Symbiont Seeking Symbiont by Jennifer Foehner Wells

Rating: WARTY!

Allus Jenson is part of a pirate crew in a spacecraft that is forced to land on a barren planet for repairs. While this is in progress, Jensen, like a moron, wanders off and encounters a species of sentient bacterium which effectively gang-rapes her in the sense that this group of them take over her body without her permission. That's it. That's the entire story! Barf. I'm not sure how much the author actually undertsands about bacteria, and this was not a worthy read.

New Lease Of Love by Arizona Tape

Rating: WARTY!

This was a dual first person PoV that I quickly tired of. It was so larded with cliché, and it had one of the main characters smoking, which is a huge turn-off for me. I mean it was already failing for me before then, but I was prepared to read on for a while; all that did was completely burn it for me.

It wasn't only the first person (barf) that spoiled it, either, but first person from two perspectives which is barf squared. Whenever I read that, it reminds me of two suspects being grilled by police, in different interrogation rooms, and it doesn't work. Well, it works for the police if they can catch them in a contradiction or get one to sell out the other, but it doesn't work as a tired plot device in fiction. 1PoV is bad enough and is usually horrible to read, but two of them just makes it so much worse. It's rare to find a 1PoV done well, let alone a two, and this sure wasn't one. The premise was wonderful - a March-June relationship (as opposed to a May-December or worse, a January-December which is frankly perverse), between two women, but the execution killed it.

I read at one point, "...but she had a symmetrical face. The customers would appreciate that" which strictly speaking isn't true. People like faces that are close to the average face they're used to. As far as symmetry goes, a study in 1996 discovered that children and young adults found those with slight facial asymmetry to be more attractive. It's a minor point, but let's not get hung up on perfection. Perfect faces, according to another study, might not be the signifier of good health that our long history has misled us to believe!

The story was marred by poor writing here and there. On one occasion I read, "With a sigh, I shoved my phone back in my designer purse." Really? You have to specify designer purse? That felt so pretentious that it about made me gag. I cannot read books written like that. I can't even take them seriously. Later I read, "With a sigh, I ran a hand along my head." Along? I can see ‘over’ my head or ‘down’ my face, but along? That's just weird. In and of themselves, things like this are not that important, unless there are many of them. Everyone screws up. Every author misses a grammatical or spelling problem here and there, or writes an awkward phrase now and then, but these added on top of other issues just make a novel unreadable for me.

Overall, I found this story plodding, tediously metronomic, and I did not like either character at all, so this was a DNF for sure. I can't commend it based on what I read.

JET - Ops Files by Russell Blake

Rating: WARTY!

This is the sort of story that ought to have appealed to me (despite really disliking the title), but I could not take it seriously. The first problem is that it jumped around so much from one place to another, and from one set of characters to an unrelated set with great flourishes of self-importance. Obviously in the long run these parts of the story are going to be related, but it was such hodge-podge that it annoyed me; every time I felt I was getting into the main character's the story, I was whisked away again and forced into something else that really wasn't interesting to me. I wanted to read about the main character, not a series of seemingly random people involved in random events.

I was going with it though, because I always enjoy the idea at least, of a strong female character as the protagonist, but my assumption going into a novel is that this main character isn't stupid, or at least if she starts out that way, she soon wises-up, but about 20% in I discovered this not to be the case.

Maya is in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force or in Israeli, Tsva ha-Hagana le-Yisrael, or The Army of Defense for Israel), and her squad is involved in guarding a security checkpoint in Ramallah, vetting vehicles coming through. This one early morning, right at shift change, when the night-shift guard was at its lowest ebb, a vehicle came through which was loaded with terrorists, there was a gun-battle and the terrorists got away, and Maya's best friend, the only other woman in the guard squad, was killed.

This didn't make any sense at all to me, because rather than come in guns blazing, the vehicle stopped and waited, and only opened fire when it was suspected by the guards to be inauthentic. I didn't get the point of that approach. If they had been trying to get through the checkpoint to cause trouble elsewhere, then their approach made sense, but that's not what the writing suggested. If all they had planned on doing was shooting up the checkpoint, which is how it seemed, then it made zero sense to come in like a lamb and wait to be discovered.

Regardless, Maya takes this shooting personally, and she begins sneaking out of the barracks disguised as an Arab woman (she speaks fluent Arabic), and scouring city for the people who did it; Eventually she locates the residence where these terrorists hang out, and she hears them discussing making a bomb. She does consider reporting this, but she's already in trouble with a vindictive sergeant and if he finds out she's been moonlighting as a spy when she's supposed to be in the barracks, then she'll be in trouble, even if she does have good intel on a threat. So she decides she has to handle this herself. It's bullshit, though.

Another option would have been for her to make up a story that an informant told her this information at the checkpoint (she could claim, for example, that this happened when no one else was paying attention because she was talking to a kid). That might sound like bullshit, but at least the intel would have been passed on. A solid writer would have gone this route - or via something similar - and then perhaps had the information discredited, thereby letting Maya have free reign to take it into her own hands. This author didn't do that, and instead, he made Maya a dumbass by having her go rogue - which is what gets her into trouble and gets her eventually recruited into the Mossad - with far too little motive. I just thought it was bad writing.

Right after Maya's big discovery, she was heading back to barracks and was accosted by three louts who figured they could take advantage of a lone Arab woman. She beat them up of course, but her attack started with a roundhouse kick that left her feeling "the toe of her combat boot [connecting] with his jaw." If shed been dressed modestly, as the text states, she would have been wearing a long dress and there's no way in hell you can roundhouse kick in one of those. The text doesn't actually specify what she was wearing other than a hijab (a headscarf), but modesty suggests a long dark dress. Arab women in Palestine do wear a variety of different clothing styles, including jeans and pants, and shorter dresses, but specifying modesty is what would seem to trap Maya. It just felt like more bad writing. That's when I quit reading the novel - at about 20% in - because as they say in the action movies, "I have a bad feeling about this."!

The blurb tells us that "JET- Ops Files is a breakneck adrenaline rush that will leave action thriller fans gasping." No, it's not. It's slow and sprawling, and it's irritatingly pedantic and constantly shifting focus. In what sounds like desperation, the blurb says, "If you love Bourne, Reacher, Mitch Rapp, or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, JET will keep you turning pages late into the night." But it really doesn't seem like this has a heck of a lot in common with Jason Bourne or Lisbeth Salander. I can't speak for Jack Reach-around for whom I have zero time, since Jack is the most over-used dumb-ass go-to name for an action guy ever. I've never heard of Mitch Rapp and I'm not impressed with his name either. I can't commend this based on what I read. It's too much like a guy with tits sort of a story.

Lust by Hildred Billings

Rating: WARTY!

Errata: "Not is was putrid." Say what? I have no idea what the author meant by this sentence! 'nor was it putrid' maybe? "Not when Lust pushed beneath the sweaty silk of Mercy's breasts and discovered her breasts." Huh? "Lust cried out with a high, wanting peal as Mercy gave in to her latent nymphomania" Wanting or wanton? Latent nymphomania?

Having enjoyed the first novel by this author that I had ever read, I embarked upon reading several more, but not a one of those others was anywhere near up to the same standard as that one. Even that had some issues, but I was willing to let those slide because the rest of the story was a decent effort. This one however, was a sorry excuse for a story and not even a novel - it's really a short story at best designed as a loss-leader to lure readers in to a series. I typically detest series and this effort only served to reinforce that view.

This is nothing more than a sex romp and has no story to tell. Ostensibly it's about this young woman named Mercy who has come to the end of her tether and right as she's about to throw herself off a bridge, this 'goddess' Acedia shows up to save her. In reality, Acedia never was a god. It was one of the original eight deadly sins along with the more familiar seven: Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, Wrath, but it got dropped or lost somehow.

This book has it that Acedia is actually a goddess who has seven incarnations, and this series, which I am not pursuing, the first of these 'avatars' is named Lust of course, and she's unleashed upon Mercy, like all she needs to shed her suicidal thoughts is to get laid good. Barf. I think this was an entirely wrong-headed approach. The series talks like it's performing some sort of a public service in addressing issues, but it's not. You can't 'cure' a suicide by getting them laid. It doesn't work like that, and it's shameful that this author doesn't know better. I cannot commend this; on the contrary, I condemn it. It was more bad writing and I am done with this author now.

Stay Here Tonight by Hildred Billings

Rating: WARTY!

Errata: "not thinking of the bad things that's happened to her." - this employs an incorrect verb person. It should read, "not thinking of the bad things that have happened..." "director Francis Ferrari, bedecked in a floor-length gown and letting her brown curls fly free" This is maybe not an error, but usually the female from of this name is Frances. "The paparazzi was out in full force" Paparazzi is plural. The singular form is paparazzo, named after a character in a Fellini movie. The feminine form is paparazza "She's biting at the chomp to date me." Chomping at the bit....

This novel is essentially a clone of Billings's novel Hold me which I actually liked. This one is really the same story: a high profile, rich, sexually promiscuous woman who 'won't be tamed' falls for a 'commoner'. It's also one of those ludicrous "let's dishonestly pretend we're a couple" stories that inevitably, predictably, tediously, boringly becomes a real romance. Yeah. Right. Okay.

The story again had endless, dangerously risky sexual behavior without consequence. Again it had a cold fish power woman and a magical lower-level woman who falls for her. Again it mistook hot sex for a loving relationship. I grew tired of it quickly. I think I have one more Billings novel to read on my list, but whether I'll get to it after this is another matter! I certainly can't commend a 'write by numbers' novel like this one at all and the lack of attention to the detail of getting her English right was annoying.

January Embers by Hildred Billings

Rating: WARTY!

This book stopped me dead in my tracks at chapter two when I saw that it was going to be a two-person PoV novel. No thanks. It wasn't even first person - it was third person, but still the author evidently experienced this inexplicable need to split the narrative and even be repetitive. Why? I dunno. I wasn't exactly enamored of it from the first chapter, but I was willing to give it a chance until I encountered that tediously pedantic approach. It contributes nothing to the story and it means every chapter has to have a label to identify whose thoughts we're sharing. Barf. No thanks. This is one of several of this authors books I will review, only one of which i actually liked!

Buzz by E Davis

Rating: WARTY!

After I finished an entertaining sci-fi read, it took me a while to find a book I actually wanted to read next, and this turned out to be it. Several I had on my unread list were first person so I decided to save myself some grief and I skipped those. A couple of others I started reading and found that they simply didn't appeal, so I skipped those. When I started this, it seemed like it might be the exception, but in short order, I became convinced it had been a mistake to even start reading this, it was so full of trope and so amateurishly written.

I mean, we're told that the main charcter, is “a guy who did a carpentry apprenticeship” but we're also told that he's been on the ice since he was three with a lifelong crdream to play professional ice hockey, so when and where in hell did he end up doing a carpentry apprenticeship? Akso, what's with the title? Buzz? It plays zero part in the story - at least in the part I could stand to read.

This was about this gay guy, Cameron Riley, who wants to be an ice hockey professional - which is a bit of a cliché I admit - but it turned out he had some sort of problem which the doctors are trying to figure out, so he can't play for a while (and that's the end of ice hockey in this story BTW), Cameron travels to stay with his older brother, who is also gay of course because gods forbid there should be any straight guys or cis women in a LGBTQIA story! Naturally, his sabbatical is where he meets Noah Clark, the love of his life, so there's some telegraphing going on here and once in a while, the author appears to forget she wrote something, so she repeats it or contradicts it a few screens later.

For example, at one point early in the story when Cameron is hospitalized after fainting on the ice, his brother Jackson messages him saying "On my way, should be there tonight." Shortly after this, when Jackson shows up, I read, "The mix of expressions on Cameron's face made Jackson smile: confusion, then surprise and joy." So did Cameron not recall reading the message announcing his brothers intended arrival? Or did the author simply forget she'd written that earlier part?

In another example, early in the novel, Cameron's boyfriend, Nathan, a complete asshole and not in a good way, texts Cameron to dump him saying he's had enough of his drama and he's moving out. The extreme cruelty of this message makes a reader wonder what the hell shit Cameron has been pulling to piss off a guy like that, so it's not a good idea to have your character become free in such a manner. This cliché was no surprise though, since in stories like these, you evidently have to have the wounded gay guy looking for love (yawn). In fact that's the worst time to get into another relationship, but not long after that point, I read of Cameron wondering to himself about Nathan, "Would they become ugly roommates now?" How are they remotely to be roommates of any hue, if Nathan is summarily moving out? Again, the author quite evidently forgot what she'd written.

The misleading book blurb - typically written by some dipshit who never read the book and has no real clue about it (or anything else for that matter, hence my series of Non-Reviews that I post periodically!) - claims that Cameron is the bad boy, but there's nothing to support this in the story at all. In short, and as usual, the blurb lies. I was so relieved this wasn't first person PoV because it would have been a real nightmare. As it was switching unnecessarily between three perspectives when the main character's PoV was more than sufficient was just dumb writing and made for an unpleasant read.

I finally quit reading when three houses came onto the market and all three brohers each liked a different one, and decided there and then to jump up and buy them so they could all hang out together like a frigging bunch of bananas. Barf. I know this is intended as a series, but WTF? I honestly could not stand to read another sentence in this jackass story.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

Rating: WARTY!

This is a series of short stories, most of which have very little to do with the sci-fi the author is best known for. I read it a long time ago and had a vaguely fond memory of it, but my renewed acquaintance from listening to the audio version very recently left me really disappointed. I don't know if it's because I've changed significantly (I probably have) or if I just liked one or two stories from my original reading, and kept a favorable impression of those few while forgetting all the other very forgettable ones. That latter, I think, is the most likely explanation, but my current take is that I did not like this overall, and cannot commend it.

Part of the problem was the reader, MacLeod Andrews, which is about as Scots a name as you can get for someone born in Kentucky. I had the erroneous impression from his voice that he was a lot older than he seems to be, but what bothered me is that his voice is overly dramatic, and he's not up to doing female voices at all. Why they even chose a male reader given that so many stories in this collection center around a female character, I cannot for the life of me figure, but there it is. I didn't like his reading. Even had that been perfect though, there were still far too many dislikes in the stories for this to get a favorable rating from me.

The stories are these:

• The Fog Horn This was too much and Bradbury evidently has no idea of evolution, the age of the Earth or of species resilience! Even casting all that aside the story was a bit flat and made little sense.
• The Pedestrian About a guy who walks at night alone since everyone else is home glued to the TV. He's arrested because the dumb cops can't figure out what a writer can possibly write about. They don't seem to get that the TV shows require writers. Dumb.
• The April Witch About Cecy, a witch who can possess humans and influence their choices, and who tries to get a girl named Ann to become involved with a guy, Tom, who the witch actually likes for herself. It felt like Cecy was a bit of a trouble-maker trying to fulfil her own wishes instead of seeking to help Ann or Tom.
• The Wilderness was a whiny, rambling, boring story about a couple embarking on a flight to Mars.
• The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl was a story I liked, about a criminal so obsessed with cleaning every last possible trace of his presence from a murder scene that he's still there cleaning when the police arrive the next morning.
• Invisible Boy I do not remember this story at all!
• The Flying Machine about a paranoid Chinese emperor who is determined not to upset the apple cart when a citizen creates wings he can fly with, and who orders the man and all witnesses to be executed.
• The Murderer I liked this one and can even identify with it since it's more à propos now than ever. A man is so sick of his life being taken over and controlled by machines that he starts sabotaging - in effect, murdering - the machines and is arrested.
• The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind about a war between two Asian villages in the philosophy of city wall building. Not great but not awful.
• I See You Never about illegal immigration. Not very good.
• Embroidery about a woman who unpicks her entire embroidered work because of one small error. Tedious.
• The Big Black and White Game A story of a black team playing baseball with a white team in the annual village game. The way Bradbury fawns and salivates over the black players is downright racist.
• A Sound of Thunder A decent and enjoyable, if dated, story about one panicked dinosaur hunter making a tiny but significant change in the distant past and how it reflected itself into his present when he returns. Nothing like the eponymous movie that was made from this same story.
• The Great Wide World Over There I do not remember this story!
• Powerhouse I think this was about a woman who I couldn't tell if she was old or dying or what because it was so badly told, but who rides to a power generating facility with her husband and inside she gets regenerated by the power. It was ridiculous and made no sense.
• En la Noche don't recall this one at all!
• Sun and Shadow This was a tedious story about a dick named Ricardo who objects to a photographer taking pictures of fashion models not only outside his house, but anywhere in his village. Dumb. I don't know what it is with Bradbury and Mexicans or Bradbury and Chinese, but Ricardo needed a swift kick in the nuts.
• The Meadow Don't recall this one, it may be one of several I skipped.
• The Garbage Collector Don't recall.
• The Great Fire Don't recall.
• Hail and Farewell Don't recall.
• The Golden Apples of the SunI know for a fact this is one of several I skipped.
• R Is for Rocket Don't recall.
• The End of the Beginning Don't recall.
• The Rocket Man dishonestly builds a fake rocket and misleads his kids into thinking they went into space. DNF'd it.
• The Rocket Man Silly story about a dick who abandons his family to fly rockets and hypocritically makes his son promise never to do it. Rip-off of Icarus. He earns a well-deserved fate when his rocket gets sucked into the sun.
• The Long Rain Chinese water torture in which people land on Venus only to find it rains constantly and the rain drives them mad. Barf! Bradbury knew shit about Venus.
• The Exiles tedious story about death.
• Here There Be Tygers A planet with a personality likes to keep people happy, but all of these assholes save one, leave and lie about it. Yawn.
• The Strawberry Window Skipped this one.
• The Dragon idiotic story about two knights aiming to take on a dragon which turns out to be a steam engine, Dumb.
• Frost and Fire Utterly dumb story about people who live for only eight days.
• Uncle Einar So tired of these stories that I skipped this one
• The Time Machine and this one.
• The Sound of Summer Running and this.

This was a waste of my time and money. I don't commend it - I condemn it. It's tedious, and way out of date now.

The Wharton Gothics by Edith Wharton

Rating: WARTY!

Every so often I give one of the classics a try and seem to have little success. I guess they're just not for me, but here goes another one!

Read nicely by Gabrielle de Cuir, I had a problem not with the reader, but with the stories. I started this in conjunction with an ebook of similarly ghostly short stories by a variety of authors and curiously I had the same experience with both of them - the first story started out fine, but the more I listened/read, the less I liked it, and subsequent stories bored me. They were slow to the point of lethargy, unappealing, and difficult to follow at times. Admittedly I listened to the Wharton stories while commuting to and from work, so there were distractions, but even in the quiet of the early morning when there's little to no traffic, I had a hard time finding anything interesting to listen to.

The eight stories are these, in case you want to look them up. Some or all of them may well be public domain by now, and available on the Gutenberg Project or some other similar online platform for free:

• The Fulness of Life
• The Lady's Maid's Bell
• Afterward
• The Letters
• Mr Jones
• A Journey
• The Hermit and the Wild Woman
• The Quicksand

I made it only about halfway through this before giving it up as a bad job. I can't commend it based on the experience I had despite Gabrielle de Cuir's sweet and mellow voice. This is my second experience of this author and my last. I did not like The Age of Innocence either so it's time to move on and give other authors a chance.

When You Had Power by Susan Kaye Quinn

Rating: WARTY!

I've had some success with this author, notably with the first daughter series, but I didn't like her Open Minds which was a lousy, trope, clichéd garbage can of a YA novel. Sadly, it turned out that this really wasn't really a novel, but a disappointingly short introduction to a series. I thought it was just about okay for what it was, but I felt cheated that I didn't get a real story out of it. I didn't get into any of the characters and I sure didn't want to get into an open-ended series about it.

The plot is set in a dystopian climate-challenged future where the power engineers are considered rather heroic in that they provide electricity to homes, the residents of which are being ravaged by rolling blackouts and regular disease outbreaks and therefore paranoid about letting strangers near them. Ironically, there's nothing in this theoretically introductory volume to explain how the world got that way. Yes, it's on the fast track to a future that could conceivably be like that, but we're already using RNA vaccines and talking of gene therapy cures for viral and bacterial diseases. Where did that go? Why did the efforts governments are starting to put into place fail to save the planet?

There seem to be unaccountable and unexplained lapses in technology. For example, homes are expected to make use of rechargeable batteries during power outages, but nowhere do we read of these same homes having any sort of solar or wind power independently of the grid. We already have that today, so what happened to it? There's no explanation to be found here. Worse, Lucia discovers that the batteries in her new home have been discharged to the point of being irreparably damaged, but apparently there was no sort of warning device built into the batteries to alert the owners of this problem! We already have warnings in our electric and hybrid vehicles, on our laptops, and even on our phones that the battery is mostly discharged so we know to recharge, so what happened to that warning on a critical home system? Again, no explanation.

We already have drones and robots, but they seem to feature poorly, too, so there are holes in the story that the author seems to have no interest in filling, which in turn makes her world-building poor and which kept jolting me out of suspension of disbelief. I didn't expect her to have detailed explanations for everything, nor would such a thing have made for good reading, but to have some sort of story that covered the obvious is expected, and she unapologetically fell short of this requirement.

The 'energy islands' seem to be in the ocean, and it's while doing a preliminary inspection of the underwater portion of her new island that Lucia discovers some weird damage. When she reports this up the chain of command, she's essentially accused of hallucinating, and the images she shot of the damage have curiously disappeared. When she returns to take more photos only a day later, there's suddenly no sign of the damage. It's all been repaired. That's a bit of a stretch

When investigating why power seems to be getting tapped from the generator, and looking for a potential target using all that power, she discovers that the area she wanted to investigate has been burned causing so much damage as to leave it unrecognizable and herself without evidence again. She tries to take more photos under the island, and she almost dies because of a sabotaged oxygen tank. The thing is that Lucia is a seasoned diver. Air has weight, especially when compressed, and you can tell the difference between an empty and a full tank, especially if it's aluminum. If her tank was seriously light on air, she would have known as soon as she picked it up regardless of what the tank gauge said, and for her to never check the gauge while she's diving is not a sign of a seasoned diver. It's the sign of a dumbass.

Clearly someone is hiding something, but even when Lucia gets photos that cannot be deleted since the next camera she uses is old tech and not hooked up to any network, she doesn't think for a minute of publishing this evidence out on the net, and thereby protecting herself and the family she has started lodging with, and this in turn makes her look like an idiot. The worst part of the story though is that there's no resolution to anything. We have no questions answered, and are expected to buy more volumes of the novel to get beyond this prologue. That doesn't work for me, not when it's so average. I don't even like prologues and normally skip them, so I can't commend this one at all, and I sure as hell don't want to read any mroe poorly-written pap like this.

Demon Child by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum: "I'd given up hope of getting those big, fat kudos" - except that kudos is not a plural! Not all words that end in 'S' are plurals!

This is yet another of those idiotic supernatural books that simply embarrasses the author and not least because it's such a clone of every other such novel out there that it's pathetic and tedious to read. I always hope there will be something new, something likeable in stories like this, something different for a change, but there almost never is and it's really rather depressing. I detest novels where the main character is named Kat because that's almost as bad as using 'Jack' in a novel about a male main character, but authors named Kat? I don't have a problem with that! I did have a problem with the predictable, self-obsessed, and ultimately unrealistic and tedious first person voice.

Another problem with this novel was that the author so obviously and desperately wanted her main character (who is uninventively named Clem Star) to be such a badass and a sexual powerhouse that she was turned into a caricature rather than a character. In cases like this one, I honestly have to wonder how much of this is really about the character and how much of it is authorial wish-fulfillment or attempts to address feelings of insecurity or inadequacy when and author creates a super-heroic character like this one, who is supposed to be tough, sexual and the best there is, but ends up looking more like some silly and trashy superhero character from a badly-written comic book.

The saddest thing about Clem was that she brought nothing new to the table. She was exactly like every other urban fantasy character in stories of this nature. The 'brilliantly effective but down on her luck' character has been done to death. And it makes no sense. If she's so good, why is she out of work? And if demons are such a known problem in this city, why isn't there an official force created to deal with them - why is it left in private hands? But authors? Find a new shtick, please, because there's nothing original here. Worse than this, though, Clem was nasty and disgusting, lived like a pig and had no redeeming qualities. There was literally nothing about her that made me empathize, or want to like her even remotely.

She kills demons and evidently uses this 'power' she calls her 'sex thrall' to lure them in. Yawn. Once again we have a female author who is saying her character is nothing more than a sex doll, in effect. Sex is actuakly mentioned to a nauseating level in this novel. Why female writers so persistently and consistently do this to their female leads continues to defeat my understanding. By all means let her be sexual if you like. I have no problem with that; the problem arises when sexuality or beauty is all an author invests her with. Can we not have a smart main female character? I don't mean you endlessly describe her as smart and then have her do consistently dumb shit; I mean you show her as smart without ever having to tell us she is. I guess I'll have to keep looking for writers who offer such characters. Or just keep writing them myself and hope there are readers out here who get it.

So the problem for one-dimensional Clem, we're told, is that this new bad guy is a demon child so she can't use her sex thrall. Why not? I guess because the author is squeamish about a child and sex, but this isn't a human boy we're talking about. It's a murderous demon who is killing wantonly and en masse, yet all the while it's treated like a child. Apparently this demon was defeated once, but inexplicably not killed! Now it's loose again.

Nowhere - not in the bit I read before giving up because I didn't want to risk vomiting from reading more - was there any definition of exactly what a demon is and why fighting it is left to humans rather than ceded to angels or some other supernatural power. Again that's par for the course for dumb-ass stories like this, but it's still stupid. The main character tells us that "working for a vampire is strictly taboo" and disses vampires, saying they stink and are animals, and then immediately gets the hots for a vampire who comes to hire her to take on the demon child - the same vampire who attacked her not long before in a dark alley!

We were told the alley was dark, and she couldn't see the vamp, yet still she still chose to walk down it and apparently the light she was heading toward at the end of the alley actually lit nothing. This entire section about this attack made zero sense, and why on Earth would she melt for this vampire who had literally attacked and tried to abduct her? Why the vamps even need help form this woman goes unexplored and unexplained, of course. It was at that point that I quit because after all the dissing of vampires, like this author was finally going in a new and different direction, she swerved wright back to type by spewing out how sexual and beautiful this violent visitor was, that was it for me. Check please! I'm done!

This story was garbage which is sad because it was recycled. But then recycling only works for waste, not for writing novels.

The Pink Bean by Harper Bliss

Rating: WARTY!

The title sounds like a euphemism for the clitoris and probably is. 'Harper Bliss' is not the author's real name which begs the question why choose such a lousy pen name? I've read a couple of other books of this nature, but none by this author, and I never will again after this one. The problem appears to be that with this genre, once you've read one, you've read them all. They really are that much like clones. I was sadly disappointed in how uninventive, unimaginative, narrow-minded, and unsubtle the story was. Maybe this is all the readers of this sort of a story need, but if that's true, it's a depressing bellwether for literature or at least for this genre of it.

The novel is set in Australia, a fact I frequently forgot because there's nothing really Australian about it apart from quirks of language here and there. I donlt know if the author is Australian, but she lives with her female partner in Belgium.

The story is about this divorcée, Micky, who is a mother of two, and who has been single for a year and finds she's attracted to women now. Obviously it's one of those raunchy, titillating, so-called romance stories which I normally avoid, but I thought one set in Australia and maybe by an Australian writer might be different. It ought certainly to be a change from endless cookie-cutter American-based novels thought I, but in the end, it wasn't! You can take the romance out of the country, but you can't take the dumb-assery out of the romance.

I've read a couple of other stories like this one: where every frigging character in the novel is lesbian. It's like there are no straight people out there at all, and not even any gay guys for that matter, or anything anywhere else on the spectrum. That's just abusive, and it's as unrealistic as a straight story that has no LGBTQIA characters, or a story featuring white main characters that harbors no PoCs to speak of. It kicks you out of suspension of disbelief - often.

Bad as that is, it's not even the worst thing about this story. The novel is written like this main character is an innocent, naïve, virginal ingénue, but she's in her forties, has a college education, two kids, and she's been best friends with this lesbian woman for two decades. How can she be so ignorant of lesbian life after that? It makes no sense. How come she's never had any sort of dalliance with this friend? It's unrealistic.

And while I'm at it(!): how has this woman been making a living for the last year? It's never discussed, but since this job she takes at a coffee shop is such a challenge, she's obviously living on her husband's hand-outs and she appears completely guiltless about that. She states that she's never worked a day in her whole life, but at a different point she mentions a job she had in college related to a degree she earned, but never used. Why is that? She's clearly sponged off her husband this whole time, and now she continues to do so even after they're divorced? Has she no self-respect? No drive? Nothing motivating her at all? Why would anyone care about someone so dull and bland?

At this point I had no respect for her at all. It makes her look like this dumb-ass gold-digger, which is not a good look for your main character. Yes, raising kids is a serious and full time job, but her kids are older teenagers who are no longer hanging on her apron strings. Does she had no urge for self-improvement? For stretching herself? How does she remotely imagine that she's going to be interesting to a potential partner?

But of course she doesn't have to worry about that because this story isn't about relationships or personality. It's about sex, pure and simple, and a goddess named Robin falls into her lap and is passionately attracted to her, without her making any effort whatsoever. This happens all the time of course.

Robin is a woman Micky's never seen before, despite both she and this woman frequenting this same coffee shop for some time. And her BFF Amber has no interest in this woman or in anything else other than pushing Micky into full-time lesbianism! That's her sole purpose in this 'friendship'! Naturally Robin treats Micky like dirt, and so is the one she has her affair with. Yawn.

The other woman is younger and obviously sexually active. It sounds like authorial wish-fulfillment to me, but the problem is that neither one of these two women has any questions for the other about sexual history before they leap into bed on the first date. That's how clueless this story is! Chlamydia is the most frequently-reported infectious disease in Australia with close to 100,000 men and women diagnosed yearly. Gonorrhea, hepatitis, and even syphilis are hardly rare, yet never once do either of these women concern themselves even momentarily with the fact that a sexually active and clearly promiscuous Robin could conceivably have something to pass on to Micky that isn't sexual experience?

I don't get how people can write this stuff. The author is a lesbian herself, so I have to wonder if she doesn't take any pride in who she is and in others who share her persuasions? Doesn't she want to present lesbianism in an realistic, interesting, and positive light?

I guess a sex romp is a sex romp regardless of what sexual affiliations it dallies with, but to me, the sad thing is that it's supposed to be titillating, yet it's really quite boring and it's so predictable. On the other hand, there's nothing else in Micky's life at all, so maybe that's understandable. Her children are supposedly important to her, but they barely figure in her life, and they seem not to have been raised very well, which is disturbing given that she was a full-time mom!

The athletic younger partner, Robin, is an American because god forbid you should try to sell a novel in the US and it not feature any Americans. How dare you! That's not the problem with Robin though. Robin is a white Aryan Amazon, yet she's supposed to be the diversity officer for the corporation for which she works, bringing the white savior mentality to encouraging diversity in countries where the modal skin tone is seriously darker than her own.

That felt so hypocritical to me. No, there's no reason, ideally, why a diversity officer couldn't be white. It would be racist to suggest otherwise, but in such a white story could we not have this partner be a woman of color for goodness sakes? Or make her some other sort of officer than diversity? Or is that taboo in Blissworld: that white Micky should be attracted to a darker-hued woman?

The only interesting things in this story had nothing to do with the story, but with language as used or not used in English speaking countries. As I mentioned earlier, at one point I'd forgotten I was reading a novel set in Australia because I read so many set in the US unfortunately! It's a lot harder than you'd think to find non-US novels in the US because we're so fucking provincial and insular here. Plus there's very little in this particular novel to really anchor it in Australia, which was disappointing to me. Anyway, one of the characters said "crikey" which is common in Australia and also said in Britain, but not really in the US. I became confused for a second until I remembered that this was not a US novel! LOL! That's how bad things are!

I also became curious about where 'crikey' came from, and apparently it's a euphemism employed in place of exclaiming 'Christ!" I came across 'sod' too, which is used in Britain as a dismissive mild insult, like "you silly sod!" It's apparently an abbreviation for 'sodomite', which I did not know. It's weird that such a pejorative term is used as a mild admonishment in Britain where the word 'bugger' is used similarly, as in, "you silly bugger!" It's almost an endearment. Weird, but true!

But I digress! The sex scenes! They were embarrassing. Can you believe that Micky was pulsing? Her "pussy lips pulsed wildly." Really? She was "reduced to one giant pulsing mess of extreme need." Seriously? I guess that's to be expected since her skin was "throbbing," but now I'm confused. Was she throbbing and pulsing at the same time? Did they alternate? Did one succeed the other?! Every ordinary thing in this encounter is presented as something wicked and sinful, and naughty and kinky, and over the top. But. It's. Just. Sex! And this book is obsessed with lesbian activity to the exclusion of all else: including reality. Neither Micky nor her friend Amber ever considered that her orientation might be bi or pan or any of the other options. No! It's lesbian all the way or nothing! I guess she just pulses that way. Or throbs.

During this same encounter, after her panties are pulled down I read, "As if by instinct, and as though this was all she'd ever done in life, Micky's knees fell wide..." What? Her husband never went down on her? I call bullshit on that. This is when you know an author is poor at their profession because she has such lesbian tunnel vision that she's ignoring the twenty years of physical intimacy between Micky and her husband - it's like Micky never had sex before and that's just dumb writing. Never once does Micky inadvertently make any sort of a comparison between making it with a her husband and making it with Robin, either. It's unrealistic. Either that or Micky is the dumbest cluck in the henhouse, and someone who has absolutely zero introspection.

It's all euphemism - very nearly. Micky could "smell her intimate aroma on Robin's lips" and so on. There's nothing new here; just tired, repetitive, retreaded, rehashed, cheap, fluffy talk that's been written to death already. That was the real problem here. The novel is shallow, boring, unoriginal, and been done to a crisp many times before. That's why I condemn it.

Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer

Rating: WARTY!

This novel "follows an American soldier across decades and continents - from the Pacific jungles during World War II to Cold War-era Vietnam." Yawn. Another American war story. How original. Get a plot. I may be wrong, but I honestly don't think there's any nation on Earth as obsessed with its military history as is the USA. Why is that?

Faking it by Portia MacIntosh

Rating: WARTY!

I'm always open to a good fish-out-of-water story or a life-swap story and this is both. It seemed, despite being outside of my usual fare, like it might be a laugh. It wasn't. It was an audiobook narrated decently by Karen Cass, but she couldn't save the poor material.

It's also set in Britain, so it made a pleasant change from the obsessive-compulsive 'range' of stories I typically see - all set in the US like there's nowhere else on Earth worth writing about, or set elsewhere, but with American characters, like no other nationalities are worth writing about. I often wonder if such a shallow publishing schedule by US publishers contributes to the US's problem whence half its voting population has an intense dislike of anyone perceived as a 'foreigner', but again the location wasn't enough to save it.

In this novel, Ella and Emma are identical twins who haven't really spoken in many years because of a falling-out over money when their mother - an advice columnist - died quite young from cancer. Emma got an inheritance because she married young and had children - a stipulation of the will. Emma doesn't get a thing until she turns 35 because their evil mother wanted them to stand on their own two feet before they got anything - or to have at least spawned offspring.

It's nonsensical and probably open to challenge in a probate court, interfering with reproductive rights as it does, but I let that slide even as I wondered if this might have been a better story had Ella decided to have a child just to get the money, and then given it up for adoption. It would certainly have given her more depth and made for a more interesting person than she was. It also would have made for a better story had Ella been the success, not needed her mother's money, and poor Emma, who had children too early in life was the struggling one who needed Ella's help.

As it was, she was thoroughly unappealing and boring, She was in a dead-end job, which she lost in an improbable way, and she showed no ambition to go anywhere or do anything. The only time she ever stretched herself, it seems, was when out of desperation, she accepted her twin's amazingly coincidental offer to impersonate her. Her twin has the unlikely fate of having to do jail time for unpaid parking fines.

This, too, was ridiculous because it turns out her twin is such a over-achiever and so organized that it's inconceivable that she - or her husband - would not have paid the fines, so the author is constantly betraying her own premises and character traits. It would have been better if Emma's crime had been something like unintentional shoplifting. It would have have explained her embarrassment and her need to be impersonated while she was in jail, better than parking fines did, so again, unimaginative.

But I let that go, and I read on. Ella becomes Emma, despite having different hair and being slightly more rounded than the trim and fit Emma. the problem with the story began immediately as Ella interacted with Emma's friends and acquaintances and finds that they're such a snotty and superior bunch, yet never once - not in the fifty percent(?) or so that I listened to - did she ever come back with an amusing observation or zinger in return. She was a limp tissue and it was boring, and turned me right off her.

On top of that there was a lot of body-shaming in the story, in endlessly talking about looks and weight. It's really aggravating when Ella finally goes to get her stupid home-attempt at hair-trimming fixed by Emma's hairdresser, who really needed to be kicked in the balls, he was such an obnoxious, judgmental, little snot - and such a cliché. I imagine this is what the author thought was funny, but it wasn't. It was stereotyping and nasty.

It seemed pretty obvious from the off that Emma's husband is having an affair, and maybe Emma is too, but I wasn't fully convinced that this was not a red herring. Ella, however, is immediately into a YA love triangle with studly men and this was another turn-off. I know this is chick-lit, but who laid down the rule that a woman cannot be depicted as standing on her own two feet? Does she have to be salivating like a bitch-in-heat over every other man she encounters? Seriously? One of them, supposedly a friend, refers to Ella more than once as "you dirty girl" which is obnoxious. It's such poor writing, and it makes it really hard to enjoy a story when it's so bald and obvious. Subtlety is not Portia MacIntosh's strong suit, evidently.

So all-in-all, this story was bad, it wasn't funny, it was written poorly, and it had serious issues. I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Beta Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book represented a prime reason why I do not like series. I loved Alpha Bots - the first in this series - and quickly I glommed onto the sequel thinking it would be as much fun as the original was, but the sorry truth is that it was the polar opposite, and I DNF'd it due to the complete lack of humor and the appalling violence which hit hard and was totally unnecessary, and it came right up front. It was such a contrast to what I'd experienced in the first volume that it felt like a whole different story. I quickly decided that this was not for me. I guess I should have known that a series titled "The Womanoid Diaries" couldn't be good - not all the way through.

In the words of Chrissie Hynde, who was no pretender: don't get me wrong! One of the reasons I dislike series is that they're essentially cookie-cutter repeats of the original, which often is merely a prologue. I don't do prologues. Where is a series to go? It's the same characters often facing the same issues and it's boring, and it's lazy writing.

I like very few series and the ones I tend to like are ones that maintain a freshness throughout: enough of what I liked in volume one to keep my interest, but a different sort of story. Very few writers can nail that consistently. Thus you might think I'd go for this sequel here because it is so different from the original, but for me it was too different and not in any good way.

Yes, there was violence in the first volume too, but the story eased into it and it felt natural in the context of the fiction: the victims were 'deserving' and main character Cookie was completely adorable throughout - even heroic. I did not like her one bit in this second volume. She was a different person altogether. I decided I did not want to read any more about someone who had essentially changed from being an original, engrossing, assertive, and fun character, and morphed into a psychotic serial murder. No thanks.

The writing seemed lacking, too. It didn't have the same 'oomph' in this volume. It felt tired and clichéd and had lost its sparkle. One thing I noticed just in my relatively short read was this: "With Tabitha's knife in hand, I hid in his blind spot and waited on the gunnel for him." The author doesn't seem to grasp that the gunwale (pronounced 'gunnel') isn't the deck - it's the part of the ship's hull that surrounds the deck - the part that the passengers traditionally lean on when the ship is departing and they're waving to those on the dock. If Cookie were standing on the gunwale she'd be particularly visible, not hiding! It's not a story killer, but that wasn't the problem.

The violence in the second volume was not remotely defensible, not even in the context of this fiction. So what if these were Russian SWAT team? That makes them acceptable victims of the Mansonian violence that Cookie perpetrates, none of which was actually necessary? Cookie had been quite happily avoiding surveillance under the river, but somehow, I guess, these people had tracked her. How, I do not know, but instead of simply going back underwater and avoiding them, Cookie decides to single-handedly take out the entire squad. And not to dinner.

Where she hoped to go with that approach, I don't know. What - these were the only police in the entire city of Moscow and after she kills them she's scot-free?! It felt like the author was trying to emulate a male writer instead of being herself as she was in volume one. There's a reason I read more female writers than male and for me, this author undermined that reason with this writing. Being a strong female character doesn't mean you're a hard-bitten man with tits. I'm sorry for those who've been misinformed on this score, but it doesn't.

The other problem with this 'opening scene' was Cookie's sexual attraction to the lone woman on the boat that she eventually climbed onto, out of the river. It felt predatory - like badly-written male-authored exploitation novel. Cookie is supposedly pining for the fact that her one true love, Wayne, from the first novel, has been taken prisoner. She's mentally tired and down, and is now facing the threat posed by the encroaching SWAT team, yet Cookie is thinking only of how hot the 'chick' on the boat looks. No. Just no.

And what about that with Wayne being captured? Cookie abandoned him! Yes, he told her to go, but is Cookie no longer a strong, independent character? Has she no agency? Can she no longer make her own tactical decisions like she did in volume one? Is she now enslaved to Wayne like she had been to 'Normie' at the beginning of the original novel? This approach cheapens and demeans her. It's a backward step that undermines everything she achieved in the first volume.

The macho slant in this novel made for truly unattractive, unnecessary, and sadly unpleasant reading and seemed to me to betray the whole raison d'être of the first novel. It turned me right off Cookie and by extension, the story she was telling, and I couldn't bring myself to even finish that one part, let alone read further. I can't commend this based on what I read, because it's the very antithesis of what I expected and not in any good way.

Alpha Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is one of the most original, entertaining, and amusing stories I've not read in a long time. By that I mean it was an audiobook, so I didn't even have to read it - I just sat back and listened - and laughed my ass off. There were some minor issues with it, but nothing to take away from the brilliance of the story and the hectic way it was told.

On top of this, the reader, Laci Powers, was awesome in the role and really put soul into the story and life into Cookie, the main charcter. I'm not a series fan, but I did secure the sequel to this before I even finished the first volume which is highly unusual for me. I remain nervous about sequels, and rightly so, because I did not enjoy the sequel at all. I'll review that next.

Be warned that this first volume pulls no punches, and is as explicit with language as it is with sex talk, which is to say there's a lot! That was one of the most amusing parts for me: to hear the naïve and softly-spoken Cookie talking so frankly and cussing like a sailor as she became liberated from her servitude, but this may bother other readers. I enjoyed her liberation, and I think it was made all the more amusing by Laci Powers's take on the character, too. The subtle snipes the author frequently took at male chauvinism and the genderist world order were wonderful.

Cookie Rifkin is a life-like AI robot designed to emulate a woman and to be servile and submissive to men, specifically her husband Norman. She's a gynoid if you will, but in the books they're referred to as womanoids. The thing is that, in New Stepford (get the reference?!), there are no human women, just human men. There are no children either. None of the womanoids think this is odd, that is until Cookie starts a book club with four other womanoids (Chrissy, Isabel, Paula, and Rita, all of whom have their own stories to tell), meets Wayne, finds her freedom, and becomes a startling rebel. Frankly, I think the story would have been even more powerful without Wayne. To me he was an annoyance, but this is what we have here.

The story begins innocently enough in a small homage to The Stepford Wives (and note to some ignorant reviewers: that was a novel from the same author who wrote Rosemary's Baby long before it was ever a movie!) where Cookie is wakened - and eventually woke - by the bed shaking and realizes that her husband is masturbating. This inexplicable and unexpected event in Cookie's life is what sets her off on her trail of discovery and eventual insurgency.

After meeting Wayne, Cookie encounters Maggie, who appears to be some sort of slacker police officer, but the more Cookie learns, the more she realizes that not everything in New Stepford is as it seems at first sight, and her encounters with Wayne and Maggie are not accidental. There is much more going on here, and over time, Cookie and her friends learn what real networking is, and they're not so much going to eat the forbidden fruit as overturn the entire apple cart. But it's not going to be a smooth ride by any means.

As far as problems are concerned, I said they were minor. There are times when Cookie's 'functionality' is described in ways that make her seem fully human, and at other times makes her seem very robotic, so this to me was a paradox; like for example she seems to eat and drink and breathe although she seems not to need to do any of that. The author never really went into any of the details of how she worked which was fine to begin with, but later, when Cookie learns how to upgrade herself, she seems much more robotic than she did when the story began, so it felt a bit like the rules of the world were changing, and this was a bit confusing, but it wasn't enough of a problem to detract from the story for me.

Also the upgrading is a bit problematic in another way. I don't want to give away spoilers, but in a way it's reminiscent of a time travel story where something goes wrong in the past and it would seem perfectly simple to just go back before that time and nip the problem in the bud, but the author makes up some arbitrary rule why that's not possible and it spoils the story for me. In the same way in this story (which involves no time-travel let me be clear!) Cookie's upgrades seem endless, but when she could have used a relatively minor upgrade to get her out of a tricky situation, she seems not to think of doing the very thing that could solve her problem. This rather demeans Cookie's agency and her inventiveness.

It made for a bit of a deus ex machina situation at some points and a 'Cookie has to be dumb not to think of that' at others, with problems being very easily solved at times, whereas at other times, they seemed insoluble by using the same convenient means. It was a bit inconsistent. I was enjoying the story enough that I let that slide, but this may bother some readers. Additionally, there is no real LGBTQIA angle to this story. There's a tease here and there, like the author is intrigued by Sapphic stories, but is too afraid to explore one for herself; so this is essentially hetero all the way

Overall though, I highly commend this story as beautifully done, entertaining, amusing, and even educational. I'm just sorry the sequel was a different thing altogether.

Two Minute Mysteries Collection by Donald J Sobol

Rating: WARTY!

This is an amalgamation of three volumes that Sobol published starting in 1969, the final one coming out in 1975. Readers may know him better for his Encyclopedia Brown series which was extensive and which ran from 1963 to 2012. I've never read any of those, and I'm disinclined to do so after reading these stories, which are short, but rather violent, and often so simplistic, or so arcane, or so out of date that they're really not very entertaining. The book contains some 200 of them and my understanding is that many of these were actually in the Encyclopedia Brown series originally.

Each story covers only two pages in print, with the solution to the mystery printed (for reasons which escape me) upside down at the bottom of the second page. All of them are solved by Doctor Haledjian who hands-down beats Hermione Granger for being an insufferable know-it-all. He's obnoxious, and no one person could know all that he supposedly knows about every little thing. Worse than this though is that he's in every story, and nearly all of them are murders and robberies, which makes me highly-suspicious. How come so many serious crimes occur around Haledjian?! LOL!

The mysteries are of the nature of, for example, a guy supposedly entering a house from a freezing outdoors and claiming he saw a thief, and Haledjian calling him a liar on the basis that the guy's eyeglasses would have misted up as soon as he entered the warm house, and therefore he would have seen nothing. I'm serious, that's what they're like - all of them, except, for example, the ones which require you to know in detail how the old Pullman rail sleeping cars are organized, and so on.

Another example is where this guy wants to impress a girl so he hires a professional boxer to come on to the girl and then 'knocks him out' to impress her. The girl sees through this because the guy's eyeglasses, which he placed in his coat top pocket prior to fighting, survived the encounter unbroken despite the prize fighter delivering several body blows. The idea is that the eyeglasses must have broken, but that's not necessarily true. Even if they were hit, they might have survived and there was a relatively low chance that they'd be hit anyway, since a boxer would be punching to the abdomen and solar plexus rather than high on the chest. Despite that, this girl, who is all starry-eyed after the fight, suddenly rejects the guy (as she rightly should, it must be said) not because of the improbability of this wimpy guy surviving an assault from a prize fighter and then knocking him out cold with one punch, but solely on the basis of the eyeglasses being intact!

Another case of trapping a criminal hinges on the confusion between Anchorage - the port city in Alaska which contains almost half the state's population - and anchorage: that state of a ship being anchored somewhere, but Haledjian's persistent mistake is his flawed assumption that everyone knows the correct terminology for everything and routinely uses it in everyday interactions. He idiotically believes that everyone has his own knowledge pool, but had I heard this same thing, I would have assume Anchorage, Alaska was being referred to because most people don't say 'at anchorage', they say 'docked' even if that term is not strictly accurate! Again, for me it was really weak, and such a case would have been thrown out of court were there no other corroborative evidence.

In another case, Haledjian's idiotic incriminating evidence is that no railroad man would have said "twenty minutes after three," but instead would have said, "three-twenty," which is patent bullshit. His second line of devastating evidence is that no resident of San Francisco would ever call it 'Frisco. Again, had this case been tried on the basis of those two lines of 'evidence' it would have been summarily dismissed.

Another case hinges on a guy - who is dying of a stab wound - coming out of the house and telling Haledjian "Water" which shortly convinces him that this guy Scott is the guilty party. His 'reasoning' is that he learned from Scott that this guy was left-handed and consequently had all of his faucets switched so that the hot and cold water come out of the 'wrong' faucets as compared with the standard arrangement. Let's ignore the fact that this person being left-handed offers no rationale for switching faucets and put it down to the guy's eccentricity. What convinces Haledjian of Scott's guilt is that when he rushes into the house to get water (instead of immediately calling for an ambulance) he gets hot water rather than the cold he expected.

Haledjian realizes that Scott must have run the hot water to wash blood off his hands and this is why hot water came out immediately rather than taking time to warm up, and that therefore Scott is the murderer! If that's the case, why didn't the victim say "Scott stabbed me!" instead of offering the asinine cryptic clue 'water' and hoping Haledjian would make the labyrinthine connection? It's horseshit of the same stinking hue that Dan Brown created in the idiotic The Da Vinci Code when he had a dying man running around creating cryptic clues when he could simply have left a note explaining that a mad monk killed him, and asking in the note for Robert Langdon to contact his granddaughter!

So while I thought these would be entertaining, they were overall more annoying than anything. Once in a while there was an interesting or an entertaining one, but those were too few and far between for me to find this a commendable read. Maybe it would make a good bathroom book - you can always use the pages if you run out of toilet tissue! But as for me, I DNF'd it.

Thief Trap by Jonathan Moeller

Rating: WARTY!

The idiot librarians at Goodreads, who are useless in my experience, have this author listed under two names - one of which is Jonatha Moeller! Not that I hang out at Amazon-owned Goodreads, but I noticed this when I was looking the author up online for this review!

The novel is book one in the "Cloak Games" series - not that the book cover will tell you this. Having the cover say it's a 'Cloak Games' story is not the same thing as saying it's a prologue to a series, which all volume ones are. I don't do prologues or epilogues. The prologue is chapter one, the epilogue is your last chapter and should be numbered as such. Deal with it, authors! That said, at least this volume did not leave you hanging off a cliff at the end, and it did tell a story, so there's that. But I have to wonder at the series name: is 'cloak games' meant to try to siphon cachet from The Hunger Games?! I don't get what it even means otherwise. But it's nothing remotely to do with any Hunger Games scenario.

This was an audio book read by Meghan Kelly (not to be confused with Megyn Kelly) and there was something about her voice that didn't work for me. It didn't seem to ring true for the character for one thing. I'm not sure if that was the whole thing, or if it was just her tone or what, but I failed to be completely at ease with her reading of this book. The voice constantly took me out of suspension of disbelief.

That's only one problem though. The biggest problem was not the reader but the writer. Also, that front cover illustration? What was that? I go by a book's description and pay little to no attention to covers, but once I had this I noticed that this particular cover is so inappropriate, I have to say something about it. Normally this is not on the author because they typically have nothing to do with covers unless they're self-publishing, but this novel came through Amazon's Create Space, so it is self-published. But note that there was nothing on that cover that had anything at all to do with the main character or this story!

There is an alternate cover which also has little to do with the main character's actual abilities, but at least that one isn't a picture of a woman's torso - ignore her brain because female brains are clearly unimportant - and this woman has a leather skirt that's hardly more than a belt, and she's pulling a - what is that: a light saber from a sheath? No. This character does not do light sabers! The cover not only completely misrepresents this character, it also appeals to the lowest common denominator. Shame on whoever decided this was a 'good cover' for a novel. Maybe I should pay more attention to covers in future - and reject stories outright which have cover versions like this even if the description sounds interesting?

Ah, the story! It made little sense once I actually did get to it. The premise is that in 2013 (why then I do not know), a gate to another world opened, and Elves used their magic to conquer Earth, crushing all resistance before them. There is nothing about the takeover other than this and a rather salivating description of how the entire US federal legislature - and the president - were publicly executed. Since then Queen Elf has ruled.

The idea, I suppose is that the rest of the world suffered likewise, but the story is so US-centric - as usual - that the rest of the world may as well not exist. Nothing else is said: nothing about why the elves came, or about how the military fought back, or whether there's an active guerilla war against the occupation. Yes, we hear vague mentions of rebels, but it's so understated that it may as well not be mentioned at all.

We do learn that in the shadow lands where the elves evidently emerged from, modern weapons do not work. Since the elven swords do, I'm forced to assume that the problem isn't metal, but chemical, yet humans, who are chemically based, can live and fight in the shadow lands very well, so WTF? The other edge of that sword is that firearms do work well here in our world, so how was it the elves where able to win so easily? Nothing is said about any of that. If it was due to their powerful magic, then why do elves need humans at all?

This is a problem with this story which supposedly takes place 300 years after that conquest - yet Earth hasn't changed a bit! it's not even run out of oil! The problem lies in that one elf, Morvilind (it sounded more like Morvellan to me in the audiobook) has taken in human Nadia as his thief in residence - sort of. He trained her from a young age to work for him, giving her fighting and thieving skills, and teaching her some rudimentary magic. Why was this necessary? He's an elf. He has powerful magic; so why does he need a human thief? No explanation is given for this and Nadia never questions it despite questioning everything else.

She works for the elf because he's working a cure for her kid brother who has 'frost bite' - that's not what it's called, but I forget the actual name. Frost fever? The elf tells her the cure takes 20 years and if she fails him, so will the cure fail her brother. She never questions this! He also has a vial of her 'heart's blood' whatever that is, which gives him power over her. She has six more years to serve, but for some reason she never looks ahead to try to figure out if she can get free of Morvilind after her time is up, or if he will still force her to work for him.

Her big trial comes when she's tasked with stealing a magically-protected 'old Earth magic' tablet from a collector. This was when the story went seriously downhill for me. The male love interest for Nadia is telegraphed from several light years away. It's so obvious and she is so doting on him, it's pathetic. it turned me right off this story or any others like it and anyhtign else by this author.

Now we're told that she's supposed to be this expert thief with all kinds of mad skilz, but as soon as he shows up at the party where she's planning to steal the tablet, she subjugates herself to him in all things and is constantly reminding us of how hot and muscular he is. There's the inevitable 'let's kiss to distract the opposition' moment that is so trope it's pathetic. Is this some sort of authorial wish fulfillment? I dunno, but it's tedious.

Predictably, they succeed in their respective quests and they part with him in her debt which is ridiculous if entirely predictable. That's the end of the story and I have no desire whatsoever to pursue this series in any form. I can't commend it as a worthy read because there's too much trope and too many holes in it.

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book read competently by Emily Woo Zeller. The story is of two childhood friends, one of whom, Aveda Jupiter (note that this is her superhero name), grew up to be a renowned - if spoiled rotten - San Francisco super hero, whereas the other, Evie Tanaka, who also has a power, had such a traumatic experience with it when younger that she tamped it down and is happy - so she thinks - to play sidekick to her friend. On the one hand Asian superheroes is a good thing, but on the other, Asian stereotypes is a godawful thing.

I don't know if the author did this on purpose, but Aveda backwards is 'a diva' (near enough!), and it suits the character perfectly. Other parts of this story were amusing too, to begin with, and I liked that the 'super villain' approach here was something off the beaten track, but I DNF'd this about halfway through because I grew sick and tired of the ham-fisted and telegraphed from ten miles away 'romance' between Evie and the macho-muscled guy who also worked on Aveda's team. Their codependent relationship was the exact opposite of romantic and once again we get a novel where sexual diseases seem not to exist - at least they don't with regard to people talking about them before diving into sex. Also I didn't like the 'Jupiter' part of the hero's name. What was that all about ? Rip off Watchmen much?

There was another problem with this, too, and arguably it was the biggest one. Evie was far too weak and servile for my taste. She just annoyed the hell out of me. She did begin to rebel, but it took her half of the novel before she even remotely started to get pissed-off with the truly shitty way she was treated by Aveda. This is a toxic relationship and Evie needed to get out of it, yet no one is advising her along those lines.

I know these guys a have a long history together, but that made it harder to understand how Evie had been so subjugated for so long. Plus Evie's oft stated desire is to be normal - no superpower - but if she's that into it, why the hell doesn't she get out of the superhero life and find a "normal" job where she's not stressed, and get that life for herself? Her show and tell are completely at odds with one another.

Also we're told like fifty million times that Evie is shut-down with regard to sex (again due to her traumatic experience), and despite it being entirely possible that she is in fact asexual, this is never addressed. Instead, people are all along essentially telling her that she needs to get laid. Do I actually have to say this is the wrong approach? Not only that, it's entirely insensitive to anyone who actually is asexual.

This shut-down of Evie's inexplicably turns to rampant explicit (be warned) passion with almost no overture. The book is very mature (or immature depending on how you view it!) in a lot of language use and explicit situations, so it's not your usual PG-13 YA book The characters are all in their twenties, but appear much younger if judged from their behavior and speech patterns. It's like they're a bunch of stalled frat boys instead of super hero team. Evie also has a kid sister who is thoroughly obnoxious and pays no price for her attitude or her behavior. It's wrong. Worse though is that this teenage kid has a drinking problem that no one takes seriously.

Starting early in the story Evie is forced to step-up from side-kick to hero - or rather, hero impersonator - since (aided by a glamor from another guy whose super power is magic) she has to stand in for Aveda when the hero is injured and doesn't want to show weakness in front of her fans. It's all about fans and rather than care about what TV or news media might say, everything in this story inexplicably hinges on some chick who writes a blog and is so two-faced about it that it's not even a secret, yet no one ever calls her on her manic approach to blogging about Aveda, not even Evie, who is supposedly so protective of Aveda and her reputation.

No matter what the blogger "prints," the team continues to suck up to her and give her exclusive interviews. It was just stupid, and ridiculous to present her as the only voice in town worth listening to. Her big blog story (as this kicks off) is the zit on Aveda's face. Yeah, if this were really a young teen book, I could see that flying, maybe, but no, this is a grown-up book (supposedly), and it just felt stupid and thoroughly inauthentic, especially since it just went on and on, entirely ignoring what she'd just done to save the city. If that had been used as an example to show shallow, but mixed with other reports, that would be one thing, but it would seem that shallow is all this novel has on offer. Despite my really wanting to read this initially, I was about ready to kiss-off the story right there when finally the zit meme was done with, so I kept reading. More fool me.

Naturally Evie's latent power starts surfacing as her impersonation of Aveda drags on long past it's sell-by date, and there's a conflict, but by this point I was so tired of the poor writing and Evie's complete lack of a backbone that I couldn't stand to read any more. I moved on to a middle-grade audio book, and liked that significantly more even though it too, had problems. I guess I should have realized from the title 'heroine' as opposed to 'hero' that this novel would be all wrong for me. Not that I'd prefer to read a book about guys, but it bugs me that women have to be heroines, whereas the guys are heroes. Why not all heroes? Why does the female have to have a specially reserved title? She can't be a hero? And before you jump on that, the word 'hero' has no gender, or if it does and we go by the earliest use, it was the name of a priestess!

So in short, this is a big no: it isn't ready for prime time, it tells the wrong story, misleadingly so given the book description, and it's poorly written.

Palace of Lost Memories by CJ Archer

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook - evidently the first of a series although I did not realize that going into it, which annoyed the hell out of me. The 'After the Rift Book One' label on the book cover was hardly intelligible in the ad offering the audiobook for sale at a discount, so I didn't notice it. I picked up the book because it sounded really interesting. Had I known it was first in a series I probably would not have picked it up because I would have known that it was inevitably a prologue in which no mystery was solved and the story would have gone nowhere beyond world building. Very few series really get me interested in following them. Typically, they're too long, too boring, and too unimaginative and derivative. I don't want to read the same story over and over with nothing but a few tweaks in between, which is what series are for the most part.

With a title about a palace of lost memories a reader naturally expects something mysterious and a resolution, but neither appeared. The story moved excruciatingly slowly and had way too much dillydallying, and instead of a mystery it came across as a romance, which I for one didn't appreciate at all. Nevertheless I kept listening in the hope that something interesting would show up to explain why all the denizens of the palace had memories which had been blanked prior to the point when the palace showed up. I never got that, and the story ended rather abruptly without even addressing the lost memories portion of it. It was teased several times, but it never was really discussed and it sure didn't get resolved because this is a series and the author has to stretch it out to milk the readers for as much cash as she can. I do not appreciate that, and I do not support books like that.

The book began - and despite being first person it was read pretty decently by Marian Hussey - with the mystery of a large place suddenly arising out of nowhere with no sign of anyone building it. That ought to have caused a sensation of curiosity and even fear among the locals, but inexplicably it didn't. Everyone just seemed to accept that this was normal despite the story having done nothing to introduce or establish any magical elements or precedents.

What was even more odd though was that no one seemed to have ever heard of this king or his palace or at least knew nothing about him. It was like a magical palace plopping down from nowhere was a normal thing in this neighborhood. What, no one owned the land it appeared on? No one had an issue with that?! No one - not even the local nobility - knew anything about the king or his past so they could fill in the blanks for the palace personnel?

The only mystery that this story focused on was that of a Lady - the king's fiancée, evidently - being poisoned and the only person who could cure her was the father of the main character, Josie. Josie was a midwife with physican skills who assisted her father, a doctor, but who was, as we were constantly reminded, ineligible to be a doctor herself because she was a woman. This is how Josie lucked-in to become a persona grata at the palace, yet despite her frequently coming through for them with treatments and cures, the king never once upped and changed the law so that she could be a doctor. That was something I'd expected to happen in this story, and I was disappointed that it didn't.

The other oddity about the novel was that Josie and her father were supposedly well-known and liked in the town which at times seems like a village and at others like a city. For example, despite being beloved and knowing the town like the back of her hand, at one point Josie perceives that she's being followed and runs off, switching directions randomly to escape and ends up lost in a very sordid part of town, where apparently no one knows her and she doesn't know this area at all! It made no sense given the cozy view of the 'village' we'd had before. Worse, the guy who is following her is purportedly not a bad guy, yet he doesn't lift a finger to help her in her predicament. Again, it made no sense.

The book description, evidently once again written by some dickhead who never read the book claims, "In the search for the truth, Josie is drawn deeper into danger, and the answers she seeks might shake the very foundations of the kingdom." No, she's never actually in any danger until the very close of the book, and that's resolved before you can even start to feel concerned for her. Besides, she's the main character and she's also telling the story in first person, so how can anything harmful possibly befall her? That's one more reason why first person is typically a fail for me. And nothing happens that even remotely threatens the very foundations of the kingdom. Once again, the blurb lies.

Add to all of this the rather dull characters and it makes me want to yawn. Josie's love interest, Captain Hammer may as well have been a hammer for all the emotion he exhibits and Josie is hardly any better, showing herself not to be smart, but to be impulsive and foolish as often as not. It's not someone I want to read any more about, and I lost any interest I'd initially had in the mystery of the lost memories. Do I want to keep reading a series that fails to actually address the main topic the series is supposed to be about? Do I want to be led by the nose, continually betrayed by an author who baits one thing and switches the entire story to another? No! I can't commend this as a worthy read at all.