On Reading More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annual e-Book Edition

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

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

Let’s start with light cozy style humorous mysteries:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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.

*******************************************

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.

**********************************************

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.

***************************************************************

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.

***************************************************

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.

***************************************************

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.

*********************************************

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.

****************************************************

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

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

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

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

 Happy Holidays!

 

I’m BACK!

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

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

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

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

**************************************

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.

***************************************

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.

**********************************************

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.

****************************************

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.

*************************************

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.

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

*********************************************************************

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.

*******************************************************

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.

***********************************************

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.

************************************************

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.

**********************************************

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.

******************************************

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.

***********************************************

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.

**********************************************

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.

***********************************************

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.

***********************************************************

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.

******************************************************

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.

****************************************************

 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.

***********************************************

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.

************************************

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.

*************************************************

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.

*************************************

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.

**************************************************

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.

***********************************************

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.

New Releases, News, and Mystery Odds and Ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

************************************

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

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

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

*******************************

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

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

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

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

********************************************

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

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

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

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

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

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

****************************************

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

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

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

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

*********************************************

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Releases in Print and Ebook Reviews

OK all you savvy readers out there, in case you missed it, the number of books being released per month is dropping like a stone.  I know there are more and more budding epubs out there even as many of the older, more established ones, like AmberQuill, are closing for good.  Others, including Samhain, have drastically cut back on the releases per week.  Since half of what they sell is novella-length ebook smut, it’s something of a surprise to me, but it could be the market for that genre is shrinking.  I checked out what was on Siren and the quality of what was on offer was way below the material they offered even 3 years ago.  I almost never read smut anymore myself, except for a few of the funny authors.  Meanwhile, Gemma Halliday’s light mystery/romance publishing effort is going strong, but some of her ‘new author’ releases are just awful lifeless junk reading while others are OK to good.  She needs a much better editor to approve manuscripts, yet some are really good and her $0.99 specials encourage folks to get books a try.

Romance, especially historical romance, cozy mystery, and even UF/paranormal are also seeing serious cuts in books released – print publishers are quick to cut any series that does not sell up to a certain level no matter how loyal the readers.  That makes it hard for authors to build readership through word of mouth, a generally slow process.  I just read the latest Jenn McKinley Hat Shop book (reviewed below) and found that like too many other ‘bankable’ authors, she’s spread too thin over too many series and the quality is suffering.  On top of that Alyssa Day is delaying her Dead Eye paranormal mystery books from SilverHart Publishing due to family issues and two other series disappeared (one historical mystery, one UF) and the authors had to write and publish their final books through services like CreateSpace.

Then Barry Eisler, with a new female lead thriller in what might be first in a new series is staying in Amazon’s playhouse.  He seems to have passed his zenith as an author and is now coasting on a shrinking fan base – or trying to get the best of both worlds – more money/book, but fewer buyers.  I just bought his new release on sale for $0.99 as an ebook while the print is going for $14+ in hardcover.  That’s not a lot of bank for the author or publisher – Amazon’s Mercer division.

There’s no question that self-promoting is a huge deal for authors as publishers put out less money for advertising and promoting books.  It can consume so much of an author’s time they lose their fan base by not writing.  Kaylana Price is a perfect example if that, plus that was compounded by health issues.  Her lastest in the Grave Witch series is over 3 years late, which for a mmpb is a LIFETIME.  There are various fan conventions and writers and genre association conventions that are ‘must do’ to keep the fan base happy, but I know from experience that kind of thing is a huge distraction from work and the flow of your thoughts.

Most writers I’ve met and seen speak, and it’s only few, seem more extemporaneous than practiced, but breaking your thoughts while writing can often mean taking a long time to get back into the right mindset,  If that happens during an especially key area of a story, you might have a huge rewrite on your hands.  I found most writers friendly and thrilled to meet fans – and it’s kind of fun to meet them.   I enjoy the experience, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of money doing it.  Other fans are the kind who wouldn’t miss a chance at meeting their favorite author and are happy to spend lots of money to travel and stay conventions.  It’s a big business and book signings give authors a shot at a HUGE and loyal fan base – but at a price in their productivity.

Not many authors get to be multi-millionaires like the James Patterson or JK Rowling.  Most toil away for the sheer love of writing and making a living.  A few make a very good living.  A tiny number get rich.  But most keep their day job.  I know how much time it takes me to just do a few thousand words for an RF story installment, or one of these blog entries, and it is not easy.  Creating stories for RF and the gang is harder as I actually need a plot, at least here, all I need is a kind loose theme and opinion.  And we all know what opinions are like!  I spent a career writing technical reports, white papers, and journal articles and believe me, it takes TIME.

So why am I discussing this?  I whine a lot about waiting on books in a series.  It’s not entirely fair, especially since I know better.  Yes, I do prefer quality over quantity.  Am I anxious for the next book?  Of course.  But I also what it to be just as good and just as creative as the first few.  There is nothing more disappointing than an author who writes half a dozen great books and rather than wrap up the series, rides the characters popularity into the ground, slowly losing fans with each book.  An epic fantasy writer was asked why he always stopped at 3 books when his fans wanted more.  His reply was along the lines of he’d rather leave then wanting more than wishing the series would END.  I only wish more authors felt that way instead of milking popular characters till people are sick of them and just stop reading.

So let’s get to the reviews and see what wonders – good and bad – came our way recently.

The First Order is the latest in Jeff Abbott’s Sam Capra series could only have one ending.  That was obvious from the beginning.  Still, I had been hoping for a better thrill ride along the way. Abbott does deliver plenty of twists and turns in his plot using Seaforth, an old CIA contact of Sam’s as a key character.  Mila, becomes equal parts friend and foe as a hidden group, the ones responsible for Sam spending time in a black site prison, starts pulling strings of plots within plots.

This story centers on Sam’s hunt for Danny, his older brother supposedly killed by terrorists in Pakistan – but apparently still alive.  Who and what Danny has become is obvious from the outset, but with each bother getting betrayed by the very people that supposedly support them, it is obviously headed for disaster.

The ending was about the only way Abbott could end the book given Danny’s character.  That was obvious early on, but it was still a good read with an interesting conclusion as hidden powerbrokers get exposed.

I’m giving The First Order a B- (3.7*) as a good, but not a great read.  Fans should make note, unlike the other books, this one was written in the third person.  Some prefer that, some do not.  It did not affect the quality of the story ar all and given the larger cast, was probably his best choice.  At nearly $18 in print and $14 in ebook, borrow this one from the library or wait for a cheap used copy.  No urgency here.  Purchased from an online book store.

**************************************

Another of Jenn McKinley cozy mysteries, the Hat Shop books have been one of her better series, but I found Copy Cap Murder predictable.  I like her characters and a lot of other things, but I knew who would die, who would be implicated, and who was guilty by page 50.  When I can essentially write the book in my head, that’s not good news.

Yes, I realize cozy mysteries have limited scope and drama, but even Agatha Christie wrote better puzzles just by creating wonderful characters.  Unlike Ellery Queen, who did Byzantine puzzles and dared readers to solve the crime by presenting all the clues, she did character studies, an art that seems lost with today’s cozie writers.  And I am suffering from Jenn McKinley fatigue.

The murder takes place at a Straw Man burning at Harrison’s boss’s mansion when his arch rival at the firm is killed and substituted for the straw man.  Obviously, Scarlette’s love interest is #1 on the suspect list and for some reason, a normally fair police Inspector seems very biased and willing to impede certain discoveries.  The ending was well done and did have a few surprises.

Copy Cap Murder was far better written than A Likely Story and had a much better-developed plot, some drama, and a bit of ingenuity.  The best I can do here is a C+ to B- (3.6*) for the book and a suggestion to wait for a used copy unless you’re a diehard fan unless you can find a good discount off the $7.99 list price.   Purchased from an online book store.

************************************************

OK, the biggest problem here is the book reads like it was drafted by Evanovich but written by someone else entirely.  Not a single character in the long-running series stayed fully true to form.  Not one.  In addition to that, Tricky Twenty-Two had many ‘factual’ errors in basic things, like where Ranger’s office was, the building size, and also subtle things, like how Steph saw her relationship with Ranger and the fundamental character of both Morelli and Ranger and even Steph’s mother.  It was a reflection in a fun-house mirror – distorted.

As usual, Steph and Lula had their escapades with the ‘Bacon Bandit’ – anyone recall the naked guy who smeared his body with Vaseline?  Yeah, me too.   And Gobbles – a Rider College student who is FTA and his protective frat brothers, a nutty professor, and Dean of Students with a giant grudge supposedly assaulted by Gobbles.  Morelli breaking up with Steph after sex with nothing but, “We should date other people.”  I was surprised to find that by page 55, I had laughed just once.  In fact, I was bored and annoyed.  And became more and more convinced she’s either lost it, her editor quit, or she’s hired a ghost writer.

Naturally, after the highly unlikely plot unfolds (This was less believable than the giraffe running down a main street in Trenton.) and Steph gets in the middle of what could biological warfare (yeah, seriously) we end with – a you guessed it! – car explosion!  (I know, done so often it’s not even amusing anymore.)  Oh, and Mrs Plum tackles the bad guy.  Well, there’s a groundbreaking change.

Tricky Twenty-Two will be hard for old fans to take.  I began reading this series when she published her first book. now I stopped buying them and wait to get a copy from an online book swap site.  I am beyond glad I did NOT waste money on this.  Yes, it was past time for her characters to evolve, but this was not character evolution, it was complete personality transplants.  Tricky Twenty-Two gets a D+ (2.4*) and a strong suggestion to real fans to go reread and enjoy books 1-8.  If you MUST read this get it free.  I’ll pass my copy on fast.

*****************************************

This is one of the better entries in Ms Painter’s Nocturn Falls paranormal romance series.  The Vampire’s Fake Fiancée has a rather predictable start with Sebastian Ellingham, the eldest, most reclusive, and serious of the 3 Ellingham brothers, learning his sort-of-ex-wife who left him 300 years ago is staying in town and wants to reconcile.  To Sebastian, that means, “She wants a LOT more money.”  Unwilling to seem easily available, the sister of the town deputy – and a Valkyrie – librarian is there for a job interview for what seems to be a dream job as head librarian at the local academy.  Much to a sister’s surprise, Tessa agrees to play the role providing it gets her the librarian’s job.  It’s just a couple of days.

Sebastian’s romancing skills, if he ever had any, are long gone, so his businesslike approach makes Tess feel comfortable and she’s rather surprised at how at ease she feels with him.  They have a trial kiss that’s way more than either expected.  And then get in deeper when what was supposed to be a dinner to prove he had another love, becomes a challenge to allow the ex to live in the mansion and watch them to make sure she can’t ‘win’ Sebastion back.

The pacing is quick, the action mostly light and humorous, and the selfish, self-absorbed ex turns out to want something else entirely than Sebastian.  The ending was good and realistic and I liked both Tessa and Sebastian and enjoyed watching them get more comfortable with themselves and each other.

For a paranormal romance, I give The Vampire’s Fake Fiancée a B (4*) rating.  I bought the ebook for $4.99 and it was worth it.  Print is $10 and since this is not a keeper kind of book, get it at the library and enjoy!

**********************************************

Gemma Halliday Publishing offered this new release, first in a series featuring female PI, Barb Jackson.  Bubblegum Blonde by Anna Snow is in the same humorous mystery vein as Steph Plum.  It’s a short read, under 200 pages, and it moves fast enough that the many shortcomings get missed.  A few too many.  The it ended with a thud.

First, aside from being prone to the same silly accidents as Steph Plum, I’m not sure I have a clear mental picture of Barb beyond short, busty, blond, and not dumb – though given her actions, I have my doubts.  All the guys but one are hunks, including Tyler Black the detective who apparently falls for her at first sight.  Barb gets hired by

Barb gets hired by he ex-fiancée, Jason King, who is the prime suspect in the murder of the wife of his boss, a powerful agent in town.  Jason swears he was NOT doing the wife (yup, sure), but his jacket and money clip were found in the bedroom.  Barb wants to put the agency on the map for things other than cheating spouses, so she reluctantly accepts.  At this point, her IQ drops and she commits felony illegal entering into the Hastings estate and house to investigate the crime scene because she’s so experienced she’ll find things CSI didn’t!

By golly, she DOES find a hidden compartment in the drawer of a bedside stand – along with a porn DVD.  (Like cops wouldn’t take that!)  Then gets caught my the maid, makes an escape, and gets beaten by a frozen chicken and rips out the seat of her jeans dashing bare butt to her inconspicuous red VW beetle getaway car.  The motel receipts lead her to a small town, a lying night clerk, and a house the victim bought which turns out to be a brothel – one full of hunky guys and horny women.  My goodness, it’s a miracle the police ever solve a crime without her help!  On the way back she gets run off the road and is lucky to live.

OK, just let me say, at this point, the author lost steam and wrapped the book up with a deus ex machina ending that was as improbable as any I ever read.  The bad guy was barely a shadow on the wall, much less a character.  I LOATHE that trick.  It means the author could not think of a plausible way to find the killer.  It’s lazy and insulting to readers.

Oddly enough, this book – short novel – long novella – gets a really high score from Amazon readers.  I am assuming they are not actually mystery fans, just chick lit readers.  Bubblegum Blonde gets a D+ to C- (2.5*) as the first half was almost decent.  Amazon readers give it 5*.  To be honest, it wasn’t worth the $.99 I spent for it.

****************************************

Tom Corcoran is the author of the Alex Rutledge mysteries based in Key West expands his to add Southernmost Aristocratic Investigations featuring his friend Dubbie Tanner and former street person Wiley Fecko in Crime Almost Pays.  They guys share a house and in home office, but Wiley is too soon off the streets to be fully at home in Dubbie’s spare room.  Kim Salazar is a local taxi driver and something of a love interest for Dubbie.  Alex is their friend and sometimes crime scene photographers for the cops who is involved with a homicide detective, the same detective that gets mixed up in what becomes a perfect example of “no good deed goes unpunished.”

It’s Tuesday night and Sloppy Joe’s has as many tourists as always, but Dubbie spots a good looking young woman at the bar who seems to be getting too drunk for what she had – and 3 Hispanic men around her, chatting her up and waiting.  The whole thing looks like they slipped her a roofie.  With the help of the bouncer, Dubbie gets her out and Kim, who was driving that night, helps get her to his place and settled on the sofa.

Morning brings out the nasty side of the woman, Lauren, who thinks everything is his fault and he’s kind of glad to see the back of her – and her multiple passports and the guys who were starting to look more like kidnappers than rapists.  When he sees Harpoon, the bouncer, he learns the 3 men sounded like they were Cuban and from the east end of the island.  Then Lauren leaves money and asks him for his professional PI help and Dubbie and Fecko are butt deep in murder, Cuban military criminals, and a lying client.

Corcoran is a Key Wester, photographer, buddy of Jimmy Buffett, and Mustang enthusiast.  His writing is the classic brisk, PI style of short sentences, quick exchanges, and fast pacing.  If you’ve read his Alex Rutledge books, this is the same style,  He knows Key West inside and out and his knowledge and love for the island with all its warts comes through.  The story has his trademark twists and turns and keeps readers guessing.  The ‘Homeland Security’ agent becomes quite a character himself.  The extra twist at the end is completely unexpected.

I give Crime Almost Pays a solid B (4*) rating.  I broke my cardinal rule on this one and spent $5.99 on the ebook and it was worth is.  I’ve missed Tom Corcoran and classic style of mystery writing.  He is now self-publishing.  Get the ebook if you like classic style PI stories, especially Florida-based ones, despite the price.  Yes, I’m a sucker.  You could try your library, but most won’t carry such a niche author.

************************************************

The last review for this installment and another book I enjoyed more than expected.  I bought the ebook of Boundry Lines at $4.99.  I read book 1 where ‘Lex’ Luther, the sole survivor of an attack on her platoon in the Mideast learns she’s a ‘Boundry Witch’, one who works between life and death.  They’re rare and mostly feared by other witches.  While the local head of the coven tries to be friendly and her one daughter is a close friend to Lex, the other witches are very unwelcoming.  Made worse by the fact that Lex works for Maven, the head vampire in Colorado.

Lex just returns from LA where she tried to learn about her magic (apparently that’s a novella 1.5 or something I missed, so there seems to be story gaps to me) and she immediately notices something seems ‘off’ about the magic in Boulder.  Then there are these unexplained attacks on humans, werewolves being driven to attack the borders, and an ancient creature – somewhere between a land Nessie and worm-snake – and only Lex can kill it, but she needs to heal her mind.

Let’s just say the plot of too convoluted to go into here, but the three key elements are the behavior of the werewolves, the appearance of a long dormant monster, and Lex getting all her memories back so she can fully use her witch powers and the fact that Maven was key to locking down the coven’s powers after a supernatural war between the wolves, vamps, and witches years ago.  And, of course, her niece (a rare magical null) is a piece of the puzzle.

Olsen’s world building sometimes defies logic, but the book was much better than book one, moved key character development along, and began laying more groundwork to flesh out this patchwork world.  Boundary Lines gets a C+ to B- (3.5*) from me and a read if you like Olsen’s work, but it’s not the best UF out there, so a series that can be safely missed.

 

 

 

Ebook Binge – cont’d

Yes, there are actually MORE ebooks to get through. When I binge, I BINGE! And after those football games yesterday (Just kill me now and put me out of my Fantasy football misery.), it was more ebooks or take up drinking something stronger than Fresca.

I hope everyone had a good holiday – or at least one that did not include tornadoes, blizzards, floods, or sleeping in airports or shelters.  The folks in Texas and other parts of the Great Plains and deep South sure have had a rough few days.  Our Christmas felt more like Easter and even though I did not make it to my brother’s this year, we did ‘tele-Yahtzee’ – playing Yahtzee by phone.  It was just as well I was home as I got sick as a dog Christmas night and 2 days later my SIL’s mother landed in the hospital.  Circumstances kept me home and apparently that was a good thing all the way around.  Funny how that happens.

I’m also starting to look for a new laptop or something like the Surface Pro 4.  Kind of pricey on that second option.  And naturally, ANOTHER crown fell out 2 days before Christmas and my dentist was nowhere to be found.  While I had one missing tooth over the holidays and a lovely hole where I am healing from my LAST oral surgery in October, I might just celebrate my New Year with another visit to oral surgeon.  YIPEE!  Then I KNOW my dentist will want a fixed bridge and ……………. dear God, the money makes me faint.  That expense must be handled before new computers of any type.

So solace was found in real Scotch shortbread – yes REAL, all butter so I can fail my bloodwork in January in style.  (Dr T – you will ignore that sentence!!!!!!!  I ate fruit and vegetables and saltines and have no idea why my bad cholesterol is so high!)  Then tele-Yahtzee and ebooks.  Football, my usual drug of choice, is best left undiscussed as I am still in mild shock and very close to the edge of murdering my TV – though what the poor innocent TV has to do with BAD OFFICIALS AND POOR CALLS I’m not sure.  But I seem to have this primal urge to cause it harm.  Dark chocolate covered figs from Spain have helped stabilize me.  Very high therapeutic value.

On the upside, no ebooks were damaged in the process of trying to pacify myself with harmless, entertaining books.  Though the whole ‘entertainment’ thing gets a bit shaky.  Anyway, here we go.

                           

         

We’ll start with the Lucky O’Toole series by Deborah Coonts set in Las Vegas.  Touted as humorous romantic mystery series supposedly similar to the Steph Plum books.  I can tell you they have only slight elements in common – mostly off the charts insanity.  Lucky is a much more complex, competent, mature character – or so it seems at the start, so the hapless fumbling, nutty sidekick, and crazy grandma are out.  Lucky does have a bordello owning mother, Mona, and a competent assistant, Miss P (Miss Patterson) in her job as head of Customer Relations at the swankiest, most coveted casino resort on the strip, the Babylon – and access to complementary Ferrari’s.

There are also numerous downsides.  The author seems attached to using antiquated technology, calls the casino owner ‘The Big Boss’ (yeah, that was original), she all but runs the whole operation and somehow manages to investigate murders when she has perfectly competent staff to handle such things.  Reality never had much to do with Vegas, so readers mostly gloss over all these annoying improbabilities and go along for the ride.  Hey, if Steph Plum can have giraffes running around Trenton, I guess Lucky O’Toole can have the only dinosaur Nextel in the state of Nevada – though one would think an iPhone would be more probable.

If the author’s last name sounds familiar, it should.  Her husband is NY Times best-selling author Stephen Coonts of the Jake Grafton/Tommy Carmelinni action thrillers.  I wonder how many reviews of this series were from his friends?

Anyway, let’s look at the books and keep in mind the highly improbable events in most cozies – and this would be closer to that than real mystery – so it’s like Steph Plum not having grown older during the 20+ years of the series.  (If you wonder why her sister and her kids disappeared, Evonavich had to get rid of them from the stories or they too would be ageless, despite state of the art electronics everywhere.  Robert B Parker made the same choice for his ageless Spencer.  It’s one of the wonders of FICTION.)

Wanna Get Lucky was free for Kindle to I gave it a shot.  Lucky OToole and the Babylon’s new security guy have a mystery to solve when a Vegas ‘working girl’ ends up getting dumped out of the Babylon’s helicopter into the Treasure Island Lagoon and killed.  And someone just ‘happened’ to be there to film it in high resolution.  Then there’s the 400-pound naked man by main staircase, and missing security tapes from certain floors and …….. well, a whole bunch of other stuff.

Lucky inserts herself into the investigation with the help of a very young, very green detective named Romeo.  The fast pace can’t quite cover the many flaws in logic, even for a lightweight mystery, and yes, it is cliché ridden.  If you can suspend your common sense long enough, it’s a decent read, albeit very annoying with its characters right from a TV script – including the female impersonator who is NOT gay and is interested in Lucky.  I will give Wanna Get Lucky a C- (2.8*) because it could have been really good with more attention to reality and fewer borrowed characters from all too familiar movies and TV.  It’s free, so try and see how you feel about it.

Lucky Stiff once again finds Lucky in the middle of a murder, problems with her now former female impersonator boyfriend, a convention of entomologists who bring in thousands of bees, sharks eating a Vegas odds maker with a shifty rep, and everything short of a circus act.  If book one was pushing credibility, this one entered comic book zone with a dose of soap opera thrown in – and if you didn’t see the ‘big reveal’ coming, you have to turn in your Nancy Drew card and promise to never work the Psychic Hotline.

Lucky Stiff had its amusing moments, but in many ways seemed to imitate the worst elements of the Steph Plum books with too much TV show Vegas.  You half expect James Cann to grab someone’s throat.  Anyway, it gets another C- (2.6*) and the same warning as above.  It’s heavy on the angst in parts too.  In fact, that’s true of this whole series.

 So Damn Lucky had a plot so over the top I actually enjoyed it.  You had Area 51, secret psychic warfare studies the government denies, a missing magician, a murder on the loose – or maybe not if Dimitri isn’t dead, boyfriend ‘Teddy’ now with a singing contract thanks to Lucky out on tour, a break in at her condo complex one floor blow her 30th floor unit, a French chef who looks even better than his food tastes – and he wouldn’t mind getting a taste of Lucky, and then there’s the whole, “How do I deal with Vegas knowing who my daddy is?”   Just to make life complete, Teddy shows up in Vegas unexpectedly – and so do his obnoxious parents.

OK, this one is hard for me because I kind of got a kick out of the magicians and the whole Area 51 thing, but you will have one of two reactions – SHE’S INSANE TO LIKE THIS (and many believe I am) to OMG THIS BOOK IS JUNK!  I give So Damn Lucky a B- (3.7*) because of the above points and despite the whole Teddy drama.  Plus I’m a sucker for mysteries involving magicians.

Lucky Bastard is the point at which I started giving up on this series.  Yes, it’s lighthearted fun, but there are just so many romance crisis I can stand before I hit a wall.  This is one of the problems with binge reading a series, the flaws leap out and start choking you.  Lucky’s waffling attraction to men in a kind of serial monogamy with no serious timeouts between them left me wondering how shallow she was.

Lucky O’Toole’s murder du jour is a body on the hood of a Ferrari on the showroom floor stabbed in the neck with the heel of her own Jimmy Choos – bringing a whole new meaning to ‘blood red sportscar.’  Lucky’s first thought was, “Where’s the other shoe?”  Then she learns the woman in question, well, DEAD woman in question, is actually the wife of one of the men who had been pursuing her since book 1 – former Babylon security man, undercover Gaming Commission Agent, now PI and partners with the Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock, Paxton Dane.  (Yeah, it really is that convoluted.)

Enter Detective Romeo, Lucky’s go to homicide cop who is showing the kind of growing as a character that makes his passingly interesting.  Too bad he’s always a bit player.  And the fact that Sylvie was cheating in the Babylon’s poker room, knew both the security code and the secret password to enter the Ferrari dealership after hours, and told Dane she had to speak with him about something urgent …………….. ok, we are now in ‘this is getting silly’ territory. Oh, and even though Lucky is moving on from Teddy to Jean-Charles, the famous gourmet chef The Big Boss hired, but is pissed at Dane (whom she rejected) for not telling her all about his marriage.  (All together now – EYE ROLL!)

Unlike So Damn Lucky, Lucky Bastard wanders in the personal wilderness of Lucky’s life and the mystery kind of just bobs and weaves in and out of her story.  And that’s my problem.  The books are half women’s fic romance/humor and half mystery and billed as the ‘Heartfelt Series’.  Being neither fish nor fowl, they probably appeal more to romance and romantic suspense lovers than mystery lovers.  Not a good genre for me to binge read after having finished the Savannah Martin series that fell into the same emotional quagmire, but with less humor.

The Lucky Bastard murder is not complex or exciting, but the surrounding endless distractions make it seem more than it is.  And how anyone can be responsible for largely running the biggest casino resort in Vegas AND have time to play amateur detective baffles me completely, especially since her only professional help is a PI and very young police detective is beyond comprehension.  Pacing is fast and if the lack of a real mystery plot and reality don’t bother you, it’s a decent read   I gets a C- (2.7*) from me.

We have now reached Lucky Catch – and in case you’re wondering, here’s the tally to far – Book 1, clear The Big Boss, book 2, clear the Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock, book 3, no close associate blamed (PHEW), book 4, clear Dane, book 5, clear new boyfriend Jean-Charles and his sister Desiree.  (And book 6, not reviewed here because I got fed up, clear Teddy, the ex-lover, who is back in Vegas.)

Romantic French chef, a renowned restaurateur, and new boyfriend Jean-Charles is the lead suspect in the death of his brother-in-law’s conniving mistress who helped him run J-C’s high-end food truck where chef tested potential new food offerings for yet to be opened restaurant at the completely rebuilt Athena – soon to be Cielo and run by Lucky.  (By the way, this will be fastest rebuild in the history of all hotel renovations.)

 Romeo focuses on the spurned wife – a wife with someone trying to sabotage her ultra high-end food supply company that specializes in truffles.  (Not the chocolate ones, the fungus ones.)  Too bad he did think to look closer to home ………….. Jean-Charles’ late wife.

You get a fair smattering of the ins and outs of behind the scenes food supply for top end eateries and enough French drama to fill several foreign language film festivals.  You know, the smoldering, moody, self-sacrificial, tragic crap.  Had this been a paper book, it would have gotten pitched against the wall about half way through.  I have no intention to wrecking my laptop for a cheap ebook, no matter how badly I wanted to stick a knife through the screen.  GAH!  The weakest entry in the series, (until book 6) with enough melodrama to fuel a month of soap operas.  Lucky Catch gets a D+to C- (2.5*) and read only if you’re following this series for the romance, not the mystery.

**************************************************

 I received The Dirt on the Ninth Grave as an ARC ebook and hoped against hope that Darynda Jones would manage to set the story back on track after the ridiculous ‘amnesia’ ending on Eighth Grave.  You have no idea how hard I was pulling for Charley and Reyes.  SIGH!  I feared I was doomed to disappointment.  I was right and man, does that make me sad.

The Dirt on the Ninth Grave finds the still amnesiac Charley waiting tables at a diner in Sleepy Hollow, NY.  Yes, THAT Sleepy Hollow.  (It’s a scenic real town on the east side of the Hudson just north of Tarrytown where Sleepy Hollow author, Washington Irving, lived.)  Eye roll.  Reyes is now the cook there, Cookie, her PI business associate and best friend, a waitress, Detective Uncle Bob – all with obvious variations on their names and none willing to tell her about her past because she must remember on her own.  No, I am not making this crap up.  Oh, if you’re worried about Beep, the newborn from Eighth Grave, don’t bother.  Mr Wong has that handled.  Well eventually he was going to do SOMETHING.

We labor through pages of Charley seeing ghosts but not getting freaked out, serving coffee, food, and getting it on with handsome cook Ray.  And after several hundred pages, the evil demon inhabiting the body of the man who tormented Reyes and his sister comes back and kidnaps her and yes, hauls her off to a spooky house.

I will not tell you how she gets her memory back, but let me just say it ranks up there with Christina Henry’s Black Wings series ending with “Mother’s awake.”  Oh, she’s not at all freaked out about Beep being cared for elsewhere.  Not a single tear.  But she’s hot for Reyes.

OK, you’ll have one of two reactions – series lovers will LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book.  People retaining some semblance of sanity will go WTF?  Yeah.  The ‘most powerful being in the universe’ not only got amnesia but is OK with her newborn being raised by strangers and ready to make out with Reyes after once again turning the tables at the last minute.  I simply cannot reconcile the contradictions in the supposed powers of the characters and the pedestrian troubles that they should easily fixed.  The rationals don’t mesh and the baby gets whisked away because it will hinder the romance angle.  Whisked away from ‘the most powerful being in the universe’ because ‘others’ can keep him safer – DOES NOT COMPUTE.  These persistent contradictions in logic just cannot be ignored.  ……….. Let me amend that.  I cannot ignore them.  Apparently fans have unlimited tolerance for such things.

Long sigh.  Time to wrap this up Ms Jones.  You’re pushing the plot well past the sell by date.  I will be a contrarian and give Ninth Grave a C- (2.7*) and acknowledge in advance I will be hated by CD fans everywhere.  The hardcover is very overpriced even at a discount given the short length of the book.  The ebook is insanely over-priced as well.  It does have better verve than Eight Grave, but not enough for me to overlook the basic flaws in logic.  If you’re a serious, SERIOUS fan, buy it.  If Eighth Grave put you on the fence – get it from your library for free or wait for a used book discount in a couple of months.  Regardless, spend as little as possible.

***********************************************

Alyssa Day is famous for her paranormal romance books featuring Atlantis and an alternate version of our world where vampires attempted a takeover of the US.  In this hybrid reality, in modern Florida swamp country mystery, Dead Eye, Tess Callahan runs a pawn shop half of which she inherited from her former boss and father figure, Jeremiah Shepherd – a man who was murdered some months earlier.  The other half of the shops and Jeremiah’s house and personal belongings went to his nephew Jack Shepherd.  Jack left Dead End 10 years ago and was involved in the vampire wars.  Now he’s back and looking to just settle his uncle’s estate …………… until he learns Jeremiah didn’t just die, he was murdered and Tess has a tiger shifter by the tail.

Tess has a gift too.  One she’d rather not have.  She can ‘see’ a person’s death when she touches them or they touch her skin.  It doesn’t happen every time, but enough that she doesn’t touch folks.  Like witches and shifters, such gifts are not uncommon in Dead End.  Jack makes himself at home all too fast and decides to ‘get this over with’ and touches Tess.  She realizes he’s already ‘died’ – kind of a first for her.  She also learns that he was one of the two top people leading the rebellion.  Jack is also a really nice guy – but bossy.

Dead Eye is a bit different from Day’s usual trope, it’s more in the UF/paranormal mystery mash-up category like Sookie Stackhouse.  Although it is tangential to her other series, you do NOT need to have read them to follow this book as works as the start of a new a different series, but it does help to fill in the background.  The series will carry on more in the UF/paranormal mystery series with the Jack and Tess romance angle.  The plot, unfortunately, was obvious and the characters, especially Tess, lacked depth.  It just came off shallow on all key elements.  There was a sense of deja vu because the characters and dialogues and plot were so familiar it felt trite.  Much as I wanted to really like it, it was too cliché, including the corrupt town sheriff.  It gets a C (3*) rating and for Alyssa Day fans, buy or borrow the ebook.  It’s much too short to justify the price of the print copy.  A miss-able series, but fun for those who like paranormal mystery in the Sookie Stackhouse style, just shorter.

*****************************************

 Here is my best advice to fans if the Miss Fortune series by Jana DeLeon – RUN AWAY NOW!  DO NOT LOOK BACK!  DO NOT SPEND ONE DIME ON THIS TRIPE!  This whole Sinful World novella craze has spawned some real garbage and but this one – good grief.  You want an example of how allowing other authors to write stories set in a world you created can go wrong – here is the perfect example.  Some of the Sinful World novellas have been good, most mediocre, one other awful, but this was Outer Limits Meets Sinful and almost singlehandedly trashed the series.

I understand that many of these novellas are little better than fan fic.  OK, that’s fine.  I remember back when multiple author series were all the rage in sword and sorcery fantasy and yes, different authors perceived the same character very differently.  But there is a HUGE difference between accomplished authors writing stories using common ‘worlds’ and characters from amateur hour in ebook-orama.  Sinful Science is almost a criminal offense.  A not believable overlay of poorly thought out science fiction/horror using characters who behave totally out of character, banal dialogue, and a plot that’s little short of an insult to both science fiction/horror fans and Sinful fans alike – and even managed to throw in shapeshifting swamp rat Federal Agents at the end.  I can’t believe I just wrote that.  I think I need to bleach my brain.  My WTF gauge just exploded.

Can you guess my rating?  Yes, Sinful Science gets an F (0*).  A rare and not at all coveted award.  I’m confident this author writes far better pieces than this, I just wish she refrained from inflicting this insane mashup of Outer Limits/Twilight Zone/Sinful on Sinful fans.  If I want to read Dystopian or horror, I’ll grab Sandman Slim or one of the other many UF/paranormal/horror mashups available.

*********************************************

OK, I think I’ve aborted my near cranial meltdown and can manage one more ebook novella review – another entry in Thea Harrison’s Elder Races paranormal romance series.  Pia Does Hollywood is book 2 in a novella series that started with Dragos Goes to Washington.  In this, a pregnant Pia is required to go spend 1 week as a guest of Queen of the Light Fae, who seems oddly anxious to put the timing off.  But Pia is pregnant and unwilling to wait and risk exposing her condition.  Dragos plans to skirt the rules that forbid him to go with Pia by going to CA on his own and staying up the coast to be near.

But Pia sees a problem as soon as she arrives, it’s high security and watchfulness by the Light Fea that has Pia’s own bodyguards on edge.  Dragos arrives early thanks to a favor from a djinn and flies out to grab some fresh fish before heading to Rodeo Drive.  A spectacular necklace, bracelet, and earring catch his eye.  But when he announces himself, the usual sudden appearance of owners doesn’t happen, just a confused and near hysterical sales woman.  Something is obviously wrong as she explains how Light Fae have been disappearing.  But he’s Lord Dragos Culebre, so he takes the jewels, tells he to stay secure and send the bill to his NYC office and goes to investigate.  He finds packs of rabid, mindless Light Fae who attack and try to kill him despite his fire.

Pia is struck by the fact the Light Fae queen and her whole household is armed as if they expect a massive assault.  It seems some infection has struck, perhaps deliberate bio attack, the Light Fae.  Only Dragos, who arrives at the mansion in a stolen vehicle – and he’s been bitten by an infected Fae.

Ms Harrison, who is quite capable of drawing out a slender story to a tedious novel length, manages to write excellent novellas.  Funny how the shorter format seems to bring out the best in some authors and the worst in others.  She managed to create enough plot for a decent book into an excellent, tightly written, action-packed novella.  Pia Does Hollywood is not at all what I expected, but it was actually much better and gets a B+ (4.3*) and suggested read along with Dragos goes to Washington.

With that, I will wrap the ebook binge and hopefully get back to print books for my next entry.  As I sit writing this and watching the end of the Alamo Bowl (which became quite exciting in the second half), I want to wish you all Happy New Year and Good Reading in 2016!