Echo: Desert Run by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume Three of this six part (30 issue) series was another winner for me. It opens in the crater blown into the desert highway by Julie in defense against the vagrant dude. Thinking he is dead, Julie also thinks Dillon is dead - or near to it, and she hauls him off in the truck, but unaccountably stops short of finding as hospital and hugs him, thereby healing him. This, she did not expect thinking of herself solely as a weapon. Ivy meanwhile visits Julie's home and finds a box with something intriguing inside, but we do not learn what it is.

It's in this volume that we learn that Julie's new suit isn't just the Plutonium alloy, but also contains some of Annie, Dillon's supposedly dead girlfriend. Now Julie starts feeling what Annie felt, and thinking what she thought. Is this the start of a meld, or a takeover? Julie doesn't know. Ivy, now embarking on a phase of this relationship that is less chasing down Julie and more getting to know Julie and becoming highly suspicious of the secret agency HeNRI. When Ivy learns that Julie healed Dillon, she realizes that she has an off-label use for Julie for herself.

The story continues to thrill and intrigue, art work continues to please - what's not to recommend?

Echo Atomic Dreams by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume two of this six volume series starts out right where volume one left off. Dillon the ranger and Julie the super-girl are hiding out in a desert motel, ostensibly protected by some of Dan Backer's motorcycle group. Dan is ex military and is highly suspicious of what's been going on in those desert military bases. What none of them know is that the vagrant who shared Julie's plutonium rain experience is a religious nut-job who thinks poor Julie is the harlot of Babylon. The Bible has a HELL of a lot to answer for.

When Vagrant Man shows up at the motel - how he tracked her there is a mystery, but I have an idea of my own - there is a showdown that leaves sand turned to glass, and Dan's biker boys dead. Julie and Dillon are once again on the run across the desert.

Meanwhile Ivy has tracked down Julie's sister Pam, who is in a psychiatric institution, and she calls Julie and tries to talk her into surrendering to Ivy - who promises protection. Doing this will implying, intentionally or not, a threat of something happening to Julie's sister isn't the best way to engage with Julie's benevolent side, but before this can be resolved, Vagrant Man arrives, and all that's left after that encounter is a crater in the desert, which is how volume three begins.

Once again we have interesting characters who change and grow, particularly Ivy who is slowly coming to a realization that this isn't your normal person-tracking job. The art work continues to be simple but not simplistic, and it was very much appreciated; it's clean, definitive, and illustrative - everything you would want in a graphic novel. I do not require color, indeed, it can sometimes ruin a story, so this wasn't an issue for me. I recommend this volume as part of this complete series!

Echo: Moon Lake by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

I found this in the library and liked the first volume so much that I went right back and got the next three, which is all the library had. Bless that library! I was hoping that this is the whole set because this was initially issued as a relatively short run of individual (and indie published) comics, and later collected into sets, but it turns out there are six of them, each containing five of the original issues: Moon Lake, Atomic Dreams, Desert Run, Collider, Black Hole, The Last Day. How he got it to be exactly 30- issues is a bit of as poser - that's like writing a novel and deciding it's going to be exactly three hundred pages long regardless of how you tell the story and whether it naturally ends on page three hundred! However, as I write this I'm half way through and I can't fault it for being too fast or too drawn-out.

The art work is excellent, but note that it's black and white line drawings, no coloring involved. Once in a while the text is too small, which is a pet peeve of mine, but other than that, I can't fault this at all, so it all came down to the usual test, for me: whether the story was any good, of course. For me the story is the most important thing, with art being secondary, and this story did not fail me.

The main character is Julie Martin, typically curvaceous as comic book females are, but not improbably so. I liked her sister better - she was drawn more realistically and looked pretty damned good, especially since her personality was adorable. And in the end that's what overcame the skin-deep appearance of these female characters - they were realistic, all three of the main ones.

Julie is a down-and-out photographer whose husband has ditched her for reasons which were not exactly clear to me. She's not happy with this, but she's just about dealing with it, and trying to work on her photography portfolio. Evidently her starboard-folio is already completed....

This is how she happens to be in the desert in the south-west (note that North America sports many Moon Lakes!) when a new flying suit is tested - one that bonds to the skin. It's being tested by a woman Named Annie, and the air-force considers the test to be a success and orders the destruction of the suit, with Annie still in it. This causes a literal rain of particles which come down rather like hailstones, but which are soft, like they're made from modeling clay. They cover Julie and stick to her skin, and to her truck.

'

She evacuates the area quickly, but soon discovers these hailstones are, in a way, alive. They begin to flatten out and stretch, and cover her skin, eventually forming a breast plate - literally. It covers her neck, upper chest, and breasts rather provocatively, like a prototype designer swimsuit top. It's not like a piece of metal armor - it's more like a thin coat of chrome. The doctor who Julie visits cannot remove it, and actually is injured by it. Julie is tossed out of the ER as a prankster.

The air force is now trying to recover all the pieces from the explosion, but can find less that 30% of them. They discover that two people were in the area - a vagrant, and Julie. They just don't know the identity of these two people two begin with. A woman with the cool name of Ivy Raven, who is an expert at tracking down people and reading crime scenes - this woman is observant and sharp - is called in to find Julie, but she isn't told the whole story.

There are several interested parties, including a park ranger named Dillon Murphy who is the boyfriend of Annie, the original test pilot. He eventually encounters Julie when the army try to arrest her, and end up all knocked out due to some explosive power of Julie's breastplate which evidently triggers when she's stressed. Now she and Dillon are on the run with Ivy in hot pursuit.

I wasn't thrilled that Julie had to end up with Ranger Rick (or Dill) - yet another woman in distress who evidently can't make it without a guy to validate her, but the characters were written realistically (they even have realistic names! LOL!), and behaved appropriately, and there was no ridiculous love at first sight, so I let that problem slide in this case. Plus, it's Julie who actually gets them out of various scrapes with her "super-power", so this balanced out. Overall, I rated this a worthy read and I was looking forward to volume two at the end of this one.

Sketchy by Olivia Samms

Rating: WARTY!

This novel started out with a series of strikes against it and I wasn't even aware of it! I picked up the audio book in the library because the blurb sounded good. Unfortunately with an audio book, you can't dip into the pages and read a bit here and there to get a feel for it. How did it strike me? Let me count the ways!

I avoid first person PoV novels unless they're really intriguing, because for me it's worst person PoV. I'm not at all a fan of listening to self-absorbed "all me all the time" narrators, especially ones read with the voice Kate Reinders employs here, which is irritating at best. With an audio book, you can't tell what voice it's in until you actually start listening. Strike one!

I don't do series unless they're exceptional. This one, the first of a new series titled "Bea Catcher Chronicles" promised ot be precisely the opposite of exceptional. Strike two!

I don't do novels with "Chronicles", "Saga", or "Cycle" in the title, so that was strike three that this author managed to escape! She's also lucky that when I picked it up, I didn't know that author James Patterson had said this was "...right up there with the very best of YA fiction" otherwise I would have ditched it, too, based on his recommendation - and I would have been right!

Having made it past all my defenses, how did this novel fare? Well it started out by exposing a major weakness of first person PoV: if the narrator isn't there, she can't tell you about it unless she gets it second hand, or unless the author admits to the failure of their choice of voice and switches to third person which is really clunky. Thus the prologue here was clunky and served no purpose other than to objectify a raped woman. Was a description of bruised thighs necessary? Was any description at all necessary? No, but this author chose to repeat these repeatedly almost as though she enjoyed reporting on young girls in pain! It served no purpose. That we know she was raped is horror enough. We don't need to read (or in this case listen to) the gory details. Unfortunately with audio books, it's hard to avoid the prologue (strike four!). Fortunately this one was really short. I don't do prologues, introductions, author's forewords, prefaces, etc., et-boring-cetera.

Bea (Beatrice) is a high school girl who is an artist and a recovering drug addict. Fresh out of rehab, and with the cliché of being fresh at a new school, she discovers that she can draw what she sees in the mind of another person. How this works is never explained int eh parts I listened to, and her description of how it comes and goes makes no sense whatsoever. It reads as though it's her sketch pad which is controlling her, which I doubt is what the author intended. Strike five!

There is evidently a serial rapist at loose who has most recently preyed on one of the high school cheerleaders, Willa, a cheerleader who survived the assault, but who cannot remember a thing about it. Bea, however, has drawn a picture of a guy she saw in Willa's mind when the two shared an art class together. Bea knows this guy - he's her ex drug dealer. A friend pointed out how antique the names Bea and Willa are. I don't know how the author came up with them (Beatrix Potter and Willa Cather maybe?), but since young people can sport antique names in real life, this didn't bother me very much. It's definitely an oddity, though!

My initial guess (and I'm usually hopeless at these things, be warned!) was that this guy Marcus would be far more of a red herring than a serial rapist. Sadly, Bea is evidently not even smart enough to consider that he might be the rapist, so I was not at all confident by this time that this novel would hold my interest, especially since it's larded with cliché and trope, and I was right about that. There's a snotty cheerleader elite group. There's a disaffected non-conformist main character who is an outcast. She has a best friend who is the clichéd perky gay guy with awesome dress sense, who creepily wants to mother her. There's a homophobic jock group. There's a cafeteria scene. The food is bad. Can we lard this up with any more trope and cliché? I had no doubt this author would find a way. Fortunately the audio book was only five disks, so I knew I would not have to suffer long if the novel continued to be awful.

I further reduced the time I had to suffer through third by automatically skipping any track which had the narrator start off by announcing a date and time and the amount of elapsed time since Bea became drug-free. It was T-E-D-I-O-U-S! This meant that I skipped most of the tracks on Disk 3, and perhaps an entire disk's worth of tracks, if not more, after all five disks were done. I skipped a host of tracks on disks four and five because they were larded with unnecessary interludes getting in the way of the action, and after disk three I had no patience left for the author's diversions and dilly-dallying. These tracks held the most boringly pedantic descriptions of school life. Strike six. This novel now has two inning's worth of strikes, so I plan on skipping the sequel on that basis alone.

Where was the story I was promised in the blurb? The one about an artist drawing images from a person's mind? The one about a serial rapist? That took a back seat to high school politics and trivia. Instead of listening with baited breath, all I got was bait and switch. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.

Uncaged by John Sandford and Michele Cook

Rating: WARTY!

I normally avoid prologues, introductions, prefaces, etc., like the plague, but it's hard to bypass them in an audio book. I only realized I had listened to the prologue when the next thing the narrator announced was "Chapter One". The prologue contained the classic trope of having a character description delivered by way of character Shay Renby looking into a mirror. It's so clichéd and lazy to write that way., and the prologue destroyed any of the tension the novel might have had over the question of whether or not the main character gets away. She does - it's right there in the prologue!

The author does have a bit of an excuse here because this red-headed girl is on the run and is changing her appearance, but still! She has a dog with her which she's also disguising. The weird thing was that chapter one describes the liberation of what is evidently this selfsame dog from an animal experimentation lab, so this was more of an epilogue than a prologue, which was weird. The end of the story arrives before the beginning. You have to have a truly great story to get away with hat, and this one wasn't.

It struck me that chapter one is the real prologue, because it takes place before the actual prologue (how screwed-up is that?!). Chapter one describes some young animal activists breaking into a lab. It's engaging enough, if improbable. The author has them breaking into the facility not so much to free the animals per se, but to unlock all the cages, so the experimental subjects become completely mixed-up and thereby ruin the experiment, so far, so good.

We're told as they first break in, that they have three minutes and fifty seconds, but the first room they enter, where they free rats and mice, would have eaten up nearly all of that time. Despite this, they then enter a second room where they free the macaque monkeys which are apparently undergoing some kind of brain experimentation. Some of the frightened macaques bite. One of the activists gets a cut on her hand from breaking open cages. Apparently this group of activists isn't smart enough to wear gloves or to grasp the essential elements of epidemiology, which I found hard to believe.

They enter an office where they rifle the file cabinets and steal USB drives which have experimental data on them. There's also a fourth room where there's a dog chained up, having evidently had some sort of medical procedure performed on it. One of them frees the dog. Even if we assume that the group splits up and does all of this simultaneously, less than four minutes doesn't seem anywhere near enough time for all of this activity to be completed, but I was willing to let that slide for the sake of a good story. I should have known better!

So the story then became, "What's the deal with this dog, and how did it end up in the company of the red-haired girl?" What we know from the blurb is that Shay's brother, a hacker who goes by "Odin" was the one who took the dog, which is how it ended up in her care, and the corporation, evidently named Singular, wanted it back with a vengeance. Shay is supposed to be more vengeful than Singular ever could be. This is what drew me to this novel. Unfortunately, nothing had happened by the half-way point.

My initial feelings were that the dog has somehow had its smarts amped up. So far so good. This sadly went to hell in a hand-basket when we reached the area around chapter six. From six through ten I was skipping tracks on the audio disks with abandon, because the story had screeched to a dead halt and became boring as hell. Eventually it picked up again, but now I was not inclined favorably towards it as I had been for the first five chapters. The narrator, Tara Sands's voice had become truly irritating, too, and sounded as pedantic as the writing. The voice was way too old for the age of the characters. I couldn't stand to listen to it any more - the narration or the boring story by the half-way point.

On the topic of writing, as I said, it had been fine to begin with, then grew really tedious. One issue I had was that evidently either Sandford or Cook, or both, don't understand that the word 'another' is a conjoining of 'an' with 'other', not a conjoining of 'a' with 'nother', so they wrote "a whole nother" rather than "a whole other". This is a relatively minor point but on top of everything else it was too much.

For me this is fine when it's part of a character's speech, because people really do say things like that, but it's not fine as part of the narration, unless you already set up the narration to be non-standard, or unless it's a first person PoV novel, neither of which holds here. Sometimes I weep for the English language. On the other hand, it's things like this which make English the most bad-ass language on the world!

But here we were, about half way through the novel, and this bad-ass female character we had been promised in the book blurb had failed to materialize. We all know book blurbs lie - that's their job after all - but to misrepresent the book so badly takes some real disrespect for your readers. I know that author's have as little to do with the back cover as they do with the front, so this is on Big Publishing&Trade; (again!), but I would flat ditch a publisher who screwed me over Publishers don't own writers anymore and if we get less than the best, it's time to recognize that, and move on.

Move on is what I did. This story should have been a fast-paced thriller and it was ponderous. It went into early retirement when Shay got to the hotel for the homeless or whatever it was, and never picked up again - at least not by the half-way mark. I was bored to tears and cannot recommend this as a worthy read.

The Valhalla Prophecy by Andy McDermott

Rating: WARTY!

I'm glad they added "A novel"! to the front cover of this. I was ready to believe it was an authentic historical, if not hysterical, document! Some years ago I read several of Andy McDermott's Eddie Chase/Nina Wilde cheap-thrill franchise. I soon grew tired of them because each was more improbable than the last, and every novel was pretty much exactly the same. The only thing which really changed was the myth being exploited. I never did review any of them, so when I saw his latest one (published in 2014) on clearance sale at the local library for just a dollar, I decided this was a good time to revisit and review. I have to say the news isn't good.

This novel is some five hundred pages, but it would have been half that length had it not been for a tedious, extended, interleaved flashback to Eddie Chase's time in Vietnam as a hostage-rescuing mercenary. That was so amateurish and boring that I quit reading those and simply skipped them to get back to the contemporary action which it turned out, wasn't much better. Instead of wasting your time on that tedious detour, you can wait until the beginning of chapter twenty three where the entire thing is summarized in a paragraph.

Eight years ago, Eddie was a mercenary tramping through the Vietnamese jungle at night in a raging storm. He and his group were approaching known hostiles and yet when they hear a noise, the author tells us they "drew their guns". They're carrying rifles! You don't draw rifles, and in hostile territory these trained and seasoned mercenaries didn't have their guns at the ready at all times? It's nonsensical!

Contemporary descriptions aren't any better. At one point the author seems to be confused between a JetRanger (aka a Bell 206) and a "Eurocopter" (by which I assume he means something like the European Heavy Lift Helicopter, but this isn't going to be available for another two or three years!). The JetRanger is a light observation helicopter which isn't going to be airlifting a granite obelisk. Eurocopter as a corporation doesn't exist and hasn't done so since the beginning of 2014. I guess the author didn't recheck this before he published, but Eurocopter isn't the name of a model, it was the name of the corporation (now Airbus).

The contemporary story moved at a fair clip, but it was the standard story: Eddie and Nina are all lovey-dovey. Something suddenly comes up out of the blue, and they're plunged into a mystery. One person is kidnapped or a kidnap is attempted and Eddie foils it. There is a deadly car chase through public streets wreaking havoc. Eddie is part of it and not only escapes unscathed, there is never, ever, ever any penalty for him to pay with the local authorities.

Not only did the authorities drop all charges, but also the hotel through which he drove a vehicle didn't pursue any civil case against him! It was completely absurd. This is the kind of story children write. It's the kind of story you end up with when you write it as a B-movie screenplay instead of a coherent, intelligent thriller. So what if he had diplomatic immunity from prosecution (although how that works is a mystery)? They can expel diplomats, yet nothing happens to Eddie. Ever.

Despite knowing that killers are looking for this obelisk, they go out to Norway to unearth it from the bed of a lake where it was buried when the dam was built. They take absolutely no precautions whatsoever to provide for security; thus the obelisk is stolen. These people are morons. It's at this point that Nina learns that Eddie has outright lied to her and sought to undermine the expedition, and even destroy the obelisk they seek. When she grills him about it, all he will tell her is that he made a promise and he can't tell her what it's all about., but a short time later, Nina learns that Eddie has known what was on the obelisk all along. Why didn't he tell her? he forgot that he knew - yeah, forgot until ti was a convenient ruse for the author to get them all back on a trail that has gone cold. This is writing at it's most amateurish and pathetic./p>

It's at this precise point that she should ditch him. He's betrayed her and worse, he's actively been working to undermine everything she was striving for risking her life, but of course she doesn't exact any price, and Eddie gets off scot-free again. He could quite simply have told Nina what his conflict was without necessarily going into any of the supposedly secret details, yet he sought to deceive her rather than come clean, adhering to a promise he made a decade ago, rather than to the promise he made to her when he married her. It's clear where his priorities lie. Dump the jerk, Nina; you deserve better. She's an idiot if she ever trusts him again after this. He has no excuse whatsoever for behaving the way he did, showing clearly that his loyalty is not to Nina at all.

It was at this point that I decided I'd read enough of this nonsense, and fully realized what a smart decision I'd made all that time ago to quit reading this amateur trash and find something better.

Twillyweed: A Claire Breslinsky Mystery by Mary Anne Kelly

Rating: WARTY!

This novel highlights the serious problem of choosing to write in first person PoV. The author is confined to reporting only what their primary character sees and hears. They cannot move from that perspective, which severely restricts and limits the story. It's also an appallingly arrogant PoV: everything is "I" - what I did, what I saw, what I felt - who cares about anyone else?! It's the most obnoxious form of writing and few writers can carry it without inflicting pain upon their readers. This novel makes it worse by bouncing back and forth between PoVs so much that the reader risks whiplash.

The author of Twillyweed acknowledges that this is a real problem by beginning this novel in third person before making an uncomfortably clunky shift to first person: primary antagonist Claire Breslinksy's PoV. It did not make for good reading. The novel also has a prologue which turned me off. Prologues are antique and I always skip them. I have never read a novel yet where skipping the prologue put me at a disadvantage, which is testimony to how pointless prologues (and introductions, prefaces, etc., etc.) truly are.

The story here is that in seeking her birth mother, an Irish girl travels to Long Island and "stumbles upon a terrible secret"! Jenny Rose Cashin is Claire Breslinsky's niece - the illegitimate offspring of Claire's sister Carmela and Claire's ex-husband Johnny. Jenny says, "Oh Gee, I'm sorry"? I haven't lived in Ireland - visited only briefly once, but I felt this was more of an Americanism - Oh gee! - than something which the Irish person would say, but maybe I'm wrong on that score. I would think they'd be more likely to say, "Oh Jeese!", but it's no big deal.

I've read none of the Claire Breslinsky stories to this point (assuming there are others), so I'm meeting her afresh, and I wasn't impressed. She first appeared as a truly whiny woman bemoaning her fate. She had gotten rid of her husband Johnny, who she now whined was failing to support their sons who are in college. Yes he's morally at fault, but not legally since both boys are now over eighteen and an insurance payout paid for the boys' college tuition anyway. Claire has gotten herself involved with a fireman now, sporting the unlikely name of Enoch, who seems at first blush to be rather condescending towards Claire who seems at second blush to invite condescension.

Jenny is consistently referred to as Jenny Rose which I found annoying in short order. There were also some odd words used in the text. Once example used to indicate, presumably, that she opened a package is: "She kipped it open..." which makes no sense unless there's an alternate meaning (in Irish usage) of a word which means taking a nap! (p15). The author ought to be aware that not everyone will get colloquialisms.

At the end of a section on page 16, right before the story returns to Claire's first person PoV, there's a weird section that's italicized and appears to be told from the PoV of an acquaintance of Jenny's (always referred to as Jenny Rose!) named Wendell. It comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. Then we're back to Claire's 1PoV. I think this section might have been intended to represent thoughts of the killer, but it came after an italicized sentence which was Jenny's thought, and there was only a line break between the two, so initially and confusingly, it appeared to be a continuation of the thoughts she had begun. It was not well done, and this seemed to be a pattern in this novel.

It was at this point that I really started to feel like I didn't honestly want to read any more of this. Jenny was completely boring to me. There was nothing going on with her except her own idle thoughts and the random impressions she had of her surroundings as she arrived at the house where she would be staying and started to get settled in. It wasn't interesting at all.

Claire's next section was simply more whining. She gets a call from Carmela, but rather than let us in on what this evidently important call was all about, she breaks the fourth wall and talks to the reader about some incident from the past, which really tripped up any momentum the story might have garnered for itself with this evidently urgent phone call. I was not thrilled by yet another digression.

I made it through ten percent of this book, but I couldn't stand to keep going. I mean who says, "...sit down and attend to your brunch"? Seriously? Maybe a hundred years ago people spoke like that. Maybe that's what Enoch will turn out to be - a time-traveler from the past. He has the name for it. Actually he turns out to be something Claire didn't expect: it looks like he misled her and now there's yet another thing in her sorry life to bemoan.

For a book which includes as part of its blurb: "Jenny Rose Cashin arrives from Ireland to take a job as an au pair in a fading Long Island resort town, hoping to reconnect with her long-lost mother. But something evil lurks in the quiet beachside residences of Sea Cliff. There is a killer on the grounds of this strange art colony, and Jenny Rose will need all the help she can get from her aunt Claire to uncover the truth--and to stay alive." there was nothing happening. Nothing at all. No dead bodies or even hints of them. No hint of a killer except for the afore-mentioned misplaced and obscure italicized segment consisting of three paragraphs or so, and even that was so obscure that it was hard to tell what the heck it meant. Certainly Claire and Jenny are going to have to save the day because as you know, this is a private dick story, so the police are, of course, utterly useless.

The book came off more as a pretentious and artsy memoir than ever it did a thriller or a mystery. It was simply depressing to read, and offered nothing to interest me. None of the characters garnered my support or empathy. I didn't like any of them, and I cannot recommend this based on what I read. I know I didn't read much of this, but life is far too short to continue to plow on through a book that has failed you in every way when there are so many other books out there, taunting me with their siren calls.

Carrots by Colleen Helme

Title: Carrots
Author: Colleen Helme
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

I've said frequently that you can get away with a lot with me if you tell a decent story, and this novel is a classic example of that. Now you know I'm a man of my word!

This is the first in a series about a character named Shelby Nichols. It's told in first person, which is the worst of all voices. Most writers screw it up, which makes for an obnoxious read. A few can get it right, and this author managed that, for which I was very grateful. It was an easy read and easy to empathize with this character even though she was far too focused on, nay obsessed with, clothes and looks for my taste. Neither was she very smart, but she made up for her lack of smarts with a certain amount of inventiveness and pluck. I didn't like the way she was far too ready to take a back seat to her husband. It undermined the adventurous spirit with which the author was trying to imbue her elsewhere.

On her way home one evening, Shelby stops at the supermarket for a bunch of carrots, and gets into the middle of a robbery of the bank which is within the store. She's grazed by a bullet, which skims her head. From this point on, she discovers that she can read people's thoughts if they are close by. Unfortunately, "Uncle Joey", a local mobster, manages to learn of her ability and by threatening the welfare of her family, he 'persuades' her to work for him part time, listening in on conversations he has with his lackeys, to alert him to any signs of unrest and dissent.

As if this isn't trouble enough, the bank robber is out to kill Shelby so she can't testify to his appearance in court should he be apprehended, and the new hire at her husband's law firm, Kate, is definitely after her husband and doesn't care if Shelby knows it.

I liked this story because although it was a bit far-fetched, it stayed largely true and real, and it was believable. Yes, the mind-reading is nonsense of course, but this is fiction, and that's a part of the framework for the story so I had no problem with that, especially since it was presented in an interesting and realistic-feeling way. I also liked that Shelby was married and had children, so we didn't have to deal with dumb-ass romances. That would have spoiled this story, so I felt that it was a smart decision on the part of the author.

I enjoyed Shelby's struggle to cope with the demands on her, especially in light of her new power and her subsequent 'gray-area' employment. I think her husband's acceptance of her lying to him about it was a bit to easily glossed over. I think it should have been more of a problem, and more of an argument than ever it was. Yes, he loves her and isn't about to divorce her over this, but he's a high-priced lawyer and could have helped her with this, at least by giving advice and support. He also probably would have been far more suspicious of her than he was.

The fact that she got into so much life-threatening trouble and shared none of her situation with him should have been more of a hot spot than it was, too. I also didn't like that he often tried to take over her life and control her behaviors - such as when she replaces her car and he gives her the third degree about it. Yes, she isn't too smart, but his domineering attitude and her passive acceptance of it was a bit disturbing to read. One example which comes to mind is that Shelby has some pain pills from the time she was shot in the head and later, we read: "When Chris offered me a pain pill, I gratefully accepted." This makes it sound like he was hoarding her pills and doling them out to her as he saw fit. That probably wasn't the author's intention, but that's what it read like to me! If you're a good little girl and do what I say, I'll let you have your medicine! Rightly or wrongly, that made me bristle a bit!

I had a huge problem with the cover since it in no way represents the main character in any way whatsoever other than gender. Normally I ignore covers because they have nothing to do with the writer, and you can blame their ill-fit on the publisher and the fact that the cover artist never, ever, ever, ever reads the novel for which they're illustrating the cover, but in this case it's self-published through Amazon's Create Space scheme, so I'm not convinced that we can let the author off lightly here here!

There were a lot of other problems, too, which a good book editor or even a decent beta reader might have caught. This is another author who can't tell the difference between 'stanch' and 'staunch' when she writes: "He staunched the bleeding with a bandage". The antique 'whom' shows up here not as part of the narrative, but as part of a character's speech: "...identify the guy whom...", but shortly afterwards we get "There’s too many things wrong..." when it should have been "There are" or even "There're". You can't have it both ways - either your characters are going to speak correctly or they're going to speak like almost everyone else does. Mixing it up, especially with the same character doesn't work.

We got a "My name is Detective Harris..." when his name is just Harris. It's his title that's "Detective". I know it's a minor thing and a pet peeve of mine, but little things matter, especially when there are a lot of them. Why not just have him say, "I'm Detective Harris"?! It's that easy.

There was one part where it looked like one sentence had been cut and pasted smack into the middle of another sentence: "I’d barely hung up the phone when Then they’d probably want to stay me as possible.it rang again...". Then there's the flirtatious redhead who has auburn hair! Yes, I know that technically auburn is classed as red hair, but when people think of a redhead they typically don't think of auburn, so if you've directed them down Redhead Road, it's a bit of a jolt for them to discover that they're really on Auburn Avenue! It was for me anyway!

One or two things made no sense, such as when Shelby thinks to herself that she "...could read minds. I’d know when he was around. I could make it work...." The problem was that this came right after she had failed dismally to detect an assailant in the parking garage! It was inconsistent, or it made her seem really stupid, one or the other. I liked Shelby and it was annoying to have her portrayed as an idiot on more than one occasion.
Also obsessed with saying, "the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes"

Another thing which made little sense was where it was revealed that Shelby helps her husband with legal work. This came as an announcement out of the blue because we had not been told that she was employed by the law office where her husband works. it sounded bad - like confidentiality counts for nothing in this law firm. I doubt the clients would have appreciated that their lawyers randomly have family members wander in and do odd jobs. I certainly wouldn't.

Those quibbles aside, I liked this story a lot. It wasn't something which made me desperate to read the next in the series as soon as possible (especially not now that I've seen the cover!), but I don't doubt that I will read it if I come across it on sale somewhere. This was, in general terms, an engaging, fun, and enjoyable story, so overall, I rate this one a worthy read.

Disposable Assett by John Altman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off and Running by Philip Reed

Title: Off and Running
Author: Philip Reed
Publisher: Brash books
Rating: WORTHY!
Erratum:
"...heart trouble run in the family." should be "...heart trouble runs in the family."

Set towards the end of 1999 (for reasons unclear to me), this novel began with a very short prologue which I skipped as I always do. The first problem I ran into was that there was a character named Jack - the most clichéd of all character names. I took a vow a while back never to read another novel which has a main character named Jack (in this case, Jack Dillon, can you believe?!) and that vow is the most pathetic one I ever made, because I have somehow managed to saddle myself with several such novels since then. This one looked interesting from the blurb, so once again I swallowed my pride, integrity, and commitment, and decided to try it out. I sincerely hoped that this author wouldn't make me regret it! He didn't.

Jack is undertaking (I may be employing that term advisedly given Walt's age!) to write a bio for a renowned comedian of yester-year, Walt Stuckey. Nobody does this kind of show any more, but Walt had a well-regarded TV comedy and variety show running from 1967 to 1973, when it was abruptly and mysteriously canceled.

Jack begins meeting with Walt regularly, and the two of them get along like pants on fire until Walt is stricken by a stroke and his eldest son Garrett (which in this story is evidently an acronym for Gloating, Arrogant, Ridiculously Retarded, Expletive-Terminated Twat), muscles in and takes over. He's a officious little jerk who happens to be the executor of Walt's will, and who rapidly pisses everyone off, including Walt's girlfriend, Mary, who has no power in this situation because Walt never married her, so she would inherit nothing if Walt dies. He also fires Walt's nurse.

It's at this point that Jack starts drawing close to Mary, which is rather a surprise, because up to this point we've been given no idea whatsoever that anything is wrong with Jack's marriage, and now it seems like there are issues galore with it. That seemed way too jarring because no hint had been given of this to begin with.

What this felt like to me was that Mary was manipulating Jack somehow for some purpose of her own, or perhaps in collaboration with Garret. I certainly didn't trust her, but jack throws his lot in with Mary after Garret fires him from the book-writing project and they end up kidnapping Walt! That's all the story I'm going to give you.

One thing which seemed a bit anachronistic, even for 1999, was the use of tapes by Jack to record his interviews with Walt. Maybe he was old fashioned, but even in 1999 it was becoming hard to find recording tape, which was antiquated by then, even in digital form! There were several issues of this nature which others may or may not notice let alone find irksome, but fortunately, the overall story was compelling enough that I decided to overlook them as reasons to reject he story.

It was a bit of a kick in the pants to see Garret muscling in on Jack's turf as soon as Walt was disabled, but Jack's agent evidently screwed him. This is why we self publish, folks! It would have been nice to have had a few more details earlier so we understood this when it happened, but when Jack fully grasps how poor of a grasp on this biography he really has, and that he doesn't even have ownership of his own tapes, this certainly gives him (he believes) a good reason to kidnap Walt so they can finish the book, although given that Walt is largely incoherent at that point, I don't see what advantage this gives him.

So Jack, Mary, and Walt head off to Mount Whitney. Let's hope Whitney's up for it.. That was a Walt Stuckey style joke. One thing the local police do not understand is the California Penal Code section 207(a)! The police chief claims it depends on how far the victim is taken, but it really doesn't:

Every person who forcibly, or by any other means of instilling fear, steals or takes, or holds, detains, or arrests any person in this state, and carries the person into another country, state, or county, or into another part of the same county, is guilty of kidnapping.

You'd think a police chief would be more up on the codes than that, but this is a small town. That said, the chief actually doesn't know whether Walt consented to go or not, so he's a bit limited in what he can do without more information, and he is a lot sharper than that idiot Garret credits him for.

The story dragged a bit - it ought to have been shorter I felt, and for a while I went back and forth on whether this was a worthy read, because some of it made little sense (for example, where did Slade manage to find himself a camper trailer on the mountain - in a national park?! He didn't have one earlier), and some of the motivation seemed off, but overall I liked the story and the characters. It made me want to read to the end even as I skipped a bit here and there, so it was really that which made me decide this was indeed a worthy read, and I'd recommend it with the above-mentioned caveats in mind.

The Girl Who Wouldn't Die by Marnie Riches

Title: The Girl Who Wouldn't Die (unable to find this on B&N or Amazon)
Author: Marnie Riches
Publisher: Maze Books (website not found)
Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
Sgraffito should be graffito?

Note this is not to be confused with J Montecristo's The Girl That Wouldn't Die (which I haven't read).

I love an author who knows that it's chaise longue and not chaise Lounge. Same letters, different order, and Marnie Riches knows the difference! That said, I had some seriously mixed feelings about this as I read it. There were parts where it got really slow, with student conversations - boring conversations - being relayed in too much detail, but just as I was wondering if I really, honestly, wanted to read this, it would pick up again and some interesting material would play out, so I kept reading. In the end, however, the slow nothing happening pages far outweighed the action and I grew too bored to finish it.

It's split into two interleaved parts which initially seem to have little in common other than that the main character in each is a young female, but it becomes crystal clear later, what's going on. One part, set in Britain, features Ella, a girl in high school who is talked - by a cop - into joining a local drug gang as a narc, to help out her mother's criminal case which is pending. Ella puts her life on the line to infiltrate the gang and has a hard time doing it initially, and then another hard time keeping herself out of trouble as much as possible and avoiding the advances of the young drug lord, a hot guy whose girlfriend is downright mean. I was more of a fan of Ella than I was of George, the other female character. George really wasn't likeable at all.

One big issue I had with this is that we're tossed back and forth not only between those two story lines, but also between a score of characters, police officers, unsavory philandering college professors, and a whole bunch of interchangeable students, many of whom have their own story line. It was really hard to keep track of who is who and why I should care about them anyway, a lot of the time. Plus it seemed like the villain was one of two characters: one a main character who seemed to me to be a huge red herring, and the other a minor character who showed up just often enough to make me suspicious, but as I said, I didn't care in the end, so I never did find out if I was right, I'm usually not!

People are disappearing, and some of those who disappeared showed-up in the rubble of a bombed building the bomb still strapped to them. By around page one hundred it became pretty obvious what was happening, and the only mystery really, was how long it would take George to figure it out, but the MO was changing, so my interest was sustained for a while. The problem here was that George should never have been involved in any of this in the first place. There was no reason for her to be other than that the author simply wanted it this way, and the more I read of George, the less I liked her. She was really a jerk and a busybody, and I found nothing to either empathize or sympathize with.

Then there was the deus ex machina factor. At one point George was breaking into apartment. She opens door and alarm starts counting down. Just as she’s trying to guess what the four digit code is to silence it, she gets a text with the answer. That struck me as way too convenient and didn't make George look very smart. There was no reason for her to break in where she was breaking in. She was, once again, just being an annoying busybody.

There was a minor writing issue, too, which I like to raise since my blog is all about writing. One of the characters is named Ad. Chapter 20 begins like this: “Had Ad not had a stinking hangover…”. I think I would have reworded that. It sounds really awkward, which would be fine if you were going for comedy, but this novel is not intended to be a comedy. For me, I would have written something like “The beauty of the Church of the Holy Spirit was lost on Ad, condemned to hell as he was by the debilitating power of his hangover” or something along those lines. But that's just me.

In short, I can't recommend this. The writing itself wasn't too bad at all, in general terms, but the pace was agonizingly slow, and the character motivations were simply non-existent. It just wasn't realistic. The thing is that I might even have been willing to let this author get away with that, had it not been so damnably boring, and had her main character been remotely likeable.

The Complete Raffles Volume One by EW Hornung

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Title: The Complete Raffles Volume One
Author: EW Hornung
Publisher: Leonaur
Rating: WARTY!

I have to say that the title of this amused me – I mean how is it in any way complete it if it’s only volume one? And yes, I do know what they mean, but it’s still amusing to me.

I ended up with this from the library having failed to get my hands any Sexton Blake – which I had decided I wanted to read after having heard it mentioned several times in a Phryne Fisher story. I found that I liked this, but only in small parts. A lot of it was uninspired and uninspiring. The thefts weren't really very thrilling, and nothing like as complex as the misdeeds in your average Sherlock Holmes story - from which era these stories also hale, so be warned it’s not everyone’s taste. If you’re into this kind of story (adult historical which was actually adult contemporary when it was written), then you might like this.

EW Hornung was rather a prolific writer, and Arthur J Raffles, described as a gentleman cracksman – that is a thief - was perhaps his best known creation. How gentlemanly a thief could ever actually be is a matter for debate, but I guess Raffles fills the bill for some definitions at least. We meet him, as we meet Sherlock Holmes (to whom raffles came second in popularity in his own time), through the agency of his chronicler – a public school friend of his, who goes by the highly unlikely name of Bunny – which was no doubt quite likely in those days. His real name is Harry Manders.

Note that in Britain, a public school is actually a private school such as Eton or Winchester, which is where Bunny “fagged” for him. Note that a fag in this context represents a sort of servant (or more accurately, a slave!) who would run errands and perform other chores for this superior, such as cleaning his shoes and even doing his homework for him. It has nothing to do with homosexuality, although in some cases it could have, I suppose!

Raffles has other things in common with Holmes. At one point, he and Bunny are caught red-handed whilst committing a theft aboard a ship. That story is included in this volume. Raffles dives overboard to escape apprehension, and is presumed lost at sea, but after Bunny finishes his prison sentence, he discovers that Raffles is alive and well, and the second, and somewhat modified phase of their joint career is launched. That takes place almost literally half-way through this volume. At the end of this volume, Raffles is killed in the Boer war in South Africa, so god only knows what's included in volume two! raffles ghost stories?!

The best stories for me were Nine Points of the Law, which was very much in the mold of a Sherlock Holmes story, although from the PoV of the thief of course, and the one which followed it, The Return Match. Both of these were rather different from the stories which came before, which all seemed to be centered on jewel thievery. In both of these stories, Raffles was acting to help someone, although what he was doing wasn’t really legal in each case! In the latter case, he wasn’t even getting paid for his actions, although he did feel he was repaying a debt, if not being blackmailed.

One very much appreciated aspect of the stories is that Raffles doesn’t always get the job done, but despite that and some other bits and pieces I liked, overall these stories were tame and boring. They included very little atmosphere setting,and very little descriptive prose in terms of setting the scene. Most of it was simple conversations, in which Raffles is usually unnecessarily and tediously mysterious, and in describing, but in nowhere near enough detail, his exploits, so it was rather unsatisfactory all around for me. I can't recommend it.

Roughly half the book takes us to where Raffles literally jumps ship. The second half takes up form where raffles disappears until he's killed in the Boer wars. What's in volume 2 I have no idea!

One thing which both amazed and horrified me was how profligate these two villains were with their money. They have stolen jewels that they sold on for literally hundreds if not thousands of pounds. They stole other things too, and they retrieved a painting which netted them two thousand pounds each, yet they're always on their uppers, looking for the next opportunity to steal money? Where did it all go?!

Two thousand pounds is a significant amount (for most of us!) in 2015. In 1915, one pound was worth roughly five dollars, so we're talking about ten thousand dollars, but that fails to address the buying power of money then as compared with now. According to Measuring Worth two thousand pounds in 1915 would be worth somewhere between 140,000 and a million today depending upon how it's calculated. Even if we take the lower of those two, it's still an inconceivable amount of money to wade through, especially back then - maybe five million dollars?!

According to US News, In 1915, you could buy a house for three thousand dollars (=six hundred pounds). A car cost almost as much as a house! A decently-paid (by 1915 standards) woman would earn sixty pounds a year. A loaf of bread cost 7 cents, a dozen eggs 34 cents, a gallon of milk about the same as the eggs, and a pound of steak 26 cents (using the US News values) . What the heck were these guys doing with all their money?! And why should we feel any kinship with people who are so appalling wasteful and who actually help no one, especially not the common people. These guys were no Robin Hoods, let's face it!

Holy War by Mike Bond

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Title: Holy War
Author: Mike Bond
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
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!

Frankly, this novel is a mess. It begins not on page one, but on page nineteen, the first eighteen pages being filled mostly with advertising. The actual novel itself is 365 pages long, one for every day of the year and judged by how much it's padded with extraneous detail, aimless rambling and flashbacks, it could probably be at least a hundred pages lighter and healthier for it.

It never hurts to lose some excess weight! Whether this is how the print book will look or whether this padded bra of commercial material up front is confined to the ARC version, I don't know. I wish that publishers and writers would have more respect for trees though.

The author has actually been a journalist in Beirut, so he knows the deal there, but that doesn't mean he can write an engrossing fictional story about it. This one was too splintered and fractured to be coherent. The book was really hard to get going on, because it was bouncing around all over the place, jumping from one set of characters to another, from one scenario to the next so quickly that I couldn't get comfortable with the characters, nor was I left with a feeling that I was going anywhere.

The author gets the lyrics wrong to the Chicago song If You leave me Now. It's not "If you leave me now, you'll take away the very best part of me", it's "If you leave me now, you'll take away the biggest part of me" which, when you think about it, sounds like impotence, doesn't it? I don't know if that's the way Peter Cetera intended it when he wrote it, but it is a beautifully embedded double meaning - if you get the lyric right! I guess the dope-smoking sabotaged Neill's brain cells and prevented them from nailing down the lyrics....

So Neill is the main character. He's an American journalist, but he's been recruited by MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA) to go (as a journalist) to Beirut, his mission is to try to contact a terrorist named (highly originally) Mohammed, who is linked to Hezbollah. Mohammed can apparently stop the slaughter, although how that works is anyone's guess. Mohammed is also evidently married to an ex of Neill's, named Layla (another original name).

To try and add a little zest to the recipe, the author has also thrown in André, who is a commando in the French armed forces, and who wants to murder Mohammed to avenge the death of his brother, who died in the Beirut Marine barracks bombing in 1983. Additionally, there's a female terrorist named Rosa (the choice of names in this novel frankly sucks) who is as deadly as she's dedicated. No doubt both of these characters will conspire to thwart Neill's aim.

While the timing is obviously 1983 or later, the actual dating of the events in the novel isn't clear - at least not in the portion I read. I noted that one reviewer considered it contemporary, but I don't see how it can be given that it appears to follow hot on the tail of events which took place a generation ago.

The pacing is excruciatingly slow and constantly - I mean constantly - interrupted with flashbacks which completely destroyed the story, the atmosphere and any sense of immediacy for me. It takes forever to actually get to any real and current events (current within the story's framework, that is), and those are irritatingly fragmented.

Instead of getting to the action, the story wallows endlessly (and mindlessly) in flashbacks, dalliances and memories, multiplied by two (one set for Neill, the other for André). Rosa seems to be the only one who is actually getting anything done! No wonder terrorist keep on blind-siding us! For example, Neill spends an inordinate amount of time in Holland doing nothing more than sitting around and smoking dope. André appears to be wandering aimlessly around Paris.

If you like gory detail, there's plenty to be had here. For me, describing how a bullet goes through a supine victim's head and then bounces back off the cement floor and returns through that same head is, if you'll forgive the pun, overkill. I already got that Rosa was coldly obsessed. I don't need to have her putting one bullet after another into her victim from several different angles and read about how he's still spastically moving even then. This added nothing to the story or to her character portrait, so I don't see the value other than gratuitous violence for the sake of it.

In the end I could not get past the first third of this novel. It really was not for me. It was far too jumbled and disjointed, which spoiled the story and made me quickly lose interest. I can't recommend this. This is the second Mike Bond novel I've reviewed. The first was Tibetan Cross and I didn't like that one either, so I guess I'm done with this author, too.

Skewed by Anne McAneny

Title: Skewed
Author: Anne McAneny
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Title: The Maltese Falcon
Author: Dashiell Hammett
Publisher: Books on Tape
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book read stiltedly by Michael Prichard.

Need I get into the blatant objectification employed in this cover? I hope not.

First published in 1930 and turned into what is now considered a film noir classic in 1941, The Maltese Falcon is what would, were it published now, be considered a stereotypical hard-bitten private dick story. This is where Sam Spade was born. He's hired by a Miss Wonderly to try and get her younger sister to return home.

Wonderly has no idea where her sister is (nor does the reader!), but she claims she's hanging out with a man whom Wonderly considers dangerous: a married Englishman with the unlikely name of Floyd - unlikely because no Brit would ever name their child 'Floyd', but Dashiell (How-About-That-Hair?) Hammett obviously didn't know this or didn't care. Wonderly requests that either Spade or Archer do this and she pays handsomely for the consideration. Spade's assistant, Miles Archer, is assigned to tail Floyd Thursby. Luckily for Spade.

That night Spade is awakened by a phone call notifying him of Miles Archer's death. Why they would call Spade rather than Archer's wife is a complete mystery, but Spade goes to the murder site and sees that Archer was shot before falling over a safety rail and rolling down an embankment. Spade undertakes (I use that word advisedly) to notify Archer's wife.

Even later that night (I guess Spade goes to bed rather early!), two police detectives, Polhaus and Dundy, visit Spade and take an interest in whether he has access to a gun. It turns out that Thursby has also been murdered and Spade is now a suspect! The fact that he was having an affair with Archer's wife doesn't help his case.

And so it goes. This story really wasn't very good at all. Maybe back in the day it was new, and fresh and different, but now it's really rather pathetic. I can neither recommend this nor the movie they made from it.

Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood

Rating: WORTHY!

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

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

The basic plot is the same. Phryne Fisher is (or rather becomes during this introductory edition) a very feisty, plucky, and successful Lady Detective. She's of independent means, so she never charges for her services, and her cases frequently lean towards supporting the downtrodden. Having successfully and very speedily solved a jewel theft at a soirée she was attending in London, Phryne is asked if she would travel to Australia to uncover who might be poisoning. The TV shows starts with the Honorable Phryne Fisher arriving in Australia and taking up residence in a charming house. The book begins with the jewelery theft and then has Phryne travel to Melbourne, where her roots lie, and where she installs herself at the exclusive Windsor Hotel.

Phryne was originally of exceptionally humble means, and came into money (that story deserves telling, but it hasn't yet been told, to my knowledge), so while she thoroughly appreciates (indeed, luxuriates in) the amenities which money can bring, she has not lost sight of where she came from. Phryne knows Doctor Elizabeth MacMillan, an ex-pat Scot who dresses like a man and is as good as any one of them. She's a physician in a women's hospital and this is how Phryne learns of an abortionist (abortion was sadly illegal back then, even in Australia) known as the Mad Butcher, who like to rape his pregnant victims before he virtually kills them performing his 'surgery'.

Cec and Bert, two Aussie blokes who each have a share in a run-down taxi-cab, find themselves with a girl named Alice, post op and tossed into their cab, bleeding onto the seats. They rush her to the hospital, thereby saving Alice's life - just.

Meanwhile Phryne begins to socialize with a view to becoming intimately acquainted with Lydia Andrews, the poisoning victim. As if these two events are not enough, there's also the King of Snow - the cocaine dealer who has taken up residence in Melbourne with a view to making a killing in an untapped market.

Both the show and the novel have all these ingredients, and the end results are largely the same, but the details are different. In the show, Phryne ends up buying Bert and Cec a new cab to replace their cranky aging vehicle - on the understanding that they'll give her priority when she needs them, but she also, in the show, owns the gorgeous Hispano-Suiza that she drives, rather than just leases it for a week. Dot, her maid in the novel becomes a companion in the TV show.

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson is a much more important figure in the shows than ever he is in this novel, but perhaps, as the series progresses, his prominence will increase. Constable Hugh Collins is a non-entity in the first book, and Dot, his girl-friend, is unacquainted with him. Also Dot isn't the one who pretends she's looking for an abortion. This rôle is taken in the book, by WPC Jones, a female police officer. This is interesting because in the second series TV show Phryne mentions to jack that there are no female officers on force, a rôle which she fulfills independently!

To cut a great story short, I recommend both this and the TV show! My biggest complaint about these books is that you can't find them in the book store! I did find a couple in the local library and I am sure they're available on-line.

The Last Fairytale by Molly Greene

Title: The Last Fairytale
Author: Molly Greene
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with The Last Fairy Tale by Laura Dawn, or Last Fairy Tales by Edouard Laboulaye, The Last Fairytale: Rise of the Princesses by M'tain A Dubois, this last fairy tale is about Cambria Butler ("Bree"), who is a journalist, after a fashion, and on the night when she's heading out to interview someone, she runs into an old college friend named Gen Delacourt. The way her first name is used here suggests it's the pretentious form of Jen, but it's actually short for Genevieve. Gen has a "1950's physique"?!?!?! I have absolutely no idea what that means. Luckily for Bree, Gen happens to be a lawyer. Luckily, because when Bree arrives for her interview, the man she's supposed to interview in his office is dead, possibly murdered.

A complete jerk of a man (remember that for later) named Taylor Vonnegon (note that this is the kind of novel in which no main character can be cursed with having an ordinary name!), who worked with the deceased, finds her in the office looking at the body and verbally launches into her as though she just murdered him. Bree is treated like dirt by the police - improbably so, in fact, almost like a caricature or a parody. It took a lot to try and convince myself that the detective would be like this when it hadn't even yet been established that there was a murder. I failed. This behavior made no sense whatsoever.

Having Gen's card in her pocket from their earlier meeting allows Bree to call her with her legal predicament, and Gen immediately comes to her rescue. When Bree arrives home at her apartment that same evening, Vonnegon (remember this jerk?) is there waiting for her. He says he wants to apologize! Yep, this guy stalks her and lurks around waiting for her to get home rather than simply calling her, or leaving her alone and simply telling the police he was wrong about her, which would be the decent thing to do if you were actually not a self-important stalker dick.

And this isn't the worst part of this novel! Bree agrees to meet him for lunch the next day in order to get him to speak up for her to the police! Gen has no problem with this and she is Bree's legal counsel! So now he's blackmailing her and she still has no problem with him? He admits he knows she's innocent and he claims he wants to apologize and explain, but he's behaving like a complete dick.

Despite this, weak-kneed, sad-sack Bree caves-in to his blackmail and agrees to meet with him - the guy who could well be the murderer himself! I am not very fond of Bree or her smarts at this point, or of Gen's competence. Gen doesn't, for example, even think for recording the conversation with the man who could be instrumental in exonerating her client.

Had it not been for the goodwill the writer engendered in me by the writing she had displayed in the first few pages, I would have quit reading this then and there. As it was, it went downhill fast, and I couldn't get past chapter ten - about 25%. The author had been on probation from that earlier point onwards, and she violated it too often! I was rather desperately hoping that this would not be yet another novel which shows a woman who, despite being completely snow-plowed by a guy, falls in love with him anyway! This isn't a YA novel, it just plays one between the covers....

At the meeting, Vonnegon explains his behavior, but it doesn't constitute an excuse. It merely proves that he's still a dick. He starts out using his guests' first names, then unaccountably retreats to calling them "Miss...". Meanwhile It's painfully obvious that Bree is in love, or at least in lust with this jerk who treated her like dirt. Now she can see how cultured and wealthy he is, this evidently excuses his dickishness, so it's fine to fall in love with him because he's going to spoil her rotten with his riches, and after all, diamonds are a girls best friend, aren't they? Who needs hearts when you have diamonds with which this guy is going to club his mate, and get her spade, er spayed...? Vomitous maximus.

Bree's biggest problem was not the possibility that she could be arrested as a murder suspect, but that she was desperate for a relationship when she was no-way-in-hell actually ready for one emotionally. She's also too dumb to see that. That's what this story (judged by what I'd read by the time I quit at 25% in) was really all about, deep down. It's yet another story about a female character, written by a female author who is telling us that if you're a woman, you need a man to fix you and then validate you, and the best person to do that is the biggest dickhead of a guy that you can find as long as he's rich and studly-looking. How sad is that?

Bree's utter lack of smarts is repeatedly thrown in our faces. It's the lawyer who has to tell her that there's a story here, which she could write: one about murder and corporate espionage. Bree didn't have what it takes to see that. No wonder she's not a real journalist! We're told that she is a writer who does "Bios, press releases, newsletters, website content, ghost writing, book editor, blogs, social media." She evidently has no work at the moment, so how she manages to live the rather profligate lifestyle she pursues, swanning around doing nothing all day and eating out routinely, I have no idea.

Gen is no better. We're told she is a lawyer who chases straying husbands and finds lost pets. Her partner is a Secret service agent, who I am sure gets paid decently, but who is hardly paid richly, yet these two live in luxury. Gen evidently has no work either since she immediately starts working full time with Bree on this 'case' without blinking an eye, yet she lives like she does and eats out routinely without a hint of financial concerns. In fact, the conspicuous consumerism in this novel was not only beyond the pale, it was about two states over from that. It's sad to read about these people who (according to the author's lack of mention of same) never lift a finger for a good cause or a charity, yet they supposed to be the good guys?

It was depressing to have to read yet another story about a female main character as lame as Bree is: one who you know is never going to grow. Her life is going to stay exactly as it is until a guy fixes it for her. How convenient is it then, that in investigating all this, she will be required to spend copious time with Mr Dick Bucks?! And why is she even "investigating"? Yeah, she's writing a story, but that doesn't mean that she's a police detective for goodness sakes. Her name should have been Brie, she's so cheesy and soft.

The two of them begin their investigation by trying to dig into Vonnegon's past. They visit his neighborhood while he's at work, but apparently they've never heard of GPS, because they're using paper maps.... This is where the story was not only bad, but now began to be as boring as a manicured lawn, and I lost all interest in these characters and this mystery.

There was nothing going on, no real activity, no real investigation. Maybe it picked up after this, but in order to get me to read that far, you would have to get me engaged with these characters and I had no interest in them. I didn't even like them! I can't recommend it and I couldn't waste any more of my time with it when there are so many other novels out there waiting to be read, many of which I know will really move me.