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I’m a long-standing Rachel Caine fan, and after recently getting my iPhone I wanted to check out another of her books I hadn’t read–a romantic suspense novel she’d written as part of the Athena Force series. When I picked up Line of Sight I didn’t realize that it was part of a greater continuity, and that in fact it starts off a third line of continuity in the overall series. But that said, the novel stands pretty well by itself and in fact is the launch book for that third continuity line.

And yeah, this was fun. The Athena Academy trains young women in various secret-agenty type skills, and certain of the girls have paranormal abilities as well. But someone has kidnapped two of the Academy’s students, and FBI agent Katie Rush–herself a graduate of the Academy–takes on the task of finding them. She’s thrown an unexpected complication in the guise of Stefan Blackman, a man who’s been living an easy life as a “network psychic”. Problem is, Stefan is genuinely psychic, and he’s getting visions from one of the kidnapped girls.

Caine’s traditional fast pacing is very much in evidence here, as is her ability to whip up some fun chemistry between her lead characters. Plus, she fits very, very well into a line of novels that seems geared for more suspense than romance per se, and it was a very strong introduction for me to the Athena Force. I’ll be looking for more of these novels. Four stars.

So to continue my burst of Elizabeth Lowell romance reading, I jumped from the Only quartet over to the duology she did about the Maxwell brothers, Autumn Lover and Winter Fire. As it happened I read the latter first, but it didn’t make much difference; after all, this flavor of romance does follow a predictable formula, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know that the gunslinger and girl du jour in the first book would get their happily ever after, and most likely show up in Book 2.

But all that aside, I rather liked Book 2 better than Book 1. The premise is interesting to start with: the Maxwell brothers, Hunter and Case, are tracking the Culpepper clan all over the West following the Culpepper attack on their family, an attack that resulted in the deaths of Hunter’s wife and child. This book focuses on Case, and how after the Culpeppers nearly kill him, he’s taken in by the young widow Sarah Kennedy–on whose ranch the Culpeppers of course have Nefarious Designs, Oh Noez!

Okay, yeah, I’m a sucker for Wounded Hero plots, but it also helped that as the heroes of these things go, Case was pretty alright. There is of course the obligatory angst between him and Sarah as they fall in love, but this time around there was no Holy Crap! She’s a Virgin! going on, nor any real Big Understandings. This left the field open for Sarah to be overprotective of her little brother Connor instead, and he was a nice side character; meanwhile, Case’s big angst point was that he’d adored his brother’s kid and so Oh Noez! Everything he loves dies, blah blah, shoot another couple of Culpeppers already, you’ll feel better.

All in all though not too bad a read. Three stars.

It is entirely the fault of the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books that I picked up an ebook copy of Patricia Gaffney’s Wild at Heart, which showed up on Smart Bitch Candy’s list of books with Schlocky Premises But Good Executions. And let’s face it, folks, “boy raised by wolves” is a pretty schlocky premise to start with. But yeah, Smart Bitch Candy is right. Gaffney pulled off a surprisingly charming little novel here.

It’s 1893, and Sydney Darrow, after the death of her young husband, has come back to her family home in Michigan to find that her absent-minded anthropologist father is involved with an astonishing discovery: the so-called “Ontario Man”, a young man who’s been found in the Canadian wilderness, apparently raised by wolves. Her father and his assistant Charles are caught up in researching whether a man in a feral state can exhibit true altruism, but Sydney is appalled that they’ve given him a churl of a guard to keep watch on him and that they’ve given him only the rudiments of interaction with his own kind. With her little brother’s help, Sydney soon discovers that “Ontario Man” can actually talk–he just needs to be reminded of it–and she coaxes him into revealing that his name is Michael MacNeil.

Once Michael starts talking, the story gets its feet under it. We learn he was lost as a boy, late enough in his childhood that he’d not only learned how to talk and read, he’d even clung to a treasured book on gentleman’s etiquette that his father had given him. All of which is Oh So Convenient for explaining why he’s not really feral, but it does actually work, and it also sets Michael up for having some very unsophisticated, innocent sensibilities–which is a bit of a switch for romance novels. There’s quite a bit of sweet mileage with Sydney’s younger brother, who is himself a boy, introducing Michael to the city and teaching him things more easily than the adults, since Michael’s forgotten many things that only a child would think to have to explain. His chemistry with Sydney is equally straightforward and refreshingly innocent, and that went a long way to my enjoyment of the plot. (I was particularly amused by one scene where he laments, “Why do you have so many clothes on? Can’t you take some off?”)

Things come to a head when the family makes the mistake of trying to introduce Michael to a zoo, and he flips right out, deciding to singlehandedly release every animal he can get to in one night and thereby causing an uproar in the city. Sydney has to juggle resolving that uproar with tracking down Michael’s long-lost family, and there’s quite a bit of nice tension around that. There is of course a happy ending; this is after all a romance novel. But all in all the trip getting there was quite satisfying. Four stars.

Y’all will notice that I’m hitting four books at once in this post. That’ll be because I was in a mood for some Elizabeth Lowell, and since she hasn’t come out with any new suspense novels for a bit, I went back and slurped up a bunch of her older romance ebooks for iPhone reading goodness. First up was her “Only” quartet of historical Old West romances, and I’m doing these as a set since they’re all inter-related, covering the adventures of Willow Moran, her brothers, and associated badasses of both genders (men with guns and feisty women, and sometimes the other way around).

Continue reading “Book Log #59-60, 62-63: Elizabeth-Lowell-athon”

One of the many reasons I’m delighted to have me an iPhone is that I can finally get caught up on reading my backlog of ebooks. This includes several I’ve purchased from my very own publisher, Drollerie Press, and I’ve been working recently on reading those along with several other ebooks.

However, in the interests of impartiality, I’m not going to do formal review posts for the Drollerie books. I will however give y’all picoreviews and touch on at least one thing about each that I like! So here right quick are the first three:

Pixie Warrior, by Rachael de Vienne: In a genre that’s been heavily overpopulated by urban fantasy the last several years, it’s a nice change of pace to get a period fantasy novel set in a decidedly non-urban locale. It’s also kind of neat to get a story in which the protagonist, the pixie daughter of a human lumberjack and his pixie wife, gets romantically involved with NO ONE. The love story with her parents is certainly an important subplot, but really, this story’s all about Sha’el. Three stars.

Unseelie, by Meredith Holmes: It should surprise none of you that with Faerie Blood under my belt, I’m a bit of a sucker for any book that involves the Unseelie Court. Meredith’s book gives ’em a bit more of a traditionalist touch than I do. Come for the subverting of which Court is the good guys and which one the bad (a trick jimbutcher fans will certainly recognize), and stay for the complicated Court intrigue and why, exactly, all these people are going berserk for Alfhild of the Seven Snows. Three stars.

Scars on the Face of God: The Devil’s Bible, by C.G. Bauer: If you like your horror old-school, with a hint of Rosemary’s Baby and a side helping of Omen, you’ll probably groove for this. I quite liked the dual-layer story involving our protagonist both as a boy and as an old man who must root out the nasty cause of why settlers in Three Bridges, Pennsylvania used to murder their babies–and why his parish’s own bishop seems to be batting for the other team. Four stars.

It took me a bit to get into A Fountain Filled With Blood, which is the second book in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s series about a young female Episcopalian priest who becomes involved with the police chief of her small town. For one thing, I made the mistake of trying to read this book before I read Book 1. For another, several of the initial scenes involve violence against gay people in the town, and I was genuinely unsure if I could handle reading about that. Nor was I terribly happy about the relationship brewing between Clare, the priest, and police chief Russ–because Russ is married to another woman, and that seemed to me to be asking for all sorts of annoying angst I wouldn’t enjoy reading about.

But then I did go back and read Book 1, In the Bleak Midwinter, and wound up enjoying that more than I expected. So I opted to give this one another chance.

As with Book 1, the writing here is quietly engaging, with just enough descriptive detail to be vivid, and not so much that it gets in the way of the story. The spate of violence–which soon enough includes murder–that must be investigated is suitably complex, and once I got past the uneasiness of seeing gays targeted, it was refreshing to see Clare speaking out against such acts being perpetrated. Clare in general seems to be a highly atypical priest, which for me at least makes her an interesting character even if sometimes I have a hard time buying her plausibility.

The heart of the book is of course her burgeoning relationship with Russ. If the idea of a protagonist being attracted to a married man bothers you, especially if that protagonist is a priest, you might skip this series. But I will give it credit for handling the chemistry between the two leads in a very ethical way so far. My only complaint is that I’d like to see the police chief’s wife on camera, and given the same complex treatment of character that Clare and Russ have gotten so far. I may have to read farther in the series just to see if that occurs. For this installment in the meantime, four stars.

I’m long on record as getting a lot of enjoyment out of mizkit‘s work, and Hands of Flame is no exception. It’s a fine conclusion to the Negotiator Trilogy, bringing some resolution not only to heroine Margrit’s relationship with the gargoyle Alban, but also to the humans close to her. Played off against the more personal relationship is the development of her station among the Old Races, with whom she has gained enough status that they’ve given her a new name: The Negotiator.

There’s some good solid intrigue here as Margrit is hauled in to mediate a deal between the selkies and the djinn–and at the same time, she’s pushed by the dragonlord Janx into trying to destroy her own brand new employer, Eliseo Daisani. Margrit is forced to delve into the history of these two longstanding rivals, and with Alban’s help, uncovers a secret neither the dragon nor the vampire knew.

The pace is fast; a lot of the time on the way through this book I found myself going “wait, what? Wait, what? Wait, what?” and having to process things I read twice. But this is not a bad thing. Just be ready to handle a lot of plot details thrown at you very, very quickly if you take this one on! And for gods’ sake, make sure you’ve read Books 1 and 2 first, else you will be very, very lost. Four stars.