Tag: 2011 book log

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oh, this was a fun one. James Knapp’s State of Decay, the first of his Revivors series, put forth a nice take on zombies: a futuristic society where people can be reanimated via technological means. Volunteering to have yourself reanimated upon your death comes with the temptation of improvement of your citizenship ranking, and many unknowing citizens go for it. But there is, of course, the obligatory Dirty Secret.

The so-called “revivors” are kept out of the public eye, serving as mercenaries in the brutal wars being fought in Asia. But our hero, FBI agent Nico Wachalowski, finds out someone is customizing revivors to kill local targets–and that, furthermore, the conception that a revivor does not remember his or her former life may be disturbingly wrong.

Be warned though that we have not one, not two, not three, but four POV characters here. Chapters cycle regularly between Nico’s storyline and those of police officer (and Nico’s former girlfriend) Faye Dasalia, ring fighter Calliope Flax, and Zoe Ott, a young woman shattered by visions of the dead. Each character is, however, critical to the plot and to Nico’s eventual discovery of the conspiracy behind what’s going on with the revivors. Points as well for the fact that three out of the four POV characters in this book are in fact female, even if it’s Nico who gets the attention in the blurb. Everything moves along quickly enough, at a suitably gripping intensity, that you never stop in one character’s point of view for long. I didn’t find this too difficult to follow, though a reader who takes better to one character over the others may get impatient for the camera to cycle back around again.

And yeah, this is a book that moves along at a thriller’s pace, and which furthermore doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to what our lead characters have to go through. Four stars.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Okay, now we’re finally talking. Something About You was the Julie James book so eagerly supported by the Smart Bitches, and when I finally made it to this one after reading the first two by James, I could see what they were going on about. Of the three, which I read back to back, this one was easily most enjoyable to me. It helped a great deal that this one was more romantic suspense rather than a pure romance plotline, so there was more to line up with my personal reading tastes.

Our heroine Cameron Lynde is an assistant US attorney who overhears a murder while she’s staying in a luxury hotel–and to her shock and horror (and to the glee of her percolating hormones), the FBI agent assigned to the case is Jack Pallas, the very same agent whose career she ruined three years before. Cue the obligatory Having to Put Their Past Behind Them to Solve the Case, and all of the attendant sexual tension therein.

Two big things I liked about this: Cameron was reasonably smart about dealing with police protection and Jack having to improve the security in her house. And by ‘dealing with’, I mean, ‘she actually accepted it and did her best to work with it’, as opposed to ‘pitching a tantrum and sneaking around the guys trying to do their jobs to keep her from getting killed’. So points for that. Also high marks for having the B romance in this story actually being a gay one, which I was not expecting. Cameron has the typical Romance Heroine Accessory of a gay male best friend, only he and his boy get a nice amount of screen time and some actual character development.

It still wasn’t the most substantial thing I’ve ever read, to be sure. While there were many aspects of it I enjoyed, I still found quite a few of the chain of events driving the overall plot disappointingly predictable. Still, this was definitely my favorite of the James ebooks I read earlier this year, and I liked it well enough that I’d consider reading further romantic suspense from this author. Three and a half stars (rounded up to four, since Goodreads doesn’t do half star ratings).

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Julie James’ first book, Just the Sexiest Man Alive, didn’t do much for me. Fortunately, Practice Makes Perfect worked better for me, otherwise I’d have seriously regretted buying three ebooks of hers at once!

The driving character conflict here has a bit more substance than the first book, which helps. We’ve got our heroine, Payton, who works for the same law firm as our hero, J.D., and it’s established right out of the gate that they vociferously dislike each other. (Which is of course, in Romancelandia, code for “they will be snogging each other’s faces off before we’re halfway through the book”.) The situation is decidedly Not Improved when they discover that someone in the firm is going to get a promotion–but there’s only one promotion slot available. And guess which two members of the firm are up for consideration? They are, of course, forced to work together on a Supremely Important Case, all the while trying very hard to pretend they aren’t noticing one another. With interest.

Though I did like this one better than the first, still, though, this one plays as awfully heteronormative to me. Payton’s supposed to be a strident feminist, while J.D. stays just far enough on the good line of the line between “conversative” and “outright sexist jerk” that I did make it to the end of the book without wanting to punch him. So a lot of the conflict between them is driven by their perceptions of each other’s gender politics, but it’s presented in such a simplistic way that I wound up having a strange reaction to it–I was all “wait, there are still novels that have such watered-down gender politics as their character conflict?” And then I remembered that, yeah, well, these things still happen in real life, so. And some readers may get their first exposure to these sorts of questions through even such light fare as a romance novel.

But to get back to the overall point, even given the very standard conversative-boy-vs.-liberal-girl conflict, I did enjoy reading this. The main plot of how well Payton and J.D. handle the case they have to handle together is enjoyable enough, and I did like how they eventually ferret out the original cause of their animosity towards each other. Not a terribly substantial book overall, but a perfectly acceptable light read. Three stars.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The fine ladies at the Smart Bitches site periodically do a Save the Contemporary campaign featuring, as you might guess, contemporary romances. And not too long ago, they played up the author Julie James, who at that point had released a total of three novels. I was interested, so I went ahead and bought all three of the titles. Just the Sexiest Man Alive was the first of these.

And, unfortunately, it was the one I liked the least. I do not read as much comtemporary romance, in no small part because that’s the romance subgenre most likely to remind me that in many ways, I’m just not the target audience for the standard heteronormative relationship story. I need something else in the story to hold my interest, which is why I like historicals, paranormals, or romantic suspense more. In this particular case, we’ve got lawyer Taylor Donovan assigned to give legal coaching to the actor Jason Andrews for his upcoming courtroom thriller–and while I might have had fun with this as a plot concept, it fell over hard for me for one simple reason.

I.e., I found our hero Jason to be a self-centered jackass. More than once he pulls selfish crap on Taylor that made me want to haul off and punch him one, and left me wondering what she could possibly see in him. That he ultimately does something less selfish for her, supposedly a sign that he’s having a change of heart, doesn’t play well since I don’t buy that he’s genuinely learned from his mistakes. I never got any sense that he realized “I’m being a selfish prick here and I should stop it”, much less “I’ve got to tell her I’m sorry”.

It’s a shame, too, because James’ writing is not bad. I am happy to say that I did like the books after this one better. For this one, though, two stars.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read Michael Koryta’s So Cold the River as a library checkout, since I’d never encountered the author before yet was in the mood to try a suspense-oriented horror thriller. And while I found it competently done in some ways, in others, it was ultimately kind of disappointing. This was an uncommon instance of a book I read and wound up not actually wanting to buy.

Eric Shaw was once an up-and-coming filmmaker, and now he’s slogging through his days by filming memorials for funerals while he avoids dealing with how he’s walked out on his wife Claire. A wealthy socialite, Alyssa Bradford, hires him to do a documentary about her father-in-law–and when Eric agrees to take the job, he comes to a town full of the obligatory layers upon layers of disturbing secrets. At the heart of them all lurks something evil, something Eric begins to see in visions once he starts taking drinks from an old bottle of Pluto Water.

At its core the plot wasn’t bad, I’ll happily give it that, yet some aspects of its execution rubbed me the wrong way. One big one was that while you initially are led to believe that drinking this old mineral water is what’s causing Eric to have visions, it comes up at one point that he has this ability anyway–and his wife actually has to remind him of an incident where he’d exhibited precognition. That yanked me RIGHT out of the story, because I found it impossible to believe that a person could forget something like that.

The other thing that bugged me was that a good deal of time is spent in the POV of the primary mortal antagonist. I acknowledge that this was necessary for the development of his character, and you do ultimately see where his character is going. But that said, more than once I found that character repugnant enough that I was almost driven away from the book.

On the good side, there were several genuinely creepy passages, and I had no issues with anything about Koryta’s prose; more, my quibbles were with aspects of his characterization and plot. In the end, though, this book didn’t seize me well enough to make it permanently into my collection. I’d recommend it as a library read, or if you need something to read on a trip, but nothing more than that. Two stars.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have to admit, the blurb line of “Even in Grundy, Alaska, it’s unusual to find a naked guy with a bear trap clamped to his ankle on your porch” went a long way to seizing my interest in How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf, by Molly Harper. So did the Goodreads header of “Northern Exposure”, which made me grin with the inevitable comparison, and the cartoony cover art. As to whether the book lived up to that promise? Mm, well. Kind of.

This is yet another one of those romances involving an out of town girl moving into a remote small town, having to get accepted by the locals, and solve a crime while resisting the inevitable advances of the local brooding hero type–but in this case, the local brooding hero type’s a werewolf. And given that this is a paranormal romance on the lighter and fluffier side, one has to avoid taking that notion too seriously.

I did very much like Cooper, the aforementioned broody werewolf, who’s an atypical alpha werewolf as alphas go–he very, very, VERY much does not want to lead his pack, and he’s got issues remembering what he does when he’s in wolf form. Problem is, something in wolf form–maybe Cooper–is going around killing people. (And this is what helped keep the plot from getting too goofy for me; towards the end, when enough serious things have happened, the main characters treat this with the gravity it deserves.) Mo, our heroine, has the usual modern romance novel heroine attributes to recommend her: she’s perky, she’s decisive, she’s willing to deal when she discovers werewolves are real. Nothing terribly unusual here, but Harper’s heroine fits the expected role entertainingly.

And, as is always the case with a romance novel, we have the obligatory character who starts off as a foil for the current protagonist and who is clearly meant to be the protagonist of her own later book. This time, it’s Cooper’s sister Maggie, who’s way more of a typical alpha wolf than he is. She is in fact one of the few rather cool aspects of Harper’s worldbuilding here–i.e., that the female werewolf is way more of an alpha than the male one is, something I still haven’t found much of in urban fantasy. The politics of the pack have the refreshing bonus of putting more emphasis on the werewolves being people than on them being wolves, too. So I’ve got to give the author high marks for that.

If you come into this expecting urban-fantasy-level worldbuilding, you’ll probably be disappointed. But if you don’t mind a lighter-hearted tale where none of the characters are terribly stupid, even the obligatory colorful parents, you’ll probably get an amusing read out of this. I did, and I’ve got Book 2 queued up to read, too. For this one, three stars.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tana French came highly recommended to me, and I am pleased to report that that recommendation spoke truth and wisdom. I initially checked this book out from the library, only to decide partway through that yeah, I wanted to actually own a copy. So I returned the library book and promptly bought my own.

French’s command of language and imagery was part of the initial recommendation, but what also drew me to this book was its being a police procedural-flavored mystery set in Ireland. And then there’s the plot itself: a young boy who was the sole survivor of an assault that caused the disappearances of his two friends has grown up to be a police detective. Rob Ryan’s changed his name and worked hard to groom himself into a more refined persona, doing everything in his power to distance himself from his childhood. But a child has been murdered in his old town, and he and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to the case. Ryan must therefore choose between revealing his past and risk being taken off the case–or struggling through his own memories as he and Maddox pursue the girl’s killer.

There’s a great deal to like here. First and foremost I very much respected that Ms. French struck the exact right balance between making her protagonist unreliable and keeping him compelling. Rob is often not a very likeable character; he’s selfish in many ways, and his motives about keeping his past secret are tied more into that than into his desire to bring their young victim justice. He makes multiple bad choices, leading me more than once to want to smack him hard. Yet even so, he was vividly portrayed, and at no point did I not want to know what happened to him next.

Cassie Maddox, his partner and best friend, goes a long way to keeping him in check through most of the plot. The chemistry between them–even when it is still at a platonic level–is excellent. It’s clear that these two are well-matched as partners, each having attributes the other lacks, making the two of them together stronger than each one alone. Yet I cannot mention Cassie without also mentioning the third major character, Sam O’Neill, who works the case with them. Sam’s clearly interested in Cassie, and yet that interest takes second chair to the much more intense relationship she has with Rob. Trust me when I say, too, that Sam’s presence in the plot ultimately proves critical.

The book’s resolution is hard-won, be warned, and our trio of detectives do not come through unscathed. It’s the ending, too, that makes me pull this down to four stars rather than five, just because while I did continue to find Rob a compelling character, in the end I did still want to smack him. Still, though, I very much enjoyed this read. Four stars.

ETA: Correcting the title of the post from Into the Woods to In the Woods. Oops! Thanks, !

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trick of the Mind, the third book of Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons series of mysteries, was actually the first one I bought thanks to finding a hardcover copy at a local used bookstore–but I didn’t want to read it till I swung back and covered the first two. I’m glad I did that, because as of the this installment, the series starts feeling to me like it’s really gotten its feet under it. Jack Gibbons has been shot in the line of duty, much to the alarm of his good friend Bethancourt as well as Bethancourt’s girlfriend Marla. But to Phillip’s further alarm, Jack can’t remember who shot him. And so it’s up to Phillip to track down the details of his last case.

I am of course a documented sucker for amnesia plots, and even though poor Gibbons loses only a couple of days out of his memory, they are nonetheless critical. And it’s a perfect crisis to let not only Phillip and Marla but several other significant characters as well–like Jack’s boss and Jack’s parents–show their true mettle. I particularly liked that Marla, despite her previous acrimony about Phillip’s engaging himself with police work, nonetheless gives him quite a bit of support as he hastens off to his wounded friend’s side. There’s quite a bit of mileage from the point of view Jack’s boss Carmichael and Carmichael’s wife Dotty as well, and between them and a few other characters, the reader is given quite a decent picture of all of Jack’s colleagues working feverishly to figure out who shot him and why.

Bethancourt is no Peter Wimsey, and yet he does carry on Wimsey’s tradition of the nobleman investigator very well. The personal stakes of his friend’s being threatened give this particular investigation a keener edge for him, much to the story’s overall benefit. I quite enjoyed every bit of it. Four stars.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Village Affairs, the second in Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons series, is the first to show signs of the series seriously getting its feet under it. It’s not quite as strong yet as the third and fourth novels, but the pieces are all in place here, and all of them are starting to work well together.

This book kicks in not terribly long after the events of the first book–and Gibbons, unfortunately, is in sad straits. (More than that I won’t say, so as to avoid spoilers.) But Bethancourt’s girlfriend is doing a photo shoot in a small town in the English Cotswolds, and it just so happens that a murder has taken place there, providing Jack with an excellent opportunity to enlist his friend’s aid. A nice tangled little murder investigation ensues, complete with the obligatory cast of colorful characters. In particular, the vital young vicar and his beautiful wife stand out for me as memorable.

Overall the actual murder investigation–which, at first, doesn’t even necessarily seem like a murder–takes second place to me behind the characters. In particular, Bethancourt’s stormy relationship with Marla holds a lot of interest, as Marla highly disapproves of his participating in murder investigations. Set off against Jack’s depression over the events that have happened between the last book and this one, it makes for great character development fodder for all three characters. You should definitely read the first one before reading this one, though, to pick up on the proper context for Jack’s state throughout the plot.

Three stars.

ETA: Corrected “second and third novels” to be “third and fourth”. Thanks, !

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I saw Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons mysteries recommended on LJ and decided to check them out–and wound up being very glad I did. The style of the series is very akin to Dorothy Sayers, enough that unless you’re paying attention it’s easy to mistake these books for period mysteries; they aren’t. That it takes a bit to realize this in Book 1, even with such obvious technological markers as cell phones and the Internet, is one of the reasons the series takes a bit to get its feet under it. But hang in there, because there’s a lot to like here.

The foundation of the series is the friendship between Phillip Bethancourt, a son of British nobility who’s dabbling in assisting police investigations, and the sergeant Jack Gibbons. Bethancourt gets away with participating in Gibbons’ investigations because his blue-blooded father has expressed strong interest in his son’s being able to productively occupy himself, and because he has an aptitude for it. For his own part, Gibbons is the more prosaic, earnest foil to Bethancourt’s elegance. The two men have an excellent chemistry to their friendship, even in this first book; I found myself a bit regretful that it’s already in full swing when the story starts, because it would have been great fun to see how these two characters meet and establish their relationship.

The case in The Young Widow gives them plenty to work with, at any rate. Wealthy Geoffrey Berowne has been poisoned, and the prime suspect, his young third wife Annette, is disturbingly alluring to Gibbons. The two friends uncover the expected pile of dark family secrets in their investigation, but what really drives this plot is the chemistry between Gibbons and Annette. It’s important character development for Gibbons that affects him throughout the succeeding books.

Three stars for a decent start to a series.