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.

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!

 

And Even More Binge – Short Reviews

My apologies for not posting.  I’ve been suffering fatigue and just kind of digging out of it slowly.  Yes, I’m still reading, actually more ebooks than print lately.  Why?  Well, publishers have consolidated, ruthlessly cut authors and series, no longer give a series a chance to develop a following and delay publication dates 18 months or more except on big name bestsellers.  On top of all that, they raised prices and reduced quality of everything from the paper itself, to the crappy proofreading and editing.  No wonder authors have turned to self-publishing.  Earlier this year, cozy mystery writers had contracts canceled and whole series dropped.  Now si-fi, fantasy, paranormal, and dystopian are getting the same treatment.  Action, espionage, military thrillers and many mysteries, from humorous to noir have gone ebook.

Looking at my Amazon purchases, I found I ordered more non-book merchandise than books.  Five years ago, the first Tuesday of the month meant UPS had sacks on boxes at my door.  Now a get maybe 2 books a month, 4 in the high release months.  Having moved from quality packaging, Amazon now also save money using padded envelopes, except the books often arrive with creased covers and scuffing thanks to Amazon and the PO abuse.  When I spend $20+ on a book, is it too much to ask for a dust jacket that’s NOT TORN?  A trade paperback with a bent, creased cover?  Can the damn publishers not use recycled tissues for paper so thin I can see the print on the back of the page and despite great care, the fragile paper rips just turning a page?  Better still, can they find printers who don’t leave blotches of link like mini-Rorschach tests all over the pages – often causing those frail thin pages to glue themselves to each other?

God knows ebooks are the prototype of bad proofreading – not to mention authors who seem unable to exercise even minimal self-discipline in CONTINUITY ERRORS – but they aren’t $20, either.  I get a lot of them through Book Bub on sale for $0.99 to $2.99 and a lot of free books.

The big downside of ebooks is the fact most authors choose a short novel length.  That might be what ebook readers prefer, but it often leaves the characters and plot wanting.  Certainly, Golden Age mysteries were largely short novel length, with Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time being one of the finest mysteries ever written and one of the shortest.  Christie’s books were all shorter novels, especially her best early works.  Same for Hammett and even Chandler.  But today’s writers are simply not in that class – or even close.  Today’s writers lack the skills of compacting paragraphs of atmosphere into a single sentence.  “It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in,” from Chandler’s The Big Sleep tells you more that paragraphs about the setting and the atmosphere in a modern book.

But bemoaning the loss of mystery’s Golden Age is a bit pointless.  Today’s books reflect the taste of modern readers and the fact they want easy, entertaining diversion – and apparently a limited vocabulary.  Not many authors can command a wide audience other than a handful of big names that run more on the reputation for their past works than their often mediocre, formulaic current novels.  Still, even ebooks have good, bad, and indifferent authors, so let’s see what we have for July/Aug mysteries.

PS:  No, I have not lost my fondness for UF and paranormal, but most paranormal now seems to fall into mystery or romance genres.  Pickings are lean there too.  Some authors have nothing new out – due to the whole publisher issue or the fact they’ve just hit a dry spell I can’t say.  I do have a few for the next print book reviews group.

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The newest entry in the Merry Wrath series is decent but choppy and frankly, not that credible, but still a fun read.  Mud Run Murder is decent as an ebook, but try and borrow it unless you’re a hardcore fan.  SHORT book.  C+ to B- (3.7*)

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The Never Say Spy series books 1 to 10 that I binge read:

OK, this series is set in Canada and involves a cross between a spy series, near future virtual reality, and a book keeper who is mistaken for a deep cover spy.  It has humor, heart, twists, turns, excitement, and some interesting takes on the James Bondish style send-up mixed with serious stuff.  Each book, while part of an overarching story, is complete unto itself.  Aydan Kelly, the woman who insists she’s a book keeper (which she is) is a terrific lead character, but would be more believable as someone 10 years younger.  Book one, Never Say Spy, is free and ebook.  Give it a try.  I enjoyed the series a lot.  The books ranged from C+ to B (3.6* to 4*)

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The House of Spies, the 17th book in the Gabriel Allon series, was the usual 500+ page tome by Daniel Silva.  What it wasn’t was great.  In fact, it barely made good.  With a cast of ever character you can think of – and some extras, an episodic style, and no really solid lead, it limped along in Mediocreville.  Completely miss-able.  Get from the FOL sale or borrow it.  Read the HC version – it was cheaper than the ebook.  C- (2.8*)  Not impressed by a usually reliable author.  Retire Gabriel, please.

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How a really good series can cause an author to rush out a book before it’s time.  Call of the Wilde is a very short book.  Yes, it’s action packed because the author doesn’t take the time flesh out any of the many individual elements and it all becomes messy in the headlong rush to the big finale in London.  Let’s do, not think.  Never a good plan.  Loose ends all over.  The rush had predictable bad consequences.  Not as well done as the earlier books.  Unpolished and fragmented.  My score is a C (3*).  Had Ms Stark taken the time to just breath deeply and THINK, it would have been light-years better – and 50-75 pages longer.

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An interesting concept, a former Episcopal priest turned war vet turned professional poker player/trouble shooter.  The Preacher was a book I wanted to like.  It had all the anti-hero elements.  It was dull, predictable, occasionally tedious, and just blah.  The Preacher gets called into some dusty torn in New Mexico by and old seminary friend to find out what’s wrong.  How he does this playing poker only works because the poker players are what’s wrong.  As sere and dusty as eastern New Mexico.  I was frustrated at wasting my time on this.  My score C- (2.8*) and give it a miss.

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OK, a favorite author – G.A. Aiken/Shelly Laurenston and a favorite series, the Dragon Kin.  Bring the Heat was a sure bet – sort of.  Now Branwen the Awful is a great character and so to is Aiden the Divine, what didn’t work do well is the choppy plot.  You’ve got Annwyl the Bloody in Hell, the dragons wiping out the followers of the blind god,  and Brannie and Aiden escorting Keita to poison another dragon queen because he son was kidnapped and murdered while under the Dragon Queen’s care.  Anyhoo …… the scene switching is not unusual, but the story isn’t smooth or as interesting, which is a shame as Brannie is one of my favorite characters.  My score is C+ (3.3*)

 

Another On Again, Off Again Binge

Hard though it may be to believe, there are times when books simply don’t appeal and I revert back to old favorites.   A bad cold started a round of sulking (I’m could compete in the sulking Olympics, but not the Drama Queen portion) followed by a burst of reading.  So much reading I haven’t had time to blog.  (OK and playing games on PBS.)  I apologize.

Binge reading has its pluses and minuses.  With cozies or light mysteries, they quickly become predictable.  With heavy paranormal, you hit a wall and have to stop and take a breather with something to lighten your mood.  But some flow seamlessly and have just the right balance of humor, action, paranormal events, and unfolding story arc to be great for a binge.  A good friend out in CA who has a lot of overlap with my taste in books, especially paranormal, recommended the Immortal Las Vegas series by Jenn Stark.  Once I started it was worse than a bag of my favorite potato chips.  I was up all night finishing one book and starting another.  In my younger days, I’d get dressed and go to work without sleep.  Now I’m retired and keep vampire hours.  (I am happy to report I have no urge to bite people in the neck or drink blood and do not burst into flame in the sunlight.)

Anyway, I’m still adjusting to needing reading glasses again.  By the way, the only upside to cataracts is you get your near vision back for a couple of years ……. until they get so big you’re going blind.  Five people I know have had or are going through cataract surgery.  Sure sign I’m getting old!  Honestly, emails from friends sound like plots for some TV hospital drama.  The award winner was a friend and her husband who had his prostate removed and finished radiation and took a week at the Gulf Coast before starting chemo.  Well, he stepped on a stingray and got a barb in the foot.   Normally not a huge deal, but painful.  Except for the fact the tip of the barb pierced a bone in his foot and now he has a bone marrow infection.  What are the odds?  This is TV movie territory.

Yup, just one of those years.  Thank heavens for books to escape in.

NOTE: All books reviewed below were ebooks either purchased or loaned by a friend.  All are available in multiple formats.

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OK, this series is not the usual vamps and shifters, it’s based in the tarot and those with some magical ability called ‘the Connected’.  Now if you are not familiar with the tarot deck it has 4 houses, just like a poker deck has 4 suits, plus what are called Major Arcana – cards that show Death, the Hanged Man, the Magician, etc.  This series is based on the premise there is an Arcana Council that keeps the balance between light and dark magic so neither side can control things and the Veil, behind which ancient and powerful non-humans have been banished stays intact.  Now the Council is composed of once humans that are now immortals, each possessing the characteristics of the Major Arcana they represent.  Knowing this and knowing something about tarot is very helpful in understanding the ‘world’ in which this is set.

Getting Wilde sort of throws the reader into the world without fully developing it first, so it’s a bit choppy and hard to get a grasp on but shows the potential for this series.  Hang in there and get through it and things improve rapidly.  Sara Wilde is an artifact hunter using her tarot deck to guide her to her goals.  She’s one of the Connected and mostly her bounties go to Father Jerome in France who rescues and hides connected children and families.  They are being hunted, not just by a secret sect in the Catholic Church called SANCTUS, but by technoceutical manufacturers, and black practitioners for body parts – especially hearts.  Protecting them is her main goal in life.  Being a ‘finder’ – modern-day magical artifact hunter – is dangerous, but high paying work.  The man who hires her for many jobs recently is the Magician, one of the Arcane Council, its leader at the moment.  He’s old, powerful, and very, very handsome.

The primary problem here is the reader is instantly thrown into the deep end of the pool without a clue as to the nature of the world the book inhabits.  There is an even choppier prequel ‘novella’ – also free on Kindle, but it doesn’t help much.  My grade is C+ (3.4*).  The story is good, the pacing fast with enough humor to lighten the darker moments, and characters really good and slowly fleshed out, but the world building knocked down the rating as it gets confusing.  There is an ongoing major secondary character Nikki, briefly introduced here a transsexual former Chicago cop and a good friend.  Her role grows bigger as the series goes on.  The Kindle edition is free, so read that.  The print books of this whole series are overpriced.

Wilde Card picks up where book 1 left off, Sara still in with the council to act as the astral navigator for the High Priestess – an unpleasant piece of work.  That also leaves her time in Vegas, the last city she wanted to be in thanks to the fact that Brody Rooks, the young cop she had a crush on when a teen helping the cops find lost kids, is now a Vegas Detective.  The Magician sends her on a mission to the infamous ‘Gold Show’ that sells supposedly charmed golden items of power – behind the scenes of an apparently normal gold show.  Too bad Brody is one of the cops sent for security.  But Sara isn’t the only ‘finder’ there and there’s a massive robbery – including the Eye she just managed to steal.  A former client, and generally bad guy, turns out to be the Emperor – Viktor Dal

Now she is after the thieves and falls into a huge stash they’ve amassed.  This is where Sara’s powers start growing and at the end, she is the one who uses the eye to save the world from a creature beyond the veil.  Doing so begins unleashing her full potential – a theme that runs through the series.  My rating is a solid B (4*)  This installment has a lot more meat to it than the first book and is just a good read.  Not long, but action packed and good story telling.  By the way, Death is a punked out tattoo artist that does some work on Sara that ultimately helps bind Nikki closer to Sara for their mutual protection.

Born to be Wilde has Sara back doing a job for the Magician – again.  His healing has saved her life more than once, but his style of healing is very sensual and sexual in its nature and Sara wants to stay as far away from him as she can.

But Viktor Dal, the Emporer and his experiments of allowing demons to inhabit children come to light.  To get the demon back where they belong, Sara must travel to Atlantis to find weapons.  Which she did, only she brought them back embedded in her own body.

Once again, the trip to Atlantis gives us a hint about Sara and her real role yet to be fulfilled.  I give Born to be Wilde a B- (3.8*) as some elements of the plot, especially the mind trip to Atlantis did mesh as well as it should have.

Wicked and Wilde is like paranormal on LSD.  Sara goes to Hell.  Literally.  Why?  The Magician, Armaeus, who is momentarily human, is there ostensibly to bring back the Hierophant, the Archangel Michael.  So human Sara is sent to haul their asses home.  This choppy, episodic, trip in Hell takes way too long and Armaeus comes back even darker and less pleasant than before, setting back any budding romance thing going on and Sara faces her alternate self.  That’s the big death scene with his initial love who died centuries before – and Sara’s alternate self is the one who kills her.  Talk about a WTF moment.  Even worse, it drives her after her teen crush Brody Rooks who is now very taken with Dixie, the owner of a wedding chapel and kind of Connected network mama.  I frankly found much of it just plain irritating as Sara blows hot and cold.  About half way through I yelled, “GROW UP!”

It has a slam-bang ending that kind of made up for the acid trip to Hell – Sara has recovered the much-desired artifact belonging to the head of the House of Swords from her dead ancestor.  As she tries to return the necklace the Swords are attacked, possibly due to a traitor within, and as their leader lays dying, Sara learns she is her heir to the House.

Not the best in the series, which blessedly gets better.  C+ to B- (3.6*) rating but the ending makes up for a lot.  The Hierophant is the best part of the book.  Too bad the author fails to flesh that character out better over the series.  Gammon, the ‘big bad’ she’s been fighting is finally out in the open. This is one you’ll love or hate.

Aces Wilde – book 5 in this series – is about Sara’s inheritance, which has strings attached.  Mostly she must fight all challengers to her being Head of the house.  To win, she needs a magic sword.  Of course, she has to steal it – but this time, her arch competitor is now not just her ally, but an Ace, a kind of hired assassin/finder/bodyguard but without any loyalty to the house and are not part of it.  Nikki becomes an Ace in training and given her size and police background is a natural.

Sara also is keeping up her work with Father Jerome.  For someone used to being a loner, these are uncomfortable adjustments and she has yet to fully recover from the emotional battering she took in Hell.  This evolving and complex plot line across the books makes discussing particulars difficult, but let’s just say it does not disappoint.  The traitor in her House, the person responsible for bringing down the former head of the House of Swords – is  revealed as is the reason why.  B- (3.8*)

Forever Wilde brings Father Jerome and the rescued children front and center.  It also calls into question the involvement of the 2 Houses still hidden, Pentacles and Cups.  The focus in of a series of experiments done on Connected children by Gammon and her partner.  Sara is determined to hunt down and destroy the Tehnoceutical experimental site using children as test animals.  A new strain of technoceuticals has hit the streets adding a ‘boost’ to a connected powers – and Dixie is among the addicted.  When Sara pushed Llyr back behind the veil, everyone in Vegas had a huge surge in their connected powers.  Some want to keep that so badly they are resorting to the drugs – and Pentacles is helping them.

Nicely woven plot with the usual slam-bang ending, where friend and foe become hard to tell apart.  B (4*)

Wilde Child is the most recent release.  A lot of Sara’s past and true parentage comes out here.  Sara finally uses her power as Head of the House of Swords to go after the technoceutical syndicate harming children.  It has more action than most and less of the Arcane Council, which given Sara’s ambivalent feelings toward the Magician give her emotional break – right up till she catches Gammon and her boss.  YIKES!  Talk about wanting to unknow something.  This gets a solid B (4*) and the series as a whole is a recommended read!

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A new series by a new author that’s all action, no character, little atmosphere, and frankly, a dumb plot.  I bought Hard Tide because I like action thrillers and I like books set in Florida (a leftover from getting hooked on Travis McGee).  An ex-spec ops guy can’t reach dad and gets a message for help.  He drives across the country to find his dad’s house empty and his beloved boat trashed.  The pacing is breakneck so it hides all the plot holes and minimal character development.  As for conveying a sense of atmosphere, something the Keys have a lot of, it’s a loss.  The ending brought in people from nowhere who help save the day.  The prose is readable but bland.

D+ to C- (2.5*) and for mindless action thriller readers only.

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D.P. Lyle first mystery, Deep Six, in the Jake Long series was another low-cost ebook I picked up just to try, and unlike Hard Tide, proved a worthy read.  It is the author’s first ever novel and was a very good read.  Jake is a bar restaurant owner in Gulf Shores, AL on the Gulf.  His dad, a retired cop, and very successful PI.  Despite Dad’s urging, Jake refuses to get involved in the PI business but does do occasional jobs for his dad, and that drags him into trouble in a ritzy gated community.

Enter a Hollywood screenwriter using her uncle’s mansion as a getaway and Jake as a willing boy toy, throw in a murder of a jogger for no good reason, international criminals, and suddenly a cheating spouse is small potatoes.

Entertaining, fast paced, good characters, well plotted and worth a read.  B (4*)

 

 

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.

More Books – Playing Catchup with Short Reviews

SAD NEWS:  Jim Laverne, widower of Joyce Laverne, died suddenly on May, just a few months after his wife of 44 years passed away.  Jim and Joyce were prolific authors of cozy mysteries under a variety of names, paranormal mysteries,  and other books.  Alas, many of their series will never wrap up now, but we have a large collection of books to enjoy in their memory.

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Yes, I read too much.  SIGH.  Here are some short reviews for MORE BOOKS.  Gad.  I’ll need a part time job just to support my habit soon.

The latest in the Novel Ideas series by Lucy Arlington, Off the Books, was a ho-hum effort that was too formula and predictable.   I won the book on a PBS game because I’ve stopped buying the series.  I hate being able to write a plot in my head within pages of starting a book.

Writing quality is good and characters and some depth, but nothing special.  No ‘oomph’ factor.  Off the Books gets a dull C (3*).  Not good, not awful, just blah.

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Melissa F Olsen is one of those decent, yet not exceptional, UF writers that live in the area where their books are good, but never reach rave review territory.  Boundary Born, the third and possibly last or the Boundry WItch series, wraps up the primary story arc of ‘Lex’ Luther, one of the adopted twin daughters of the Luther shoe fortune.  Her twin, Sam, died in an accident and Lex should have died in the deserts of the Mideast, but survived, much to the puzzlement of the military doctors.  Back in Boulder trying to get over PTSD and spend time with her niece, she learns she’s a witch.  Not just any witch, a boundary witch that deals in death.  In book 1, Boundary Crossed, she learns what she and her niece are and the plot to kidnap the child ends up in an unexpected place.  In book 2, Boundary Lines, she battles an ancient magical creature eating random hikers and other poor souls and uncovers a plot to break a compact that ended a war between vamps, witches, and shifters.  In book 3, Boundary Born, she battles yet another problem – someone killing vamps with an ancient form of belladonna.  And it all turns back to Lex’s undiscovered parents – until dear old dad shows up on her porch.  What happens from there is part personal discovery and part action thriller.

Basically, the whole series is about Lex’s finding of who and what she is as well as the evolution of her powers.  I read Boundary Born as a free ARC in ebook and it’s a good read, wraps up a whole bunch of questions, but the series felt unfinished.  Judging by the afterword, Olsen is leaving room to revisit these characters in the future despite saying the series is wrapped.

Boundry Born gets B- (3.6*) from me and read only if you’ve been following the series.

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Book 1 and 2 in the Geek Girl mysteries (not to be confused with the Lexi Carmichael books) and feature’s Mia Conner’s Falls, her hippy parents, mini-mogul grannie she helped make rich and her sex-obsessed sister and brother-in-law who basically get grants to do studies on things sex related.  A Geek Girl’s Guide to Murder starts with some kind of hacking issue that has mysterious emails going to residents in an exclusive gated community of mostly retired folks – including her grandmother.  Despite being well to do thanks to her computer skills setting and running an online store for grandma’s homeopathic beauty aids, she lives in kind of a dumpy place in town and drives to work – to find a huge pick-up taking her space and then some.  The truck and obnoxious owner turn out to be the strangely over-qualified new head of security.

The mystery that unfolds ends up centered around Mia herself.  All the emails setting up fake appointments and such are just a prelude to other events involving her off-beat family and grannie’s all natural skin treatment business.  The ending is a mix of obvious and odd – with more obvious than anything.

In A Geek Girl’s Guide to Arsenic, Grannie’s very business is threatened when police and Ren Faire goers all think the death of a arist is linked to their products.  The ex-security head, real FBI agent, now US Marshall (Yeah, I don’t get that either), so once again, with her family involved, Mia gets nosey and does her own investigation – easy to so when you’re Queen Guinevere and someone burned Grannie’s business set-up at the Faire.  With an endless supply of costumes for various community events where she works, and running the online store for grannie and the IT department for the community, you wouldn’t think mia had enough time meddle in an investigation – but you know you’re wrong.  The resolution is once again an odd mix of good and bad as the victim is revealed as a person in Witness Protection as well as a womanizer and a likable scoundrel (possibly cheat) who pretty much screwed everyone – ummmmm – physically and financially.

A Geek Girl’s Guide to Murder and A Geek Girl’s Guide to Arsenic are both quick, decent reads that try to be too complex and too simple at the same time.  It’s like the author isn’t quite sure where she’s going with all this.  Parts are very well dome and then segues into a side road that has nothing to add to the story or characters.  Despite being fairly decent compared to the paint by numbers cozies out there, both get a C+ to B- rating (3.5*) and suggested reads for those tired of the trite cozy books.  I bought and read both as ebooks.

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The latest installment in the Neurotic Hitwoman series has a LOT going on.  The story of her sister Darlene.  The truth about Patrick, Maggie’s nutso mom once again breaking out of the home, thanks to her criminal father, and Katie having a major meltdown over not having a real mommy.  The Hitwoman and the Mother Load was more about family and friends than Maggie’s part time job as a hit woman.

JB Lynn writes a fast paced book that crams a lot of different stories into a fairly short novel and as usual has a neat hook at the end.  This one is kind of hard to discuss without giving the key plot elements away, but I can talk about Katie acting out at school over not having a ‘real’ mommy and the suggestion both maggie and Katie see a psychologist for counseling.  (Which end hysterically.)  Finding out the truth about Patrick was painful, but seemed inevitable for the last few books so not dramatic.  Angel is taking a bigger role, but that leaves Maggie in a quandary given the fact she does work for his gangster uncle.

The Hitwoman and the Mother Load is solidly plotted, has good characters, and breakneck pace.  It gets B (4*) from me and highly suggested for readers of this series or the Housewife Assassin books.  Purchased as a Kindle ebook.

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I have been waiting FOREVER for the latest Addison Holmes book to be released and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was a little disappointing given the wait.  Like many ebook series, this suffers from what movie makers would call ‘continuity gaps’, that is mixed up details about people, events, and other things, that tend to be distracting.  The last Steph Plum book was riddled with them, so somewhere editors are not doing their jobs.

The story itself isn’t bad, basically, it’s a very clever con game that Addison isn’t aware of.  She and her Great Aunt Scarlett – who is a hoot and the best part of the book – and Rosemarie try balancing a real case and special assignment as half payment for a tricked out van for surveillance.  I like the surprise ending for the bad guy.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gets a C+ to B- (3.5*) because it was sloppy in continuity and plot, but entertaining enough that I could forgive most of it.  Purchased as a kindle ebook.  Like the Neurotic Hitwoman series, this id for those who enjoy humorous mystery.

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The paid or mysteries by Kait Carson features a SCUBA diving paralegal who gets mixes up in murders.  In Death by Blue Water  protagonist Hayden Kent is recovering from a sudden break-up with her live-in boyfriend when she goes diving to clear her mind and instead finds a body caught in a wreck she’s dived dozens of times before.

It gets more complicated when the body turnout to the older brother of her ex and she becomes suspect #1.  Many of the supporting characters don’t get fleshed out much here, but the plot has good twists and turns and an unexpected outcome – rare for a near cozy style mystery A little heavy on the whole migraine thing and SCUBA diving, but very decent first book and a nice departure from the all too predictable cozies.

Book 2, Death by Sunken Treasure, the mother of a friend, and her kind of surrogate mother, Dana Kirby, a museum operator, finds her own son’s body floating in the reeds near the ferry dock as she heads to work on Pigeon Key.  She and her son had a recent falling out and becomes a suspect.  More importantly, her son made a major treasure find and was a very, very experienced diver, so she is convinced, despite the police claiming his pain-killer drug addiction and diving lead to an accidental death.

The sheer number of characters involved make following the plot a bit of a challenge at times as she keeps introducing more and more variables with people and lies that are hard to separate from truth, an ex-wife and ex-boss (who lost his fortune to Mike in a workplace accident lawsuit), now lovers, seeking a share of the treasure, partners telling different stories about what Mike owned and who had title to the treasure – and more deaths – including twice nearly dying herself.

Once again, despite the sometimes rambling plot and overuse of migraines, the culprit is a surprise.  The plot unspools in a choppy fashion and is only tied together at the end, but once again, it was better than the typical cozy and the mid-Keys setting is a big draw for me.

My grades are Death by Blue  Water is C+ (3.4*) and Death by Sunken Treasure is C+ to B- (3.6*).  Since she has to create a whole new base of characters, I will buy book 3 and see how she manages the transition.  Good reads, but not great.  Far better than the typical cozy and worth the ebook price.