold in the US Federal Reserve in NYC with gold plated tungsten while moving the actual gold elsewhere is not only improbable, it makes no sense how Knight works it out.

Curious Minds has a few really amusing throw-away lines, but it was so choppy and jittery, it got annoying.  Though it got 3* from me on GoodReads, it’s really a D+ to C- (2.6*) effort.  I know the style was deliberate, but that did not make it less annoying.  Riley is too young for her years and lacks the maturity to make this pairing work, so she comes off a dimwit with multiple degrees from Harvard, an unlikely combination.  I found it frustrating as the concept was good, it was just not well done.  For Evanovich fans, none of this will matter.  For anyone else, give it a miss or get it free or really cheap somewhere.

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Oh dear God, why do I do this to myself?  I hate chick lit and buy the ultimate chick lit ebook because of the reviews.  On the upside, I got it super cheap, on the downside, about half way through I gave up.  It was that or throw up.

OK, a psychologist learns her building is being demolished and the two weird people she shared the practice with both knew and had new jobs.  She’s left holding the bag with even her file lost.  (The improbability of all this boggles the mind.)  So she starts a column called The Breakup Doctor with the help of the friend she was counseling when the demolition started.

She starts getting clients and missing the fact that she also missing all the signals her own romance is about to hit the rocks.  All that was missing was a flashing neon sign.

At a quarter of the way through, I’d had enough.  It’s mildly amusing, annoying, and beyond belief – with amusing being only 20%, 50% annoying and 30% not remotely believable.  The Breakup Doctor gets a DNF since I couldn’t make myself finish it.  The writing was solid but the characters everything I loathe in chick lit.  Unless this is your thing, (please, don’t tell me, I’ll just cringe) give it a miss.  If it is your thing, it gets 4.5* on Amazon, but they tend to overrate these things.

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OK folks, it came election day and I read it all that day.  I did vote first.

Belle Chasse picks up soon after DJ and Jake make good their escape from the trial Zarkovi  – with the help of Christof Winter Prince, Jean Lafitte, René, and Adrien – getting Eugenie out at the same time.  The are now in Old Barataria at Jean’s home.  Alex stayed back to get the inside scoop on the Council.

The pace is quick as Faerie descends into civil war with the queen on her deathbed.  Eugenie’s sister is killed by vampires – but who did it?  Rand, the elf father of Eugenie’s son, the or the wizards?  Then a group of vampires attack Lafitte’s home in Old Barataria and end up paying the price as the gang arrives back before they can kill any but the undead.  Then a strange woman arrives who turns out to be her cousin Audrey, Lennox’s daughter.  They a young ally to get holy water and take messages.

Then the war the war in Faerie goes bad as Florian kills their aunt and claims Christof is to blame seeking help from the council, help denied by Zarkovi.  With the holy water and her staff, they get to eavesdrop on the council meetings.

The ending is fast and furious as Zarkovi grows more desperate to prove himself.  Old loyalties die hard, but we also lose one of the characters I really liked, so it kind of sad.

Suzanne Johnson did a really good job in keeping this series fresh and interesting and action packed.  Belle Chasse ends on a very surprising note.  Only downside, the book was pricey for a trade sized hardcover just barely over 300 pages.  I give Belle Chasse an A- (4.8*) but a big negative on cost.  Borrow it from the library or wait for a few months and get a used one.  Even the ebook is overpriced.

Binge Reading – again

Yes, it is a bad habit.  I know that.  Maybe as bad as my addiction to dark chocolate – though I see that as therapy that keeps me from killing annoying authors.

The computer caught that damn keylogger again and 4 days later I finally am back up and running.  So there are a lot of books to get through as I try to once again forget that day 15 years ago when our lives changed forever.

 Lest we forget

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Let’s start with a new author that impressed me – Chelsea Field  – with her first two books.

Here’s the setup in Eat Pray Die – Isobel (Izzy) Avery is an Aussie hiding from a loan shark her scumbag ex-husband owes money and expects her to pay up.  So she takes a dangerous job.  One person in hundreds of thousands can taste poison and poison has become the weapon of choice for assassins.  So the rich hire tasters – like kings did in the Middle Ages where the condemned often became the King’s taster.  The difference is the odds of survival for these rare people are much higher thanks to their weird genetic anomaly, the same one that lets them taste and identify poisons.  Izzy just finished training and has her first case – or so she thinks, but he’s really her final test, until a client dies and he has to reveal himself as part of the investigative branch   So as he recovers from the poison he deliberately introduced into her food at breakfast, Izzy finds herself caught up in an investigation and trying to avoid the legbreaker, Mr Black, sent the by the Aussie loan shark and dealing with her easy going male apartment mate and the horny older woman across the hall.  Her ‘client’ turned trainer and Taster investigator, too handsome for his own good, Connor, all get introduced while she tags along on the poison investigation of one of the Society’s client’s.

Izzy turns out to have a knack for trouble and her attraction to Connor is sort of like cuddling up to a glacier.  But she also i good at unraveling puzzles, like murders – in her own stumbling fashion.  AT over 300 pages, it stayed a fast paced, amusing read with likable and believable characters.

Book 2 – Hunger Pains – has Izzy on her first real assignment as a taster for a blogger about to blow open a huge tech story – making him a target and keeping him away from heroin – the addiction he gave up 18 months ago, are as much a part of her job as tasting his food for poison and just laying around getting bored – and a tiny big plump.  He was as also agoraphobic and addicted to spicy cheese doodle from Mexico Izzy often went to buy at a local bodega.  Then he sends her home to sleep and he tests his new freedom and walks to the bodega himself – and she finds him the next day, dead from an overdose.  Not her fault, yet she’s treated like a suspect because she didn’t stop it.  But Izzy is convinced nothing is what it seems and she once again finds herself working with Connor.

The mystery here is more complex with more pieces on the board than in Eat Pray Die and a bit better done.  both are done with a light touch, but absent the OTT screwball situations and real mysteries driving the plot with the character stories wrapping around it.

Eat Prey Die gets a solid B (4*) and Hunger Pains gets a B+ (4.2*).  Highly suggested reads for fans of light, but not cozy, humorous mysteries.  Good characters and Izzy is fun.

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The Witch PI books by Adele Abbott, an English author using English setting range from very good to a jumbled, annoying mess.

Witch is When the Penny Dropped was the setup for Jill Gooder, adopted as an infant, she knew her mom was alive.  With her adopted dad, a PI, as her mentor, she learned the business and looked for her birth mother only to be told to never contact her again.  Her adopted parents now dead, she’s running a shoestring PI agency in her dad’s old office with his knitting crazed secretary – who works for free just to get out of the house – and her older sister, Kathy, (a bit bossy) and mellow BIL plus niece and nephew round out the core cast.

Jill gets a message her dying mother needs to see her, but after two rejections, she’s unwilling to go till sis insists it’s the right thing to do and will bring her closure.  At the hospital, her mother wakes just long enough to yell, “You’re a witch” and dies.  Her aunt tries to get her to come to the funeral, but she arrives late and refuses all overtures from family and leaves.  Aunt Lucy comes to town and meets Jill for tea – and it turns out, Jill is a witch, one her mother hid among humans for years to protect her, but now she must fast-track her learning because someone is out to get her.

It all seems like such foolishness till she tries a spell from the book and finds she and her cat can talk.

Not the best in the series, a bit confusing in that it felt like a few key elements were left out, but over all, a C+ (3.3*) effort.

Witch is When life Got Complicated picks up with Jill training with Grandma – not a warm and fuzzy one either and cousins Amber and Pearl, Lucy’s grown twin daughters, are annoying distractions. and spends way too much time with Amber and Pearl and frankly, the signs of the plots holes big enough to drive a truck through appear.  We get and evil witch, and icky guy friend, and cousins more irritating than my own – and trust me, that takes a LOT.

With each book, you get a small mystery Nancy Drew could solve between English Lit and Trig classes.  The humor gets strained and so does the oddly rapid pace of Jill’s powers.  About book 8 I got the, “Kill me now and let this be ober with!” speed read mood.  Subsequent books did not encourage me to slow down.  It wraps with a none to shocking reveal about who is the ‘Big Bad’ and ends with the evil witch assuring her she has yet to meet her real enemy, The Phoenix.

That is it, the whole 12 books that get increasing annoying with talking cats doing semaphore and naked ghosts and such.  What had a decent start became a choppy mess of piecemeal life that frankly, you just stop caring about it all.  Mrs V, the ever knitting secretary is sane.  The rest are suspect.

The books ranged from D+ (2.4*) to B- (3.6*)  All are short – and trust me, that’s a good thing.  Price is too high for what you get.  If you want to read them, borrow them from a friend.  DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.

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Unraveled is the 15th outing for Gin Blanco, the Elemental Assassin and unwilling nominal head of Ashland’s underworld, she, her sister police detective sister Bria, adopted brother Finn (Bria’s boyfriend), and her lover, Owen Grayson.  Finn’s conniving mother left him one thing, the deed to a poor man’s western theme park in Georgia, so off they go, much to Gin’s disgust.

But once there, it gets pretty obvious things aren’t what they seem and it’s a good thing Gin came prepared – she packed all her knives.  The Christmas spirit is lacking when people start trying ti kill Gin.  Now, after being the most feared assassin in Ashland for years and now nominal head of the underworld – while she rather just run the diner, Finn is hellbent on this and she won’t disappoint him after what happened with his mom.  And more importantly, Gim hopes to learn a bit more about her mother’s involvement with The Circle, the real power in Ashland.  She’s not disappointed as a lot comes out here, and not all of it is good.

Estep keeps this series fresh and brings what should be a tired group of people into new and interesting stories.  I like The Circle concept and we’ll see how she handles it.  The book ends with the usual showdown, with Gim once again almost dying.  (She does that a lot)  Overall it was a good read and good addition to one of the more reliable series out there, and less uneven than most – though the story lines need a new ending, not yet another fight from which Gin barely escapes alive.

I give Unraveled a solid B- to B (3.8*) losing just a little ground for her constant use of the fimal ‘big fight’ scene in every-damn-book.

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The Sight is book 2 in the Devil’s Isle post-apocalyptic world where supernatural being broke through The Veil (bk 1) and the main battleground was New Orleans.  Anyone showing any sign of magical power is banished to live in ‘Devil’s Isle’ a community in partial ruins.  Full humans fear magic, all magic, and it can, if the human isn’t trained, turn them into monsters.  Yet it is magic that protects them from what’s on the other side, many of whom are not interested in anything but war.  Not all sups are evil any more than all humans are good and Claire Connelley is just slowly learning the ropes.  She’s a ‘sensitive’ some with signs of magic.  Enough magic that a fallen angel is helping train her so it won’t drive her mad.

After the war, the city, or what’s left of it, is closely monitored by magic detectors that go off with the slightest evidence of magic use or the presence of a sup.  Claire teams up with Liam Quinn whose mother still lives in what is now Devil’s Isle as that where the family home is.  He knows about Clair’s ‘gift’ because she closed the veil through which the Fae and other magical creatures tried to again attack.  Try as she does to just run her old family merchantile store, she keeps getting drawn into problems, this time with an ‘evangelical’ type that wants all sensitives and sups killed to cleanse the world.  As an apprentice bounty hunter with Liam, they discover just a little too much and become targets of the believers.

The Devil’s Isle books are more older young adult than true adult UF and fast easy, rather predictable reads, especially if you’ve read her Chicagoland Vampire series – which is far more complex and original.  The Sight has a predictable end and frankly, while good, it never passed into ‘very god’ or ‘can’t put down’ territory.  It gets a C+ (3.4*) rating from me with a strong suggestion you borrow the book and if you MUST buy it, get the print.  It’s cheaper than the ebook.  (go figure)  This is NOT a series that you should go out of your way to read.

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Well, once again, Leslie Langtry is hitting on most cylinders – BUT – this writer needs a damn good continuity editor.  Movie Night Murder picks up a few months after Riley is declared a ‘rogue agent’ for murdering several Yakuza to protect Merry in the choppy and messy Marshmallow S’more Murder  – where he declares his love for Merry and leaves her confused and torn between Rex and Riley.  Three months later at the baptism of Finn, Merry and Riley’s goddaughter to best friend and co-scout troop leader Kelly’s daughter.  And has to get to know the ‘mommies’ of the girls in the troop thanks to whole Evelyn Trout fiasco in DC.

But it’s movie night with a twist – just as the girls and mommies settle in, Merry opens the door to a banging sound a woman falls dead on the floor.  Not just any woman, Evelyn Trout.  The mommies are horrified, the girls are thrilled and sit discussing poisons that can cause heart attacks.  The new Medical Examiner, a beautiful Asian woman called Dr Body, makes her debut – and arouses Merry insecurity issues with Rex.

Evelyn Trout was no girl scout mom, but a rogue CIA black ops assassin working for whoever paid best.  What she was doing with the troop is anyone’s guess.  But her death brings Riley back to Merry’s door because the CIA wants them to steal her body.  But someone beats them to it.

The positives – it’s amusing even though the author keeps making key plot errors from prior books making continuity beyond annoying.  It has a better ending for who is the bad guy.

The Negatives – it’s like a retread with tweaks.  Kelly is getting annoying, throwing a baby in the mix is weird, and suddenly Philby has 3 kittens who look different from the first two kittens – and one must assume neutering a cat is unheard of in Merry-world.

Movie Night Murder is between a C and C+ (3.3*) Langtry needs to pay more attention to her own plots because there were a LOT of discrepancies from where we left off on the last book.

That’s all for now gang and you might not get review next 2 months as I need my eyes worked on and doing computer works is tough right now.  But I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Witness Protection?

No, not hiding and not on vacation and I am not incarcerated for attacking any presidential candidate, though both have provoked me to rages at various times.  (Though I wish I was able to avoid our election coverage, it seems impossible.  It makes me want to move Australia, except they too have a huge problem and turn prime minister over faster than pancakes.)  I have been enjoying the expensive pleasure of a hard drive crash – from which they thankfully were able to save my data, followed by getting a keystroke logger that kept crashing the OS.  So it had to be lobotomized.  And it happened again.  And again.  And finally, I had them reformat the SSD and start from scratch, changed a bunch of settings, passwords, my firewall, and – much to my eternal joy – my bank account.  In all, it took almost 3 weeks and I did buy a rebuilt backup computer JIC.

Now getting a new checking account is more fun than root canals without Novocaine.  The banker was surly and treated me like scum, and despite her pinstripe suit, the young customer service person had attitude to spare and NO understanding of the bank’s rules.  I did discover my driver’s license had expired 5 days earlier and landed at DMV with 5,000 pieces of ID to prove I’m me.  Not a seat in sight (and they have over 100) I point out I’d be happy to wait, but cannot stand that long.  I end up over in an area for mobility impaired and basically get first rate service – after I filled out a form that had been copied to many times the print was pale gray on white and just barely legible if you sort of tilted it the right way.

You know, the day you can say the DMV treats you better than your own bank says so much about how big banks now treat customers.

The upside to so much computerless time, I did a LOT of reading.  The downside, I’m still fixing all the damn EFT autopay accounts.  Technology cuts both ways.  (And that damn snotty bank associate didn’t fall in a ditch.)

Well, here go the books.

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Cash Landing was on my PBS wishlist and came through quickly.  It didn’t take long to understand why.  I was a good 70+ pages into it and kept muttering, “How many times have I read a variation on this trope?”  Too many.  It was at best a pedestrian and uninspired book from a usually decent author.  The story arc was such a familiar tale I know what each character would be before it happened.  It made a tedious and unexciting read.  I mean a robbery staged by a chef, a criminal, and druggie with the IQ of a turnip was a train wreck waiting to happen.  Making them Cuban does NOT make then interesting.  Even worse, he used names that confused characters.

Cash Landing was a crash and burn and certainly not up to Grippando’s usual level.  My grade D+ to C- (2.4*) and with nearly 40% of the Amazon reviews and 3* and down, you’d be better off reading an old Hardy Boys book.  Free through PBS and will depart that way or to the food pantry.

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Stealing the Countess was the second disappoint Housewright delivered in his last 2 books.    When Paul Duclos approaches Mac about helping him ransom his stolen Stradivarius, you can tell immediately what’s wrong.  No insurance company would pay a claim on a violin of that value with offering a reward, no questions asked, for its return.  But the violin belongs to the Foundation his wife runs with her family money.  Like all Strads, it has a name, the Countess Borromeo, or Countess, for short.  Duclos is a local boy who ended up a world class violinist was asked to do a benefit in his hometown.  The violin was stolen from the suite at the B&B where he stayed and someone wisely unloaded the case with the GPS tracker on the property of one of the now richest women in the town, and Paul’s old HS flame.

Mac gets a letter forwarded from his old address that warns him away and learns the insurance investigator he knew from his initial windfall and occasionally shows up in the books, Vincent Donnatucci, sent it.  But why?

You can figure out who has the violin fairly fast, but the rest of the story, including murder and infidelity (that was obvious) and well-drawn characters keep it interesting along the way.  My score, C (3*).  Borrow the book from the library, though I bought the print book and thought it way over priced.  Stealing the Countess is NOT a keeper, just a very a very average read.

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Book 4 in the Laura Black series, Scottsdale Scorcher, is another good outing for Laura and her police and mafia love interests as a major drug gang war starts brewing and she gets caught in the middle.  Billed as a ‘romantic humorous mystery’, it all 3 elements, but the mystery part does take center stage.

Laura gets hired by Mistress McNasty, Scottsdale’s leading Dominitrix and a friend of Laura’s as well a college professor part time, to find her favorite client.  Then Tough Tony DeCenzo her to find is long time friend, former bodyguard, and now driver who has gone missing – the same man she’s already hunting for Suzie.  Hot on her trail is the Mexican drug Carlos.  She and her friends at the law office when Ms McNasty (Suzie Lu, a neighbor to Laura) is officially a client of her sleazy boss and the girls are on the case.  Using the super-secret DEA software left behind, Sophie finds four very hidden accounts that suggest the Mexicans have been paying him to tip them off.

As is often the case, there are plenty of twists and turns and the whole thing ends in a shootout that ruins Maura’s decision between Reno the cob and Max the mobster that kind of had my ‘shallow bitch’ alarm going ding ding ding.  Even with that annoyance, Scottsdale Scorcher gets a solid B (4*) rating.  Read the ebook, like did.  Available on Amazon and the author is NOT prolific.

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Yet another entry in the seemingly bottomless well of paranormal cozy mysteries to hit the market is Tonya Kappes’ Spies and Spells.  She also authors the rather blah and uneven Ghostly Southern mysteries.

Let’s summarize the whole mess this way, Maggie, our ‘heroine’ suddenly can’t make the gravy for the biscuits, sausage and gravy sold at the family restaurant.  That means her ‘witchy hour’ is there whatever her powers are, they won’t include taking over the restaurant.

Then she gets recruited by some secret agency called SKUL (no, I did not make that up, so don’t blame me.) and ends up posing as the top saleswoman for a privately held cosmetics company, a loosely cloned copy of Mary Kay with red as their signature color.  The whole thing is akin to asking a dog groomer to do brain surgery.  Seems her Witchy Hour was this hottie guy in the diner.

Oh yeah, her ‘familiar’ is her car,  Vinnie, who does NOT like the hottie SKUL agent Mick, the guy that triggered Maggie’s Witchy Hour.

Now the Amazon readers LOVED this book.  Damned if I know why.  Even for a fluff read, it was not well done.  A slight, silly, not especially entertaining, except for Vinnie, Spies and Spells gets a C- (2.8*) from me.  If you must read it and like chick lit fluff, you’ll enjoy it more.  Bought the ebook from Amazon for an insanely overpriced $4.99.  It’s now sells for $2.99 and is worth about 99 cents as a beach read.

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J. C. Daniels is one of Shilo Walker’s pen names, so Blade Song carries her usual style, just in UF.  Her lead character, Kit Colbana, a one woman all-purpose crime player, assassin, thief, investigator, whatever work come her half-breed way.  Being half human makes her an outcast, but her sword makes her damn dangerous one.  Except she also has panic attacks that all but paralyze her thanks to her abusive family upbringing.  This is classic Shilo Walker trope, a strong woman with a fatal flaw that keeps interfering with her life.

The other problem is the Walker inability to fully command her world building.  She sketches it in as needed, but never fleshes it out and breaths life into it.  It becomes a 2 character drama, Kit and Damon, her shifter ‘bodyguard’, watcher, and apparently love interest.

But no matter what name she writes under, Shilo Walker goes for the traumatized heroine and the ‘hero’ who tends to infantilize her.  It does not sit well with me.  Neither did the angsty plot.

Blade Song gets a D+ to C- (2.5*) from me because I found Kit just not a very believable character and the romance bit more icky than romantic.

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Another Neurotic Hitwoman book for JB Lynn, Hitwoman Under Pressure.  One again, the whole, ‘white hats’ and black hats’ secret organizations as well as one angry mobster, are all converging on Maggie.  It’s a very convoluted tale that bordered on incomprehensible at times with all its various detours.  In fact, too convoluted for here without a lot of spoilers.

Suffice it to say that Maggie’s sister’ kids, and her whole family are in danger over a code in a book Maggie has.  Her supposedly dead sister’s  kids are kidnapped and Maggie had to get them back while keeping the rest of her family safe – with the help from her lizard, cat, dog and now a bird that talks like he too many Soprano’s episodes.

Unfortunately, there is a sameness to these plot lines that regular readers will like or find tiresome, especially all the family crap she puts up with and unanswered questions about her brother – the one she never knew about and no one will talk about.

Hitwoman Under Pressure was a quick, light read and moderately entertaining, though I hear, One more, “We can’t discuss that,” and I’m DONE.  this overarching plot is an endless loop of non-answers.  My score is C+ (3.5*) and suggested for series fans in ebook, preferably borrowed from the library.

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 The First Hostage is the second outing for news correspondent J.B. Collins.  Covering the President’s secret visit to Jordan he is in the convoy that is returning the president to Air Force One when they are attacked by a well-organized group of ISIS soldiers who take the president hostage.

OK, that part might faintly be possible, but who gives a journalist automatic weapons and trusts his instincts over their own intelligence service?  And Collins immediately falls under suspicion as the leak to ISIS or ISIS i trying to get even for his provocative and incendiary articles about them.  One exception is a Jordanian Captain who tends to believe him that the leak is somewhere in the US chain of command.  Very few people knew the president was there, so the list of suspects is short and very high ranking.

An untrained journalist fighting with battle hardened elite soldiers is a bit of a tough sell.  SO was convincing me saw things no one else saw in his ‘reporter instincts’.

The initial pacing, taking place mostly in various intelligence bunkers in Jordan, is slow, and it doesn’t pick-up speed till the end.

While plot has some credibility issues with me, especially at the end, Rosenberg’s skill as a writer shines and his knowledge of the area and the key people, including the King of Jordan, gives it authenticity most books lack.  He writes fiction and non-fiction, so his style is professional and finely honed.  It’s the plot I found issue with.

The First Hostage gets amazing endorsements from Action/Thriller fans on Amazon with over 1,000 reviews with 85%+ at 5*.  It gets a B- (3.7*) from me because honestly, a newspaper reporter did all that?   I bought it on pre-order for just over $13.00.  Some used copies are less + shipping and Amazon’s current price is just under $18.  The paperback is tentatively set for Sept 6 and is over $9.  My suggestion, buy used or get it from your library to keep cost down.

New Releases, News, and Mystery Odds and Ends

Well, April came in like it was March and March went out like it was May, so spring is the usual weather potluck in the northern states where we can 4 seasons in 24 hours. We had a rare April snow and my brother got over 5 inches – and was displeased because the 70-degree weather had him putting away his snow blower and plough the week before. (My laughing at him did not improve his mood.)

There is a major bout of angst among cozy readers as the latest ‘consolidation’ of publishers is causing contracts to be canceled and series abruptly ended as authors are notified their sales are too low to justify keeping them.  For anyone who has followed the glut of cozies on the market, it comes as no shock that the buyer pool has been diluted and the publisher’s rationale that they ‘overbought books in that genre’ is probably fair.  Still, a few of the authors have been around a long time, so they were shocked at having the rug yanked out.  The list of about to be deleted authors is growing, so if you’re on FaceBook, check out the Save Our Cozies section.  I’m not on that site, but those who are say many authors are venting their frustration at the short notice.

The whole mmpb market is not considered ‘profitable’ to publishers.  They want trade-size books to be the new paradigm for softcovers as that format’s higher price also had better margins.  That’s why many paranormal series are in that format already.  Romance and cozy mystery still use the mmpb size as their default and a few paperback versions of HC books.  I am more and more often seeing popular hardcovers going to paperback getting released as trade size books, so buying used HC books is actually more economical!  Aside from improving the used book market, I’m uncertain if the publisher’s bottom line see substantial change.  Authors don’t have a whole lot of choice – unless control stays with them and their estates.  Harper Lee required To Kill a Mockingbird mmpb books be removed from sale – and publishers and sellers did so very promptly – but not before I got a cheap new copy!

Books-a-Million is continuing to stumble in online sales.  I dropped my membership in their Millionaires Club because of failure to ship pre-order books, despite multiple phone calls to customer service.  That happened while I was still a member last year and I never did get my book.  And it happened again in March and April, much to my lasting annoyance.  Three days after the new releases SHOULD have been here, I sent Customer Service an email with the details of all the missing books.  They claimed they were ‘out of inventory’.  HUH?  They were released Tuesday I wrote on Thursday and you don’t even have a delivery date?????  I wrote back and told them to cancel every remaining pre-ordered book.  I have a very low tolerance for such incompetence and poorly run business in an age where inventory control is entirely computerized and pre-orders tell you in advance what your demand is.  AVOID BAM! Their sale discounts are not what they were and their service has fallen off badly and only released books in the store where you shop get the MC discount of 10% for in-person purchases, nothing online or for pre-orders.  Their pricing on HC and trade size books was never a match for Amazon, even with additional % off promotions.

Amazon is once again offering random discounts on mmpb books, particularly cozies and si-fi/paranormal/UF series.  Some are as much as 26% off list.  And numerous HC’s have sale points BELOW the ebook cost, including several bestsellers, like Off The Grid by C.J. Box below.  Get them while you can and if you’re Prime, remember, pre-order adjusts prices to reflect the lowest price between your order date and release.

If you’re a cozy fan, be prepared to have your authors migrate to self-published ebooks like so many others have.  They are cheaper, but much harder to pass on as you do print.

On to reviews!!!!! (I started this post nearly 3 weeks ago and forgot I never finished it.  OOPS!)

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Vanilla Beaned is the latest entry in Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery series takes place in Vegas where Tate has kind of bullied Mel into licensing a franchise.  The story starts with a bag as the woman who wants the bakery is a stunning showgirl and Mel, thanks to her overweight HS years, has kind of a deep prejudice over that, but her mean girl stunt kind of backfires and she ends up agreeing to take a look at the place.  The realtor who hung back from the girl drama for a smoke opens the door and the place explodes.  The showgirl and hopeful bakery owner, Holly, works with Mel to try and help the two men while waiting on EMTs and the fire department.   Tate and Angie get there just in time to see the end. and Angie convinces Mel to do a tasting at Holly’s house the next day.  Turns out Holly’s glamor was just as much artifice as she said and her baking skills were extraordinary.  With Mel finally on board, the search for a store continues – and so do the awful ‘accidents’.  But who are they trying to hurt, Mel or Holly?

Ms McKinlay does a good job here, much better than her last Library Lovers book.  In fact, this is pretty much her best series for characters and plots both.  I liked Holly and the change of scene to Vegas was refreshing and the Elvis convention amusing and also gives some of the plot a unique twist.

Vanilla Beaned gets a B (3.9*) rating from and a suggested read for cozy lovers.  It’s a reliable series so far.  I paid $7.99+ tax but you can get lots of discounts at any big box or club store with books.

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It seems to me there have been an awful lot of disappointments lately, including Fortune Hunter, Jana DeLeon’s latest entry into the Miss Fortune series.  I don’t think I was 30 pages in when I realized she had allowed the darker side of her writing used for romantic suspense to creep into what is normally a very light and entertaining series.  The change in tone made all the usual humor seem forced and contrived, rather than flowing naturally from the characters.  That was especially true with Ida Belle, Gertie, and Fortune.

The other bad part – no one even died yet and I knew who did it and why.  When a plot is that transparent and trite, it signals a complete lack of caring by the author – or a loss of focus that had her doing reruns of old TV series plots.  I was bored and what few chuckles I had were not really entertaining.  The real kicker?  I bought the ebook and wouldn’t bother with the print because I could bearly slog through it once.  Her previous book, Hurricane Force, was on the bubble but I still liked it enough to have a hard copy.  Not this one.

I might not be a writer, but I know how hard it is to slip from serious and dramatic, to light, clever, and briskly witty.  The carry over made with out of character for the series.  She’ll get one more shot, then I’m done.

Fortune Hunter gets a C- (2.7*) for a dreadful transparent plot and a total change in tenor for the characters and feeling of the book.  Read it if you’re a fan, but try and get the ebook from the library.  Not worth the $6.00  I paid for the ebook.

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And another favorite author bites it with Leslie Langtry’s Marshmallow S’More Murder.  Where is a good editor when you desperately need one.  I don’t what to hammer first.  OK – let’s start with in impossible timeline.  When we left Merry, boyfriend Rex, best friend and co-scout leader Kelly, and Riley, her boss, Merry’s cat Philby just had kittens, Kelly just announced she was preggers, and Riley took off after the dubious vet who  cut the SD card out of Philby’s neck because it something to do with Midori Ito’s death back in book 1.

Fast forward about 6 weeks.  Philby is still nursing the kittens but they’ll be weaned soon.  Kelly, who learned she was preggers 6 weeks ago is due to pop so not in DC with Merry and the scout troop as a prize from the Girl Scout Council for selling the most cookies ……. ever.  (Is it me, or do you see a space-time continuum issue here?)  There she is, at the White House with the whole troop and a missing mom, Evelyn Trout, who stepped in to cover for Kelly and promptly stepped out to the hotel spa leaving Merry to deal with her troop alone.  Good thing the First Lady can manage because the Secret Service guys are close to panic.  But wait!  There’s more!  Riley is missing and she gets a call suggesting he’s in great danger there in town.  So what’s a former spy to do?  Take the troop to the CIA HQ and get some unofficial help from her buddy (and cookie junkie) Maria Gomez.

But wait!  There’s more!  Riley is missing and she gets a call suggesting he’s in great danger there in town.  So what’s a former spy to do?  Take the troop to the CIA HQ and get some unofficial help from her buddy (and cookie junkie) Maria Gomez.  Maria goes above and beyond when she takes time off, moves into the hotel with the troop and helps ride herd on the girls while Merry tries to figure out where Riley is before he dies.

Just to make sure there are lots of loose threads, something is wrong between Merry’s mom and dad and neither is talking.  She goes undercover at the Japanese Embassy while her dad, a respected Senator from Iowa, works his charm on his friend the Japanese Ambassador, and the daughter of Midori is working at the Embassy.  And is mom was ruthless, daughter is certifiable nuts, and the troop is in danger.

While parts of this book are very entertaining and works, the author left so many loose ends it felt like half a story and the obvious issue of Evelyn Trout is not even touched till everyone is safely back in Iowa and the Ito’s are no more.  Time wise, nothing makes a bit of sense.  Story lines are left hanging in space, and the ending is better suited to a 3-hanky tear-jerker.  And why in heaven’s name would a cop who got a restraining order against an old girlfriend give her a key to his house and have her care for the cat and kittens of her arch enemy, Merry?  I had to assume everyone lost the minds.

Marshmallow S’More Murder gets another C- (2.8*).  Honestly, authors cannot make that many basic timeline errors and not get hammered or that many impossible plot line leaps and not annoy readers.  Humor and an entertaining group of girl scouts can only cover so many errors and these were just too glaring.  The ebook was $5.oo and at a slender 218 pages, not worth that much.  Get it as a loaner.  This is another I won’t be buying in print.

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Off the Grid picks up the story of Nate Romanowski where Endangered left off with Nate escaping the hospital and a sleazy FBI agent who almost got him and his girlfriend killed.   In hiding and healing for months, the illness of his girlfriend Sheridan’s mother leaves just enough trail for a NGO to find him.  They want to find the sun of an Arab leader they think has turned rogue -and he and that young man have something in common – falconry.

Once again coerced into helping, in the national interest, of course, Nate ends up back near his friend Joe and does find the man in the video – and as is often the case in Nate’s world, nothing is as it seems – but Nate sort of knew that going in.  The ending alone with the canny and shrewd soon to be ex-governor is worth the read.

I should note this is far less of a mystery than the early Joe Pickett books, it’s more of an action thriller.  If you don’t like how this series has been trending toward a slightly different genre, then you won’t like this book.  Pickett himself stays more true to his earlier character but gets drawn deeper into the gray life that Nate lives and is less than comfortable there.  That is the one part of this evolution I have yet to fully embrace – Joe the family man moving to Joe the reluctant action character.  I have mixed feelings about it, but even Robert Crais evolved Joe Pike and Elvis Cole, so it’s not uncommon for an author to shift to a different style and have characters change over time.  This is book 16 in the series and the move has been gradual, but I think the departure here to put terrorists Wyoming is the whole NGO is a bit of a stretch, but not unbelievable.  Pacing is fast and not every good guy wins.

Off the Grid gets a B (4*) rating from me, but I love action thrillers so I might be more tolerant than some with Box’s segue in style and his inherently suspicious view of NGO’s and other ‘black ops’ security groups.  This is the second time he’s a similar thread in his plot, so if you’re a regular reader, you know .  It is a recommended read with the above caveats.  At around $17 new, wait for a good used copy or borrow from the library unless you’re a collector of Box’s books.

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Double Mint and Double Knot are two latest entries in the humorous mystery series featuring Davis Way.  In Double Mint, Davis and new hubby Bradley, now the General Manager of the sprawling Bellissimo Casino are trying to come to grips with living in a 10,000 square foot voodoo Mardi Gras from Hell palace that was the former GM’s residence – now their’s – and home sweet home it ain’t.  Davis is going crazy with the demanding Bianca Sanders, for whom she works as a body double, just one floor up.  (Her going to the gynaecologist for Bianca is just hysterical.) Not to mention she is utterly convinced As one of the casino’s undercover security people, it’s like having 2 jobs and no life.  And Bradley is trying desperately to undo the damage of the old GM – including locating the platinum coins that they help as part of the casino reserve that were replaced with fakes.  There’s the whole locked room that curious Davis shoots her way into only to find a press and rag paper for a counterfeiting operation that the old GM and now largely senile Casimiro family boss (Bianca’s father) apparently ran.

Ms Archer writes a fast, funny plot with some great twists involving undercover security partner Fantasy, the security muscle, Baylor, and chief, No Hair (Jeremy) and missing events manager Holder Darby, and her ‘not cat’ found in Holder’s empty house that hated Davis but took up residence in the huge GM suite.   Oh, and the handsome guy down the hall in the Jay Leno suite doing the advance work for Dionne Warwick.  He fainted when Davis shot her chandelier.

If you feel a little lost at all the plot lines, that’s just Archer’s style.  Her writing takes getting used to, as she writes in the first person and Davis’s thoughts are often confusing integrated.  Nonetheless, Double Mint was a good read and it gets a B (3.9*) rating from me with the caveat about her writing style.  I read the ebook at $6.99 – which is overpriced.

Double Knot picks up the plot several months later with Davis being pregnant with twins and Bianca panicked by her weight gain due to inactivity and too much delivery pizza.  But the new joint venture casino boat was about to take its maiden voyage and there was a fashion shoot scheduled for the trip, so Davis was off with her ……. mother ….. and Fantasy in an owner’s suite with a butler, maid, and …… Jessica DeLuna, wife of Max DeLuna, the banker Richard Sanders hired to filled the ship’s 50 suites with very high rollers – without doing proper background checks.  Bradley is stuck doing a casino security seminar in Macau, so Davis has no real buffer between her and her mother except Fantasy.  Everyone is issued the latest high-tech handheld to operate everything from elevators to stateroom doors to TV sets and ship communications.  Jessica, who Davis is convinced is after Bradley because she and her hubby Max do not even touch each other, shows up in Davis suite and suddenly all the doors lock, all communications are cut and they have no way in or out because every single device is dead.  They are just close enough to shore that Davis tries to call her sheriff dad in her mom’s antique cell phone, but the connect is so bad, he won’t be riding to her aid.  And No Hair is trapped and tied up deep in the bowels of the ship and can’t help.  What the hell is Max DeLuna doing?

It’s a good read and the way they get out is clever and relies on Davis’ computer skills and a working device.  All the usual ways of escaping are out.  Thankfully, the kitchen is stocked so her mom can do the cooking but can Jessica be trusted and what about the main and butler?

Two plot elements stand out her, one is Davis’s relationship with her mom and an event in her teen years, and Fantasy’s decision to get a divorce because she can’t forgive herself for cheating on her husband.  (It’s all a part of Double Mint, so that’s all I can say.)  The other part is Mom is not exactly what Davis always saw her as ……. and the part where her mother gives ‘marital advice’ to Fantasy is laugh out loud funny.  So is the part where Fantasy uses a priceless metal sculpture to knock a hole in the wall.

Double Knot, like Double Mint and all her other Davis way books has plenty of twists, turns, and unexpected plot developments.  You have a good core story, character growth without too much drama to drag down the general tone, but enough to give it heart, and good ending.  Double Knot also gets a B (4*) rating.   Like Double Mint, it’s $7 in ebook so unless you plan to re-read it, borrow it from your library.

Mixed Genre Reviews – Print, eBook, and ARC

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.