The Blue Nowhere by Jeffrey Deaver

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

Try Not to Breathe by Holly Seddon

Rating: WORTHY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia C DeFelice

Rating: WORTHY!
read by?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone

Rating: WORTHY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...I have been out cashing favors."
For Charice to say that was ominous. Almost everyone seemed to owe her, somehow, and who knows what strange circumstances would occur from a cached favor?

This was an example of "Was the author trying to be clever, or was it merely inattention?" Caching, in computer geek speak, means holding something in memory ready for immediate use, so I liked the wordplay between cashing and caching, even though it didn't make a lot of sense. When I ran into so many other such issues, I decided this was a mistake, and not a play on words.

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

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

Size 12 and Ready to Rock by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

Death Before Decaf by Caroline Fardig

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academy Girls by Nora Carroll

Rating: WARTY!

I ditched this book at 90% in because there was one-the-hell-way-too many stanzas of over-rated Emily Dick and some for my taste. I honestly could not stand to read one more obscure-to-the-point-of-vacuous line from her. On top of that, I felt this was a bait and switch on two levels. I requested to read an advance review copy of this novel precisely because it wasn't (according to the blurb) a teen high school melodrama. It was, so I was led to believe, about an adult!

I've sworn off reading any more YA novels with "Academy" in the title, and this promised to turn that on its head by being adult-oriented, and focusing on a teacher at the purportedly prestigious Grove Academy instead of on the bitchy, air-headed girls who usually infest such stories. It wasn't. It was the latter going under the guise of the former. Worse than this even, was that this was really nothing more than an overblown attempt at explicating Dickinson drivel in place of telling a real story. I didn't even get the obsession with that poet; any such poetry would have served the same purpose hers did in this context.

On top of that, what story there was, was all over the place. It was flashing back on several levels and with such obsessive-compulsive dedication that I was at one point considering filing a lawsuit for whiplash. Even in the sections that were not dedicated flashbacks, there was an ostensibly plagiarized novel in play which was telling exactly the same story we were also being told in the annoyingly extensive flashbacks, if you can get your mind around that, and in annoyingly extensive detail. It was tedious, and I started routinely skipping these sections.

On top of that, the supposedly mature teacher was behaving like a teen herself around a certain other teacher who I highly suspected (rightly or wrongly, I can't say) was ankle-deep in whatever it was that happened during those flashbacks - which themselves flashed back to an even earlier generation where there was yet another murder. How this Academy managed to maintain its prestigious veneer with all of this going on was really the only unexplained mystery here for me.

Jane Milton - yes, that's really her name - was a student at Grove, left without a diploma, tried writing, failed, got married, failed, and now was forced to come back to her old school, cap in hand, begging for a job as a teacher, for which she was wholly unqualified. Her story is what interested me, but we never got that story except in passing, and in a way that felt like it was completely incidental to the other story/ies. Instead, and pretty much from day one, we got the mystery of what happened when she was in high school investigating, with her two "friends", what happened when her own mother would have been in high school. Convoluted doesn't begin to describe it adequately.

I think if maybe I'd had the time and patience - and sufficient Promethazine to get me through the dick poetry which slathered these pages with all the delicacy of a bull in a book store (and was in the final analysis, utterly irrelevant to the story except in the most pretentious way imaginable), I might have made it through this in one day and been able to actually keep track of the plethora of potential villains who were randomly popping up and ducking down like whack-a-mole characters, but to try and keep a handle on the endless names over multiple readings over many days was impossible, which robbed the story of any potential it might have had to retain my attention and favor.

I quickly lost interest in Jane, since she consistently proved herself to be a spineless idiot with nothing interesting to offer me. The only thing which prevented me from wishing she would be bumped-off was the fact that she was a single mom, but she wasn't even very good at that, either! Her relationship with her son was virtually non-existent and what did exist was almost completely unrealistic. I'm tempted to say that the story was disorganized, but that would involve using the word 'organized' in connection with this novel, and that would be too generous in describing this patchy mashup. I cannot recommend this at all.

Killing Secrets by Dianne Emley

Title: Killing Secrets
Author: Dianne Emley
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
There wasno..." - space missing, should be "There was no..." (p10 Adobe Digital Editions version).
There were a couple of other errors of this nature, but otherwise the writing was pretty well done.

This is your standard murder detective story with all the associated tropes and clichés. That doesn't mean it can't be an engrossing story, just that it was too early to tell in chapter one. I had some issues with it as detailed below, and in the final analysis I can't recommend it. I quit reading twenty pages from the end as soon as the supposedly ruthless villain began monologuing and we had a précis of the entire novel. Not only was it boring, it was the last straw in what had been a very borderline novel even to that point!

The vics, a teacher and a teenage boy were found by Emily Vining, daughter of detective Nan Vining, in a park. So already we have a family involvement and a conflict between daughter and mom since Emily is at the park after dark with a boy she knows her mother will not like. We're pretty much telegraphed that there's a conspiracy going on here, up the highest levels, as the saying goes.

One thing that immediately bothered me is that the female vic is described as pretty and young - as though the murder wouldn't have been so bad had she been old and/or 'ugly'. We're told that she's young twice in almost as many lines, but when the guy is described, we don't get pretty for him, or 'studly', or handsome, or beautiful, or good-looking. He's just a guy, so obviously we need to go deeper than mere skin for him than we do for a female, where a simple definition by age and skin-deep appearance is apparently quite sufficient to categorize her.

I don't get this obsession with describing all women as pretty or beautiful in novels (except for where the plot calls for them to be old or repellent in some way, of course). Why do writers do this in such a disturbingly knee-jerk manner? Why do they - and I'm concerned about female writers especially here - feel this evidently overwhelming need to make even victims of a murder pretty rather than just regular everyday people? I'd rather read about real people in my fiction, not caricatures or fantasies, or popular habits. But that's just me.

"Police Detective" Nan is advised that she will probably want to drive Emily home, because no teen girl can possibly drive herself home after this, no matter who she is. She's only a weak woman after all (and pretty, too!), a girl of at least sixteen who Nan nevertheless infantilizes by calling her "sweet pea" which could with a slight change of spelling just as ably describe the constitution of her urine as it can a wilting flower. No wonder she can't drive herself home. She's been disabled since birth by her own mom. We see this friction in stark profile later.

Another thing which was really confusing was the hierarchical relationship within the Pasadena police department. We learn that Sergeant Early (and she is consistently described as a sergeant, never as a detective sergeant) is Nan's "commanding officer" but a sergeant really isn't a commanding officer. She may be Nan's superior officer, but only if she's a detective sergeant and Nan a lower-ranked detective. The problem is that we're also told that Nan is the senior officer in Homicide, so there's a lot of confusion as to what this means.

Senior could mean that she's the highest ranked officer, or merely that she's been there longest, but that latter option begs the question as to why her rank isn't higher. We're not initially told her rank, but later, a superior officer refers to her as 'corporal'. I have personally never heard of this actually being a rank in the police (as far as I can recall), although I understand it's considered one in some unformed branches. It's not a detective thing as far as I'm aware. But that's only as far as I'm aware.

I skipped chapter fifteen because it brought a huge screeching halt to the story just as I was actually beginning to become somewhat interested in it. Another thing which bothered me came right after this when they had a memorial service for the vics, which took place breathlessly close to the discovery of the bodies, but the problem was that some known gang members and prison parolees were in the crowd. Instead of being asked to leave, they were allowed to stay. I didn't get that at all. It was in no way appropriate for them to be there.

One problem with Detective Nan Vining is that she seems to be incompetent. Despite being told that the teen victim, Jared, was researching his father's death, not believing that it was a suicide, she fails to take the boy's laptop, which is the obvious repository for any research he might have been doing, and then the laptop is stolen. She fails to pursue any laptop or other device for the female Victim Erika, and later those things are evidently not in evidence as well! This didn't imbue me with any faith at all in her ability, and this faith further retreated into inaccessibility the more I read of her actions.

Just before the half-way point in the novel, Nan calls a guy who is in DC, and who is obviously more than just a friend, but the assumption here is that every reader knows who this is. Since I have read no other books in this series, I had no idea who he was or what he really represented to Nan, but there was nothing in the text here to offer even a modicum of guidance. This was came completely out of the blue, especially since he hadn't been mentioned at all, not even in passing, up to this point. That struck me as odd.

I managed to stay with this story almost to the end, but as I said, it wasn't credible, there were what seemed to me to be pointless digressions from the investigation which served only to irritate me, and I didn't find the story overall to be credible. I didn't like the main chracter and had no desire whatsoever to read more about her. Your investigation may yield different results!

Last Shot by Eve Gaddy

Title: Last Shot
Author: Eve Gaddy
Publisher: Belle Books
Rating: WARTY!

This author got on my good side in only the second paragraph when she wrote: "Brown hair, so dark it was almost black.". If you've read my reviews you'll realize that at times I've taken an author to task for writing something dumb like "black hair so black it was almost blue". It was nice not to see that here, but the novel still packed an awful lot of clichés and sadly formulaic writing, not least of which was the title. Last Shot? Barnes and Noble has three web pages of titles just like this, but I can't rate this positively because its biggest problem was positioning itself as a murder mystery when it's really just a tawdry romance.

I thought this was to be a murder mystery from the blurb, even as I realized that there would be romance "... and no matter how hot he is, she's not interested." I knew that was an outright lie! Della is obsessed with Studly Do-Right's body from the start - not his personality, not his integrity, not his decency, not his warmth, not his friendship, not his reliability, but his body from minute one, and she never lets it go, not for a minute. if a guy had been written with this same one-track mindset, the author would rightly have been pilloried for objectifying women. How is it any different here?

She's obsessing on his body non-stop despite witnessing a close friend get shot. Even when stud-muffin Nick is lying in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound after saving her life, she can't get her mind onto anything but his body. In short, Della Rose disgusted me every bit as much as a male character would if he were obsessing on a female in this same way, so why does Della get a bye for objectifying a guy? What, sauce for the goose is saucy for the gander? Is that it? I don't subscribe to that.

What makes this truly sad is that Della was an interesting character and this was a good set-up for a story. She's a single mom with a past. Her boss is shot. No one knows why. The Sheriff is dishonest, her only hope is a burned-out cop? How cool could that have been had it been handled properly, i.e. not put under the cookie cutter of trope romance?

Even her attraction to Nick wouldn't have been so bad had we not been treated to repeated descriptions of Nick's "beautifully rippling muscles" which really cheapened the story for me immensely. Can we not have a story about ordinary people? Do we have to dwell on buff carnality - which quite frankly destroys the artistry of romance with the caustic paint stripper of lust? I wish more authors would make the effort to grasp the crucial differences between the two. I could have liked Della and rooted for her, but after three chapters of her monotonously boundless lust, I was truly nauseated.

It only got worse when I realized that Eve Gaddy is yet another writer who doesn't know the difference between 'staunch' and 'stanch'. For me personally, I'm a staunch supporter of those who stanch blood running from open wounds. Too many writers are not!

I made it to page 75 in this story and it was just too boring and predictable to stay with it. There was nothing interesting going on, and the author was far more interested in rambling on and tediously on and endlessly on about how hot Della thought Nick looked and how hot he thought she looked. There was no mystery here, no thrills, no adventure, no danger. It was boring. I can't recommend this novel.

I have to issue a final warning on this, too. While this novel read fine in Adobe Digital Editions, and also in my Kindle, on my iPad, the novel read backwards. I am not kidding. It started on page 234 (or whatever the last page was - I forget), and to read it you had to swipe backwards to progress forwards through the novel, watching the page count go down instead of up! It was weird. I've never seen a novel do that before. I even downloaded it afresh, thinking it was just a bad download, but it wasn't. The iPad edition is screwed up.

Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart

Title: Jade Dragon Mountain
Author: Elsa Hart
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WORTHY!

Possible erratum:
Page 272 "indicate" is used where "implicate" would be more appropriate. Either can be used here though, so maybe this isn't an error.

There was a prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. Chapter one begins on page seven, so the book is some 315 pages long. It's set in China either at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or the beginning of the twentieth, thinks I, depending upon which Prince Frederick of Saxony is referred to in the text. There were three. I was wrong: it was actually set in 1780.

There is nothing in the text per se to show in what year this takes place, not until page 131, where we see a letter which was dated December 1707. We're told that this letter's date is "...only several months ago...", yet the book blurb assures us that this is taking place in 1780! One character mentions Prince Frederick of Saxony. The Kingdom of Saxony existed only between 1806 and 1918, and the only prince Fredericks were: Frederick Augustus I 1806 - 1827, Frederick Augustus II 1836 - 1854, Frederick Augustus III 1904 - 1918.

There was an Electorate of Saxony prior to this, and there was an Elector Frederick Augustus III was in power around 1780, but not in 1707 and anyway, to call him a prince is mistaken and misleading, but aside from that, I noticed no other glaring errors - and they would have had to have been glaring for me to see them since my knowledge of eighteenth century China is non-existent!

Author Elsa Hart is a genuine Roman! She was born in Roma, Italy and has lived in Russia, and in the Czech Republic, the US, and China. This novel was actually written in Lijiang, which used to be known as Dayan, the setting for this story.

It begins with Li Du, a once respected librarian who fell into disgrace because of his association with malcontents in Beijing. He was exiled from the capital by the Emperor himself, evidently lucky to have retained his head. Now Li Du spends all his time traveling alone, and on the very edge of the Chinese borderlands, he stops at the city of Dayan, an outpost which is becoming ever more crowded as people gather to see the all-powerful god-emperor hide the sun. Li Du has to report in to the magistrate, who happens to be a cousin, who is none too pleased with the disgrace Li Du has brought upon the family.

His cousin would normally send him on his way into the mountains, but the emperor is coming to the city to perform his miracle - seemingly to precipitate this eclipse which in reality he knows is coming because it was predicted by Jesuit scholars. Li Du's cousin doesn't trust all the foreigners crowding into his city, and demands a favor of Li Du: spend a few days here, talk to the foreign guests, find out what their attitudes and purposes are, report back, and then he can go on his way with his cousin's blessing.

The first night he's there, one of the two Jesuit Priests, an elderly astronomer, is murdered. Li Du discovers that he was poisoned, but no-one seems to care, not with the emperor due to arrive in only six days. Li Du's cousin becomes annoyed at Li Du's potential for stirring up trouble over this murder, so he signs his papers early and pretty much runs him out of town without even giving him the courtesy of providing him with a rail.

Unable to live with the idea of someone getting away with murder, Li Du abruptly halts his journey and resolves to return to the city from which he was ejected by his own cousin, and solve this murder. He has less than a week to do it and he risks of the wrath of the Emperor should he fail.

As writers we're told to write what we know, but no writer really ever does that when you get right down to it. Joanne Rowling never met a dark lord and she certainly never attended a school for witchcraft and wizardry, yet she wrote seven best sellers in the subject. Jack McDevitt never traveled between the stars, yet he wrote not one but two (mostly) excellent series of novels on that very topic! Elsa Hart never lived in China in the eighteenth century, but she sure lived there when she wrote this, and I think that shows.

You don't have to be Chinese or to have lived in the eighteenth century to write a good novel on the topic. You don't even need to be accurate to write it well, not for me, at least. The truth is that very few people would be in a position to call you out on errors - unless, of course, those errors are glaring. Typically I really don't care that much because for me, she's written it convincingly, regardless of how spot-on accurate or how far adrift from the truth she actually is. That's what's important for me. The only reason I looked up the prince was to try and figure out exactly when this was supposed to be taking place!

Unable to live with the idea of someone getting away with murder, Li Du resolves to return to the city he's effectively been tossed out of by his own cousin, and solve this murder. He has less than a week to do it and the risk of the wrath of the Emperor should he fail.

What follows is a really excellent story, which I enjoyed immensely. The author is a skilled writer and while she did drop into a bit too much detail for my taste here and there, overall the story moved well. It moved intelligently, and the plot definitely thickened! I'm usually bad at figuring out who dunnit, so I was rather thrilled in this case to narrow it down to two people one of whom was the actual killer. I even figured out what the motive was, but what I didn't see coming was not one, but two twists at the end, one of which was big, and both of which I really appreciated. This was an excellent and speedy read, and I fully recommend it. I'd love to have read more about Lady Chen and Bao, but that's a minor complaint.

The Girl Who Played With Fire Adapted by Denise Mina

Title: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Author: Denise Mina
Publisher: DC Comics (Warner Bros)
Rating: WORTHY!

Art by Andrea Mutti, Antonio Fuso, and Leonardo Manco.
Colors by Giulia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill, and Lee Loughridge.
Letters by Steve Wands.

I already reviewed this novel so what's up here? Well I originally read this in print book form. Later, I listened to it in audio book form, so now it's only right that I check out the graphic novel too, right?! That's why this review is shorter than I normally write. I'm not going into any details of the plot since I've been there and done that, and you can get those from my original review. This review is all about the graphic side of things.

The graphic novel again relates Steig Larsson's original story faithfully and while there's just as much violence in this volume, there's no sex at all worth the mention. I don't know why, but the art work here didn't grab me like it did in the first two volumes. I was nowhere near as fond of the rendering of Lisbeth here as I was in the previous outing, but the art was very workman-like and got a complex job done. It just didn't leave quite the same pleasant taste the previous material did. One notable exception (illustrated on my blog) was the full page rendition of Lisbeth's dragon tattoo, which I thought was really good.

The lettering felt better in this one than in the previous volumes, and it seemed a better reading experience to me for that. Maybe I was just more used to it this time after reading two previous volumes? On this topic, I was amused where we saw one frame of a report which was actually information about a software license, but imaged with the lettering backwards! Later we get a news report, but if you look at it. It consists of the same paragraph repeated over and over again.

We do get to meet a member of the Evil Fingers punk band which is mentioned in the book, and which is now a group of female friends who are close - as close, that is, as Lisbeth would ever let anyone get. Lisbeth was never in the band since she's tone deaf, but she was part of the post-band gatherings. It doesn't specify the name of the band member who is interviewed. We know it's not lead singer Cilla Norén, unless she's changed her hair completely and lost a lot of weight, yet that's the band member whom officer Faste interviewed in the novel.

So, to sum up, I didn't like this quite as much as I liked the first book (which was in two parts), but I still think it's a worthy contribution to the canon. I am looking forward to, and hoping for, the third volume to be completed.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 2 Adapted by Denise Mina

Title: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 2
Author: Denise Mina
Publisher: DC Comics (Warner Bros)
Rating: WORTHY!

Art by Andrea Mutti and Leonardo Manco.
Colors by Giulia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill.
Letters by Steve Wands and Lee Bermejo.

I already reviewed this novel so what's up here? Well I originally read this in print book form. Later, I listened to it in audio book form, so now it's only right that I check out the graphic novel too, right?! That's why this review is shorter than I normally write. I'm not going into any details of the plot since I've been there and done that, and you can get those from my original review. This review is all about the graphic side of things.

Again, as with volume one, I was impressed with this. Denise Mina's writing covered everything of import, but also kept the pace tight. Steve Wands's and Lee Bermejo's lettering was nothing spectacular, and a bit on the small side. Obviously you can't hide the image under large blocks of text, but for me, and especially in this era of e-comics, lettering is nearly always a too small. I was glad I read this in print form as opposed to on an e-pad. What impressed me were Giulia Brusco's and Patricia Mulvihill's colors and Andrea Mutti's and Leonardo Manco's art work which continued the same standard set in volume one. The covers were excellent in quality, but as I mentioned in the review of volume 1 thought that the cover for part 2 didn't capture Lisbeth Salander. The face was wrong, somehow. The interior artwork captured her magically.

The hilariously squeamish depictions of nudity continued. I found it curious that there were no-holds-barred when it came to violence, but that genitalia were deemed too horrific to show! One of the most important scenes - the rape of Lisbeth Salander, was glossed over a little too conveniently. We get the full gloory of the headless cat, with its bloody entrails all over, yet a central event of the brutal rape of a woman is deemed inappropriate?

Nothing overt was depicted except blood and strongly implied violence. A sheet strategically covered her butt crack afterwards. Seriously? If you're going to show the violence, then show it, don't blow it. If all you feel you can show is blood spatter, then don't show anything. This part made no sense because it robbed Lisbeth of the full horror of her torture. I didn't get the point of a graphic novel that's inconsistently graphic! Why the artist would baulk at that, and not at blood spray and cat entrails is weird to me.

That gripe aside, I really liked this overall, and I recommend it. I'm certainly going to buy it if I get a chance.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 1 Adapted by Denise Mina

Title: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 1
Author: Denise Mina
Publisher: DC Comics (Warner Bros)
Rating: WORTHY!

Art by Andrea Mutti and Leonardo Manco.
Colors by Giulia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill.
Letters by Steve Wands and Lee Bermejo.

I already reviewed this novel so what's up here? Well I originally read this in print book form. Later, I listened to it in audio book form, so now it's only right that I check out the graphic novel too, right?! That's why this review is shorter than I normally write. I'm not going into any details of the plot since I've been there and done that, and you can get those from my original review. This review is all about the graphic side of things.

So I was very impressed with this work. It's been somewhat updated from the original novel to include smart phones, for example, but otherwise is faithful to it. Denise Mina's adaptation was sparse but covered everything that was important, and kept the story moving at a clip. Steve Wands's and Lee Bermejo's lettering was pretty much boiler-plate comic book, so there was nothing there to praise. On the downside, lettering is nearly always a little too small for my taste, especially if you're trying to read it on a screen, such as an iPad. I'm glad I read this in actual print form. It would have been annoying on a pad. What impressed me were Giulia Brusco's and Patricia Mulvihill's colors and Andrea Mutti's and Leonardo Manco's art work. Both were excellent for my taste and really brought the story to life. The covers were excellent in quality, but I thought that the part 2 cover really didn't capture Lisbeth Salander. The face was wrong, somehow. The interior artwork captured her magically.

I was amused by the depictions of nudity (and almost every eligible female gets nude in this graphic novel, even young Harriet, whereas only one guy does). The amusement came from the apparent squeamishness of the artists to depict genitals and butt cracks! I've never understood this, especially when violence is depicted without a single thought to covering it up! Are we to understand from this that our society believes that looking at something sensuous and beautiful is verboten, whereas violence is cool?>/p>

To me breasts are far more out there, provocative and 3D, than ever female genitals are, so what's with the shyness? We got mammaries a-go-go, but whenever there was any danger of a vulva heaving into view, there was always something in the way: panties, or a judiciously draped sheet reminiscent of the wispy gauze which inexplicably floated around in classical paintings of nudes. The same applies to male genitalia.

So, overall, I highly recommend this - especially if you haven't read the original. It's a great introduction to the first novel of the trilogy, but the cost, I have to say is pretty steep. It's forty dollars for both of the volumes which make up the first novel, so you might want to get this from your library before you decide to buy, or look for it used. I would definitely like to buy these two.

Murder and Mendelssohn by Kerry Greenwood

Title: Murder and Mendelssohn
Author: Kerry Greenwood
Publisher: Bolinda Audio
Rating: WARTY!

Read impeccably by Stephanie Daniel.

'
I first met Phryne Fisher on Netflix where two seasons can be found as of this writing, both of which I've seen. There will be a third series and perhaps more, since this is a real money-spinner for ABC (that's the Australian ABC, not the US ABC!) and deservedly so. I fell in love with Phryne from the first episode. Essie Davis is magical in the title rôle, and the whole show is smart, fast-paced, daring, socially conscious, and majorly fun. Note that the name is pronounced Fry-Knee - which is why the TV series came to be titled "The Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries" - no one wanted to have to teach everyone how to pronounce the name!

The problem is that when you're hit like that and become so on-board (with a movie or a show), it's a tough decision as to whether to go to the book, just as it is in moving the other way. Books and movies/shows are very different entities, and the trick when you wish to migrate one to the other is to capture the essence if not the letter. In this case, it worked, because now having read the first in the series of books which kicked-off the shows, I can come down very favorably for both outlets, although be warned, the two are quite different in many respects.

It pains me therefore to have to rate this, the latest volume negatively, but I have to! While I happily admit that there were parts of this novel which were the Phryne Fisher quality I’ve come to expect – blasts of sweet humor, highly amusing observations, delightful turns of phrase, amusing character foibles - the story was, unfortunately, also padded way beyond passing interest-level with endless rambling digressions into the activities of the choristers, which was – ultimately – irrelevant to the mystery, and quite frankly boring the pants off me (not literally, I’m happy to report, which would have been decidedly awkward at 65 mph down the highway). There were endless quotes of the lines they were singing, endless digressions into the politics of the group, endless descriptions of their activities, and it was, frankly, tedious and boring after the first one or two.

I don’t know if Kerry Greenwood was involved in, or has taken up, choral singing herself, but to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes (from A Study in Scarlet), and no matter how much you love your hobby, it is a capital mistake to theorize that everyone else will share your deep joy of your personal interests. It biases the judgment. This novel could have been lighter by many pages and the healthier for it had all this been omitted.

Another example of padding was the affair between Phryne and John and Rupert. Phryne’s purpose is, of course to achieve what she did indeed achieve in the end: the conjoining of the two men in a far more romantic and physical manner than they’d enjoyed hitherto. Admirable as that might have been, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the mystery and it annoyed me because I really didn’t like either character to begin with. If it had been dealt with peripherally and briefly, it would have been great, but it wasn’t. There was more than excessive meandering into this relationship which should have been in some other genre of novel the way it was written, and the supposed pinnacle of this story arc was more like a sinking pinnace.

From reading reviews others have written, the Wilson-Sheffield relationship was evidently Greenwood’s interpretation of the Watson-Holmes relationship, which is bullshit. This was not apparent in the audio book which lacked end notes and author commentary, but of which I have to say that the reader, Stephanie Daniel, was awesome, and way better than the material she had to read. Another thing some reviewers have commented on is the, in their evident view, impossibility of a homosexual guy having any sexual interest in a female. This is completely wrong-headed.

Greenwood wasn’t asserting the inverse of that clueless macho trope (as featured in Ian Fleming’s GoldFinger for example) that all a lesbian needs is a masculine guy to “cure” her. Greenwood was merely revealing a fact: that sexuality isn’t a binary thing. It’s not yes or no, on or off, plus or minus. It’s a sliding scale, and not only from female to male, but also within any individual. Just because a guy is preferentially homosexual (and I use preferentially not to indicate a choice, but an orientation) doesn’t preclude that in certain circumstances he might be attracted to a female. To say otherwise is to deny the existence of bisexuals – many if not most of whom doubtlessly have a preferential leaning towards one gender or the other, but this doesn’t preclude them from finding their ‘less-favored’ gender appealing!

What made this novel worse for me is that all of the three main characters in this story: Phryne, John, and Rupert, were complete Mary Sues (in the original sense). Admittedly, Rupert was endowed with a rudeness which gave him a token flaw, but it was such a caricature that it failed for me (and failed to evoke Sherlock Holmes, to boot!). This undiverting diversion was only exacerbated by Phryne and John’s endless perfection and rectitude, and by their endlessly unimpeachable character referencing, and so on. For goodness sakes! I could have done without that. I love Phryne, but the more I’m told how comprehensively wonderful, heroically selfless, unutterably perfect, and endlessly skilled she is, the less attraction I feel to her.

So in the end, I couldn’t finish this story. I got to within two or three disks of the end of the audio book and gave up on it. I honestly couldn’t stand to hear one more choral line quoted! I cannot recommend this, and I think I may have to take a break from the written Phryne for a while and succor myself on the small-screen version again to get over this particular novel.

Dying to Get Published by Judy Fitzwater

Title: Dying to Get Published
Author: Judy Fitzwater
Publisher: Judy Fitzwater
Rating: WARTY!

This novel sounded really intriguing from the blurb - which means the blurb did its job, I guess! The problem was that what started out as a really grabbing premise - a writer concocted a plot for a murder mystery, and is now in prison accused of the very murder she plotted. Yes, it’s been done before, most notably in the movie, Basic Instinct, but it’s always a good idea if you can put a twist or two on it.

The problem with this, for me, was that the author's idea of a twist seemed to be adding a trope romance. That might even have worked except that the murder mystery was forgotten about as we abruptly flashed-back to her romance. Even that might have worked had the new guy in her life been the villain. This brings me to the second problem - the real villain here is the main character. She's pissed off with an agent who wasn't very nice to her (but then she wasn't nice in return, either), and for no good reason decides to start sending her threatening letters. She's plotting her death and it’s not at all clear whether she's really intending to do this, or if she's just playing with ideas for a novel, if playing a little too authentically.

The romance wouldn’t have been so bad had it something original to offer, but it was so clichéd as to be pathetic. The male is tall, so the female can be rendered into a little girl rather than a woman. He has hair falling into his eyes, he's muscular, he has 'startlingly blue eyes', because brown eyes look like…well, not chocolate (so this style of authorship evidently thinks). And he's going to fix her because she's broken, and you know that every girl needs a guy to both fix and validate her. In short, it went quickly down the toilet.

This is one of a series (of seven as of this review), but detective series are really nothing more than a rehash of the original story when you get right down to it, with a few tweaks to the template in order to try and make the next story sound original when it really isn't. I have no time for writers who milk money out of readers like that while eschewing any efforts towards inventiveness or creativity. Some writers can make a series work, and they are to be treasured, but when a series gets off to a boring and clichéd start like this one, I can neither subscribe to nor recommend it.

There was some nice humor here and there, particularly in the writing group that the "detective" attended, and the novel was relatively short, but that's the best I can say for it. One wonderfully and, I assume, unintentional piece of humor was that at one point the protagonist agrees, right at the end of chapter ten, to meet someone at eleven! I loved that, but to put this in relationship terms, this book was simply not there for me when I needed it.

Skewed by Anne McAneny

Title: Skewed
Author: Anne McAneny
Publisher: Amazon
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 enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
Page 212 "...either approving of either..." - too many eithers!

This novel could have been a classic example of how you can get away with murder with me and still get a positive review. All you have to do is tell a good story and have interesting characters and I'm willing to forgive a lot, but in the end, there was too much to forgive here.

Also, I have to say up front that this is a first person PoV novel, a voice I detest because so few writers can carry it off, and it ends up being arrogant, self-absorbed and self-obsessed. In this case it wasn't so bad - and the author knows the difference between stanch and staunch, so kudos there. but the problem remains that there are several serious problems with 1PoV even for authors who can get away with it.

The first and foremost of these is that it doesn’t work suspense-wise, because you know the story gets finished – so there's zero drama over whether the narrator will survive! For example when main character (and narrator) Jane gets trapped somewhere during this novel, it doesn't make for a chapter-ending cliff-hanger because there is no question of the outcome.

Another problem, which became apparent in the way that this novel was written, is the extreme limitation of being a first person narrator: you're stuck with you! The narrator can't relate anything that they don't experience personally, or the reader ends up with long info-dumps, or boring conversations where the reader has to sit and wait while someone relays what happened elsewhere. It's completely unnatural.

Maybe some readers (and far too many writers, particularly those of the YA persuasion!) feel it brings more immediacy, but to me it brings irritation and annoyance. I routinely put books back on the shelf at the library or the book-store as soon as I discover that they're 1PoV, but it's a lot harder to do that with ebooks - and no book blurb ever gives you the PoV!

The interesting thing about this is that the author here evidently agrees with me: in this story, we periodically reverted to 3PoV because of these limitations, and for me it failed because it kept halting the story at the interesting parts while we went back in time, and I'm asking myself: "So now who's telling the story?" and I'm losing faith in the reliability of what I'm being told. Is the narrator reliable? Is the third party reliable? Who is the third party? We don't know. More on how I dealt with this anon.

As I said, the main character is Jane Elizabeth Perkins, the narrator, who's a police crime scene photographer. That is to say, she's a police employee who photographs crime scenes (not necessarily only ones where police have committed crimes...).

She doesn't sound like she's very good at her job, but she does sound like she has a ferociously nauseating case of YA romantic interest in one of the detectives. We get bitch-slapped with this on page eight (this is only five pages in, since the novel unaccountably starts on page three). Indeed Jane's obsession with Wexler is pathetic and worthy of a trashy YA nomance, not a serious adult novel. It seriously mitigates against Jane being a likable female character. She pulled her chestnuts out of the fire with sufficient dexterity for me to let this slide by, but it was still annoying.

Jane and John (who-is-tediously-and-inevitably-called-Jack) Perkins are inexplicably famous as 'The Haiku Twins'. Fortunately Jack was a minor character or I would have ditched this novel on principle. I don't read novels any more which have main characters named 'Jack' because that name has gone wa-ay beyond cliché, past ludicrous, and well into plaid by now.

But I digress. Jane and John's mom was in her seventh month of the pregnancy with them when she was accidentally shot by Grady McLemore when he was attacked by a third party - someone who got away Scot-free since the police thought Grady had shot Bridget Perkins deliberately. Now Jane's getting anonymously-sent photos of the crime scene - photos which seem to prove that there was indeed a third party present at the scene - namely the guy who took the pictures.

John Perkins doesn't have any interest in solving his mother's murder. He's more interested in his run for DA. Indeed, he sounds like a complete jack-ass, so maybe he was named appropriately. There are two things which bothered me at this point. The first is that the author expects us to believe that some three decades after their birth, everyone still refers to John and Jane as haiku twins, and everyone recognizes them on sight. Frankly, that took far too much to believe. The second problem is that Grady McLemore is still alive. How this works in a nation which has pretty much Universal death penalty - and has been that way for decades - is the real unsolved mystery here! Virginia has been aggressively pro-death penalty, so how did McLemore escape the electric chair in 1985? No explanation!

I had thought that chapter one, which takes place 30 years (and zero hours!) before the present was the prologue, and praised the author for incorporating it into the body of the novel (I don't do prologues), but then I reached chapter five and now we're 30 years (and eleven hours) into the past again. This I did not like because now we're not reading a story, we're riding a switch-back and are risking whiplash!

I'm not really very fond of stories that continually interrupt the flow of the narrative and the action for a flashback. I really don't care for a blow-by-blow account of what happened thirty years ago. I care about what's happening now, and the author is denying me that knowledge. So do I skip the flashback chapters? After reading chapter five - a second flashback chapter - and discovering how utterly irrelevant and boring it was, I decided I was indeed going to skip any and all future flashback chapters (there was a bunch of them). Rest assured that I did not miss them.

Those problems solved, I was able to get on with what turned out to be really a rather good novel (previous complaints aside). So Jane takes these photos she received, and accompanied by Wexler and Nicholls - another detective - delivers them to Sophie Andricola, supposedly some sort of Sherlock Holmes consulting detective type, who evidently doesn't grasp that you can buy decaf coffee pretty much everywhere, even in Virginia. Jane wants her to look at the photos and see if Sophie (name means wisdom, you know!) can provide any further clues. Frankly, I'm not sure I understood the point of this part of the novel. Ultimately Sophie's contribution was irrelevant.

Some parts of this story didn't ring true. For instance, Jane's grandfather is ill and when she visits him in the hospital, he re-writes her mother's last words telling Jane something slightly different from what he's previously told her. This is also rather irrelevant, but anxious to know if he's rambling, Jane asks an "orderly" what medications he's on - trying to decide if he's likely to be coherent.

An orderly? Seriously? Is this the fifties and the military? No, if you want to know what meds he's on, you ask the doctor, or more likely the nurse, who is the one who actually administers the meds, yet despite the author being female, we get a male doctor, a male orderly, and no nurse, male or female. I didn't like that and I find it hard to understand why female authors so routinely marginalize females in their work. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong authors?

The author does do a good job of writing a mystery, and of dangling red herrings misleading throughout, and the romance wasn't as god-awful as it had threatened to be with annoying hints being dropped loudly and routinely, but by this time it was too late. I read about 90% of this novel and then gave up because it was dragging on way too long and it was becoming ever more boring. I got to the point where I really didn't care how it ended and I gave up on it. Life is too short, and there are far too many books out there calling. Every one of them (although doubtlessly many are lying!) promises to be more gripping. I can't recommend this book, but this author does have a future, I think.