Crown of Serpents by Michael Karpovage

Title: Crown of Serpents
Author: Michael Karpovage
Publisher: Karpovage Creative Inc.
Rating: WORTHY!

Oddities:
Page 129 had some gratuitous and unnecessary objectification: "…tight black slacks and an open black overcoat revealing her service pistol holstered at her shapely waist." Seriously?
Page 265 carries the assumption that older woman not attractive! Seriously?
Yet another author doesn't get that it's 'biceps' not 'bicep'.

Jake Tununda is a Native American who is a soldier and a war hero, but he's had enough. Now he wants a quieter life and while he is still in the army, he's now working for the Military History Institute, collecting historical artifacts and oral histories, and investigating battle sites, which actually sounds like a really cool job. On his way to give a lecture and collect more information for the institute, he accidentally intercepts a call for help, and tracks down the caller to a previously unknown native American burial site which happens to be right next to limestone fissure, into which the victim has fallen.

Jake tries to rescue him, but discovers, once he gets down in there, that the vic died from his injuries. Jake thinks he's all done here once the authorities have taken over and he's given his statement, but his next port of call - to a museum to investigate a newly-discovered and major historical artifact from the revolutionary war, brings him into conflict with a powerful and dangerous native American known as Alex Nero - a man who started out gun-running, but now has built a huge 'respectable' fortune from running an exclusive casino on a reservation.

Jake doesn’t want to get involved in his own tribal politics and ritual history, but the more he tries to avoid it, the more he gets pulled in, and soon he's running after clues and treasure, trying to stay one step ahead of the extremely aggressive Nero, whose thugs know no restraint and no limits.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I had some reservations (pun intended!) about yet another novel extolling native American tribal lore and spirits guides and what-not, for which I have no time, but this novel doesn't over do it. It treads carefully between a respectful view of the people, and avoiding completely dissing traditions, which I respected, so I was impressed and thrilled to finally find a novel which, although it wasn't perfect, handled the story and native American traditions without being sycophantic or maudlin.

The plot is believable and tight, and the action and adventure coming thick and fast. The book is written well for the most part, although the scenes involving Jake's growing lust for police investigator Rae were rather objectifying, but even as I started to get irritated over those, the story looped away from physical involvement and back into the action, so that was pretty much acceptable, too.

One problem with the ebook I read is that it was far too small to show the images and maps that are included in the text, so I got nothing out of those. How they would appear in a print book or on a larger format reader than my phone is an open question!

There are always some issues. In this case, for example, it made no sense that all the doors would be locked down in an abandoned army underground bunker, nor that they would contain any army materiel. The army has abandoned the base, the new owner literally just took over that same day. Why are they locked?!!!

At one point we read of a blood stain from the revolutionary war - but it certainly wouldn't be red, it would be brown! At a later point, it makes no sense that Rae wouldn't use the fact that her captors were reduced to crawling to get through a cave in pursuit of her, to disable one or more of them or to escape. When she 'accidentally' escapes, she fails to take out her opponents even when they're shooting at her and she has the advantage; then of course, it's Jake to the rescue, so it ends up making yet another woman seem like a damsel in distress who can only be helped by a guy. I didn't like that part.

For a historian, Jake has a lousy sense of how to handle historical sites and documents. He blunders in tampering with things, moving things, making no attempt whatsoever to preserve or document anything. I know he's not an archaeologist, but that's no reason for him to be an out-and-out disaster, especially given his credentials and background, so that seemed unrealistic to me.

Having said that, overall this novel was a really engrossing and entertaining story, so I consider this a worthy read.

Black Death in a New Age by Kathy Kale

Title: Black Death in a New Age
Author: Kathy T Kale
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: WORTHY!

I love this kind of story, especially when it's well written, as this one is, with great world-building and memorable, flawed characters. I really liked the main character, Dana Sparks. Great name, great character, strong and weak, smart and dumb, proactive and paralyzed, attractive and repulsive just like a real person. She was just the ticket to entertainment. I also love stories about disease outbreaks. I find them more horrifying than actual horror stories because even as you chill at horror stories you know they're ridiculous. Viral and bacterial pandemics are real. The last outbreak of pneumonic plague in the US was this year in Texas. This novel is set in Texas!

Dana Sparks is a plague expert who is desperately seeking a grant to research a new vaccine. She works for a university, but she doesn't have tenure. She was on track for it when her old boss left and a new military man was brought in. Since then, her life has been plagued. McCoy doesn’t like her, and it now looks like her tenure quest is questionable. Dana is her own worst enemy. She sees rules and regulations as optional, which only antagonizes McCoy who is of course (being a military man brought out of retirement to take over as head of the research facility), a stickler for regulation.

Her vaccine is ready for human trials which the army will shortly conduct, but there is some question as to what its side-effects might be. Losing patience, Dana once again goes off the reservation and tries it out on herself. She has no bad reaction to it, fortunately. Curiously, it’s right around this time that an outbreak of bubonic plague starts up in the very town where she lives and works. Her life is further complicated when she learns that Nick, her thesis adviser, and a married man with whom she had a highly inappropriate affair, is coming back to town for the first time in seven years to lend his expertise to combating the outbreak.

As she, Nick, and a guy from the CDC who has the hots for Dana, try to pin down how it began so they can figure out how to fight it, and they conduct one investigation after another into people and wildlife, they slowly begin to realize that this is not your typical outbreak. They can find neither patient zero nor ground zero, and as the victims start to mount, and the plague goes from the relatively quiescent bubonic form to the virulent, much more deadly, and highly transmissible pneumonic form; then Nick gets the septicemic form - the deadliest of all.

When Dana's lab assistant's young daughter contracts the disease, Dana - at the passionate demand of the girl's mother - administers the vaccine to her and to her mom, and also to a high school jock who has it. They all recover. McCoy, whose heart isn't anywhere near as strong as his will, fights against requests that they publicize this outbreak. He fears panic and also the cancellation of the vice-president's planned visit to town. As things continue to slide south, even he finally realizes that a public announcement is necessary. On the morning of the announcement, he learns of Dana's renegade delivery of the vaccine to certain victims, and the stress is too much. He keels over with a heart attack and is hurried to the hospital.

The idiotic mayor makes the announcement, but he claims the disease is a virulent form of flu - and then tells everyone that prophylactic antibiotics are available. It’s plain to anyone who who has a modicum of medical knowledge that there's a huge disconnect here: influenza is a viral disease, whereas the bubonic plague is a bacterial disease. Antibiotics are useless against viruses!

It’s at this point that we (but not Dana) learn that there is an FBI agent in town - and he believes that the plague was started by Dana herself, to promote her vaccine and to win for her this research grant and her tenure!

I loved this novel. It was action-packed, fast moving, and intelligently written by someone who knows what she's talking about, but who doesn't make the Tom Clancy-ish mistake of permitting reams of technical detail to trip up a good story. I made the wrong choice as to who was behind this plague outbreak! In my defense, I'm usually slow at this anyway, and there's a distracting red herring swimming around, too.

I really think this novel could have used a much better title, but that's really the only fault I found with it. It's really well-written, it’s engrossing, it moves quickly, it made me want to keep reading, it has a great female main character. You can't ask for more in a book!

Model Undercover: New York by Carina Axelsson

Title: Model Undercover: New York
Author: Carina Axelsson
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Rating: WORTHY!

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

I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of fashion stories or modeling stories because I detest the fashion and modeling world. Never has there been - not even including Hollywood and TV, a more self-centered, self-obsessed, pretentious and shallow enterprise as these. I despise those who spend thousands upon clothes and accessories when there are sick and starving children throughout the world, but fiction is not the same as the real world, and once in a while I've found a story that's interesting, and which doesn't take itself too seriously. It's those rare few which keep me cautiously coming back looking for another one! This novel turned out to be such a one.

The premise here is that Axelle, a sixteen-year-old girl, is both a model and a "sleuth" - but primarily (so she keeps limply protesting) the latter. Why anyone thinks grown-ups will respond positively - or even politely - to a relentlessly inquisitive sixteen-year-old goes completely unexplained, but let's let that slide right on by: this is fiction, after all!

Having solved a puzzle in Paris (presumably in an earlier volume which I have not read), Axelle now believes she's a brilliant detective and can solve anything, which is why she's just arrived in New York City. An extremely valuable black diamond has been stolen during a modeling shoot, and she's supposed to discover who took it. Carbonado diamonds are rare, and are thought to be formed - unlike other diamonds - in stellar explosions, so they are really intriguing - to me at least.

In amongst slurs aimed at London (referenced constantly in a rather snobbish way, but paradoxically run-down in comparisons with NYC) and at vegan cuisine, we discover that Carbonado (black) diamonds (which do actually exist)are supposedly almost impossible to cut without incurring serious damage. They are harder than other diamonds, but this doesn't necessarily mean they will shatter if you cut them. Since this particular one - the Black Amelia (named after one of its owners, who was Amelia - not black!) - is so very distinctive, the thief is going to have a hard time getting rid of it, so perhaps the theft wasn't because of the value per se of the diamond, but because the thief had a grudge against the owner, or was intent upon blackmail.

There were no security guards at the shoot (idiots!) because the owner is a friend of the editor of the fashion magazine, and the editor is evidently too stupid to hire her own security. The shoot was closed and limited to only a handful of people, all of whom were really successful in their fields, so the motive looks a lot less like petty theft, as it were, and a lot more like revenge or blackmail. Cassandra, aka Cazzie, the British editor of Chic fashion magazine, idiotically fails to notify the police (they don't want bad publicity!) and she's the only one who knows that Axelle is here primarily as a detective, not as a model.

So the author seems to have everything locked-up to explain these oddball circumstances, but there's one problem: Cassandra, aka Cazzie, is receiving texts from someone who appears to have the diamond. So why all the cogitating on Axelle's part about motive? Clearly this is the motive - to taunt and embarrass Cazzie for some reason. What makes less sense right here is that they now have someone the police could conceivably track down yet not once do they consider bringing them in. This made no sense to me. It's also weird that the texts don't start rolling in until Axelle is on the scene, isn't it?

The text-taunter tells Cazzie that there will be three riddles which she must solve or she won't see the diamond again. Interestingly, Cazzie is able to respond this time - she wasn't before - and the taunter tells her that she's pissed him/her off, so the first riddle will be delayed. The taunter never used the word 'diamond' to begin with, instead talking about 'treasure', so I began to suspect that it was entirely possible that this was unconnected with the theft of the diamond. That would have been a nice red-herring, but no - the text-taunter uses it later - after Cazzie has used it. It was at that point that I wondered: is Cazzie doing this all by herself?

Axelle gets an email which she thinks is from the same source as the texting - this warns her to butt out. I suspected that this came from Sebastian, an insufferably over-protective out-of-favor boyfriend of Axelle's, but that was just a wild guess, and it was wrong. Sebastian is a jerk and I didn't like him, even given that Axelle is flying-off-the-handle over him. The fact that she's cluelessly wrong about him is another irony. The detective - clueless?!

I have to say I find all foreign characters annoying when they're depicted as speaking perfect English yet nonetheless are reduced to interspersing it with words or phrases from their native tongue. Thus we get Miriam the maid peppering her dialog with French, which is not only pretentious, it was really annoying. If you can't depict a foreign character without being forced to make them spew a brew of Franglish or whatever language combo, then make your character English. Otherwise find a way to depict their foreign nature by doing work on the character-building instead of taking the lazy way out. Please? Just a thought.

The weird thing is that while Axelle wisely tries to get Cazzie to stir-up the text-taunter in an effort to have him/her to give themselves away, when this is going on, Axelle fails completely to station herself next to one of the suspects to see if they're texting when the taunter responds. That's just plainly stupid. If she thinks it's one of a small group, then all she has to do is be close to each one in turn during one of these exchanges. In this manner, she could at least eliminate some - those who were not texting - even if she can't necessarily zero in on the actual perp right away. This doesn't speak strongly to her smarts, but then Axelle is only sixteen and not the most worldly of people despite all her claims to being widely traveled.

Without wanting to give anything away, I chose two people as the prime suspects quite early on in this story, and one of them soon seemed unlikely. The other one, it turned out, actually was the thief! If I can get it right when I'm typically lousy at that kind of thing, I suspect the villain was way too obvious!

Aside from that, the writing in general was not bad. There were one or two exceptions, such as where I read, "...the studio was shaped like an L. A curtain..." which was misleading, because it initially read - to me - like "LA curtain - as in Los Angeles curtain! It took me a second to realize what it actually was. It would have been nice had the author put the 'L' in single quotes, like I did just then, to clarify this.

The novel moved at a decent pace and was - refreshingly - very light on fashion and make-up, which I really appreciated! It was also pretty decently plotted (in general) with a nice twist here and there. It had rather shallow, but otherwise reasonably realistic characters, so despite some early misgivings about this I was, by the end, convinced that it was a worthy read. I can't pretend that I'm waiting breathlessly for a sequel, but you might be after you've read this one!

Tibetan Cross by Mike Bond

Title: Tibetan Cross (could not find it listed on B&N or Amazon!)
Author: Mike Bond
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Rating: WARTY!

I could not get into this at all. I felt nothing drawing me in and felt no interest in or warmth towards the characters. The story is a mess. I had no idea where it was going.

The blurb felt a bit off to me, but it made it sound interesting enough, yet when I began to actually read this, the writing wasn't engaging at all, and it took far too long to bring in the female interest. By the time she showed up I had lost interest to such an extent that she wasn't enough to regain it for me.

It begins with some guys crossing a raging river in Tibet? Nepal? I don't know. One of them nearly falls in but he doesn't. Then they continue the journey, teaming-up with some locals carrying either salt or assault rifles, and it turns out it's actually a nuclear bomb trigger, and they fall into the river, and suddenly the other guys want to kill them, but they escape. In order to evade pursuit they have to split up, then this one guy is chased by a leopard, and at this point I was rooting for the leopard. At least she had motivation and was interesting.

Here's the problem - these guys are transporting arms, why would they want some hippie climbers coming along with them? It made no sense whatsoever that they would ask other people, outsiders, to travel with them. I think this farcical set-up was one of the main reasons why this novel lost credibility for me, and it never regained it.

Later there's shooting outside an embassy and more endless running, and I'm so bored by this time that even a shoot-out didn't engage my interest. It's around this same time that I find I'm skimming sentences, then paragraphs, then pages trying to find something which could hold my interest.

The formatting for the Kindle was pathetic and this didn't help endear me to the novel. When I was half-way through, the Kindle said I had three minutes left to read in the book, which is patent nonsense, although I admit that skimming screens probably screwed it up, but even when I slowed down and began reading properly again, it didn't change the timer. Weird. Yeah, I know this is an ARC, but this isn't an age where metal type has to be set by hand in a tray. In a world of electronic writing, and templates, and automated formatting, there really is no excuse whatsoever for sub-standard ARCs.

Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, I gave up on it. It was too disorganized, poorly plotted, limply depicted, and offering no reason to get interested in the story or the characters. It wasn't even trying to lure me in. I couldn't care are about any of these people because I was never given reason to. They just didn't engage me. It seemed like it was far more a surfeit of set action pieces flimsily linked with a really vague attempt at a narrative rather than an actual and complete story.

It reminded me of exchange Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson had during one academy awards show, when Stiller was giving grief to Wilson about his (then recent)movie Behind Enemy Lines where the entire movie is about Wilson running and being shot at to no purpose or end, and that was this novel - highly improbable, impossible to appreciate, endless running and unlikely garnering or one injury after another, none of which slowed down the runner. Why would anyone be interested in reading this same thing over and over again with nothing else happening and no reason offered to care about who it happened to? I wasn't.

The Face Transplant by R Arundel

Title: The Face Transplant
Author: R Arundel
Publisher: Publisher unspecified
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 novel is reward aplenty!

I had the hardest time ever getting into this. From the first paragraph on page one, it made no sense. Indeed, it really began with the title which indicates one special event, but in this novel, face transplantation was pretty much production-line. Inside, I found the text to be extraordinarily dense and uninformative, which was paradoxical because there was virtually no conversation, only huge amounts of info-dump. Despite this, and after many pages, I hadn't the first clue what was going on here or what this novel was actually about.

Yeah, it was about face transplants being performed under guard, about identities and conspiracies. It was about a face being stolen in a canister, but apart from this loss of face, what was happening here? I have no idea. Whose face was it? I had no idea. Was it the president's face? A celebrity's? An important politician's or a leader of industry or a criminal's? I had no idea.

Why were face transplants being routinely performed? I had no idea. I kept trying to focus on what the text was saying, but it kept blowing me off, and while I'm sure I missed something in that thicket of prose, I have no idea what it was, and I really don't care.

Why was it so critical that this particular face was missing? I had no idea, and worse? I didn't care about that either. I didn't care about any of the characters or about what was going on, and I had no interest in reading on through this dense undergrowth of wild text to find out. I just wasn't interested in these confused and confusing, running, frantic people or in their problems.

This was bad, bad writing if it can't command my attention even for a few chapters. There was one paragraph which went on unbroken for the span of four screens on my Kindle, and I have no idea what it was supposed to be telling me! Take a look at the blurb, which is of the same nature - one long uninterrupted paragraph.

I gave up on the novel after about ten percent because this was all work, with no reward. If I want to work this hard for my entertainment, I'll play a sport. You should not have to work-up a sweat to be pleased by a novel - not a good one anyway - and life is too short to waste on a story which refuses to give you a thing, or which only begrudgingly gives, in return for your willingness to try reading it.

In some ways, this novel borrows heavily from the movie Face Off, and it makes the same mistakes that movie made: it's a lot harder to combat rejection and graft versus host disease than the stories pretend, and it's not just the face. It's arguably much more the bone structure underlying the face which gives the face its appearance than ever it is the face alone. You can't just slap person A's face onto person B and have B look and act exactly like A did, and have the face look normal and work perfectly from the off! Nor would having a robot helping you do the work have any effect on the biology and micro-chemistry of the transplant.

So why did I pick this up? Well, I liked the movie Face Off which obviously inspired this novel, and I actually knew a health-care-giver named Sarah Larssonn (the one I knew was a different spelling, and she wasn't an anesthesiologist; she was a nurse who married one!), so I was interested despite the density of the blurb. I didn't realize that the novel would be written exactly like the blurb, or that it would give so little in return for my reading it. I can't recommend this one.

Update one year later!

This is a weird one. I first got this as an advance review copy from Net Galley, and reviewed it negatively back in May 2015. Then I completely forgot all about it. It was worked on some more by the author and I picked it up for free on Amazon, not realizing I had already read this! Net Galley says it's been completely re-written and if we liked the earlier version, we will love this. I'm sorry but that "logic" simply doesn't work! I did read it, coming into it like it was a new novel (since I'd forgotten it), and I had just as many problems this time as last time. It's still not a worthy read!

One of my initial problems was the info dump, which has gone, but now the novel is completely stripped bare of virtually all description - it's largely a series of conversations, often long enough that you lose track of who is saying what. Moreover, the plot isn't any better. This business of face transplanting (for the purpose of having people become unrecognizable spies) still makes zero sense. Unless they have a DNA transplant, they're still the same person, will still need the same anti-rejection meds, and a simple sampling of facial and body DNA will reveal the ruse.

On top of this there were numerous formatting issues in the Kindle app version of this novel on my phone. Lines ended midway across the screen and continued on the next line - or the next line but one. Speech from different characters was mixed on the same line as is evident in these examples cut and pasted directly from the Kindle app version:

Matthew looks at Liam's smooth narrow face. "You have my vote.""You don't have a vote. You're not on university council.""Well, you know what I mean."

"ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. I just can't believe it. Look at you. Beautiful, strong . . . I can't believe it." Sarah, "I don't look like a person with a progressive neuro-muscular disease.""Exactly.""I don't feel like one either, not at this point." Liam finally speaks.

"Dr. Tom Grabowski, one of the best research surgeons of his era, has died of a heart attack.""Where?"

The voice is that of a young woman. It is calm, confident, and reassuring. Without skipping a beat, Matthew says, "Hi, what should I call you?""I am Alice.""Hi, Alice." Kofi says, "I did all the computer programming. Alice has some facial recognition and voice commands."

The medical knowledge is still poor and too deus ex machina to be believable. At one point, when a legitimate partial face transplant patient has tissue dying because of poor circulation, the doctor says, "I'm not sure it will survive. I'll start antibiotics." If the tissue is all but dead from poor circulation, what's the point of antibiotics which are way over-used anyway? There has been no suggestion that there's an infection, just that the tissue is dying! Antibiotics are not going to help, and are contra-indicated if there is no evidence that infection is playing a part. If the dying tissue is to be excised, then perhaps we can allow that the doctor started prophylactic antibiotics in prep for surgery, but this isn't what's implied in the context of this statement.

The novel is written in the present third person tense which makes it sound weird to me, but that's okay. The problem was that the author sometimes forgot, and used past tense, such as around 10% in, where there was a bit of a flashback, but when we come back to the present, the past tense was still briefly employed.

One last problem is a pet peeve of mine - that every female character is described as beautiful (or as some variant of that word). We get, "Celerie is stunning." (yes, there's a character named Celerie). Another example is, " She is thirty-four, but doesn't look a day over thirty". I found this kind of thing uncomfortably often. It's a form of objectification - as though a women who isn't explicitly beautiful is an ugly hag and not worth our time. I resent that approach and I see it disturbingly often from writers - even from female writers. It needs to stop.

Unless the character's beauty (and indeed physical appearance in general) plays an important part in the story, it's really irrelevant what he or she looks like. Naturally writers put in a description for the benefit of readers, but if you think about it, it's really not necessary. Readers can and ought to be allowed to make up their own mind about how a given character looks. A smart writer will put in a hint or two and leave the rest to the reader. Anything more is a form of telling rather than showing, and I'm surprised that more reviewers don't pick up on it. There's nothing wrong with offering some sort of a description if you feel you must, but I think it's better to be vague. At least, let's agree to cut it out with the 'stunning' and 'beautiful' crap.

In short, I still don't consider this novel to be a worthy read.

The Trials of Nikki Hill by Christopher Darden and Dick Lochte

Title: The Trials of Nikki Hill
Author: Christopher Darden (and Dick Lochte)
Publisher: Hachette
Rating: WARTY!

Dick Lochte? Seriously? That sounds like a medical condition. I get that you don't get to chose the name you're given when you're born, but you do get to choose the name that goes on your novels. He didn't like Richard Lochte? Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he thinks it's funny, but the problem with chanting "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" is that there have to be torpedoes in the first place....

So why do I get to make fun of a writer's name? Well, I get to do that because of the writing in this novel. At one point, at the start of chapter 30 on page 149, we learn that a character looks like Rock Hudson "in his healthier days". Now there are two ways of using that description. One was to go the AIDS reference route, the other was to simply say "looked like a younger Rock Hudson" - or even omit the reference altogether. It wasn't necessary to make an arguably derogatory reference, yet the writer chose purposefully to go that route. That's my justification.

Clearly this guy, who has published several crime thrillers of his own, was hired to "punch up" Darden's writing since he's less of a novelist than he is the prosecuting counsel in the disastrous OJ Simpson murder trial. I read his In Contempt about that trial. I reviewed (unfavorably) Guilt by Degrees by his co-counsel, Marcia Clarke (whose Without a Doubt - about that same trial, I also read), so I figured it's only fair if I give him the same chance.

I have to say I wasn't favorably impressed by the first two pages (numbered 5 & 6, not 1 & 2 for some reason. I guess that numbering scheme is because there was a prologue, which I skipped as I usually do. If the writer thinks it's not worth putting in chapter one or later, I don't think it's worth reading.

So what didn't impress me? The rampant racism shown by the main character on the first two pages. She uses the term 'white-bread' on the first page and describes a murder victim as "whiter than rice" on the next page. There was absolutely no need to go there for either of these comments. She didn't know at that point that this was a murder victim, but this doesn't excuse unrestrained racism on two consecutive pages.

The black and white references are rampant in this novel, even when it's clearly quite unnecessary to reference what race the character is. I started to wonder if there was some abolitionist throw-back going on here, since when the character was identified as black or "Afro-American" or whatever, it always seemed to be a character who was employed in a subservient role - a security guard for example - someone who serves someone else. It made no difference what color the person was, so why specifically reference it?

Yes I get that there are real racists in society and that therefore it's fine to represent them in your novels if your plot or even verisimilitude requires it, but that's an entirely different thing than having your main character routinely espouse racist phrases. If a white writer had written these same kinds of derogatory phrases about a black person, they would have been called on it and rightly so. So why isn't anyone calling Darden on it? Or Lochte, whichever of the two of them came up with this?

There was also genderism here, and this was by the author, not the characters. The authors reference all female characters by their first name, all male characters by their last - like an abusive private school. Why? I have no idea, but genderism, like racism, cuts both ways. Just like it's not only whites who can be racist, it's also not only men who can be genderist, and it's not always in obvious ways that genderism rears its ugly head as we see here.

The way to fix a problem - like racism, and like male chauvinism - which has been characterized by the pendulum of justice swinging way-the-hell too far in one direction - isn't to force it to swing an equal amount in the opposite direction, it's to nail it dead in the middle and never let it move again.

I suspect this is more a Lochte novel with input from Darden than it is a Darden novel with guidance from Lochte, but that's just a guess. Since I've never read a Lochte novel I have no comparison to make - it's just a feeling I get from the way this is worded - and wordy it is. You could skip the first four chapters and not miss anything, and this same text-stuffing was rife throughout this novel (at least as far as I could stand to read it.

I wanted to read this because of the police investigation, to follow how the crime was solved, not because I wanted a detailed report of the main character's social life. I took to skipping chapters where the 'action' had nothing to do with the case - and that was a lot of chapters. This begs the question, of course, as to how to rate the writing where you deem only certain examples of it readable, and find yourself constantly irritated by the endless digressions. Is it worthy because of the crime story, or is it warty because of the mindless and pointlessly trivial babble?

Chapter one is pretty much all about how the main character, Nikki Hill (Nikki Heat rip-off, much?) getting out of bed, and the life history of her dog (I kid you not). Barf. Chapter two I had to go back and look at because I'd forgotten it by the time I reached chapter eight already. It's Hill's bad history over a case where evidence was mishandled. Objection: irrelevant, your honor. Chapters three and four are a pointless look at the limp interrogation of the guy who is the prime suspect - so we know for a fact that he didn't do it. It contributes nothing to the novel. Five and six are a look at the crime scene, so you may as well start there. You'll miss nothing.

This is your typical celebrity murder with lowlife suspect who's innocent story. TV personality Maddie Gray is found murdered and dumped in a dumpster. Jamal Deschamps is found close by with her ring in his pocket - yet later we're expected to believe she wore no jewelry! Naturally he's arrested despite the fact that other than his theft and failure to report a dead body, there's no evidence he committed any such thing as murder.

This marks the first failure of the enjoyable part of this novel - the murder investigation. We, the readers, know that Jamal is innocent, but the detectives are supposedly convinced that he's the perp, yet despite the fact that they're running out of time for holding him without charging him, they never once charge him with theft (of that ring) or of interfering with a crime scene, or failure to report the murder. They could have easily nailed him on something and held him longer, but they never even consider it. Bad writing. They also end up opening themselves up to a lawsuit for wrongful arrest because of this. These people are morons.

Given that a prosecutor was at least involved in writing this, I expected that procedures would be spot on, but there are failures all along, and this is what tipped the balance for me. For example, at one point we learn that the murder victim's computer is still in her house - the police never seized it, which means an assistant to the victim can get on it and do whatever he wants. Bad writing.

In another instance, they get a report of a car seen in the vicinity of the murder at about the time of the murder, and the first thing they think of in trying to track it down is to contact car dealerships in the area? What they don't have a department of motor vehicles in LA?! Bad writing.

There's also a curious piece of writing when discussing Jewelry. Gold is referred to by karat with a 'K' whereas diamonds are referred to using carat with a 'C'. The fact is that while the term has a different meaning when used for gold than it does when used for gems, the spelling isn't fixed in stone, precious or otherwise. To suggest that the 'K' form can only be used for gold and the 'C' form for gem stones is nonsensical.

But the bottom line is the characters. While I found the crime story engaging to a certain extent (when it wasn't being interrupted with commercials for Nikki's private life), I found I had no interest whatsoever in any of the characters, least of all the main one. I found her to be a prosecutor who was completely without appeal, and I really didn't care whodunit. In the end, that was my objection, and coincidentally the only motive I needed to kill-off this novel.

The Tenth Chamber by Glenn Cooper

Title: The Tenth Chamber
Author: Glenn Cooper
Publisher: Lascaux media (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

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

This was yet another novel with a prologue which I skipped as usual. If it's worth reading, it's worth putting in the first chapter! If it's not in the first chapter or beyond, I'm not going to waste my time reading it. The novel begins with a fire in an abbey in France during which a firefighter discovers a codex (ancient book) hidden in a wall space. The front page inside the cover claims that its writer is Barthomieu, who is 220 years old at the time of writing. Why the writer would mention this is a mystery. He's supposed to be a humble monk. The codex is lavishly illustrated, as they say, but the drawings appear to mimic those found in cave art from the paleolithic, rather than representative of the age in which they were drawn in the codex.

Frankly this novel didn't stir my interest until chapter four wherein we began learning about this mysterious codex. At that point I felt I could quite happily have skipped the first three chapters without missing anything since they really told me nothing. The codex contains a map which a book restorer, Hugo, and an archaeologist acquaintance (and amateur playboy), Luc, follow. It takes them along a cliff face, to the discovery of the very cave to which the map was intended to lead. Inside, the cave is adorned with scores of images in a vein similar to those found in the prehistoric caves at Altamira and Lascaux.

But it appears that someone else is interested - someone who has far fewer scruples than do Hugo and Luc, and the body count begins to mount. As the cave is opened to scientific investigation, people start turning up dead, and two locals, who creep their way into the cave team's camp are to me, highly suspicious, although, of course, no one suspects them. This was the first problem, It was obvious these people were bad guys. No mystery at all here. The only mystery which remained was why was there such an interest in the cave? That turned out to be so mundane that it was frankly laughable.

I have to say that about 40% in, I was having serious doubts about wanting to continue reading this. Although the novel is technically well-written, there was a heck of a lot of extraneous detail (for me anyway). I wanted to get on with the exploration of the cavern, and the deciphering of the codex (which was written in code rather like the Voynich codex).

I certainly didn't want to be dallying and dithering, and especially not with an old love interest of Luc's, which bored the pants off me. He was not an appealing person, so there was nothing to attract me to him as a main protagonist. His love interest wasn't of interest at all - not to me, and it was so obvious where this was going that there was no mystery there either.

Unless she turned out to be the villain, she had nothing to recommend her other than that she was Luc's ex, which is frankly a lousy excuse for her to be in this novel. Oh, she did have one other trait: she was a damsel in distress which turned me right off pursuing this story any further.

Luc's behavior towards her bordered on stalking and assumed ownership of her, which also turned me off this story, and made me wish he was the one being pushed over a cliff. When he 'turned around' and started posing as the hero of the story, solving the mystery and rescuing the 'fair maiden', I was not the least bit interested.

The title of the novel is misleading. It implies that there's something magical or evil about the tenth chamber in the cavern, and there really isn't. It did relate to something important to the story, but that was completely insufficient to justify its dramatic use as a title.

The more I read, the more I found myself skipping a paragraph here and there (mostly there) to begin with, then I skipped with increasing frequency. There were alternating chapters which went back to the time the codex was written, and other chapters which went back to the time the cave paintings were made, and after reading one of each of these, I found them so boring that I avoided all the others.

Obviously, it's no leap from that to asking myself why I was reading this at all, and that's when I quit. I didn't care about the ending or any of the characters. The proposition that "villains" who had supposedly been at their game for centuries hiding in the shadows, never exposing themselves, had suddenly become so blindly stupid that they exposed everything within a few dumb days by killing as many people as they could for no reason whatsoever was risible. Some people may find entertainment here in counting the number of clichés and tropes in this story, but for me, I lost all interest in it. I cannot recommend this.

The Immortal Crown by Richelle Mead

Title: The Immortal Crown
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: worthy

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

Errata
p31 "…dropping and rolling to the ground…" should be "…dropping, and rolling on the ground…"

p98 Mead uses the word 'frequented' when she really appears to mean 'visited'.
p101 "Mae shook her head wonderingly"? Better: "Mae shook her head in wonder"
p193 "When he'd stopping their escalations before..." should be "When he'd stopped their escalation before..."

This is book 2 in Richelle Mead's Age of X series. I reviewed book one, Gameboard of the Gods a while ago, and despite finding well over a dozen errors in the advance review copy, I really enjoyed it, so I've been looking forward to reading the next installment.

I have to say that while I definitely don't think anyone will ever laud Richelle Mead of being a great literary writer (she could use a crash course in the difference between 'less' and 'fewer' for example), she does a pretty decent job in general; however, there are some fingernails-on-chalkboard moments in her writing, where she employs bastard 'words' such as, for example: 'politician-y' and 'orangey-red'. Any writer can do better than that. Note that these things appear not in a character's speech, which would have been perfectly fine because people do speak like that, but in her own narrative, which is a bit too much, since she's not telling this in first person as though she's a character herself.

This novel continues the story of Mae Koskinen, a soldier in the so-called 'Praetorian' guard - some sort of super-soldier outfit in Canada/the USA (known as the RUNA - the Republic of United North America). Mae is Finnish by descent, and a genetically healthy woman in a world where a plague has struck down much of humanity and disfigured many of the survivors. Mae is assigned as bodyguard to Justin March, a religious investigator for the RUNA government. The RUNA doesn't like religion, because in this world, there really are gods vying for a following amongst the humans, and in this volume, they appear to be gearing up for a war.

After receiving a vision via a special knife which was an anonymous gift which Mae received, she comes to believe that her niece, an eight-year-old who was lost to her family and whom Mae has long sought, is being held in Arcadia, a nation not known for it's generosity of spirit towards the female half of the population. Coincidentally, Mae has the chance to go there on official business.

This story, I should forewarn you, is over 400 pages long and it moves with a proportionately sluggish pace, which I found annoying. In addition to a decidedly more lively narrative, something else I would like to see in this series is the termination of this non-existent relationship between Mae and Justin. Not only does it not exist, it doesn't work. There's no basis for it and it's neither appealing nor realistic, so at the risk of giving away spoilers, I was rather thrilled with the ending of this volume, although I am sure it's not any kind of an ending in the long run. Going there, would take a writer with some real guts!

Perhaps I should explain. Volume one featured a quickie between these two characters before Mae knew that he was the guy she was supposed to be body-guarding (he knew who she was, but he never let on). Justin, who is being sought as a devotee by the god Odin, had a revelation that if he started getting it on with Mae, he would simultaneously be selling-out to Odin, and becoming the god's priest (read: pawn). He doesn't want that, so he rejected Mae in a rather callous way. She does not know his motivation, and simply accepts that he's that kind of a guy, but unrealistically, this does not prevent her from obsessing over him unhealthily. This causes me to seriously question Mae's smarts!

So, end of story, right? Naw! For reasons beyond human understanding (which is sadly all I'm equipped with), the two are still attracted to one another. I can see why he would be still hot for Mae - he's a lech and a womanizer and she's attractive (not that that's a requirement given the premises), but there's no reason why she should be, especially not after his behavior towards her. The problem with this relationship is not only that it doesn't exist in any romantic sense, it's that even in a romantic sense, it's non-existent.

It didn't work in volume one, but there was enough going on to render that a minor matter. Now that the pace is reduced to a limp in volume two, the interaction between the two really stands out as a pairing which needs paring. There is no chemistry; there's no tension, sexual or otherwise, and there's no reason at all why the two should be so focused upon one another in any way other than purely professional.

The first mistake Mead makes I think, in this novel (other than including the first hundred pages, that is) is after there's a attack on Tessa, Justin's young, female ward. Because of the assault, which was actually aimed (so we're told) at Justin, Mae and some of her friends at the Praetorian volunteer to watch the house. Mae also hires a dedicated, retired soldier named Rufus as a more permanent guard, and here's where the problem lies.

We're given to understand that both Justin and Mae are really shaken-up by what happened to Tessa, yet Mae hires this guy, a stranger, at his first interview, and with zero background checks! This is a guy whom she quite literally just met. That struck me as gullible at best, and stupid at worst, neither of which traits Mae has exhibited before. Just saying! It felt like bad writing to me, and I never trusted Rufus.

It was only when we got past page 100 (that is, some 25% the way in) that the story got to where I felt I could become honestly interested in it. That first 100 pages could be completely skipped and the story would not suffer for it. Also, the sections in which Tessa appears could be skipped. I liked her in the first novel. She contributes nothing in this one. If this had been a first time novel by a newbie, any competent editor would have advocated this, but once you're established, it seems that no one dare say boo to you. Go figure!

In chapter nine, they've finally arrived in Arcadia (read Alabama) and their military escort is deprived of its weaponry, yet not a single one of them raises any sort of protest. This struck me as being really dumb and unrealistic. Why did they even take their weapons with them if they were going to be robbed of them anyway? It made no sense. To me, this was poorly written. Think about it in a modern context. If the President was going to Iran, and the Iranians wanted the Secret Service guards to be robbed of their weapons, would this be acceptable? No! Then why is it here?

Worse than this was the the way the females in the party were treated. They were forced to be silent, to cover up, and to undertake menial household chores! Seriously? Could you see that happening in the real USA? No one would stand for it, least of all the women. This was entirely unrealistic and it really degraded the quality of the novel for me. Fortunately, it was right after this that things improved dramatically and turned it around for me, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to rate this novel favorably, which would have saddened me, being a fan of Mead's (at least of her Vampire Academy series!).

Mead also missed a great opportunity with Mae's magic knife. It's discovered in her possession, but instead of having her say that it's a religious artifact and daring this highly religious nation to confiscate it as such, Justin steps in and says it's his, and he's allowed to keep it. I found that completely irrational given that they'd just confiscated weapons from the military for goodness sakes! It made no sense and could have been written much better. I've seen several reviews on this novel which compliment Mead for her writing, but I don't see it as anything special. Her writing isn't outright bad per se, and she delivers on so great ideas, but there are some serious flaws in it as I've pointed out in the errata and throughout this review.

The reason I mentioned Iran above is that some reviewers also commented on the Islamophobic aspect of this depiction of the Arcadian nation - that Arcadia is nothing more than a surrogate for a slam at Islam, but while Islam does merit being pilloried for its appalling devaluation and marginalization of women, such reviewers appear to be blind to the problems of religion in general. It's not only the Muslim religion which is abusive of women: each of big three monotheistic religions, all of which share the same root - Judaism - are misogynistic and the root cause of that lies in the story of Adam and Eve.

People dishonestly pretend that Christianity is not as bad, but it is, and some sects of Christianity such as Mormonism and the bizarre Amish-style cults are worse. The more orthodox Judaist sects also repress women. Religion in general is very bad for women, so this isn't what those reviewers think it is; it's much broader than that narrow view and I appreciated Mead's tackling of this important topic.

Having said that, I also have to register some disappointment with Mead's own writing about women. It seems that all she can talk about as the women are introduced to Arcadia is how "beautiful" or ugly they are. She tries to hide this by depicting it as Justin's thoughts, but this actually makes it worse because from her PoV of developing him as a character, it makes Justin nothing but a shallow jerk, and yet we're somehow expected to root for him as Mae's beau? I don't think so! I for one am not on-board with him!

It's like even Mead thinks that women have no (or at best, limited) value unless they're beautiful, the hell with how their minds are, the hell with whether they're strong, emotionally stable, good providers, hard workers, reliable, have integrity, and so on. There are scores of criteria by which to appreciate them, yet Mead's sole criterion for which women are to be valued is skin deep, and that's it. I find it hard to believe that Mead writes like this, but let's face it, she does foreshadow this in her Vampire Academy series which is the only other series of hers that I've read, and which I actually - for the most part - like. Let me just say that I am very disappointed in her at this point in reading around page 114...!

Those problems aside, the interest for me definitely ramped-up as Mae was turned loose (figuratively speaking, that is - she was in fact extremely restricted) amongst the Arcadians. She didn't, unfortunately, "go all kamikaze on their asses" as one reviewer amusingly had hoped, but she did cut loose at one point and I appreciated that.

You can see that here, she proved herself to be strong, independent, aggressive when necessary, effective, capable, and resourceful, yet never is she appreciated for any of that - only for how beautiful she is. It's sad. Hopefully, from the way this novel ended, we'll see much more of that side of her and much less of the limp, uninteresting and let's face it for all intents and purposes other than as a love interest for Mae, completely pointless Justin in volume three.

Prior to this point, I had seriously been wondering if I wanted to finish this novel, let alone go on to read another in this series, but from that point onwards, it really turned around and became very readable. If Mead had started this novel chapter nine, and had excluded all the chapters where Tessa was involved, and excluded the pointless scenes of flirtation between Mae and Justin, this novel would have been perfect. As it was, it seemed to take forever to get through this, which isn't a good sign! However, it was worth reading in my opinion, but it's certainly not my favorite novel of Mead's.

Whiteout by Greg Rucka

Title: Whiteout
Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Oni Press
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated and lettered by Steve Lieber"

This is the second of three reviews of work by Greg Rucka. Whiteout is written by Rucka who has an article on strong female characters. Whiteout is also yet another really uninspired title as B&N's website shows - there is a over dozen stories with this title on their first page of results alone.

This is volume one of a graphic novel series. It was also made into a sorry excuse for a movie of the same name in 2009 starring Kate Beckinsale. Other than its title and the name of the lead character, the movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the graphic novel. That they even pretend it does by using the same title and main character's name is, in my opinion, nothing but a huge fraud. The novel is actually better than the movie, which is poor and is why I don't carry it in my movie review section, but that really doesn't say a whole heck of a lot about the novel.

The graphic novel is executed as really cheesy line-drawings, which were not that well done. It's like reading a comic strip in a newspaper - except one that's 164 pages long. I had a real problem in that the villain and one of the good guys looked the same to me. I was over 60% of the way into this before I realized that the two were different people - and they were not even of the same gender!

The action takes place in Antarctica, where a US marshal, exiled for some issue with her superior, is trying to track down a murderer. The story is readable; I didn't have any problem following it or finishing it, but it just wasn't any good.

Greg Rucka is a guy who has somehow become known for writing strong female characters, but I've now read two of his stories and I don't see anything special about either of them. In this novel, the main character is Carrie Stetko, the US marshal, who is later assisted by a female British agent (who doesn't even appear in the movie!). There seems to be a strong undercurrent of lesbian attraction going on between these two, which never goes anywhere. Maybe volume 2 pursues that, but I have no interest in reading another volume of this to find out.

Carrie isn't a bad character per se, but she's nothing special, memorable, endearing, or engaging. On a couple of occasions she's shown to be "tough" as exemplified by her being able to throw guys around, but that's not what people mean when they talk about strong female characters! Yes, it can include that, but there's much more to it than that. Other than that cheap-ass attempt at making her "strong", there was nothing about Carrie to recommend her. She wasn't particularly smart or inventive in her investigation, and she wasn't a brilliant cop by any means. The action scenes were pretty tired and lacking in interest.

There are some things which Rucka gets completely wrong. For example, he writes "Pome" when he means "Pommie" (an antiquated term to describe someone from Britain). There's an incident near the end when one of the good guys is being threatened with a gun, but the gun fails to fire because it's so cold that it froze the trigger, which in turn shattered rather than triggering anything. That struck me as too dumb for words. I mean, if it was cold enough to render steel that brittle, then it's sure as hell far too cold for people to be outside without full face protection (or even at all for that matter) as they were depicted here!

In short, I cannot recommend this novel, unless your taste in novels runs to the insipid, tame, pedestrian, and uninspired.

Alpha by Greg Rucka

Title: Alpha
Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!

Alpha is written by Greg Rucka who has an article on strong female characters, but you won't find any strong female characters here. All the females are appendages to the men, because this is a macho military man kind of a novel. After I read this, I decided that I probably had to visit the improbable characters populating his comic books to find out what he thinks a strong female character should be, and I wasn't impressed there, either.

This novel reads like a rip-off of a movie I saw some time ago about the take-over of a theme park by thieves or terrorists, but I cannot for the life of me recall its name. I guess it wasn't that great, huh?! I've searched on Amazon, on Netflix, and on the Internet, including IMDB, but I've failed to dig up the name of the movie I saw, and IMDB doesn't identify Rucka as the writer of such a movie or as a movie based on anything he wrote.

In this take, a terrorist threat aimed at the fictional Wilsonville theme park a thinly disguised Disney knock off, comes to the attention of government agencies, so Jad Bell, a master sergeant in some special forces outfit or other, is recruited as deputy safety director. Another of his team is working as a security employee. There is a third person, a CIA operative, also working there, but the park's management has no idea that it's a target, nor that there are undercover operatives implanted at the park.

When the terror does strike, it's in the form of a couple of dozen guys who set up a dirty bomb. It turns out they were hired by a US government politician who wanted to literally scare-up funds for defense, but the terrorists take that and run with it, and then demand that this same guy pay them over again what he already paid, otherwise they really will detonate this bomb. It's up to Bell and his team to rescue the hostages, take out the terrorists and defuse the bomb. In short, your standard macho bullshit.

The complication is that Bell's wife is in the park with his deaf daughter, taking a tour which magically happened to be on this self-same day, of course. The daughter, Anthea, does seem to be a strong woman, but she's marginalized, Bell's ex wife (it's always the ex in these stories, isn't it?) is a complete moron. In the first part of the novel, Bell pretty much outright begs her not to visit the park, but he can't tell her exactly why, and so this dip-shit chooses to completely ignore the advice of her terrorist-expert husband. Later in the story, she bitches him out about getting her into this and putting her daughter at risk! What a frickin' numb-skull!

Generally this novel is well-written and I certainly had no trouble maintaining interest in it, but once in a while there was a "Wait, what?" moment. At one point, Rucka writes, "...judders to a sudden, sharp stop." I'm not sure that makes sense. Judders is a word, although it's not one I like. The problem as I see it is that "judders" implies at least a small amount of time for said juddering to happen, which seems to be at odds with the "sudden, sharp stop" portion of the sentence. Maybe it's just me, but I would never have written that. It just sounds too weird to me.

I have no idea, even having read this novel, what the 'Alpha' title is all about, unless it describes the guy on the cover holding his gun like it's a loaded automatic metal dick....

So overall this was not quite a disaster, but neither was it anything memorable, new, inventive, or original and, as I said, it's strongly reminiscent, if not a rip-off, of that movie. So in short, I can't rate this as a worthy read. Others have done far more with less.

Naja by JD Morvan

Title: Naja
Author: JD Morvan
Publisher: Magnetic press
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Bengal

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

I liked this graphic novel. The art was very simplistic, but it still looked good, and the use of color was wonderful. This novel owes a huge amount to the Kill Bill movie duo. It also owes a lot to Luc Besson's work, such as Nikita, or Columbiana or even The Fifth Element wherein he creates a strong and mysterious female character who has issues to say the least. And it also owes a little to the Kick Ass movie character Hit Girl, if only for her wig!

The eponymous main character named herself after a snake (Naja is the biological genus for the cobra snakes and also, as 'naga', the name of a group of Hindu snake deities. It also happens to be the name of a founding member of the band, Massive Attack...). Six out of the first seven novels on BN were titled simply "Naja" when I looked this up! Maybe some thought should have been given to naming it after a different genus of snake?!

The character, Naja, is cold rather like a snake, having no emotions. She feels nothing, not even pain. We never learn her real name; it's always, and quite literally, beeped out, which frankly was overdone and became annoying after a while. We never learn the real name of her best friend from her abusive childhood, either: a guy whom she rescues from prison at one point in this story.

Naja works for an anonymous person named 'Zero', who runs a team of assassins. Naja is number three, but her ranking doesn't bother her one bit. At a point early in the story, a strange guy shows up in her room and bests her in a struggle. This is a remarkable feat in itself, but after he ties her up (which she enjoys way more than any balanced person would), he reveals to her that number one wants her dead because he thinks she wants him dead.

The problem is that the more she pursues this - going off the books and planning her own assignment, which is something she's never done before - the more questions arise as to what is really going on here, whether anyone really wants her dead, who this stranger is, and what his motives are. The story eventually draws in all three assassins, and as they realize they're in a trap, they also realize they're mixed-up in someone's plot - but whose plot remains to be seen - and the answer might surprise you!

This story wasn't perfect. I had some issues with it. I mean, Naja is supposed to be emotionless, yet we're told often that she hates the denizens of whatever particular country it is that she's entering at the time, which seemed illogical at best. The narration - almost of the "dear reader" type, became truly annoying here and there, and the constant dislocation of the timeline was irritating (this was the bulk of the Kill Bill influence).

In addition to this, I lost the thread somewhere in the last part of the story (maybe the last fifty pages or so) and really had no idea what was going on for a while, which reduced the reading experience for me a bit. Also I would have liked to have had more back-story for Naja, of which we're deprived. Yes, we get her childhood in a big expository section and several minor flashbacks, but we get nothing of how she became the number three assassin in the world.

Those relatively minor considerations aside, I highly recommend this story. It was warm, engaging, interesting, easy to read and to follow (except for the last part, and despite the flashbacks!). In addition to this, it was not afraid to get out of the USA! There are too many stories obsessed with the US, like it's the only place of any value or interest in the world, but this novel said the hell with that, and took us all over the place: Britain, Columbia, India, and elsewhere, so all-in-all it was a very worthy read to me.

Secrets in the Fairy Chimneys by Linda Maria Frank

Title: Secrets in the Fairy Chimneys
Author: Linda Maria Frank
Publisher: Archway
Rating: warty

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

This is one of a series featuring the same female protagonist. I've read none of the others, having gone into this without realizing it was a sequel. That there were other outings was made annoyingly obvious to me every few pages, unfortunately, but with a few exceptions, it was possible to read this without having to know details from previous volumes.

There's a seven page prologue - which bizarrely takes place after chapter one!!! I skipped this as usual. Prologues either need to be chapter one, or they need to be eliminated completely. Other than that, the novel started out really well. It was too long with a bit too much detail, but other than that and the prologue, the author evidently knows how to get a story off to a great start. The one real downer for me was first person PoV again, which I detest, but at least in the early pages it wasn't awful (an issue I had is noted later in this review).

We begin with Anne Tillery arriving in Istanbul, Turkey, to participate in an archaeological dig near Nevşehir, which the author spells as Nevshehir throughout for pronounce-ability. Before the plane lands, she receives a slightly unnerving text message on her cell phone warning her away from the dig. I found this peculiar in light of what we’re told very shortly afterwards: that her cell phone doesn’t work in Turkey; then if it doesn’t work, how can she send and receive texts? This made no sense to me. The fact is that different people have had different results with their cell phones in Turkey - sometimes they work fine, sometimes they work and then stop working, other times they don't work. You can fix the problem by using a Turkish simm card or by using a temporary phone while there, so this isn't a killer, but it can be expensive!

The immediate problem with this (not the Turkish cell phone issues, but the warnings that Annie gets) is that they were completely baseless! Never at any point in the novel that I saw, was this apparent need to keep her away from the dig justified. I got the feeling this was "fake danger" added into the novel merely to try and spice things up, rather than as an organic outcome of the plot. The artificiality of this wasn't appreciated.

Annie is expecting to be picked up by boyfriend Ty Egan, so the first problem on the ground is that someone else tries to pick her up, and not in a flirtatious way - by deceptively pretending to be a driver for the dig. She's really suspicious of this guy, which is just as well, but later, when she receives what’s quite obviously a death threat, she handles the photograph, getting her fingerprints all over it. No one calls the police. I think after a threatening text, an attempt at kidnapping, and a threatening photograph, I’d be dialing whatever the Turkish equivalent of 911 is. Not Annie. Instead she pops on a cocktail dress and goes to a party. This passive attitude goes against the grain of what we’ve been told about her being cautious earlier, and about her having had some experience with danger in her previous adventures. It’s really hard to reconcile the two.

Now, about Annie and Ty's kissing in public places, I don’t know! I've never been to Turkey, but I do know there is a slowly rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism there (as everywhere in those parts, it seems), so personally I’d be wary of kissing in public places, but Annie and Ty apparently think this is fine. Okay. If they say so. What I don’t get about them is that Annie is put up in a hotel where she stays by herself - Ty is nowhere around. I don't see how this works! Are they really so sweet and innocent, this couple who kiss in the streets?

This goes to another problem I had with this novel which is the disconnect between Annie's "circumstantial age", and her overt behavior. Is she thirteen? Sixteen? Eighteen? I don't know from the writing. Circumstantially, judged in general by the story, she appears to be seventeen or eighteen if not older (note: the author says on her website that Annie is 17 in the first novel in the series). Judged by other criteria - her behavior and this chaste relationship, she appears to be really juvenile. Clearly if she's at the young end of the YA spectrum, then this behavior is appropriate. If not, then what's up with that?! It doesn't matter what her age is if it's consistent with her behavior (or if there's a good reason given why it isn't), but the real problem here is that this novel seems all over the place in terms of the age group the author is writing for.

Both Annie and Ty tell the other that they love them, although Tyler states it as "I love you little Annie" - way to demean your girlfriend, Ty! But why are they not sharing a room? Again there's an age thing going on here. As I read this I did not know Annie's age nor could I guess it from the writing! It’s not like they're early teens (although they do behave like that), and this made little sense to me given their interactions to that point. It’s like the author wasn't quite sure how old they were, and so neither was I!

At the cocktail party (this is what finally made me believe Annie was older) she meets other members of the archaeological team. Doctor Sasha Borodin is so steely-cut that I became, rightly or wrongly, convinced that she was more of a victim than a villain. Yuseff Sultan was so oily that I couldn't believe his clothes didn't simply slide off him. He had no sense of propriety or boundaries, yet Annie made no attempt to set her own boundaries right up front, which is always a big mistake, and something which suggested that she's a lot younger than 17! Cedric Zeeks was so friendly and cool that he seemed like he had to be the (or a) villain here - if not Ty himself.

Why suspect Ty? Well, he's obvious to begin with(!), but at the party, instead of including Annie in his conversation with the leader of the dig, Doctor Atsut, about the threats she's received so far, he hustled her away to the food table and took Atsut off for a private conversation. This struck me as decidedly odd, especially since Ty made no mention of what was discussed when he returned and sat with Annie at a table. Neither did Annie ask what had transpired. Later this came out, but this lack of curiosity for a character who's being promoted as a mystery-solver struck a sour note for me.

Atsut talked about the dig at Çatalhöyük (Turkish for Fork Mound), which is a Neolithic settlement that existed about 8,000 years ago, and lasted for almost 2,000 years. It was discovered half a century ago. Atsut reveals that there have been thefts from the site, and if the perps aren't apprehended, the Turkish government will be shutting down the dig. This ancient town was weird by our standards because all of the buildings were joined - like a gigantic one-storey apartment block. The homes had only one entrance - in the ceiling! - and no windows. The "streets" were the rooftops of these dwellings! None of this came out in the text which made me wonder why. It's so interesting and odd that I expected at least a mention of it, but we really got no feel for it at all. Instead all we heard about are caves - endless caves!

It takes until the end of chapter six before they finally arrive at the dig, and Ty suddenly takes off running without a word to Annie. When she catches him up he tells her that there has been a cave-in and that everyone must help to dig-out those who are trapped. So my question was: why did he not tell her this before he took off? That made no sense to me, but I took comfort from the fact that the author understands that it’s 'triceps' and not 'tricep'! I've seen that mistake (or it's companion, 'bicep' instead of 'biceps') in way too many novels of late. No wonder US science and math education is doing so poorly!

It's hard to believe that the clean-up of the cave-in would be undertaken by anyone other than trained archaeologists, yet it is. This made no sense to me either! How are a fresh volunteer and a physical plant specialist going to be able to tell if something is important enough that it warrants careful handling and preservation, or is just rubble? That was just wrong!

Annie meets Yelda and Ahmet, Doctor Atsut's two children, who are fraternal twins, but for as young as they are, their English is better than good; it’s actually spectacular, which stretched credibility a little too far for my taste. They play a significant part in the story, but were a bit annoying for me, as was Atsut's poor parenting! This was one of several issues I had, some of which I've mentioned here. Another one was where Annie's dad "pulled out his government-issued revolver". Really? A revolver? I found it hard to believe the US government is issuing revolvers to State Department employees and they're able to travel across borders with them, but maybe they are. It just seemed to lack authenticity to me and after I'd run into so many issues, it became so much harder to swallow other things.

This story, while very engrossing, had too many serious editorial and plotting issues. For example, at one point, Annie, in pursuit of a potential smuggler, heads towards a flash she spots in the distance. She gives herself away by the dust cloud she raises as she walks through the fine sand. Ty and Cedric, only a mile away, suddenly have second thoughts about leaving her alone, so they head back, yet they cannot find her - not even from the trail of dust - which is apparently non-existent now! That was just bad continuity. At one point, Annie is hit on the head and is later cleared by the doctor as having no concussion, but Ty decides he will sleep in her tent - because she has a concussion. Again, poor continuity. And one more: the entire novel is in first person past PoV until Annie gets knocked-out; then suddenly we get a chapter out of the blue in third person. The shrieked.

So, much as Id like to commend this novel for an entertaining story and writing that's not bad at all from a purely technical PoV, there were far too many issues with it to make it an enjoyable read for me. It was like getting on a sled and setting off down a snow-covered hill only to find that there are bare patches of Earth every few yards along the track that keep on bringing the sled to a jarring halt, so in short, I cannot recommend this novel, and I feel no compulsion to read any more in this series.

Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks

Title: Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

This guy Faulks makes a game attempt to replicate Ian Fleming's writing, but the problem is that he goes too far - to the point of essentially cutting and pasting directly from Fleming's originals. We have a villain with a deformity; one of his hands has the appearance of an ape's, with hair and claws. Why a billionaire would not get this fixed (since we're told that it bothers him so much) is left unexplored.

He has an assistant who is a complete rip-off of Oddjob from Goldfinger, and who can feel no pain, like the villain Renard in the Bond movie The World is Not Enough, and all the Bond tropes are there, which is sad. The novel was intended as a continuation from The Man With the Golden Gun and as such is set in 1967, but Faulks could have done so much more. Fortunately, he's declared that he will write no more Bond novels. I have to ask why he wrote even this one.

"Devil May Care" is a chronically over-used title. You'd think the author or the publisher would check this stuff out to find a title that's a bit more original and distinctive. BN lists over 20 novels with this title on the first page, although some of those are other editions of Faulks's effort. It's not like the title has anything whatsoever to do with the novel's subject matter. It actually should have been called Doctor No, Not Again....

The villain, Dr Julius Gorner (named after Julius No, from the Fleming novel Dr. No, isn’t really a villain - he's just a drug lord when you get right down to it, who harbors the asinine delusion that he can bring the British empire (what empire?!) to its knees by flooding Britain with drugs! Why is Bond even needed? As if Faulks realizes how badly he's under-calculated the magnitude of his villain's villainy, he lards up the plot with two greasy dobs of villainous fat. On the one hand he depicts Gorner as having a plan to make it look like Britain has bombed the Soviet Union, like anyone - even the Soviets themselves - would swallow that. On the other hand, he also expects us to believe that the US is so pissed-off that Britain didn't go into Viet-Nam with it, that it's effectively complicit in this plan because it would finally get the Brits off their "arses". Really? This whole "plot" is a joke.

In this novel, released to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth, most of the action centers on Persia - Iran before it became a fundamentalist nightmare. Gorner has factories which produce legitimate pharmaceuticals, but he also produces and sells heroin in large quantities on the black market. During the course of his snooping, Bond discovers Gorner's smuggling transport: a Soviet-made ekranoplan, supposedly some 300 feet long (the Soviets actually built a functioning test version which was over 200 feet long). The problem with this is that Bond has a golden opportunity right there and then to destroy it, but he runs away!

The Bond babe in this edition is Scarlett Papava who has a twin, Poppy (not to be confused with the opium poppy…), so we’re told, but it turns out that Papava is actually agent 004. The non-existent Poppy is supposedly being held captive by Gorner, hence Scarlett's involvement, so she tells Bond. How Papava can be a double-0 agent, and yet so useless is nothing short of a farce. How her Majesty's Secret Service would even put her into the field without informing Bond is even more ridiculous. Why Bond suspects nothing when this woman was quite obviously stalking him brings us completely into the absurd.

Faulks also includes the disposable assistant, in the form of an Iranian by the name of Darius (seriously?) Alizadeh, and he also hauls in both Mathis and Leiter, Bond's opposite numbers from France and the US. I’d always read that latter name as 'lighter', but the audio book reads it as 'liter'. I have no idea which is correct, not that it really matters. The audio book reader does a fairly decent job, and has the right voice for a Bond story, but I wasn't overly thrilled with him.

The biggest problem for me was that I really didn’t buy any of this story. It just wasn't Bond, despite Faulks' freely plagiarizing the canonical Fleming stories. There were also some writing issues. Faulks is supposedly a highly-regarded writer (I've read nothing else by him so I can't comment there), but when he writes that the Bond cannot control the plane he's flying, and then has Bond take that same plane up to sufficient a height to parachute out without any difficulty, I have to ask how good of a writer he is. In another instance, Faulks has Papava and Bond all-but-naked in a hotel room about to have sex (before they’re 'forced' into coitus interruptus!); later he has her turn her head modestly when Bond is changing into different clothes? Really? That struck me as so false it was inane. On the other side of that coin, I'm pretty sure that Faulks didn’t write the word 'new-cue-ler' so why the audio book reader pronounced nuclear like that is as much of a mystery as it is an annoyance.

In short this novel is warty! I've now read, I think, four 'post-Fleming' Bond novels over the last few years (the most recent one before this is reviewed here) and I've found none of them up to snuff, although I have to say that Kingsley Amis at least got close with his title! I think Colonel Sun was a cracking good title - one which Fleming might have come up with himself. That novel, unfortunately, sucked. So, I have to announce that I'm now done trying to find new novels that effectively capture Fleming's spirit! Time to move on to something different.