I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane

Rating: WARTY!

I believe I saw the Armand Assante movie based on this novel, and evidently I found it unmemorable. I started reading the novel and it was so bad that I could not get into it at all. I know it's a novel of its time (1947), but seriously? Frank Morrison Spillane was working in a department store and he got his start in writing through concocting super hero stories for the comic book industry right before Pearl Harbor. Maybe it was his military experiences that hard-boiled him, but Mike Hammer's debut was penned in just 19 days when Spillane was looking to make some money to buy a nice house.

I think that two-week gestation shows in the writing, but it's the Trumpian treatment of women which bothers me. "She had million-dollar legs, that girl, and she didn't mind showing them off...[she] wore tight-fitting dresses that made me think of the curves in the Pennsylvania Highway..." Hammer leaves his girlfriend at a party, going off into the woods outside to have sex and then returns. Spillane's books are racist, homophobic and misogynistic. I can't commend this one and I'm definitely done with this author.

Geist by Philippa Ballantine

Rating: WARTY!

I could not get into this. I made it through three chapters and it was unfurling so painfully slowly that I looked at it and the thought of suffering three hundred pages of this was too much. The author seems to be channeling Stephen King, but the fact is that if the only way you have to make your characters pop is to detail their life history even unto the third and fourth generation, then I'm sorry but you're doing it pedantically wrong.

The book description tells us that "The undead are here and only the Deacons stand in their way," but it really doesn't tell us a damned thing about who or what deacons are, how they get to be in such a position, and what they actually do. Everything is so unnecessarily mysterious and after three chapters of that, I was tired of not knowing anything./p>

These deacons are supposed to be "guardians against ghost possession," but the author never showed us what a deacon would do with one of these ghosts, or undead or whatever-the-hell-they-are. Instead we're introduced to the anomaly of a host of them without ever being shown what the norm is, so it really means nothing because we have nothing with which to compare it! This is the first book in a series, naturally, and that's the first problem because it means the author thinks she has four books at least to tell this story.

She really doesn't. If she fails to tell an engaging story in volume one, no one in their right mind is going to want to read further. So it sure doesn't mean that she can coast through the first volume without doing any work. I can't commend this based on what I suffered through.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith

Rating: WARTY!

Several years ago I tried reading The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by this author and did not get along with it. I guess I picked up this book at the same time form the same close-out shelf! It's been sitting gathering dust and I finally decided to give it a try-out, without holding out too much hope. This book is part of a long series, so I guess it has a readership, but after sampling about a tenth of it, I can safely say that readership does not include me. I'm done with this series and this author.

This book had precisely three same problems the other one did in that it rambled incessantly, it insisted on using the full name of every character every single time they were mentioned, which was tedious, and the story simply didn't pull me in at all, so I gave up. The thin plot revolves around Mma Ramotswe worrying over her fiancé, Mr. JLB Matekoni not having set the date for their marriage yet, along with Mma Makutsi, Ramotswe's assistant, wanting a husband, on top of which, a rival detective agency has opened doors for business. It's not enough. I can't commend this based on the admittedly limited sampling of it I could stand to suffer.

One Foot in the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Rating: WARTY!

According to wikipedia, One Foot in the Grave is volume two of the 'Night Huntress' series, being preceded by Halfway to the Grave by six months, but according to the listing in the novel itself, the first volume is OFitG, with HttG following. I'm confused. Actually, I'm more confused by the titles: what, pray tell, is the practical difference between having one foot in the grave and being half-way to the grave? Isn't that the same thing with different wording?! This is a big problem with a novel series - how the heck do the newbies know where to start unless there's a volume number on the cover? Yeah - dig inside, I guess, but what a nuisance. Oh well, best foot forward - to the grave....

I started this novel out fresh from the excellent Dead Until Dark which means that Jeaniene Frost isn’t getting perhaps as fair a deal as she ought in the comparison, but what really hit me strongly in the first hundred pages was how 'young-adult' this novel seemed even though it isn’t a YA title. That's not to say that YA titles are bad per se, but picture the worst YA instadore you ever read, and that's what I'm getting at.

The main character is Catherine Crawfield, who goes by Cristine Russell and is known as the Red Reaper by her vampire enemies because she has red hair. She has dyed it for anonymity in this volume, but I don’t see the point of that given that vampires have heightened senses and can tell who she is regardless of her hair color! That's not the problem though. The problem is how sickeningly on pretty darned near every page, we’re treated to Cristine's desperate pining for her ex-vampire love, "Bones", who I shall refer to as Boner from this point on because this isn't about love, it's about sex, period. I can understand that she was hot for him, but she left him, not the other way around, and although she did it unwillingly, it has been well over four long years. This is a woman who is in serious need of urgent medical therapy.

That aside, the story hasn't been too bad (and it's hard to put aside when the stench of it is rammed under your nose on every other page). Cristine works for an offshoot of the Homeland Security Agency which is tasked with keeping the vampire population under control, so yeah, it’s the vampire hunter trope. Except she's described as a 'huntress'. I'm not quite sure how to rate the potential genderism in employing the feminine form there. This is a writing problem. Do we say both genders are equal and therefore use only the one term, so as not to 'discriminate' against women by using a specific feminine term for them, or do we go the other way and argue that employing what has been hitherto the masculine form is actually a form of insult to the woman so depicted?

I've tended towards the former option: employing the masculine term universally, but this is really something each writer has to decide. Look at it this way: what if we employed exclusively the feminine form, even to describe the male? So for example, if this novel had been about Cristopher Russell (instead of Cristine) we would call him a vampire huntress. How many people would find that strange, and doesn’t it say something awful about our society that such would be the case? It’s worth a thought or few.

At the start of this volume, Cristine is tasked with bringing down an ancient and powerful vampire. Cristine FYI, is literally half-vampire/half-human in that her mother was impregnated by a freshly-turned vampire who evidently had viable sperm flopping around in his resurrected testicles. This gives her enhanced powers which is how she came to be hired by the HSA. How that works is something quite literally never discussed in vampire stories: have you noticed? They supposedly have no heartbeat, so by what means does the nutrition from the blood they drink get to their cells to keep the vampires looking so young?! Osmosis?! In Cristine's case, how did that sperm become genetically changed in order that it could both still match up to the mother's genetic complement, and confer upon Cristine the vampire traits she garnered? This suggests that vampirism is genetic: that the dying body undergoes a genetic change before resurrecting as a vamp. But no one ever talks about it!

Frost employs some standard vamp tropes, such as older vampires are more powerful, and silver kills them, whilst dispensing with others: her vampires aren't allergic to crosses, churches, or daylight, and the silver knife not only has to penetrate their heart, but it has to be twisted to actually kill them! Thus although Cristine stabs this vampire in the heart, she's in deep conversation with him (another trope: smart-mouth your foe as you beat the crap out of each other - thoroughly unrealistic but sometimes entertaining) and from her conversation, she learns something which causes her to spare his life and let him go free, just as a favor to her ex-lover. Will this come back to, er, bite her? Of course, she then has to stab herself to make it look like he escaped, but it’s fine since she heals very quickly.

Cristine's best friend Denise, who knows all about her, is getting married, and Boner shows up as one of the groom's retinue. Cristine is a complete Mary Sue here. At that point it was patently obvious to we readers that Boner was going to show up, yet Cristine is completely clueless, and then she turns to Jell-O® in church when she sees him. It’s truly pathetic and frankly made me nauseous. This kind of writing stinks, but as I said, other than this tripe, the story isn't too bad at all, so I had planned on trying to stay with it. That plan failed!

I was very roughly halfway through this and as I said, finding parts which were interesting, but it was so hard not to drop this in the recycle bin because the "romance" was so awful, so tedious, and so uninteresting I honestly didn’t know how much more of this I could stomach, especially since I finally had some more library books, every one of which was calling to me far more strongly than Frost's 'amateur masturbation for teens' tome was. Parts of her effort did continue to be really interesting; that wasn't the problem. The problem was Cristine's dishrag-to-a-bull act which had continued to travel beyond merely sickening and into heaving stomach convulsions and projectile vomiting.

The hilarious irony is that Cristine was so angered at being such a limp dick in Bones's company in church that she hared off to the next gig her team was supposed to undertake (so to speak!) alone! Yeah, she's that kind of moron. There was a nest of vampires hanging out at a dance bar, so rather than go there immediately to deal with it, the team evidently had decided to let the vampires kill a few more innocents before they took them down; they planned to raid the place the next night, but Cristine decided to do the job herself like the dimwit loose cannon that she is.

She killed a bunch of vamps, and Boner (the walking hard-on to Cristine's slavishly gushing pussy) showed up and killed one more, but there were still three to go, so naturally, Boner takes Cristine dancing while they wait for those vamps to show because, god forbid they should actually go outside and wait for them! The other vamps turned up (their vamp instincts evidently having failed to warn them) and these three were also rapidly dispatched. Boner then raped Cristine; not sexually, but vampirically. Cristine had no problem with this - she limply let him have his way as he sucked heavily on her blood, preparing herself to die. I told you she needed therapy.

This so-called hero of the novel is nothing but a toy for a guy who has no reason whatsoever to be attracted to her other than that she evidently is a moist location in which to keep his dick when he doesn't need it free for urinating. Cristine hasn’t even an ounce of self-respect or feminine strength to her name. She's no hero. She's no one to look up to. She has no spine. Why is this essentially always the case in vampire stories? Why is it all-too-often the case with female so-called heroes in novels in general? Are we not to even expect a feminine main character in a vamp story who isn’t an invertebrate when she finds herself within smelling range of some hot vamp's blood-engorged brain-dick? Can nobody come up with a better way to tell this kind of story than this god-awful whiny, clingy, needy, co-dependent drivel? And what does it say about the women who enjoy this garbage?

The problem today was that I was stuck at work and this was the only lunchtime reading I had, so I gave it another half-hour, and it continued in the same - er, vein! Or maybe vain? If I could just excise the mindless teen-romance trash, I could enjoy the novel because I'm interested in the overall plot and where this will go, but I'm not coping well with Jeaniene Frost's depraved wallowing over what is, let’s face it, an abused woman. The problem is that the plot is increasingly taking a very distant back seat to the endless nymphodore (that's the same as instadore, but where the relationship is exclusively sexual) "romance" which doesn't even feign a weak pretension towards actually being romantic!

A quick word about the English language: it's not still four hundred years ago! No one calls women 'poppet' or 'kitten'. It seems that Frost has seen one-too-many Pirates of the Caribbean movies. And I don't care if she tries to argue that the vampires are old and still using the lingo they heard in their formative years, because then she's arguing that they cannot or do not change no matter what era they're from, and her own writing gives the lie to any such claim: clearly they do change. So please, "pop it" in the trash unless you intend upon including a barf bag with each novel you sell.

As if the rape wasn't bad enough, Cristine was kidnapped by Boner and woke up lying in bed with him. As a result of this, she decided to get back together with him! Is this what we want to set out as an example for young women* that if your lover persists in stalking you and in doing things you didn’t invite and have no control over, then the best solution to this dilemma isn't to kick the son of a bitch in his balls and report him to the authorities, but to get back with him and let him have what he wanted all along? Let's face it, this relationship has nothing whatsoever to do with companionship or with being with the right life-partner. It has entirely, solely, and exclusively to do with sex. There is no love or romance here.

* yeah, she's a teenager: though she's twenty seven, Cristine apparently has the body of a nineteen year old! Again, there's no explanation for how that works. If she ages so slowly that her life expectancy might be double or more what your common-or-garden human gets, how did she mature so rapidly that she looks even nineteen now? Shouldn't she look like she's three or something? Of course, then the thing with Boner would be entirely inappropriate. Not that it's any more appropriate to have a hundred year old vampire dating a nineteen year old woman....

Moving right along now.... Despite my desire to find out what happens in the rest (i.e. the non-brain-dead portion) of the story, I'm going to ditch this one and move on to something more intelligent, or at least more entertaining and far less tedious. Perhaps I will hold onto the novel, and maybe try and get back into it at some other time. Maybe if I skip the gooey parts completely and just read the other bits, I can still read it to the end and enjoy it insofar as that goes. Unfortunately, in order to do that, I'd still have to dig through the goo to find the good! For now, this is warty!

Titan by François Vigneault

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a graphic novel in limited colors by a Canadian artist and writer. While the art isn't completely to my taste, I didn't think it was awful, but I didn't get the warm colors. Titan is almost a billion miles from the sun, and it ain't warm out there. I felt the color palette ought to have been blues, not the warm colors used here, but that's just me. Once I got used to it, I didn't really pay it any attention. I focused on the story, which after all is the most important part, otherwise it's just a picture book. While that can sometimes work, I prefer a good written story to an implied one. I have to say up front that this is a very graphic novel with sex scenes, so be warned!

The story begins with "MNGR" (everyone who has a title has it capitalized and with no vowels in it in this story!) João da Silva landing on Titan to get the mining operations back up to speed since they're been falling off lately. The atmosphere - among the living inhabitants that is - is stressed and full of fomenting revolution. The moon, the largest one orbiting Saturn and the second-largest satellite in the Solar System is populated by genetically-amped-up WRKRs who are significantly larger and tougher than humans. They mine hydrocarbons, although exactly why is rather glossed over as is why they have genetically adjusted miners as opposed to robots.

The atmosphere of Titan itself wasn't well-represented. It was shown as rocky whereas it's really an ice moon - and the ice isn't water, but methane. In short, it's really nasty out there. Everyone is wearing a space suit and helmet so it's not until they get indoors that João finally gets a look at Phoebe Mackintosh, who will be his liaison during his work to reorganize and ramp up the efficiency of the Titan operation.

Rebecca is kind of sexy despite dwarfing João in size, and she speaks a sort of patois which is fortunately quite intelligible (I don't know if this originated in English or French, Vigneault being Québécois). Anyway, they bond together and survive a revolution, but they don't remain together at the end which I found rather sad, especially since they discussed it during their encounters, one of which is quite graphic and very sexual. I loved their coy talk afterwards!

I applaud the author for telling an interesting story and for showing a rather asymmetrical relationship without any fuss or judgment. It was entertaining and a fun read. I was sorry the translation went the road most traveled and referred to Earth dwellers as 'Terran'. I have no idea where that began, but it's always struck me as stupid. No one has ever referred to humans as 'Terrans' except in sci-fi and to me it sounds ridiculous - like we're all a bunch of tortoises or something. But that's just a pet peeve of mine. I don't know if the original did this or if this was just the translated version.

Overall I found this to be entertaining and engrossing, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Ill Wind by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad aka Rachel Caine aka Julie Fortune

Rating: WARTY!

This urban fantasy novel title shares my initials, and I have to live up to its title here, because, while the first time I read it, it wasn't great, neither was it awful, so I got the next two volumes thinking I might get into it. In some ways the story has a good premise, but in others, it's trope and cliché and I've moved on from that because of so many substandard and/or otherwise disappointing reads I've been through. I much prefer the road less-traveled these days because I've become so tired of reading the same old stories under supposedly different, but instead just are highly flimsy guises, and this novel is far from a road less traveled. So in the end it really was an Ill Wind for me.

It harks back to the ancient idea that there are four elements: air, earth, fire, and water, which is patent nonsense, but under this premise, the protagonist is a powerful weather warden (the series title). Weather wardens control the weather which means all of us ought to be really pissed-off with them, because they sure aren't doing much of a job. By that light, we ought to be extra pissed-off with Joanne Baldwin since she controls two of the four elements, and that, apparently, is rare.

Joanne is on the run from someone or something, and desperately trying to find her heroic guy to rescue her, and that 'damsel in distress' motif is a problem for me, especially since we don't learn very quickly exactly what she's supposed to have done, although the blurb talks of "accusations of corruption and murder." I have no clue exactly what it was she's supposed to have done because the story was not that memorable, and it's irrelevant anyway because you know for a fact it will turn out that she was set up.

But I gave up on the second reading far too early to get that information refreshed because I really didn't care to read it again. I don't even recall why it needed to be such a mystery except as a rather ham-fisted attempt to lure the reader on. It didn't lure me on as I recall. I was more interested in Joanne and her powers, but that interest was somewhat diluted by her desperate need of a St George.

So all I can say is that this didn't really do it the first time, and although I resolved - for whatever reason - to give it a chance, on closer examination, it failed. But what I lose on the read-about, the local library gains for its book carousel, so I can't complain too much! But I can't commend this either.

Sub-Human by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't like series. The first book can only ever be a prologue and I don't do prologues, but sometimes a book description makes it sound interesting enough that I bite and taste the sour when I was expecting sweet. I have to confess to my own part in this inexcusable crime because even the description had warnings in it that I chose not to heed.

The story is about Craig Emilson who is "a young doctor" why his age is important to the blurb-writer I have no idea, but it goes on to say that he's "sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III" when in fact he volunteers. He enlisting to become a "Special Forces suborbital paratrooper", but why a doctor would do that is completely glossed over.

He's "selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history-a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong Artificial Intelligence." Why him again is glossed over. Why not drop a bomb on it? Why send a doctor when one isn't needed? Why make your main character a doctor instead of a computer scientist? The feeling I got, the further I read into this, was that it was very much fan fiction, and not well thought through - the author going for melodrama instead of realism. That's never a good thing in my book.

My first inkling that this was not for me was right at the beginning where the doctor is being injected with some sort of nano-bobs. Those are like thingumabobs, but they infest sci-fi stories. These are supposed to help maintain his respiratory system when there's no oxygen. Why this was necessary goes unexplained so obviously it was to get the main character and this nubile doctor together. Telegraph much? That wasn't the problem though. The problem was the inappropriate behavior of the young (naturally), attractive (of course) female doctor who hits on him. I'm like "What?!" Here's the exchange:

"You're married, huh?" the doctor asked, apparently rhetorically. Craig nodded anyway. "That's a shame. You're way too handsome to be married. Handsome young doctors like you should be single. Then single doctors like me could marry you instead."

From that point it was obvious that those two would end-up together, so his present wife needed to be dealt with, and that conveniently happens when she thinks he's dead after the mission (or at least brain-dead, which she got right), and so she happily married a sixty-year-old guy (ie twice her age) with whom she's been working and of whom she denies having any sort of relationship when her husband got jealous in an earlier chapter!

That phone call was a joke. At one point she warbles sickeningly, "I never miss a call when we schedule it, baby, and I never will," and then very shortly afterwards says, "Don't 'baby' me, Craig! I'm not a child!" Excuse me? Isn't that precisely the same thing that you just did to him? Like I said, the writing is amateurish and thoughtless.

Another example came in that same section. He says, "I'm not brilliant like you." And she responds, "Not brilliant? Craig, you're a doctor!" I'm sorry but that doesn't necessarily follow. There are doctors who are brilliant, but there are also doctors who are idiots. On top of that he uses stock phrases like "In this brave new world of ours..." which about made me barf, and there's a robot which is named Robbie. And not after Margot, I'm sure.

In short, this was pathetic and a waste of my time. I couldn't stand to read more than about five chapters, let alone a whole series, because it was so sickening to read. I can't commend it. It was pathetic.

Sanyare the Last Descendant by Megan Haskell

Rating: WARTY!

This was supposedly an "IAN Book of the Year Finalist" but it's not this Ian, rest assured! The last thing I'd want is a book prize named after me! I should say right up front that typically, I am not entertained by fantasy stories, but there are occasions when I see one that looks like it might be different and better than the usual unappealing cloned crowds of such books. This was one such novel, but while it started out interestingly enough, it soon sunk into a mire of trope that is the very thing which turns me off these stories in the first place.

The story begins with Rie, a messenger working for the government (the 'high Court' - this is mired in trope, as I said, so there are kings and courts and so on - nothing new or original). Rie's delivering a message to a Fairy lord. They're called 'fae' here, employing the archaic spelling because the author is apparently too much of a wuss to call them fairies, like the 'fae' spelling somehow makes them more mature, or more worthy of being taken seriously. Seriously?! But anyway, she's attacked by what the author repeatedly refers to as 'blood sidhe' - read vampires, even though sidhe - also known, and pronounced, believe it or not, as 'sith', never were vampires. They were simply fairies or muses in Gaelic - not garlic! - folklore.

So when she's sent undercover to the 'dark realm' (it's always frigging' realms in these stories isn't it?!) she immediately teams up with a handsome muscular blood sidhe despite him twice trying to take advantage of her. It was at this point that I quit reading this nonsense. I can only drink so much trope because I become thoroughly nauseated and this story was so larded with it, that it was in danger of self-induced coronary right there.

I can't commend it based on the portion I read. When is a fantasy writer going to come along and give us something truly imaginative, different, and fulfilling? Please make it soon! The blurb warns us that "war is looming in the nine faerie realms." The nine realms? Shades of Thor! Or should I say 'Sidhes of Thor'?! One can only hope that this war will arrive soon, because what is it good for? Well, it might wipe these tired nine realms out completely and clear the decks for a clean start with some new and original fantasy stories! One can hope.

London 2012 What If? by Ian CP Irvine

Rating: WARTY!

This is a time-travel story, so we're told ("A Romantic Time Travel Thriller"), but in fact it's really not. It's a parallel universe story. There's no time travel involved. I'm drawn to time-travel stories, so I thought this might be interesting, but I was quickly disappointed. This was so poorly-written that I couldn't get into it. The main character is in a mid-life crisis, bored with life and doubting everything, so predictably, one morning, he does a George bailey, and ends up in a parallel world. All the station names seem wrong, and the place he was going to doesn't exist despite his having visited it many times.

There comes a point at which your disorientation at something like this happening, has to give way to a practical approach - or at least to a realization that something is profoundly off, and you need to stop and take stock, but all too often, people in these stories seem to be so determinedly stupid that they take forever to adjust to the fact that everything has changed. This guy reacts by vomiting repeatedly, which was nauseating to read about. Worse than this, though, was that he could never get it through his thick skull that things had switched around dramatically. He keeps thinking, notwithstanding how compellingly different are the things he's already experienced, that other things will be exactly the same - like that he will be married to the same person and live at the same address.

It was this tedious drunken pirouette the author insisted on taking us through repeatedly that turned me off the story. No one can be that stupid and have made it to adulthood. One of the big things discussed in the text is how the phone service companies are different - some he was familiar have not yet started up or never did start up, while there are others he's never heard of, but conveniently, his phone works perfectly when he needs it to, and fails him dismally when the author wants to inject a hiccup into his story. It was unrealistic, and after a very short time I gave up trying to follow the story and moved onto something I hoped would be more entertaining.

I have better things to do with my time and could not stand to waste any more of it on this haphazard and poorly-constructed story.

Fall to Earth by Ken Britz

Rating: WARTY!

This was the start of a series (Pillars of Fire and Light) and again it exemplifies why I typically do not find series either compelling or fulfilling. I made it only 10% of the way into this - a 450-some pages tome - before I became completely bored. In the final analysis, volume one of a series is nothing more than a prolog. Thankfully this volume doesn't have an actual prologue. I don't do prologues. It does have an epilogue. I don't do those either.

The story begins with Indiana Beckham who, we're told, has had her lifelong goal tripped up when her entire team was banned from Olympic fencing because of one member's doping problem. But guess what, there are other competitions, and another Olympics four years hence. This woman, as she reminds us, is the best in the world, so I don't know what her problem is. If she hasn't won the Olympics, how is it she's considered the best? If she has, then she already won it once, and missing this year's isn't a life-ending issue!

But that's probably easier to get your mind around than why she's recruited for a clandestine super-soldier program, and even worse, why she accepts it, given that only one in 30 actually makes it unscathed through the genetic changes to the brain. It made no sense that anyone other than a complete psycho would go into this program, much less someone like her, who had so much to lose, and she had no motivation whatsoever to join these people from the part that I read. There went any suspension of disbelief for me.

So while that was left hanging out there, we were unceremoniously switched to a seemingly unrelated story of a navy jet fighter pilot who had just learned that she's failed to get into NASA's astronaut program. Instead of thinking maybe she could get into some other country's astronaut program, or even go back to being a kick-ass fighter pilot again, she is all depressed and presumably she gets dragged into this program too, but I had lost my interest in the entire story at that point, so I quit reading to move onto something which would do the job a reader pays a writer for: engrossment!

The story contained a lot of technical gibberish at one point. The author is an engineer, and while I am sure he's pleased with himself, the fact is that he overdid it because none of it made any sense to me, and I work with engineers! On the other hand, I was driving at the time, so maybe I wasn't paying as close attention as I ought, but I don't usually have problems following a story when I drive, so I can't believe I was that distracted! Anyway, it did not bring me in and I didn't like the story-telling, so I can't commend this based on what I read.

Alice in Virtuality by Norman Turrell

Rating: WARTY!

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

I got turned off this almost from the start, but pressed on because the topic interested me. In some ways it was reminiscent of the 1992 Al Pacino movie Simone, but whereas that was a simulation, Alice is a full AI. The book was still nowhere near as entertaining as the movie though. I skimmed bits and pieces and the more I read, the worse it got. A third of the way in I gave up on it completely.

Instead of focusing on the Alice character, which is what interested me, the author kept going off at tangents, playing virtual poker, playing a D&D type of game, launching an avatar into a virtual chat room, and all of that was tedious to me. The parts in which Alice was featured were more interesting but even those lacked something and felt repetitious at times. In the end I decided I have better things to do with my time than to pursue this when it was so consistently disappointing. I can't commend it based on what I read.

The Perfect Wife by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This authors seems to skip the article (definite or indefinite, it doesn't matter!) from time to time:
“He was only one The Panel would approve in the area.” (the only)
“Admittedly, it had required opening up to man who had killed almost twenty people;” (to a man)
“Whatever the reason, she’d had to go to other” (the other)
“He still didn’t know she’s told Mel about seeing Teddy with the hostess” (she'd told)

This novel needs to be retitled "The Perfect Ass-Wipe." The book is a poor cross between Silence of the Lambs and The Stepford Wives with some Sex and the City tossed in for rude measure. The interactions with the serial killer are pretty much a direct rip-off of Silence of the Lambs ("Quid pro quo, Clarice!"), but it felt like the author couldn't figure out what kind of a novel he wanted to write.

This woman, for an FBI profiler wannabe and supposedly a promising candidate, seems remarkably stupid, and her husband is a jerk, but she can't see it. So on the one hand we're supposed to believe she's really sharp as a profiler, but on the other we're expected to swallow that she's completely dumb when it comes to profiling the motives of her friends and her husband - and his best friend.

She and hubby move to a new elite neighborhood when he's assigned to an office there, where he manages people's financial investments - so they're really well-off. He insists they join this ridiculous elite marina club (which she ought to have flatly-refused as soon as she learned that men (known as Oath Minders) often meet separately from women (known as Hearth Keepers). Seriously? She sure as hell ought to have quit when she learned that one of the activities enjoyed there is free love for husbands. I don't know of any self-respecting woman who would who doesn't vote Republican who would put up with any of that horseshit, but as with everything else, this Jessie girl mutely goes along with every single thing her husband Kyle, dumps on her. And he dumps a lot.

Things slowly deteriorate and come to a head when she catches him snorting cocaine with his friend Ted, and kicks him out. He comes back all contrite the next day promising reform, and she pretty much instantly forgives him. That night, they go to a party down at the marina. She's just learned she's pregnant, but she decides to drink some champagne anyway. My guess is that her sleaze of a husband put something in her drink, because after a couple of sips she began to feel woozy. Rather than have her husband take her home, she let him put her to bed in the cabin on the boat that belongs to Ted! Someone needs to give her a Ted talk! LOL! She has to be a moron to do that, given what she knows at this point.

I thought she'd wake up and find she'd been raped by Ted, but instead she wakes up next to the dead body of this woman she'd had an argument with earlier over flirting with her husband, and she has blood and skin under her fingernails. Instead of calling the police, this imbecile lets her husband talk her into disposing of the body, so now she's completely trapped.

She didn't agree to it outright because she felt so woozy, which ought to have told her she'd been drugged, but she was alert enough to have stopped him and she didn't. For her to even consider doing something like that given what career she was supposed to be following, is completely ridiculous, and I lost all interest in reading anything more about this bozo right then.

It was pretty obvious her husband was the murderer, and he'd bene having an affair with this woman who was going to expose him. It was obvious from the writing, but also from the fact that an author like this one is never going to let his favorite profiler get tied down with a husband and a baby at the start of a series, not when he can follow the safe road most traveled! I don't mind if a book starts out with a stupid character who wises up later, but to have an author depict a woman who he claims on the one hand is sharp and smart, yet who he depicts consistently choosing the dumbest option in any situation which faces her, is misogyny, period.

I resented the time I spent reading even half of this. If she'd been remotely as smart and sharp as was claimed, Jessie (the name says it all in this case!) would have refused to dispose of the body, called the police, and had herself drug-tested - and especially done all this given her career choice! She did the exact opposite and doesn't merit having a story told about her. Warty to the max on this one.

The Seven Wonders by Steven Saylor

Rating: WARTY!

Set against the growing conflict between the might of Rome and that of Pontus in 92 BC, this story is of teenager Gordianus who embarks upon a journey with Antipater of Sidon to enjoy the seven wonders of the ancient world. Supposedly he encounters a mystery at each one, and this was what interested me. Unfortunately the author was so intent upon showing us how much research he'd done that he forgot he was supposed to be telling an entertaining story, and I became bored to tears and gave up on it in short order. Maybe a print version would be less galling than this audiobook, but I doubt it. Based on the portion I heard, I can't commend this one. If a story doesn't grab you from the off, give it up and find something that does. Life is too short to read a list of authorial research notes.

Extreme Medical Services by Jamie Davis

Rating: WARTY!

This was a seriously disappointing audiobook both the story and the reading of it. I should say up front that I'm not a fan of vampire, werewolf, or other shifter stories. I have read one or two that were worthwhile, but those were few and very far between. As for the vast majority of them, they vary only between laughably unimaginative and downright brain-dead stupid, but this one seemed like it offered a new angle: that of a med tech who caters to this supernatural crowd, and I made the beyond the grave mistake of deciding to give it a try. I sure learned my lesson.

The biggest problem is that this story felt like it was written by an author who was not painting by numbers, but writing by numbers, trying to get the 'right' concepts in the publisher-approved spaces, and he became so focused on that, that he forgot he was supposed to be relating an original and engaging story. So while his writing-by-numbers was perfect, in those latter categories, this story was an abject failure. It was so unrealistic - even within its own framework - that it constantly kicked me out of any suspension of disbelief by reminding me far too often of how profoundly stupid it was.

So we start the story with the predictable in the middle of a crisis situation, then we immediately revert to flashback mode, which brings the story to a screeching, jarring halt. Even that might have been survivable had it not been for the brain-dead writing. The author expects us to believe that a med tech who graduated with a great track record in his academic life, and thereby earned himself an unexpected berth in the supernatural med-tech world, would be thrown into a service about which he was profoundly ignorant, never even heard of, let alone knows anything professionally, and in this state of dangerous ignorance, be sent out on emergency calls with absolutely zero preparation and training.

Yes, if your goal is to slaughter your patients through sheer incompetence, then by all means go right ahead and do that. If you're serious about your work though, and intent upon saving lives, then you tell your proby up-front what he's going to be doing, you'll ascertain with certitude if he's okay with that, and you'll train him as to the special needs of the supernatural clientele so he can actually be of use instead of floundering from the off! You don't toss him into it in the dark without a word that his patients will all be supernatural, and that his first call is going to be a werewolf in the middle of a diabetes-induced transition. Wait a minute, a werewolf with diabetes? No, not a werewolf - a lycan! I'm sorry, but this was all horse-shit, and did I mention stupid? As much as I would have liked to have read an intelligent take using this plot, I could not stand to read any more of this absurd garbage.

One of the warning signs, which I ought to have heeded was the EMT lecturing the new guy on the fact that werewolves prefer to be called lycans - a term shamelessly lifted straight from the Underworld movie series. Why would these alien creatures prefer to use a human-invented, if venerable, term for a disease? Like I said, the author was so intent upon conforming to established standards, that he rendered his book into a boring joke instead of an engrossing read. I ditched it very quickly. This is precisely why I don't read this genre: it's boring as hell! It would be nice to find something new and different, but in a way it's quite reassuring and even encouraging to know that nothing has changed. Now I know I don't need to waste any more of my time on this tedious crap for a couple more years at least.

And Then There Were Nun by Dakota Cassidy

Rating: WARTY!

For purposes of my own, I've recently been taking a look at some of these detective stories that I quite honestly despise, especially the ones that make a pun out of something - typically the main character's name - in every title. It blows, and this story was predictably yet another fail, despite the premise being a lot more interesting than most.

I liked the idea of the detective being an excommunicated nun, and her 'Watson' being a demon, but after a short time the story became cloying and one-note. It was too extreme and inauthentic even within the premise we're given. Having written a novel myself which features an incarnate demon, I was hoping this would entertain me, but that hope was dashed with disturbing rapidity.

The novel became annoying, in particular at one point where the inevitable body was inevitably found, and the police were called in, and the detective outright asked the main character if her name, Trixie Lavender, was her stripper name. I'm like "WTF?" I seriously do not get why female writers seem to enjoy going out of their way to marginalize, slut-shame, or otherwise denigrate their female characters, and it was at that point that I quit reading this one. I can't commend a novel that has a female cop gratuitously insult a female witness at a crime scene and there's no pushback from anyone, not even the author.

Outlaw by Edward W Robertson

Rating: WARTY!

This was a sci-fi novel which is evidently part of the 'Rebel Stars' series and I should really have paid attention to that - not just that it was a series starter, and therefore I probably wouldn't like it, but also that name of the series which struck me as half-baked and overdone at the same time. I also should have been warned off by the blurb, which, despite this novel being published in 2014, starts out, "in the year 2010, an alien virus nearly wiped out the human race." Funny, but I don't recall that happening!

This is the second story by this author that I've read and I've been pleased with neither of them sdo I guess I'm done reading his material from this point on. He doesn't plot well, and so this idea in this particular story of an alien virus was poorly planned. No such virus is likely to harm humans because viruses, parasites, and bacteria evolve and specialize, so unless this alien virus evolved alongside humans, how is it going to even begin to affect us? Was it genetically engineered? There's no word on that, and the events of the novel tale place a millennium after the virus, so how is it relevant? Maybe it all 'falls together' later, but I didn't have the patience to read that far. To me it just felt like his signature style: poorly thought-out plotting. If you're going to write sci-fi, you really ought to have some knowledge of science!

As I mentioned, the story jumps from the wipe-out to a thousand years hence when humanity ("mankind" according to the genderist blurb, not 'humankind'), has recovered from this virus, so why even introduce the virus in the first place? Aren't we immune to it now? And if it's a thousand years with no return of the virus and no aliens in sight, then why is everyone so jumpy thinking aliens are lurking around every corner? That would be like us, in 2019, living in fear of Attila the Hun. And how are you going to shoot that alien virus anyway, if it returns? LOL!

The novel was a tedious read and after these people got into two bar fights in the first few pages, I decided I had better things to do with my time than plow through this anymore. I can't commend it except as trash-ready garbage.

Ambassador Seeing Red by Patty Jansen

Rating: WARTY!

Once again a novel where the blurb makes it sound interesting, but the practice of reading it was an exercise in tedium. I really must quit reading the first book of a series in the hope it might be worth the journey before we get to the end, especially if it's in first person because that's nearly always a grave mistake. The main character here, Cory Wilson, seemed so self-obsessed and self-important, and so profoundly stupid, that I was ready to barf, and I gave up on this tedious tome in short order.

It's supposed to be all on this guy to stop an Interstellar war. Ri-ight. I had no faith in him doing a damned thing, especially not in volume one of a series that I now discover has at least ten volumes. That tells me this author has no idea how to concisely tell a story and is more in love with her own writing than actually getting on with it and having a start, a middle, and an ending. No thanks. Here's hoping the aliens win! At least they, so the author, without a whit of irony, tells us, know how to get to the point!

The Djinn Wars by Christine Pope

Rating: WARTY!

This one sounded interesting from the blurb and started out well, so it encouraged me to keep going. That's always nice in a book!

It begins with this woman, Jessica Monroe, who is a teaching assistant, starting to hear about a disease that seems contagious. It's on both coasts of the USA, but not in Albuquerque where she lives. It quickly shows up there though, and the mortality rate is extremely high. She sees her brother, her mother, and her father all die quickly from it. She seems very ill-informed about how to deal with an extremely high fever, giving her mother ibuprofen and putting damp cloths on her head when her temperature was 106 degrees and she should be putting her into an ice bath!

But it seems like there's nothing even hospitals can do, and once her family is dead, and the power goes out in her parents' home that same night, she decides to drive over to her uncle's house the next morning to see if they're alive. Apparently she's unaware that you can call people on your cell phone! LOL! Maybe the cell phone service is out now too, but the fact that the author didn't even mention it and somehow rule it out was a bit of a writing miss, I think. Jessica seems to have no friends, either, because she's not thought a single thing about calling any of them, nor has anyone called her.

She's started hearing this voice in her head that seems to appear randomly, telling her not very useful things, and she thinks she's imagining it, but she doesn't seem to be getting sick. The voice could have easily told her what it was up to and where it was directing her to, but it never did, meaning that yet another female writer has put her female character into the hands of a manipulative and domineering guy, for no good reason, and had her sappy female character goes along with it like a zombie. I'm sorry, but no. Pope the author seems to have as little respect for women as does Pope the Vatican guy and his church.

That next morning, with the power out, she looks out of her window to see the automated sprinkler system working across the street. I guess the author didn't think about how that would work with the power out. Another example of poor writing. Jessica sees the neighbor's dog out in their yard and adopts it - without even checking to see if the neighbors are alive - and sets off to visit her uncle.

So yeah, there were multiple issues with the writing, but I was curious about the story for a while. Before I knew more, I'd assumed it's called djin wars because there are jinn involved in the story and that's what the voice is that she's hearing, but how that would pan out given that it's supposed to be a romantic series, remained to be seen. I was merely hopeful to begin with that the writing quality wouldn't slip and Jessica wouldn't become too damned sappy, but my faith in such things is low and that's what killed this in the end. That and the poor writing, and Jessica's gullibility and stupidity. I don't mind an author's faux pas here and there. We're all prone to that, but if the story is good I can overlook those. I can't overlook really stupid so-called romance stories, and that's why I can't commend this. I'm done with this author. Next please....

The Knight's Secret by Jeffrey Bardwell

Rating: WARTY!

This author has an amusingly appropriate name, incorporating 'bard' as it does, for someone who is writing a courtly romance - and by romance I mean it in the old-fashioned sense, but it's written from the female perspective and in first person and I don't think this author can carry it. I'm not someone who thinks guys shouldn't write first person girl stories or vice versa, but the more I read of this one, the more it started to sound like a guy's idea of what or how a woman should be rather than what a woman might really be, and it felt rather hollow and inauthentic because of that. Plus he seems to be confusing the granddaughter with the grandfather far too much.

Let me explain. The fantasy plot takes place in a pseudo-medieval milieu featuring knights and swords, but it's told using modern idiom, which I think loses the period a little. It's set in a world where the heroic Sir Corbin, the Hero of Jerkum Pass (so we're told to a tedious extent) is looking forward to a reunion with his old army buddies where he will give a speech and get a financial consideration, through which he'll be able to move his family from the increasingly village where they live, to a place safer for his daughter, who is a mage.

Since his stint in the military, times have changed and now, despite their help during the great war, the emperor is turning against mages and a pogrom is coming. Unfortunately, before he can attend this reunion, Sir Corbin dies. His remaining family: granddaughter Elsa, and her dad and mom, who is Sir Corbin's daughter, find themselves increasingly - and for no apparent reason - becoming pariahs. This felt entirely inauthentic to me, but it's no more than has been done in many other stories (and therein lies the problem). The only solution seems to be for Elsa, under a magical disguise, to impersonate her grandfather and go to the reunion in his place, get the much-needed money, and enable the family to relocate to a more hospitable locale.

Elsa's mother, a mage who acts as the village doctor (for which the village resents her apparently - and inexplicably) uses her magic to create a façade of her own father over the top of her daughter, but it feels outwardly real, such that if someone touches her chest, for example, they will feel a man's chest, not a woman's. The problem with this is that it's just a superficial change, so I understood, but the author began writing the story subsequently as though her grandfather's very soul and spirit were somehow possessing the girl. Plus the girl came-off as being quite young at the start of the story, yet later, she seems a lot older, so it was confusing as to exactly how old she was exactly! If she was so much older, then how come she wasn't married?

It's not that I'm saying a young girl must get married, but given the background to the story, it's the kind of world where that seems like it's a given, and if she isn't married or promised to someone, then there has to be a good reason for it. The problem is that the fact that she was single was never discussed, like it wasn't an issue precisely because she was so young. If there was some other reason for it, then it ought to have been brought up, but the way this is written, it's like the author never even considered the implication of the world he was building, or it never crossed his mind that single girls might marry in his world. The thing is that if she was unmarried because she was so young, and even knowing all of her grandfather's war stories, how come she was able to carry off this impersonation of an much older guy so convincingly to everyone, including people who knew her grandfather intimately?

It wasn't just that, either. The writing wasn't so great in parts. At one point I read, "Who had been fooling whom that night?" This is wonderful grammatically speaking, but the problem is exactly that: it was speaking - and no one actually speaks like that in real life unless they're boorishly pretentious. I've repeatedly seen writers do this because they can't help themselves. My advice is to get the emdash out of your ass and loosen up! At another point I read, "still out brothers and sisters." Now there is some gender-bending going on in this book, but I think this should read 'still our'!

On top of all that, we're told nothing of Elsa's sex life and left to assume that she had none, precisely because she was so young, yet under the guise of her grandfather, she runs into Maven, a mage and an old flame of her grandfather's, and she falls into bed with her and has sex without even a second thought or a whiff of distaste or fascination, or anything else! How can that be, unless Elsa is highly-sexually experienced and has had many lovers, and not just men? It felt completely wrong to include this scene and not address any of this. Worse, there was a second encounter between them later in the book that just went on and on and on, tediously so. Again, without a word of the fact that this was an apparently young and inexperienced girl having sex with a much older woman, and not only not thinking twice about it, but not thinking a single thing about it. It was just thoughtless and poor writing.

It was like once Elsa had donned the disguise and left her village behind, the author dispensed with the fact that she was in fact a young female through and through and simply went with her being a rather elderly man. It was lazy at best. Even that might have been manageable if the author had gone somewhere with the story, but once in the city, all progress stopped. It became tedious to read, and the story, other than revealing that there was a conspiracy to destroy mages, which we already knew, the story literally went nowhere, unless you count going round in circles as progress. I don't. All we got was repeated chants about the Hero of Jerkum Pass of which I was thoroughly tired of reading by then, and talk of this big speech, without getting any closer to actually hearing the speech. When I got to seventy percent and nothing had changed, I ditched this, resenting the time I'd wasted reading it. I cannot commend something as cluelessly-written as this, and I plan on never reading anything else by this author.

Cinders by Cara Malone

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum
“She leaned against the hood and worried at a hangnail on her pointy finger”
Surely she means 'pointer finger'?! This is why I have a problem with that term. OTOH, maybe she does have a pointy finger....

Well I made it almost 60% of the way through this before I had to run from it gagging. It started out pretty decently - a female firefighter, an arsonist, a love interest who wasn't yet a love interest but was quietly in the wings. Even when Marigold and Cynthia aka Cinder, aka Cyn, start to hook up, it still made for an entertaining story, although from that point on it became much more of a YA love story than ever it was an investigation into an arsonist. That I could even handle.

The problem came for me when the story made its nod and a wink to the Cinderella story. Marigold, who always complains about the amount of work she has to do, but all she seems to do is be a socialite, invites Cyn to a social event and Cyn comes dressed up, but gets called away to a fire. She changes shoes while talking to Mari in the parking area (for no apparent reason!), and accidentally leaves one of her loafers behind, which Mari then returns to her at the station house.

That part was fine, but as soon as these two began making out and going into a full blown sex session right there in the bunk room of the station house that was too much for me. It just felt wrong and sordid, and juvenile. If the author had made the fire alarm go off so they were interrupted when they began to make out, that for me would have made for a much more entertaining story! But this author went obvious on me and rather gross and immature as well, and that was far too much for my taste. That's when the romance felt fake and forced, like the author was faking it rather than feeling it, and I lost all interest.

I can't commend this based on the 60% or so that I read.