Annalynn the Canadian Spy by Shawn PB Robinson

Rating: WARTY!

"After she’s visited by a curious band of thieves, 10-year-old Annalynn is recruited as a spy for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service." Way to insult the Candian intelligence services! This is a non-starter.

Never Say Spy by Diane Henders

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first in a series. It’s one of those annoying series where every single title has a keyword in it. Often the keyword is the improbable name of the main character, but in this case it’s 'spy'. Tedious. What's the fear here - that readers are so shallow or so stupid, or both, that they can't recognize this book is by the same author as that book? Personally, I don't write for people that stupid. Even my children's books aren't aimed at adults who are so lacking in basic mental wherewithal. You don't have to be particularly smart or highly literate to read my books, but you do have to have a functional cortex.

The plot is that "middle-aged Aydan Kelly" is mistaken for a spy and then evidently becomes one since this series runs to another dozen novels at least. It's one of those wishful thinking deals, especially when the main character is pretty much (give or take a few) the same age as the author. But note that age: the main character is 46. There's nothing wrong with that until something happens in the first chapter which I shall shortly get to.

I actually applaud the desire for an author to promote an older woman as a main character in something that's not a pure romance story or one of those tedious multi-generational stories, or the even more tedious 'old friends reunion' stories where a tragic or dangerous secret is unleashed! The problem is that this is a series starter and a first person novel, which sets it up to fail in my long and bitter experience with these things, because a series is essentially the same story told over and over again with a few tweaks. I know it's beloved by authors, because they can lazily recycle the same characters and plots, and by publishers who can vacuum up the profits from their hopefully addicted 'users', but first person is worst person for me, and I have a problem with series unless they're really well done.

Case in point: the story begins with Aydan waking up from some sort of unconscious state to find herself with a paramedic standing over her. Yet her first person voice description is perfectly fluent and natural with no memory gaps or confusion. This is why first person truly sucks as a descriptive voice for a novel. It’s completely unrealistic and nauseatingly self-centered. I began skipping sections of this from almost the first page because of the tedious predictability, although kudos to the author for having a doctor introduce himself with "I'm Doctor Ross" rather than the absurd, "My name is Doctor Roth." No, dipshit, your name is Roth. Your title is Doctor. No, I don't cut slack for crappy writing, especially when I'm already annoyed by the first person voice. Recently I went through my unread print book collection and summarily tossed out everything that was in first person even though I hadn't read it because I was so profoundly sick of this voice!

The book description isn't typically written by the author, but it's often written, it would seem, by some moron who hasn't even read the novel. That has to be why this one claims that Aydan is a bad-ass, yet she's still wearing her wedding ring despite her husband having gone two years before. That doesn't translate to 'bad-ass' to me. Where I quit reading this was in the first chapter when - seeing a guy who is described insultingly as 'beefcake' come out of her trunk and into the car, bearing a gun - Aydan slams on the brakes and dives out of the car, which has already begun moving again, and rolls away as the car continues on downhill. No. Just no. This woman is 46, remember? She's not an athlete. She's a bookkeeper. This is not to say that no bookkeeper is fit, but this one 'flung' herself out of the car as it was 'picking up speed'? Was she on some of that speed I wonder? It was far too improbable. No. A bad ass would have disarmed the guy and demanded an explanation from him. This woman is not a badass. She's an idiot.

The stupid book description also has it that this woman has a penchant for profanity, but a search of the book, out of curiosity, revealed no use of any four-letter words other than 'shit'. So profanity is a lie. Maybe the text claimed she used profanity such as where it read, 'after a few moments of heartfelt profanity", but there isn't actually any, other than that one word which is used many times. So again, book description misleading. Which I resent. I gave up on this because it’s not up to my standards for a good read, and I will not commend it based on my introduction to it. I'm done with this author.

The Coldest Winter by Antony Johnston, Steven Perkins

Rating: WARTY!

I got this because it's purportedly related to the movie Atomic Blonde which is a really good movie. The problem is that this book, despite having Charlize Theron's image on the front, has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie, which is based on The Coldest City not The Coldest Winter. This is why I have nothing to do with Big Publishing because they're so shamelessly dishonest, it's disgraceful.

Nevertheless, I tried to give this a read and it was boring. The art is thick, ugly, smudgy black and white, and the book was unappealing in every way except that I could close it and return it to the library and pretend I never had it in my hands. That was the best part about it by far.

Code Girls by Liza Mundy

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming from a long line of renowned Mundys, such as the late lamented Sic Transit Gloria, and the animalistic Coty, this author...I'm kidding. The real review starts next.

This book is about the literal thousands of young women such as the work-like Dorothy Braden Bruce and the stellar Ann Caracristi (and some, such as Agnes Meyer Driscoll and Elizebeth Smith Friedman, not so young) who worked in, oversaw, and contributed invaluably to cracking Axis codes during World War Two. Most of these women are unsung and many just as heroic in their way as the men who went into battle. It was that very drafting of men en masse which deprived the allies of critical help in the war effort on the home front, which is where women came in.

Realizing help was going to be needed in the grunt work of cracking enemy coded transmissions, women were initially sought from the upper crust colleges of the northeast, but before long, the trickle of such women became a flow and as soon as the white men running things realized that it wasn't so much a woman's academic qualifications as other characteristics that made her useful (r useless) in not just working the pipeline, but also cracking codes, the floodgates opened and women from all walks of life came in by the hundreds, and not just civilians.

In the course of this recruitment, there was created a Navy branch which came to be known as the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). Despite these women being summarily rejected at the end of the war, not all of them left the espionage service, and the world would never be the same again after women had finally been given the chance to show what that could do.

I had some problems with the organization and the writing of this book. It had too much extraneous detail, and the time-line jumped around like a grasshopper on a hot tin roof. It made things much more confusing than they ought to have been. It once again only goes to show that a journalist is not necessarily qualified to be a writer of books.

The brainwashing that journalists are given to put some humanity and personal interest items into the story got in the way of this story at times. I know there were a lot of women worthy of mention, but here there were so many that it often got to be a problem keeping track of who was who, and the jumping did not help this. And did we really need to know that so-and so resided at address X in city Y? No! Who cares? Seriously? I sure a shell wouldn't want to see my address appear in a book because so and so lived here in 1943. Hell no!

There was a lot of this kind of thing, and while some details were interesting (such as Bets Colby's "epic" parties about which I actually would have liked to have learned more!), this technique (if you can call it that) failed to make a lot of the women who were mentioned actually stand out. They tended to get lost in the mundane. It seems like those who did stand out, achieved that despite the writing, not because of it, and many did, purely from the sterling contributions they made and the insights they had in the actual breaking of codes, but others, who nevertheless made serious contributions in terms of attention to detail and work ethic, often got lost which was a crying shame.

That said, the author did make a remarkable and very welcome contribution to offset the woeful lack of information out there about what these girls and women did. There were scores of them, far too many to mention here, and they worked their butts off to crack codes and save lives. They lived and breathed their work and it was a sad loss when most of them went back to their unheralded lives after the war, never to be heard from again. Although no doubt at least a few of them were happy to do that, I am sure many more were not. I found this book gripping and fascinating, and could not put it down for the last third because I was so engrossed in it and really wanted to finish it. I commend it fully as a worthy read despite some writing issues.

There were code-breakers and female 'yeomanettes' in World war One, believe it or not, and I found it quite curious how these two wars panned-out in terms of what happened afterwards. Post WW1, we had the era of the 'roaring' twenties and the flappers, but after WW2, all we got was the fifties - not an era known for excitement and rebellion in the lives of women! What happened? What was the difference? Why were these two periods so varied? To me that would be worth a book. But I doubt it will be mine! I do have to say though, that normally when I finish a book or a novel, I donate it to the small local amateur library that serves my area of town; this one I kept because it gave me some ideas for a novel that I might write about this particular era and these women.

The Unexpected Spy by Tracy Walder

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was the unexpected memoir for me because it popped up as an invitation in my email box and I didn't need to be asked twice! The book was very short (about 200 pages) which I normally love, but frankly I could have stood to have read a lot more of this. The author doesn't waste words or pages, and after a very brief mention of her childhood and college, both of which are relevant to things that occur later, we get right into her recruitment at the CIA, the work that she did, and then a switch to the FBI, which I did not expect but which I think I found even more interesting than the CIA, which had been engaging aplenty.

Obviously a lot of this is about the CIA, so the details she gives are naturally censored in parts. This was my only problem with this book - not that things were censored, but that the author had chosen to leave the expurgated portions (which were not that many) in the text, but as a series (in my copy) of tilde marks, rather than write around the topic. For example, I read at one point, "I'd been moved into what was then a deeply classified operation within the CIA, the ~~~~~~~~ Program." I didn't get why she hadn't simply changed it to say something like "I'd been moved into what was then a deeply classified program." At another point I read, "if we ever were to ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~, that action would never be taken without thorough analysis." That could easily have been rendered as something like "any action on something like that would never be taken without thorough analysis." The tildes were most annoying when they ran on for many lines - twelve or nineteen on a couple of occasions. But as I said, it wasn't that often and it wasn't a book-killer for me.

The author was born with what's called 'floppy baby syndrome' or more professionally known as hypotonia, in which the body's muscles are less than sturdy, but she overcame that. I'd never even heard of it until I read this book. Here it stands as an foreshadowing of some things the author had to overcome in her career. This led to some bullying in school, then on to her being a blonde Delta Gamma sorority girl and hardly - to some people's narrow minds - the kind of person who would end up in the CIA! But she did, and started out life eying satellite photographs and analyzing them as an aid to tracking terrorists. It reminded me of a scene from that Harrison Ford Tom Clancy thriller Patriot Games in which they were similarly examining photographs to try and identify people at a camp.

Apparently the CIA has a crazy course in vehicular pursuit, called Crash and Bang, where they get to drive these old beat-up cars and have to try to run the opponent off the road. The course ends with them deliberately crashing into a cement wall just so they know how it feels, which seems a bit extreme to me, but I guess it's better to be prepared. I assume it's a relatively low speed crash, but they were told if they didn't hit hard enough to render the vehicle un-drivable, they'd have to do it again!

I got to read about how it was in the CIA right after 9/11, when people like George Bush, as well as Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney would come in unexpectedly, asking rather desperately if the operatives had managed to find a link between this guy Zarqawi, who they knew was into making chemical weapons, and Saddam Hussein, and each time the CIA would report in the negative. At one point the administration learned that Zarqawi had been to Baghdad for surgery, so they used that as the link, changed the heading on the information this author supplied them, and went on national news claiming a link! That news meant that Zarqawi went underground and they lost track of him for a while. It also meant they had manufactured a 'justification' for invading Iraq. It was disturbing to read things like this, it really was. The book was an eye-opener in many regards.

After some time with the CIA, the author wanted a change of pace and applied to the FBI where she was accepted for training. I'm not sure I'd personally consider that a change of pace, but each to their own! At Quantico though, unlike in the CIA, it seemed like there was an institutional program of resentment and bullying of females, and particularly of one who 'claimed' to have worked in the CIA. The three trainers seemed intent upon employing the same genderist attitude toward her from day one, despite one of the trainers being a woman. Their behavior was appalling.

The book is replete with anecdotes and interesting information not about the details of the work (where permissible!), but about the way the work is done and how hard these people strived to keep a country safe - and how awful it is when they feel like they have failed, either because they did not reach the right conclusions in time or because they did, but those who could act on the information would not listen to the experts who were telling them there was a threat. It made fascinating reading and I commend it whole-heartedly.

My Wicked Little Lies by Victoria Alexander

Rating: WARTY!

I didn't realize this was part of a series (Sinful Family Secrets, volume 3) otherwise I would never have requested it from the library. I'm not a fan of series. That said, it appears to be amenable to reading as a stand-alone, and as an audiobook, it seemed like it offered an interesting read. Unfortunately it's yet another American author thinking she can write Victorian drama. Some US authors can do it admirably, but others cannot. This one gets too much wrong, and authenticity falls victim to this failed effort.

Additionally, there was paragraph after paragraph of idle gossip which I am sure the author was thrilled with herself for, but which was boring, and which did nothing whatsoever to move the story, except into the DNF category. I was twenty percent in before anything of interest happened, and by that time I was so tired of the reader's voice and the lackluster plot that I gave up on it. The book was read by Justine Eyre, whose voice was a bit annoying. I recognized it at once from other audiobooks because it's very distinctive, but in the other book I recall, she sounded far too mature for the character she was reading about (and it was first person which made the discrepancy worse). In this case her voice tended to fall off to what sounded rather like a pout at the end of each sentence which became irritating after a while. Even with a perfect reading voice though, the story would still have dragged abominably.

The basis of it is that Evelyn Hadley-Attwater used to be a government spy. She purportedly worked for the Department of Foreign and Domestic Affairs, but 'Department' is an American thing. In Victorian England it would much more likely have been called an 'office' since it wasn't large at all, or a ministry. Additionally, Lady Evelyn is married to a Count, but again there's a problem because 'Count' isn't really an English title at all. It's European, where the man would be a compte, or a graf, or something along those lines, so this didn't really work either and felt appallingly pretentious.

This is also a story where the main character has retired but is called back into service because no one else can do the job. Yes, everyone is utterly incompetent except our miracle hero. Barf. These stories usually feature some guy named Jack who is ex-military, or he's a troubled FBI serial-killer profiler, and I avoid such stories like the plague because they're too tedious for words. The idea here is that there's tension now between Evelyn's need to get this one last job done, and her need to shield her husband from her activities. My wild guess is that her husband is the very man who used to hand out her assignments when she worked for the "Department" and she doesn't realize he's her fantasy guy (whom she never met). Of course I may be completely wrong with that, but I really don't care because I honestly don't care about this character. I cannot recommend this: it was boring.

Love Is for Tomorrow by Michael Karner, Isaac Newton Acquah

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: WORTHY!

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

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

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

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

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

Velvet Before the Living End vol 1 by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser

Rating: WORTHY!

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

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

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

Obviously, since it's espionage of this nature, there is a secret and a betrayal. I have no idea what it is, since the story is unfinished at this point! I can say that I loved the dialog, the artwork, and the story overall. It was fun, made all the right moves, was believable and enjoyable, and I definitely recommend it.

Spy the Lie by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a book written by a twenty-five year veteran of the CIA, and ex-employee of both the CIA and the NSA, and a CIA security officer. I picked it up because it looked interesting and recently I've been watching the TV show Lie to Me which I completely adore. That show, which gets a mention here, actually employs some of the techniques discussed in this book, although it understandably over-dramatizes them (sometimes to a melodramatic level) for the sake of making entertaining TV.

This book is a little slow, and doesn't offer much (the audio version to which I listened was only four CDs), but what it does offer, when it offers it, is interesting and useful knowledge. It mentions real cases in which the authors have been involved, and some in which they were not, including, for example, the Simpson (OJ, not Homer) trial.

This book never was intended as an audio book, so it makes no sense to it referring to figures and diagrams, which are clearly print version only. Those issues aside, I enjoyed listening and learned some interesting stuff - stuff that maybe I can use in some future novel? Who knows?! It's read by Fred Berman whose voice was slightly irritating but not obnoxious. I recommend this if you're into the background to spying and lying.

Disposable Assett by John Altman

Title: Disposable Asset
Author: John Altman
Publisher: Severn House
Rating: WARTY!

This one annoyed me in the second sentence, where I read, "To anyone watching, she would look like an average young woman of nineteen or twenty, perhaps a bit prettier than most...". I had two issues there. If she was prettier than most, then certainly she wasn't average, but what actually bothered me was this "prettier than". Why? Why is it necessary to make this woman prettier than most? Why is this shallow, skin-depth assessment so vitally important to authors when dealing with female characters?

The front cover describes this as a "riveting espionage thriller", but even by grandiose publisher standards, that doesn't even begin to describe this novel It's superficially espionage, but it's neither riveting nor thrilling. At best, the blurb writer is batting a .333.

Superficially, the story is supposed to be about CIA assassin Cassie Bradbury, who was set up to kill a defector in Russia before being abandoned by her agency. This is the reason I picked-up the book, but as usual, the blurb lied. It's not really about Cassie, although she does make a few cameo appearances in this story. It's really about supposedly disgraced ex-CIA agent Sean Ravensdale and how he 'undisgraces' himself when turned loose in pursuit of this supposed rogue agent.

This business of having a retired agent brought back in to do something no one else purportedly can is nonsensical, but it's what we have to deal with here, and the story checks off pretty much every cliché in the book: Disgraced, retired, disaffected agent, check, check and check. Has old contacts inside the Soviet Union, er Russia? Check. The guy is in a poor relationship? Check! Ravensdale is a single dad, who, though retired and disgraced nevertheless doesn't think twice about sucking up to the very agency that treated him like dirt, abandoning his kid, and taking off to some dangerous pursuit where he might die. Some dad, huh? I sure didn't like him and wasn't interested in him.

The problem for me is that this was neither riveting nor thrilling, which is why I gave up after reading just over a quarter of the story. Life is too short to spend any more time on a novel than that if it isn't doing it for you, especially when there are scores of other novels out there begging to be read, many of which actually are going to be thrilling and riveting, I have no doubt.

The bottom line is that this one was boring for me. There was nothing interesting happening, and what did happen was tedious and repetitive. The entire story of Cassie, in the portion I read, was of her running and hiding, and hiding and running - all the time.

Ravensdale was doing much better, hanging out with old cold war contacts, drinking cognac and vodka, and seemingly making no effort to actually find this supposedly rogue agent. There was no urgency to his actions or to the endless leisurely descriptions of the faded glory of tsarist Russia. I had to quit this and move on. The novel is baroque and badly in need of a Renaissance.

Spying in High Heels by Gemma Halliday

Title: Spying in High Heels
Author: Gemma Halliday
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

Hopefully this isn't book one in the "Spying in High Heels" series, because why write one novel when you can milk the same story for several? Once in a while, a writer makes it work, but more often than not, not. Hopefully this is a one-off (I was wrong - this is one of a series, unfortunately).

The ebook for this has a page listing reviews complimentary of the book. I don't get this. If it's an ebook, you're not perusing it in the library or the bookstore, considering purchasing it, you already have it. What is the point of trying to sell you a book which you already have? Seriously, how dumb is that? And how dumb do they publishers think we are to be swayed by the opinion of someone we don't even know? I often find I do not enjoy a book which was recommended to me by someone I know and whose opinion I typically value, so what makes these people think I'll be blindly swayed by an opinion of someone who I have no reason to rely on?! I've never understood that mentality. It's cynical at best and moronic at worst.

That gripe aside, this novel sounded tempting from the blurb, but his means the commercial did its job - it lured me in. I have always felt there's a place for a 'girlie' spy or detective novel - where the superficially highly feminine main character turns out to be tough and smart underneath her misleading exterior. I have yet to find such a novel. I'm actually in process of planning my own to fill that void.

In this case, the woman, Maddie Springer isn't even a detective. She's a brand-name obsessed children's shoe designer who's dating a high-priced lawyer, Richard Howe, who evidently finds himself on the wrong side of the law and disappears without warning or trace. His girlfriend (Maddie) - for reasons unexplained and sans motive - starts to get involved in finding out what happened instead of leaving it to the police and the FBI.

There is neither valid nor credible reason given for her obsessive involvement. Yes, on the one hand, it's great to have a proactive female character instead of one who sits and weeps inconsolably for her lost love, but no, it fails when you make your character do dumb stuff which serves no apparent purpose other than to throw her into the arms of her designated beau, and in the process makes her look like a busy-body at best, and a moron at worst.

This is supposed to be a mystery, but all mystery fled the premises when her love interest showed up. No, Richard is not her love interest. That's a lie. Her love interest is Los Angeles Police Detective Jack Ramirez, who appears (and transparently so) to be a bad guy at first blush. From the very first page he appeared on, it was glaringly obvious that she was going to ditch yesterday's love of her life and end up in bed with this rough-looking, tanned, muscled, tall and handsome guy, who merely looked like a villain. It was so obvious that it was as painful as it was pathetic and predictable.

Gone from that point onwards was any motivation on her part for becoming involved in finding out about Richard, because it was so glaringly obvious that he would be a bad guy or dead, or on the out for some other reason before this novel was over and she would be done with him. It was starkly apparent that she would be deeply enveloped in the strong, protective arms of this new guy. Kiss-off any idea or hope of her proving to be a tough, smart, independent operator. Nope, she was immediately transmogrified, from that very page, into a maiden in distress, and this novel lost all allure for me. I refuse to recommend it.

Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger

Title: Waistcoats & Weaponry
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Errata
p180 "Because we both know you've got my best interests at heart?" is not something a Victorian lady of breeding would say. "…you have my best interests…"
p197 There's a bullet in the side of his chest, then it's in his gut? Where is it really?!
p137 "I guess I do, don’t I?" sounds awfully American for a Victorian woman of British birth to say. More likely would be something like, "I suppose I have, haven’t I?"

And we’re back. I was really been looking forward to this, the next volume in what is now a trilogy. Sophronia Angelina Temminnick, Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott, Agatha Woosmoss, and Sidheag Maccon are returned with more steam-punk and espionage as they travel over the emerald green countryside of southern England in 1853 in their dirigible finishing school along with designated villain, Preshea Buss.

I was surprised that I didn’t immediately warm to this volume. The last two drew me in at once and held my interest effortlessly. This one felt more like I was pushing myself to read it, rather than being hypnotically led by it. That's the problem with a series - you have to give more of the same, but you also have to change it. It works well when an author can deliver enough familiarity that it feels like a story continuation, but with sufficient difference that it doesn’t feel like it's really the same story you read before, warmed over.

This felt like too much more of the same as we joined the girls watching a vampire teacher dancing with a flowerpot on his head, then had to meet with one corner of Sophronia's limp love triangle - Soap, the lower class lackey in the engine room, then went to an engagement ball where Sophronia meets the other corner of her triangle - Lord Mersey.

I honestly have zero liking for either of these guys, and I have no idea what the attraction is for Sophronia, either. Oh, and we now learn that Sophronia is nick-named Ria! An unfortunate name given that it sounds like 'rear' and she does behave all-too-often like an ass, primarily with these two unlikeable and inappropriate boys.

Eventually the adventure begins when Sidheag - an honorary member of a werewolf pack - discovers that the leader of her pack has killed his number two and left Scotland. The pack is apparently in rebellion against the Queen, and now Sidheag feels compelled to go take over the pack - even though she is not and never has been a wolf - and tell them all what to do. Naturally Sophronia, Dimity, Agatha, Lord Mersey, and Soap go along. Naturally? Hardly!

It was at this point that the plot became quite unbelievable to me. I get that when you have made the mistake of embarking upon a series to milk your characters (and your sales) for all they're worth, you have to stir things up and change things around not because it’s makes for good story telling, but because you have to prevent your readers from becoming bored and disillusioned, and abandoning you in droves, but when the change isn’t organic - when it’s quite obviously manufactured, as this one clearly is, it just doesn’t work well at all.

In this case, it’s actually worse, for me, because I have a real aversion to and detestation of werewolf stories - even more so than I do to vampire stories, so this abandonment of everything I've grown to love from the first two books to head to Scotland (which is actually a place I love) with the apparent intention of relating a sorry tale of werewolves isn't exactly a charmed idea in my book.

Since this isn't my book, but Carriger's book, I decided to press on and see how it worked or even if it worked, and fortunately they don’t make it to Scotland; they become, how shall I put it? Derailed? The novel is very short - only a couple of hundred pages, so "How bad could it get?" I asked myself lightly…. Well it became boring - that's how bad it got.

The train journey really didn't offer anything interesting or exciting, and it did offer large measures of Le Stupide, I'm sorry to report. There was one point where it was train v. small dirigible, and they stopped the train. What? This made zero sense, since in such a battle, the train wins every time - why did they stop? Why did they leave Monique almost unattended? Why didn’t the trained spy escape? So the novel was very badly let down by weak plotting and limp action here.

There's a really odd sentence fragment on page 19 in the eighth paragraph at the start of chapter two:

Over a year and a half's association and Sophronia would have described the other three as confidantes extraordinaire.

I can see what the author is trying to say but it could have been said a whole lot better - like by replacing the 'and' with a comma, and starting the sentence with 'After'.

This same kind of thing occurs on page 47, where we read, almost at the bottom of the page, "Not all sudden, you just never asked." I think that comma ought to be a semi-colon at least.

On the other hand, there were some touches of hilarity of the fine vintage that I fondly remember from the earlier books, such as on page 115, where we read, "It was an instinct ill-suited to Dimity, like watching a duck eat custard." which was delightful. It will never beat "Who wouldn't want an exploding wicker chicken?" from the first book, but that one was so wonderful I doubt it will ever be beaten.

On balance I have to say that the bad far outweighed the good. This felt like the stereotypical second novel in a trilogy - the one which is typically weak - instead of the third in what, until this volume had been a cracking good yarn. Consequently, I can't recommend this one.

However, in my slightly improving aim of providing a parody song to ease the pain when I tender a warty review, here's my effort for this one. To the tune of All Kinds of Everything as sung by Dana:

Airdrops and abseiling, steam-dogs, no fleas,
Dirigibles and carriages, crumpets and tea,
Secrecy and high intrigue, early morning school,
Waistcoats & Weaponry used to be cool.

Steam trains and aeroplanes, now have gone by,
Both volumes one and two left me with sighs,
Sophronia and Dimity, and Agatha too,
Waistcoats & Weaponry used to be cool.

Evening or school time, on land and in air,
These three and Sidheag, or Lady Kingair.
Dances, no romances, soirees and secrets,
winning, never losing, these girls won my bets.
Cool jokes, British blokes, and some frou-frou,
Waistcoats & Weaponry can't remind me of you.

Now it's all wall to wall boredom and dull.
The third one in the series has hit a big lull.
Excitement and fun are a thing of the past.
I guess I should know that such fun cannot last,
Reading this, feeling pissed, I am such a fool.
O waistcoats & weaponry please go back to school!

Legends by Robert Littell

Title: Legends
Author: Robert Littell
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

Today I will review two novels which were turned into TV series, and curiously, in both cases, I like the TV show, but really don't like the novel which spawned it!

Martin Odum is a private detective working in New York City, but there's far more to it than that. He's a retired CIA agent who has had many identities (legends) in his career. He was so good at becoming subsumed under his various legends that he has become consumed by them, and is rather confused these days about who he really is.

In the TV show, he isn't a detective, he's still employed by his agency, but he does have issues regarding his identity. The show makes more sense and is far more entertaining. In both cases, maybe he's not really Martin Odum at all!

In the novel, the story begins with him being sought out by Stella, supposedly a Russian immigrant, who wants Martin to track down her sister's wayward husband, who she thinks is in New York, but curiously, the case takes Martin and Stella back to Israel and then all over the world. Interspersed with modern day activities are flash-backs to Martin's career, and this became so disorganized and so confusing that I lost interest in it and gave up after a few chapters. It was boring to me, and the story appeared to be going nowhere and taking its own sweet time on the trip.

If I want to work for my entertainment, I'll play a sport. I don't want to work-up a sweat reading a novel and trying to figure out what the hell the writer is telling me. Writing is communication. Good writing is effective communication, and Robert Littell's novel is defective communication.

Modesty Blaise: The Night of the Morningstar by Peter O'Donnell

Title: Modesty Blaise: The Night of the Morningstar
Author: Peter O'Donnell
Publisher: Souvenir Press
Rating: WARTY!

This is the eleventh in the Modesty Blaise series, and perhaps it suffers for that - or rather, perhaps my take on it suffers for that, but I could not get into this novel at all.

I almost quit reading it after the first couple of pages, which rambled on interminably about stuff which failed completely to engage my interest; then it went downhill from there. I read so little of this that I can't even tell you what it was about other than that Modesty is apparently trying to wind down her criminal business and retire, and someone wants to keep it going.

Blaise began as a newspaper comic strip in 1963 and then transferred to novels, which perhaps explains some of the caricature nature of the writing. Several movies have been made. That's how I got into this. I saw My Name is Modesty and I loved it. The movie is reviewed elsewhere on my blog. I can't say the same about this novel. Maybe at some point I'll dig out the first in the series and give it a try, but I make no promises, not with so many good books out there calling like sirens trying to draw me in!

Blonde Ops by Charlotte Bennardo And Natalie Zaman

Title: Blonde Ops
Author: Charlotte Bennardo And Natalie Zaman
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WORTHY!

Charlotte Bennardo And Natalie Zaman are fellow blog-spotters although I don't know either of them, but do pay them a visit (if you're on my blog, then the links are at the top of the review). I have to confess right up front that I had some real reservations about this one. It really intrigued me, but it was so reminiscent of the Ally Carter spy novels (which I began by liking, and then quickly ended up despising) that it made me seriously hesitate. The fact that it had two strikes against it (it was first person PoV and it was about fashion!), yet still won me over is, I guess, testimony to the joint authoring skills of these two writers.

The premise for this novel is that Rebecca "Bec" is a sixteen year old problem student, who's been summarily tossed out of several schools, who ends-up in Roma working an internship for a fashion magazine, which is expecting a visit from the first lady (a fictional one evidently modeled on Michelle Obama). Fortunately (for Bec), she's spoiled-rotten in that her parents are wealthy beyond your average child's most rabid imaginings, so they're able to keep bribing new schools to take her.

Bec is a complete ingrate, having no idea how privileged she is. She's totally unappreciative of what her parents have tried to do for her (nor does she grow appreciative, which is sad). Normally this would turn me off her, but Bec does have some saving graces. OTOH, perhaps "grace" isn't the appropriate word for her. She's the YA novel equivalent of Jar-Jar Binks, but infinitely smarter. Hell, a dead guinea pig is smarter than Jar-Jar, but I digress.

Bec has a good heart. She's hard-working (when motivated!) and she's honest. Plus, her parents are jerks - pretty much abandoning her while they live their own lives. This, of course, begs the question as to why they even had a child in the first place, when they couldn't be bothered to spend time with her, so all-in-all, it's understandable where Bec is coming from.

As we join the novel, she's just been expelled from her most recent academy and is now, for once, being taken in hand (however briefly) by her absentee mother. She thinks she's going to Belize in Central America, but she actually ends up in Rome, as an intern to a friend of her mother, who is the editor of a fashion magazine named 'Edge'. Edge, though, is a CIA cover.

Bec slowly grows to realize what's going on (hint it's tied to the first lady's visit, but there is no way whatsoever to get an unwilling person down a manhole so quickly!), and eventually, she saves the day. Despite some plot holes and highly improbable if not ridiculous events, and the really dumb chase at the end, I found myself liking this character and the light level of the story. It's perfect for a fluff read when you're not in the mood to get into anything deeper or more involved. It's easy and fast reading, and I was pleasantly surprised that the fashion was not thoroughly obnoxious as depicted here. I have no time whatsoever for the multi-billion dollar congenitally head-in-its-ass absurdly pretentious fashion industry. Also, it was pretty obvious who the villains were - even to me, who usually gets it wrong!

So, don't go into this expecting anything (as I did) and you won't be disappointed (as I wasn't!).

Close Call by Stella Rimington

Title: Close Call
Author: Stella Rimington
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is a sad DNF for me - and another example of a novel where the author (or the publisher, which ever was responsible!) needed to survey the gazillion other novels with this same title before wisely deciding to choose a different one.

I could not get interested in this at all, and the poor writing only served to make it worse. it read like fanfic, not like a new novel from a professional, published writer. This is supposed to be another novel in the Liz Carlyle series, but in the first 21 chapters (out of ~60), she appeared in only 8, so how it's really supposed to be about her is a bit of a mystery! That's not the biggest problem, however.

You know this is no longer an era where the author hand-writes or typewrites their 'manu'-script and it has to be laboriously set in metal trays and printed by hand to provide review "galleys". This is an era of word processing, and spell-checkers and even grammar checkers (although Microsoft's grammar checker isn't worth spit). But there is no absolutely excuse for putting out a novel of the atrocious quality I found in the Kindle version, not even as an advance review copy, and trying to pretend that it's ready for review. It wasn't. I had more success in the Adobe reader version, but not everyone has that available to them.

I've reviewed well over a hundred 'galley' copies, and this novel was without question the worst I've ever seen in the Kindle format. There were multiple problems in the first few screens, and these were not oddball problems which are difficult to find, but gross spelling errors which any spell-checker would have caught, and sloppy errors which all but the most incompetent of beta readers or book editors would have caught, and yet here we are, expected to try and read this novel and review it?!

In the Adobe version, the first letter of each chapter was set as a drop-cap, an antiquated and nonsensical affectation which needs to be banned. That's the only reason I can think of as to why, in the Kindle, chapter one begins with the capital letter 'T' on line one, and then the rest of the word on line 2: 'he' when all of it should read: 'The' on the first line.

Beginning in paragraph two we had pairs of words running together ("shawarmaof" in place of 'shawarma of' for example, and this was obviously the start of a trend, because it continued to happen from then onwards The fifth sentence in that paragraph began with 'ere' in place of, presumably, 'There' or 'Here'. The last sentence of that paragraph has this phrase: "...of meat o the shawarmalike..." when it clearly should have been 'of meat of the shawarma like'.

There is a character named 'Az' introduced here, but apart from that first time, his name is rendered with a space between the two letters. I learned from the Adobe version that it's supposed to be Afiz. The next paragraph has "indierent" in place of 'indifferent', and on and on it goes. This is nothing but gross incompetence and is insulting to readers, whether they be beta or review. I quit reading this at that point and resolved to try and get through it in the Adobe Reader version, determining that if that didn't look a lot better, this was going to be one-starred after three paragraphs and done with!

So I switched to Adobe Reader and it looked technically much better. I saw none of the problems with it that I had seen in the Kindle version, so I can only assume that some automated conversion process was responsible for the problems. This means of course, that the real problem was that no one checked to make sure the conversion worked for the Kindle! But the reprieve was short-lived because switching to a readable version served only to highlight a whole new set of problems! Once I could focus on reading the novel without becoming annoyed, I could focus on the quality of the story, and it didn't start out at all well!

The first few pages are an account of this character in a souk in Syria (this novel is very tardily rooted in the so-called 'Arab Spring' which was actually over long ago), and he's attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Why this assailant would carry out this attack in public in broad daylight is unexplained, but that's not the worst part. The worst part is that the subject disarms the assailant and hurries away, finally finding himself in a different part of the souk where, we're told, no one is paying any attention to him, but immediately after that, we're told that his hand is covered in blood, and it's dripping! In fact, he's lost so much blood that he starts feeling faint and has to be bundled into a taxi to go to the hospital. So I'm thinking: no one is paying any attention to a guy who is copiously dripping blood everywhere he goes? How likely is that? It just didn't work.

There were many grammatical errors. Some of these you can accuse me of being picky about, but they're there nonetheless. On page six, I read, "...the countries who support them." when it should really read, "...the countries which support them." or "...those people who support them." Countries are not people! On page sixteen I read, "...what is the sources of those weapons..." when it really should be "...what are the sources..." or "what is the source...". So again, it's still not ready for prime time, even in the Adobe version.

We meet the main character, Liz Carlyle in chapter 2. She's just returned from vacation, but instead of catching-up with her deputy (or whatever he/she is called), who was presumably in charge of her section in her absence, she gossips instead with her "research assistant" to get up to speed! I found that to be completely absurd.

I hit a problem two chapters later, because it seems like there is a two-chapter flashback in chapters 4 & 5 or 5 & 6, but there's no indication whatsoever in the test that we're in a flashback! I found myself wondering what the heck had gone wrong with the timeline!

The fact that Liz had apparently only been working at MI5 for eighteen months and was still on probation, yet was leading a counter-terrorism section and taking three-week long vacations made zero sense! As a flashback it did make a kind of sense, but I was unaware of this while reading it! I have no idea why the flashback was even there, because it contributed nothing whatsoever to the story.

So my problem at that point was that, if she'd been working at MI5 since she graduated from university, and it's been only 18 months, then how was she ever involved in the Northern Ireland peace process which was resolved years before? If she's running a counter-terrorism section, then how is she going to find the time to go on secondment to the Merseyside (Liverpool) police for training? Worse than this, we're told she had her vacation with a French security agent and then a few pages later we're told that the last boyfriend she had was a guitar player from Bristol! So is this a flashback or not? I was forced to assume it was.

I have to add that I found the depiction of the "sexual harassment" she supposedly received at the Merseyside police department to be amateurish at best and childish at worst. I frankly cannot believe that it went immediately to the level the author portrays it any more than I could believe there was none at all. To portray it so baldly and so obviously serves no purpose other than to negate the effect the author is trying so ham-fistedly to achieve. Frankly, it read like a poor rip-off of the TV show Prime Suspect featuring Helen Mirren.

At this point I decided this novel was not worth my time. I have no idea what happened to the book editor or beta readers on this novel, so I can only assume there were none. I know this is an advance review copy, but to put one out which is so appalling is just asking for trouble, and in this electronic age there is no excuse for putting out an ARC that's as shabby as this one is.

Even had it been in pristine condition, that would not have improved the disturbingly amateur quality of the story - a story which was all over the place, had no coherence, and read like poorly-written fan-fiction. This novel was lousy and I cannot recommend it.

Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger

Title: Curtsies & Conspiracies
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WORTHY!

I read this novel some time ago and was quite thrilled with the opportunity to read it in ebook form. The ebook version (epub format) for Adobe Digital Editions was beautifully laid out and eminently readable, which was a pleasant experience, and it's only some 200 pages, so it's a really quick read.

This novel is the first in a series:

Etiquette & Espionage
Curtsies & Conspiracies
Waistcoats & Weaponry
Manners & Mutiny

Fourteen year old Sophronia is sent to a finishing school, where finishing means exactly that: finishing off people, as in assassination! It's also a school for spies. I'm completely in love with Gail Carriger's sense of humor, if not Carriger herself (And I reserve judgment there!). How can you argue with a line like: "Who wouldn't want an exploding wicker chicken?"?!

The author spent some time in Britain, where this novel is set, and it shows very commendably. She has an amazing eye for the absurd, for the quirks of British life, and for the square peg in a round hole kind of person which Sophronia inescapably is. This novel is Harry Potter on steroids, but minus the too-cute and the magic, that being replaced with a liberal helping of steam-punk and intrigue, along with a sneaky and hilarious sense of humor.

In leading her main character on a merry dance in pursuit of her objective, the author goes through a humbling (for other writers like me!) repertoire of exquisitely-drawn characters, all of whom have quirks and foibles to both hate and love. The adventure begins with Sophronia's escapades at home, which lead directly to her being consigned (some might say exiled) to a finishing school suited to her disposition and talents.

I adore the playfulness of these stories, and the names which the author invents for her characters are exquisite: Bumbersnoot, Lord Dingleproops, Madame Spetunia, Sophronia Angelina Temminick, Dimity Ann Plumleigh-Teignmott, Pillover, Preshea, Bunson's, Duke Hematol, Mrs Barnaclegoose, Frowbritcher. They alone are worth reading the novel for, but the writing is exquisite, the plotting very well done, and the execution remarkable.

After saving herself, the girl who is to become her best friend, her best friend-to-be's younger brother (who is going to a different school to train as an evil genius) and the schoolmate who is in disguise as an older woman and who is highly suspicious, from flywaymen, life at school seems like it will be a let-down for Soph, but she discovers that an associate of the school, who helps them get aboard, is a werewolf, and one of their teachers is a vampire. Oh, and the topics at school are entirely to do with spying. Indeed, when Soph is called to the office after being reported climbing around on the exterior of the airship during one of her snooping forays, she isn't punished at all; she's merely dressed-down for allowing herself to be seen!

So Sophronia has to find her way in this finishing school to which she did not expect to go, and to which she was dispatched with unladylike speed, and find it she certainly does, and quite literally, too. The school is aboard a gigantic airship, which is subject to raids by flywaymen (sky pirates who are seeking something very specific from the school, and Soph is determined to discover what it is they're after).

During one of the sky pirate assaults, Soph actually ends up accidentally acquiring a brass steam dog from the pirates, which she promptly names Bumbersnoot, illicitly secreting him in her room, and feeding him coal! This is much to the disgust of her worst enemy (with whom she's forced to room along with her now best friend Dimity, a rather shy, retiring sort (but who's game for anything, it turns out), and a lanky Scots lass who also joins her troublesome trio. Along with aid from a precocious and amusing child of one of the teachers, and a likely lad from the engine room, as well as some assistance from Dimity's brother, Soph begins making herself very much at home - and very much a handful - on the airship.

In the end she saves the day of course, and I adored this novel. I was immediately, and very much looking forward to the sequel, Curtsies & Conspiracies which I also reviewed favorably. Carriger also has a series set twenty five years after this time period called "The Parasol Protectorate" which, rest assured, I shall be tracking down post-haste (at least, tracking down the first four volumes. I already have the fifth.

Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger

Title: Etiquette & Espionage
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Hachette
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

I read this novel some time ago and was quite thrilled with the opportunity to read it in ebook form. The ebook version (epub format) for Adobe Digital Editions was beautifully laid out and eminently readable, which was a pleasant experience, and it's only some 200 pages, so it's a fast read.

This novel is the first in a series:

Etiquette & Espionage
Curtsies & Conspiracies
Waistcoats & Weaponry
Manners & Mutiny

Fourteen year old Sophronia is sent to a finishing school, where finishing means exactly that: finishing off people, as in assassination! It's also a school for spies. I'm completely in love with Gail Carriger's sense of humor, if not Carriger herself (And I reserve judgment there!). How can you argue with a line like: "Who wouldn't want an exploding wicker chicken?"?!

The author spent some time in Britain, where this novel is set, and it shows very commendably. She has an amazing eye for the absurd, for the quirks of British life, and for the square peg in a round hole kind of person which Sophronia inescapably is. This novel is Harry Potter on steroids, but minus the too-cute and the magic, that being replaced with a liberal helping of steam-punk and intrigue, along with a sneaky and hilarious sense of humor.

In leading her main character on a merry dance in pursuit of her objective, the author goes through a humbling (for other writers like me!) repertoire of exquisitely-drawn characters, all of whom have quirks and foibles to both hate and love. The adventure begins with Sophronia's escapades at home, which lead directly to her being consigned (some might say exiled) to a finishing school suited to her disposition and talents.

I adore the playfulness of these stories, and the names which the author invents for her characters are exquisite: Bumbersnoot, Lord Dingleproops, Madame Spetunia, Sophronia Angelina Temminick, Dimity Ann Plumleigh-Teignmott, Pillover, Preshea, Bunson's, Duke Hematol, Mrs Barnaclegoose, Frowbritcher. They alone are worth reading the novel for,but the writing is exquisite, the plotting very well done, and the execution remarkable.

After saving herself, the girl who is to become her best friend, her best friend-to-be's younger brother (who is going to a different school to train as an evil genius) and the schoolmate who is in disguise as an older woman and who is highly suspicious, from flywaymen, life at school seems like it will be a let-down for Soph, but she discovers that an associate of the school, who helps them get aboard, is a werewolf, and one of their teachers is a vampire. Oh, and the topics at school are entirely to do with spying. Indeed, when Soph is called to the office after being reported climbing around on the exterior of the airship during one of her snooping forays, she isn't punished at all; she's merely dressed-down for allowing herself to be seen!

So Sophronia has to find her way in this finishing school to which she did not expect to go, and to which she was dispatched with unladylike speed, and find it she certainly does, and quite literally, too. The school is aboard a gigantic airship, which is subject to raids by flywaymen (sky pirates who are seeking something very specific from the school, and Soph is determined to discover what it is they're after).

During one of the sky pirate assaults, Soph actually ends up accidentally acquiring a brass steam dog from the pirates, which she promptly names Bumbersnoot, illicitly secreting him in her room, and feeding him coal! This is much to the disgust of her worst enemy (with whom she's forced to room along with her now best friend Dimity, a rather shy, retiring sort (but who's game for anything, it turns out), and a lanky Scots lass who also joins her troublesome trio. Along with aid from a precocious and amusing child of one of the teachers, and a likely lad from the engine room, as well as some assistance from Dimity's brother, Soph begins making herself very much at home - and very much a handful - on the airship.

In the end she saves the day of course, and I adored this novel. I was immediately, and very much looking forward to the sequel, Curtsies & Conspiracies which I also reviewed favorably. Carriger also has a series set twenty five years after this time period called "The Parasol Protectorate" which, rest assured, I shall be tracking down post-haste.