Showing posts with label thriller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thriller. Show all posts

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Rock Paper Tiger by Lisa Brackmann


Rating: WORTHY!

This was an advance review copy I got from Net Galley, and I really appreciate the opportunity to have read it. Thanks to the author and publisher, and to Net Galley!

I loved this novel! It was refreshingly different, had something interesting and out-of-the-ordinary to relate, and had a believable main character and a believable plot. This was written for adults and it showed. Though the main character was quite young, she was beyond the YA range and definitely more mature than your trope special princess YA character about whom I've seen far too many novels. Indeed, my desire to break that detestable mold was why I wrote Femarine!

Rock Paper Tiger is about a woman who's down on her luck, feeling sorry for herself, and in some sort of nebulous trouble that she can't get a good handle on, but she hangs in there and wins through in the end, and all without having some shining white knight coming to rescue her. This pretty much defines what I mean when I talk about a strong female character. Of course there are different varieties of strong character, but this is definitely an admirable one. She's not strong in that she can kick anyone's ass. In fact she gets her own kicked in different ways more than once. She has no super powers. She's not paranormal. In fact she's rather weak in some senses, because she's hurting inside and she's physically disabled after being the victim of a mortar attack while serving in the Middle East in the US Army, yet she keeps on going and she never gives up. It can be done, you YA authors! You can write a novel with a female character, and have her go it alone, and have her be credible!

The first thing which impressed me was that this was written in first person - a voice which I routinely detest - and yet it was completely readable. Not once did I feel nauseous reading it! See? It can be done well enough to impress even a decidedly-biased curmudgeon like me! That doesn't mean it has to be done, and it certainly doesn't mean every novel should to be written this way. I'd be a lot happier if there were significantly fewer such novels, but this one definitely made the grade. There were also flashbacks which I normally detest, and even those were interesting and actually contributed to the story, so way-to-go Lisa Brackmann! If you can write a novel that impresses me, and it's in first person, and there are flashbacks, you can't be writing wrongs!

This is also the first in a series about which I know little. I think maybe there are two more, but this doesn't mean I'm going to rush out and read them. My biggest fear is that any sequel to this, however loosely connected, cannot be as good as this one was! This is one reason I'm not a fan of series either, although there are some which have been worth pursuing. I just feel that if I read the next and it wasn't as good, it would tarnish my memory of this one! But I am tempted, which is a rarity for me.

The story is about Ellie Cooper, who has been for some time out of the US Army after being injured in a mortar attack on the base in the Middle East where she was a medic. She had a severe leg injury, but in the end didn't lose her leg - just a chunk of muscle from it, rather like Gregory House and like House, she's in frequent pain. Unlike him, she is not an addict, and doles out a meager ration of her dwindling Percocet™ supply to herself when the pain becomes too much.

She lives off her miserly benefit she got from the Army after she was invalided out. Since her injury was not obtained in combat, and for a variety of other reasons (read: excuses) she didn't get as much as she'd hoped for, but it's enough to get by on in China. What she did get was a marriage proposal from the guy she was having casual sex with on the base. Shortly after that, when he left the military for a more lucrative private employment, they moved to China where his job took him. Shortly after that she came home unexpectedly early to find him at home with a Lily - of the human rather than the Lilium variety, and he told her he's in love with Lily and wants a divorce so they can marry. Ellie is dragging her heels, and is hurting from this state of affairs too. Or is it the state of an affaire?!

She also has a drinking problem, and doesn't seem to eat very well or exercise. She gets herself into foolish situations, but none of this prepares her for the situation she's about to get into when she comes into contact with a Uighur who is staying with an artist friend with whom she's had a casual sexual relationship for some time. Because of this contact, she now finds herself both under surveillance and threatened not only by the Chinese Public Security people, but also by some anonymous Americans who are probably CIA. Her art friend disappears, as does the Uighur, and all these suits seem to think Ellie is the key to finding both of them. The story follows her as she ambivalently tries to "help" the suits to keep herself out of trouble, whilst also trying not to sell-out her friend. She suffers for that friendship.

I have to say I had to wonder why she didn't simply leave China when this began, if not at the beginning, then certainly at the end, although the author kind of has that covered. but on the other hand, she was being watched, and if she had tried to leave, maybe she would have simply been picked up. I would certainly have lit out, but maybe Ellie is tougher than I am, or maybe she simply loves the life there despite the hassle. I also had to wonder why these people thought she had such a handle on what was going on that she could tell them what they wanted to know, but maybe these suits aren't as informed as they claim to be. Intelligence only goes so far when it comes down to the way governments operate, after all, doesn't it?!

On the down side, there were some formatting issues with the ebook - a hyphen missing from between words here and there, some lines ending in a carriage return long before the edge of the screen was reached, but I assume these will be fixed in the actual released edition. Other than that, the writing was excellent - I mean really good and eminently readable. This is why I am so tempted to move on to the next thing Lisa Brackmann wrote, even if it is a sequel, despite having a list of books to read that's a mile long (and probably literally so at this point).

I loved the way the author conveyed the feeling of paranoia and claustrophobia that a person has to feel in a situation like this - not knowing who the good guys are, fearing there are none, not knowing who to trust, not knowing where to go or what to do next. That's how a totalitarian society works, and from whence its power is derived, and that came through five by five. The author has actually lived in China, so this is authentic. I didn't get the sense that she'd been in the military, but that, too, sounded authentic to me, and in the end that's all I care about! I don't require Tom Clancy detail or authenticity - in fact, that turns me off a novel - but I do like one that reads like it's true no matter how fictional it is and either way, this one worked. I really liked it, sped through it effortlessly, and was pleased by how it went and how it ended. I recommend it unreservedly.


Sunday, June 12, 2016

Salem's Cipher by Jess Lourey


Rating: WARTY!

Be warned there are spoilers in this, I've kept descriptions as vague as I can and also somewhat out of order - in order to minmize spoilers, but I can't address specific problems with a narrative unless I talk about what those problems are, otherwise it's simply a vague list of complaints without any supporting evidence, and I'm not that kind of reviewer. It's of even less help to a writer if I don't explain what the problems are, but I shall try not to go into more detail than I have to, to make a point.

I struggled with this one in consideration of whether it was a truly worthy read or not, but when I went back and analyzed my notes afterwards, I had no problem downgrading this. In some ways, it had a lot going for it, but in the end, the highly improbable plotting, the literally incredible coincidences, and some really poor and/or thoughtless writing made my mind up for me. The ending did not help the case at all, so I can't recommend this novel. Plus it was way too long for what it offered, and as if that isn't bad enough, it's the first of a series where even though the bad guys are soundly beaten in this volume, we find they're not really beaten at all in volume two. What?! Yeah, that's what I mean about improbable.

I am not a fan of inane story arcs like this any more than I'm a fan of the 'girls in peril' genre of horror movie where the psycho is killed two or three times but always gets resurrected and comes after the girl(s) again just when they think it's safe - and this is all in the first movie! As if that wasn't bad enough, we get not one, not two, but three villainous assassins, two of which are straight out of horror movies. Their behaviors make little sense. One of them is supposed to be so strong and muscular that he can dislocate your shoulder by a simple squeeze of his fingers - and this guy travels around under the radar? No! Another of the villains can literally rearrange his face so his appearance changes. He can even pass for a woman. What? No! Just no! This isn't a Marvel comic book!

Written very much in the Dan Brown mold of "impossible to solve" puzzles which are really rather juvenile, and in the National Treasure mold of hidden booty and arcane clues which are so old they don't even matter any more, this one featured a female protagonist by the name of Salem Wiley, who we're told is a 'genius cryptanalyst', but we see very little of that (although she is smart enough to know that lightning does strike twice in the same place!). She's partnered with a Chicago cop named Isabel who was a lot more interesting, but who got second-billing and relatively little air time. There never was any good reason why these two resisted going to the police or the press, or the Internet with what they knew at any given point in the story. In fact, most of the time it would have made far more sense if they had. I don't mind stories where they go it alone or avoid the police, but there has to be a good reason for that. Here, and for the most part, there was not.

After every few chapters there was a huge info-dump on Salem's past which I took to skipping after perusing the first one. They were boring and unimportant and they brought the story to a screeching halt if you stopped to read them, as did the chapters which pursued the campaign of the "first viable candidate for election as a female president," which were irrelevant to the main thrust of the story and should have been omitted. Oh, and excuse me, what is Hilary Clinton - chopped liver? Well, only if you're a Republican!

Worse than this, the extra pages bulked-up the novel embarrassingly and were, frankly, a potential waste of trees, as was the formatting of this book with blank pages all over the place. In this era of ebooks, trees are not so raped and pillaged as they used to be, but if this novel ever went to a significant print-run, I would fear for the forests to the tune of a hundred or a hundred-fifty or so superfluous pages.

The story's central premise is the most ridiculous of all: that there's a secret society of men which is dedicated to keeping women out of power (and it's not even the Republicans! LOL!) - to the point of assassinating them if necessary. Excuse me? Since when have men ever needed a secret society to step on women? The whole thing is utterly absurd, as are the links the author makes, calling in Emily Dickinson to offer clues to Thomas Beale's treasure via absurdist non-puzzles hidden in even more silly, improbable, and risky locations offering an inanely ancient, but still extant trail of clues which any middle-grader worth her salt could uncover, and at the end of this trial is a list of the members of this society - which itself is really irrelevant given how much families have intermarried in the intervening century and a half?

The list is supposed to be still relevant because it travels in bloodlines, so we're expected to believe that in a republic which came together to overthrow a monarchy, power is passed down like royalty from mother to daughter to combat the status quo which is power passed down like royalty from father to son? How is that even an improvement?!

My question here is why would any secret society keep a list of their members hidden by simplistic clues so that their enemies could find it? If it's passed from mother to daughter, why would they even need such a list? Why would anyone care about such a list if all they wanted to do is keep women down, for which they're already doing a fine job by sabotaging "uppity women", and undermining them, and assassinating them if necessary? Why would they even be considered a threat (or conversely, a success) if they're doing such a lousy job that women have sprung-up everywhere around the world into positions of power and influence despite all this?! The premises of this establishment were vacant!

In general, the writing was technically good, which you would (hopefully!) expect in an author's thirteenth novel, but the plotting too often felt like it came from an author's debut novel, with far too many convenient coincidences and overly dramatic characters. Some of the writing left something to be desired ranging from the minor to the major (as I've already explored). There were instances like, for example where I read, "Cards and gifts at all the appropriate holidays" which would have made more sense if it had read, "Appropriate cards and gifts at the holidays." Is there an inappropriate holiday to send cards?! But then I wondered: is it cipher?!

Once again I was sorry to see that I had run into yet another female author who was practically labeling women as worthless unless they were physically attractive. At one point I read, "Pretty flight attendant" and at another, "Catherine wasn't beautiful, but she was smart." Excuse me? Beauty comes first, but since she's ugly at least she has the consolation prize of being smart? It's not as good as beautiful, but being smart is the best she can do? It's sad, but it's all she has to offer? In a novel about a "genius cryptanalyst," smarts is on the back burner? That's frankly a disgraceful insult to women. I didn't get why the flight attendant's looks were remotely relevant, unless we're to understand that her death would have been somehow less tragic had she been 'homely'. That kind of writing is nauseating and obnoxious - and it's unacceptable.

There were unintentionally amusing portions where for example, I learned that Emily Dickinson lived behind the green door. No wonder she was depressed! I'm guessing the door wasn't green when she lived there, but who knows? Maybe it was! There were some instances of intentional humor, but not many. Unfortunately, there were lots of minor hiccups such as when a guy comes in dressed for Halloween and has five-cent pieces taped to the back of his T-shit. How did Salem see them when he never turned around? Nickelback never sounded so bad. On another topic, I think by "200 convening years" the author actually meant "200 intervening years."

There were larger issues, though. One of the most glaring was when they were supposed to get rid of their phones and one of them doesn't. The other knows she has not done so because she's shown the phone with her phone number in the case, yet later the other one is supposed to be pissed-off upon just discovering that her trusted friend lied about ditching the phone? In movies this is known as poor continuity, and the sad thing was this part (showing her phone number in the case) could have been completely excised! It wasn't necessary to the story. This is the problem with long novels: you grow tired of reading through them to catch errors like this and inevitably some get missed! We've all been there. This is why I don't write long novels!

At one point Salem and Isabel take a trip to Massachusetts, and the timing for the various stages of their journey is completely amiss throughout the trip, with hours disappearing unaccounted-for so we have sunset and sunrise popping with undue haste or undue tardiness. Also on this trip we have an assassin who is itching to kill these two women, and yet when he has his best opportunity - when they're sleeping in the car on the side of a deserted road at night, he has six hours in which to kill them, yet he fails to act despite previously vowing he will get them asap? There was no explanation for this, except of course that these two are our heroes so we can't kill them off - and this assassin is quite literally the most inept assassin ever.

That makes my case for not viewing this novel as a worthy read so I'l leave it there. This author can write, for the most part, and I wish her luck with her career, but this novel fell flat for me despite the appealing premise of two women taking care of business without needing men to save them. I'm sorry I could rate it better.


Saturday, June 4, 2016

Truth Lies Buried by Lesley Welsh


Rating: WORTHY!

This was an advance review copy and I was very grateful to the author and publisher for the chance to review it.

I loved the title of this - which can be read in two ways - but that's just me. I love the English language and I love playing with it. I wish more authors did! Anyway...Alice Samantha Riley spent her twenties in the British army and now in her mid-thirties, she's a bodyguard to Monica Cohen and her son Brando. Mr Benny Cohen, the seedy underworld boss, isn't around any more because Sam bumped him off and buried his body out in the woods, but now that it's been unearthed, the cops are trying to discover who did it. Sam is all about protecting her lover - Mrs Cohen - until she can settle up her late husband's criminal business affairs, and the two of them can move to Spain and retire together. At least she thinks that's the plan. She thinks wrong.

When other London mobsters start showing great interest in carving up dead Cohen's turf - and anyone who gets in the way of their plans - and Monica seems to have a male lover stashed away somewhere, Sam realizes that she has less of a sunny outlook than she does a murky pout-look (see I warned you!). Now a tall red-headed cop is on Sam's tail (and not in a good way), Monica has become vindictive, and Sam finds herself appointed temporary legal guardian of Brando, Benny's young, spoiled son. What else can jump the tracks? In this novel? Plenty!

The novel was written in first person PoV, which I detest, but some authors can carry it, and this one can. However, the tragic weakness of 1PoV was made crystal clear as the author found herself forced into jumping back and forth between voices and it made for really, truly clunky reading at times. If all of the third person sections had been excised, the story would have been much improved, but realistically the whole thing should have been in third person. That said, I liked the story overall, but if the artificial 'romance' had been omitted, it would have improved it greatly.

Frankly, I didn't get why a romance was needed at all in this story. The male interest (in whom I had a total lack of) had so little of a part in the novel, it was painfully obvious that his only purpose was to serve as the 'necessary male' in the female main character's life, and it was completely irrelevant and totally a waste of time. This is evidently deemed to be a requirement by far too many authors - this blind, headlong rush to 'validate' their female character with a male love interest - and quite honestly it's a bit sickening.

This story would have been excellent had this one character been eliminated (and of course he almost was, but purely for dramatic purposes), but having this man swoop-in to carry off the female felt like a complete betrayal of Sam, who was independent, strong and determined, and pretty awesome despite her shady behavior and poor decision-making skills, and who started out in a lesbian relationship. At one stage in the story, the male love (dis)interest pointedly tells us that a boy needs a dad. Well, he's entitled to his opinion, but I call a big BS on that one.

Having two parents is good idea because it's always smart to have more than one perspective to play into raising a child and to share the stress and work, but scores of single parents both male and female do sterling jobs, as do gay couples both male and female, so this felt like a betrayal of Sam. If she had to have a love interest, why couldn't it have been the female cop who was also in the story, and a lesbian? To be fair, Sam was bisexual, so her future partner was in no way cut-and-dried, but the trope "happy ending" was a misstep, I felt. Sam was fine on her own.

There was one other minor item, too, which is that at one point, a stolen laptop is offered in evidence. I doubt that this would be of any utility whatsoever except in furthering investigation. As evidence in itself, it seems to me that it was useless, because the chain of evidence was broken the minute it was stolen. The defense would have a field day with something like that, using it to cast doubt on every other piece of evidence, so I seriously doubt the police would be interested in it as evidence per se (not per say!).

That aside, the story was great, and if I ignore the "nomance", I have no problem rating this very positively. The story was engaging, interesting, and kept the reader off balance like it was a fairground cakewalk, because you never knew exactly what was coming next (except for the love interest where you knew exactly how it would play out). I recommend it as a worthy read.


Wednesday, May 11, 2016

The Crystal Skull by Manda Scott


Rating: WARTY!

Well I guess I'm done with Manda Scott as an author of interest! This is the second I've tried of hers and it was a non-starter - or more accurately, it was a great starter, but rapidly fell apart. Reader Susan Duerden's voice wasn't bad, but neither was it wonderful. It was okay.

Not to be confused with Crystal Skull by Rob Macgregor, this story had a wonderful premise which was sadly squandered, but what lost it for me was when the book started flashing back to Elizabethan times and modern times got boring. I lost all interest. In a print book, and somewhat in an ebook, you can skip parts you don't like and get to the next good bit, but it's really hard to do that in an audio book!

The story was of two young newly-weds, Stella and Kit, whose wedding gift to each other was to explore one of the limestone caves in Yorkshire, England (which is where my parents were born! Not in a cave, silly, in Yorkshire!). They were the first to enter this one particular cavern in over four hundred years (hence the Elizabethiana), and just as this one obscure legend had it, they discovered the heartstone, which appeared to have mystical powers. Either that or Stella seriously needed a brain scan to detect that tumor she certainly has growing in her skull.

Of course it's not that easy. The authorities don't care of course, that someone who values life very little wants to take that stone from them, either to own it or to destroy it, yet instead of turning the stone and the location of the cavern over to appropriate authorities, these two complete dicks start squirreling it away. Stella lies, even to her husband, that she's disposed of it. I stopped liking them both at that point. They are irresponsible jerks and I lost all interest in reading any more about them. If they'd had good reason to do as they did, that would be one thing, but the author gives us no reason other than selfishness and stupidity for them to hold onto the stone and keep the cave secret, and that never makes for a fun story in my experience. The monotonous flashbacks to that delusional charlatan Michele de Notredame and the wa-ay overrated John Dee were trite and laughable, worthy of an amateur writer, not a professional. I can't recommend this based on what I listened to.


Saturday, March 12, 2016

The Beauty Volume 1 by Jeremy Haun, Jason A Hurley


Rating: WORTHY!

This volume (an advance review copy for which I am grateful!), collects the first six individual issues and seems like it could have been made for me, someone who rails against the obsession humans have, particularly in this media-soaked age, with physical beauty and who cares what lies beneath - with the emphasis on lies. I wish I had thought of this idea!

Yet another sexual disease gets loose in the world, but in this case, people actively try to get infected, because what it does is confer beauty upon those infected - youthful good looks, taut, fresh healthy skin, lush hair. In short, everything TV, movies, and magazines look for in actors and models. Very soon, this disease is no longer considered a disease. It's called simply 'The Beauty' and it has spread to almost every adult on the planet as this story begins, in a world where there are very few people of color, curiously enough. That was my only problem with this story.

Detectives Vaughn and Foster, one of whom is infected, the other not, are called to an apparent incident of self-immolation on a subway train. The curious thing is that it looks like the passenger burned from the inside out. Soon more and more of these victims are found, and they were all infected with The Beauty. This disease, it seems, has a long-term consequence, and now if a cure is not found, the world is going to burn.

The story is by Jeremy Haun and Jason Hurley, and is tight and paced, moving things along at a very readable clip. The art is by Haun and is excellent, although be warned it is adult in nature, with nudity and graphic violence. I recommend this as an entertainingly worthy read.


Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Kris Longknife: Audacious by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe


Rating: WORTHY!

Another close-run thing, but hopefully this now will all change from here on out. Princess Lieutenant Kris Longknife continues on her usual trajectory, inexplicably and unexpectedly (believe it or not) getting shot at, fawning over the navy and the marines, and venerating certain old people as though each is some sort of a magical sensei, but it's entertaining and perversely addictive. I guess that's how most series suck people in.

In this episode, for the fourth time, she's sent to the middle of nowhere with no instructions and has an almost impossible conundrum to solve while running for her life. she's dispatched to planet Eden, which has strict gun control laws - purportedly - where she's promptly shot at, and almost blown up by a bomb which wasn't even meant for her. The news outlets are so controlled that they don't even report these things. It's like they never happened. It's 1984 meets the Soviet Union, with Kris Longknife emulating James Bond charging in there to inevitably and successfully sort them all out.

She was told this would be an easy job, in a quiet backwater, which would keep her out of trouble and out of the headlines. Given that this is the fourth time she's been dispatched to a backwater like this, you'd think by now she would not be so naïve. Indeed, you'd think that she would be angry as hell at this point, but inexplicably, she isn't! Not until the entire novel is over. This is more of the same and it was becoming rather tiresome even for me. There were enough differences, however, and I did check my brain at the door as I advise you to do, and this will make it a simple and easy summer read. Not that it's summer yet but it sure feels like it here. Hopefully with the changes Kris demands at the end of this one (she's not too quick on the uptake at times) things will improve in the next volume, which I've read before, but can scarcely remember a thing about. That should tell me something, huh?!


Kris Longknife: Resolute by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe


Rating: WORTHY!

This one just made it under the wire into worthy, but check your brain at the door - it's mindless entertainment. Yet again Kris is shipped off to the butt-end of nowhere where she's dumped into a complete mess, gets no support, is threatened and shot at and/or starts a space battle with interloping rivals, wins it on a shoestring and heads home. I don't know why this series is so addictive, because I find plot holes and problems galore with it, but I still keep reading it. Normally I would never do this, but I guess we all have to have a guilty pleasure hidden away somewhere, and I suppose this particular one, sad as it is, is mine.

Despite having proven herself a capable commander, Kris is still stuck as a lieutenant, yet even so, she's put in command of a space station orbiting an unaligned planet which would just as rather not have the station there as have it. The problem is that the station is shut down, and Kris has to reboot it. The totally odd thing is that she makes no effort whatsoever to report this status to base, and no effort to request personnel to run the station. She simply tries to make do with volunteers from the planet below. No idea why. I guess she's a really poor administrator.

This struck me as utterly absurd, but nowhere near as absurd as a space station which makes no sense. It costs a fortune to run, supply, and to maintain, yet here they are up-keeping it when it serves absolutely no practical purpose at all. There's literally nothing it does that cannot be done by shuttles or robots. In four hundred years, the entire human race seems to have forgotten about drones and robots despite having AIs with human-level intelligence and far faster processing speed. I think the Longknifes have far more to worry about than evil humans. They just don't know it yet! The previous commander got pissed off with the navy and abandoned the station without telling anyone and without waiting for Kris to arrive to hand it over to her. Yet he goes unpunished for this. No wonder Kris loves the Navy - you can get away with anything as she herself has proved on several occasions!

The planet is named Hicksville - not really, but that's how it comes across - and the mayor of course has the hots for Kris. She spreads her money around and makes all kinds of friends, so that when Hank Smythe-Peterwald, sometime beau and now arch-enema, arrives with six cruisers in tow, obviously intent upon taking over yet another planet for his father. Instead of calling immediately for help, Kris takes him on with brown paper and glue, and lollipop sticks, and in a repeat performance of her destruction of the Peterwald Stealth navy attack on War(d)haven, her home planet, kicks Hanks ass predictably.

Hank was becoming boring and the romance with Kris was going nowhere, so the author disposes of him by having him become insane and having some anonymous person sabotage his escape pod, where he suffocates. This is so he can introduced the non-existent Vicki Peterwald (yes, she's female but she's still a Peterwald, not a Petrawald, a Pipkinwald). At least she was non-existent until he realized Hank was going nowhere, so she materializes out of nowhere in the next volume and changes the dynamic. And also provides for the start a side series featuring her rampant exploits.

All in all a blustery light-weight beach read, but not bad if, as I advise, you check your brain at the door. On that basis and that basis alone, I recommend it as a worthy sci-fi read.


Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Kris Longknife: Defiant by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe


Rating: WORTHY!

It's at this point - volume three - where you fully realize how formulaic this series is, and you have to decide decide whether to keep going. I obviously kept going, but please be warned that there are several stock elements in this series which, if you don't like them, or worse, start to hate them, will drive you nuts, and they're all overdone here, having only been half-baked in volume one.

The first is Kris's non-existent relationship with Jack, her bodyguard. He continues to snipe at Kris's disregard for safety and she continues to ignore him. This goes on in every volume. It's boring. Largely absent and not really missed in this volume is Abby, Kris's ridiculously home-spun and sassy 'body maid' who showed up in volume two. There's nothing for her to do besides be a repository for weapons and armor, and she's not needed at all in this volume which - be warned - is almost entirely concerned with the overly long preparation for - and then the speedy execution of - a one-sided space battle. In that regard, it's different from most of the other volumes in the series.

Penny and Tom get married, and then it's all up to space to defend Wardhaven against six anonymous battleships which have entered Wardhaven space, are headed directly for the planet, and are refusing to identify themselves. Despite them being identified early on as representatives of the Peterwald business enemies of the Longknifes, the Longknifes - supposedly the essence of bravado - are too chickenshit to call out Peterwald on it, and worse than this, they fail to take any precautions, thereby putting Kris into deep jeopardy again in the succeeding volume. The Longknifes are morons, let's face it!

One final problem: any modern planet with the apparently endless resources available to the Longknifes, would have an array of space drones which would take out any line-of-battle ship on short order. That's why we no longer have battleships in the real navy. The last one was built over seventy years ago. Evidently authors like Mike Shepherd and David Weber simply don't get it. Neither do film makers like George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry!

So after a condescending sojourn on a planet modeled after Hawaii (seriously? 200-some nations on Earth, six hundred planets in space in this novel, and yet every single one of them is influenced and informed solely by by the US culture?), Kris returns to Wardhaven just in time to be the only one who can save the day! As per usual. She takes command - not as a naval officer, but as a princess! - and cobbles together an assortment of space yachts and LACs, and repels the battleships miraculously and pretty much effortlessly. Yet despite this tour de farce no one ever learns from it, ditches the navy, and starts building thousands of cheap, human-free drones for defense. Go figure!

That said, this was an entertaining romp if you check you brain at the cover and don't put it back on until the last page is done. On that basis and that one alone, I recommend this as part of a complete series that's light, fun, mostly fast-moving, and a worthy read. Think of it as a TV series like Charlie's Angels rather than a series of novels, and you'll be able to better judge whether you can stand to read it or not.


Thursday, February 4, 2016

Point of Control by LJ Sellers


Rating: WORTHY!

This was a great novel which I really enjoyed. The first delight was to find a novel with an older female main character. It's nice to know that not all authors think that women who are beyond their twenties are uninteresting and not worth writing about! The second delight was in that this character was a sociopath (not to be confused with a psychopath!) who worked for the FBI, and had to be constantly on the alert not to expose her anti-social tendencies. Indeed, those tendencies were the very reason she made her way into the FBI. The structure of a law-enforcement agency was what helped her to conform to societal norms and fit in, and she was good at what she did.

The novel was well-written, and moved at a good pace without rushing. I felt that maybe it could have been tightened a little bit, and the romantic (if that can be applied where a sociopath is concerned!) dalliance wasn't necessary (not every woman needs to be paired with a man - and vice-versa - to make a story readable and enjoyable), but it wasn't obnoxious, either, so it didn't spoil the story for me.

The plot revolves around an odd assortment of people dying or disappearing, and investigation reveals that they all seem to be connected with rare earths, which are employed in hi-tech devices. The novel is up to date, too, since rare earths are pretty much cornered by China, and if it so chose, it could cripple the west's ability to build things like computers, tablets and phones. Not that we in the west build very many of those these days. They're all imported, which is another security weakness.

The FBI is investigating these events, and the agent starts running afoul of a dedicatedly evil man who is willing to stop at nothing to achieve the success he craves and believes he deserves. But someone is helping him, and that someone might well be in the FBI.

I enjoyed this story, and read it avidly. It felt a bit long to me, but it was enjoyable nonetheless, and I fully recommend it as a worthy read.


Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Kris Longknife: Deserter by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe


Rating: WORTHY!

This author has a series of (as of this writing) fourteen novels with titles just like these - the main character's name, along with a single dramatic word which usually doesn't apply until late in the novel, and is never as bad as it seems. it's a series which, to read and enjoy, you need to turn off certain analytical parts of your brain, and take a very large grain of salt, and if you're willing to do that, you can enjoy some pretty good mindless entertainment from these.

In volume one Kris didn't become a mutineer until the last three dozen or so pages, and even then it was to prevent an illegal war being fomented by her captain. In this volume, she's on a week's leave, but is trapped on a planet by a quarantine and a communications blackout, so she isn't really deserting. She also gets an entourage and becomes a princess. How that works is a bit of a mystery. I guess the author didn't think an heroic naval lieutenant was quite special enough to write about.

Kristine Anne Longknife is the descendant of aged war heroes who are still alive because about four hundred years from now there will be longevity treatments (which probably explains why humanity has been forced to farm itself out to some six hundred planets, which are, of course, at odds with each other and forming shifting alliances). One of her 'grampas', named Ray, is promoted to king. I have no idea how that's supposed to work or why anyone in this society in this universe would do that, except of course to make Kris a princess and give her even more powers and privileges than she already has, being the trust-funded daughter of massive wealth.

It was in order to get out from under this yoke, so we're told, that she joined the navy, but nowhere did she ever eschew her money or family privilege, so her motives are rather suspect if not downright hypocritical. That said, however, the stories do make for a fast, fun read. I think the author set out to write movies in book form, evidently hoping that Hollywood would take notice, because that's how this series reads, and in this volume he even goes so far as to parody himself by having his characters remark, on more than one occasion, as to what would be happening if this were a movie. Chances are that you're either going to like this or hate it. I tend to pass over the annoying bits (such as the overly smart movie style wise-cracking in which the team indulges itself) without paying much attention, and slide right on by to the more entertaining pieces, which are common enough for me to be able to enjoy these volumes despite issues.

In this particular one, Kris gets a 'body servant' (named Abby) added to her entourage inexplicably by her mother! Please note that none of this seems intended to make any real sense. Prior to this, her only regular companion was her bodyguard, named predictably (and irritatingly) Jack, who is all but perfect. Fortunately, he does very little except pose and talk tough. He's not really there to guard her body, but for Kris to have someone to lust after secretly, and flirt with openly. While I flatly refuse to read any more novels which have name the lead character 'Jack', I do make occasional exceptions when there's a Jack who isn't the main character.

Abby has some sort of a secret agent background which is revealed later in the series, although it's obvious something oddball is going on pretty much as soon as she shows up. Jack doesn't follow Kris on her navy duties, but when she's off duty and at home. In this volume, her best friend Tommy, a weird amalgam of Chinese and Irish, who is actually neither in practice and who seems to be there solely in the role of maiden in distress, disappears and it's evident he's been kidnapped. It's also evident that this is a trap set up to get Kris, so naturally she goes anyway, and gets trapped when the planet is quarantined for Ebola(!) and the entire off-planet communications network breaks down so the planet is also isolated in that regard. The weird thing is that not a single spacecraft shows up to try and find out why this planet suddenly went dead! Despite how important Kris is, not a single person comes after her from her home planet, which is nonsensical.

Kris and her team rescue Tommy and hook up with Tommy's blossoming love interest, Penny. Kris gets to expose her bodily acreage (as she does in every volume) and blow things up, while fighting back against the bad guy and condescending the poor folks who live there. It's not great story-telling by any means, but it is entertaining if you don't take it seriously.


Saturday, January 30, 2016

Kris Longknife: Mutineer by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe


Rating: WORTHY!

I've read many of this series, which is a follow-on to an earlier series about a different generation of the Longknife family, and one which I haven't read. I fell in love with the Kris Longknife novels, and read them avidly, but this was before I blogged reviews. My plan this year is to read the entire series, including two or three volumes I've acquired more recently, but not yet read. I'll be doing at least one per month, and posting a review for each one. I'll probably blow through this series rather quickly if the time it took me to get through the first novel is any gauge! For me they're very readable, despite an issue or two I had with them. I think it helps to go into this thinking of it more as a movie than a novel, because it reads like a movie script that's been fleshed out into a novel more than it reads like a novel that's written in the hope it might make a movie someday.

The first volume introduces a new member of the Longknife family: Kristine, who has recently joined the navy, which of course in this case is the space navy. I have to say this makes little sense to me, although it is a trope which pervades virtually all space operas that have a significant military component. I was surprised to discover that there's rather more of the David Weber touch in the Longknife novels than I remember from the first time I read them - and I don't mean that in a complimentary way, although I was a fan of Weber for a while.

Like in Weber's novels, the space fleet is very much a branch of the navy, a tired cliché in which far too many sci-fi writers indulge. They have fleets of ships which seem constrained by the maneuvering capabilities of sail ships from Georgian times, cavorting on a two dimensional ocean, rather than powerful craft traversing a three dimensional vacuum. I know a lot of sci-fi readers love it when authors gaze into their naval, but I don't. To me this approach is short-sighted, uninventive, and rather a lazy way of writing. It's also very Americanized. It's the US (although in this case named United Sentients, which is really clunky!) navy, not any other navy, despite the supposed homogenization of assorted planets, including Earth. In this case it's not even Earth, but an entirely different planet, yet these are American writers who can't seem to avoid Americanisms, American bureaucracy, and American historical references. There's even a reference to radio Shack! That's like a contemporary novel referencing a store form medieval times. It's rather blinkered and too often smacks of jingoism.

In the sixties, and after a rocky start, the US became without question the leader in space travel and technology, but that impressive lead bled dry over the next four decades. Now it's the Russians and the Chinese who are, if not exactly blazing trails, at least riding them, while the US sits without any means to put people into space. Even private industry is taking over, and after filling the astronaut ranks with white male military personnel, the diversity amongst astronauts is increasing significantly. Satellites aside, there is no military presence in space, so whence this impetus to have space navies in the future? Whence the sad bureaucracy which accompanies it?

Out of curiosity, I looked up the original seven Mercury astronauts, thinking they were largely air force personnel. As it happens only three were air force per se. Another three were navy, and the final one was a marine, but with one exception, all of them were primarily aviators. Even the exception, while beginning his career as a regular Navy officer, moved into aviation, so none of them were traditional navy personnel in the old fashioned sense. This was primarily a flying exercise not a naval exercise, yet now we're awash with navy references in sci-fi space operas. How weird is that?

I know that David Weber deliberately set out to replicate the Horatio Hornblower novels, which provides a root cause at least, if not exactly an explanation for his tedious by-rote naval parallels, but why anyone else would choose to go that route is a mystery and a disappointment to me. I honestly wonder why spacecraft are referred to as ships rather than as some sort of flying machine? Naturally they're not airplanes, since there's no air in space, but there's no water either, so why ships? Is it for no other reason than that they're simply larger than any airplane? Ships were what we had before airplanes, so even the pilot is a captain, but he's still a pilot! I guess old habits are really hard to break, and people don't like to think of large aircraft as anything other than ships.

Even if we let that go, there's still the bureaucracy. Shepherd employs the same US bureaucratic and stagnated institutions which Weber uses: Bureau of Personnel, which he refers to as BuPer(s), just as David Weber does. There are other such bureaus. too, such as BuShips, and so on. It's tedious and unrealistic. I think Elizabeth Moon does a far more realistic job in her Vatta's War pentalogy, which I recommend, and will also get around to reviewing at some point. I have mixed feelings about the Star Trek universe, but I think they got it right - or at least closer to right than too many sci-fi authors manage. Yes, they still start with the captain and descend through all the other such naval ranks, but the ships are not primarily 'war ships' - not the ones featured in the series. They're spacecraft of exploration so we don't get the same bureaucratic tedium and military saber-rattling in which other stories wallow.

That said, let's set it aside and get on with a look at the story itself, because the nicest thing about this series is that it isn't a space-naval-opera. I understand in the early editions of this book there were misspellings and grammar issues galore. In the paperback I read there were very, very few. Kris is a navy ensign, and she's depicted in some scenes aboard the navy craft, but most of this first story finds her on the surface of one of three planets. We meet her as she's leading a mission to rescue a kidnapped girl, and the mission almost falls apart. It is Kris's expert flying skills which save the mission.

This brief introduction in the first few chapters puts her head above the radar when it comes to another mission - to go to a water-logged planet and distribute food. This occupies the bulk of the novel but by no means all of it, and some of it makes no sense. We're told that a huge volcanic eruption had clouded the sky, and continual torrential downpours are washing out crops and roads. We never do learn how it manages to be raining the entire time she's there. With that much rain, the ash and soot would be gone from the sky in short order and the rain would stop!

A better question is where is this rain coming from? If the rainfall is planet wide, then where is the water being evaporated to feed the continual rain? If there's a clear sky somewhere else, then why not move the people there? If they're moving equipment off planet because the acid rain damaging it, then it's going to be damaging the soil. People need to be evacuated off planet too!

I read a lot of negative reviews on this to see if I needed to take into account anything my positive outlook had not covered, and I failed to find any. A lot of the reviews mentioned inconsistencies and logic problems but not a single one of them detailed any! That's not a review it's just a complaint! Maybe these reviewers had a case, but if they did, they failed to make it. This is why I got into reviewing in the first place - to write more useful reviews and to discuss author technique and general writing style. Yes, there are problems with every book - plot inconsistencies and issues, which I highlight, but the issue isn't whether there are any (it's fiction, so there always are), but whether those problems and issues spoil the. For me they did not. This doesn't mean a book is perfect. None are, but the bottom line is whether the novel overall is worth reading. For me, it was. I enjoyed the story and the characters.

The book blurb is completely wrong in one regard. It says, "...she enlists in the marines" and she does not. She's in the navy. This is one excellent reason to ditch Big Publishing™ they're utterly clueless. The people who illustrate the cover and write the blurbs are usually in shameful ignorance of the actual content of the book since they've never read it. They're "just doing what they're told" which is pathetic and no excuse whatsoever.

I noted that some reviewers have chided this because it doesn't take place in space (at least not as much as they think it should), but it's not set in space per se. It's just a futuristic action-adventure story. I think those reviewers went into it after reading David Weber's Honor Harrington series. There is no rule that says this has to be a space opera, although in parts it read like one. I've also seen Mike Shepherd accused of trying to emulate David Weber, and while he does appear to mimic Weber for some of the space scenes and background military story, so does every author, as does Weber. To me, that stuff is boring, which is why I quit reading the Weber series. it started out well but went into the toilet.

Shepherd emulates him with regard to the space conflicts, but any story about a navy, on the ocean or in space, is going to be the same in many regards since most writers really aren't that original, but just because there are parallels doesn't mean the story is a copy. With regard to Weber v. Shepherd, Shepherd's background is the Navy, whereas Weber's is in games and sci-fi literature, so I'd give Shepherd precedence for knowing the navy! At least Shepherd isn't rooted in the nineteenth century as Weber is, which is patently absurd! That said, he could have done a lot better, because his "naval battles" are far too rooted in the same problems that Weber's are - battle ships in 2D on an ocean, not spacecraft in a 3D vacuum. he makes the same mistake that Weber does with regard to a complete lack of robots and drones. Any navy which sought to conduct itself as Weber's and Shepherd's navies do would get it's ass kicked royally by a realistic navy four hundred years into the future!

Kris is possibly an alcoholic. It's a mess and it's hard to decide if she really was one, or just a teen who drank too much. I suspect it was the latter, which excuses Shepherd in the way he addresses Kris's sobriety and her behavior around alcohol. On this same issue of Kris's personal problems, the stress on her tragically kidnapped brother is rather overdone. I can see it at the beginning, where she's in process of freeing a kidnapped child, but her feelings seem to be far too raw to be left from a decade or more ago. Military training doesn't seem to have helped. Novel might have done better had it skipped the large central section on Flooded planet, and instead follow Kris through basic training where she could have worked through her issues. That said, her Eddy fixation is really only dwelt on this rescue mission, so naturally her thoughts are with her brother then. Later, she's far less preoccupied by his, and this to me seemed realistic.

So none of this made sense, and the phrase "one of those Longknifes" is way-the-hell overused in this series, but the story wasn't so ridiculous that I could simply not stand to read it. I liked the story and went with the flow - literally in this section! I liked the way Kris was depicted here. She slowly grew into her shoes. She was no Mary Sue and she made mistakes, but she was smart and figured things out in her own way. She had a good attitude and a can-do sense of mission, and she sorted the place out in her own way. You'd think this part was the big story, but it was what happened after this which shows us why the novel is titled Kris Longknife: Mutineer, and again it's down to her smarts and quick thinking.

Despite some issues, the story was eminently readable because it was a good story. It held my interest, made me willing to overlook some issues, and it rather subtly laid some groundwork for a sequel, without hitting the reader over the head or leaving them in the slimy grip of a cliffhanger. Despite issues and personal preferences, I recommend this novel as a worthy read.


Friday, January 22, 2016

Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp


Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with Nothing Lasts Forever by Sidney Sheldon, or a score of other similarly titled novels, this one, written in 1979, was the basis for the 1988 movie "Die Hard" featuring Bruce Willis. Even from the first two chapters, it's quite clear that the book and movie diverge considerably, which I guess is predictable. I hate to say this, but the movie was better!

In the move, NY cop John McClane is visiting LA to meet with his somewhat estranged wife. She had taken a big job opportunity, and John was unable to immediately move with her because of his unfinished police work, although that struck me as a poor excuse. There is resentment between them: that she would go ahead without him. that he would seemingly want to hold back her career. They have two children and this is the first time he has been to see them. Apparently Holly, his wife, who has taken back her single name of Gennaro, had either never seen fit or never had the time, to visit him in NY. For some reason on Christmas Eve, the Nakatomi corporation expected the entire staff to attend a party in celebration of a big deal that had just gone through.

The first two chapters of the novel is covered by the first two minutes of the movie, and the differences between it and the movie are evident right from the off. There is no John McClane here. The guy is Joe Leland, which to me has nowhere near the appeal of the movie character's name for a heroic figure. Leland isn't in his mid-thirties as Willis was when he first played McClane. Leland is in his fifties at least, and is gray-haired. He isn't married to Holly Gennaro, he's her father, and is simply visiting her for Christmas. There is a party where he first meets up with Holly, but this is the Klaxon corporation which is celebrating. In the novel we get no perspective other than Leland's (although it's thankfully not first person) and there is no masterful Hans Gruber as portrayed by Alan Rickman.

In general terms, the story is similar to the movie, with Leland wandering around the building, slowly bumping off the bad guys, causing mayhem, and so on. the problem with it is that unlike the movie, the action is constantly interrupted by angsty introspective roadblocks from Leland, which frankly annoyed the heck out of me. I can't recommend this novel at all. Watch the movie if you can stand that kind of a movie. It's better than this.


Thursday, January 14, 2016

Love Is for Tomorrow by Michael Karner, Isaac Newton Acquah


Rating: WARTY!

This novel struck me as strange from the outset. Obviously (and especially as judged by the cover) this is very much intended to be in the mold of a James Bond spy thriller, but it really has nothing to do with James Bond. It has a lot more to do with the special ops genre of stories, such as Mission Impossible, for example, with small teams going in under the radar to accomplish a goal.

The novel itself is written in a very breathless style, almost like fan fiction, which was hard for me to stomach. Some of the expressions used seemed really odd, and some of the descriptions were off. For example, Arlington cemetery isn't known for its trees, and willow trees aren't known for emulating umbrellas, so describing a funeral there which has willow trees forming huge umbrellas over the mourners seemed inauthentic to me. It felt like the authors often used a word too many in describing things, too. It's hard to explain that, but the descriptions often made me say, "What?" and brought me to a halt while I went back and re-read it to figure out if it made any sense.

In other instance, the words were not gainfully employed, such as when the authors used the term, "She walked into a side nave" when it should have been, "She walked into a transept." It was things like this which kept taking me out of the story, but perhaps other readers will not notice or not care about things like this, so here's an example of the writing style which felt off to me. This is one complete section of text with nothing removed or changed, so you can judge for yourself:

     The car lurched forward and propelled her onto the narrow street without making as much as a sound.
     She maneuvered through an upslope alley, being spit out onto the main square on top of the mountain. She closed distance with Olga's Mercedes, as she sped the Porsche Boxter downhill. The city walls rushed past her. She banked right, taking the road over the bridge. The river rumbled a hundred meters below as the three cars reached the other side.
     Tanya led them in a wide circle around the city. The yellow blades of dry grass rushed past her. Cars and cyclists stopped in laybys to take in the sunset, oblivious to the chase.

Apart from misspelling 'Boxster', this description just sounded odd to me. Note, to begin with, that this is not a car chase, James Bond style. It's merely a vehicle tailing two other vehicles to a restaurant. Why it was written in such a melodramatic fashion is a complete mystery to me. And the wording is too much. For example, while banking (in this sense) is an aeronautical term, you can describe a motorbike as banking around a corner, but not a car. Then we had "The city walls rushed past her...The yellow blades of dry grass rushed past her." It was too much to take seriously for me - not all in one small section of text.

This kind of thing struck me as strange given what the blurb says: that the authors are scientists and have engineered every sentence. Say what? What does that even mean? It certainly didn't feel to me like any 'sentence engineering' was undertaken unless what's meant by that is injecting gratuitous Adrenalin into passages which require none. That entire section could have been reduced to a couple of sentences indicating that car C tailed cars A and B to the restaurant; nothing would have been lost, and I would have enjoyed it a lot better.

Science and engineering are two different disciplines, and while they do have many points of overlap, they're not the same thing. Why a scientist would be better at 'engineering' a sentence than a professional writer would be, escapes me. Scientists are often the worst at writing novels because of the fact that they're trained in writing scientific papers, and the two approaches are not the same.

Initially I had guessed that the writers were French, and writing in English, but I was wrong. Karner is Austrian and Acquah is from Ghana; however, if they wrote this directly in English, it might explain some of the wording. One thing I noticed here was that they don't use contractions in this volume, so the English is rather stilted with everyone saying "I am" and "I have" instead of "I'm" and "I've", and so on. This is odd because in the brief introductory (so-called) volume I reviewed, they did use such contractions. I don't know why that changed.

Right after the section form which I took the above quote, the people who were tailed entered a restaurant. For some reason which isn't explained, the person tailing them cannot enter the restaurant. Not that there's any reason to. What they want to do is conduct surveillance using a small drone, but instead of getting on with it and running the surveillance from the car right there in the parking lot, which would have been perfectly fine, they quite literally invade an occupied home across the street, barging in and taking over the house to conduct their surveillance from there. It's completely absurd and hardly the best way to undertake clandestine surveillance unless you want to cause an uproar and direct your subject's attention to your activities!

The worst part about this is that they apparently intended to assassinate someone. A bullet was fired that evidently entered someone's head, but I could not figure out who it was who was killed! I was certainly neither of the two people they'd been initially tailing. So they invade someone's home to kill someone across the valley and then they leave the witnesses (the people whose home they just invaded) alive? Again, it was nonsensical.

It was at this point, 30% in, that I really decided I didn't want to read any more, but because the novel was so short, I decided I would go to 50% and if there was no sign of improvement, terminate it there. I'm not one of these people who believes in wasting my time reading an un-entertaining novel when there are so many more and better ones waiting for me to get to.

Another issue I had was not with the writing, but with the crappy Kindle app I use to read novels on my phone. Note that this was not an advance review copy, but a published copy, so it should have been ready for prime time. I have my Kindle app set to a black screen with white text, but in this novel, random words, sentences, and entire paragraphs were in reverse colors: a white background with black text. Sometimes the reverse text would even begin in the middle of a word. I have no idea why, and there seemed to be no pattern to it. The effect was the same in the Kindle app on an iPad, too.

I did not encounter this problem with the introductory volume, but I have encountered numerous issues with the Kindle conversion process in general and while there are things authors can do to minimize issues, these tend to be very restrictive things which step on authorial creativity. The bottom line is that this is simply Amazon's way of saying, "Screw you! We don't care! We don't have to care: we're Amazon!" It's really annoying, but this really had nothing to do with the authorship itself.

Finally to the plot! The basic story consists of a small team of people wo are supposedly spies. None of these people had any sort of a real introduction in this volume. They remained flat and uninteresting. I really didn't care what happened to them or whether they succeeded or failed in whatever it was they were doing at any given moment. There was no sense of tension or possibility of failure.

I had thought that perhaps the earlier volume took care of this, but it did not, so the characters are completely flat and have zero history, and thus were uninteresting to me. They were what they did and nothing more. Antoine is apparently the leader, and he is employed by an international agency located in Vienna. On his team are an ex-MI5 agent, although how someone who isn't a British citizen would ever have been an MI5 agent isn't explained. Perhaps 'from Ghana' means he was based there, not born there. Additionally there is a hacker from India, and a so-called 'Lord of War' (whatever that means - I think it means arms dealer) from Pakistan, who are evidently an item, and for reasons unknown, this seems to be a problem.

I don't get how these people can be successful spies. Not one of them has any real training in espionage. They're essentially nothing more than murders. The obligatory 'hacker' is a joke in stories these days, and this one, Priya, turned out to be far less interesting than I'd hoped she'd be. She did no hacking at all in the part I managed to read. There's another character named Mini, but she played such a small role that she may as well not have been there.

I was initially attracted by the international flavor of the team, as improbable as it sounded in the blurb, but this really contributed nothing to the story. These people could have been anyone of any gender and any nationality, and the story would have been the same. This cosmopolitan flavor had made me think, originally, that this novel would make a pleasant change from the usual white men only (with a 'babe' thrown in for sexuality) club, which is what Mission Impossible largely is, but it didn't.

This team has to contend with stolen Chinese stealth technology and a dirty bomb, although the authors seem to be confusing 'dirty bomb' with 'neutron bomb' or perhaps even with a regular nuclear bomb. Dirty bombs are not intended to be hugely destructive in terms of blowing things apart. Dirty bombs are intended to contaminate large areas to render them useless and quarantined. A neutron bomb does something similar, but the intention there is to kill large numbers of people while leaving infrastructure intact. I'm not sure what the real purpose was supposed to be here.

Anyway, I reached fifty percent and things did not improve. They actually became worse, and I honestly could not bear to read any more, so I quit this at the end of chapter ten. There is something wrong, and off about the writing as I've indicated. Overall, it just grates. There was another example where some hacker has evidently brought down firewalls in multiple systems Mafia-boy style, including, we're expected to believe, the CIA. The team decides to use this as a means of investigating three people they are tracking. Despite the fact that firewalls are down, we're expected to believe that in order to get into the CIA's database, Priya will have to infiltrate an NSA facility and log-in to the system from the inside. In that case, what does it matter that the firewall is down? They could have done that at any time. None of this made any sense.

So Priya gets into this high security building by lifting the ID card of one of the janitors. This bald assumption that all janitors are trusted anywhere inside an NSA facility simply isn't credible. Neither is it credible that there would be no security worth a damn, and no night-shift at an NSA facility! The funny thing is that this isn't the biggest problem here. Even if we buy this scenario, why do they put it off until that night? It's simply not credible that a firewall breach at a CIA or NSA facility would be left hanging in the wind throughout the course of a whole day. By the time these people had got in there that night, the breach would have been long sealed, or at the very least, the affected computers removed from the network entirely. It's simply not remotely believable, and this merely served to confirm the feeling I'd had at around the 30% mark, that I could find better things to read with my time.

I honestly can't recommend this novel in good faith as a worthy read, but I wish the authors all the best.


Love is for Tomorrow Réunion by Michael Karner, Isaac Newton Acquah


Rating: WARTY!

I initially had the impression that these authors were French, but they're not. Karner is from Austria and Acquah is from Ghana. Not that that's important in the grand scheme of things, but I had initially been interested in it because these novels felt to me like they had been written in English by people who had English as a second language, because of the way sentences were constructed and the way the English was employed and formed. I say 'novels' because this and the next one I'll review, Love is for Tomorrow really come as a pair although they can be read separately.

I avoid prologues like the plague because in my experience, they're a complete waste of trees and contribute nothing to the story. This 'novel' proved that beyond contestation because it was merely a prologue, and not a novel at all. Far too many authors just don't seem to get that chapter one is the prologue! Duhh! But for me, prologues are far too pretentious, yelling out, "Look at me, I'm Shakespeare, setting the scene!" I have no time for that.

I was particularly disappointed in this, which is nothing but a very short introductory volume offered for free on Amazon. The reason I was disappointed was not so much that it was way short, but that it's not even introductory. We learn almost literally nothing about any of the characters. This entire and very short story is merely a meeting at a café, and an assassination of three CIA officers. And these murderers are supposed to be the main characters in the main volume? Why would I be interested in people like these?

This begs the question as to why I have the main volume if I was so disappointed in this prologue, but the reason for it is that I got this one several weeks before I got the other. I'd begun to read it, but put it to one side to do other things and then promptly forgot about it! That's how memorable and addictive it was. When I was asked if I would review the main novel, I realized I had this other volume, so I returned to finish it. I didn't like it, but now I have to continue on with the main volume even after finding this one an unworthy read. I cannot recommend this, not even as an introduction because it offers nothing by way of introduction. I think the authors or the publisher thought that it would be some sort of intro-suction, and pull readers into the main novel. Maybe it will work. It wouldn't have for me if I didn't already have the main novel and a commitment to take a look at it.


Monday, December 28, 2015

Velvet Before the Secret Lives of Dead Men vol 2 by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser


Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second collected volume of one of the best graphic novels I've read in a long time. Unfortunately it's the start of a series, so I have to pick up more volumes. Had it been a novel, it would have been self-contained in one volume. I'm not a fan of series, but this one was good enough that I am interested in reading more, despite it being a royal pain! Unfortunately, there are no more compendium volumes beyond the second one at this point, as far as I can tell, which is annoying, especially since this series began in 2013. If the author would finish one series before moving on to another, maybe he'd get the one finished in a reasonable amount of time?!

Note that I've read only the compendium issues. Volume two covers original issues six through ten. Since volume fourteen isn't due until January 2016, I'm guessing it's going to be a while before the third compendium is released. Meanwhile I'm going to be looking for individual issues!

The story is set in the past, and has flashbacks into the more distant past, which was slightly annoying, but not too bad (I'm not a fan of flashbacks). This is very much a spy thriller in the mode of James Bond. It's set in Britain, but whereas James Bond has ties, tenuous as they are, to real British intelligence services, this is a secret service with a code-name. Other than that it's very much James Bond.

There are two big differences, both of which I approve. The first of these is that the agent taking the spotlight here isn't a male, but a female, and secondly, this female isn't a 'pretty young thing', but a mature woman. It's like Moneypenny left Bond behind and went on the mission herself, except that this isn't a recent Moneypenny. This is the Lois Maxwell Moneypenny and the novel works the better for it because it focuses on her tenacity, dedication, intelligence, and skill, and not on sexuality. I really liked of all of this.

This story continues full throttle from the first one, with Velvet, retired secret agent, who was very much a Moneypenny before she was forced to take up the role of field agent after she discovered she had been set up by someone high up in her own agency. The story jets across Europe and out to the Bahamas and back (another nod to James Bond), with Velvet Templeton having to remember skills and contacts from her field days many years before, and having to tread lightly and seek to forge contacts and even alliances with people from the past - some of whom were not on the same side of the intelligence services as she was. It ends in a cliffhanger since there are more volumes to come after this open, of course. I liked this very much and recommend the series (at least this far!)


Sunday, November 8, 2015

The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet


Rating: WORTHY!

This novel was beautifully written and had an historical feel to it even though it was set in modern times. It was also set in France commendably, thereby proving that the USA isn't the only nation where interesting stories can happen. The main character, however, was American.

Twelve-year-old Maya and her family - kid brother James, her mom, and her all-but-absent father - have moved to France for a year. Maya's father has been offered a job at the chemical philosophy society, Why, we never actually learn, we can merely guess. Maya and James attend school, and meet their oddball cousin Louise, who is all but invisible to everyone, and even when Maya looks at her she's inexplicably hard to see. But she's a great French teacher.

Close by where Maya is living, there is an odd building with a sculpture of a young woman's head above the door - a sculpture which looks disturbingly like Maya. And did that weird brass salamander door-handle actually turn and look at her? And smile? What's the deal with the old man she meets and his 'cabinet of earths'? What earths are they and where do they come from? Is there any connection between those and the children who seem to disappear too often - and then return somehow changed? And what's going on with her oddly good-looking and beautifully purple-eyed uncle?

The answers to these questions are original (at least in my experience!) and engrossing - and even disturbing. Will Maya be able to protect those she loves or if she does, does it mean she must sacrifice herself to do so? This is the start of a series, so you know she's going to come through okay - that negates the drama somewhat. And there's a guy - Valko - who befriends her, but there is no romance here, just friendship, and Maya certainly doesn't become a wilting violet in his presence or become dependent upon him to rescue her. She's a commendable young woman: responsible, thoughtful, strong - a female main character of a kind which is all-too-rare in stories written by female authors. Maya puts to shame a score of young adult female characters, and Anne Nesbet is to be congratulated on writing such a character and putting her into a story which wholly immersed even a jaded adult reader, I recommend this story highly.


Ape House by Sara Gruen


Rating: WARTY!

Read a bit tediously by Paul Boehmer, this novel focuses on bonobos, a great ape species which is very similar to chimpanzees in many ways, very different in others. All of the major great ape species have been taught to communicate in American Sign Language, from Koko the gorilla, to Kanzi the Bonobo, to Chantek the Orangutan. Apes are not the only species with which we’ve communicated. These studies cross a wide range. There are not only chimpanzees, but also elephants, dolphins, and parrots, and dolphins. Although there is controversy around these studies, and even around the study directors, it’s definitely fair to say that animals are way more complex than most humans have typically been willing to credit, and some of them have very advanced intelligence, experiencing emotions as humans do.

In the novel, fictional character Isabel Duncan works with Bonobos and language. She becomes the subject of a newspaper story researched by John Thigpen and two other people from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who visit her one New Year's Day to discuss the Bonobos she works with: Bonzi, Jelani, Lola, Makena, Mbongo , and Sam. Boehmer reads these oddly, and I can’t be sure if this is how the author told him they were pronounced, or if he's making it up and getting it wrong. He pronounces Bonzi as Bon-Zee rather than as Bonsy, and Mbongo as Muh-bongo rather than Um-bongo.

It would be nice to know how they’re supposed to be pronounced and an audio book is the perfect way to do this. Print books and ebooks fail in this regard unless they have a pronunciation guide. It would have also been nice to know what the more obscure names meant, too. All names used to actually mean something, and we’ve lost that. Now people pick names for how they sound, or to honor a relative or a celebrity rather than for how they apply to the child and what they mean. When I come up with character names, I really give some thought to how they should portray the character, and in some books, the names are clues to the characters character or fate - if you can only figure them out! I had particular fun with this in Saurus, one of my favorites.

This story really takes off when there's an explosion at the lab, and the apes end up in a reality TV show. Isabel discovers that in order to fix this, she has to find a way to connect better with humans - something she's not very skilled at. This fictional character seems to be based loosely on the real life, controversial ape language researcher, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. One of the interesting things about these studies, and about great ape research in the wild, is that the big names associated with it always seem to be female. The three best-known names in great ape studies in the wild were women tasked by Louis Leakey to study these apes in the hope that it would throw light on early hominid development, and it has, but these women were also controversial. The best known of them is probably Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees, but almost equally well known was Dian Fossey who studied gorillas and was murdered by gorilla poachers. Much less well known is Birute Galdikas who studied orangutans. The books these three wrote are well-worth reading, as is Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal if you want to learn more.

The author, Sara Gruen, studied American Sign language and the symbolic lexigram language the apes use so that she could better understand the bonobos she visited at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa. This is where Kanzi lives. Clearly the author may be writing fiction, even fanciful fiction, but it is grounded in her own personal experiences with real apes. My problem with her writing, however, had to do with how the university responded to the bombing of the lab. It was like they couldn't wash their hands of the apes and of Isabel fast enough, and this seemed completely unrealistic to me. They were, in effect, siding with the terrorists. Never once did they try to correct the insane mis-perception of the purpose of the "lab" - which was language studies, not animal experimentation.

You would think they would be very much concerned about putting their best face before the public, and they didn’t even have to lie about it, yet they failed on an epic level. Never once did they consult with Isabel about the apes' future. I get that the university effectively owned the apes and it was their decision, but I find it hard to believe that any university worth its name would behave so callously and precipitously. I also get that this is a dramatic fiction, but it seemed to me that there were better ways to set this up than to make the university leadership look like spineless jerks. Maybe the author hates universities!

The lot was plodding and predictable, but the worst fail for me, however, was the fact that The main story - about the apes - was repeatedly sidelined by a boring domestic trivia story going on between the other main character, John Thigpen, and his wife Amanda. I could see the author desperately wanted to get John and Isabel together, but why? Why not just make John single? Why include John at all, and thereby make Isabel merely another maiden-in-distress, needing to be rescued by Saint John, a knight in shining armor? It made no sense to me to take the drama away from the apes, and it was yet another insult by a female writer to a female main character.

From a purely narrative PoV, it was really annoying to have to abandon the main story to go off into this boring drama over whether this couple would stay together or over Amanda's and John's spinelessness when confronted with Amanda's domineering and interfering mother. It didn’t even instill any confidence in me that an invertebrate like John could be a heroic man of action when he was such a wallflower, or that he was even heroic at all if he was going to abandon his wife at he drop of an ape. Maybe I got his wrong - as I said, I didn't finish this novel, so maybe it panned out differently; however, it felt like the road most traveled and that's the road least interesting to me, but it was this negation of both Isabel and the apes which was what truly killed this story. I could not finish it, and I cannot recommend it based on what I heard. I haven'tread anything else by this author and now I have no intention of doing so.


Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Echo: Collider by Terry Moore


Rating: WORTHY!

This is not the last in the series, but it is the last which my local library has for loan. Now I have to dig up the last two volumes or preferably find the entire series, which I believe is available in a single volume now.

I recommend this whole series - at least this far, and I have to add that it's hard to believe it will fizzle when it's been so strong so far. We learn that Ivy has a young, sick daughter - to add to her many other facets. We also learn something of a bombshell about her - or at least we see it hinted at - at the end. We also get a new and deadly assassin hired to take out Julie, and the return of a character who "died" in an earlier issue - Hong. Somehow, he is resurrected, and turns into something out of a fifties B horror movie - The Mummy meets The Creature From the Black Lagoon, or something! We also learn what HeNRI's end game is - they don't want Julie dead so much as want her armor so they can put it into a collider and smash the substance at itself in order to create a black hole.

Terry Moore's understanding of how dangerous black holes are has a huge black hole in it. A black hole does not have infinite gravity. It has only a fixed amount which is, as with all gravity, proportional to its mass, so if you create a black hole the same mass as a tennis ball, it's going to have no more gravitational pull than does a tennis ball. In order to destroy Earth, you'd have to have a truly massive black hole which you can't generate in a particle collider because the masses of those particles are minuscule. And you can only collide particles - not alloys, so I have no idea where he got this physics from - or worse, where HeNRI got it from. The fact is that if their understanding is so disgracefully flawed, then they're no threat at all!

But I was willing to let that slide for the fun of the story and the excellent way it's told. I can see this making a fine movie, if it's handled right, and if so, I would definitely pay to see it.