Showing posts with label murder mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murder mystery. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith aka Joanne Rowling


Rating: WARTY!

I had no interest in reading JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, but when I learned that she was writing private dick stories under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith which happens to be my real name (no, I'm kidding), I decided to see what she was up to. I was a big fan of the Harry Potter series, which were full of plot holes, but very entertaining reading, and while I realized that this novel would be nothing whatsoever like that, I was curious to see how she would tackle a non-fantasy work for grown-ups. All my reading has suggested she has no intention whatsoever of going back into fantasy, so if you want to continue to read Rowling, you have to take this stuff, or go without!. Having attempted to read (or more accurately, listen to) the first of the series, I have decided I'd rather go without. I made it about twenty-five percent in an abandoned it as a lost cause.

This audio book was read badly by Robert Glenister, which didn't help. The main character, saddled with the absurd name of Cormoran Strike, is supposed to be from Cornwall, but Glenister's impersonation of him was literally all over the map, and very little of that meander was in Cornwall. His voicing of the other characters left much to be desired, too. Even looking past this, to the actual writing however, you can see that it's not ready for prime time in the adult world. Rowling's overblown prose, which worked so well in Harry Potter and was charming and amusing to read, is out of place here and bogs the story down. This needed to be a lot tighter and more dynamic.

The author has brought not a thing to the genre that's new. Down at heel investigator? Check. Too-perfect super-efficient assistant? Check. Suicide that's really a murder? Check. This dick is the last option for the grieving relatives? Check. Why would I want to read this un-inventive boilerplate story? It's all been done before.

On top of this, Rowling seems to have a poor opinion of the British police forces. They're a bunch of clueless losers and screw-ups, it would seem. A celebrity falls to her death from her apartment (aka flat in Britain), a man is seen on the street, running from the scene. A neighbor sees a man fleeing the building after an argument, and yet the police rule it a suicide without a second thought? I call a huge steaming pile of bullshit on that one!

I feel bad for Rowling for being in the position of trying to write other stuff after the run-away success she had with Potter. It's an unenviable position to be in, so kudos to her for trying, but what's with the pseudonym? Everyone knows its her, so there's no secret here. I could have seen the benefit of choosing a pseudonym if she moved from children's fantasy to adult-oriented fiction and wanted to segregate her first foray from what went before, but since she already put out very adult-oriented fiction under her own name before this series began, why suddenly take a pseudonym? It made no sense to me. I hereby vow that I, Robert Galbraith, will never adopt a pseudonym. I'm kidding again. I'm not really Robert Galbraith. Really.

Seriously, I can't recommend this novel based on what I heard of it.


Friday, February 12, 2016

Seven Dials by Anne Perry


Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with Agatha Christie's The Seven Dials Mystery, this novel is named after a location in Covent Garden, London, where seven streets converge. It's the twenty-third in the Pitt detective series by Anne Perry, aka Juliet Marion Hulme, who served five years starting in 1954, when when she was fifteen, for helping her friend Pauline Parker brutally murder Parker's mother. A Murder mystery written by someone who has actually murdered! I didn't realize this when I started reading (or actually, listening to) this novel. I mistakenly thought that this author was the one who wrote The Accidental Tourist, but of course that was Anne Tyler! Oops!

As it happened, the novel really wasn't very good. I only made it to the half way point, and that was by skimming and skipping about sixty percent of the first half. I started listening with interest. I thought the crime was a good one to investigate, but this novel took so many digressions and rambling asides into pointless drivel that I tired of it very quickly. It didn't help that reader Michael Page, while doing fine with male voices, sounded like a Monty Python sketch when he tried impersonating cantankerous dowager aunts.

One of the worst failures is that an obvious possibility for a murder motive was completely ignored. Obviously I don't know if that turned out to be the actual motive, but it seemed to me that there were two options here, and neither was voiced, not in the portion to which I listened anyway. The first of these is that the victim was lured there deliberately by a third (or actually, a fourth in this case!) party for the express purpose of murdering him. The second possibility was that the victim was actually 'collateral damage' from an attempt by the fourth party to murder the third. The fact that this detective never even considered these possibilities made him look inept at best, and like a moron at worst.

Almost as off-putting: the detective's boss was a complete caricature, and all of his scenes with the main character were nauseatingly bad. The reader's tone may have contributed to how bad these were, I have to add. That's one of several problems with audio books - you get their take on it, not your own! And what's with the whiny violin music at the start of these disks? When you opened the original print novel, did violins spew forth? I seriously doubt it, so where are the heads of these audio book morons at, that they feel compelled to add music? Get a life you guys!

This novel takes place - as far as I can gather, during or after 1883, by which time the use of fingerprints had already appeared in an 1883 novel (by Mark Twain), yet never once is the consideration of using fingerprinting raised in order to see who had handled the gun used in the murder. So, along with other problems I had with it, this novel was sad and I am not interested in reading any more by this author. I cannot recommend this one.


Wednesday, February 3, 2016

The Body on the Beach By Simon Brett


Rating: WARTY!

This one I picked up from the library on spec. It's book one of "The Fethering Mysteries", Fethering being the quaint English village in which the mysteries are found, but given how tiny the village is, I find it had to believe a whole series can reasonable be conjured from it, and having listened to one disk of this, I decided I certainly had no interest in a series on the topic.

The novel was published in 2000, but it reads like it was written in the fifties. The main character was quite simply unlikeable. Whether she's in the entire series, I don't know, but she's not someone I'm interested in, although to the author's credit, she's an older woman and not some air-headed, cupcake-baking, superficial busy-body which topic seems to have become quite the trend of late. This audiobook was read by Geoffrey Howard, and it was a bit tedious to listen to. If you imagine the perky guy who used to read the old Pathé News films, but having a really tragic day, that's how this one was read.

The story is that this woman is out walking her dog and encounters a dead body on the beach apparently washed up by the tide. She returns to her house (evidently she has no cell phone) and instead of calling the police at once, she washes her dog, then cleans her kitchen, then calls the police, by which time the body has disappeared. Shortly after he skeptical police leave, a strange and possibly drug-abusing woman appears at her door with a gun, threatening her to say nothing more about the body, before fleeing the house when someone else knocks at the door. How this second woman even knew where to find the first is a mystery, but the first disk was as far as I wished to go, so maybe some of that mystery is unveiled later. This was not for me, and I certainly can't recommend it based on what I listened to .


Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie


Rating: WARTY!

This is one of three novels by Agatha Christie that I intend to review this year, the other two being Murder on the Orient Express, and Cat Among the Pigeons. I enjoyed all three of these in the ITV television series starring David Suchet as the consummate Hercule Poirot, but my experience with the novels was not the same. This one I really did not care for. It was boring. Note that I already favorably reviewed Christie's The Unexpected Guest in July of 2013, and Thirteen at Dinner in November of 2014.

The murder doesn't take place until about half way through the story, so the entirety of the first half is prologue. I'm not a fan of prologue! Some of it plays into the story, but most of it seemed to be nothing more than Christie running off at the mouth painting character studies and contributing nothing to the plot at all. It was awful. The same could have been achieved with two or three short chapters.

This saddened me, because this particular audio book was read by David Suchet, and he did an excellent job. I had never heard his real voice until this novel! But the tedium, particularly of the interactions between the girls in the opening chapter, was deadening. I detested each and every one of those women and had no issues with any of them being bumped off!

The story was highly formulaic in quintessential Christie manner. She cannot write a travelogue story without having her stock characters. These consist of several Brits, including a young woman and an old crotchety woman, a couple of Brit guys, and then there are "the foreigners" which always consist of an American, an Italian, and at least one other foreigner, preferably French or German. In addition to this there is the trope Christie ending which improbably gathers all of the characters together at the end so he can lord it over them with his brilliance. This, for me, was the most irritating part of the TV series, and it was so unrealistic as to be ridiculous. Seriously, would all of these people put up with this every episode, including the murderer? Not on your nelly!

Poirot is actually in danger of being charged with impeding a police investigation, too, since he has knowledge which leads to the arrest of the perp, but which he inevitably conceals until the last minute, and the police inexplicably indulge him every time! In this case, there were no police, just Poirot and some high-up in the Brit consulate or something, I forget which from the TV show, and I didn't listen far enough to meet him in the audio book. The essential plot is that a woman introduces her fiancé to a Lady who isn't so much a Lady as a spoiled brat. She steals the man and marries him, and the jilted woman takes to stalking the happy couple including following them on their honeymoon to Egypt. No one thinks to ask how this impoverished woman could afford a vacation to Egypt and a cruise on the Nile. If they had, they might have rooted out the killer earlier.

The new bride is found shot, and witnesses are being bumped off left, right and center before Poirot figures it out. There are the usual Christie red herrings, of course. All in all it's a bit improbable, but not a bad story in the TV version. The written version not so much. I can't recommend it.


Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie


Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of three novels by Agatha Christie that I intend to review this year, the other two being Death on the Nile and Cat Among the Pigeons. I enjoyed all three of these in the ITV television series starring David Suchet as the consummate Hercule Poirot, but my experience with the novels was not the same. This one I really liked, though. Note that I already favorably reviewed Christie's The Unexpected Guest in July of 2013, and Thirteen at Dinner in November of 2014.

This one contains many of the tropes Christie routinely employed in her detective stories, including the usual array of foreigners: one Italian, one American, one French or German, and assorted Brits. It includes the young good looking guy, the young good looking girl, and the old crotchety woman. There is also the stock Christie signature ending whereby Poirot gathers all his suspects together at the end and slowly eliminates each until the murderer is identified. This to me is the weakest link, because none of these people would put up with this, and the police certainly would not. Fortunately for Poirot, the audience is already captive aboard the train, and there are no police here, only an official from the railroad. The role of official is usually played by a police officer, but there are other people who act as stand-ins, such as government officials. Here it's the railroad guy who lends Poirot authority as an agent of the railroad.

This story is so old that you very likely know the outline if not the filler, so I'm not going to launch into a detailed review here. The basis is that a truly bad man is traveling on the Orient express with a large assortment of other people. The express is full, which is unusual for the time of year. Poirot has encountered some of the passengers before he gets on the Orient Express, and meets many more aboard. The train hits a snowdrift and is stuck for several days. The night the snowdrift is encountered, the bad guy is bumped off, and Poirot naturally takes it upon himself to solve the crime. He has a harder time of it here than he usually does because of the nature of the death.

The victim was traveling under a false identity. He was stabbed twelve times, but the stab wounds offered no consistency: some were violent and deep, while others were shallow and weak. Some appear to have been delivered left-handed, whereas others were right-handed. There were some 'clues' which appeared to be false, whereas others appeared to be real, and the result of mistakes made by the perps(s).

The passengers are interviewed one by one, and Poirot slowly picks away at their stories until the rather unusual truth is revealed. I liked this story and the characters, and I recommend it.


Saturday, December 5, 2015

Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark


Rating: WARTY!

Read somewhat annoyingly by Carol Higgins Clark, this novel failed to launch, which is sad because it's the first of about four Christmas novels I intend to review this month. I hope the others are better!

Apparently it's something of a tradition for this pair of family members to write a Xmas novel together, and after this I'm thinking that tradition ought to die a natural death under the snow, allowing something fresh and different to spring up next year in its place. This is the second novel I've read that the mom had a hand in, and I'm done with Higgins Clark stories at this point.

This one featured two kidnappers - whose names we knew from the off, so no mystery there - who kidnap the husband of a successful novelist, knowing she can well afford the million dollar ransom. One of the kidnappers is so puerile as to be a joke. It's not remotely possible to imagine that the other guy would ever trust him with something like this - and of course he screws up royally. The kidnappers are so dumb that they follow the plot of one of the writer's novels exactly, yet the police are too stupid to predict what will happen next despite this.

Not that any of the other characters are any more realistic. They're flimsy caricatures, every bit as cheap and nasty as the tinsel and baubles which bedeck a evergreen fir tree at this time of year. They undergo no development. Any one of them could be substituted with a different character and the story would have worked just as badly. The story is larded and puffed up with tedious extraneous detail. These two writers can't introduce a character without describing their hair and age - nothing else, just hair and age! How and why is that ever relevant?! Talking of which, the title of this novel bears no relation whatsoever to the story, which could have been set at any time of the year. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Xmas. The overall impression I got was that this was essentially nothing more than a mercenary attempt to cash in on seasonal excesses, and I can't recommend it.


Friday, November 27, 2015

Chasing Shadows by Swati Avasthi


Rating: WORTHY!

The author's name, we're told in the fly leaf, is pronounced SWA-thee Of-US-thee. The author was born in in India, but now lives in the USA. I find myself wondering, given that none of the native Indian languages uses the English alphabet, why her name isn't spelled phonetically. Why spell it in a way that necessitates either a phonetic spelling or a wrong pronunciation?! I've never understood that kind of thing when words are translated from languages which do not use anything remotely like the western alphabets. Life, it seems to me, would be a lot simpler for all of us if more thought was put into making it easier on ourselves!

In this context, one of the main characters is named Savitri, and again, it's not spelled how its pronounced. Interestingly, for a novel about three main characters, her name is pronounced like it's 'savvy three', but that's ruined when Holly, one of the other characters, shortens it to 'Sav'. Maybe this is on purpose, because it sounds like the way Americans pronounce 'salve'. Is Savitri going to be Holly's salve when things go bad? You'll have to read this to find out. The ending wasn't at all what I had been expecting, but it was a really good ending. Although this kind of thing is exactly the kind of word play in which I like to indulge myself in some of the things I've written, somehow I don't get the impression that this is what was going on here.

This novel is about friendship and about the psychology of loss, and about free-running or parkour. The free-running could also be taken as a metaphor for the ups and downs of friendship, and it was this panoply of opportunity and ideas which attracted me to this novel. It also has an Indian character written by an Indian author, which is another attraction for me. I find it hard to believe that authors do not include more Asian characters in their work given how huge the Asian population is - half the world! Given that African Americans are a significant component of the USA population and still struggle to get a fair shake, I guess I'm living in dreamland expecting that a community that is seen as being distanced from the US by half a world would get their turn, even though large numbers of them also populate in the USA.

There was one more thing to like about this novel. Although it's largely text, it's also somewhat of a mixed media publication in that it has a significant graphical component - rather like a comic book or graphic novel - which intrudes on the text from time to time. That said, the novel was written in first person PoV which I don't like, and to make it worse, this novel had three main characters, two of which were telling it in their own voice. That doubles the issues you have with only one PoV.

First person PoV is unnatural to me. We're being told that the author is typing-out the story as it happens, which is patently absurd, so we have to understand either that they telling us - narrating it as it happens to them - or they are writing it in retrospect, in which case, they evidently remember every little detail with eidetic clarity down to pinpoint accurate conversations, all with none of the natural modification which memory inevitably molds events. I can't take any of that seriously. Typically if I pick up a book off the shelf in a book store or the library and I see it's first person, I put it right back. Some writers, however, can carry this voice, so every time I find myself stuck with a novel like this, I'm hoping against no hope that this writer can do it without nauseating me or making me resent their self-important main character, and from the way this one started, it seems my wish was granted. In the end, it worked, and for once, worked well provided you were willing to let the absurdity of first person slide by.

Holly Paxton is the daughter of a cop, but this doesn't stop her free-running with her twin Corey and their friend Savitri Mathur across the cityscape of Chicago. These three late teens are (we're told on page six) "Defying the Physical Laws of Gravity." I have no idea what that means! There's only one law of gravity and nothing defies it, not even the birds. The best you can do is learn to work it, which is what these guys are doing, and as the story begins, Holly almost fails to work it. She comes close to missing a jump, and Savitri knows this, but neither Corey nor Holly are willing to consider that she could have died in a forty-foot fall. This near disaster presages the real disaster which is about to befall them.

Savitri and Corey are an item, but Savitri is heading off to Princeton when her high schooling is done, and Corey doesn't know this to begin with, so the story began well with a nice variety of friction from different sources showing up right from the off. Talking of controversy, the twins have a silver Mini Cooper which Corey has named "The Dana" and the author talks of this as though it's exclusively a female name, but it isn't. It's bi-gender. Just saying! In fact, pretty much every name is bi-gender if you're willing to let a few hang-ups go! There's a boy named Sue and there's a man duhh!!

What happens next is that Corey is shot and dies. Holly almost dies, and she and Savitri are left to try and make sense of their world sans Corey. The story that follows from this is beautifully told and unfolds about as close to perfection as you can hope for. The title was perfect! This is really well written, and tells a good and engrossing story. It constantly fooled me because I would think it was going somewhere when in fact it went somewhere else that was at least as interesting. I would have liked it to have gone further than it did in some directions, but I was satisfied with how it moved. Be warned: this is not your usual super hero story!

It wasn't all plain sailing, though. For example, I didn't get why both Savitri and Holly were letting jerk Josh back into their lives. It seemed to me to be unforgivable what he had done, but then it wasn't my call, it was Holly's and Savitri's choice. There was also one instance where Savitri came home from free-running and without washing her hands, immediately launched into helping her mom make roti (chapati). This didn't do Asian cuisine any favors and played right into the hands of any bigots and racists who like to trash foreign kitchen hygiene. Maybe most young readers won't notice this, as probably they won't notice (but they sure as hell should) that a revolver does not have a safety like an automatic does!

The biggest issue though, if I had one, was that what was happening (with regard to the graphical portion of the story) was happening to Holly, yet it was steeped in Indian mythology. I know this author is Indian at her roots, and if it had happened to Savitri, it would have flowed organically, but it didn't make much sense that a westerner who had been raised in different cultural traditions would have experienced what Holly experienced. Yes, she had read comic books about that mythology, but she also read comic books about different mythologies, and she had been raised in an entirely different cultural milieu, so this focus on Indian ritual didn't flow logically. That said, it was still interesting to me, and it was definitely different, so I was willing to let that go and enjoy it for what it was overall: a fun adventure, engrossing and entertaining, and I rate it a worthy read.


Tuesday, November 24, 2015

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation The Interactive Mystery by Sam Stall


Rating: WORTHY!

Come one, come Stall, and indulge in a real murder mystery. Really this is just a regular murder mystery with a few frills tossed in, but once in a while something like this, which you can't really do in ebook form to the same effect, is fun, especially if you do it with your kids (who need to be PG 13 or somewhere around that level of maturity given the graphical elements). The difference between this and your regular murder mystery, is that this novel contains items of evidence, such as a pamphlet of Haiku, a shredded piece of notepaper that you have to put back together, a blueprint of a house, a partially burned flyer, and crime scene photos among other things. It's a large-format hardback that was fun to indulge myself in.

Mr Bledsoe, a gated-living community developer is found shot dead one evening in his luxury home, and the CSI team has to process the various items of evidence. At the same time, another murder victim is found across town and that situation is as different as could be from this rather rarefied and pristine environment. That victim was shot once in the back of the head and then his rathe rlow-rent little home was burned down! Can the team (i.e. you!) solve both crimes? The actual solution - in a rather lengthy info-dump - is given at the end, so you have until then to solve it all!

The crime wasn't that hard to solve. We got most of it - although not all of it - right, and this despite some misdirection and red herrings. Usually I'm hopeless at this kind of thing, so it was nice to feel like I actually had a handle on the case! I liked this and I recommend it. I have another one by the same author that I'll review before long. It's not CSI though; it is a mystery solving story, but it's about a descendent of Dracula!


Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Cracked Spine by Paige Shelton

Rating: WARTY!

erratum: "Young man, would you please some with us?" should read 'come' with us.

The Cracked Spine was an intriguing adult fiction story which I got for advance review purposes. I initially enjoyed it, but as it went on and on, it wore me down and I ended up not liking it, mostly because of the protagonist and the complete lack of rationale for most of her actions. The curious thing about this that there was no blurb available for this novel. It was quite literally a mystery book, and normally I wouldn't pick one up for review without having some idea of what's in it.

This one intrigued me from the cover and the title, and I thought it was a murder mystery set in a book shop. Which person who loves books doesn't like the idea of a novel involving books? Of course not every such novel ends up being even so much as readable let alone lovable. As I began reading this one, it seemed more like some sort of supernatural or sci-fi novel than a murder mystery, but then a murder occurred (and it wasn't in the book shop). In short, it was all over the place.

I failed to grasp the point of bringing the supernatural into the story considering that it played no part in the plot. Additionally, Delaney is supposed to be able to "hear" books speak, and several times we get a hint of her "hearing" a quote from a book - usually Shakespeare - but this made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It played no part in the plot or in resolving the mystery, so I simply didn’t get this at all. It just made her seem in need of some serious psychiatric attention.

So Delaney Nichols is not in Kansas anymore. She's in Edinburgh, Scotland, to take up her new job at The Cracked Spine, an old, small, dusty, disorganized book shop on a narrow street in Edinburgh, Scotland. The shop is odd, but the main character is more odd. She uproots herself from Kansas and flies to start a new job in this obscure little shop in Edinburgh. We're given absolutely no reason whatsoever to justify this flight. Delaney is decidedly odd and not in a good way.

Consider the cataloging system she apparently employs: "It was more than the fact that it might be in the P's for parody. It wouldn't have been that simple, I decided." Who catalogs books by putting them in 'P' for parody? A chain book shop might have a humor section where parody would be, but it would be alphabetized by author. In a disorganized antiquarian shop? And a specific section on parody? No. It was just weird and took me out of my suspension of disbelief for a second or two. A bookstore like this wouldn't have survived with so many employees and so little movement of books. No one actually seems to do any work there.

So ween granting that the owner is old and quirky this cataloging seemed off. It seemed even more off that Delaney would think this way - but then we never do discover why she was hired. The shop itself has too many quirks. On her first brief visit, she meets a young man dressed in Shakespearean costume, who introduces himself as Hamlet. He says he's acting in a local production of Macbeth, although he's too superstitious to use the play's name. Fie on that, say I! Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him who first cries "What if Macduff doesn't want you laying on him?" Well, the rest is silence, so let's not paint the lily.

I digress, but there's an on-line source which purports to correct misspoken Shakespeare, and one of the misquotes is from Richard 3.0, where the titular character says, "Now is the winter of our discontent...." He goes on to finish his assertion by adding, "...made glorious summer by this son of York," except that corrections page itself is incorrect in that it says, "sun of York"! I really enjoyed the irony. Shakespeare is often misunderstood because there's been many a year slipped 'twixt bard and modern lip. Even words we still use have changed meaning.

Moreover, they had a different way of speaking four hundred years ago - of pronouncing words, as the Crystals demonstrate at the Globe Theatre. It puts a whole new sense and sensibility on some of the seemingly obscure things he wrote and the rhymes he apparently didn't make. When you pronounce "Nothing" as "Noting", for example, then "Much Ado About Noting" makes sense given how often that last word is used in the introductory scenes, and how important the act of noting events accurately becomes during the rest of the play.

Do I really digress? Not so much, because part of this mystery centers on the location of a Shakespeare first folio - a new one that has been surreptitiously discovered, the existence of which known only to a local cadre of wealthy friends in Edinburgh. The fact that there are many so-called 'first' folios rather robs them of their cardinal precedence, doesn't it? I mean, only one can actually really be the first. The rest are not to be. That is their destiny.

Edwin, the owner of the book shop where Delaney now works, bought this new folio (maybe the last first folio!), and inexplicably left it in the charge of his previously ne'er do well sister, who inexplicably hides it in a place where it’s inexplicably discovered. Now she's been murdered, no one knows where the folio is, nor why she was murdered. Was it an unsavory character from her addled past, or is it someone who was looking for the folio? And why is Edwin hindering the police investigation into his sister's murder by withholding information about it from the police? Was the folio stolen and if so why would his reputation - or preserving hers - be more important than tracking down his sister's killer? None of this makes sense, nor is it explained.

I found it funny that chapter three ended with a 'five' leading into chapter four: "I didn't wake again until my alarm sounded the next morning at five." But that's just me. It felt like a countdown to something wicked this way coming. It wasn't. It would have been hilarious if it could have somehow been continued, but it was not to be. That's the question?!

As you may have gathered, I had some problems with this novel, the first of which was why the main character suddenly started acting like a detective. She knew no one here. She had nothing to prove and no vested interest in any piece of property or person, yet she immediately and suddenly started acting like a private investigator for no reason. She neglected the job she was hired to do, and pursued the case like a pit bull, yet no one says a word about her behavior! Worse than this, she's unaccountably aggressive and rude without having any reason to be so. It just felt wrong. If you're going to have a character do this, then please at least equip her with a rational motivation for out-of-character behavior! Give her something which spurs her into it - don’t just have her running all over for no reason at all!

In general, the writing was very good from a technical perspective, and for the most part it was readable, despite it being first person PoV. Some authors can do that voice without it being nauseating to read, but this created problems for the author, and it shows. When you write like this you can only tell the story from the PoV of the narrator. If something happens elsewhere, she doesn't know about it and we're set forth upon a sea of details, which by depressing, rends us. It lets slip the dogs of "Bah!" It's no better than a flashback or an info-dump which makes me want to shuffle off the awful tome. As it happens I made it to the end, and discovered it to be a total let-down. The plotting was less than satisfying.

One example was when the police came looking for Edwin, the owner of the book shop and the brother of the murder victim, Jenny. Instead of going to his home, where he might reasonably be expected to be - and in fact where he was - the police came to the book shop though there was no reason whatsoever for them to visit it. Another example is when Delaney goes with Hamlet to the police station. There's no reason for her to do this! Indeed, she's supposed to be working, yet off she goes of her own volition, accompanying one of the shop's part time employees - a teenager she barely knows - without so much as a by-your-leash. For me, her behavior turned her into an insufferable busybody, but the take-home lesson from this is that the author forced herself into adopting this unnatural and annoying behavior for her characters because of her choice of first person voice - the most limiting and restrictive voice you can choose. It felt so unnatural that it took me out of the story. Again.

The only explanation for this behavior is nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with Delaney having to witness things in order to derive something from what she sees or hears. The shop visit could have been explained by having the police say he wasn't at home which is why they were there at the shop, but this didn't happen. It was also weird in that when the two police detectives arrive, they turn out to be a chief inspector and an inspector rather than the usual Inspector and sergeant. Why did such a relatively high ranking officer show up on a murder investigation? There's no explanation offered, so what we're left with is the surmise that this is a case of special treatment because rich people were involved, which speaks very badly of the Scots police force. Did the author intend this insult? Who know - maybe they do things differently in Scotland but this seemed odd to me.

There was some genderist phrasing in the novel, too, such as when Delaney encounters the man who is quite obviously destined to be her male interest: Tom from the pub which shares Delaney's name and is across the street from the book shop. "He was beautiful, but in a manly, Scottish kind of way." What exactly does that mean?! A guy can't be beautiful without it being qualified lest it impugn his manliness or imply that he's gay? Scots manliness is different from other varieties of manliness?! I have no idea what it meant, but it felt like an insult.

Personally I'd prefer it if the character wasn't described in such shallow terms at all whether it's male or female, but if you're going to do it, don't insult people further by trying to make 'beautiful' a word inextricably tied to femininity which consequently requires qualifying if it's used elsewhere. It's like saying, "The castle was beautiful, in an impregnable, granitey kind of way...". Consider the inverse: "She was beautiful, but in a feminine, Scottish kind of way." Does that make any better sense? I think it doesn't. I think it sounds like an insult to Scots women.

A big disappointment was that chances to present Delaney as a strong female character seemed to be frittered away, as in when I read: "I'd had an issue with the warm water in my shower, but Elias said he'd fix it...". Immediately we have to go to a guy. What would be wrong with saying the same thing, but letting Delaney fix it: "I'd had an issue with the warm water in my shower, but I figured it out and fixed it." It's just as easy to write and doesn't make your main female character dependent on some guy for no good reason at all. It supports your position of having her figuring out a crime, because she's showing that she's independent and a self-starter. But Delaney really wasn't. She was never in any peril. She was totally dependent upon men throughout the story, and everything magically fell into place for her: a place for her to stay, free transportation whenever she needed it by means of the friendly cabbie trope, everyone being nice and friendly, and helpful. She wasn't quite a Mary Sue (although she was close), but the plot itself definitely was a Mary Sue.

One issue I could definitely relate to was in how much of the Scots accent a writer should convey in the writing. I wrestled with this problem in my own novel Saurus. Fortunately only one of the main characters was Scots in my case, so I didn't have to have everyone speaking like that all the time, but I can sympathize with a writer who does find themselves in such a position. Do we go full-tilt and risk readers becoming annoyed with the constant 'tae' in place of 'to' and so on? Do we start out full-tilt and slowly reduce the incidence, so the reader only has to deal with it for a short time before it becomes embedded and hopefully they won't notice as we reduce or even eliminate it? Do we only put a hint, or do we simply confine ourselves to referring to the accent once in a while, but not actually depicting it by changing spelling? This author went the 'changed spelling' rout and it became a bit tiresome. It was definitely a lesson for me.

In addition to the changed spelling, there are actual words employed, such as 'ken' which means 'knowledge'. It can be equated with 'know'. Ken is actually a verb, and it has tenses, which is what made this sentence wrong: " Edwin certainly ken what he was doing." That's like writing " Edwin certainly know what he was doing." It should have been "Edwin certainly kenned what he was doing," or "Edwin certainly kent what he was doing." These are issues that most people might not notice (or even care about!) unless they're actually Scots, but for a writer, they're worth keeping in mind. Talking of which, I didn't get this sentence: "Dinnae mynd a bit". I don't know how we're expected to pronounced 'mynd' - is it just the same as the regular spelling, 'mind' or is it supposed to be pronounced 'mean-d' or 'mein-d' or something like? If the pronunciation isn't any different, why misspell it? If it is, why not spell it phonetically?

A big concern I had with this novel was over the stereotyping of the Scots. There's a lot of talk in the novel about drinking and whisky and while, in the UK, Scotland does consume more alcohol per capita than the rest of the country, on a global scale, the Scots fare poorly when it comes to consuming whisky: they're beaten by France, Uruguay, the USA, Australia, Spain, and the UAE. In overall alcohol consumption they're eighth in the world, and when it comes to drinking Scotch, they're not even in the top ten! So the stereotype doesn't hold.

In the final analysis, I found I really didn’t like Delaney and had no desire to read more about her in a series. She’s more of an idiot than an investigator. First of all, as I mentioned, there’s no rational reason offered for why (other than being a royal mile of a busybody) she gets involved in any of this. There’s no justification for her repeatedly skipping work to investigate, and it’s completely ridiculous that she appears to be going out of her way to solve the crime on the one hand, whilst at the same time, she’s actively hampering the police investigation on the other by withholding evidence!

She finds important evidence in Jenny’s apartment in form of torn-up bits of paper with writing on it, distributed in several locations, yet she fails to inform Edwin (even though he’s in the apartment when she finds it). She also fails to inform police of this. The resolution of this is, in the end, unimportant, but when it’s explained, it's given to us wrongly! We're told that one (incomplete) section of it reads, "ut tell him I’m so", yet when it becomes clear what this is, there is no word with 'ut' in it.

Delaney outright lies to the police about the existence of the missing first folio, even though Edwin had said it was okay to tell, if the police asked. In short, she’s actively tripping-up the investigation instead of helping it. A nicer resolution to this tale would have been to have her charged with obstructing a police investigation, but she isn’t, I'm sorry to report. If this had been set-up as a situation where we knew one of the police offers was somehow involved, then her behavior would be understandable, but this is never intimated. In short, it felt to me like she’s simply going through actions by rote, adhering to a regimented sequence to which she held tightly regardless of how stupid or silly it made her appear in doing so. I don’t have time for a character like that and I can’t recommend this novel.

In the end I had too many issues with it to give it a positive review. The main character was bordering on being a Mary Sue, but the real Mary Sue, to me, was the plot. There was really nothing troublesome or problematic in it in terms of obstacles the detective had to overcome.

For example, usually in these detective stories the main protagonist has to be put in some danger, but this one never was, and it seemed like everything was falling into her lap. She got a boyfriend pretty much on the first day, although thankfully that was a very minor element. She made friends with the cab driver who picked her up from the airport, and he then not only became the trope friendly cabbie who takes her everywhere for free, but also the means by which she found housing on her second day there.

The worst thing for me, though, was how much of a busybody she was. Despite just arriving and not knowing these people, and having no vested interest in their issues, she jumped right into the case, neglecting her job, and pretty much taking over the entire investigation. She was withholding vital information from the police, and pushing herself, often rudely, into questioning people and chasing down her "leads". She even withheld information from her employer, whose sister had been murdered.

The right ending to this would have been her being charged with obstructing a police investigation! In the end, the resolution was decidedly mundane. I kept seeing references to the supernatural, mainly to ghosts haunting various places, yet never once did that enter into the actual plot or the story as a whole, so I failed to get what the significance of it was. She also claimed that books talked to her - mainly in the form of quotes from the classics, and most often, in this case, Shakespeare, but this led nowhere. I got the impression it was only in there to set up future volumes.

It wouldn't have been so bad if there had been justification offered for some of the things she did or the things we were told, but there never was. We didn't even get a valid reason for why she upped and left Kansas to fly to Edinburgh to take up this job in a pokey little private book shop in an obscure backstreet in Edinburgh. I was really disappointed. The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential. It is intended to be read only by the individual or entity to whom it is addressed or by their designee. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are on notice that any distribution of this message, in any form, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete or destroy any copy of this message!

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Model Undercover: London by Carina Axelson


Rating: WARTY!

In this outing, teen model Axelle Anderson is in London. This is the second of these that I've read, and though normally - and thoroughly - disdain the fashion industry and fashion consciousness as the most self-absorbed, self-indulgent, abusive and wasteful activities ever devised, I found myself curiously liking the character and enjoying the story in the first volume, even though the title 'undercover model' is really wrong. She's actually an overt model and an undercover detective! There are three volumes published so far. I missed the second volume, so this is only my second outing. it didn't work out very well for me this time. It became obvious pretty quickly what the mystery was (hint: twins), yet the "detective' didn't even consider this forever, which spoke badly to her smarts.

The hardest thing for me to read in this series is the frequent mention of fashions, but I found in the first volume that if I ignored that, I enjoyed the rest of the story. This one didn't start out well, and the sad YA tropes started thick and fast, such as flecks of gold in the male's eyes: "...eyes (brown, with flecks of greengold..." Yes, 'greengold' is now a word! But seriously, can we get away from this flecks of gold nonsense? It's so tired now that it needs to be retired. I think maybe the 'greengold' was an accident because in the kindle app edition I read on my phone, I noticed there were quite a few such pairs of words run together. It seemed to be primarily where the word pair would normally have a hyphen between, and perhaps the conversion process to the Kindle format had missed a hyphen here and there? An example of this was in " state-of-theart", and this same phrase was used just a few paragraphs later with the hyphenation correct, so exactly what the problem here was, I can't pinpoint. The greengold eye disease revisits later: " I could see flecks of gold flickering in his eyes."

The chaptering was also messed up. I don't know if the original had dropped caps, but in the Kindle app version it had dropped lines! For example, if the sentence at the start of the chapter began, say, "As we quickly hurried for the train...", the Kindle app version would have the first letter 'A' on one line, the second letter (s) on the next line, and then the rest of the sentence on the third line. There were no screen-breaks between chapters, either; they just followed pell-mell after one another on the same screen as the previous chapter. It looked messy. This was an advance review copy which doesn't excuse shoddy presentation in this electronic age, but hopefully these flaws will be fixed before the final edition is released.

Some of the gaffes were amusing. This phrase belongs in the glossary of misheard song lyrics: " Thorough route aside," I think the author may have meant to write "Though that aside." How you would get what we did get from that, I don't know unless the word processor is doing automatic correction, or the text was being dictated, which in this case wouldn't surprise me.

In a similar vein, I read, "...a small pavilion in the far left corner of the Palace of Westminster caught my eye. I hadn't seen it before- it was small and whimsical..." Small is repeated, and repeating is, well, repetitive! Since it had already been described as small, then the second 'small' should have been left out. Something like, "... a small, whimsical pavilion in the far left corner of the Palace of Westminster now caught my eye. I hadn't seen it before..." would have worked a treat.

There were some plot problems. The beginning of this story is that photographer Gavin, the boyfriend of a friend of Axelle's, is apparently "mugged" when he was down by the River Thames investigating something. He's in a coma. Later his apartment is ransacked as though someone was trying to find or recover something. Axelle is brought in to see if she can discover what is going on. The mystery involves celebrity fashion designer Johnny Vane, and seems to center around a picture of Vane as a boy, arms around his twin brother Julian, who evidently died in a drowning accident in the Thames at the very spot the picture was taken. It was at this point that most of the plot became quite obvious even to me who usually gets these things wrong.

Despite the fact that Gavin is mugged, has his apartment ransacked, and is later discovered with the life-support unplugged in his hospital room, no one seems to think it's necessary to mount a guard on his room, not even the police! That's really insulting to the Greater London Metropolitan Police Service based at Scotland Yard (which is actually now New Scotland Yard!). The author appears not to appreciate that there's a distinction between that and the City of London Police Force which covers the City of London. The action centers around an area in the City of Westminster, however, so she is correct in specifying Scotland Yard.

One thing I didn't like was that Axelle doesn't come off as very smart in this story, and dumb main characters is not something I can abide. I don't mind if they start out dumb and wise up, but when they start out in a series as reasonably sharp, but become painfully, obstinately dumb by volume three, it's pretty clear that the series has lost its fire. The very first thing you should wonder, if you're dealing with one dead identical twin, is: "Is the surviving twin who he claims to be?" Is it Johnny who is still alive, or Julian, posing as Johnny for some reason - and how can you tell? This never crosses her mind - which made me suspicious! Whether this is the solution or not, it's not a good thing for the "detective' to have failed to even consider it.

Only the twins and their nanny were present at the drowning, so unless she could tell them apart, the surviving twin could have been either brother. Or if she could tell them apart, was she in on a murder or a cover-up? Or was it really just an accident and Julian really was the one who died - in which case, what's the significance of the photograph, if any? One twin is inevitably older than the other. Was one of them favored over the other? Did the older one stand to inherit? Was the older one Julian? Axelle never asks any of these questions, and while this may serve the author's plot, it doesn't serve her flagship character if it makes her look clueless. She looks especially so when we're told time after time about Johnny's love of wearing gloves - how he's never seen without them, and we get heavily pointed smack-you-hard-on-your-head hints about close ups and the photo of where both boys hands are visible. it just makes the main character look stupid and sad.

Talking of which there was some dumb text, such as this example: "... often find that looking at a person's house... can give away a lot about a person's preferences and lifestyle." Nope, always looking at a person's house gives these things away, and it's not something which takes a keen eye or a detective to figure out.

At one point Axelle is trying to find out information from the twins' nanny, but is called away by her boyfriend, who's helping her on this case. The reason he calls her away is that someone is coming to the house, but instead of sneaking into the yard after the visitor goes inside, to see if they could overhear what takes place, the two hurry away, thereby failing to avail themselves of a golden opportunity to find out something more. This tells me Axelle really isn't much of a detective after all.

There's your cliché teen love triangle here, too, with a new guy on the block, a rock star who starts coming on to Axelle. Never once does she ever clearly, unequivocally tell him she's in a committed relationship which is pretty pathetic on her part. Failing to do this means she is actively encouraging his attention. Then she acts surprised by the media attention she's garnering because she's photographed with this guy! If I were boyfriend Sebastian I'd think twice about allying myself with a woman who encourages male attention and invites trouble by failing to set clear boundaries.

This is another example of how dumb Axelle behaves in this story, and it's not remotely endearing. By continuing to effectively flirt with rock star Josh, she is, in a real way, being unfaithful to Sebastian. He doesn't strike me as the sharpest knife in the box, and he's rather immature, too, but he's a decent faithful guy and he deserves better than this. None of this made me warm-up to this story, and it made me actively dislike Axelle. At about sixty percent in I was ready to quit, since I pretty much knew the ending. I read to the end to make sure I was right about what I thought I was, and consequently this novel left me feeling tired and bored. It felt way too long and too much of a drag - in short, very different from the first one. I can't recommend it.


Monday, October 12, 2015

The Blue Nowhere by Jeffrey Deaver


Rating: WARTY!

Read by Dennis Boutsikaris, this audio book went nowhere for me. The reading wasn't very inspired and the subject matter was boring, so I think this is the last Deaver I'm going to read, too. I didn't like his take on James Bond, and that really takes some skill to be able to write a James Bond novel and make it suck. I couldn't do it.

The premise here is that there's a hacker who is also a serial killer. He hacks into his victim's computers and spies on them, learning all about them, which enables him to socially engineer his way into close proximity - because it's all about feeling them tremble as he knifes them. He sees them as characters in a vast computer game, nothing more.

Naturally the police free a hacker from jail to counteract the exceptional skills of their perp, but the levels of incompetence and thoughtlessness these people routinely display is a caricature. The counter-hacker and the police department's own computer experts are scary in their cluelessness, and it's actually insulting to these people. I honestly don't believe they don't have better people than this working in law enforcement. It's also a very male-centric story, with women just put in as victims or set decoration, so it wasn't really very interesting there, either.

I made it through three of the five or six disks and decided there are better books waiting for me and life's too short. This was too much Jeffrey showing off how much he'd read about hacking, and not thinking things through properly. No wonder it's so short.


Sunday, October 11, 2015

Try Not to Breathe by Holly Seddon


Rating: WORTHY!

This is an advance review copy of a "murder mystery" novel, although technically no murder occurs. It’s set in 2010 in Britain and uses a lot of colloquialisms, so if you're not British and not a Brit-o-phile, you may find this a little obscure in places, but overall, I think this is well-written and a worthy read. I had some issues with it which I will mention, but overall, the characters are complex, flawed, realistic, and well portrayed, and in general terms it was well-written.

One example which tripped me up more than once (since it involved the same verb) was where the author would write something like "his parents rowed in sharp little bursts." The word I read as rowed, as in 'they rowed the boat across the lake', was actually a British word meaning argued and is pronounced to rhyme with "Ow!" such as a person would say if they hurt themselves. I think the author would have a better chance of transatlantic success if she changed that out.

On another occasion the author wrote "told Any that I was getting married" where she meant, I assume, 'Amy' rather than 'Any'. A spellchecker isn't going to catch hat! Only a good beta reader or editor will. One sentence which made me wonder was the one which ended thus: " and scorched some guesses where they lay." I think the word the author intended here was 'scotched' (meaning to end or to foil rather than 'scorched' meaning to destroy by fire. There's only one letter difference, and 'scorched' did make some sort of sense, so maybe I'm wrong here and the usage was intentional, but it didn't read right to me.

The story has changing PoVs (although thankfully only one of them is first person!). There are flashbacks which I normally do not like. In this case they were not bad to begin with, but frankly became a little tedious as the story progressed. The story is told from three perspectives: Amy, the girl who is raped, Jacob, the guy who dated her in high school, and Alex, the alcoholic journalist who is trying to get back on the rails, and to discover what really happened to Amy fifteen years before.

I'm not a huge fan of murder mysteries although I've read a few and once in a while find one that looks interesting. This one was interesting because it wasn't a murder mystery - it was an attempted murder mystery - and the victim, Amy, is in a vegetative state and has been since she was attacked when she was fifteen.

The rapist/would-be murderer was never caught, and Alex is trying to sell this story to a national newspaper for which she used to work many years before, and which she left in disgrace. They won't buy it without some new breakthrough in the story - like other murders or attempted murders done in a similar style, or new evidence showing up. The police have pretty much abandoned this since it's so old.

The alcoholism works in that at one point, Alex thinks that someone has broken into her house and stolen a look at her notebook where she's writing down the results of her investigation. She was sleeping upstairs at the time and thought she heard noises, but was too paralyzed with fear to investigate, and now, because of her alcoholic fuzz, she can't be sure anyone broke in at all. There was a window open and nothing was stolen, so she doesn't report it to the police, thinking they won't believe her. Her ex, who is a police officer in a different area, doesn't believe her. He's pretty much lost patience with her because of her past alcohol abuse. The idea of the break in itself made no sense to me, but that aside, it was well-written.

The novel is set in 2010 for reasons I did not grasp. For a good story, one year is as good as another, but why 2010 instead of 2015, or 2001, or whatever, I can only wonder. The story flashes back often to Amy, who is a disaffected fifteen-year-old who lusts after an older man. The problem is that when a chance finally comes for her to get it on with this guy, he (or perhaps someone else!) attempts post-coital murder. He fails in that, but leaves Amy hospitalized in a vegetative state. This was one of the problems for me. I don't want to post any spoilers, but I simply did not get the motive for this guy to do what he did. It made no sense at all to me, and to have it come down to him when he's hardly been in the story at all, felt like a real let-down.

Alex encounters Amy in the hospital, still uncommunicative, but apparently with some brain function. She also encounters Jacob, who is a volunteer visitor. Jacob has his own set of issues. He married his ideal partner, Fiona, but ever since then, the marriage seems to have slipped somehow and now is more fricassee than fantasy. Intent upon getting something out of her encounter with Amy that she could turn into a sale-able article, Alex starts delicately investigating what happened, and manages to get an interview with her father and some of her school friends.

I had a small issue with part of the story where Amy's father talks to Alex about his life before Amy was raped and nearly murdered. He is very slightly older than his wife: “Yeah, Jo was twenty-two when I met her. We had about eighteen months between us..." yet this is made out to be some sort of huge gap, whereas it really isn’t. I don't know of any young people of that age who could consider eighteen months to be such a yawning chasm, so I'm not sure whether the author got the age discrepancy wrong, or changed it later and didn’t adjust the text to compensate, or if she really does consider it to be a huge difference. It just seemed like a complete non-entity to me.

That said, there were very few problems with the writing in this novel, which was impressive and made for a nice read, although as I said, it started to drag towards the end. This was seventy-nine chapters, and although the novel itself was not really long, it felt like it was maybe twenty-nine chapters too long. I can't tell you how long this book actually is because there was no page numbering, not even in the iPad version. This is another failing of ebooks. The kindle app version was screwed up, too. For example, when I was sixty-one percent into the book, the little notification at the bottom of the screen told me I had six minutes left in the book - not the chapter, but the entire book! - which was pure nonsense.

But every book has problems, and this one, in general was a worthy read, so I recommend it, keeping the above-mentioned caveats in mind.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia C DeFelice


Rating: WORTHY!
read by?

Read very competently by Christina Moore, this audio book is book one of the 'Ghost Mysteries' series. I'm not a fan of series mostly because they tend to be filled with fluff, repetitive, and un-inventive, but some are worthy or reading. This one isn't. I didn't even realize this was the start of a series until I read some other reviews for it, but at least it wasn't in first person PoV! The reviews were a bit odd; even one and two star reviews said this was a good read. I don't understand how you can rate a novel two stars and say it's good in any way. This is why I don't subscribe to the five stars review system. It's really meaningless. A novel is either worth the time or it isn't, period. For me, and acknowledging that I am not its intended audience, this one wasn't.

It started out great. It was age appropriate (it's middle grade) and had a gripping beginning: Allie the fossil-hunting explorer is stuck about a hundred feet up a crumbling shale cliff face and thinks she's going to fall when a voice comes out of nowhere and talks her down safely with no more than cuts and abrasions for her troubles. Allie starts to hear the voice more often, and finds herself the beneficiary of a nice old blank diary - in which words start appearing slowly, rather like the diary in Harry Potter #2.

The problem with ghost and horror stories like this is that it makes no sense that the mystery is slowly unveiled. I see this all the time in this kind of tale - the horrors or the ghostly visitations begin slowly with random bits and pieces building to a crescendo. Why? The authors never explain that. Obviously it's to draw the reader in and build tension, but within the story it makes no sense. The Exorcist was a classic example of this kind of build-up, although that did contain some rationale for the slow burn - it was to draw in the priests and keep people confused, but in the case of this story, where Lucy Styles was evidently murdered, why did the ghost simply not tell Allie "I was murdered by X" right from the off? Nothing is offered to account for this!

If the ghost can talk Allie down a cliff face, clearly it has no problem with communication. Why not say "I'm Lucy, I have some 'splainin' to do! My body is buried at location X, and I was murdered by person Y, you can find evidence for this hidden in spot Z"? Clearly it's so the author can spin this out into a short story, but when nothing is given to account for the lethargy, it makes the story sound amateurish and fake.

That wasn't even the worst problem. Obviously in a children's story, the children have to be the center of the action. You can't have them failing to solve a mystery and encounter no danger or delight of sudden discovery because they handed-off the evidence to the police or to their parents, but there are ways of writing those scenarios which make them bear at least a veneer of realism. This author didn't even offer a mocking obeisance to realism. Even though a lot of her information comes from the ghost, Allie has Lucy's diary which at the very least offers motive for murder. Any police officer worth their salt would see that this was worth a look.

Allie could have gone to her parents (although her dad was a bit of a dick) or to the police with a reasonable expectation of seeing justice done, but she didn't. Her best friend, "Dub", proved to be a dick because he made only one really lame attempt to suggest going to the police and never suggested going to her parents at all. Maybe he was wise not to do so: Allie's father could see she was plainly scared one night, yet it flew right over his head like he was a moron. This bad dad never even noticed how scared she was. Worse even than this was that in writing the story this way, all that's revealed is that we have yet another female author who apparently delights in showing her main female character to be clueless. This is particularly evident in the dénouement where she completely fails to call for help even though help is within hailing distance, and she knows it. The ending is entirely predictable given the beginning. It reads like fanfic or amateur fiction.

I can't get with stories like that, especially not when they are young children's stories, which exemplify kids - and for no intelligent reason - acting like imbeciles or airheads. Why not just make Allie a blonde to complete the ridiculous cliché? I'm sure that there are children in the intended age range who will enjoy this story, but I don't think it's a good idea to write stories like this and I won't recommend this one or the series if it's anything like this first volume.


Monday, October 5, 2015

The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone


Rating: WORTHY!

This is a brilliant novel and well-worth reading, but it was seriously larded with spelling and grammatical issues, which is actually quite shameful given that the author is, however admirably, a librarian! It does, however, prove my point that you can give me a novel that's less than exemplary, but if it's written well-enough in terms of characterization and plot, I'll rate it worthy despite technical issues. Note that this was an advance review copy, so troubles are always possible, but a lot of these were issues which ought to have been caught during the writing and editing process. We're no longer in the era of real galleys laboriously put together with little lead characters wedged into metal trays. In the ebook era, it's less and less easy to excuse this kind of writing, but I'm placing my faith in the assumption that these issues will be cleared up long before this ever hits the stores.

I list, on my blog and in my review to the publisher, the examples I noticed, but I'm not listing them elsewhere, because they detract from what was, in the final analysis, and viewed as a whole, a really, really good story that I warmed to exceedingly quickly, and stayed with throughout. There was never a time when I felt it was slipping, or becoming repetitive or boring. This was also a first person PoV novel which I normally rail against, but even so, I do always say that some writers can carry it, and this author evidently is one such writer - at least in this case! Next time he may piss me off to no end, but it actually makes me marvel that here, he has done a better job at writing a female main character than far too many young adult authors do in far too many YA series. I mean, seriously? Why can this guy write a better girl than some female authors can?

Of course, I'm not a female (nor do I play one on TV), so I'm willing to grant that my perceptions and expectations may be rather at variance with those of readers who have a hundred percent mark-up on the number of X chromosomes I have at my disposal, but having said that, we men do have fifty percent female in our sex chromosomes, whereas females don't have any male in theirs! Actually some do - we're no more binary in our sex chromosomes than we are in our genders, but that aside, maybe guys do have an edge when writing across gender? Maybe not! I'll leave you all to argue that out amongst yourselves, while I carry on with the review over here, quietly in the corner...!

It's not that Dahlia Moss is like a kick-ass character in the comic book sense - busting into places, taking down villains, making smart remarks, zeroing in on clues. Far from it: she's really a bit on the weak and retiring side, and she's not exactly the sharpest knife in the box, yet she wins through in the end, and looks good doing it. And by looks good, I don't mean she's a beauty queen. She isn't. But she's still fine; she still manages to have appeal to spare, leaving in shadow far too many female 'heroines' of YA literature. She even has to be rescued at the end - after a fashion - yet she is still, in my estimation, a kick-ass character. Note that while I keep referencing YA literature, this is more of a YA-to-adult book in terms of the age of the characters. They're all grown-ups here; young but adult.

Dahlia is hired by rich boy Jonah to find out who stole the "Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing." which is a virtual object in an online computer role-playing game. He puts Dahlia onto a member of his 'guild' in the game - a guy named Kurt, who seems completely uninterested in Dahlia or in talk of spears. By turns invested and dis-empowered, Dahlia starts investigating every member of the guild and slowly zeroes in on the thief, but what she doesn't expect is that almost immediately she begins this real life quest, Jonah is killed irl with a replica of the very spear he lost online.

Relationships which were rather complex to begin with, start to become ever more complex and obtuse now. I keep saying I'm not a fan of worst person PoV, but I keep saying once in a while there's a writer and a story which can carry it off, but it's rare that I get to say that such an exception is a great example of that incongruous confluence of possibility. This one is. I still don't like the voice, because it's so full of self-importance and limitations to your story-telling, but here it works and works well. Besides, how can you not at least start out liking a story that begins, "The only time I ever met Jonah Long he was wearing a fake beard, a blue pin-striped captain's outfit, and a toy pipe that blew soap bubbles."

And now a word - or several - about the errors. There were errors of bad grammar, spelling, and punctuation. A simple final spell-check would have caught the most egregious of the spelling issues, but actually, the bulk of these problems were subtle enough that only a good editor or beta reader would catch them. A lot of the 'misspellings' were homophones, where the word was spelled correctly, but it was the wrong word for the context. No spell-check will catch these. There were examples of a homophone and misspelling in the same sentence. As for the grammar problems, it was a mixed bag, with some bad grammar, some words missing, text oddities, and words out of order(!) or other issues which obscured the sense. There was also a slight continuity problem with the sharpness of the spear!

This things aside, I rate this a very worthy read and recommend it.

There were times when I thought maybe the author had written a given sentence that way intentionally for subtle humor or because it was some geek thing of which I was unaware, but the sheer number of these mitigated against writing them all off with those excuses. There were also times when it looked like the author had dictated the text and it had been misheard during transcription. So here they are.

Bad grammar/punctuation
"I can state these rule" (wrong number: 'these rules' or 'this rule', not a mix!)
"something ,then" (comma in wrong place)

Misspellings that a spell-checker would catch
"Ddriver"
"Gunpiont"

Spelled correctly, but wrong word(s)
"the king of thing that pisses me" (kind of thing)
"wedge the sticky T-shirt down her hallow" ('hallow' should be 'hollow')
"They'll be food, at least." (there'llbe food - might have been funny if the story had been about cannibals or zombies!)
"task now is more difficult that simply taking a boy out" (than simply taking a boy out)
"crossed-referenced a list" ('cross-referenced')
"And Nathan was back to his usual amiable self. Whatever had troubled them there had been just a momentary blip." (whatever had troubled him there...)
"it's not big deal" ('it's no big deal' or 'it's not a big deal')
"had an unreasonably head start" (unreasonable head start)
"Sylvia, it had to be said, looked remarkably like her sun." (like her son)
"probably the result of a guilty conscious crumbling at Jonah's posthumous largesse." (guilty conscience)

Misspelling and wrong word in same sentence
"given that I had planted my phone in a knoll on the murderesss." (knoll is a small hill. This word was used many times wrongly in place of hollow. Also, murderess has one 's' too many, and I have issues with the 'ess' part irrespective of spelling. Why must we specify a 'murderess rather than simply murderer? It's a form of genderism to me, but I see it frequently: actress, murderess, hostess, mattress (that last one might not be real...)

Missing word
"Why would do that?" (should have read something like "Why would she do that")
"At the risk of coming as completely callous" (coming off as....)

Obscure English
"I felt like a combination having an earworm and heartburn. My best option was to chance the subject." ("combination of an earworm..." and 'change' instead of 'chance')
"The certainty that she had put on a bug me hit all at once" (seems like words were unintentionally transposed here)
"as though it were pitched outside of the normal of range of human hearing." (too many 'of's!)
"'Ndiyo,' said Francis, which I assumed was yes for Swahili." (Swahili for 'yes'?)

Text oddities
"or for tanking aggro off a raid boss" (I have no idea what this means - maybe draining off, leaching off? Taking aggro off? )
"sort of muddled about in folding chairs" (muddled about amongst the folding chairs?)

At one point Hindi is spoken, but the text appears as minuscule black characters on a white background in a Kindle app on my phone. Note that I have the screen background black, and the text white as a battery saving measure, so the text looked like it was in the negative to me. No matter how much I enlarged the text in this kindle app on the phone, the Hindi text was never large enough to see it clearly.

"queen of England" - Elizabeth 2nd is the queen of the United Kingdom (inter alia), which includes England, but given that this was a character's speech, you can get away with it because people do speak in ignorance like that.

"dominated my life a little bit" - contradiction in terms! Again this is something you can get away with in a 1PoV novel since it's the character speaking, but it's worth keeping in mind that it makes no sense!

"...I have been out cashing favors."
For Charice to say that was ominous. Almost everyone seemed to owe her, somehow, and who knows what strange circumstances would occur from a cached favor?
This was an example of "Was the author trying to be clever, or was it merely inattention?" Caching, in computer geek speak, means holding something in memory ready for immediate use, so I liked the wordplay between cashing and caching, even though it didn't make a lot of sense. When I ran into so many other such issues, I decided this was a mistake, and not a play on words.

Problems with continuity with the spear point
"The blade itself was sharp and shining,"
[It was] "Sharp enough to do the job"
"He shouldn't have made the thing so sharp in the first place"
"the spear wasn’t actually all that sharp"

Note that there was more than one copy of the spear, but the problem here was that it was not made clear until almost the end of the novel that all but the first copy - the murder weapon - were purposefully blunted, but this didn't rob me of my point, because Dahlia never had access to the murder weapon. She only ever saw copies, so from her PoV, she was talking about the same spear in effect. This was the root of the continuity problem. That said, I liked this book and would read a sequel. I'd even beta read a sequel if it would help!

Size 12 and Ready to Rock by Meg Cabot


Rating: WARTY!

This is evidently volume 4 in a series, which I once again jumped into not realizing. There was nothing on the audio case to indicate it was mid series. I'm not a fan of series unless they're well done. I liked the title of this one. The problem was in the writing. The audio CD started out with music, which I have encountered frequently on audio CDs, and which I have never understood. The author's original typescript typically contains no music in my experience so whence the impetus to lard up the CD version with it - because CDs first were produced as a vehicle for music distribution? Seriously, that's your 'irrationale'? The reading by Sandy Rustin wasn't very good either.

That was the first problem, but fortunately it was brief, since I skipped the track entirely and landed, amazingly, at chapter one. Unfortunately, then I had what I took to be poetry, but later learned were songs Meg Cabot had 'composed' larding up the start of each chapter. I skipped these. No diva in 2012 is going anywhere up the charts with lyrics like those. The story is of a size twelve young woman who is in charge of one of the residence halls at a university. It's the summer, but there are people in residence for one reason or another, and the story opens with the main character being shot - by a paintball. The author milks this for all it's worth trying to make it sound like it was a real bullet, but failing to make it convincing. No one who is shot could continue to narrate in the smart-assed and sassy fashion this narrator does, so my good will was lost right there.

The entire story quickly devolved into university administrative procedures and meetings, and I asked myself what I was doing even pretending to listen to this tedious nonsense. Maybe if you're invested in the series, you can swallow this better than I did, I who came into it in progress, and didn't even miss the previous volumes. I couldn't get into it, and I had no interest in pursuing this story. According to other reviewers, the murder mystery doesn't even begin until half the book is taken-up with filler, and having jumped to the last disk to listen to that as I was driving to return this to the library that same day I started listening to it, I realized that this was written like a bad movie horror B picture - the killer miraculously escaping, only to pop-up later and threaten the main character. The final showdown was a tour-de-force in awful and I won't recommend this kind of writing. I'm done with Meg Cabot now.


Friday, September 25, 2015

Death Before Decaf by Caroline Fardig


Rating: WARTY!

It’s my personal belief that first person PoV (worst person PoV!) novels ought to have a warning on them like the cigarette cartons do. Few authors can do them well, and when they’re not done well, they suck. The problem is that while you can leaf through a book in the library or in a bookstore, you can’t do that same thing with an ebook or an audio book. Sometimes you get to read a sample, but not always. All you usually have to go by is the blurb, and like The Doctor, blurbs lie! They certainly don’t warn you of voice.

That voice and a few plot problems aside, this book started out annoying me before I began warming to it. I guess means this author can carry that voice, which is amusing to me, because the story is, in part, about a character not being able to carry a voice – not in public that is. She also has an allergy, which is not nice in reality, but is a nice thing to read about in fiction, where we see so many flawless characters that it’s laughable. The problem with the main character for me, though, is that while she was commendably flawed and realistic in some respects, in others, she was also too stupid to live.

Juliet Langley has returned, almost decade later, to manage the not-exactly-originally-named coffee shop and diner that she worked in during her college years in Nashville, Tennessee. We don’t immediately learn what it was she studied in college, but if it was business management, then she evidently failed the course. The last place she managed went under after her partner/lover absconded with all the cash, and she evidently didn’t have the requisite skills to keep it afloat. Despite this disaster, her supposed best friend, who is amusingly named Peter, but behaves more like a dick, has drafted her in to help at the Java Jive after the death of his father.

I don’t get this best friend thing. This, for me, was one of the plot holes. Maybe they were besties in college, but it’s apparently been nearly a decade since they last saw each other, and Juliet evidently didn’t even attend the funeral, so the besties thing fell a bit flat for me. On top of this, Peter pretty much leaves Juliet hanging out to dry on her first day. Even though he’s around, he fails to overtly support her with the issues she has with the staff. Worse, Pete himself has apparently let this eatery go downhill as judged by the disgusting and irresponsible behavior of the day-staff, and their disrespectful attitude towards their new manager. I know he needs to let her establish her own chops, but he’s not going to do that by ostensibly distancing himself from her, and by being completely unapologetic for the awful conditions Juliet finds in the restaurant he’s supposedly been managing.

On her first day there, which is also her thirtieth birthday, Juliet finds herself administering an epi shot to a customer who is allergic to onions, who was served onion in his sandwich despite specifically requesting none. Yes, you can argue this idiot needed to check himself to be sure, but that doesn’t excuse the restaurant’s irresponsible serving of it, nor the hostility of the staff as Juliet tries to track down how this happened and prevent it happening again. Juliet definitely has her work cut out for her.

That same evening is open mike night and Pete further embarrasses Juliet, who he knows isn’t good with feeling exposed in public, by singing the first song, dedicating it to her and reminding her of her failure when she was in a band and forgot the words to a song she herself wrote. She’s never been on stage since (this is how limp she is - more on this anon) and here’s Peter, being a dick again, embarrassing her and reminding her of it. At this point I sincerely hoped she wasn't going to get involved with him. Which leads to the other plot hole – how come she never did get involved with him? These two had four years together and I'm sorry but it just beggars belief – except for Nora Ephon-style movie where this is a routine occurrence – that neither of them would have made a move on the other in that time.

Things go further downhill for Juliet when the body of the chief cook, Dave, is found in the dumpster outside the restaurant shortly after Juliet had balled him out (again) for sitting on the prep table. Now she’s a person of interest in his murder! Obviously she didn’t do it. It’s rare – and bad form - to write a first person PoV where the narrator is the murderer, but it can be done. Juliet is going to get with Peter despite his having a girlfriend, so obviously she’s not guilty. That much is a given. Personally, I think hunky customer Seth Davis did it, but since I usually get these guesses wrong, that’s not even a spoiler!

I have one question, though: why would a restaurant have voice mail? LOL!

Perhaps the biggest problem with this novel, for me, however, was complete lack of authenticity when Juliet takes up the detective baton and runs with it. She's not been accused of a thing, much less charged with anything, but she decides she's the best person to figure this out and starts taking all kinds of risky actions, and worse, forcing Peter to partner up with her in her crazy quest. There was absolutely no motivation for this. Yes, the detective had given her some straight talk and told her she was a person of interest, but she'd hardly been handcuffed and hauled in for questioning.

Worse, everything we had learned about Juliet to this point showed her to be a shy, retiring, wilting violet kind of a girl who would never do anything like this. Yes, she was a stereotypical redhead whom we're told - not shown, but told - has a fiery temper, but we had been given nowhere near enough cause to believe that this wimp would behave like she suddenly does, or that she had been given sufficient motivation to change her personality and behave like she does. To me, this abrupt switch was simply not credible.

As dissuaded as I was becoming from reading this, I was intent upon continuing, and I didn't decide enough was enough until Juliet, helping out in the kitchen, uncovered a tub hidden in the freezer that should never have been there. When she examined it, it had all kinds of odd things in it, including something she quickly learned belonged to Dave. Instead of immediately turning it over to the police, she started going through it, getting her fingerprints all over it. Never once did she think of calling the detective she'd met, and handing it over to him. Never once did Peter, who knew about all this, ever tell her she needed to turn it over to the police, either!

This is a woman who's smart enough to know you don't keep cornstarch in the freezer, yet too stupid to know that you don't conceal information from the police? I'm sorry but I don't read novels that make women look stupid unless that 'stupid women' is shown in process of wising up and getting her act together. This was just too larded-up with Le Stupide and far too far-fetched to take seriously, so I quit reading it right then and there. I guess I don't understand how a female author can write a demeaning novel about a female character like this. It's sad. I cannot rate this as a worthy read based on the portion I did read, which is about a third of the novel.