Grayson Manor Haunting by Cheryl Bradshaw

Rating: WARTY!

This is the starter for a series - as per usual, but I didn't even want to finish reading this one, let alone embark upon a series based on uninteresting characters and retreaded plots. Besides, how is Addison going to proceed? She keeps inheriting a house in each new volume, all of them are haunted, and she solves each haunting? LOL! Yawn.

The story was so larded with trope and cliché that it became completely uninteresting. There was no mystery because all of this has been done countless times before in every haunted house story ever written, and it's the same old crap where the ghosts are so tight with revealing the problem that it's annoying. Why is every ghost so coy? Why are clues so meagerly distributed? Why are the ghosts so reticent to start with, and then increasingly social? It's farcical and irritating.

Of course Addison is the girl in distress and the trope 'hunky guy' is the one working on fixing up her house, but the guy is such an interfering creep that he turned me right off. The fact that Addison saw nothing wrong with his stalker-ish behavior tells me she's a moron. I have no interest in reading another female-penned asinine YA novel about a idiotic and tedious main female character. Even the title is tedious.

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.

Murder in the South of France by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

Rating: WARTY!

I knew this novel was not for me when I read, "He was actually quite handsome, Maggie realized with surprise." What I realized with no surprise is that it was actually quite the contrary: it's entirely predictable that this single woman would meet a guy - two in fact, each better than the last - so no. No surprise at all. Not in a novel like this, written by a female author who seems to think a woman needs to be validated by a man in every novel she writes.

No, that's not my invention, it's apparently the view of the book description writer who predictably gets it wrong: "Maggie Newberry is sheltered, privileged but also a whip-smart" No, she isn't! Would a whip-smart person hand over €30,000 to a man she just met and has never seen, without - at the very least - asking for some sort of ID and a receipt?

Nope! "Whip-smart" just hands it over, no questions asked. "Fast on her feet" is a complete misdirection since the story moves with a glacial pace. But that she's "a little stunned to realize that she's 34 years old and still hasn't found 'the one' " is what supports my contention above. Maggie is a desperate woman created by yet another female author who thinks every woman needs a man to validate her.

The story is that Maggie's "long-missing sister" Elise turns up dead in France, apparently shot in the head and dumped into water. Maggie is tasked with going to identify the body and also to take the money to pay off this shady guy who claims he can kidnap Elise's daughter, Maggie's niece, from her father and get her into the USA on a fake passport, and Maggie has no issue whatsoever with any of this. She has zero thought for the child's welfare or what's actually best for her niece. Instead, she takes her cue entirely from these shady guys she's only just met.

I didn't like Maggie from the very start, or how she was introduced in a tedious info-dump. And how she explained - to the French officials at customs - all that money is glossed over. Just like the Americans, the French take an interest in anything over ten thousand currency units. How did Maggie get that amount of money so quickly? Yes, it was from her father, but if she didn't take it with her, then how did she get that much from a French bank at short notice? If she did take it with her, how did her father lay his hands on that much cash at short notice? No explanation is offered.

I understood even less why the author set the novel in France and then proceeded to diss French men! Main character Maggie is predictably paired with a guy who's described as "Broad chested and tall, he was easily six foot four which was unusual for a Frenchman." This is horseshit. The average Frenchman is taller than the average American and right on par, to within an inch or so, of every other male in the western world. The French men's basketball team in the 2021 Olympics, for example, was two inches taller than the US team on average. So no, a six foot four male in France isn't unusual, jackass.

For an author who is supposedly a Francophile, you'd think she'd know this. You'd think she'd know about France. You'd think she'd know French. That this is a "TOTALLY NEW AND REVISED EDITION!" suggests it required work even after it was first published, but rest assured, it still needs work. My question here though, is: why did it need to be totally new and revised? What was wrong with it before? And why was it published in that condition?

Why Maggie has to go and identify a corpse that's bloated beyond recognition from submersion in water, when the DNA has already been confirmed is also a mystery, but a bigger mystery is how did they obtain the DNA sample against which the corpse's DNA was verified? And how were they able to do it so quickly? Again, the author says not a word about that. So by this point, barely into the story at all, I was already tired of the clichéd writing and the poor plotting and I detested the main character, so there was no point whatsoever in reading on. This novel sucks shit like a starving fly, and I sure as hell have no intention whatsoever of reading a whole series about this dickhead. Slap a Newber(r)y on it! LOL!

The Kerrigan Kids Box Set Books 1-3 by WJ May

Rating: WARTY!

This is where I quit reading this garbage: "Oliver Jack. If there was one thing she didn't miss this summer, it was the inescapable flirtation of Oliver Jack. Never trust a guy with two first names. No matter how cute he was." At that exact moment I could see exactly where this was going and it sure as hell wasn't anywhere near where I was interested in traveling.

That wasn't very far into the story at all, and I've seriously been wondering lately if I should just quit reading female-authored novels altogether. I'd hate to do that, but it seems like it's becoming ever-harder to find a female-authored novel that isn't sticky with sugar, as well filled with trope to the wazoo, and cliché galore. It's truly nauseating. The problem is that male authors don't do any better. Male-authored books are too often way over into macho end of the spectrum in the same way that female authored novels are way too sappy. Is there no one writing in the middle for readers like me? Is it time to start reading authors somewhere else along the gender spectrum? I can tell you from personal experience that really good writers are few and far between.

This story rubbed me up the wrong way from the start. I wasn't long into it when I read for example, "It had touched down somewhere in Kent, never to be seen again." - but the question is, if it had never been seen again, how did they know where it landed? And yeah, it's a minor thing, but when you get a string of minor things, they all add up to a major problem. Surprisingly, this was not first person, which would have made it horrendously barf-worthy, but it was about a bunch of privileged high-schoolers not only flaunting, but reveling in their privilege. Yuk!

Even so I was willing to read on at least a little to see what this author would do with it, but she did precisely what most every other YA author does with their cookie-cutter clone of this kind of a story: make it about a weak woman under the thrall of a domineering and way too hands on 'hot' male that she claims she hates, but who you know she's already melting for like ice cream on an August sidewalk in Texas.

In this case the guy physically grabbed her wrist to stop her paying for her purchase and insisted he would pay for it, so there's the inappropriate touching and the "I'm the alpha male and you are my woman" horseshit right there, and this girl is such a dumb fuck that she sees nothing wrong with this assault. I was out of there from that point on because I could see then precisely where this was headed, and like I said, it sure wasn't any place I wanted to follow. I don't mind a novel where a woman starts out weak and grows strong, or starts out dumb and wises-up, but I could tell from the idiotic way this was written that there was no way in hell any of that would happen here, not with a main character named Aria. This book is shit, period. I didn't want to continue reading volume one let alone two more shit books just like it.

True Colors by Melissa Pearl

Rating: WARTY!

Paradoxically the first volume in a series called "masks" this idiotic and utterly predictable story is another example of YA at its worst. It's first person so the main character is unnaturally describing herself with ridiculous terms from the off: "I patted the back pocket of my pale denim, skinny jeans." Nobody talks like that. When did your friend last say to you "I thought I'd lost my phone so I patted the back pocket of my pale denim, skinny jeans"? It's idiotic, inauthentic and completely unnatural. It sounds so fake and self-obsessed and snotty, that it's nauseating.

Here's another: "I ran my hands through my long curls" Barf! If the author can't put in better descriptions than this (and forget the tired trope of looking in a mirror) then she needs to find another profession. Maybe a fashion runway commentator? Here's another: "I should have gone back in to find a handbag. Every girl in the world seemed to wear them" Since when do you 'wear' a handbag?

The last straw was this tired bitch-in-heat trope: "I tried not to look, but couldn't help stealing a few furtive glimpses as he got out of his black Jeep shirtless and reached for the surfboard attached to the roll bars. His straight hair was wet, droplets hanging from the long ends before dripping onto his shoulders. I watched one droplet glide over his hard chest and perfect abs and couldn't help scraping my teeth over my bottom lip." Barf.

Because every girl is constantly desperate and needy for a man, and only one kind of man will ever do. Good luck with getting guys to respect girls when female authors are routinely putting this shit out there in a steady regular diet telling guys who can't think for themselves that every young girl desperately wants them, right now, and the most physical way possible. And why is his hair still dripping water? Is the beach next door? Or did it rain on the way home? And what the fuck difference does it make what color his jeep is?

This is one of the worst examples of a generally poorly-written genre, and no. Just no. Warty to the max. These colors are about as tired and faded as you can get.

Blow the Bloody Doors off by Michael Caine

Rating: WORTHY!

Michael Caine's autobiography is read by himself in the audiobook version and it was interesting, informative, and laugh-out-loud funny on occasion. I confess some slight disappointment that he doesn't talk more about the making of the various films he's been in. He does talk a lot about them, but his approach every time seems to be to focus on the elements which would help aspiring actors: offering tidbits and advice, and lessons he's learned, which is great, but I felt like he wasn't really talking to me, somehow.

I don't regret buying the book though - it's well worth listening to if you like him as an actor or are interested in the movie business. He covers his life from birth through youth to his first interest in the movies and thence onto his career: how there was a struggle and then how it took off once he'd made two relatively early and successful movies where he had major roles, such as Zulu in 1964 and Alfie two years later. This brought him to international recognition, and got him a lot more choice roles, and brought him into the world of movie superstars with all the attendant pleasures and problems.

Throughout the book the author remains grounded, good humored, and informative. He has no illusions about the movie business and tells it like it is - the good parts and the bad parts. He offers a lot of information and advice, and jumps from one move to another to make a point or illustrate an aspect of his life or his career. I'd have liked a lot more depth and breadth in his discussions of the movies, but I did appreciate what was offered. I enjoyed this book very much and commend it as a worthy read.

ExtraOrdinary by Danielle K Girl

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "Jack text them around ten to say it was going to be a long night." Texted is the word!

"From above comes a drawn out scrapping sound, like someone is hauling a piece of furniture across the room." 'scraping', not 'scrapping'!

"sweeping view of the properties carefully maintained gardens." 'property's' not 'properties'

" 'You can fly.' Ryder cringes at the high pitch of her voice" This is after Ryder has already seen Olessia float down from an upper storey, clearly demonstrating that she can fly.

"I’m going to have a shower and catch an hours sleep before we start thinking about getting you into town, okay?" Hour’s sleep!

This novel was a true disappointment because it began by pressing all the right buttons for me: faking like it was a ghost story and then slyly morphing into something much more interesting, but it quickly pissed me off by having such a limp main character in Ryder, who was a squealy, idiotic, spineless, unappealing, and uninteresting little shit. On top of that, it brought in such a trope manly male character for her that I laughed out loud.

IRL, this guy would have zero interest in a little wet rag of a wuss like Ryder, but you know from the way the author describes him and Ryder's reaction to him that the telegraph message of the day is: these two will be all over each other like white on the Republican party. Barf. I quit reading at that point because I knew exactly where this novel was going and I had no intention of being its traveling companion. I knew just how it would turn out, too. It wasn't going to be sci-fi story I'd begun to root for; it was about to be taken over by a dumb-ass romance between these two jackasses. No thanks!

I found, as unfortunately happens all-too-often in these stories, that Ryder's best friend Sophie was far more enagaging and interesting than Ryder ever could be, and I knew with equal certainty that the author never would give Sophie a fair shake. When that happens in one of my own stories, the main character gets downgraded and I shift the weight of the tale over to this more interesting character from the less engaging one. I don't plan it that way, but my characters are smarter than I am, and I happen to be smart enough to know when to listen to them instead of trying to force my own original idea onto them when they're trying hard to go off in an unexpected, and much more interesting, direction.

Letting them decide how the story goes makes for a much more realistic, original, and natural story than if I'd forced anything on them, or been stubborn about clinging to my original line of thinking. In one story I released not long ago, I even killed-off the person who was to have been one of the two main characters and promoted her best friend into the role, because she was a far more appealing character. I'm sorry this author didn't have the same willingness to toss some things out of the window, but this is what happens when you're hidebound by tradition and dedicatedly writing to trope. I can't commend this at all.

Strays by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "...giving the merest wave of his fingers to thwart off his angry daughter" Thwart off?! No. Find the right word, please!

"I’ll turn the time over to Professor Kaynan" Kaynan? Seriously? Why not just call him Canine? If you're writing a parody, by all means go for the dumb-as snames.

This is Werewolf Academy, book one, and so it's yet another series I won't be reading. Normally I avoid werewolf stories like I do mass gatherings of unvaccinated people, but I like to keep in touch with the various genres, so once in a while I 'make the sacrifice' and read something outside of my comfort zone. Oh how we artistic types pay for our art, don't we? LOL! This one sounded not too awful, which means the book description never ended-up being the subject of one of my 'non-reviews', but even so, I had serious issues with it from the off.

I've never been a fan of vampire and werewolf stories because in general, they're so trope and clichéd, and profoundly stupid, but I've read one or two here and there. Or tried to. The thing about this one that bothered me is that it's set in an academy - a high school for werewolves - and it makes me wonder why writers of these novels are so uninventive and so bound by convention.

The problem with this kind of a story as I see it, is that it's supposed to be about an alien lifeform in effect: a werewolf, yet the story is exactly the same as it would have been had it been about a regular academy, and regular humans, with no supernatural input whatsoever. You could have removed the werewolf element and told the exact same story. So why even introduce werewolves if you're not really going to go there?

It's the same characters who think and talk just like regular high-schoolers, never mind that they're all werewolves. There are the same conventions and the same high school tropes. Obviously you can't make it so alien that a reader can't begin relate to the characters, but you'd think that somewhere along the way, the author might want to stretch and put in something a bit alien, a bit supernatural, yet they never do. Particularly not this one.

There's no 'wolf' in this story at all. It's all human all the way. Oh yes, there's a token nod and a wink to 'wolf cutlure' but that's entirely confined to pack mentality, as though werewolves are exactly like wolves, and not some alien form or some combo of human and wolf. The school, contrary to what the story yaps on about family, isn't the pack.

Instead there are twelve packs in the school, and rather than follow the school teachings about all working together for the good of werewolves, there's an appalling rivalry between them, along with cliché bullying, none of which is restrained by the teaching staff. In short it's pathetic and right down there with the worst examples of a typically bad high-school story. At one point, there's a fight scene stolen straight out of that execrable Divergent garbage, again with the flimsiest of justification. It's really atrocious.

The characters are exactly like regular humans at all times, even when hunting down a slightly lame deer and brutally slaughtering it, and then trying to justify this appalling cruelty by claiming the deer would never have survived the winter. What? Why? becuase it coudlntl hunt game? Deer dontl hunt, moron! They eat bark and whatever else they can find. A slight lameness isn't a problem. And who are they to judge that? Maybe it was a weredeer! LOL! The fuckwit 'justifcation' was laughable, and that's when I quit reading this rancid pile of entrails because it was so badly-written.

This story failed in many ways, but primarily because it's eactly like all other such stories. There's nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing even remotely different to every other werewolf story ever told. So why read it?! In other genres, we have vampires that behave exactly like humans, or in another, we have ghosts that behave just like regular people. I even read a plot for one ghost story that was a murder mystery where someone was going around killing ghosts. I'm like, wait a minute, aren't ghosts already dead? What's that all about? LOL!

It's a bit ridiculous. As I said, there's nothing alien or supernatural about the people on this story, so why even make the characters werewolves at all? It wasn't worth any more of my time, especially since I was then able to quickly move on and find two books in succession that truly were worth reading. I would not have done this had I forced myself to continue reading something that was boring and cringe-worthy.

The Recollection by Gareth L Powell

Rating: WARTY!

"After his brother goes missing, Ed hurtles through alien worlds in search of him." I swear to god this man has destroyed more planets by hurtling through them than Darth Vader and Darth Wit combined.

Beyond the Red by Ava Jae

Rating: WARTY!

Beyond the red? Why not just call it infrared?! "When an assassination plot goes wrong, a young queen and a rebel soldier must work together to survive." Why? Could it be because the soldier is irritatingly handsome?! Once again the white girl needs saving by the strong man. Barf. Get a clue, please.

Something Borrowed by Louisa George

Rating: WARTY!

"Wedding planner." That character's never before appeared in a so-called romance novel - except like a thousand times. Yawn. "Chloe’s business unravels after her own fiancé ditches her at the altar." Good. She must have been lousy at it if that's all it took. The author is obviously conflating 'wedding planner' with 'matchmaker'. If so, that makes her a dumbass in my book and I have no desire to read anything she writes. "In order to save her career, Chloe needs the help of chef Vaughn" Why? Does she plan on giving everyone food poisoning so they forget that matchmaker...er, wedding planner Chloe got ditched? Of course the chef is the "frustratingly handsome" best man. Frustratingly handsome? That goes with "irritatingly" handsome and "annoyingly handsome." Never read those in a book description before. Ecxcept maybe a million times. Get an original idea for fuck's sake. Barf.

Miss Pinkerton by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Rating: WARTY!

"In this classic whodunit, amateur sleuth" stop right there. Let me off. I'm done. Sleuth? really? Fuck that shit.

Meet Me at Beachcomber Bay by Jill Mansell

Rating: WARTY!

"In the Cornish seaside village of St. Carys," Caries is tooth decay. Is this novel too sweet for its own good? "Clemency asks her best friend, Ronan, to pretend to be in a relationship with her. Why?" Because it's one of the most over-used plot devices ever, which tells me this author is evidently struggling to come uop with an original idea. Pass.

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

Rating: WARTY!

"While serving time, bank robber Jack Foley" Stop it right there, I want to get off the bus. 'Jack' is the most ridiculously over-used name ever in this kind of novel and it's an immediate no for me. A Foley on the other hand is a device for draining urine from someone's bladder, so maybe Elmore is just taking the piss out of you? Is it really Elmore Leonard, BTW, or is it instead, Leonard Elmore?

Dark Matter by Ian Douglas

Rating: WARTY!

"President Koenig is convinced that forming an alliance with the Sh’daar" Oh look! The aliens have an apostrophe in their name How original. Automatic 'no' for me for sci-fi and fantasy when the author starts pulling out those ridiculous apostrophes - or more accurately: putting them in for no purpose whatsoever. We're done here.

The Summer Girls by Mary Alice Monroe

Rating: WARTY!

"At the behest of their father’s will, three half sisters gather together one final time at their grandmother’s South Carolina beach home" How many times ahs this exact plot been done before? I've lost count.

Gil's All Fright Diner by A Lee Martinez

Rating: WARTY!

"Gil’s All Night Diner isn’t your average greasy spoon - so eat fast before a customer takes a bite out of you! When the diner’s owner pays werewolf Duke and vampire Earl to deal with her zombie problem, it won’t be an easy task… Listeners 'will happily sink their teeth into this combo platter of raunchy laughs'" Not me. Not interested. I was doing fine until the 'raunchy laughs' but then I lost interest. Maybe it's ebcause I'm not thirteen anymore?

Crown of Bones by AK Wilder

Rating: WARTY!

A 'layered, surprise-laden fantasy' (Kirkus Reviews)" I'm outta here! "...perfect for 'those who enjoyed Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy and Rin Chupeco’s The Bone Witch trilogy'" Again, count me out. With two narrators it's doublessly a dual first person PoV which is another reason to avoid it. Here's the plot: "In order to master his powers and raise his phantom, the heir to the throne of Baiseen enlists a sailor and an amateur scribe to accompany him on his voyage." Huh? This tells me literally nothing about what's going on here. Pass (and by that I mean it's a fail).

Cop Town by Karin Slaughter

Rating: WARTY!

"Karin Slaughter is simply one of the best thriller writers working today, and Cop Town shows the author at the top of her game" Doubtlessly that explains why she has to sell off this title at a discount in a book flyer. And she only had to rip-off part of the title of the 1997 movie starring Sylvester Stallone - about "a horrific murder" in Cop Land!

The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter by Hazel Gaynor

Rating: WARTY!

Fresh from the bar Mitzi, Gaynor trots out this work, hailed thus: "This is historical fiction at its finest." Ri-ight, because nothing so compliments a woman as her being labeled as someone else's appendage right there in the title. Barf.

Ladies of the House by Lauren Edmondson

Rating: WARTY!

"A 'witty' retelling (Publishers Weekly) of Sense and Sensibility" - because the original had no wit at all, right? There's nothing witty about ripping off a dead author. The world desperately needs the ten-thousandth and one re-writing of a Jane Austen novel. Like it needs another pandemic. There's nothing new in this plot either: "When Daisy Richardson and her sister learn of their father’s involvement in a public scandal, they must" open a bordello and call themselves 'ladies of the House'? Now that just might be an original story!

Death on the Page by Essie Lang

Rating: WARTY!

"When a true crime writer visits Shelby Cox’s bookstore for a series of signings, she’s over the moon!" What a cow! "But after the author is found dead days later, can Shelby page through potential suspects and solve the case?" Why? Are there no police to work this case? Are they so utterly imcompetent that a bookstore owner with zero exerience, meddling where she ought not to be, and doubtlessly finding clues that she keeps from the police, thereby illegally interfering with a murder investigation, can solve it first? "...before the investigation is shelved for good?" Murder investigations are never shelved, numbnits. They remain open until they're solved. A murder mystery author really ought to know that....

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Rating: WARTY!

"When Violet and Finch meet on the ledge of a bell tower, they form a bond that will change them both." Yes indeed! The bird tries to eat the flower, but it reacts violetly, and they both have to pay the bell toll. Yawn.

Day Zero by Marc Cameron

Rating: WARTY!

"Wanted for murder, special agent Jericho Quinn flees the country with his daughter." Chickenshit. Some hero, huh? Any novel that has a ridiculous character name like that - and assuming it isn't a parody - needs to be tossed without any further consideration.

Crash into Me by KM Scott

Rating: WARTY!

"First in a series" Of course it is, because god forbid one trashy novel should be enough. "When smoking-hot billionaire Tristan offers Nina her dream job" she shits herself and realizes she can make a killing in the organic fetilizer market.... Barf. The title alone should make you nauseated.