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Y’all may recall that I was fortunate enough to win a copy of the ARC of Dawnkeepers, Book 2 of Jessica Andersen’s “Final Prophecy” series, earlier this year. And I liked it well enough that I decided it was necessary to go back and pick up Book 1 to see what I missed. Survey says, I’m very glad I did!

As with Book 2, so with Book 1: we have ourselves a decent ensemble cast here, and although sure yeah fine the plot is set up to faciliate the pairings of various interesting couples, the driving force of what’s going on is the Nightkeepers having to rise from the ashes of their own destruction in order to combat the likely end of the world in 2012. Things get underway with the focus on Striking-Jaguar, a.k.a. Strike, the son of the last Nightkeeper king. Strike thinks he and his sister are the only survivors of the massacre of their people. He is, as none of you should be surprised, wrong.

Complicating matters is Miami detective Leah Daniels, who’s busily investigating the cult that brought about the death of her brother, a cult based on Mayan beliefs, and whose leader seems dead set on acquiring power he thinks Leah has. Strike must not only bring together the other survivors of the Nightkeeper massacre and forge them into a team, he also needs to rescue Leah–and figure out fast why a woman with no Nightkeeper heritage whatsoever is showing every sign of being a Godkeeper. And his own destined mate.

All in all good strong fun. The sex scenes are kept down to a minimum, and there’s plenty of action and tension as Strike, Leah, and the Nightkeepers get their magic on. Four stars.

The second Simon Canderous book, Deader Still, picks up fairly soon after the first installment left off–and this time around, on top of dealing with the challenges of what may be his first long-term steady relationship and suddenly outranking his own mentor, Simon’s got to deal with what may well be a vampire outbreak, a psychotic ex coming back to ask him to commit one last crime, and a hapless archivist who is a lot more effective out in the field than he thinks he is (and who under pain of death cannot be told exactly what he has going on!).

So yeah, there’s a lot of lighthearted fun here. The story didn’t quite click as well with me as with Book 1, mostly because the relationship drama between Simon and Jane wasn’t my cup of tea. But to balance that out, I really like the whole plot arc with Godfrey the archivist, and I’m looking forward to seeing what might happen with him later. Plus, there’s interesting developments in the partner relationship between Simon and Connor, and of course, a lead-in to the next adventure at the very end.

For this one, three stars.

It was a bit of a challenge for me to read In the Bleak Midwinter–in no small part because I didn’t much expect to go for a plot involving a female Episcopalian priest who falls in love with a married man. And yet, although I had additional challenges coming in from reading this thing in ebook form (and therefore in scattered bits and pieces on my computer since I have no reading device), I found that I did in fact rather like the story.

Clare is certainly not the stereotypical image one might bring to mind for a priest, even a female one. I quite liked that she was very down-to-earth, and that her faith was not particularly in-your-face; it was important to her, clearly, and that was subtly and nicely portrayed to the reader. It was also quite cool that she had military background, and that was she was a former pilot before feeling called to join the church. The beginnings of her relationship to Russ, the sheriff of the small town where she’s come to live, is the driving force of this novel, and I found it less angstful than I was fearing. Rather, it seemed a natural depiction of two people who initially get along very well together under crisis circumstances, and who only realize later on that attraction is beginning to sneak up on them.

The crime that Russ must investigate, and on which Clare joins him, is the abandonment of a baby and the later murder of the baby’s mother. It’s fairly low-key stuff for a murder mystery, yet entirely appropriate for the small town setting. Spencer-Fleming does a decent job portraying the impact of the abandonment and murder on the lives of the connected parties–and, I was pleased to note that the ultimate culprit was neither immediately obvious nor brought totally out of left field.

This story was interesting enough that I’ll probably be checking out book 2, since I acquired a free ebook copy of that as well. Four stars.

Man, what can I say about Angels & Demons that hasn’t probably already been said by thousands of other people before me?

I can at least say that as with The Da Vinci Code, there’s a bone structure to this story that I halfway like; it was at least interesting enough to keep me reading. That bone structure, however, is sadly bogged down by writing that for the most part just doesn’t work for me as a reader. There’s an argument to be made for Brown’s short, choppy style being what you want for a thriller–after all, the emphasis here is supposed to be on the action and the clues that Langdon uncovers, not the elegance of the wording. Problem is, that style isn’t generally snappy enough to deliver the tension that it should.

Sometimes it does work, I’ll grant. The bit I actually like the best is a sequence where Langdon’s trapped in a sarcophagus, which triggers his claustrophobia: a scenario that felt a lot more personal and scary than the later, over-the-top climax where our hero pulls the most ludicrous escape from an aircraft since James Bond. And I’ll also allow that the camerlengo is an effective character–usually. I’ve got issues with his big God Good Science Bad diatribe that he delivers not long before the climax, as well as with some of the assumptions behind his entire set of motivations.

All in all, A&D as well as its sequel strike me in a very odd place for books. Which is to say, bad enough that I’m definitely not impressed, and yet, decent enough light amusement and the printed equivalent of MST3K fodder. Two stars.

Man, what can I say about Angels & Demons that hasn’t probably already been said by thousands of other people before me?

I can at least say that as with The Da Vinci Code, there’s a bone structure to this story that I halfway like; it was at least interesting enough to keep me reading. That bone structure, however, is sadly bogged down by writing that for the most part just doesn’t work for me as a reader. There’s an argument to be made for Brown’s short, choppy style being what you want for a thriller–after all, the emphasis here is supposed to be on the action and the clues that Langdon uncovers, not the elegance of the wording. Problem is, that style isn’t generally snappy enough to deliver the tension that it should.

Sometimes it does work, I’ll grant. The bit I actually like the best is a sequence where Langdon’s trapped in a sarcophagus, which triggers his claustrophobia: a scenario that felt a lot more personal and scary than the later, over-the-top climax where our hero pulls the most ludicrous escape from an aircraft since James Bond. And I’ll also allow that the camerlengo is an effective character–usually. I’ve got issues with his big God Good Science Bad diatribe that he delivers not long before the climax, as well as with some of the assumptions behind his entire set of motivations.

All in all, A&D as well as its sequel strike me in a very odd place for books. Which is to say, bad enough that I’m definitely not impressed, and yet, decent enough light amusement and the printed equivalent of MST3K fodder. Two stars.

Every time I go into a Nora Roberts book, I expect to not be very surprised. And this isn’t exactly fair of me, because while yes, we’re talking romance novels here and the romance genre certainly has a huge list of common tropes, this does not mean Ms. Roberts is necessarily going to use them.

Let me give you an example with Tribute. The instant the heroine’s ex-husband showed up, I expected him to be a bastard and/or to get a rivalry going for her affections with the guy she was obviously interested in. I also expected there to be Angst and Grief Oh Noez(TM) involved in why she was no longer married to said ex-husband. None of these things were the case, and this was delightfully refreshing. The ex-husband is in fact a fairly admirable guy and it’s a bit of a shame that he’s on camera for the comparatively small amount of time he is.

And that’s just one thing I liked about this book overall. Okay, yeah, fine, we’re also dealing with the common trope here of Heroine Moves into Small Town and Takes Over Abandoned Family Home, and Then Falls In Love With Next-Door Neighbor. We’ve all been there done that. But this time around, I gotta say, the next door neighbor was so very much right up my alley that I adored practically every sentence that came out of his mouth. The man is a graphic novelist, and very, very clearly a geek. I don’t know if Ms. Roberts is herself geekily inclined, but if she isn’t, she’s got access to people who are, because she did a fabulous job portraying her geek hero. I actually squeed when the heroine tried to throw him a line about love being like kryptonite to Superman, and he started trying to debate what kind of kryptonite. AND! He owned both classic and new Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

I liked as well that our heroine Cilla, a former child star, is taking on the new career of redesigning houses–and that she does a lot of the physical labor herself. This makes her a very cool contrast to Ford, who, while not scrawny, does not have any particular skill at construction. It’s very cool to see her be the dominant one in a skill one would consider traditionally “masculine”, and to see him not be threatened by that in the slightest.

Someone is, of course, out to get Cilla–someone who apparently takes very unkindly to her efforts to restore her grandmother’s house and to dig up old family history. So there’s some good suspense here too, playing off against the developing love story between Cilla and Ford. It’s a lesser degree of suspenseful tension than you typically get in a JD Robb novel, but that’s okay; this is a less violent scenario, at least up until the very end.

All in all a fun read. Four stars.