Blog

This one I picked up entirely on the recommendation of a guest review at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, because a) it’s set in the Canadian north, and b) the hero is a Mountie. I’m a Due South fan, what can I say?

Anyway, we have a nice recipe for suspense here with our hero, Sergeant Gabriel Caruso, being deployed to the tiny Yukon town of Black Arrow Falls as their new RCMP officer. He’s running from the fallout of a case gone horribly, horribly wrong, wherein his beloved partner had been killed and he himself had been seriously wounded in the effort to catch a psychotic killer. And the Yukon, as far as he can tell, is as good a place as any to hide. Only there’s a local tracker, Silver Karvonen, who stirs his interest–and to their horror, the very killer Gabriel had put away has escaped and has followed him north to take him out. Gabriel and Silver must band together to protect themselves and the town, while confronting both their pasts.

As romance novels go, this one was fun. Points for a remote and unforgiving setting, and extra points for the heroine not being lily-white; she’s half-Finnish and half Black Arrow Gwitchin, which makes her stand out wonderfully for me against the usual run of English or American heroines I’m used to. She is an excellent heroine for the setting as well–not only because of her tracking skills, but also for how she had to deal with the incident of trauma in her past, a secret she doesn’t dare reveal to Gabriel lest she sacrifice her freedom.

And around all of this, the hunt for the escaped killer was suitably creepy and suspenseful. Four stars.

Legend Hunter was my first book bought off of Fictionwise on the strength of its blurb. I was unfamiliar with author Jennifer McKenzie, but thought “hey, romantic suspense involving Bigfoot. Sounds vaguely X-Files-y. I’m game!”

And yeah, that was about what I got. Kiera McConnel is the daughter of a man who grew famous hunting Bigfoot–but to her eternal shame, she caught him fabricating evidence of the creature’s existence. Now, she shuns anyone with any interest in hunting the creature, and indeed, much of the world in general. But paranormal investigator Ben Harmon is convinced she’s the only one who can help her prove for once and for all that the creature actually exists, and though it goes against her better judgment, Kiera agrees to help him.

Problem is, there’s a lot more going on in the surrounding wilderness, and someone’s willing to kill to keep their secrets.

This was a pleasant enough way to pass time, although I didn’t find the writing particularly smooth or notable, and there was a bit too much use of the F-word in the narrative for my taste; it felt out of place and jarring. Two stars.

The problem I always have with reading any kind of media tie-in novel is of course that if I’m not familiar with the source material, chances are high that I’m not going to know who any of the characters are going in, or what the setup of the world is supposed to be. But, that given, Doranna Durgin’s Ghost Whisperer novel Ghost Trap does a good job giving a newcomer reader just enough data to get the idea.

I’m a big fan of Durgin’s work. I prefer her fantasy novels, but was pleased to see here that even when playing in somebody else’s universe, she can still deliver a story with substance. Melinda Gordon, the “ghost whisperer” of the title, must track down why the children in her small town are all mysteriously falling into comas–and at the same time, what happened to the members of a deceased barbershop quartet who are following her around.

The ghostly characters, both the main ones driving the plot and periodic side characters that show up to aid Melinda in her seeking, are by far the stars of the action. Especially the quartet, who are awesome. By contrast, the flesh-and-blood regulars are almost inconsequential–at least to me as a reader; I figure that fans of the show will be better able to judge how well those characters are portrayed. I did like the chemistry Durgin had between Melinda and her husband Jim, though. Three stars.

The Folk of the Air is my first Peter Beagle book, and I certainly have been remiss in taking this long to get to him. And while I’m given to understand that this is considered to be one of his more flawed works, it’s nonetheless a lovely introduction to what the man can do with the written word.

There’s definite magic for me in this prose. Right out of the gate, I adored that the hero’s Volkswagen van was named Madame Schumann-Heink, that the vehicle was very definitely a “she”, and that she normally couldn’t make it to fifty miles an hour without a tailwind and two days’ advance notice. I loved the casual juxtaposition of a thinly-disguised SCA with actual magic; this made the whole thing play for me as less a fantasy novel per se and almost more as magic realism, which is not a bad thing. And I very much loved that the character Sia, the crux around which the action revolves, is not beautiful or young or even overtly desirable; she is, however, elemental and primal and very compelling. She is a pillar of stone against the sound and fury of young Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner.

In the midst of all of this, protagonist Joe Farrell is almost a nonentity. He’s likable enough, but he doesn’t so much as participate in the action as stumble across it, and he has very few points at which a choice or action of his is necessary to dictate how the plot will flow. As a result he has little character development. Much of what we find out about him as a character is simply because other characters keep telling him he’s like this or like that.

There are those who find the ending quite a bit of a mess. I’m not one of them; I followed the ending well enough. But because of Joe’s relative lack of active participation, I found it difficult to get really invested in what was going on. Also, it didn’t help that there was almost too much quirkiness in many of the side characters. It seemed like pretty much every single minor character was “colorful”, to the degree that after a while I couldn’t help but feel as though I kept getting hit with a barrage of characters going “look how quirky I am! Look how quirky I am! Aren’t I just QUIRKY?”

Still, though, all in all, worth my time. Three stars.

Read this one recently on the strength of a friend’s recommendation, and was rather glad I did; it’s one of the more unusual SF novels I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Aristoi is set in the far future, when humanity has unlocked the ability to manipulate matter at the molecular level and has spread out into the stars. Those who have mastered the ability to reshape matter in physical and virtual reality alike are the Aristoi, the kindly absolute rulers of their various individual domains, and under their leadership humanity is enjoying an enlightened peace…

Only, since this is a novel and you know this has to be coming, not so much. One of the Aristoi has secretly built an entire solar system filled with planets and even people of their own design, and whoever they are, they’re willing to kill other Aristoi to keep their secret. The Aristos Gabriel, who up till now has let a fairly lightweight life pursuing operatic composition, avoiding the cult that worships him under his mother’s guidance, and romancing his various lovers, is moved to investigate what’s happening–and finds that not only is his own life threatened, but so are the lives of those he holds dear, and indeed, the galactic society at large.

There’s a lot to like in this book, and the plot’s not all of it. Williams’ worldbuilding (aheh) is solid indeed, full of all sorts of little flourishes and details about how a society that’s mastered nanotechnology and virtual reality is not limited by lifespan, gender, sickness, or even original physical forms. I quite liked that one of Gabriel’s lovers, a man, starts off the story being implanted with their genetically engineered child, and that Marcus didn’t elect to become female for the duration of the pregnancy; I quite liked, even, that such was even an option, described so seamlessly that it was clear that in that society, such choices were commonplace.

And I very, very much liked that part of the process of becoming an Aristos or Ariste involved the creation of “daemons” running in one’s head. This amused me from a computer geek perspective, but it also provided an excellent way to present Gabriel as essentially a highly functional multiple person. Many of his daemons are themselves characters, and one even is a significant plot point. Their participation in the action makes for several sequences as well where dual tracks of action are described on the page–a challenge to read through, and very adroitly done.

The book’s not perfect; I took a bit of issue with the open-ended and somewhat too convenient nature of the ending. But all in all I found this a very strong read. Four stars.

I’m sure there’s a target audience for this book, but unfortunately, it wasn’t me. Even for a free ebook.

The basic setup seemed interesting enough: Congressional aide Mallory Dawes has become infamous after levelling sexual harassment charges at her boss, and she’s decided to flee her sudden infamy by taking a vacation to France. Problem is, she’s been set up to get caught carrying secret information, and agent Cutter Smith has been assigned to track her and find out who she’s taking the information to. He soon realizes she’s innocent, of course–and the two of them have the obligatory sparks flying while teaming up to find out who’s actually behind the information theft, not to mention attempts on Mallory’s life.

Thing is, way too little time was spent on the suspense part of this plot for my tastes, and way too much on describing the lushness of the villa where Mallory and Cutter get to crash and the clothes Mallory gets to borrow. Especially the shoes. We’re told over and over what awesome shoes she gets to wear, and how she even winds up using one of them to take down the actual villain in the final confrontation… which would have been awesome if it’d actually happened on camera instead of getting brushed over in description after the fact. While, I might add, the only other notable female characters in the cast (clearly the heroines of previous installments of the series this book must be part of) swoon hardcore over the shoes. No admiration of our heroine’s takedown of the villain, no exclamations of ‘wow, you’re awesome’… just gushing over the thousand-dollar designer shoes.

For me, for whom a thousand dollars means ‘the amount of money necessary to buy an awesome laptop or guitar’, this just did not compute. Not a badly executed book for what it was, but clearly not for me. Two stars.