Under Dark Skies by AJ Scudiere

Errata: "the Jeremy Kite incidence" I think the author means 'incident'. "He couldn’t figure it out." Should be ‘She couldn’t figure it out’

I am avowedly not into werewolf or vampire stories for the most part because they're far too cookie-cutter: each one is a clichéd clone of the last, especially if it's a YA story (which this blessedly is not). This particular one promised to be different and thankfully it started out quite differently, and I liked it very much, but the more I read, the less I liked it because it was so trudging and inauthentic, and although the author took a commendably different tack with the werewolf part of the story - which is something I advocate authors to do, but so rarely see - she fell down on the realism with regard to the FBI investigation over missing children.

One immediate problem with this narrative is that while it is thankfully not in first person, it is told alternatingly from the perspectives of the main two characters, which means tediously going over the same ground we already covered, but from the other protagonist's perspective. That became an irritant in short order, and led to me quickly skipping portions of the text where this happened.

One sad trope the author didn't skip I'm sorry to say, was the haunted backstory that I've seen done to death far too many times and of which I am so bored. Are there no detectives who don't have a haunted past? No PI's? No FBI agents? No CIA officers? LOL! Not in the fictional world there are not, and it is such a tired trope. FBI agent Eleri is a woman whose lost sister has haunted her for years (not literally). Donovan is a werewolf. Both work for the FBI division of Nightshade, although they may as well be regular FBI agents for all the part that 'nightshade' actually plays in this story.

Eleri is the experienced agent and she plays mentor to Donovan, who is a new recruit who was previously a medical examiner, so the pair are like Fox and Mulder from X-Files with genders reversed. Other than that, this isn't remotely like X-Files. It's simply a missing children story, so why nightshade division needed to be involved is a mystery. That said, I read only fifty percent of this before giving up on it, so I may have missed something more supernatural toward the end.

At one point they locate a dead body in a shallow grave and Eleri supposedly helps excavate the body, but I seriously doubt that an FBI field agent would be on her knees digging up a body when an expert forensic team is there. She would just get in the way and mess up stuff. I may be wrong - I'm not an FBI expert, but it just seemed off base to me. There were times reading this when it felt like the author was putting shit into the story just to show off how much research she'd done rather than getting on with the story. I don't appreciate it when authors do that. If you feel like some things need to be in there, then there are much more subtle ways of doing it than were exhibited here.

The story has it that children are going missing and it's connected to a religious cult called The Children of God, situated in a remote part of Texas, so the agents head down there and then hit such an unrealistic series of coincidences that it became too much. On top of that, there was a lethargy about raiding the cult's camp that was utterly insupportable. That's why I quit reading in the end. I guess the author did it to have a big showdown at the end, but it came off as just plain stupid.

So, first absurd coincidence is that while out reconnoitering the cult's compound as his werewolf self, by accident, Donovan encounters a kid called Joshua who has escaped the compound. He's bleeding badly from a wound apparently inflicted with the edge of a shovel, and he has a broken arm and bruises, and Donovan and Eleri take him to a hospital, but despite the kid's descriptions of the brutal life there, do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to sleep the night.

Second, and again purely by accident, they find a girl also from the camp, and who tells the same kind of stories about it that Joshua has told them. This girl is identified as one of the missing girls, and her story corroborates everything Joshua has already told them. She has also been badly treated. Do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to eat.

Next, and again purely by coincidence, they encounter a truck driver who has picked up one or two kids from the camp and helped them out. He corroborates a story about a girl from the camp who sought medical help at a hospital, and later was killed in the camp, according to Joshua. Do they raid the place? Hell no! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about the endless Texas heat. I'm sorry, but this is bullshit and piss-poor writing. This is thoroughly unrealistic and just stupid. It really turned me off the story and that's when I quit reading. It was too much.

I liked that Eleri's power was that she would dream true things and this helped the investigation, but there were still issues with this: in that she wasn't much more aggressive in finding her missing sister who she dreamed of often. There was a poor excuse made for why she didn't, but given that this supposedly haunted her for years, it made no sense that she hadn't pursued it when younger. I think that the young Eleri's quest to rescue her sister would have made a better story than this one turned out to be.

The werewolf part of the story I liked for the most part, but there were problems even with that. For example when he's investigating the compound, the author has Donovan's wolf sprint at over 30 mph for an hour, which isn't possible. Wolves can reach some 30 mph, but only in short bursts, and from the pseudo-scientific descriptions that are given, Donovan's change from human to wolf is a physical thing involving readjustment of his bones, which makes it seem like, rather than become a wolf, he's really a worst of both worlds wolf-human hybrid, and therefore he'd be hampered by his change, not enhanced by it. And no explanation is given for why two species as disparate as a dog and a human, would even remotely have a hybrid.

It's supposed to be through mutations, but given that canines and humans have not shared a common ancestor for well over forty million years, there's nothing to support even a fictional attempt to pretend there's any science involved in the hybrid. Plus, if two organisms can mate and successfully produce viable offpring, they're the same species, so this hybrid idea is nonsensical unless you keep it purely in the supernatural realm. You can't turn pure fiction into science. The idiot creationists learned that a good while back.

At one point the author has Donovan say, of his enhanced sense of smell, "I have a larger nasal cavity inside my head than most straight-up humans." He's trying to suggest this is why his sense of smell works so much better than most, but that's not actually how it works - not all of it. Dogs have a unique organ in the base of the nose called Jacobson's organ, for example, that humans do not have - or anything like it. They also have maybe as many as 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose whereas humans have some six million, so yes, having a large area for detecting smells is important, but it would be larger than any human has, and it's no good unless you have the brainpower to process that information.

Dogs devote 40 times more brainpower to processing smells than do humans. All of this ultimately goes back to your genetic complement. The olfactory receptor part of the vertebrate genome is the largest genome superfamily, signifying how important it is to us, and whereas humans have around 900 'smelling genes', rodents have almost twice that many. We have a lot that are broken and useless because they were no longer critical to our survival, so there was no evolutionary benefit to maintaining them, whereas dogs have a stunningly impressive ability to smell tiny concentrations of odor, so there's no doubt they have more functional genes in this department than we do. None of this is even mentioned in Donovan's 'explanation'. I felt more could have been done, or else the author needs to abandon any attempt to pretend there's any sort of rational scientific basis behind Donovan being a werewolf and just leave it in the supernatural.

As it was, I could have let those things slide, but the trudging and lethargic pace of the investigation, which led to me skipping parts of the narrative just to get past those bits, together with the absurd coincidences and lucky breaks, the obsession with inner monologues, with the Texas heat, and with dining and sleeping arrangements, and the complete lack of anyone's interest in raiding a cultist camp that was clearly abducting and abusing children and women was so ridiculous that I couldn't stand to read any more of this. I'm done with this series and with this author.

Demon Child by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum: "I'd given up hope of getting those big, fat kudos" - except that kudos is not a plural! Not all words that end in 'S' are plurals!

This is yet another of those idiotic supernatural books that simply embarrasses the author and not least because it's such a clone of every other such novel out there that it's pathetic and tedious to read. I always hope there will be something new, something likeable in stories like this, something different for a change, but there almost never is and it's really rather depressing. I detest novels where the main character is named Kat because that's almost as bad as using 'Jack' in a novel about a male main character, but authors named Kat? I don't have a problem with that! I did have a problem with the predictable, self-obsessed, and ultimately unrealistic and tedious first person voice.

Another problem with this novel was that the author so obviously and desperately wanted her main character (who is uninventively named Clem Star) to be such a badass and a sexual powerhouse that she was turned into a caricature rather than a character. In cases like this one, I honestly have to wonder how much of this is really about the character and how much of it is authorial wish-fulfillment or attempts to address feelings of insecurity or inadequacy when and author creates a super-heroic character like this one, who is supposed to be tough, sexual and the best there is, but ends up looking more like some silly and trashy superhero character from a badly-written comic book.

The saddest thing about Clem was that she brought nothing new to the table. She was exactly like every other urban fantasy character in stories of this nature. The 'brilliantly effective but down on her luck' character has been done to death. And it makes no sense. If she's so good, why is she out of work? And if demons are such a known problem in this city, why isn't there an official force created to deal with them - why is it left in private hands? But authors? Find a new shtick, please, because there's nothing original here. Worse than this, though, Clem was nasty and disgusting, lived like a pig and had no redeeming qualities. There was literally nothing about her that made me empathize, or want to like her even remotely.

She kills demons and evidently uses this 'power' she calls her 'sex thrall' to lure them in. Yawn. Once again we have a female author who is saying her character is nothing more than a sex doll, in effect. Sex is actuakly mentioned to a nauseating level in this novel. Why female writers so persistently and consistently do this to their female leads continues to defeat my understanding. By all means let her be sexual if you like. I have no problem with that; the problem arises when sexuality or beauty is all an author invests her with. Can we not have a smart main female character? I don't mean you endlessly describe her as smart and then have her do consistently dumb shit; I mean you show her as smart without ever having to tell us she is. I guess I'll have to keep looking for writers who offer such characters. Or just keep writing them myself and hope there are readers out here who get it.

So the problem for one-dimensional Clem, we're told, is that this new bad guy is a demon child so she can't use her sex thrall. Why not? I guess because the author is squeamish about a child and sex, but this isn't a human boy we're talking about. It's a murderous demon who is killing wantonly and en masse, yet all the while it's treated like a child. Apparently this demon was defeated once, but inexplicably not killed! Now it's loose again.

Nowhere - not in the bit I read before giving up because I didn't want to risk vomiting from reading more - was there any definition of exactly what a demon is and why fighting it is left to humans rather than ceded to angels or some other supernatural power. Again that's par for the course for dumb-ass stories like this, but it's still stupid. The main character tells us that "working for a vampire is strictly taboo" and disses vampires, saying they stink and are animals, and then immediately gets the hots for a vampire who comes to hire her to take on the demon child - the same vampire who attacked her not long before in a dark alley!

We were told the alley was dark, and she couldn't see the vamp, yet still she still chose to walk down it and apparently the light she was heading toward at the end of the alley actually lit nothing. This entire section about this attack made zero sense, and why on Earth would she melt for this vampire who had literally attacked and tried to abduct her? Why the vamps even need help form this woman goes unexplored and unexplained, of course. It was at that point that I quit because after all the dissing of vampires, like this author was finally going in a new and different direction, she swerved wright back to type by spewing out how sexual and beautiful this violent visitor was, that was it for me. Check please! I'm done!

This story was garbage which is sad because it was recycled. But then recycling only works for waste, not for writing novels.

Lost Library by Kate Baray

Rating: WARTY!

My mistake with this book - yet another dumb-ass YA series starter - was to fail to pay attention to the word 'quirky' in the book description. That word is almost always a warning that the novel will be garbage. So, my bad.

The next problem is that the main male character is called 'John'. This is almost as bad as 'Jack', the most over-used action character name ever - and is a sure sign that this book is to be avoided. I don't even recall how this came into my collection. It was just there and I'd evidently begun to read it some time ago, but when I dug back into it I realized why I hadn't continued past chapter six: it was so bad.

Another problem is that this is a shifter book, and with one or two very rare exceptions, I'm not really a fan of those at all. Contingent with this problem is that he's not called a werewolf, but a lycan. This is the same chickenshit approach that you see in fantasy books where the fairies are called fae because the author is too big of a coward to call them what they are. "It might lose me some sales!" Fuck the sales. Tell a story! Write a good novel, for pete's sake!

I read only enough to know this was bad and not worth my time. Other negative reviewers I subsequently discovered have derided the novel as boring, with which I agree, derivative, with which I also agree, and formulaic, with which I also agree! Most shifter books are though, so this is nothing new; the authors of these novels are a very incestuous community. One reviewer mentioned that the main charcter, Lizzie Smith, is a Mary Sue, which is never good.

One reviewer mentioned that the central premise of the novel - which from the description, is that John arrives at Lizzie's house looking for a magical book of power - is quickly shelved in favor of the main female fan-girling over the werewolf. I encountered this as soon as I began re-reading in chapter six, and read: "why was she acting like a crushing teen." Well, it's because the idiot author wrote her that way, duhh!

I about barfed at that and quit reading right there because I could see precisely where this story was going - into the garbage as most of these werewolf stories, all of which are evidently about women who are ovulating - do. There's nothing worse than reading about an alpha male and a bitch in heat, which is typically all that these stories are. Wish-fulfilment much? I'm done with this book and this author. Next please, right this way.

Justice Calling by Annie Bellet

Rating: WARTY!

I've read and reviewed five previous books from this author and liked them all, but this one? No. I do judge a book by its cover because I've seen so many where the cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the story it conceals. I can't say a lot about this cover model because I don't know for sure, but it looks once again like the cover illustrator maybe got the ethnicity wrong. Maybe. What I can say is that while the cover of this particular volume isn't bad, the covers for this series - from the ones I've seen - are downright exploitative, slutty, and insulting and I refuse to read any further on that basis alone.

The main character is supposed to be an American Crow Indian, so of course she's named Jade Crow like somehow we won't get it otherwise. There are two other American Indians also in the story but they don't get to be called Nez-Perce! Go figure. For some reason they have a Jewish-sounding names. This is the second character named Jade in the first six of these stories, which means there's a problem, and it's not just because of that. It's from the fact that six 'different' stories from six different authors have all somehow ended up sounding largely the same. This is what's known in literary circles as 'a very bad thing'.

So this is number 6 out of an introductory volume of seven stories by various authors. It felt more like number two. It's a shape-shifter story which is far from my favorite genre. The thing began going rapidly downhill from page three when the main male character showed up and was described as what I can only imagine had to be a pre-menstrual fantasy man: "...a Hollywood version of a Norse God. About six foot six with shaggy white-blond hair, features that a romance novel would call chiseled, and more lean muscle than a CrossFit junkie." No. It's you, Ms Author, who described him like this, not some romance author, so why are you describing him like a bad romance author would? I am so tired of this being the standard go-to description. Most guys don't look like this and it's insulting to guys to describe this appearance so consistently, like it's the only guy worth knowing. It's just as insulting as authors decribing women in equivalent shallow fashion.

Despite this and the severe misgivings it induced, I read on, only to have my worst fears confirmed about where this story was going, which was nowhere fast. It turns out this guy is a 'Justice of the Council of Nine'. What's that? The shifter supreme court? These sorts of novels always have councils. It's so tedious. Who gets to be on the council? Is there a shifter election? Or do they savagely fight it out and the alphas get to rule the weak? And why is there one single guy who gets to be "judge, jury, and executioner"? It's nonsensical. Especially given how whack this guy is. He blunders in, accusing Jade of being a murderer based on a vision. Seriously? Is this how he operates? Snap judgments without so much as an investigation? The guy is a dumbass, period. He's the male equivalent of the insulting and stereotypical blonde ditz.

I reached chapter three and read this: "My whole body, all my senses, was aware of the huge, handsome man only inches away from me." Seriously? This is after he unjusifiably accused her of being a murderer, and they'd gone next door to the Leprechaun's junk shop and found a stuffed fox which actually turned out to be the mom to one of Jade's friends. That was freaking hilarious to me, which I'm sure wasn't what the author intended. But after all this, all she has on her shallow mind is this huge handsome man? Fuck that shit. I ditched the novel right there and moved on to the next one in this increasingly sad collection. This particular story is garbage. Period.

Dark Angel by Christine Pope

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second of the series of intro books in a collection of seven of them that I've been reading lately, and for me this marks three strikes against this author.

This is a supernatural, urban fantasy, paranormal, whatever kind of a story, which is not something I'm that into, but once in a while I like to stretch and see what’s what in genres I donlt normally habituate. I'm always looking for a good, absorbing story, so while I held out little hope for this one, based on long and sad experience, I was open to something engaging me.

It wasn't this story that woudl do it! It turned me off from the start. First of all it’s worst person voice, and a sad and whiney first person this Angela character comes off to be, too. It made for a dreary and boring read, and I started skimming the pages almost right away. Nothing showed any sign of improving, so after about ten pages of this I gave up on it, and moved on to story three.

The set-up here is that Angela is part of a coven, and she's in her twenty-first year, which is when she's supposed to bond with a 'consort' to set her up for her future as head of the clan. Why a consort rather than a partner or a husband or whatever, goes unaddressed. Why a witch even needs a man at all is left unanswered, apart form vague hand-waving at the idea that this will ensure she comes into her full powers. What - a witch is uselsess without a man to trigger her? Shades of Grace Slick's Across the Board!

Why the 21st year is the magical one also goes wanting an explanation. So Angela is supposed to be this eventual coven leader, and she's a witch, but apparently it’s never crossed her mind, nor one single mind of the generations of witches that came and went prior to her that maybe, being a witch, she can find some spell to point her to her prospect? Apparently despite their witch powers, all of these morons just sit around all day singing "Some day my prince will come" or something like that. I guess. I'm sorry, but that is truly pathetic and I am not interested. Why are female authors so often the worst possible enemy to their female charcters? Wait is that enemy or enema? Does it even matter?

In Angela's case it’s all exacerbated because she's a special snowflake who has this recurring dream in which her man shows up, but she has no idea who he is. He's predictably tall and handsome - in this case also dark - with broad shoulders and all the other studly traits women apparently fantasize about bedding when approaching ovulation. The book description actually says that 'the clock is ticking,' which is even more pathetic. The opening pages were exactly what I’d expect from an author who wants to drag out an average story to wasteful serial lengths: slow, unimaginative, humdrum and boring. I cannot commend this one based on what I skimmed of it, unless you want a non-pharmaceutical means of putting yourself to sleep for the night.

Ill Wind by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad aka Rachel Caine aka Julie Fortune

Rating: WARTY!

This urban fantasy novel title shares my initials, and I have to live up to its title here, because, while the first time I read it, it wasn't great, neither was it awful, so I got the next two volumes thinking I might get into it. In some ways the story has a good premise, but in others, it's trope and cliché and I've moved on from that because of so many substandard and/or otherwise disappointing reads I've been through. I much prefer the road less-traveled these days because I've become so tired of reading the same old stories under supposedly different, but instead just are highly flimsy guises, and this novel is far from a road less traveled. So in the end it really was an Ill Wind for me.

It harks back to the ancient idea that there are four elements: air, earth, fire, and water, which is patent nonsense, but under this premise, the protagonist is a powerful weather warden (the series title). Weather wardens control the weather which means all of us ought to be really pissed-off with them, because they sure aren't doing much of a job. By that light, we ought to be extra pissed-off with Joanne Baldwin since she controls two of the four elements, and that, apparently, is rare.

Joanne is on the run from someone or something, and desperately trying to find her heroic guy to rescue her, and that 'damsel in distress' motif is a problem for me, especially since we don't learn very quickly exactly what she's supposed to have done, although the blurb talks of "accusations of corruption and murder." I have no clue exactly what it was she's supposed to have done because the story was not that memorable, and it's irrelevant anyway because you know for a fact it will turn out that she was set up.

But I gave up on the second reading far too early to get that information refreshed because I really didn't care to read it again. I don't even recall why it needed to be such a mystery except as a rather ham-fisted attempt to lure the reader on. It didn't lure me on as I recall. I was more interested in Joanne and her powers, but that interest was somewhat diluted by her desperate need of a St George.

So all I can say is that this didn't really do it the first time, and although I resolved - for whatever reason - to give it a chance, on closer examination, it failed. But what I lose on the read-about, the local library gains for its book carousel, so I can't complain too much! But I can't commend this either.

Daughter of Athena by A Rose

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata:
"She knew it would earn her a lecture from Jackson if the she ever saw Amara do that" - the 'she' should be a 'he' and the 'the' should be omitted.
"Its bright blue eyes glinted off the sun" - surely the other way around?!
"Amara tried to get up and move but found her hands, chained to the floor." That comma doesn't belong there. It should be placed after 'move'.
"Let me go, there is a dragon I need to slay," is a run-on sentence.

This novel is written in a rather innocent style which initially charmed me, but over time it became rather more disagreeable to read, and after about twenty percent I DNF'd it because this simplicity of writing wasn't entertaining me at all. I found that the narrative was superficial, with no history and no depth and often nonsensical, so it became far less charming as it went on, and I was asking questions which the story didn't seem interested in answering.

I couldn't have put it better than one reviewer who gave this a five-star review while telling us next-to-nothing about what it had done to earn those stars. In one part of the very short review, the reviewer said, "... Amara the dragonslayer hunts and kills a dragon and the story starts to unravel from there..." and that's exactly what it did: unravel. I rather suspect the reviewer meant to say it 'unfolded' from there, but what it really did was unravel, so she inadvertently got it right.

The story is set in a future post-apocalyptic world where, for reasons which go unexplained, Chicago, which was evidently burned to the ground by dragons, was rebuilt in stone, because dragons apparently can't melt stone, although this claim is overturned when shortly after the story begins, the main HQ of the dragon-slayer force is pretty much burned to the ground by a dragon, despite it being built from stone. Worse though, the story failed to address the fact that Chicago was largely built of stone to begin with - at least when it came to the main buildings downtown - since it is such an old city (by USA standards). It would hardly have been burned down as described. Yes, the newer stuff is glass and steel, but even that incorporates huge amounts of concrete (which is for all practical purposes, stone), and most of the older large buildings are stone, so none of this made sense to me.

It made less sense as to why the rebuilt Chicago would be renamed Athena. There is no precedent for this. If the story had been set in Athens, in Georgia, I could see it maybe being renamed Athena, although even that's a stretch, but renaming Chicago? The city was named after a wild onion that grew abundantly in that area, and has had that name since the late seventeenth century. There would need to be a really overwhelming reason to change it so drastically, and maybe that would even happen, but the problem is that we're not given any reason why it did happen, just the credibility-straining bare fact of the name change, and it doesn't work. It simply makes it seem whimsical and random.

There were lots of errors in the text, some of which I've documented above. There were other oddball issues such as when I read, "Even though Emery was attractive, she did not trust him." I don't get the connection there! Are we supposed to trust people just because they're attractive?! Why would his attractiveness (or otherwise) have any bearing on his trustworthiness?! At another point, I read, "Their bodies did not have scales in the drawings, making their skin look like that of a snake." Well, snakes actually do have scales! At another point I read, "...men took point in the front." Taking point quite literally means assuming an exposed position in front! It's a tautology to say that someone takes point in front! I quite understand that mistakes appear in novels. We've all been there, but the sheer number of them in this story was a major reason why the writing lost its charm for me.

A major problem with the future presented here is that this one city (Athena) is totally divorced from everywhere else in the world, like it's the only place that exists. It isn't, but it feels that way. This is all-too-often the problem with this type of novel. It's not been properly thought-through: the author has focused so tightly on the little story that unfolds in this one location, and hasn't given an ounce of thought to how this apocalyptic scenario would have played out on the world stage. This insularity: that only the USA matters, and in this case, that only this one city matters within the USA, is really a problem not just in this story, but in a much wider context of how a person's mind works. If you get into a mentality that none of the rest of the world is important, then it's a serious delusion that I'm not in favor of promoting, not even in fiction. On top of that, it makes for a very claustrophobic story. What happened to the government? The police forces? The military? We get no explanation. It's like all of that somehow disappeared along with the cities of old. It makes the story sound very artificial.

Related to this is the total isolation of one city from another. We're told that the area between cities is a wasteland where no one wants to live, but when Amara, the main character, is kidnapped, she's transported to a thriving community that exists within sight of the city. No one in the city ever noticed this? Despite this, and despite there still being people around from Amara's dragon enforcement bureau, or whatever it's called (I forget), no one traces the attack back to this community despite their use of 'Hummers' to travel back and forth on their attacks.

Worse, Amara never tries to escape despite being completely free to do so. She never attempts to report back to her people in the city and tell them what's going on, and we're given no good reason for this; yet we're expected to believe she's the best there is at what she does. She even participates in another attack on her own headquarters in which she takes part freely, and has no remorse about it! Her motivations do not work.

I didn't get the Hummers, either. The last Hummer rolled-off the production line in 2010. Are we to believe these gas-guzzling catastrophes were still hale and hearty almost a century later? That would be like driving the Ford Model T today as an everyday run-about rather than a classic car. It's too much of a stretch. Here's the thing: if everything that wasn't stone was razed to the ground, then so was all of the gas and oil infrastructure, so whence the gasoline that the Hummers run on? Where does it come from? Who processes it from oil - and where does the oil come from in the first place? How does this tiny community which kidnaps Amara, pay for itself? Hummers get only some ten miles or so to the gallon, maybe a little better at a relatively low speed on the highway, but not rumbling over rough terrain in a post-apocalyptic world, so they'd need a lot of gas, and it's like the gas magically appears from nowhere.

Maybe it does because there was another component of this story which was the magical abilities. Amara wasn't born. She was somehow created in a genetics lab, and endowed with special abilities. How magic was inbred into her is again unexplained, but what's worse is that she almost never uses her magical abilities, which are ill-defined to begin with. Maybe there are limitations on them, but we never know, since it's never specified what she can and cannot do. To judge from the endless times she seems unable to employ magic, it would seem that it's so limited and weak as to be pointless, so why include it at all? It doesn't help her fight dragons. It doesn't help her avoid being kidnapped, or to escape when she's briefly confined. It doesn't help her to solve any mystery she was faced with during her captivity in that first 20% of the novel. And she's supposed to be the best there is?

There's a weak love interest which, as usual in YA novels, has zero basis. We're offered no reason why Amara, genetically engineered so she isn't distracted from her dragon-slaying purpose by anything, including men, starts falling for this one guy. There's no reason for it. There could have been, if the story had had a little more depth. There could have been something about this guy which really resonated with Amara, but we're not given that or anything else to explain it, so the rationale wasn't there and the relationship is forced, as it is in nearly every YA story I've read.

At one point I read, "He had almost died in her arms, they were forever bonded from through experience and she couldn't leave without knowing he would be okay." In addition to being a run-on - and slightly nonsensical - sentence ("from through experience"?!), the problem here is that she barely knows this guy and has had her limited acquaintanceship with him for only a short time. There's no way she could realistically feel this way about him unless she's a moron, and especially not since she's genetically-programmed not to have such crushes!

The fact that she's genetically engineered is a problem in itself. Even today, we cannot genetically-engineer a healthy human let alone a super human, so how would this be possible in a post-apocalyptic world a mere eighty years into the future? How did such a devastated society manage to rebuild so quickly and get so far ahead of even where we are now? It makes no sense!

Maybe by now you can see my problem with this: the basic idea was great and the author has some real story-telling potential. I wish her all the best in her career, but no matter how good an idea is or how charming it starts out, if it keeps on racking-up one improbable assertion after another, as this one did, and if it fails to build a solid foundation, it's not going to win me over. This one faield to do that, and for the reasons I listed, I can't commend it as a worthy read.

There's No Place like Hell by Janis Hill

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I read an earlier novel by this author and liked it, so I was asked by the publisher if I would like to read another of her works for review and I accepted. Then I was shamefully lapse in getting to it, so this review is long overdue and I apologize for that, but I literally only just finished reading it. This is why it's first up on my June reviews.

The good news is that I commend the book as a worthy read! The bad news is that this is volume two of a series and I was not invited to read volume one, so I came into this blind. There are a lot of references to an earlier life in this novel, which made me think, even before I knew this was volume two, that there was a previous novel, but it wasn't necessary (at least not from my perspective) to have read that one in order to enjoy this one. It would have been nice had the cover at least mentioned it was part of a series though. Publishers seem almost abusively negligent of advising readers about that, and I have to say I resent it.

Overall, the novel was too long for my taste. I like 'em more pithy and I felt it could have been shortened and tightened, and would have made for a better read. There were also some grammatical errors which presumably will be removed next time the author gets to do a makeover of it. I list the ones I can remember below. Other than that, I enjoyed most of it. There were bits where it dragged, and I failed to see the point of resurrecting this character from the previous volume. For me he contributed nothing, but at least he wasn't a love interest, and I really appreciated that.

The main character, Stephanie Anders, is very much her own woman and not dependent upon some guy validating her, so I fully approve of a writer taking that approach. It's not that I object to a main female character having a love interest, or that I think it necessarily weakens the character to have one, but all-too-often this is what writers do to their women, especially in Young Adult novels. This author avoided that and I commend her for it. If the love interest is there solely to be the love interest, then lose him - or her. It spoils the novel for me; and if your main female character has a male character who smothers her, dominates her or otherwise detracts from her story, then I won't read your novel. I can't stand stories like that, so I'm glad this wasn't such a one.

In some ways this novel reminded me of Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston, not because the two novels are the same - they're very different - but because they share the same playful attitude and irreverence, and I like that, so even though this novel was first person - a voice I typically detest, it was very readable.

Stephanie works for the Egyptian deity Isis, helping protect souls from the dark side. Yes, this is one of those novels that insists there is and must be a balance between light and dark and also one in which humans have to do the work of gods and angels because apparently gods and angel aren't up to it. I never have understood why there had to be a balance (or why evil would agree to any such balance!), or why gods are so paradoxically weak and reliant on humans to do their dirty work, but in this case, again, the story was original enough and amusing enough that I was willing to let my loathing of this genre slide. So kudos to the author for drawing me in.

The main story here is that the man who instigated the split between Stephanie and her husband - something which still smarts - is now begging for her help after drunkenly selling his soul. It's a credit to Stephanie that she takes on this job rather than letting him slide into hell - and she seriously takes it on. Being the Protector of Souls she really can't refuse, but she goes into it full tilt and doesn't give up despite the odds being heavily stacked against her. She is deadly serious about her job.

I loved the humor, the original take on an old premise, and how inventive Stephanie is in doing her job. She's always skirting the edge of rule-breaking without technically going over the line, but being a woman what would she do but skirt? You can't trouser the rules! They're already trousered. This behavior naturally - or supernaturally - brings her grief and praise, but it also makes the reader a little nervous that maybe this time she's gone too far. I loved that - that she had a fine mind and it never stopped ticking, so this story was definitely a worthy read.

This book could have used a bit more proof-reading. Here are the errors I found:

"He is my weapon's instructor" - unless the guy was instructing the weapon rather than Stephanie, then he was her 'weapons' instructor - no apostrophe necessary!

"without the aid of Isis' Light I may add." Isis is a name, not a plural, so it needs an apostrophe s, not just the apostrophe: Isis's.

"who'd obviously heared all that stuff I'd not said out loud." 'Heard' has only one 'e'.

Demons do not breed to begat demons!" This was the wrong verb tense. It needs to read 'beget', not begat and don't you forgat it!.

But those didn't detract from enjoying the book at all, and I enjoyed it overall.

Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Max opened ajar of honey-covered peanuts" should be "a jar"
"I don't have a million pounds just lying around to fix my father's fuckup." - The amount is a hundred million pounds, so I don't know if this is in error or just a character misspeaking.
"she wouldn't upset Stevie by killing him." - the phrase should, I believe, be precisely the opposite: she would upset Stevie by killing him.
"I'm going to crack his jackal bones like kindle." should read " I'm going to crack his jackal bones like kindling." Let's not give Amazon's crappy app any more due than it's worth, which isn't much! Now if it had read "I'm going to crack his jackal bones like a Kindle device," I would have found that funny!
There was a section that read (in part) "...last few months, but they’re already booked through the first of the year.” that was all in Italics. I think the first word of that section, 'is', was intended to be in italics, but the rest of it was not.
There was a merged paragraph where the second person's speech ran into the first person's without having a paragraph break between them so it read, “Out.” “Fine.”
There was also a sentence which began with Or, and which should have had a question mark after it but didn't. I was too tired to copy & paste it at the time and when I tried to find that in Amazon's crappy Kindle app, I discovered that their crappy search engine isn't case specific so when I searched for "Or" it found a bizillion of them including examples such as 'door', 'before', 'woodworking', 'disorder, and on and on. It should be easy to find it in a word processor.
One last one I noticed which may or may not be a mistake. At one point there was mentioned a "duffel Dbag." I have no idea what this is. I've never heard of a duffel Dbag before, so I wonder if it might be a mistake?

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

So this hilarious story is about the MacKilligan sisters: Charlie, Max, and Stevie. They all have the same father, but each a different mother. They're all honey badger hybrid shifters, and all are dangerous and violent, or at least paranoid when off their meds - which at least two of them are taking. I had the opportunity to read a sneak preview back in September 2017, which turned out to be the prologue of this book. Normally I don't read prologues because they're useless and antiquated, but that was all I got back then, so I read it and I really liked the idea and the story.

I'm not a fan of urban fantasy stories or of series and this was both - at least I assume it's volume one in a series - and this is the first such volume I've read in a long time where I'd actually welcome a volume two. That's very high praise from me! For me in general, it's tedious to read stories of endless werewolves and vampires all looking the same, behaving the same, doing the same things over and over. It goes completely against my grain to read a paranormal romance - which are beyond tedious and well into laughable. This book skillfully avoided that trap and instead went for the humor and the action, and especially for the out-of-left-field off-the-wall situations and it was right up my alley. I would love to see a movie of this.

The market is glutted with bad paranormal and urban fantasy stores, most of which are boring cookie-cutter vomit, and few writers seem to have the smarts or the ability to move on and write something different. This author is definitely not in that category. I don't usually have much interest in shifter stories, but the idea of reading about honey badgers was very appealing to me. I was thrilled to get a chance to read the whole novel (minus the prologue!) and I enjoyed this one thoroughly because it was so different from the run of the mill uninventive werewolf and vampire romances. This one actually had a story! it also had a romance but thankfully that was not the point of the story and it was well written.

I have to say I am not a fan of prologues or epilogues and this book had both. I honestly do not get why authors don't simply label them chapter one and Chapter whatever-the-last-chapter-number-is. The very word 'epilogue' puts me to sleep. But I read this one and it was, in effect, the prologue to volume two. Please no more epilogues and prologues! But please, volume two!

Anyway...the MacKilligan trio's father is a shiftless shifter, a worthless piece of non-human trash, and no one knows it better than the MacKilligans themselves. When they learn that he's dead, they're thrilled by the prospect of identifying the body, but you know how this is going to turn out, right? He's alive, he has absconded with a hundred millions pounds from his Scots relatives, and they are after him, and after the MacKilligan sisters to find their father. Other people are also after them, either to recruit them because they're so violent and deadly, or to kill them because...they're so violent and deadly.

This is the world we're in and oh my, there are lions, and tigers, and bears! The MacKilligans are semi-adopted by the bears who provide some protection, but this doesn't protect them from the machinations of their father, who is as sneaky as he is dishonest, and the kind of man who would be willing even to sell his children if he thought he could come out ahead on the deal. But to put that in perspective, the MacKilligan family is widespread and not altogether properly hinged. And that's the nicest thing you can say about many of them; then there's the wedding...and cousin Dutch.

Fortunately, theres also Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan, who is equal to any challenge. And her half-sister Max, who is barely shy of psychotic, and who regularly has knock-down-drag-out fights with kid half-sister Stevie, a bona-fide genius who is completely paranoid. Especially of bears. But they're sisters, and no one better try to mess with them.

This was a really beautifully-realized world, populated with interesting individuals. Even the bad guys were fascinating and nuanced. If I had any complaints, I have to say the story was a little bit on the long side and I was somewhat disappointed it wasn't nicely wrapped-up after this volume. Also there seemed to be far too many shifters for the human population not to be completely aware of them. And I won't get into the biological issues of inter-species mating (if two animals - or plants! - can successfully mate, they're the same species!). The definition of a species is that it can't mate outside it's own species. Since this is paranormal, pretty much anything goes, but I always think it would be nice to have some sort of rationale behind it, no matter how hazy!

Like I said, not a fan of series, but I'd read volume two and follow this series if it maintained (as opposed to tainted) the high standards set in this novel. I'd even buy this volume in hardback just to have it on my shelf, so hopefully I don't have to spell out that I fully recommend this. It's one of the best books I've ever read and unquestionably the best novel I've read this year.

Solomon's Ring by Mary Jennifer Payne

Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
"Smith flexes a well-toned bicep" Once again YA authors, it's biceps! Unless you do happen to be speaking about only one of the two upper attachments of this muscle: the long head or the short head. I favor the long head myself....

The twin motif in novels, especially young adult novels, has been way overdone, so if you want to venture into it as a writer, you need to offer something truly different or inventive and unfortunately, this novel offered neither. To be perfectly fair, this was volume two in a series, and I have not read volume one, but this seemed like it stood alone fairly well if you were willing to accept that there was baggage from the past that you were not directly party to. But every new relationship is like that, right?!

My problem with it was the writing which felt very amateur. There was nothing technically wrong with it in terms of spelling errors or poor grammar and so on, but it just did not tell the tale well at all, and some of the story seemed so poorly thought-out that it felt like reading indifferent fan fiction.

If you're going to call-up children to do a job that would normally be done by adults, you'd better have a more solid reason for it than simply "Oh she's a special snowflake" and then get all coy about why it's so, and in book two no less. It's just an insult to your reader's intellect, or did you plan on writing only for dumb readers? It's a good question to ask yourself as and author: who are you talking to? And do you really want to talk down to them?

The stakes are higher when the story is a fantasy, especially a religious one, because if you're calling on humans to do a job that a god cannot do and angels cannot handle, then you'd better have a good reason for that too! I know the Bible has countless instances of humans being called on to do a job which God can't handle, but that's a sign of really poor fiction, not of a well-written classic. Just to put it out there - that these kids are needed to fight demons - and offer nothing to support that contention is either empty plotting or the cowardice of hiding behind scores of other poor writers who've employed precisely the same blinkered plot.

The twins had been separated (in volume one) one of them being thought dead, but she was just in Hades evidently, although it's not called that here. Here it has a cutesy hipster term that I prefer to forget. Anyway, her sister discovered where she was and rescued her and now they're back together, but demons are walking the Earth! Or at least the town where they live.

There is a curfew and there are power outages, and these two sixteen-year-olds are so dumb that they let themselves get talked into staying out until dark, which is apparently (and for reasons unexplained at least in the part I read) when demons are loose. Why the demons can't walk during the day is unexplained of course because this novel cowers behind trope. You're expected to swallow all these dumb 'rules', like not crossing running water and being allergic to iron, and so on because it's always done that way! Why would an author strive for originality and to up their game when they can take the road most traveled like everyone else does?

The demons are hunting one of the twins because she's your predictable YA special snowflake although no-one, predictably, will tell her why, not even her angelic best friend, predictably named Raphael. This is one of those tedious stories with all kinds of unnecessary secrecy and poor plotting. If a city was in that bad of a shape, the national guard would have been called out, but no! Everything is going along 'normally' despite the dire crisis, the curfew, and the murders in the streets. This made no sense whatsoever.

It made no sense that one of the twins would be armed with a bamboo pole to fight demons. We're told that bullets cannot kill these demons, but this made no sense either given that the demons were occupying frail human bodies. Why would decapitation work? How do you decapitate with a blunt bamboo pole anyway?

Even were I willing to grant all of that, especially given that I'd not read book one, I can't overlook that it made no sense that the police would not find something highly suspicious in a young, rather frail-looking girl magically decapitating an attacker with a bamboo pole! It made less sense that they would simply nod their heads and say "Oh, okay!" when told the bamboo pole had disappeared. Police are not dumb. They know a lot more than you do, yet far too many authors treat them like they're clueless clowns. For all the faults that police do have, I can't respect an author who depicts all of them as idiots.

It was at the point where Raphael was being all mysterious and for absolutely no reason whatsoever that I could not stand to read another world of this book. There are people no doubt who will whine that you cannot gauge a book after reading only ten percent of it, but that is an outright lie. A book either does it for you from the off, or it doesn't; it's either smartly-written or it isn't. A novel is with worth reading or it's not, and this one simply was not. Life is far too short to waste it on a book that does not launch for you right from the beginning.

This one seemed dedicated to employing great leaps of faith as a substitute for thoughtful writing and solid plotting, and it relied on so much hand-waving to cover plot holes that I could feel a chill from it. To me, that's a sign that you should whack it with a bamboo pole. Intelligent readers deserves a lot better than this. Other readers deserve what they get.

Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I can't honestly review this novel because all we were allowed was the first chapter! Due to a small oversight on my part I did not realize this, but based on that sole chapter, I was interested in reading more. The blurb was misleading though. The interaction between the shape-shifters: a bear (a guy of course) and a honey badger (a girl of course) bore only passing resemblance to what was described in that blurb.

I am not a fan of the vampire/werewolf stories so I normally would not have read this, but the fact that this was expressly not about wolves (which is a genre way-the-hell overdone these days), but about a bear and a badger made it more interesting to me. I'm a big advocate of authors taking that road less-traveled rather than trying to clone some other writer's work, and it pleased me that this author appears to be, too.

I have to say that the idea that a bullet hitting someone in the shoulder or arm could propel them over a balcony is preposterous! If you understand a little physics you know that those absurd gunfights in the movies and on TV, featuring grown men flying backwards after being hit is nonsensical. A bullet is so small and so fast that it will tear right through you barely if at all affecting your stance or your motion. Depending on the circumstances, you might not even notice you've been hit at first.

To paraphrase Golden Earring in their song Twilight Zone, you are likely going to know if the bullet hits a bone. It may break it, and that will cause you problems, but it still won't throw you dramatically backwards or toss you over a balcony, unless you happen to be precariously balancing on the balcony in the first place, in which case you might drop off it.

If you've seen the North Hollywood Bank of America robbery shootout from February 1997, which is admittedly grisly, you can see from it that when shot, the suspects do not go flying anywhere, and when killed, they simply drop to the ground. If you do not want to see that, it's perfectly understandable, in which case, I'd recommend watching the twelfth episode of Ray Donovan in the third season, where Ray has a shoot-out and is hit more than once. His reaction seems far more realistic than ninety percent of actors in standard TV or movie gunfights.

One thing which was a little confusing to me was the time of day that this opening chapter took place. I'd got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that it was very early morning - as in very late at night, but then we find there are school-children on the street, so I was confused, because we'd been told the streets were quiet, so I'd been thinking it was about three AM. Clearly it was not, but if it was late enough in the morning for school-kids to be out and about, how was it that the streets were so quiet, and how come a team of mercenaries could invade a hotel and not be seen and reported? And if the hit squad was specifically after Charlie (the honey-badger) then what were they doing at the grizzly's hotel room? he had no connection with her at that point. The author might want to rethink her setting and action a bit, or explain it better!

That and the irritating shortness of the sample aside, I have to admit the idea of three sisters in serious trouble and trying to figure out what's going on, sounds like a great idea for a story. As long as we don't get the grizzly bear always riding to the rescue of the poor helpless maidens in distress, like these girls can't handle themselves and need a man to validate them, which would simply ruin the story, I'd recommend it, based on the admittedly inadequate portion I had access to.

Greywalker by Kat Richardson

Rating: WARTY!

There's something like nine volumes of this series and that's nine too many in my opinion after listening to this first one. I could not make it through this book. This is another book which proves my point that if the things start going south in your read, there's no point whatsoever in gamely reading on in hope that it will get better.

It began with the tired premise that a person who has "died" and recovers (! - which actually means that they never died at all) comes back equipped with psychic powers. When is someone going to subvert that trope? So Harper Blane (I should have quit reading as soon as I read that this was the private detective's name - it sounds like a foot disease!) has this experience and finds she can enter the grey zone (seriously this is the best name you can come up with?) which is the zone between life and death, where ghosts and vampires live. Yes, and werewolves Everything was in here including the kitchen sink, which was more of an off-white zone with rust stains than grey, to be perfectly honest.

Harper is given two cases: one to track down a woman's college-student son, who has apparently disappeared, and the other to locate a pipe organ that was sold and went missing some years ago. Mia Barron doesn't do too bad of a job reading this, but her Irish accent was annoying and her voice for the missing student, Cameron, made him sound like Ash Ketchum from the Pokémon anime cartoons. Ash's real name was actually Satoshi, but why would we in the west respect that?!

I never was a fan of the cartoons. I thought the only purpose Pokémon served was to legitimize cruelty to animals, with these unlicensed and unsupervised jerks capturing critters and making them fight each other for their jailer's personal glory. Ash was supposed to be becoming the best trainer in the world, but he never trained anyone! He just made them fight all the time, and he wouldn't even let them fight in their own particular...(sigh) Concorde, "Idiom, sir?" Yes! That's it! Idiom!

In the real world, dog fighting will get you jail time, but in this world, it makes you famous. I have seen some episodes and for me the duo of Jessie and James were heroically amusing, and Misty was a feisty one, but Ash made me nauseous. I understand that team rocket retired in later episodes and were replaced by a limp facsimile, but to me the whole show was a limp facsimile of the real relationship one can have with a pet. To get back to the review, I found Cameron way more hilarious than I ever found him sad or pitiful precisely because he sounded just like Ash.

Event that I could have contended with, but the story just dragged on and on and on, with the author too frequently giving in to an obsessive details which were simply not interesting. I don't require a writer of sci-fi or fantasy to legitimize their story. they don't have to dome up with convincing explanations for why something works or why this is the way it is. Just tell your story and I'll go along with it. Unless of course, you bog it down in endless ruminations about The Grey as this one did. I was bored witless listening to that mindless drivel, and I took to skipping any tracks that dealt with the minutiae of The Grey, and any tracks that featured the Irish Witch. In the end I decided to skip all the rest of it because it was simply not getting ti done. I can't recommend this one.

The Accidental Demonslayer by Angie Fox

Rating: WARTY!

I liked the oddity of this story and the title, but when I began reading it, I ran into some issues. The first is that it's your usual cliché of the ignorant special snowflake coming into their power and knowledge of who they are. The main difference here is that the demon-slayer here isn't your usual wilting, vapory YA girl. Lizzie Brown is an older woman who teaches kindergarten. We still get the story in first person though, which can be annoying, but in this case, it wasn't awful. She lives alone (save for her Jack Russell Terrier dog), in a loft apartment and is an adopted child, her mother having given her up when she was a baby. So lots of trope. The differences were not only in her age, but also in that there was humor here, some of which missed the mark for me, but some of which was funny, such as when she tells her little dog "Feel free to protect me from butterflies, the vacuum cleaner, my hair dryer". I thought that was great.

On Lizzie's birthday, her grandmother shows up out of the blue riding a pink Harley Davidson motorbike, and she locks Lizzie in the bathroom. She's wanting Lizzie confined while the latter undergoes her slayer transformation. Why this happens when she turns thirty (or whatever age she is) is a mystery, and it's even more of a mystery why her grandmother locks her up and refuses to tell her anything - this again is tedious trope. What goes wrong though is that a demon shows up intent upon killing Lizzie, but it's told in more of a humorous vein than a dramatic or scary one. After this event is when Lizzie starts to get her education. She also realizes she can hear her dog - which talks like a frat boy rather than a dog might talk if it could - and which became annoying quite quickly, the occasional humorous comment notwithstanding.

The story really started sliding towards oblivion for me though, when the clichéd muscular, protective male showed up. I'm not a woman (I've never even played one on TV, believe it or not), but if I were a woman, I think I'd be a bit pissed-off with some stranger showing up trying to lay a claim on me and arguing with my grandmother about who has dibs on me! But the problem was much worse than that. Here we have this almighty demon-slayer, who comes along only once in three generations, and who is so scary to demons that they launch an orchestrated campaign to kill her off, and yet she needs protector? This immediately devalues her and renders her as little more than a maiden tied to a stake awaiting Saint George to come along and slay the dragon before he carries her off on his pretty charger (and by that I mean horse, nothing untoward!).

It felt like a betrayal to me. It's fine by me if she has a guy who is an equal partner, and it's also fine if, assuming it's done intelligently and realistically, they fall in love by the end of the story, but to set up this woman as some exceptional demon destroyer and then slap us (and her) in the face with "well, she's really just an air-headed and weak flibbertigibbet" is inexcusable.

It was at this point that I decided this book was not for me - or for anyone else who likes a smartly-written urban fantasy and female protagonists who have a healthy self-respect and are not in dire need of some abusive male to validate them. As soon as Dimitri (seriously? You couldn't come up with a better name than a Vampire Academy retread?) started asserting ownership of Lizzie, and literally manhandling her around - like dragging her into a corner to lecture her, and insisting she leave her bedroom window open so he can "talk to her later," and actually kissing her without so much as a by-your-leave - I'm leaving! Lizzie should have kicked him in his balls right there and then. She didn't. She's having palpitations and marveling at his muscles instead. He's just man-meat and she should have been marveling at the lack of muscle in his head. If you like moronic female leads, and guys who are outright dicks, then this is definitely for you. For me, I couldn't bear to read any more of this nonsense.

Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Paul Krueger

Rating: WORTHY!

This is yet another advance review copy from Net Galley for which I was really grateful! It's a mixed bag and you can only chose by blurb what you think will be a worthy read. Sometimes it feels like Christmas and you wonder whether you will get coal in your stocking, or a real gem. This was without question a gem of the finest cut. My only real quesitont o begin with was: who is the real author? Goodreads has two versions, one which credits authorship to Grady Hendrix and lists Paul Krueger as a contributor and this is listed as a "chaplet" whatever the heck that is. The one I read which gives Paul Kreuger the whole credit. Are they one and the same person? Is one an excerpt from the other - because it bears no resemblance to the actual Last Call! Who knows!

The real Last Call took off right from the start, grabbed me and ran with me. I sped through the chapters. It had a really interesting premise: that bartenders are really protectors of humanity from the demon world, and it's not a metaphor! By mixing and consuming the perfect cocktail, they can give themselves a range of temporary powers to fight real demons which are appropriately known as tremens, and which manifest in a variety of forms. Different cocktails lend different powers and the book contains recipes for various cocktails between chapters.

Kudos for making the main character Chinese-American. Bailey Chen was such a break from the trope young adult world of dystopian trilogies or ridiculous love stories featuring Mary Sue Wasp. She was smart, determined, inventive, amusing, and fearless despite her fears. Even as she was introduced to the world of demon-hunting, for which she had a real talent, she was still trying to do the sensible thing and protect her future with a decent day job.

I was into this from the start, but the real question was: was our main character, Bailey Chen? She was bar-tending as a temp job until should could get something in the hi-tech world, and even when she discovered this weird world of alcohol magic and demon-hunting, she was still pursuing her dream avidly, even as the demon world began to go sideways in that it was no longer the predictable world it had been. But Bailey was up to it.

I adored Bailey, and liked all three of her companions in this fight, although one of them temporarily was a dick. I would have loved to learn more about Mona, but then I always seems to be more intrigued by the companion than by the star! However, it was a close run thing here - too close to call because Bailey was kick-ass also.

I loved this novel (in a sweet platonic manner...) and I recommend it highly.

Weregirl by CD Bell

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not a fan of werewolf or vampire stories. The first because that genre has never actually interested me, and the second because vampires have become so larded with trope and cliché that they've become nauseatingly bland and ridiculously pathetic. This one was different in that first of all, the blurb writer got my interest, which is almost a miracle in itself, and the secondly, that the author made the story worth reading - as far as it went.

Note that the cover calls this a novel, but all I read was actually a novella (I'm guessing, without knowing the word-count). But you know, if Amazon is going to continue trying to force writers to sell novels at 99 cents a pop, like they involve no more work than a two or three minute song does, I don't blame authors for putting out shorter stories, or for releasing them the way they used to be released in the days of Arthur Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories: in episodic form. This one was not such a novel however. It was, as I learned after I had requested it, merely an introductory 100 pages from a four-hundred page novel, so the publishers actually made me DNF this! This review, therefore, is only of those first 100 pages.

The first thing I liked is that this wasn't told in first person. I'm tempted to build a shrine to author CD Bell for that. It would have been very easy to make that mistake and the fact that this author didn't is highly praise-worthy. The second good thing was the two main characters: Nessa and Bree, who were for me completely real and believable.

Nessa Kurland is a high school junior who is very much into cross-country running. She not only loves it, she needs it if she's to get a scholarship for college. While running one evening, she's bitten by a wolf, and over the next month she finds herself changing at first subtly, and then more scarily, until she can't deny that something embarrassingly and frighteningly weird has happened to her. Fortunately, Bree is a true friend and she begins to work with Nessa on handling this.

The story felt too thin. For a short story this would have been understandable, but for a four-hundred page novel, it's inexcusable. By 'thin' I mean there was not a lot of depth to it. It's written it like it's a first draft, getting all the essential elements down without adding any real atmosphere. I would like to have seen it a lot more fleshed-out, and by that I don't mean padding (which it evidently has if it's four hundred pages and is this skimpy), but filling in spare areas with some color and texture. The story also has a prolog which I skipped as I do all prologs. I've never regretted not reading one, nor missed it! If you don't think it's important enough to tell in chapter one or later, then I don't think it's worth reading!

For an example of the failure to flesh out, consider one of Nessa's fellow runners - a girl named Cynthia. Nessa is supposed to train with her one evening, but they miss their connection, and despite Nessa's wolf bite injury, there's nothing from Cynthia: no asking why she had not shown up on time the previous night, or asking after her health. There were several people I suspected of being the werewolf, but my prime suspect was this Cynthia, notwithstanding Nessa's inexplicable conviction that the werewolf was male.

Another such area is where Nessa wins a race but instead of hanging around at the end, she keeps running and disappears completely. There was a good reason for this, but there was no follow up to it. Any real event like that, where the record-breaking winner disappears afterwards, would caused a lot of suspicion! Maybe it wasn't Nessa, but someone else running, fraudulently pretending to be her? I can't go more into detail over this without giving away too many spoilers but this event was simply glossed over, as though there was nothing weird about it. Reality would have brought dire consequences: an investigation at the very least.

This was an advance review copy, and there were some grammatical problems with it, which I assume will be cleaned-up before actual release. There were some cases of a word missing from between two other words such as, for example, "The tooth from the wound" which should have presumably been: "The tooth came from the wound." Another was a case where 'here' was used when 'her' was meant. That's a really hard one to catch with a spellchecker! I normally list the errors I find in ARCs on my blog so an author can make use of the information if they wish, but Bluefire reader, on which I read this and which is otherwise an excellent app, makes it impossible to capture these errors. A final read-through will fix them though.

There were also occasional odd sentences, such as when Nessa walks by a garage and she can see "...a Toyota of some kind..." which sounded really strange. I think the author intended this to mean she recognized the make but not the model, but even if you don't know the model you can identify it as a car or a truck or an SUV or whatever. I think I would have just had it that she saw a Toyota pick-up or whatever it was. Or simply kept it completely neutral and said "...an SUV on a hydraulic lift..." or something along those lines. But that's just me! I also found it odd that it's copyrighted to Chooseco LLC rather than to CD Bell, but whatever!

When Nessa meets the 'shaman', the story lost a little something for me, not least because he was disgustingly racist. Also because he was precisely the trope male which turns me off these stories: chiseled muscles and so on. I thought at this point, "Nessa deserves a better dog kennel than the one that's being built for her here if this is to be her romantic interest!" Why this trope came to be associated with werewolves, which are not larded with bulky muscles (far from it!), is a mystery. It was also odd that Nessa feels, along with other physical improvements in stamina, hearing, and smell, her eyesight becoming acute. Dogs, including wolves (or conversely, wolves including dogs!), do not have great eyesight. They're most likely short-sighted, and are largely color-blind compared with humans. They do see better at night, and the reason they do is connected with their poor color vision.

It makes no sense for Nessa's sight to undergo the improvements it did. It should have become worse, except at night. You can argue that since she was hyperopic beforehand, then becoming more myopic could have corrected her vision, I guess, but that's a bit of a stretch. Wolves have a wider field of view, but poorer binocular vision than humans. So this super-powered vision is a trope which has no honest place in the cannon, although it has actually become cannon for this kind of tale. This random, nonsensical approach to telling werewolf stories is one of the reasons I'm not attracted to the genre. It's far too deus ex machina for someone like me, who thinks it would be nice if a potential writer of werewolf stories actually read-up on real wolves before they began their story instead of soaking their pages in the tainted water which they've blindly hauled-up from the well of trope that's been established by far too many YA authors of late.

So overall, based on one quarter of a novel, I can't recommend this. It started out great and drew me in, but as the story sailed on, particularly when the "shaman' appeared, it began to take on trope like a badly-holed ship takes on water, and this sunk the story for me! I don't any to read four hundred pages of this, and I can't recommend it based on what the publisher allowed me to read of it.

Seal Team 666 by Weston Ochse

Rating: WARTY!

This was a DNF for me and it seemed like a real waste of a great title. I think the first problem was that the novel had no good idea what it wanted to be: a fantasy/horror story, or a "procedural" special forces novel. I think it tripped up going back and forth between the two. I made it only 64 pages in, which I think was a fair shot, especially when nothing really happened in that time except the highly improbable - and I'm not even talking about the supernatural! I think I can add some observations and commentary here that I've not seen in other reviews, too.

Actually the first problem was with the main character's name. Do we honestly need yet another in a tediously long line of action adventure novels featuring a main character named Jack? Seriously? Are authors so lacking in imagination that they go to trope as soon as the starting pistol cracks? I am so sick of this clichéd name that I swore off reading any more novels which feature such a character. Somehow I managed to miss that with this one, but it self-corrected! A Navy Seal would not have made that dangerous mistake! Anyway, Jack is training to be a Seal (a contraction of SE_a, A_ir L_and). He's four weeks from finishing his SCUBA training (which is only one step in a long training schedule), yet he's pulled out of it by a redheaded woman (who was so obviously destined to be his 'squeeze' that it was pathetic) to join Seal Team 666. How four weeks from the end of a twenty-four week course counts as "half way" through is a mystery, especially when there was more to come, but I let that go since there were worse problems!

This is the worse problem: Jack's specialty is as a sniper. Seal teams count not only on toughness and skill, but also on extensive mission practice leading to working together as a finely-tuned machine. You do not throw a new guy in there right as a mission is setting out! I am not militarily trained, so this is a pure guess on my part, but my guess is that a team like this would rather go one man short than bring in a brand new guy they never even met before, let alone trained with for this specific mission. I think this is especially true when that guy's specialty is sniping and no sniper is needed for this! It wasn't like he had something critical to bring, so this made absolutely no sense at all to me, because it presented such a ripe opportunity to get one or more of the team killed because of some misstep or miscue. I cannot see how this would have been countenanced.

They were operating on US soil, too, which seemed even more odd. The author justified it by saying that there is no police SWAT team trained to deal with the supernatural, but they really were not dealing with the supernatural - they were simply gathering intelligence from some Chinese guys who they knew were in this building. It was at this point in the story where the author wrote: "Walker had been watching the Chinaman's eyes." Does that sound a bit racist to you?

I talked with a couple of people (neither of whom is Chinese!) about this, and they didn't think it was any big deal, but to me it sounded off at best, and racist at worst. If this was someone's speech in the story, I can see how he might say something like that. Even the narrator might say it if the novel was told in first person PoV, but for a writer to put that in the narration when it's third person and not part of some character's speech, seems off to me. This guy who writes this used to be army intelligence which might explain a lot. He's now, apparently, defense intelligence, which also might explain a lot. It just seemed strange.

Aside from that, the story was just not interesting. The author seemed far more attached to spewing Tom Clancy-style technical descriptions than ever he was in telling a cool story about military men facing off against the supernatural. He couldn't simply say, for example, "he cleaned his gun" or "he fired his pistol" without providing a mini-description of the weapon every time. It had to be, "he cleaned his Super 90" or "he fired his MP5", which quickly became tedious in short order and irritating right afterwards. Here's one example of a partial paragraph so you get the boring idea:

And also like the M16 and the AR15, the Stoner used a gas-impingement system to automatically move the bolt back and forth, enabling semiautomatic fire down the twenty-inch barrel. Rather than the regular floating barrel, the Stoner was reworked to incorporate the URX 11 Picatiny-Weaver Rail System, allowing for better application of any mounted hardware such as laser sights, telescopic sights, reflexive sights, tactical lights and forward grips.

Now I don't doubt that there are readers out there who like stories larded with this techno-jargon, but I really don't care about it and it gets annoying when it looks like the author is more interested in showing off how much research he did, than in moving the story along nicely. It failed to grab me and I decided after a very short debate, that there were far too many other books out there begging to be read, for me to waste any more of my time on one which doesn't thrill me from the outset. This is the start of a series, and I sure didn't want to read any more of this one volume let alone another one like it.

Asura Girl by Otaro Maijo

Title: Asura Girl
Author: Otaro Maijo
Publisher: Haikasoru
Rating: WARTY!

Translated by Stephen Snyder (no website found).

This story started out strongly and had some really fascinating and amusing moments when Aiko would go off at a tangent on some rant or another about something she had encountered. Unfortunately those were few and far between, and the further I read into this novel the less I liked it.

The big disappearance (Sano) that seemed to be driving the plot at the beginning simply fizzled out and went nowhere, and there seemed to be an increasing number of pages devoted to Aiko's dreams, all of which I skipped because I can't stand writers who write pointless and fatuous pages about a character's dreams. If the dream is somehow tightly-tied into the story, then fine. For example, if the character is psychic or is being communicated with in her sleep, then this would work, but that's not here. It was nothing more than self-indulgent, extravagant, and a waste of time. I skipped those pages.

I reached a point about two-thirds the way through or maybe less, where I really didn't want to read any more of this because it had lost all its interest for me, so I gave it up. Life is way too short to keep gamely plodding through a story that's not doing you any good, when there are countless other volumes out there which are just waiting to be read and which promise to thrill you. I can't recommend this novel.

Karma by Donna Augustine

Title: Karma
Author: Donna Augustine
Publisher: Strong Hold Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"loosing" should be "losing" (12% in)
"Battlestar Gallactica" should be "Battlestar Galactica" (chapters 6 & 8)

Well today's the eleventh of December so this must be the day I post a review of a novel beginning with 'K'!

This is book one in the "Karma" series, of course, because, why go to all the trouble of giving birth to a potential new cash cow when you can keep on milking the old? I started out thinking that I really wasn't going to like this, then I warmed to it, but nowhere near enough to want to keep reading more of the same.

The premise is rather juvenile. Twenty-seven-year-old Camilla Fontaine dies in a train wreck (a literal one) and finds she's being recruited by Harold, who is the Mr Jordan of this story. Harold thinks she's perfect for taking over the role of Karma - the celestial being which is responsible for seeing that everyone gets their just deserts. Of course there is no such thing in real life because life isn't fair. There is nothing out there keeping accounts or maintaining balances.

The problem in this story is that Camilla/Karma is a transfer - someone recruited from the newly dead, rather than being a lifelong inductee, and fate isn't kind to such recruits, particularly the Hand of Fate - the guy with whom she must work. It's so nauseatingly obvious from her completely unjustified and over-the-top hatred of him, that she will be falling in love with him before long which was frankly rather sickening to me.

I have to say that I'm not a big fan (actually I'm not a fan at all, with few exceptions) of supernatural novels where the supernatural world is exactly like ours except supernatural. That is to say, it turns me off to read a vampire novel (which I purposefully try to avoid for just this reason), where there is a royalty - with king vampire and/or queen vampire, and princes and sheriffs, etc. One of the weaknesses of the Harry Potter series for me was the Ministry of Magic and all the laws and rules and the farcical policing.

To me, that was completely nonsensical, trite and tedious, and it kept reminding me I was reading a novel, pulling me out of suspension of disbelief, but at least Rowling seemed to realize this, and made an effort to put some absurdity and humor in there to make it just about palatable. I've read too many other stories (including one last month) where this kind of thing goes on mindlessly and it's ridiculous, for example, in how the supernatural investigator comes back to the office and has to fill out paperwork. I'm like, what? What paperwork? Who is asking for this?! What possible purpose can it serve? It's stupid.

Back to the story in progress! So here, Karma - whose real name is Camilla, but who is renamed Carma (seriously?) when she's reincarnated - works in an office, lives in a beach house, drives to work in an old car. No one tells her squat, so she's completely in the dark. Even though she changes her mind about doing this job, it's because of formalities and paperwork that she can't get out of it immediately and has to work for thirty days. Since this is a series, we know for a fact that she's going to stay in the job, so this was farcical at best.

Day after day goes by with no one telling her anything. I mean people literally don't say anything to her except "Hi!" and "Bye!" She gets no training whatsoever despite being a 'transfer' who quite evidently needs it. She keeps getting told that she'll have to wait and she will know when it's her time to do anything, but she's given absolutely no clues whatsoever about what's going on, what she might expect, and what she might have to do about it. This is dumb because we're told the job of the people in the office is to correct imbalances caused when the universe forgets to maintain a balance by itself, yet it's the universe - evidently - which notifies her when it's her time to intervene. Huh?

She shares the drab office with several other such beings: the Hand of Fate (who is a complete jerk, and creepy to boot), Lady Luck, the Jinx triplets (who are really teenage brothers), a leprechaun, Murphy of Murphy's Law, Kitty, who is in charge of the black cats, and so on. None of them seem to do anything. Given that there are seven billion people on the planet, I find it hard to believe there isn't more to do - unless there are offices like this all over the country, and all over the world.

OTOH, if the universe is so good at doing this that there's is so little to do, what does it matter if one slips through the cracks here and there? What harm does it do? Again, no explanation! Why does there even need to be a balance? There's no explanation for that either. I wouldn't mind the office and the paperwork, and the rules and regulations so much if I were offered some sort of justification, or if some attempt was made to make them make some sense, but none is. This is a classic example of a really good plot idea thrown down the toilet with piss-poor execution.

Karma's first task comes in the form of a dream about a bad guy who has, through several incarnations we're told, cheated and otherwise been very naughty. Apparently neither the universe nor previous incarnations of Karma did squat about him - so why is it suddenly important now? Again, no explanation is forthcoming. The current Karma's home-grown solution is to put a wild bee's nest in his car, so that he dies from stings. How does this correct all the evil he's done over several incarnations? I have no idea, and neither does the author as far as I can see! It doesn't actually fix anything. None of the people who he screwed-over gets a thing out of this, so how is this even Karma (in the sense intended here)? There is no justice served, no balance restored.

It makes no sense either, to have a "Karma" to restore balance and to simultaneously have a "Murphy", to upset the balance. How the heck is that supposed to work? What happens if Fate and Karma are at odds? Who decides who wins?

It was at this point that I found myself thinking that I honestly didn't know how much more of this I wanted to read. Camilla agreed to join the organization because she wanted revenge - but that's the very opposite of how one is supposed to approach the concept of Karma! Someone, we're told, purposefully caused the train-wreck which killed her, so why didn't Fate step in then? There's no explanation for that, either!

Karma initially starts out, after being rein-Karma-ted trying to visit her family and fiancé, but she can't. Whenever she gets near them, she gets horrible feelings that they're going to die. They can't hear what she's saying anyway. It's like she's only partly visible in her old world. She can go to a café and order coffee, but no one sees her dump the bee's nest in the car, and she doesn't get stung even once from doing this. She's initially brought in with the promise of getting justice for the train wreck; then she's denied it, and finally she's offered it again. How does any of this roller-coaster contribute to restoring balance to the universe?

This business of karma (not Karma!) makes no sense, especially in view of how it's depicted in this novel. The Indian idea of karma is that your actions dictate your future; bad acts make for a bad person and vice-versa. Duhh! It's hardly sublime! The problem is that this is popularly taken to mean that if you do something bad, then something bad will happen to you in return, and vice-versa, but this is a very blinkered view, and it really makes no sense, especially in a western civilization where reincarnation is not considered an option. It makes even less sense if it's being forcefully controlled as this novel suggests! Around 40% into reading this, it made even less sense, as I shall discuss shortly.

Looked at from another angle, I couldn't help but wonder what was going to happen to Carma for all the bad stuff she was perpetrating here. She was a lawyer, but she was a public defender, so does this mean she has dharma and punya for helping disenfranchised individuals to have a voice and find justice, or does it mean that she's larding herself up with adharma and pap because she has helped bad people to avoid justice?!

Taken to its logical conclusion, why is it so focused on bad stuff? If the bad stuff has to be balanced out, then doesn't the good stuff also? If you do something good, then "logically" shouldn't something bad happen to balance it out?! This is the problem with religious beliefs. They don't lend themselves to rational analysis, because once you do that, they fall apart completely.

I decided I was pretty much done with this story at this point. This is where Karma - against express instructions, kills a guy who is abusing his wife, thereby preventing him from killing her. She was supposed to have got his wife's blood on his clothes, thereby implicating him so he'd be arrested, but she lost her cool, and she done him in!

Here's the first problem with that: isn't she supposed to be in charge and do what she thinks is best? This is what we were told about her. Yet when she does precisely this, the weather changes to thunder, lightning and rain?! The universe is pissed off? How? If the universe missed correcting this, then how can that same universe declare what's to be done? Why would it even care? If it knows what's to be done, how can this be considered to be a case which slipped through the cracks? None of this makes any sense.

That's not even the worst part, and the juxtaposition of the abusive husband with Karma's next actions is completely ironical at best and downright criminally insane at worst. Here we have Karma going full throttle to seek justice in the case of an abusive guy and his wife, and next she's making out with Fate, who has done nothing but abuse her from the off?

Can no one see the hypocrisy of this paradox? Admittedly Fate had not beaten her up or anything like that, but he had physically (if in minor ways) and mentally (in major ways) abused her, and she has the hots for him? I'm sorry but this is entirely the wrong message to send to female readers and that's why I am rating this book WARTY! I've seen this in too many young adult novels, and though this isn't one of those per se, it's clearly aimed at adults who are at the young end of that range.

I can't condone a book which tells women of any age that it's okay to 'put up' with domination (in the broadest sense) and outright abuse, and as if that alone isn't bad enough, that as a young woman, you should be more than willing to lay down and open your legs for abusive partners, and fall in love with them too, if they require it. It's sick, and Donna Augustine and her publisher should be ashamed of themselves for purveying inappropriate and sick trash like this.