Steths: Cognition by Karl Fields

Title: Steths: Cognition by Karl Fields
Author: Karl Fields (no website found)
Publisher: Pleated Press (no website found)
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 enough reward aplenty!

Here's a novel which gets right to the point - a cover, a title page, and then chapter one! Screw antiquated Library of Congress rules and antique publishing methods! You've got to admire that. This is the world of ebooks, not of trays of lead characters pressed together rank and file waiting to be slathered with sticky ink and squished onto a galley page. So off we go!

The world in this novel is one of people who have special powers - not supernatural powers, but enhanced human powers. Devin Chambers, the main character narrates this story, unfortunately. I say unfortunately, because it's a first person PoV format - something which I normally rail against. As it happens, it was done well on this occasion, and didn't feel to me like someone was scraping their fingernails down a chalkboard as I read it! That was a major relief.

Devin is known as a 'steth' - short for stethoscope, presumably - because he can detect, at a distance, the faintest sounds of someone's heartbeat which allows him not only to know if they're alive, but to some degree, what they're feeling and whether they're lying. How that works, exactly, goes unexplained. Yes, you can detect a change in heart-beat, or a particular rhythm, but what does that really tell you, and in how much detail? He cannot, however, detect the heartbeat of another steth - and certain other people as will become clear to readers.

He first begins to feel he's really different from others (even other steths) when his school class attends a trial and he's the only one who thinks the defendant isn't guilty. Shortly after this he's visited by a guy, Mickey, who offers him a place at the prestigious Faulkner Academy. His good friend Travis, who's also invited, is pumped about it, but Devin has doubts because the Academy has no athletic program (no, honestly!).

Devin is also obsessed with the innocent guy saddled with a guilty verdict and one day when he goes to the jail to visit him, he encounters a girl, Sarah Shaw, who was already visiting this same guy. He follows the girl, only to discover she's a special, too - but a 'bouncer' who, he learns, is supposedly his mortal enemy. Is this be the clichéd love-hate relationship whereby these two are destined to fall in love? I can't tell you!

The writing in general is very good, with only one or two questionable areas, such as on page 17 where we read: "Shaw, the defendant, who sat beside his attorney in a white jumpsuit..." Who was wearing the white jump suit?! How about, "Shaw, the defendant who was wearing a white jump suit, sat beside his attorney..."? Just a suggestion! Apart from rare happenstances like that, it was well-written, entertaining, and engrossing.

I have to say (and without confirming if I was right or wrong - I'm usually wrong on these things!) I didn't trust Carissa Watson, a fellow student at Faulkner who became involved with Devin. She seemed a little too convenient for me. I much preferred Sarah! I also liked Travis, although he initially seemed to me to be like a victim waiting to happen. Whether that does happen I'm not going to tell you!

It struck me as odd that Devin tells us he couldn't talk about movies with Carissa on their first date because there was no movie theater in town. What, they never saw one on TV or rented a video?! That struck me as strange, but that and some misspellings, such as "planed" in placed of "planned" (which a spell-checker won't find!) were about the worst issues I had with the technical aspects of this story, apart from the one I'll discuss next, which needs its own paragraph!

At one point, about halfway through this novel (which is a surprisingly fast read) there was a really improbable situation where Devin, obsessing way more on a missing photograph than ever he had any reason to, went on a highly unlikely "expedition" to a place he thought it might be. This made no sense whatsoever - first that the photograph would be hidden (and hidden there of all places) rather than simply destroyed, and second that Devin would ever become so focused on it, let alone dedicated to finding it. There was no rationale for it.

Devin had what was termed in the book, Hypersensitive Tympanic Syndrome. This isn't a real disorder as far as I know, but it is the condition which steths are supposed to have. What bugged me about that was that if steths's hearing is so sensitive that they can clearly detect a heartbeat (and from a distance, yet!), then how come every noise out there doesn't drive them crazy or deafen them? This issue is never even discussed, much less explained!

Those things aside, I really liked the characters and the story. It was well-thought out (for the most part!) and interesting. Devin was a really likable character and, again for the most part, the story was believable and made sense. This was a refreshing change from way too much YA 'literature' that I've had to read. Also kudos for having a believable guy as the main character. Devin was an African American, but one who isn't somehow tied-in to gangs or rap! It was such a relief to find stereotyping was absent here: Devin was just an ordinary everyday guy, and I appreciated that. I'm looking forward to the sequel to this novel.

Ryder: American Treasure by Nick Pengelly

Title: Ryder: American Treasure
Author: Nick Pengelly (no website found)
Publisher: Random House
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 enough reward aplenty!

Errata:
On page 8 in the Adobe Digital Editions version, there is the full name of the Israeli organization, the Mossad, but one of the characters in the name is rendered as a box with an X in it (X-Box!). In the iPad Bluefire version, there is no problem with this name.
"...cavalry have arrived" is Wong. Calvary is singular. it should be "...cavalry has arrived"

This novel is a mix of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Robert Langdon, and I found it to be, overall, a worthy read despite some issues I had with it.

I love irony! On page nine of this novel, I read, "…the capitol the British had looted and burned in 1814, during the war of 1812…." This phrase was highly amusing to me because it makes it look like the British were two years late (and a dollar short) with their burning and looting, doesn’t it? The fact is that "the war of 1812" did indeed run for three years!

It’s important to this story because of the burning down of the White House. The conceit here is that something possibly taken from the White House at that time, a letter which might impinge upon the success of a candidate in the current US election campaign, was believed to have ended up in the possession of Lord Kitchener.

A problem I had here was with one of the central premises of this novel: it's not really believable! The contention is that a past US president knew of a spy in a high level position, yet did nothing about it. In that era, where spies were rapidly dispatched via rope or rifle, this made no sense to me, but there's a really nice twist at the end that I did appreciate.

1812 was quite a year. It was a leap year. It was the year when Lord Byron first addressed the House of Lords, the year Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Edward Lear were born, and Sacagawea died, and it was the year in which Napoleon introduced metric measurements in France and begun his ill-fated invasion of Russia. It was not the year in which Tchaikovsky wrote his 1812 Overture to commemorate Russia's defence of its homeland against Napoleon.

This novel is the middle of what's so far a trilogy: Ryder, Ryder: American Treasure, and Ryder: Bird of Prey. I have not read any of the others, but I plan on doing so, having found this to my taste, but nevertheless hoping for better in other volumes.

It's about Ayesha Ryder and her tracking down of this "treasure". Ayesha is tall and dusky, of Middle Eastern origin and already accomplished when the novel begins (from the previous volume, Ryder). She's at a ceremony where she was presented with the British George Cross for her services to the nation. She's trying to calculate how quickly she can leave this event without seeming rude, but she's trapped by the formidable trio of Dame Imogen Worsley, the head of MI5 (the Brit equivalent of the FBI), Susannah Armstrong, the Brit prime minister, and the American Secretary of State, Diana Longshore. How cool is that?

Yes, all women. I really want to know why it takes a male writer to put a host of women in prominent positions?! I've read far too many novels by female writers where women are given disturbingly short shrift (if not shift) and it bothers me. I know there are some excellent novels penned by female writers which do give due prominence to female characters, but there is nowhere near enough of these writers.

On the other hand, my fear at that point, once I’d seen this bevy of female influence, was that the author would betray it all by turning Ayesha into some wilting vaporous girl swooning in the arms of some tough American operative as the story progressed. I could only wait and see with baited breath (and baited breath is pretty disgusting when you think about it, so I didn’t like that at all...).

Rest assured that Ayesha turns into no such thing. There was, however, an issue with these powerful women which bothered me and which is hard to discuss without giving away too much, so let me confine myself to saying that lesbianism should be conflated neither with stupidity nor with women in positions of power. The two sets overlap in places, but they are not equal sets!

Ayesha is very much a female Indiana Jones - chasing after the ark of the covenant no less! She's irritated that she's been deflected from her course by some American nonsense in which she has no interest. What she doesn't know is that she's about to come into collision with someone else who has a much greater interest in finding what she's been tasked with uncovering.

In this world which the author has created, Israelis and Palestinians have united and formed a new nation known as the Holy Land, but some movers and shakers in both the US and the Holy land want to return to the days of Israel's independence. There are all kinds of unexpected alliances (and dalliances) and unusual undercurrents in play in this novel, and the power players are not neglected in this wild and crazy interplay, although some of them behave rather foolishly at times and it's a bit hard to credit that a woman would put her position at risk. Unlike men, women know they've not only worked damned hard, but succeeded against the odds to get where they are, and they're not so foolish as to put it all at risk like that. But this is fiction, so I guess it could happen.

As always, no matter how much I may like a given novel, there are issues to be found with it. In this case, the most disturbing one is that Ayesha isn't always presented as the smartest cookie in the box (or, since this is set in Britain, I guess I should say, 'biscuit in the barrel'. I can understand a need to have your prize character have flaws, and to put him or her into gripping situations in a novel like this, but in my opinion, integrity and faithfulness to your character trump excitement every time!

For example, at one point in this story, when under fire, Ayesha could have used a truck to shield her friend and protect him from gunfire, but she never thinks to do it, exposing him to the fire by her thoughtless inaction. Now you can argue that she wasn't thinking straight, but this takes place immediately after we're given a flashback which shows us how admirably cool and calculating she is when her life is threatened.

At another point, someone tries to set her up as a murderer. This stupid given who she is and how well-known and well-connected she is, but the plan is to kill her so she can't clear her name. This is also flawed (as the finale shows!). The author went for dramatics rather than realism, which can sometimes work and be more entertaining, but it can also back-fire. In this case it seems to me that a deadly killer like the one who is after her, would use much a more simple, sure, and direct method of assault. It's issues like this which repeatedly kick a reader out of a story.

At one point Ayesha directly observes an easily-identifiable man planting an object which will set her up as a murder suspect. Immediately afterwards, she runs into a cop who she knocks out. If she had taken a second to tell him that she saw someone plant the object and tell him where it is, before disabling him, she would have been in a lot stronger position. Instead, she knocks him out and runs, and makes herself look guilty.

Indeed, she assaults several police officers quite brutally over the course of her escape, almost killing one, and pays no kind of penalty whatsoever for this. That was too much of a stretch, and her actions only served as a confirmation of her guilt. I began actually disliking her during this part of the story and wondering if I really wanted to read on. I'm sure that's not what the writer intended, but it is what was achieved in my case. It's hard to like characters who are, we're told, smart, but who routinely act foolishly! Fortunately things improved.

Ayesha personally knows some very important people, yet never once does she consider calling any of them to let them know what's going on. Instead she runs like she's guilty, and acts like she's guilty, and thereby digs herself deeper into the hole which has already been opened-up for her by the very people who are trying to set her up! She plays right into their hands, which doesn't make her seem very smart.

Fortunately the villain is even less smart. He's one of these James Bond types who monologues instead of dispatching his captured secret agent and accompanying love interest du jour Fortunately, I was on-board sufficiently with this novel that I was willing to let a few clunkers get by, but I do have my limit! This author managed to avoid exceeding it, and on top of that gave us a non-white, non-American, non-male hero, and I think that deserves encouragement. So here's to more - and steadily improving quality - volumes!

Deadly Accounts by CR Wiley

Title: Deadly Accounts
Author: CR Wiley (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WARTY!

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

The author of this novel actually emailed me and asked me to remove this review from Amazon because "...it contains so many spoilers and plot points that it could end up ruining the story ...". I disagree, and there was a warning at the head of the review on Amazon just like this: WARNING! MAY CONTAIN UNHIDDEN SPOILERS! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Detailed reviewing and discussion of writing is what my blog does, so I refused to accede to censorship and outright remove it, but as a pure courtesy I did remove parts of it and refer readers to Goodreads, or to my blog. Since I don't plan on reading anything else by this author, I consider this matter closed.

Note, please don't confuse CR Wiley with author RC Wiley or you're risking ending up paying a hundred and forty some dollars for a paperback!

So, gorgeous cover, nothing to do with the story as usual! This story recounts the adventures of Nora Wexler, a new FBI agent, which is hilariously, how her colleague introduces her to his family. I found that rather strange. Would someone really introduce a colleague like that rather than just saying, "This is my colleague, Nora."? Why introduce her as a new FBI agent?

Yes, if the guy was really nervous or inept, he might, but that's not what Agent Greer has shown himself to be - quite the opposite, in fact, so he didn't sound realistic to me, phrasing it that way. It sounded more like the author had forgotten that this had already been established, and tried to establish it in that way.

This wasn't the only odd thing which caught my attention. Throughout this novel, Travis Greer was always referred to as Travis in the narrative, whereas Nora Wexler was always Wexler. Why? I've seen a lot of writing where females are referred to by first name whereas males are just the last name, so was this to try and balance that out? It was just odd and distracting! Why not use both firsts or both lasts?

Nora is new and idealistic, and obsessed with going after Internet offenders of one kind or another - mostly pedophiles and stalkers. This brings her into conflict with her boss, who wants her to focus on bigger pictures - such as terrorism. Nora gets a break when someone begins stalking three women who are successful and independent, who meet once in a while as friends, and who now find themselves under the brutal attention of a psycho.

Nora's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. At one point she introduces her self with: "...my name is agent Nora Wexler". No! Her name is Nora Wexler. Her professional title is 'agent'. She should simply say "I'm Agent Nora Wexler." It doesn't make a character look smart if they introduce themselves this way, although it does happen more often than is helpful. We don't improve our readership by talking down to them, we improve them by lifting them up to join us.

Their first encounter with this fate is when Jenny Iverson receives a parcel containing what appears to be her missing cat's head. Next, her friend Erin Clausson discovers that her assistant, Ricardo Lantham has been 'poisoned'. Finally, Lyla Robbex is targeted via her high-school age daughter, whose new car is bombed. Fortunately, Lori wasn't in the car when the bomb went off.

Very soon, Wexler and Greer have a suspect - Christopher Walden - in their sights. I didn't buy it though! It was too early in the book, and there was no evidence other than the single fact that he'd had one date with each of the three women (not that any of them knew he'd dated the other two as well). They were evidently all using a dating site on which he was also a member.

My suspect, pretty much as soon as I "met" her, and for reasons I can't really articulate, was Clausson. Like I said, I don't know why, and I'm sure not going to spoil it by telling if I was right or wrong (I'm usually wrong, FYI!), but that was where my money, for better or for worse, went. I was probably wrong because when I quit reading this it seemed like there was a much more realistic suspect (than the first one identified in this novel) in the agents' sights.

The really weird thing is that the FBI agents, one and all, were completely convinced right away that this initial person of interest was their guy! Based on this flimsy evidence, they were able to invade his home, search it and lie in wait for him arriving home from work I found that hard to swallow, and I sure hope the FBI isn't so gullible that they can so easily convince themselves of their rectitude based on a coincidence, when there's nothing else whatsoever condemning him. I hope our judges are not so clueless as to grant search warrants based on such flimsy 'evidence', either. OTOH, they have done some really dumb stuff.

Truth be told, by the time I was a third of the way through this novel, I was seriously starting to doubt the smarts of our two FBI agents. Lori, the girl who was almost blown up, was rolling in money which her mother could not have given to her, yet neither the agents nor her own mom seemed seriously interested in pursuing that damning fact!

In addition to this, and as he left Lori's hospital room with Wexler, Agent Greer noticed that someone was spying on them from a closet, yet he never stopped the elevator and went to find out who this was. I'm sorry, but this is at best incompetence, and at worst, gross negligence on his part, and made me lose a lot of faith in this story. I don't mind law-enforcement having road-blocks to overcome, but when the roadblocks are glaringly artificial, or make the main characters just look stupid, I can't help but find the writing wanting.

Another issue I had was that the poisoning episode wasn't food poisoning (the immediate suspect), but potassium chloride poisoning. KCl is essentially the same as NaCL - the sodium chloride with which fast food joints baby-powder your fries. It's salt. It never fails to fascinate me that you can get a deadly poisonous gas (which was used to kill people in World War One, and which is still used to wipe-out germs in bleach) and mix it with a metal which explodes on contact with water, then sprinkle the result on your fries, and they taste great! Better living through chemistry....

The problem is that while KCl is used as part of the lethal injection trilogy of chemicals, it actually does have to be injected. You can't eat it and die. Well, technically, you can, but you'd have to consume so much at once that you'd end up throwing-up. So this had to be delivered via a needle, yet we don't learn of this from the coroner who should have been looking for a needle site as soon as he or she discovered what the cause of death was! More incompetence.

As it happens, Nora is on the verge of being dumped from the case and sent back home because of her incompetence, but of course, the psycho comes to her rescue. Now he's sent a taunting email to her, and just as she's reading it in her room before getting ready to take a plane back home, some guy shows up at the door to the B&B where she's staying, and the owner shows him up to Nora's room. Nora has no idea whatsoever who this guy is, but she blindly assumes it's the psycho without any evidence whatsoever - in short, she makes exactly the same mistake which got her thrown off the case!

Worse than this, she could have apprehended the perp right there (if it was him), but she ran away! Seriously? She could have called the FBI, but instead she texts Greer for help! Double seriously? Instead of opening the door and confronting him, thereby taking him by surprise, she dives out the window. Instead of seeking out his vehicle, which would have been easy, and getting a line on him, and even disabling it, she hides by the front door to the B&B until the owner comes back out. By this time, the visitor has gone and the lead has been lost. Nora Wexler is the worse law enforcement officer ever.

It was at this point that I decided I didn't care who the perp was or how she, he, or it was brought to justice. This novel was not something in which I had any more interest when there are better reads begging for my attention. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.

The God Project by Stanley R Lee

Title: The God Project
Author: Stanley R Lee
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!

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

Today is Stan Lee day on my blog, but note that this author isn't the Stan Lee of Marvel comics fame (although Barnes & Noble's web site is stupid enough to have his picture tied to this book, and Amazon idiotically conflates him with the better-known Stan Lee!). He's a completely different guy, Stanley R Lee, who died in 1997. While it's nice that this work is still freshly available I hope the recompense for it is going to a good cause.

This one starts out with a long, long, long, rambling section about a US election, which I skimmed because it was tedious. One page (p34) even has a tabulated election results list. This (the rambling, not the results list!) went on, and on, and on forever. Once I got into the habit of skimming, it was hard to stop, especially since the "story" continued in this vein: rambling about political dancing, and good old boys, and government kibitzing, and back room meetings. I'm sure the author intended the story to go somewhere eventually, but after a hundred pages or so of this, it was simply uninteresting to me and I gave up! I can’t recommend it based on what I read.

Dunn's Conundrum by Stanley R Lee

Title: Dunn's Conundrum
Author: Stanley R Lee
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!

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

Today is Stan Lee day on my blog, but note that this author isn't the Stan Lee of Marvel comics fame (although Barnes & Noble's web site is stupid enough to have his picture tied to this book, and Amazon idiotically conflates him with the better-known Stan Lee!). He's a completely different guy, Stanley R Lee, who died in 1997. While it's nice that this work is still freshly available I hope the recompense for it is going to a good cause.

I have to say up front that this book was a study in inconsistency in modern publishing. I first began reading it on the Kindle, and there were multiple problems: every word which had 'th' in it had a blank in place of 'th'. There was also a blank in place of 'wo', and a blank in place of 'ft', and that was just on the first two screens! This would have resulted (purely as an example) in the sentence, "There was the worst bafflement in those on the left" being rendered "_ere was _e _rst ba_ement in _ose on the le_" (note that I used an underscore for the blank space, for clarity).

Fortunately the Adobe Digital Editions version was free of these problems, but I've encountered other novels where the reverse was the problem: the ADE version being far from perfect and the Kindle version perfectly legible. My question is "Why?" This is no longer an era of some poor guy (or much more rarely some poor woman) having to pick out lead letters from a series of drawers and patiently line them up, rank and file, in a tray. This is the era of e-publishing, so I can find no excuse whatsoever for poor spelling or formatting, not even in a so-called "galley" proof.

That said I had to DNF this novel even in the readable format because I simply could not get into it no matter how I tried to focus on it. I don't know what it was, and I couldn't get past it. Page after page was just boring to me. I sincerely hope others have more luck with it than I did, but it didn't speak to me at all. It just had nothing to offer me and pull me in.

The story is about an absurdly named secret US government organization named 'The Library' (trust me, the TV show is better), which spies on the Russians, as absurd as that is (for when this was written). There's a traitor amongst them, however, and it's up to a Sherlock Holmes type amongst them to ferret him out before the world ends. Yeah, it's like that, but it wasn't for me.

Seti's Charm by Chris Everheart

Title: Seti's Charm
Author: Chris Everheart
Publisher: Yellow Rocket Media
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 enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
In the Adobe Digital Editions version, on page 94, we got the start of Chapter 30, minus the title 'Chapter 30"! It ran for four pages (the entirety of chapter thirty), then we got the actual chapter thirty and the same text again. The end of chapter thirty has Max encountering Renault, but at the start of chapter thirty-one, he's still searching for Renault; then chapter thirty-two takes off sequentially as it should. Something got badly screwed up here! We got chapter thirty three times: once as part of chapter twenty-nine, once as chapter thirty, then again as chapter thirty-one.

This short, fast read begins really dramatically and goes right into the action. Max's grandfather is the founder and curator of the Carter Museum, but neither he nor Max expected anyone to break in, assault Max's grandfather, and then set fire to the place. Thank goodness then, that Max chose that time on that night to stop by the museum. He managed to get inside and pull his grandfather almost literally from the flames. He also noticed something missing from one of the display cases.

Max's grandfather almost miraculously survives the assault (and being tipped out of the ground-floor window when Max rescues him from the fire!), but things go downhill from there. Max's step-grandmother is a harpy who somehow deludedly manages to blame fourteen-year-old Max for the fire and her husband's condition. Worse than this, Grandpa tells Max, in a brief moment of lucidity, that the stolen amulet was a fake - that he must find someone named Renault, and return the real and cursed amulet to Egypt. No pressure then...!

The amulet, said to be worth a million, is a wadjet eye - the Eye of Horus - designed to protect the Ka or soul of a person on their journey to the after-life. Max's grandfather came into possession of it by accident, but he never returned it, instead setting it up as the center-piece in a museum exhibit where it's been ever since. Now he evidently believes that set I has unleashed a curse upon him for taking it from the Pharaoh's mummy.

Of course you know that Max is going to manage to get where he needs to go, and here I have to say that the author neatly writes around one of the most common issue with stories like this - why doesn't the character go to the police. Often it's skirted around or glossed over, or simply ignored. Here at least, the author presents a plausible scenario, if dramatic! OTOH, there were some minor issues. At one point, Max misunderstands some spoken French and confuses 'petit chien' with 'pétition', but they actually don't sound at all alike to anyone who knows a little French, as does Max! It's the difference, close enough, between shan and shon.

I recommend this novel. It's fast-moving, well-written, visits some interesting places, and is appropriate to its target age audience. The story is believable and has a good plot, and the characters, particularly the young Max, are realistic and likable. Their actions are plausible, and even the villains seem true-to-life. Good one! I recommend it.

The Housewife Assassin's Handbook by Josie Brown

Title: The Housewife Assassin's Handbook
Author: Josie Brown
Publisher: Signal Press
Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
At then end of chapter 2: "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in site." should be "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in sight."

It's the eighth of the month so this must be a novel which has a title starting with 'H'!

Sometimes books like this work, and sometimes they crash and burn, but they're so appealing to me that I keep on picking them up anyway, in the hope of finding a gem. One of my issues with books like this is that there can be some subtle (and not-so-subtle!) genderism involved - yes, women can be just as genderist as men. I noticed this in this novel, but it was relatively mild, so I decided to let it slide.

The premise in this story is that Donna Stone was married, unknowingly, to a CIA field agent named Carl. Carl had infiltrated a Russian mob, and they'd discovered him. On the same day - almost a the same time - that the Stone's third child, Trisha, was born, Carl's Porsche exploded and very little was left of him. Now Donna has followed in his footsteps to revenge her beloved husband's death, and she's not at all squeamish about doing whatever it takes to achieve her aim.

I don’t buy for a minute that Carl is dead! There was no body - in any meaningful sense - to identify, but if he isn’t, he's sure taking his sweet time letting his wife know that he's fine. For over a year Donna was still maintaining the increasingly absurd fiction that her husband abroad, on an extended tour of duty for Acme corporation - for which he works/worked, and which is a CIA front.

Meanwhile she's a mom to three children, and having to deal with teen tantrums and transportation. Initially she was living off Carl's continued salary as even the CIA, for reasons of their own, maintained the fiction that he was alive and well, and living incognito. Unfortunately, after that first year, this stipend ended stupendously, hence Donna's need for employment.

It was at 25% into this novel that the real turn-off showed-up in the form of a character named Jack. I've sworn never to purchase another book with a main character named Jack because I'm nauseated beyond polite language by the fact that this is the cheesiest, most over-employed, most brain-dead, most clichéd, laziest, most stupid-ass trope character name ever. I'm serious. Are authors so utterly vacuous and so deeply entrenched in their rut that they can’t think of a different name? Must they be hide-bound by mindless tradition? I guess so.

Now, I still have some books on my reading list which no doubt have a character with this name in them - such as this one, for example - and I'm committed to at least starting them because they're on my list, but I'm by no means committed to finishing such books or to giving them a good rating. In fact, were I to rate using stars (other than the binary 'worthy' five star or a 'warty' one star ratings which I habitually use), I would drop two or three stars for this alone. I'd drop another two or three for the fact that this jack-ass, who is supposed to be undercover, is driving around the neighborhood in a Lamborghini Aventador (the same car that billionaire Bruce Wayne drove in one of the Chris Nolan Batman movies).

So I was at this point faced with a problem in that I was enjoying this novel until this character name showed up, and it’s not only the name - the circumstances of his arrival were completely implausible. That alone would merit a one or two-star drop, and a further one or two stars would disappear because he has his "broad, muscled chest" and it's bared, which is another one or two star deficit for maximum trope-age. In addition to that, he's a complete jerk, so another two for sure there. At that point, this novel has plummeted from a potential five star rating down to something in the region of a negative four stars to a negative nine stars, depending upon what mood I was in when I quit reading (which may or may not coincide with my finishing the novel)! All because of this Jack(-off). It took very little time to decide.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this woman - whom the author has gone seriously out of her way to drill into us loved her husband beyond anything, misses him tragically, and can't stop thinking about him - has no problem whatsoever in throwing herself at this guy even as she deludes her mindless self that she hates him. So we’ve gone from a delightful novel where anything could conceivably happen to a completely clichéd one where it’s is so absurdly and painfully obvious what’s going to happen that the story is no longer even remotely interesting. I rate it warty!

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.