Category: Review

Masquerade

  By

★½
“Home confusion.”

It’s never a good sign, when the first thing we do at the end of a movie, is go straight to the Internet and try to find out what happened. That’s what we needd to do here, after a “twist” left us both thoroughly confused as hell about what had happened. After 15-20 minutes of both Chris and I googling, I think we eventually achieved some kind of consensus. But it was far from satisfying, and we are definitely not happy about it. I admire the attempt made to up-end everything the audience has seen over the previous 75 minutes. Unfortunately, when the execution is as wretched as here, I wish writer-director Taylor hadn’t bothered. 

After Girl and Chick Fight, it seems to be part of Bella Thorne’s attempts to re-invent herself as an action heroine, rather than the wussy vampire lover of Twilight fame. But this appears to have mutated more into a race to the bottom, between her and Ruby Ros,e as to who can select the worse projects. While both actresses have potential, neither of them have found material which is decent. This definitely ranks among the crappiest, even before reaching the ending. It’s about the burglary of a mansion belonging to married art brokers, Olivia (Monroe) and Daniel, by a masked man and a woman (Samuels). The couple’s young daughter, Casey (Lind) hides after the babysitter is brutally bludgeoned to death, while waitress Rose (Thorne), who is driving the couple home, appears to be in cahoots with the home invaders. Key word: appears.

The burglars turn the power off, for no particular reason – it’s established they had already disabled the alarm. Which means that the bulk of the movie has everyone involved creeping around the house in near darkness. I don’t know why film-makers persist in doing this. I stopped being scared of the dark when was 11, and now it’s just an irritant. Not helping matters, the criminals demonstrate absolutely no sense of urgency, moving at the most languid pace possible, when you would think it would behoove them to get in and out as quickly as possible. Of course, these actions are so that the movie can happen, with Casey crawling around the attic space, desperately trying to avoid capture, as Rose looms ever closer.

Lind is probably the best thing about this, balancing nicely between being brave and resourceful, without toppling over into Hit Girl-like excess. But even here there are problems – such as, why she didn’t get her parents’ gun earlier, or make any effort to call for help, leave the house, etc. It all adds up to one of the most woefully inept scripts I’ve had the misfortune to view in a long time. I should have seen the warning signs on the poster: when the thing you want to tout most is the producers’ previous credits, you have a very weak hand. Still better than Twilight though. Albeit, only just.

Dir: Shane Dax Taylor
Star: Bella Thorne, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Skyler Samuels, Mircea Monroe

Rag Doll

  By

★★★
“Punching up”

Truth be told, this took me two attempts to get through. The first foundered inside about thirty minutes, because I just wasn’t feeling it at the time. The movie made so little impression I managed to forget completely I’d seen it, and so it eventually made its way back onto my watch-list. When I realized this, I almost debated nixing it again; however, I persisted, and am at least somewhat glad I did. If falling well short of being a classic – not least, because of a twist ending which is both superfluous and a terrible misfire – there is enough here to merit a review.

Nora (Murray) is juggling several life elements, all of which demand more than she is able or prepared to give, and which are interfering with each other. Firstly, she has a mother, Catherine (Erb) with stage 4 cancer, requiring constant care. Then there’s her job, which involves cleaning motel rooms – and, to make ends meet, turning occasional tricks. Finally, there’s her actual passion: mixed martial-arts at a local gym, under the eagle eye of trainer Rosheen (Jones). Nora is there mostly as a sparring partner (read: punching-bag) for the more talented Aisha (Sanchez). But there’s a tournament for female MMA’ers coming up, with a $100,000 prize. That would take care of a lot of her problems, if she could win it. Life, however, appears to have other plans for her, not least her workmates’ intense, increasing dislike of her.

It’s a very earnest film, with not much in the way of light-hearted moments, beyond Catherine’s death-bed self-sarcasm. It stands almost entirely on the strength of Murray’s performance, which is intense to the point of occasionally being uncomfortable to watch. The MMA scenes are well-staged, the camera getting right in there with the participants, and incorporating some particularly good audio work (you can hear the muscles stretching). These elements work much better than the script, which is an awkward combination of sports movie cliche with kitchen-sink working-class drama, and is not particular convincing as either. In particular, there’s an attempt to shoehorn in a romantic subplot for Nora, which ends up being more cringeworthy than effective. Indeed, the same goes for the sexual tension between Nora and Aisha, though fortunately, that lasts just one scene.

The problem is that neither Nora nor the film need anyone else. She’s the very epitome of a strong, independent heroine, who is trying to make her way in life, through circumstances which would reduce most of us to a wreck in short order. Simply having her handle this would prove sufficient drama for most purposes. Neither the romantic entanglements nor the climactic tournament offer as much proof of life as, for example, her standing up against her part-time pimp. Then there’s that twist, which presumably seemed like a good idea. At some point. To someone or other. I can’t imagine when or who though. I would not be averse to seeing Murray in future, however, on the basis of her powerful performance here. Providing you are in the right mood, anyway.

Dir: Bailey Kobe
Star: Shannon Murray, Stephanie Erb, Dot-Marie Jones, Roxana Sanchez

9-Ball

  By

★½
“A load of balls.”

Oh, dear. There’s part of me which thinks this is what you get when you try and make actors out of pool players. For the star here, Barretta, is one of the top women cue artists in the world. She’s joined here by cameos from a couple of bigger pool stars i.e. people even I’ve heard of, in Jeanette ‘The Black Widow’ Lee and Allison Fisher, and you can’t really expect much out of any professional sportswomen, in terms of acting ability. However, she isn’t that bad, though this may just be relative to some of her fellow cast members. And, to be fair to the actors here, you could be an Oscar-winner, and still not be able to do anything with the wretched script, which is little more than a parade of cliches, when not being a shameless advert for the American Poolplayers Association and its leagues.

Gail (Barretta) is the daughter of a pool player, who saw Dad stabbed to death in the street in front of her house. Taken in by creepy Uncle Joey (Hanover), Gail has clearly inherited some of her father’s skills, and Joey makes her turn them to his benefit, hustling suckers for money in bars. But, of course, Gail has dreams of her own, meeting Nice Guy™ Mark (Kochanowicz), and wants to leave Joey to head out on her own as a professional player. Hence the largely pointless cameos by Lee and Fisher, advising Gail how to achieve her goal. Joey isn’t happy at the prospect of using his cash cow, and beats up Gail, who absconds with his “retirement fund”. Though initially sent to jail, he gets bailed out, and the time spent inside hasn’t exactly improved his temper.

I was really hoping for considerably more, and better filmed, pool. It’s  closer to being a Lifetime TVM with occasional interludes of the sport. And on the (sporadic) occasions we see Gail in action, we mostly see her striking the cue ball, or the target ball going into the pocket – hardly ever both in the same frame. What’s the point of having one of the world’s top players in your movie, if you rarely see them making their pro-quality shots?

It all builds towards an APA team tournament in Las Vegas, which at least. is a little better in this regard. Though that only shows up in the last ten minutes, leaving precious little room for any kind of tension to built. We gallop through it, to a final shot which don’t realize is the final shot, until after it has been pocketed. Even Joey’s subplot is hustled off-screen with an absolute minimum of excitement, despite him turning up at the event with a gun. There are possibilities in the idea, which I won’t deny: after all, pool is one of the few games where men and women can compete on equal terms. But they are painfully squandered by the wretched direction and script. As bar sports action heroine movies go, I guess we’ll have to wait for the Fallon Sherrock biopic.

Dir: Anthony Palma
Star: Jennifer Barretta, Kurt Hanover, Mark Kochanowicz, Jennifer Butler

Girl Force, by Jonathan J. West

  By

Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

On the one hand, this is a book in desperate, desperate need of a copy-editor. Seriously: this is littered with more typos, grammatical gaffes and clunky phrasing than any other book I’ve ever read. I don’t know what the process was, which brought this to market, but it clearly fell dramatically short of adequate. Even as a first draft, this is something of which I would be flat-out ashamed. At times, I had to read a sentence three times, just to try and figure out what was meant. I have DNF’d books for far, far less. 

And, yet… Not only did I finish this, I genuinely enjoyed the whole, lunatic experience. I don’t know if the editing got slightly better as the book went on. Maybe I just became used to the style, which flies defiantly in the face of, not just all literary convention, but the basic rules of English. Bizarrely, by the end, I found myself almost appreciative of the stream of consciousness, neo-Joycean approach. It’s better demonstrated by example, than description, so here’s a sample paragraph – neither particularly good nor bad by the book’s standards:

Terrorist fighters were all except the junior member the fifteen-year-old boy, all dead, all taken out with kill shot perception of naturality of the cold kill of special forces combat. As feeling neither angry or regret did the unit, the squad of Girl Force have. It was a job that needed to be done and done with maximum efficiency it was.

Imagine 176 pages, just like that. But for all the shortcomings in grammar. spelling, and frequently,  coherence, it doesn’t lack for sheer energy. The five women of the title are a super-secret black ops group, who carry out impossible missions on behalf of the US government, while bickering amiably about what tunes should be played [There’s a blackly funny moment involving suicide bombers and the song It’s Raining Men…] GIRL Force – it stands for Ground Infantry Reconnaissance Logistics – are a vastly disparate quintet, in terms of background and culture. They run the gamut from “hee haw rootin’ tootin’ dixie chick farm girl” Annabelle Huston, to Hannukah Jones, “at the top of the top from Persian and African royalty.” But they are all amazingly talented, in everything from dance to martial arts, loving their country (and puppies), while hating injustice with an equal and admirable passion.

The first mission is an extraction out of China, which escalates into an extended chase sequence, worthy of a Michael Bay movie, before they are swept up to safety. After a brief pause to meet their boss, General Sofia-Jones Washington in their state-of-the-art headquarters, and her nemesis, Senator Karen Mann, it’s back out into the field. For a terrorist  attack has led to the brink of World War III, and GIRL Force represents the only chance of stopping it. But can these five brave women really defeat the five hundred terrorists of ISIL splinter group Crimson Jihad? Oh, who am I kidding. It’s a light challenge. For they are so good at everything, this reads partly like a sly parody of the dreaded Mary Sue trope (which was, itself, originally created as a parody of Star Trek fan-fiction).

Indeed, I’m not sure how much of this is to be taken seriously. If forced into judgment, I’d say rather little: I’d line it up alongside the original Charlie’s Angels movie.  Taken in that light, it’s a fast, frothy read which, against all odds, did have me interested in finding out what happens next. But you definitely need a huge tolerance for what My Fair Lady’s Professor Henry Higgins called the “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” Never mind homicide, this may be guilty of war crimes against the language. 

Author: Jonathan J. West
Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

And Tomorrow the Entire World

  By

★★★
“Chewy, yet slightly crunchy.”

Plenty of films in our genre use violence, either as a tool of the plot, or simply for entertainment purposes. Fewer consider the philosophical and moral underpinnings of violent acts, in the way this does. Luisa (Emde) is the daughter of a rich, aristocratic family who is now a law student. She rebels against her upbringing by joining the P81 commune which is fighting against extreme right-wing groups in Germany. But there is a growing schism in the commune, between those who are opposed to injurious violence, and those who feel the ends justify the means. As Luisa drifts into a relationship with group leader Alfa (Saavefra), she finds herself drawn increasingly to the latter camp – albeit without an appreciation for the potential consequences.

It would be easy for this to descend into political polemic, yet it largely manages to avoid that. Luisa and her pals may be “fighting the good fight,” but they’re clearly not without significant flaws. For instance, Alfa regards the group as his own, personal all-you-can-eat buffet of young women, with Luisa just the next platter. It also does a good job of illustrating the slippery slope, from civil disobedience through property damage to full-on violence against people. At which point, I’d say you lose the moral high ground, and the film acknowledges it can become counter-productive. As someone says after a clash between left- and right-wing factions: “They are angry, really angry, and who’s going to pay? You, Alfa? No, it’ll be someone, somewhere, who had nothing to do with this.”

It’s still a shock when the full force of the German state and (the apparently infamous) Section 129 of their criminal code, is dropped on P81, making Luisa and Alfa fugitives. They hide out with Dietmar, a former activist in the 80’s, who spent time in jail for his acts then, and now lives quietly, working as a nurse. He offers a particularly cynical view regarding the futility of their actions, based on his own experiences: “We were absolutely convinced that we could build a new society. I was going to be a minister.” This is lost on Luisa, who steals a hunting rifle from her family’s home and prepares to launch an assault on an enemy gathering.

The film opens with her tossing away the gun, but at that point it’s not clear whether this was after, or instead of, its use. It’s on that decision that the film’s climax pivots: will she step back from the precipice, or embrace wholeheartedly what it means to take a life, even of someone you regard as lower than an animal? [Pointedly, Luisa is vegetarian…] This was Germany’s entry for the 2021 Best Foreign Film Oscar, though it did not make the final list of nominees. It definitely has that sense of earnestness the Academy likes, and is not so much biased ignores any other side exists – which may be the point, it being easier to hate someone who is kept distant and seen only as “the enemy.” But even an entrenched old hack like myself still found it more thought-provoking than I expected.

Dir: Julia von Heinz
Star:  Mala Emde, Noah Saavedra, Tonio Schneider, Luisa-Céline Gaffron

My Name

  By

★★★★
“Squid Games? They’re over-rated.”

What is it with Koreans and revenge? From Lady Vengeance through Princess Aurora to The Five, it seems an integral part of about half of their cinematic canon. This goes down the same line, but despite that familiarity, delivers an intensity that’s hard to resist, and provides an excellent action heroine. Indeed, in terms of Netflix series from Korea, I’d say this was more worthy of worldwide acclaim than Squid Game. But I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

The central character here is Yoon Ji-woo (Han), a teenager whose father is part of the Dongcheon, a major criminal syndicate. She’s somewhat estranged from him, but when he is gunned down, literally on her doorstep, she wants vengeance on those responsible. The cops seem largely disinterested in solving the case of a dead mobster, and the only person who wants to help is her late father’s boss, Choi Mu-jin (Park), the head of the Dongcheon. He tells Yoon her father was killed with a police revolver and sets her up as his undercover operative in the force, in order to identify the murderer and take her revenge.

It’s a long process, taking several years. It begins with her training in martial arts in the Dongcheon gym, then adopting a new identity of Oh Hye-jin, joining the police and working her way to the department run by the man suspected of her father’s killing, Cha Gi-ho (Kim). There, she bonds with another detective, Jeon Pil-do (Ahn), but the moral landscape gets increasingly murky. It turns out that there may be more to her circumstances than she has been told, with one revelation in particular upending everything she had believed since her father’s death.

This is a very strong effort, particularly at the beginning and end. Yoon’s status as a “take no shit” type is quickly established with a classroom brawl against bullies, and her tenacity and persistence in the search for her father’s killer is absolutely relentless. You can knock her down – and many times, that’s exactly what happens – but she keeps on getting back up. The action scenes here are extremely well-staged, and Han is clearly doing almost everything herself, rather than a stunt double. I did feel the show lagged somewhat in the middle, with the focus moving to Choi and his struggle for control of the syndicate. In particular, there’s a thoroughly unpleasant rival whom he kicked out, but who returns, with venom, for a take-over bid. Yoon ended up rather backgrounded in parts 3-5 of the eight episode show.

But the ending of part 6 is the revelation mentioned above, yanking the carpet out from under the viewer, every bit as much as Yoon, and gets the show firmly back on track. It’s not the final shocking moment, though I do have some questions about the motivation of certain characters for their actions. Still, it builds to a climax which, in hindsight, should have been almost inevitable from the start. It ties up everything nicely, and in an emotionally satisfying way. Where are the Western shows that offer such a solid combination of action and drama?

Dir: Kim Jin-min
Star: Han So-hee, Park Hee-soon, Ahn Bo-hyun, Kim Sang-ho

Too Hot to Handle

  By

★★★
“If you can’t stand the heat…”

Director Schain had already worked with his wife Caffaro on the Ginger trilogy, in which she played (per Wikipedia), “a tough and resourceful bed-hopping private-eye and spy.” Here, the character isn’t too different, though her day job is rather more morally questionable, being a professional killer. “Samantha Fox” (Caffaro) is the identity she has adopted, as she works on a series of hits in the Philippines. On her trail is the local chief of detectives, Domingo De La Torres (Ipalé), who first views Samantha as a suspect, but their relationship quickly becomes more intimate. It feels almost like a precursor to Basic Instinct, in that there’s a cop obsessed with someone he’s supposed to be investigating, and really doesn’t care whether or not she’s a murderer.

The film does aim to make Samantha quite a sympathetic character, in that all the people we see her kill, as ones without whom society is better off. But there are a couple of moments where she seems clearly psychopathic, to Villanelle-esque levels. For example, she takes pleasure in sitting and watching her first victim slowly suffocate to death. This is not by accident. When Domingo takes her on a shooting trip, she states, “It’s much more of a turn on to watch something die slowly. Even then, the greater the distance, the less the fun.” It’s an attitude we see in action, at a cock-fighting event which is apparently her idea of a date night (I’m pleased to report Chris is perfectly happy with dinner and a movie). While watching animals fight to the death, she is simultaneously dreaming about having sex. This seems… not exactly normal.

Yet, Samantha is still depicted as nicer than her victims: it’s not as if her twisted fantasies hurt anyone else. Well, except for her victims, anyway. I did like the way she rarely used physical means to take them down, outside of a duel against an operative De La Torres sends to the boat where she lives. Mind you, that scene is functional rather than impressive, and so it makes sense for the film-makers to script it so that she relies on her smarts. She’s fond of disguises, whether it’s pretending to be an art journalist, or going full brownface as she pretends to be a local maid. Caffaro clearly also has no inhibitions about shedding her clothes, though her figure is on the lighter side for my tastes.

Less effective in general is Ipalé, who became well-knows twenty years later, as Pharaoh Seti in The Mummy and its sequel. It feels as if he learned his lines phonetically, and he makes little overall impression here. I was more excited to see veteran Philippino actor Diaz as De La Torres’s lieutenant, for once getting to play a good guy. Overall, while nothing particularly special, this is reasonably entertaining, and considerably more twisted than I expected in terms of its protagonist and her psyche.

Dir: Don Schain
Star:  Cheri Caffaro, Aharon Ipalé, Vic Diaz, Corinne Calvet

Skull Forest

  By

★½
“Going Dutch can be a very bad thing…”

I think Len Kabasinski probably is the director with more  films reviewed here than anyone else, save perhaps Andy Sidaris. This is the fifth; the previous four have seem palpable improvement, from the near-unwatchable Warriors of the Apocalypse, to the reasonably competent Hellcat’s Revenge II: Deadman’s Hand. This, however, is one of his earlier efforts, and you have to peer pretty hard past the dreadful film-making style to see any worthwhile elements.

In particular, it feels as if it was made as a wager, after someone bet him he couldn’t make an entire film with the camera pointed at a 30-degree angle. The Dutch angle shot, in which the camera is tilted to evoke a sense of unease, is a well-known cinematic technique, used by the likes of Hitchcock. But it’s one that needs moderation. In a famous review of Battlefield Earth, Roger Ebert said of the director, “Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.” The same is true here of Kabasinski, who appears to think every shot is better at 30 degrees off vertical. Or perhaps he was just drunk throughout filming. Then there’s the excessive close-ups and violent shaking of the camera. No. Just, no.

The story open with a quote from The Most Dangerous Game, and that’s what we get. Four women, on a weekend getaway, find themselves targeted by a group of rich hunters, and have to fight for their lives. That’s the entire plot, and I’m fine with that. The action is no great shakes, to be honest; a lot of something happening off-screen, then cut to a not-too-convincing make-up effect. The only sequence that succeeded in holding my attention, was when two women among the hunters had a falling out, and ended up fighting each other. Kabasinski plays another one of the villains, and I’m not sure which is more distracting: the single contact lens his character wears, or the bad English accent employed, for no apparent reason.

However, there is a surprising amount of nudity, so the film, clearly aiming at shallow exploitation (and I’m fine with that too!), does at least deliver on this score. Though it is a bit of a mixed bag; Playboy model Neeld looks the best, but Brooks has the most memorable (if not exactly erotic)  shot, clawing her way naked out of the shallow grave in which she was left for dead, and beginning her quest for vengeance. However, the impact of these and any other credible moments, are sucked away by the truly dreadful camerawork employed. It seems likely to induce motion sickness and/or a migraine. If he’d simply nailed the camera to a tree, it would have been an enormous improvement, and likely been worth close to another whole star. I guess this was early enough in his career Kabasinski was still experimenting. We should be glad it’s not a style with which he persisted.

Dir: Len Kabasinski
Star: Sara Brooks, Lisa Neeld, Pamela Sutch, Melissa Scott

HellKat

  By

★
“Contains far too much pussying about.”

Rarely has there been a bigger gap between expectations generated by a synopsis, and the underwhelming reality of the actual movie. The former: “A fallen MMA fighter must win a netherworld no-holds-barred death tournament against man, beast and demon to save her soul. ” While I guess it’s not technically inaccurate, you will be forgiven for expecting something like Mortal Kombat on ‘roids – and not the recent, fairly crappy remake. Instead, you get a film which dillies, dallies and faffs about for the first forty minutes. Considering it runs less than eighty in total, including the end credits, this is not a good thing. And the “netherworld no-holds-barred death tournament”? It’s a boxing ring lit by red lights, in which the heroine has a couple of fights against people in remaindered Halloween masks. You should now understand my palpable disappointment.

When you are a low-budget movie (actually, true for any level, but especially on smaller budgets), you typically need to hit the ground running, and grab your audience’s attention quickly. It’s okay if there’s a lull thereafter, but in today’s world of short attention spans and other entertainment alternatives, if you lose people, they’re probably gone forever. Unless, that is, they run a site devoted to action heroines in popular culture, and thus feel obligated to soldier on, for review purposes. Though even they maybe spend more time than is ideal checking their email, eating snacks, and wondering how in hell they are ever going to write 500 words about this.

In this case, it begins with ex MMA fighter Katrina (Cohen), who is on the road in murky circumstances. Her car breaks down, and she accepts a lift from a stranger, whom she ends up having to shoot. She then goes to a bar, and hangs out there for a bit, being paid in tequila for mopping up patrons’ puke. The customers are an unprepossessing lot, abusive to each other and to Kat, even though the barman (Bouchet) wields a sawn-off shotgun at the slightest provocation. Again, we get forty minutes of this before the Devil, or a representative thereof, turns up in the shape of the man who gave her a lift. He is Satanic fight promoter Jimmy Scott (Davies), who gets Kat’s signature on a contract and the tournament is finally under way.

It’s pretty obvious we’re not in the real world from the get-go, e.g. Scott possesses demonic teeth and doesn’t die after getting shot. A bar patron survives a shotgun blast to the head with nothing more than a bad attitude. The number of moons exceeds the customer “one”. Kat, however, is so oblivious that none of this makes any impression on her. Any of this would have been forgivable, had the fight scenes – when they show up – been solid and effective. They aren’t. There’s a couple of decent moments, and Cohen’s stunt double [yeah, it’s kinda obvious] is athletic enough. Then it’s back to the chit-chat once again. Nobody cares. If there is a hell, it probably involves watching this on endless repeat.

Dir: Scott Jeffrey, Rebecca Matthews
Star: Sarah T. Cohen, Ryan Davies, Serhat Metin, Adrian Bouchet

The Flower and the Blackbird, by Liane Zane

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

My friend Liane Zane kindly gifted me with a paperback copy of this second of her Elioud Legacy novels, as she did with the first one (The Harlequin & The Drangùe), in exchange for an honest review. Having liked the first book, I was glad to accept; and I wasn’t disappointed with the sequel!

The premise of the Elioud Legacy builds on the idea, based on a passage in the book of Genesis, that in the days before Noah’s flood, “and also after that,” there were matings between angelic beings and humans, resulting in mixed-race offspring, here called the “Elioud.” On that foundation, Zane builds the literary conceit that these pairings are still going on at times, that a fair number of humans with some angelic genes still walk the earth, gifted with more-than-human abilities and perceptions in proportion to their angelic ancestry (although using these usually takes some training), and that those who know their ancestry may consciously ally themselves either with God or Satan. Though some, the “Grey Elioud,” would prefer to stay out of the whole cosmic battle….

Readers of the first book will already know the above; and I definitely recommend reading the books in order. Here, events from the series opener are referred to in a cursory way; but you will understand the characters, situation, and prior events better with a reading of the first book, and that one lays an essential foundation for what follows. In the first book, CIA agent Olivia Markham and her two close female friends and fellow 20-something intelligence agents (though from different European countries) met Albanian tycoon Mihail Kastrioti and his two fellow long-lived Elioud warriors for the Lord –and the ladies learned that they also have Elioud blood. That book pitted the two threesomes against the demon Asmodeus and his human acolyte, Joseph Fagan, who happens to head up the CIA’s Vienna office, but who has an agenda and proclivities that his superiors wouldn’t like. (A serious psychological evaluation on him before he joined the Company would have been a really good idea!) But equally importantly, we also learned that each member of the two trios felt a mutual strong attraction to a member of the other one. Since the series is projected to be a trilogy, and it’s in the paranormal romance sub-genre, I figured that each book would feature the story of a different one of these couples, and focus on their relationship.

Here, we focus on Italian intelligence agent Anastasia (“Stasia”) Fiore and Mihail’s side-kick Miro Kos. (“Fiore” is Italian for flower, and “Kos” means blackbird in his native Croatian, hence the book title.) Neither are unaware of feeling attracted to the other, but neither of them welcome it. Stasia’s not immune to male charms; but as a largely secular-minded young woman who mostly goes with the flow of her culture’s mores, she’s always opted to keep her sex life strictly casual. And she’s put off by the whole eternal cosmic battle revelation, and wants no part of it; she wants to keep her feet firmly planted in the familiar mundane security of the “real” world she’s always known. For his part, Miro has psychological baggage going back a long time (to the era of World War I, in fact!); his only venture into romance didn’t end well for him. But circumstances are about to throw these two together.

When last we left Asmodeus and Fagan, the former was in a coma and the latter had been on the receiving end of a partial memory wipe. But some weeks have elapsed since then…. Now, on loan from her agency to the Art Squad of Italy’s national police force, Stasia’s on the track of the thieves of a couple of valuable paintings, one of them a long-unknown, recently surfaced work by Rembrandt, “The Judgment of the Watcher Angels.” This case will be the tip of an iceberg involving not one but two demons, secrets of the classical art world, and high-stakes derring-do and fighting action that will give all six of our favorite Elioud a dangerous work-out, on both a physical and a spiritual plane.

In terms of messaging, stylistic features, and the quality of the writing, this volume is much of a piece with the preceding one. We have the same Christian grounding (the author is a Christian, of the Roman Catholic denomination) and strong good vs. evil vibe. Also in evidence is the same quick narrative pace, vivid characterizations (all six of our principal characters have quite distinct personalities, rather than being clones of each other), local color clearly based on serious research, capable depiction of action scenes and high technology, and solid knowledge of the actual geography of the locales where events take place, which I’m guessing comes from very extensive use of Internet maps and pictures. The relationship between the hero and heroine develops over a period of months, so we don’t have the same insta-love problem as in the first novel. Readers interested in the shady side of the art world, including art theft, will appreciate the use of that angle here (in that respect, the book might appeal to fans of such novels as The Collection and Zrada by Lance Charnes, though his works don’t have any supernatural elements).

Unlike the first novel, this one does have some explicit (and unmarried) sex, though it’s described in a way that comes across as loving rather than lewd. The author is aware that this poses issues; but it’s also, in the circumstances, not an unrealistic development, human nature being what it is. This is a stirring tale of a strong, respect-worthy hero and a tough, straight-shooting (in more ways than one!) heroine fighting evil and finding a committed connection to each other along the way. Though I don’t recommend starting the series here, I’d recommend this book to any reader who liked the first one!

Author: Liane Zane
Publisher: Zephon Books; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.