Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older

Rating: WARTY!

This is your trope story of your innocent kid finding she has superpowers. The problem is that by fully a third the way through this novel, I had no idea whatsoever what her superpower was. None! At all! That was strike one. The story has the tired cliché of her being delivered to 'enlightenment' by some new guy she meets - because you know that no girl can do a damned thing on her own. That was strike two. Worse, it seemed to be going nowhere, and taking its own sweet time even about doing that, so that was strike three, and I ditched it at a third in, and moved onto something more interesting.

The main character is Sierra Santiago, a young artist (who never actually does any art) who is tasked by her grandfather with updating a fading mural painting which evidently offers some sort of protection (I guess) against some sort of a threat (I imagine), which begs the question: why didn't grandaddy get off his lazy ass and fix things in his younger years? This story is written way younger than the characters in it!

Anyway, Sierra meets the new guy in school of course, who is also an artist (who never does anything other than token art), of course, and who will be her validator. Before he even deigns to lift a finger to help her, she's accosted by a reanimated corpse (although she doesn't know it at the time) demanding answers to a question she doesn't even understand. The ridiculous name they give to the corpse is 'corpuscle' which doesn't work (neither does the name John Wick which also turned me off this story). Even then this guy Sierra befriends is really tight with information like he wants her to struggle. Some friend.

There was diversity in this story, but I don't think reviewers at this point should be giving credit to stories for being inclusionary and presenting a diverse array of characters! That should be the norm - the baseline, so I don't give extra credit for that.

The story seemed to be going around in vacuous circles and sure didn't want to tell me anything, so I said the hell with it. You want to keep the story to yourself, why even publish the freaking novel in the first place?! I can't commend this at all.

Sailing With Her Wolf by Ariel Marie

Rating: WARTY!

This is probably another novel I should never have embarked upon, but I liked the idea and I always hope for the best when starting a novel. Unfortunately, this one went wrong fast because of the author's focus on sex instead of upon a relationship.

I made it through the first third and quickly grew the feeling that this story was wrong-headed and not remotely appealing to me. I pressed on for a little while, hoping it would improve, but it just got worse. In the end (the end of the first third, anyway!), I DNF'd it for its obsession with sex, and the poor writing.

The story is of werewolf (or whatever the female term is, since the 'were' in werewolf, means man) named Marley, who has the sadly laughable last name of 'Gerwulf'. I mean really? Marley is lesbian and her friend Zara York, who she's known since high school, knows this. They know everything about each other. Yet never once have they connected or even talked about it, evidently, other than being BFFs.

This felt off to me, esspecailly since the book blurb insists that 'Marley's wolf' had identified Zara as her 'mate' the day they met. Yet here they are, both entering their thirties, and...Nothing. Got. Done. The blurb ridiculously says that "the urge to mate was strong," but this made zero sense, since as lesbians, they would not have the offpsring that mating implies, so whence this 'mating' urge? And if it's not mating, then why not use some other term? It felt like the author hadn't thoguht this through.

Don't get me wrong. Anyone who's read anything reasonably deep about the natural world knows that humans did not invent queer. We like to think we did, but the animal - and even plant - world had long had queer before we ever evolved. There are gay relationships all over nature; lesbian ones; bisexual ones, and even transgender arrived in nature long before humans thought they'd invented it. Hell, I just read in the news very recently that California condors have been shown to have reproduced asexually, which was not something science was aware they could do - not until now! Let's hear it for lesbian condors! Yeay!

There's nothing new under the sun, so the problem here isn't with a gay shifter relationship. It's with the 'mating compulsion' which implies a drive to produce offpsring, which will never materialize - not with each of the main characters as a biological parent. So whence this urge? What does it mean exactly? This would have been the perfect place for some self-examination by the main characters: a book like this one.

But the author never touches it! Why not? She never deals with it; never tries to explain it, and never discusses it. It's like she put this out there blindly as a wolf prerogative - a dominant wolf necessity - without thinking it through, and without even seeing the beautiful story possibilities that were here. It's like she was so obsessed with the sex that she never gave a minute's thought to the people she had created and was putting through this lackluster story. That's why this made no sense to me. It felt like a profligate waste of a glorious story opportunity - one that I am now going to have to write, and I don't even like shifter stories that much!

The blurb asks stupidly, "will Marley be able to protect Zara while resisting the call to mate" and the answer is hell no! They jump each other's bones the very first night they're stranded through the tired cliché of sharing a bed to stay warm. It's tedious. And no, there's no 'mating'. They have sex, but that's not what 'mating' implies!

So these two women set sail on a yatch, get caught in a storm which damages the engine, and shuts down all the electronics on their boat, and so they're adrift together until they get rescued. It would be the perfect place to explore a real relationship in depth, but this author sadly takes the path most traveled and therefore least interesting, and she squanders even that journey on sex scenes that read like a thesaurus of body parts. It's not erotic, not romantic, not exciting, and not entertaining, and I can't commend it at all.

No Good Deed by MP McDonald

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a rare worthy read. The story has been done before, but this take on it was an unusual one in my experience. In 2001, Mark Taylor is in possession of an old still frame 35mm camera, and he discovers that it creates some images which he never pointed the camera at, and those pictures when developed, show acts of violence, death, and terrorism. That same night, he dreams of those images. This gets him into trouble, because on the morning of September 11th that year, he calls in a desperate plea to try and prevent tragedy and finds himself abducted to solitary confinement, interrogation and torture as an enemy non-combatant.

I hope our security services are better and smarter than the ones depicted here, because I had some issues with that, but eventually Mark is freed through lack of evidence, and is left to try and pick up the peices of his destroyed life. The crux comes when he starts using his camera again and finds that it has taken more pictures of yet another terrorist attack to come. The question is, does he dare report this one?

There was only one glaring writing issue that I picked up on, and I see this frequently: "The paramedic wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his uninjured bicep" No! Unless the paramedic - who sure as hell should know better - actually incised into the man's upper arm, selected one of the two bicep attachments that link the biceps muscle to the humerus, and wrapped the cuff around that, then he wrapped the cuff around the guys biceps! It's never used singularly except in an anatomical context. The biceps is the msucle that bulges when you flex your arm. The bicep is one of the two ligaments that attaches the biceps to the bone. Every writer should know this, but increasingly, I'm seeing many of them fail, thinking, I dunno, maybe thinkign biceps is the pural that applies to both upper arm muscles, so if you're talking about only one of them, it must be bicep? I dunno. I do know writing standards are falling, for sure.

That minor quibble aside, and in general terms, I liked how this was written, although there were parts I skimmed because it seemed that a particular motif, especially the interrogation, went on way too long. There were other bits I found uninteresting, but I liked the ending and overall I enjoyed the story, so I commend this as a worthy read. That said I am not into series and this is part of a series which I do not intend to pursue.

Jenny Greenteeth by Aubrey Law

Rating: WARTY!

This is one a series of short stories that are presented as prequels to the Black Annis story by this author that I read and enjoyed a while back. They're free downloads, but they were really not very thrilling because first of all they didn't mean a whole heck of a lot to me. I don't recall any of these characters from the Black Annis story, although it's been a while and a few books since I read that. On top of that, the story is so short you can never really get into it.

One of the problems with this for me was the same problem I'd had with Black Annis in that there was a significant gross-out factor to it, and there's only so much disgusting description I can read without becoming truly tired of it. The problem here is that gross-out was all this particular story seemed to be! It went into some detail about Jenny Greenteeth's foul habits and depraved diet and her abominable abdominal activities, and it really lost me in the sense that my eyes were glazing over after a paragraph or two of that, and yet still it went on.

The story was about four wizards - who I didn't know and had zero investment in. Their fates were immaterial to me, so there was no excitement or engagement. Anyway, they set out into the swamp to take down Greenteeth, who apparently used to be married to that Bluetooth guy. Just kidding! Why they were after her, I do not know, other than that she was simply gross, maybe. The thing which strikes me about these 'magic' stories is that they are so dated in their philosophy.

I mean, Greenteeth lived "in a bloody swamp," as Michael Palin might describe it. She never left and only preyed upon those who entered, so all they had to do was fence it off, and the problem was solved. But they stalk in there, using old school magic, and get their noses bloodied eventually. Why not just conjure up a tactical nuke? Or a black hole to swallow her up? Their techniques seemed laughably quant.

So for a variety of reasons I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Fire and Shadow by TG Ayer

Rating: WARTY!

This is book one in the " Hand of Kali" series, and I am not a series person for multiple reasons - mainly because series tend to be so badly done and so tedious. In this case, I think the title was badly chosen. Do you have any idea how many frigging novels are out there which employ this title exactly or in part? About fifty too many. It's ridiculous.

The author ought to have re-thought that, especially since a title like that carries a certain dissuasive pretention about it, but that issue aside, this novel promised to be different in that it was an author of Asian ancestry writing about the rich Hndu mythology of India. The problem was that the story was set in the USA because you know there's no way in hell any story not set in the USA can be remotely interesting, right? That and the fact that the bulk of the insular US readership is incredibly limited and provincial, and won't read stuff not set in the USA - at least that's what Big Publishing™ wants us to believe. Yawn.

All writers have to bow to that irritating fact of life unfortunately. That aside though, there were some really bad writing issues with this novel that essentially turned out to be a clone of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that this was Maya the Demon Slayer. The first of these issues is: why was it set in the USA? This doesn't feature native American mythology, but Indian mythology! Okay, fine, you bow to pressure and set it on safe turf, but you then it's really incumbent upon you to offer some sort of explanation as to why these Hindu gods and demons have transplanted themselves to the US, and this author offers nothing - at least not in the portion of this that I read, which was about 25%.

So it's your trope cookie-cutter story of the ingénue raised in ignorance of her powers, who despite her disbelief is a super-strong wielder of whatever power it is she has. In this case hers is the power to immolate demons - apparently without leaving a significant trace - as we shall get to shortly. Maya Rao is an outcast in her rich kids high-school of course, and she has a clichéd creepy kid who is always around, keeping an eye on her. His name is Nik and he's also an empowered guy who happens to be hot and know more about Maya than she does about herself, but nether he nor Maya's parents, who also know about her powers, have the kindness or decency to bother educating Maya, not even indirectly, not even remotely.

In order to prevent her juvenile scorching of things, her parents bound her powers magically, and she conveniently forgot about all those burned toys and the scorched furniture. Now she doesn't believe in a single thing about Hindu mythology despite going to church every week. Yawn. I guess even the god she serves doesn't give a shit about poor Maya! Barf. But she gets an invitation to the rich kids party, and like an idiot she goes and gets a drugged drink, and rich jock Bryon (barf!) leads her to a boathouse bathroom here he beats her up, but this beating together with the alcohol and the drug allow her to unleash her power and she burns Byron to death with such intense heat that all that's left is ashes and a scorch mark or two.

That amount of heat (and nowhere does the author say it was magical heat as opposed to regular everyday burning) would have to be hot enough to melt at least some bathroom fixtures, but apparently virtually no evidence is left, because when Nik - who's been stalking Maya at the party without once having the consideration to warn her that there are humans possessed by demons present - shows up and enables her getaway from the party, there are zero consequences for Maya's actions.

I'm talking zero consequences. Never (at least not in the portion I read), do police show up at Maya's house asking her about Byron - with whom she was last seen! There's no outcry, no news reports of a missing rich white kid. Maya was so badly-beaten that she had a punctured lung, yet despite her being hospitalized, nowhere does the hospital file a report about a minor being admitted after having been beaten so badly. That together with Byron's disappearance ought to have triggered some alarms, but Maya's charmed life goes on totally uninterrupted as she trains to fight and evaporate more demons.

This is a serious writing problem - when an author is dedicatedly following her tunnel vision without paying any attention at all to the possibility that the real world might just intrude on the story here and there. When I quit reading though, was when I read this: "A small part of her saw how sexy he happened to look even when he smudged soot on his cheek as he dusted himself off." Seriously?

In learning how to use fire, Maya almost kills him (he's fortunately protected by his own god) and instead of her being horrified and disturbed by what she did, all she can do is think how sexy he looks in his scorched clothes?! Again the author is so obsessed with her neat little love package that she completely forgets that this story is purportedly taking place in the real world and that there are real world consequences, feelings, and issues to address. It was ridiculous and this story, having threatened this several times, finally became undeniably too stupid to continue reading.

The book could have used a literate editor, too. I read things like: "Maya tread water in the sea of her ignorance." Ignorance is right, because the past tense of 'tread' is 'trod'. "She didn't even believe Rakshasa's existed in the first place" The plural of Rakshasa is Rakshasas, not the possessive case! I also read,

"You have the same eyes, you know?" "Same as whom?" Maya asked

Nobody, especially not a high school kid, says 'whom'! It's a big writing mistake. The author is so focused on how it technically 'ought' to be written that she forgets she's (supposedly) writing about real people saying real things in a real world. 'Whom' stands out like a sore thumb.

Even some of the descriptive writing was too impenetrable to make sense. In describing a traditional fighting weapon known as a madu, the author wrote: "Really a pair of shield, with twin antelope horns melded together to form a natural double-ended piercing weapon." That's a really bad description!

This weapon is essentially a buckler (from the French buclier). A buckler is a small round shield, which can be up to half a meter in diameter and which can be used offensively as well as defensively. In this case it also has two antelope horns, each protruding horizontally at opposite sides of the buckler, pointy ends out, fixed to the shield. Why Maya would train with this antiquated device rather than learn to shoot a gun is another writing problem - again this choice of weapon isn't even discussed.

So this story was larded with cliché and trope, had nothing new to offer since it was essentially a Buffy clone with demons substituted for vampires and so on, but otherwise exactly the same story, and badly-written to boot. So what's new? Nothing! So why read it? The plotting was poor, the quality of the writing awful, and I sure as hell am not about to read a series like this!

The Last Necromancer by CJ Archer

Rating: WARTY!

If only it were the last necromancer, but alas! There will be more stories about necromancers, I fear.

Despite having misgivings about this, I started reading it because it was a new take on Frankenstein. While we unfortunately get vampire stories up the wazoo, and quite a few sad werewolf ones too, we don't see any of the other classic monsters (Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc.) retreaded very often. So I was curious about this one, especially since it has a girl living as a boy on streets of London.

Technically, Frankenstein is the Georgian period, not the Victorian in which this novel is set, but it wasn't that important to me. What is important is that I get a good, original (even if borrowed from a classic!) story that moves at a decent pace, and which entertains me, and I sensed quickly that I was not about to get any of that from this, as it turned into yet another trope-laden YA romance story.

It started out well-enough in that this girl Charlotte (who goes by the unoriginal and unimaginative 'Charlie' as a boy) has the ability to raise the dead, and she's kidnapped by this guy Lincoln Fitzroy. It was painfully obvious right from the start that he and Charlie would be an item, and it was so telegraphed and pathetic, and so, so inappropriate that I wanted to give up right then, but I read on a little way to see if the author could rescue it or had anything new to offer; once it became crystal clear she did not is when I DNF'd this.

Fitzroy is often a euphemism sort of a name for a king's bastard offspring, but I have no idea if that's the case here or if the author just blindly chose it as a 'cool name' (it really isn't). This guy, as I said, kidnaps Charlotte, and holds her prisoner without giving her any idea of why he's doing this. They butt heads repeatedly, and it became quickly tedious to read at that point.

It turns out that the reason she's kidnapped is that the people employing Fitzroy want Charlotte kept out of the hands of Frankenstein, who is having a problem animating his creation, and since Charlotte can reanimate a dead person's body by calling their spirit back into it - over which she then has complete control - she is of course of inestimable use to him. I don't doubt that happens further down the line in what is probably an inevitable trilogy. Correction: I later learned this is a ten book series! Are you fucking joking? Jesus! But I figured Frankenstein will indeed get his hands on Charlotte, and I have no interest in yet another tedious YA love triangle or a tedious ten-novel series, especially not one written this badly.

I so quickly tired of the imprisonment and the cruelty and the business of treating Charlotte like a child - although she did behave like one often. But there was meanness and cruelty involved in her imprisonment and the author seems not to care a whit about Stockholm syndrome, like this adversarial and punitive relationship is the perfect start to what will somehow magically blossom into passionate and undying love. Barf. Get a clue, Archer, please. You're missing the target by miles.

The last straw for me was when Fitzroy gave Charlotte her wish and freed her in a poor part of London dressed to the nines, and left her to her fate. He was of course following her so he could rescue this poor waif, but that wasn't the saddest part. The saddest part wasnt even that Fitzroy had purposefully hired a thug to threaten Charlotte so that he could "rescue" her and have her even further in his debt. The guy is a complete dick and a jerk.

No, the problem was a complete betrayal of Charlotte, and the most inauthentic part of the novel. Charlotte had been living on the streets for several years before she was captured by Fitzroy, but now she's portrayed as somehow being inexplicably and completely at a loss as to what to do, where to go, and how to keep herself safe. Inevitably she falls into the hands of this ruthless and brutal rapist that Fitzroy hired, thereby forcing Charlotte further into his control and dominance. Way to trash your main character's entire backstory, Archer! I'm done with this atrocious author.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Rating: WARTY!

Read not well by Claudia Alick. I could not get with her reading style or voice at all, and it sure didn't help that the writing was atrocious: confused, jarring, choppy, and with events and the mechanics of this fictional world very poorly explained.

I was attracted by the PoC on the cover of the book since usually the folks in stories of this nature are white, but once again I proved to myself what an appalling mistake it is to pay any attention to a book cover. The woman inside the book could have been anyone - white, black, tall, short, long-haired, short haired, bald, fat, thin or anywhere in between any of those options for all the description we got. Her appearance is never mentioned - at least not in the portion of this that I could stand to listen to. I'm not one for detailed depictions of every single aspect of a fictional world, but a bit of hinting here and there is nice!

Ideally, it ought to be utterly irrelevant what the character looks like or what color he, she, or they are, unless of course it has some bearing on the story, but realistically, you would expect there to be some sort of mention at some point of her skin color, or hair or something, even if only in passing, but there was nothing - not in the portion I read. It was like she was a blank slate. Since the author is white I can only assume this is a cynical attempt to claim some relevancy in the current climate. Or maybe he wrote this story about a white character and the publisher just slapped a woman of color on the front since he doesn't mention who she is. Maybe the Chinese edition has a Chinese protagonist, and the Latin edition a Hispanic one. I dunno.

The story is that Tara, the main charcter, has graduated from her supernatural academy, but she left dishonorably somehow, so how that worked, I do not know. She's a complete newbie with no experience whatsoever, so why she's chosen to resurrect the deceased fire god of Alt Coulumb is a mystery. The deal here is that people worship gods, which gives the god power, and the god in turn uses that power to care for their worshippers. It's a bit incestuous and weird, but it's really not explained too well, and you have to wonder what's the point, really!

Tara and her supervisor discover that the god, Kos, has been murdered. For me this is where the very idea of the story gets boring because they have to take it to court! I was concerned about the story becoming mired like that, but I was willing to give this audiobook a chance until I began listening. It failed me fairly quickly, so I ditched it and moved onto something hopefully better. Life's far too short to force oneself to read a crappy novel to the end.

Scholarship Girl by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

This turned out to be another dumbass high-school series starter. The plot had sounded interesting, but the trope and cliché was a death knell for this as far as I'm concerned. Yet again we have the girl with an old and trusted friend as one corner of the inevitable triangle, and the rich bad boy of the school, who she hates, as the other corner. Why do so few female authors have anything original to say in YA? I know there are some because I've read and enjoyed them, but why are there so few and why are so many female authors dedicated to reproducing cloned pap? Are the authors or blame or the readers? Or the publishers? Thinking people want to know!

So this girl is a scholarship student at an academy that has fantasy characters: elves, fae (the author is too chickenshit to call them fairies), demons, etc., as students. So it's the uninventive usual. Naturally she's forced into being a bodyguard to the rich, spoiled, cruel brat of a student that she supposedly hates, but will inevitably, predictably, unimaginatively fall for. Wait, what? Bodyguard? This is a rich student school and they can't hire regular competent, professionally-trained adults as bodyguards? They have to bribe the bullied and impoverished scholarship students to do it? WTF!

I quit reading right there because I was almost literally nauseated by how bad this was and what a shameless rip-off it was of every other YA high school story. Despite the fact that these students are magical beings, they were all portrayed as exactly like regular high school characters. There was literally no difference other than their species name!

It was so pathetic that hoenstly, I was cringing for the author while reading it. Do none of these authors turn on their brain before starting to write? Do they not think outside of the box? Do they never put themselves into another's shoes or hooves? I honestly do not know how anyone can be so wooden as to write like this. I really don't. Yeah, I did expect this, but as always, I hoped for better. I was genuinely sorry to be once again disappointed. This was an early DNF, and I'mm done with reading anything else by this author.

Map of Shadows by JF Penn

Rating: WARTY!

In this, the first book of the Mapwalkers Series, Sienna Farren inherits her grandfather's map shop when he's murdered. Yes, this is the tedious trope "You're a wizard, Harry" kind of story, where a kid is raised in complete ignorance of their supernatural power. Nonetheless, it seemed like it might be a worthy read, but I was quickly disabused of that quaint notion.

Despite it being crystally-clear from the off who the villain is here, no one, least of all Sienna, who of course is a special snowflake with legendary powers, can see it. Wouldn't it be nice if once, the one with the special powers is actually smart and perceptive? No such luck here.

Sienna learns that she can 'map walk' - that is, can go to places in time and space using maps - and her "specialness" is that she can even do it based on nothing more than a map in her head. The villains are people who use the skins of other map-walkers to draw their own special maps and of course there's a 'shadowland' that they want to open the borders to - and of course Sienna is the only one who can stop them.

Despite having zero training or even any clue what she's doing, Sienna exhibits heroic powers from the off, and despite landing in the HQ of the villains, wherein several vital skin maps are hung on the walls, neither Sienna nor her companion - an experienced map walker - think for a split second of destroying or of taking these maps, to limit the powers and abilities of their enemy.

It's a no-brainer, but these two girls evidently have no brains. It made me want to quit reading the story there. While I don't mind a good story about someone who starts out dumb and wises up, I really don't appreciate stories by female authors about dumb women who start out dumb and bask in it throughout the story, consistently making bad decisions that even a moderately intelligent person in real life would avoid like the plague.

The story seems to revel in how gory and stomach-churning it could be, and that along with the fact that it really had no saving graces, and was larded with trope characters exhibiting predictably idiotic behaviors forced me to DNF this after maybe a third of it. I can't commend it based on what I could stand to listen to.

Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles: Books 1–3 by Rebecca Chastain

Rating: WARTY!

Rebecca Chastain is actually quite a cool name for a novelist, but the book description? Not so cool! "When Mika sets out to rescue a baby gargoyle, she’s plunged into a surprising new life of adventure…" How is it surprising? She's chasing a baby gargoyle for godsakes! How is anything surprising in her world?

Here's the thing though: I make it a point, unless there are really extenuating circumstances, to avoid like the plague books with ‘chronicles’ or ‘saga’ or ‘codex’ or ‘cycle’ in the title. I've seen too many of them be boring, rambling, tedious, vacuous, pretentious bullshit stories to make that mistake again. Those words are the kiss of death for a novel, so it's warty based on that one word alone. Plus, gargoykes? No thanks. And I'm pretty much ready to start skipping novels entirely where the book description begins with the word "when"! I'm so tired of it!

Night Broken by Patricia Briggs

Rating: WARTY!

If this novel has "over 29,000 five-star Goodreads ratings" why is it being flogged at a discount in a book flyer? The blurb claims that, "When her werewolf husband’s ex comes back into the picture, Mercy must protect herself — while trying to solve a murder case" Why? I mean by all means protect yourself, but why is it necessary? Is her husband's ex evil? Dangerous? If so why can't she rely on her husband or the police?

And why is she trying to solve a murder case? Is it because the local cops are once again morons as they always are in these private dick novels? If I were a cop I'd resent insulting novels like this one. And if this is a supernatural world, are there not supernatural means to solve it? Or is it insoluable since it's supernatural? LOL!

Oh look! Charlaine Harris apparently said, "I love these books" - well, maybe she did, and maybe she didn't. I don't know and I sure don't trust a book description to get it right. My question is: did she love this particular one? We don't know!

Did she actually read "these books" or does she just like the covers? Is anyone going to ask her? I doubt it. And why the hell should I read something that some author I don't know personally recommends? I may well have read a book of hers, but I don't know her or her tastes. Her recommendation tells me nothing about "these books" if I've never heard of her! If I've read her books and didn't like them, I'm sure as hell not going to buy this one!

Bloodfire by Helen Harper

Rating: WARTY!

I should say up front that I am not a fan of werewolf or vampire stories, or any of that kind of thing. I've read a few and I've been almost consistently disappointed in them because they're so tedious and so conformal. I know many readers enjoy predictable by-rote stories that retread familiar territory, but I've never been one of those; hence my aversion to series. I quickly tire of reading the same thing over and over again. I prefer authors who do not take the road most traveled.

Initially that's what appealed to me about this story because the author seemed like maybe she was going my way. Yes, she still had the ludricous idea of a pack and an alpha male and all that shit, but this pack had a human member, and although she was a little weird, she was not a shifter. This created problems when trouble arose and the "Lord Alpha" came to visit the local pack. It sounded interesting.

In the British Isles, at least as far as the mainland is concerned, Cornwall is about as far south as you can get, but for me, this is when the story itself started going south. It didn't help that the author seems clueless that Cornwall does indeed get Earthquakes - about one every other year or so. But with regard to the story, I hear you objecting that these are wolves. Wolves live in packs! There's an alpha male. Why is this wrong? Well, it actually is wrong!

Among real wolves, there is not a lone alpha male; there's an alpha couple. This couple does all or most of the breeding, so pretty much all of the pack is related. Despite this, everyone else, while a part of the pack and deriving certain benefits from that, is pretty much out for his or herself, trying to rise up the hierarchy, and packs are not set in stone. Nor are they all best friends all the time. They wil band together to protect their turf, but within the pack, which can number from two to thirty or so wolves, levels of aggression can rise and fall, and pack members can leave and start their own pack.

But there is no Lord Alpha Male (LAM for short! LOL!). Now werewolves are supposed to be different, but for some reason this pack identifty has taken over the mythology and everyone has bought into it. I have no idea why. And the leader is called 'Lord'? Seriously? What is this? Star Wars? It's the same with vampire stories and it turns me right off them.

This story had the makings of an engaging one, but the more I read, the more humdrum and the less compelling of a read it became. Mackenzie, the main character, was first person voice and this is usually a mistake. I managed to read it, but every time she said "I blah blah blah...", and "Hey lookit me!" and "It's all about me!" and "Check out what I did next!" it reminded me this was a story, and I couldn't get lost in it. "Listen to me" is a great Buddy Holly song. It makes for a sucky narration voice.

Anyway, the pack took her in as a child and no one told her why, but because she's been there so long, she's considered by most to be a pack member, even though she doesn't behave like one herself: she's constantly off following hunches without asking permission or sharing what she knows. So much for the pack! Naturally there's the "school bully" which again turned me off. Of course, she has a special snowflake power which is at the root of the story, but when we finally got around to addressing that, the ending was really rather flat and unsatisfying to me, and predictably, she goes rogue. No surprises there.

The introduction of Lord Corrigan, the national alpha male turned me right off yet again, because he's clearly this macho studly teasing flirtatious dominant male. Even as he curses Mackenzie for insolence, he inexplicably lets her get away with anything she wants to do, and he's simultaneously so weak, useless, and stupid, that he cannot even tell shes not a shifter much less a werewolf. So much for his vaunted powers.

At least the author doesn't call them lycans, I guess, so there's that. Calling werewovles 'lycans' just to try and sound special is as pathetic as calling fairies 'fae'. It's chickenshit and authors should be ashamed of it. But, anyway, if he's the capo dei capi, that doesn't automatically make him the capo di tutti i capi, because presumably there are other packs in other nations.

That's one problem with this story - the world-building just isn't there. Naturally no one - least of all me - wants a story bogged-down with backstory, but it doesn't hurt to toss in a line here and there filling in some detail during the course of telling the story. Instead, we get a vague hand-wave about this local pack, considered by the human residents to be a cult, and yet no one finds this odd? MI5, which is the Brit equivalent of the FBI, has no interest at all in this nationwide network of cults? Really? Had this been set in 1820, fine, but in 2020 with terrorism embedded in the landscape it doesn't work.

There's a central authority pack in London, we learn. Why London? If these wolves despise humans as much as they clearly do according to this novel, then why emulate us at all? For that matter, if they're so superior, or think they are, why even tolerate us? Why not wipe us out? Why even use human names and descriptions for themselves? Like I said, 'lycan' is blessedly avoided, but werewolf is still used. It makes no sense to me, yet it's one of those things readers are expected to just let slide.

We're told nothing about how the wolves make a living or pay for food - or even what food they eat, apart from vague allusions to someone's bad cooking. But why do they even cook their food? I'll tell you why. It's because the author wasn't writing about werewolves any more than one-trick pony author Stephenie Meyer was writing about vampires. They're both writing about humans with a gossamer-thin patina of urban fantasy sprinkled over it.

Does this sound like a litany of nitpicking? Too bad! For me a story either works or it doesn't. When a female author perpetuates this nonsense: "much in the same way that women’s periods aligned themselves if they lived together in close quarters for a long time," it's more than nit-picking, because that menses alignment? It doesn't happen! Like werewolves, it's a myth. Real nitpicking would be to mention that when using the app in night mode, the chapters are so pale against the background that it's hard to read them, or pointing out that when the author writes, "you tended to become somewhat inure to nature’s most reliable outcome" she really should have used 'inured'.

Real problems with writing are what turn me off a book. If it's entertaining enough and delivers a good story I can put up with a lot of issues, but if you, as a reader, are constantly pulled out of it by poor writing choices and shoddy or inconsistent world-building, and disappointed by a flat ending, it's not worth reading the story at all, and this one makes me wish I could have the time back so I could have read something else instead.

Best Friends by Ruby Jean Jensen

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I should say up front that I'm not a fan of horror stories and so this was a bit of an experiment, but I'm always interested in reading authors I haven't encountered before, especially if they have anything interesting or new to share, and this book offered something that was first published back in 1985 and was a little bit different from the stuff we tend to see today. It was a quick read, and although I had some issues with it, they were not enough overall to turn me off it.

I appreciated that there were only one or two writing and publishing issues. For example, at one point at the end of a descriptive sentence, there's a closing quote which is wrong, because the sentence was neither speech nor a quote: ...when, Shannon suspected, he was disturbed about something." The ending quote should not be there, but we've all been there, I'm sure! No big deal.

At another point, there was a paragraph describing their first trip to a supermarket, and it began and ended with a contradiction: "They each took baskets" as they entered the store, but then they left it was "With three grocery carts loaded with food supplies..." Disconnect! If they took baskets they should leave with baskets (or bags), otherwise the author ought to have had them take carts at the start! Unfortunately Ruby Jean Jensen died in 2010, so she can no longer fix that. We'll let it live as a memorial to her.

The final one I noticed was a bit of a writing wash: "And the tabletop had beneath it a shadow that seemed, when Shannon glanced away from it, darker than it should have been, as if there were something more beneath it adding its own shadow." It's possible to have a variation in shadow depth, but in this circumstance it stood out to me as being awkward in the circumstances. There was only one light source and the table top shadow could not have been deepened by anything underneath it when there was no other light shining. It's a minor quibble, but one which jumped out at me. Rather like the thing that was hiding! Not that the hiding made any sense, but I let that go. I know what she was trying to say; I just don't think she said it well.

For me, one of the biggest problems with horror stories or hauntings, poltergeists, that kind of thing is that writers always approach them in a terrified way - in that they tend to have the ghosts or evil spirits, or whatever, start out with minor ambigious events where the victims are always talking themselves into believing that nothing really happened, or that there's a rational explanation for what they think they experienced, but to me that makes zero sense. It especially made little sense in this particular novel.

I don't believe in an afterlife, or ghosts or evil spirits, but they make for good stories, and while I can understand how a writer would feel a need to slowly ramp-up the tension and the horror, it's all been done exactly like this so tediously many times before. The thing is that if you dive into that world and pretend for the sake of fiction that it's real, why would demons, ghosts, or spirits actually do that?

Maybe ghosts would behave like the humans they once were and ease into it if they were having fun - like the dead couple in Beetlejuice, for example, because they're supposed to be the spirits of people, but demons? Other monstrous creations? Why would they follow any rules or ramp up anything, when they can go full throttle from the off? Why would they behave remotely like humans?

The premise in this story is that a woman who has lost a young child is offered the opportunity to babysit three young children, the youngest of which is the age of the child she lost. They go to the family retreat in the mountains. The kids lost their mom, and dad can only visit on weekends, so it's just they, the housekeeper, and the evil friends of young Barry, who went through bad experiences in his previous setting where he was abused. Now he's withdrawn. No one knows he was abused by a woman who practiced demon worship.

The whole motivation of young Barry's supernatural 'friends' therefore, is to keep him to themselves and get rid of all competition, which includes Shannon the babysitter, as well as his sister Becky, his brother David, the housekeeper Edna, and even his Aunt and her two kids who come to stay for a while. Why in particular the demons want to rid the house of these other people isn't actually made clear. There's no explicatory backstory at all. The other people in the house are no competition. They're not even aware of the demons to begin with, and the demons are perfectly free to do whatever they want. To me this made no sense.

There was a epilogue which I did not read. I don't do prologues, epilogues, prefaces, introductions, forewords or any of that antique and tedious crap. Chapter one is where I start. I've never regretted it or felt like I missed anything by skipping those - which proves my point! It's possible there was something offered in the epilogue, but rather doubt it.

Barry spends time with the demons playing with, and talking to them. His family just think he's withdrawn and talking to imaginary friends. Barry has some control over the demons, but not much, and they have their own agenda, so when they decide they want the family gone, my question was: why do they not simply suffocate each one in their beds one night? Why the slow burn and the overly-elaborate deaths? Obviously it's because the writer is trying to entertain the reader and slowly jack-up the tension, but to me it made little sense and kept knocking me out of suspension of disbelief as I questioned why they were so lackadaisical in their demonic behavior! It reminded me of the villain in a thriller monologuing until the hero can find a way to defeat him. It's silly and inauthentic.

I let that slide though for the sake of enjoying an older story by someone who writes decently well, and it turned out to be entertaining. It wasn't something that made me want to run out and buy more Ruby Jean Jensen books to read. I may read another of hers down the line somewhere, but I wasn't overly impressed with this. It was however a worthy read overall.

I liked the way the family was put together and the way the author wrote the female characters, especially Becky and Shannon. I enjoyed the evil characters. They were new and different, and believable in many ways.. I liked Barry, although I thought he was a bit limp at times. On the other hand, he was very young, so maybe he was written realistically. I thought the ending was a bit lacking, but it wasn't awful and it lent Barry some weight that seemed to be missing from his character earlier, so all of these things brought the story around for me. Therefore I commend it.

Legion by William Peter Blatty

Rating: WARTY!

This was Blatty's attempt to get back some of his former glory after The Exorcist supernova had faded. I thought that original offering was a great novel and I really enjoyed it, but this one, which I read some time ago yet did not realize until today that I hadn't reviewed it, was a poor, poor sequel.

Often when a writer has a huge hit it's hard for them to get anywhere near that point again. We've seen it with runaway best-seller writers like JK Rowling after the Harry Potter marathon, and Suzanne Collins after The Hunger Games and its sequels. Inevitably they're drawn back to retread old tires because efforts to go in other directions are met with indifference. Typically retracing steps is a mistake and it fails.

The plot for this is very confused, resurrecting people who clearly died in the original novel and turning the demon into a limp and unoriginal serial killer, jumping from living body to body to leave trademark serial killer crimes scenes but with different fingerprints. The book was clearly very badly-written, very confused, and not worth the reading. A better take on this idea is the Denzel Washington movie Fallen which did not perform well at the box office but which I think far outstrips both this novel and the movie that was made from it. I can't commend this particular novel as a worthy read.

One Foot in the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skinwalker by Faith Hunter

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb for one of the books in this series caught my attention, and even though I'm series-averse and will never write one myself, I was curious about this one, so I got the one I was interested in, plus an earlier one in the series to read as an intro. Please be informed that my curiosity didn't long survive my beginning reading of this trope-filled novel.

Jane Yellowrock looks like she's Asian on the cover, especially with that stereotype of a cue, but she's apparently American Indian. I just got through a short and sassy discussion of book covers with a long time email friend and it was her opinion that covers are all important. It's my opinion that they're shallow and misleading depictions of the content of the book created all-too-often by someone who appears to have no clue what the book is about, let alone actually read it themselves.

These covers are a case in point. I know that IRL, people do go by book covers, but I think it's stupid and shallow for anyone to judge a book by its cover. Quite obviously, it's the content that matters. I'd far rather read a good book with a shitty cover than a lousy one with an artwork for a cover (although I might buy a used copy of the artwork one for display if not to read!)

A major character in a novel I'm working on as I write this review is an American Indian, so I sure have no problem with reading about one, but to lead a reader to believe it's about an Asian main character from the cover illustration, and then have someone of different ethnicity actually be in the novel is a piss-off at best. This is my beef about misleading book covers in a nutshell.

Add to that a bunch of info-dumping in the book, some of which seems to me to stereotype the main character, and I'm going to lose interest pretty fast, I promise you. This is the same kind of problem American Dirt has from what I've read about it. Blurbs can be misleading too, but I don't think they're quite as misleading as the wrong cover no matter how many squees that cover gets at the 'unveiling' party! Seriously? I mean how freaking shallow and pompous can we get?

The next problem was the first person voice, which is unrealistic at best, and which I detest unless it's really done well. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it isn't. This book features Jane traveling to New Orleans. She's recovered from a devastating fight with vampires (so we're told) and is looking to get back into her business of bringing down the rogues, in this Trublood rip-off of a fantasy world where vampires and other paranormals are out and accepted at least in principle.

So this story's been done (to death) before, but I thought this author might bring something new based on the book blurbs. Unfortunately, those can be as misleading (or as dishonest, however you view it) as the cover can, and I felt misled by this one. I know the author typically doesn't write the blurb or illustrate the cover unless they self-publish - and perhaps not even then - but you'd think someone who's running a purportedly successful series would be able to police the appearance of her books a bit better. On the other hand, why offer discounted books if you're selling them handsomely already? Maybe the series is in trouble. I dunno.

Anyway, Yellowrock arrives in town and meets with the trope vampire monarch - in this case a queen. Before she even gets there some sleazy stalker jerk on a motorbike is already slavering and panting after Yellowrock like a dog in heat. While bugs (the spying kind, not the insect kind) on the premises of the house she's going to be staying in piss-off Yellowrock, this dick of a guy stalking her didn't bother her at all! This turned me off the whole book, so I ditched it about thirty pages in. It was too sickening to read.

I refuse to commend a book like this and I'm done with this author.

Murder Above the Fold by Regina Welling, Erin Lynn

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those detective novels I usually laugh at and deride - especially when it has a dumb-ass title like this one does. I flatly refuse to read any such book that has the word 'sleuth' anywhere in the blurb and this one didn't, but it may as well have for what it was. My mistake was in thinking that this might be different in that it was a pair of witches that were the amateur investigators. I was curious as to how this would work. Couldn't they just do some witchcraft to determine who the perp is?! The trick in writing a novel like this is that you have to put in some valid reason(s) why they couldn't do precisely that (which would have meant a very short and boring series!). The problem is that these authors failed to do so and simply left the question begging. That's a really poor way to treat your readers.

So what I got was the absurdity of two quite powerful witches doing the detecting job precisely like someone who isn't a witch would do it - apart from a sprinkle of pixie dust here and there (apparently pixie dust can detect traces of blood, but it also destroys those traces). So I have to wonder what is the point of making them witches in the first place? Having done that, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have Witch One say, "I wish we could wave a wand and solve this" and have Witch Two retort, "Now Esmeralda, you know perfectly well that when a person kills another person, their true self is horribly warped by the violence done to their soul. Because of that, we can't see who it was, so we have to solve this the old fashioned way!" or words along those lines (and perhaps not quite so baldly!), but these two authors either were too clueless to see there was a major plot hole, or they simply didn't care. Either way, their readers deserve better.

To write about these characturds being very able witches and then have them pottering around without being able to lift a wand to solve the murder is just silly. The author has made the witches 250 years old, too, so there's that issue! Why she chose to do that I do not know, but the issue here is the same one that those asinine young adult vampire novels suffer. Someone who has been around for a quarter of a millennium isn't actually forty or fifty even if they look like they are. Such a person would not remotely behave like a person of that age (or be interested in a boring teenage slip of a girl unless he was into child pornography), yet these two authors write about the antique witches like they're really the age they appear to be. That's like saying a fifty-year-old would have the mentality of a ten year old. It doesn't work. Neither does the claim that witches age until twenty-five and then their ageing slows dramatically, which 'explains' how they continue to look young. Fine, if that's the way it is, but to say that's how it is and not even pretend you have a valid reason for that is just lazy writing. Why 25? Why does it slow? These authors don't give a shit.

Worse than this, we have these biddies in the story tampering with evidence. This happens all-too-often in this kind of story, going all the way back to Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot. He frequently keeps the police from solving a crime by withholding evidence. He won't even share his suspicions - all because he's an arrogant little tool who thinks he's better than anyone, and evidently deems it more important that he gets the celebrity value of solving the crime than it is to bring the criminal to book with all haste and by any means necessary. In reality, such a 'sleuth' would be arrested for obstructing justice!

In this story, the first notable thing that happens after the body is discovered is that their pixie dust destroys the blood evidence, but before that, they failed to report a scrap of torn fabric they found which is from the victim's clothing. As soon as they found that scrap stuck in a door jamb, they immediately leapt to the conclusion that the dead woman had been murdered! The discovery of the blood came afterwards. These things are precisely why I have a problem with these 'amateur sleuthing' series. I'd thought adding witches to the brew might make it readable, but I was wrong. It actually made it worse! I quit this nonsensical story right after the destruction of evidence.

I don't object to amateur detectives, not in principal, but I do object to sloppy-writing where things are just taken for granted, evidence is destroyed or withheld, and the 'sleuths' simply don't care about collaborating. That's just simplistic, stupid and lazy, which is why I rarely even look at this kind of a series. I certainly cannot commend this one based on how poorly-written the opening chapters were.

The Speed of Light by Amber Kizer

Rating: WARTY!

This is the third volume in the 'Meridian' trilogy which began with Meridian in 2009, and was followed by Wildcat Fireflies in 2011, and this one a year later. Despite liking the first, and not so much the second, both of which I read before I started blogging books, I could not get into this third volume at all. Maybe I left it too long before moving on to read this one? But that said it didn't ought to have affected my perception of it to this extent.

This is why I typically despise trilogies because far more often than not, the author takes a great idea and ruins it by dragging it out way past its natural life cycle. This is what happened here. Each volume was less than the previous, and this particular one was a bloated tome. One of the reasons for that was the appalling waste of trees involved in its production. There were massive margins, and the widely-spaced text did not start until halfway down the page on new chapters. How many trees could you have saved, Ms Kizer if you had formatted your book a little more wisely? Maybe she doesn't care. Maybe she hates trees. No one wants to see a book that's all text and no white space not even me(!), but come on! I think I'm going to start negatively-reviewing any print book that's so disrespectful of our environment.

Anyway I think I am done with this author after this experience. But briefly, the book is about Meridian Sozu, who is known as a Fenestra, that is, a human who has been, dare I say it, touched by an angel, and who is supposed to help transition souls into the next world. Why such a person would ever be needed goes unexplained. It implies that the resident god is incompetent and needs help shoring-up the defective system he created!

The author pairs her up with a guy, of course, who is naturally her soul-mate and protector. Why the author couldn't have changed this up a bit instead of taking the road most traveled, I do not know. She could have made the two antagonists, or made the protector a lesbian who wants Meridian, but whose love is not requited, or something else, but no, let's stick with traditional weak women who desperately needs a guy to validate her, young adult crap.

In volume one, this wasn't so bad as it happened, but it got worse. In this volume there's a battle to save this girl Julia who will do almost anything to find her parents, and who is siding with the idiotically named 'nocti' - the forces of dark who try to steal souls from people like Meridian. Plus there's a disaster awaiting at the Indianapolis 500, which some would argue is already a disaster, but still. Sorry, but no - not interested! The author has done insufficient work to create this world, and consequently it doesn't hang together at all well.

Unhappy Medium by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

Rating: WARTY!

Evidently part of a "Suddenly Supernatural" series, this audiobook was a disaster from my perspective. First of all it's number three in an ongoing series, which I couldn't tell from the book cover because Big Publishing™ seems to be in an orchestrated campaign to consistently deny this knowledge to readers. Why they would want this, I do not know, but it's yet another reason I have no time for Big Publishing™. Consequently it was a story in progress before I ever got there. This might have been manageable if other things hadn't tripped it up.

Worse than joining it in the middle as it were, it's worst-person voice, aka first-person voice. Worse than that even, the main character Kat Roberts appears to be a complete moron. Why female authors make their female main characters idiots so often remains a mystery to me. I don't mind if they start out somewhat dumb and wise up during the course of the story but to portray your female as an idiot doesn't do anyone any good. Women have enough to contend with from men without their own gender turning on them like this.

On top of that, the reader, Allyson Ryan, seemed like she wanted to make Kat's best friend as irritating as possible. Typically I find I like the side-kick better than I like the main character in far too many novels of this nature, but here the reader makes "Jac's" voice nauseatingly scratchy (she sounded like that clown from the Simpsons cartoons). She was so bad she almost made the main character seem worth my time. Almost. But I honestly couldn't stand to listen to it. This and the fact that the story was written so badly it was uninteresting to me, made me ditch this DNF. I can't commend it.

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Usually on Net Galley, you request a book to read and review and you take your chance as to whether it will be approved. Sometimes books are listed as 'Read Now' which tends to mean the book isn't doing so well or is being undervalued, and the publisher wants it read more widely. Those books are great because I've found many gems among them. There is another option though, which is the 'wish for it' category.

This has also been kind to me because I've found some gems there, too, but since the ones I've wished for have all been granted (to my best recollection), I have to wonder if this category is used because the author or publisher is lacking somewhat in confidence in the book and wants to ensure that it's requested only by those who really want to read it? I don't know. Personally I've tended to enjoy the 'wished-for' books, but I can't say that of this particular one unfortunately.

The blurb for this book makes it all about Charles Hayden, which seems rather genderist since Hayden is only one half of a married couple who travel to Yorkshire in the UK, a place I know and from whence both my parents hailed, but we see very little of Yorkshire. We are confined to an ancient manor house surrounded by a castle-like wall, and it's Erin Hayden's family connections which have led to this inheritance: to this manor isolated in an even more ancient wood. Erin isn't even mentioned in the blurb! Charles may as well have been single.

That said, the story is told from Charles's perspective, thankfully not in first person, but this novel would have been a lot easier to like had either of these two people been themselves remotely likeable. As it was, they were chronic whiners and I was turned off both of them within a few paragraphs of starting to read this.

Both were endlessly wallowing in the loss of their daughter Lissa. A mention of this once in a while would have been perfectly understandable, but as it was, it felt like it was every other paragraph and it became a tedious annoyance, drawing me out of the story as I read again and again of how obsessed they were with their 'lost' daughter. A search for the daughter's name produced 156 hits in this novel. A search for 'daughter' produced another 56. It was too much, and it felt like a failure of writing. It's certainly possible to convey deep grief in a character without rabbiting on about it to a nauseating degree, so this felt like a really bad choice to me.

The fact that we're denied any real information about what happened to Lissa didn't help at all, and actually made things worse. Did she disappear? Was she killed? Did she become fatally ill? Who knows? The author doesn't care to share this information, at least not in the portion of this that I read before becoming so frustrated I didn't want to read any more; nor do we learn anything about the affair Charles had - just that he had one.

This affair is related to us as if it were no more important than his remembering he had once stubbed his toe, so even as big of a betrayal as that was, it carries little import because of the way it's so casually tossed out, yet this woman Syrah, is mentioned a further 34 times in the book. It's another thing that Charles is unaccountably obsessed with. No wonder he gets nothing done: his mind is always elsewhere! And this obsession is a continuing betrayal of his wife.

Frankly, these two, Charles and Erin, were so annoying I wanted to shake them and slap them. Not that I would, but the truth is that they were seriously in need of inpatient psychiatric attention and it showed badly, but no one seemed to care. The fact that we're told his wife has a boatload of medications she's taking and Charles doesn't even care made me dislike him even more intensely. He came across as shallow and selfish and quite frankly, a jerk. His wife was painted a little bit better, but neither of them remotely interested me as characters about whom I would ever want to learn anything more or about whose futures I cared.

At first I had thought the story would end with their daughter being returned to them, but then I learned of another child in the story and it seemed pretty obvious what would happen at that point. I don't know if that's what did happen, but if it did, that would have been way too trite and predictable for my taste. It's been done before.

Charles's other obsession, aside from his daughter, the woman he had an affair with, and the woman, Silva at the local historical society with whom he'd like to have an affair, was this book he stole as a child, and which was written by a Victorian relative of Erin's. He thinks he can write a biography of the author, Caedmon Hollow - yes that's the name of the guy, not the name of the mansion! - but it seems like he's much more interested in getting into Silva's panties than ever he is in writing anything. He's been into that book only once in his entire life, but he's into thinking about Silva at the drop of a hat.

The book and the mystery it was attached to should have been central to the story but there was so much stuff tossed in here (I think there was actually a kitchen sink at one point) that the book robbed that purported mystery of any currency it may have had. It became a secondary issue to everything else that was going on.

Since it was that very mystery which had drawn me to the novel in the first place, this felt like a betrayal if not an outright slap in the face and really contributed to my decision to quit reading. It felt like it was going nowhere and taking a heck of a long time to get there, and I had better things to do with my time. I wish the author all the best, but I cannot commend this book as a worthy read.