Tag: novel

The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang

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

“Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”

There can’t be many fantasy novels based on the events of World War II. But here we are, and Kuang has done an amazing job of taking historical events and weaving them into a saga of gods, magical powers and monsters, that works very well, even if you have no clue about the background.

At the beginning, Rin is a young orphan girl in a remote village in the South of the empire. Abused ceaselessly by her foster parents, they’re about to sell her into marriage. Her only hope of escape is to pass the exam which grants admission to the military academy of Sinegard. Even though she succeeds, she remains an outcast there, except to the equally derided Master Jiang, professor of lore. He helps her tap into powers largely forgotten by the Empire, but warns that if she doesn’t control them, they will control her. Her studies are brought to a sudden end when the Federation invades, laying siege to Sinegard. With the city about to fall, desperate measures have to be taken. But some doors, once opened, are an awful lot harder to close.

“This is what you have to tell yourself,” Qara said fiercely. “You have to believe that it was necessary. That it stopped something worse. And even if it wasn’t, it’s the lie we’ll tell ourselves, starting today and every day afterward.”

The above quote is a good depiction of the dilemma at the core of the book. Is it permissible to do evil deeds to stop evil deeds? But that’s just part of the moral quagmire in which Rin finds herself, where a desire to protect her country merges with a quest for vengeance – both personal, and for previous genocide. There’s no denying the abilities into which she can tap are increasingly powerful, bordering on the divine. But she’s no “Mary Sue”: the cost mounts alongside them, to the point where her humanity is in danger of being entirely scorched away when she uses them.

And even if it doesn’t, the drugs necessary – both to reach the Pantheon where the gods reside, and to numb the pain of life following her awakening – won’t necessarily help Rin retain her sanity. There’s a gigantic stone prison, inside which are entombed, in a state of living hell, the thousands of previous shamans, who were driven completely insane by what they unleashed inside themselves, and had to be contained or they could destroy the world. The dangers here are very real, and only escalate the further Rin develops.

“I will die on my feet,” she said. “I will die with flames in my hand and fury in my heart. I will die fighting for the legacy of my people, rather than on Shiro’s operating table, drugged and wasted. I will not die a coward.”

Kuang has constructed a great heroine in Rin. From the very beginning, she is driven to escape a situation many would accept as hopeless, and demonstrates enormous resilience, and an utter commitment to do whatever she feels is necessary. She succeeds, not through some innate ability (hello, Harry Potter), but by working her butt off. Yet it’s that same willingness which ends up taking her, both physically and mentally, to some appalling places and experiences. The descriptions of Federation atrocities are all, apparently, backed by historical fact, matching what the Japanese did during the occupation of China in the thirties and forties. Most notably, the sacking of one city is based on the Rape of Nanking, and even a hardened soul like myself had his stomach flip on occasion. Kuang doesn’t pull her punches. There also seems to be a scientist based on the infamous Unit 731, who carried out human “experiments” on the locals.

But it’s all severe unpleasantess which is very necessary to the plot. Because it’s the only way through which Rin can justify her own reactions, and the extreme measures which she unleashes, along with the rest of the Cike [the Imperial shaman troop to which she is conscripted, and who are used to take on the Federation by unconventional means] There’s certainly no shortage of awesome-if-horrific set pieces, such as the Cike’s luring in and destruction of an enemy fleet. I’d love to see Peter Jackson or Guillermo Del Toro take on a cinematic adaptation, though the entire $200 million budget would probably end up going on digital flames…

“She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of the Cike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding. And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.”

The general tone is one of increasing darkness, and by the end, I was as much scared of Rin as in awe of her or concerned for her fate. About the only weakness I can think of, is that she’s rather distant and unlikable. Not exactly fun to be around, shall we say, and given some of her later acts, the term “heroine” seems dubious at best. But she’s going to need to be an ultimate, supernatural bad-ass in future volumes – not least to deal with a potentially equally-lethal shaman, who escaped from the stone prison, partly through Rin’s actions. There’s also the little matter of the Empress, who may not be the honourable subject of veneration she initially appeared to be.

It all sets up very nicely, without needing to create an artificial cliff-hander. As time permits, I definitely look forward to reading the next installment, The Dragon Republic.

Author: R.F. Kuang
Publisher: Harper Voyager, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Poppy War series.

Danger’s Halo, by Amanda Carlson

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

In the late 22nd-century, Earth is pretty much screwed. The impact of a giant meteor killed a huge number of people, wiped out the everyday infrastructure, and sent the world into perpetual twilight. Thirty years ago, the wealthy upped and left, never to be seen again, abandoning the rest of the survivors to scramble in the ruins of civilization, simply trying to survive. Holly Danger is one of them, a salvager who lives by her wits in the labyrinth of a coastal city’s destruction. Which means dodging the seekers, addicts of the hyper-destructive drug, Plush, as well as the outskirts, those who come in to the city and raid it for supplies.

An encounter with a young kid, Daze, leads Holly into further trouble. He is in possession of a quantum drive belonging to Tandor, an outskirt who has kicked off a plan to take over the entire city. Holly and her allies represent one of the biggest impediments to Tandor’s plan, considering the authorities here are largely notable by their absence. He’ll stop at nothing to make sure they can’t interfere, and having his drive puts her in greater danger. If only she had the necessary gadget, called a ‘pico’, to read the drive…

It’s a really fascinating world, one which comes to life off the page and fully occupies your imagination. Even though the apocalypse has been over for generations by this point, it still determines every aspect of existence. People hang on by their fingernails, living on crappy, mass-produced food blocks and trying to make the best of things, however they can, with whatever they find. Paranoia is a very necessary order of the day: homes, possessions and even travel routes are typically highly booby-trapped, to prevent access by the unauthorized, making every day a potentially lethal one.

Holly, too, is a sharply-drawn and likeable lead character: loyal to a fault, once you have gained her trust, though this is something which can be exploited as a weakness by Tandor. It’s refreshingly romance-free – merely surviving occupies all her energy – though I get the feeling future volumes might drift in that direction. I do have to say, the plot at the core is perhaps a little thin, with the quantum drive more of a MacGuffin. If you want to find out what’s on it, folks, you have to buy the sequels! But at $2.99 for an omnibus containing the first three novels, I’m honestly very tempted. A little more evidence of the heroine’s combat talents might have been welcome, too.

These are relatively minor complaints, and this is the kind of book I’d love to see made into a film. It plays somewhat like a post-apocalyptic take on Tomb Raider, not least given Holly’s fondness for crossing the gaps between buildings on cable swings. Admittedly, simply re-creating the post-meteor cityscape, with its toppled and decapitated skyscrapers, would be far from cheap. Guess I maybe will have to pick up that omnibus.

Author: Amanda Carlson
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 6 in the Holly Danger series.

Queendom of the Seven Lakes, by A B Endacott

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

There is an interesting set-up here: unfortunately, it’s one which truly doesn’t get developed far enough. Elen-Ai is a 21-year-old woman, who has been brought up since birth to be an assassin for hire, part of “The Family.” Her latest commission is a little different: it’s not to kill, but to protect. For she is hired to make sure that Gidyon, the teenage son of Latana, Queen of the Second Country, stays alive. This is a matriarchal society, where power passes down the female side. But Latana has only her son, and is set to upset the traditional apple-cart by proclaiming Gidyon as her heir apparent. This decision will potentially be rejected by some among the seven clans who comprise the queendom, and may make him a target for those who’d rather see him out of the way. Hence, Elen-Ai’s presence, to make sure that doesn’t happen, as he begins a national tour around their estates, seeking support for his position.

I suspect it’s pretty obvious where this will end up going, based on Gidyon’s plan to defuse the clans’ concerns by marrying someone outside of the nobility entirely. I would bet his bride ends up being Elen-Ai, given by the gobbets of unresolved romantic tension which pepper proceedings, together with the wild swings between like and dislike. Given his age though, we’re probably a few volumes away from that. For now, this is more of a travelogue than an action novel. There’s one assassination attempt on Gidyon while they’re on the road, but otherwise, Elen-Ai’s skills are more seen in the stealth department. As well as her abilities with weapons, she can make herself invisible, a useful talent when it comes to obtaining information regarding the conspiracies against Gidyon. However, she’s far from infallible; indeed, her momentary inattention proves to have tragic consequences.

Despite some interesting wrinkles, e.g. the identity of Gidyon’s father is a closely-guarded secret to avoid political repercussions and enforce neutrality, this doesn’t capitalize on the worldview. Indeed, by using a male heir instead, it largely negates much of the role reversal which has gone before. I’m also hard pushed to imagine Latana is the first ever queen who failed to have a daughter. The main issue though, is I really would have liked to know more about Elen-Ai. The very concept of the Family – a tacitly-accepted guild of assassins – merits considerably more exploration. How she reached the point of being commissioned by royalty as a bodyguard, seems considerably more interesting than her traipsing across country as some kind of lethally mobile baby-sitter. This seems like a sad waste of her talents, a bit like reading a Sherlock Holmes book devoted entirely to his post-retirement life as a bee-keeper. While I didn’t feel like I’d wasted the time, there wasn’t enough here to convince me to go further into the series.

Author: A B Endacott
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 6 in the Legends of the Godskissed Continent series.

Hunter, Warrior, Commander by Andrew Maclure

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

This may be a first, in that the heroine here is non-human – contrary to what you (and, indeed, I!) might expect from the cover. I think I may have covered various crypto-humans before, such as vampires or elves. But this is likely the first entirely alien species. I began to suspect on page 1, when I read that Sah Lee “sank her pin-sharp teeth through the thick fur of the calf’s throat, and tasted the sweet metallic tang of its young blood.” This is clearly not your average twelve-year-old. And so it proves. The story really kicks under way two years later, when Sah Lee leaves her rural village on the planet of Aarn to attend school in the city of Aa Ellet.

She is out of town on a class trip, when demons descend from the sky, causing massive death and destruction. Of course, they’re actually an alien tribe known as “outcasts”, who specialize in this kind of thing. But Sah Lee being a pre-first contact civilization, demons it is. Eventually, the rest of the galaxy, led by the super-advanced group known as “the People”, come to the rescue, but by that point, the planet is uninhabitable and most of the Aarnth dead. Sah Lee is taken aboard a ship, and vows to take revenge on the outcasts by any means necessary, which involves joining one of the galactic armies. But there will be a period of sharp adjustment from the pastoral life she had on Aarn, to being an interstellar soldier. Not drinking out of the toilet will be a start.

It’s not quite clear what Sah Lee is. Mammalian, to be sure – and that’s significant, since one of the features of the universe depicted here is that it is peopled not just by mammals, but reptilians, avians and even insectoid species, generally (but not universally) getting along. Thank heavens for universal translators. Anyway, something cat-like is probably my best guess, though quite how… furry she is, is never established. It doesn’t matter much though: her story is what’s important. And this is at its best in the relatively early stages: seeing an alien invasion from the side of the natives, then following Sah Lee as she has to adjust to a radically new and unimaginably different life. It makes me wonder what first contact will be like for Earth, when it finally happens. Potentially not good.

It’s rather less effective one she settles in, becoming fairly standard space opera. Through a special relationship with the People, Sah Lee has a cutting-edge AI and tech which does make her a bit super-powered. She breezes through every situation, even getting harshly disciplined after breaking military protocol (albeit for good reason). I’m also very unsure of the timeframe here. By the end, she’s basically in charge of her own army, and I’m guessing she is no longer a teenager. Not least because the galaxy as a whole has more or less conquered disease, meaning that violent death is about the only thing preventing near-immortality, with one character being over 172,000 years old. But again, it’s just not clear.

It is, at least, a self-contained story, rather than being volume one of a saga. The book reaches its end at an appropriate and generally satisfying point, which could go on, yet doesn’t have to. I’d have been very interested at the half-way point, when this was offering a different and original perspective on a super-advanced society – looking at it from the bottom up. Now Sah Lee is no longer in that position, she has become considerably less appealing.

Author: Andrew Maclure
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, as an e-book only.

Satan’s Sword + Elven Blood, by Debra Dunbar

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

The first volume in the Imp series, A Demon Bound, was one of the most entertaining books I’ve read of late. It told the story of Samantha Martin, the human vessel occupied by a demon “who has chosen to spend her life among us mortals, rather than in the underworld… largely because it’s more fun up here.” I was thus stoked to read the next two entries in the series, with Sam’s further adventures. She’d ended the series having been “bound” to an angel, Gregory, and in the subsequent parts, this is now causing issues for both of them. He is getting flak from his colleagues for his association with her, while she is experiencing unfamiliar emotions, such as loyalty and kindness.

It makes sense to cover both of these as one volume, as they combine to represent a significant story arc. The main thread in that is her hell-spawned brother, Dar, has got in the bad graces of upper-tier demon, Haagenti. Unfortunately, that escalates into Haagenti putting out an infernal hit on Sam – as well as those she cares about, in particular her all-too human boyfriend, Wyatt. To deal with that, she ends up taking on a job for an elven lord, locating the offspring of an unfortunate liaison between an elf and a succubus – the latter just happening to be Sam’s foster sister, Leethu.

The main problem, I felt, was Dunbar over-stuffed these books with ideas. If she’d stuck to the basic concept above, and developed it properly, it might have worked a bit better. Instead, there are any number of threads which feel undercooked, to a greater or less degree. For example, the serial killer targetting Sam’s slum tenants, or the teenage boys who managed to summon her, courtesy of a ritual they found on the Internet. The latter feels especially rife with potential, sadly never realized. Or the heavenly bureaucracy in which Sam gets entangled, complete with committee meetings and detailed reports. I’d rather have heard more about these fascinating and amusing ideas, than the detailed discussion concerning the breeding habits of elves we get.

Fortunately, the heroine remains as wonderfully twisted a character as ever. Though I must confess, the angel influence is a little worrying, given what made Sam so deliciously bad was her complete lack of scruples. For when you are all but immortal, you can afford to push other entity’s buttons – such as when she manages to goad another angel into an all-out brawl during one of those committee meetings. There may have been a stale Danish pastry involved. If this sardonic edge becomes dulled due to the angelic influence, it would be a real shame, since it’s one of the main things which makes Sam stand out in the field of literary action-heroines. We’ll see what happens as we go forward in the series.

Author: Debra Dunbar
Publisher: Volumes 1-3 are available as an omnibus from Anessa Books, available through Amazon, as an e-book
Books 1-3 of 10 in the Imp series.

Wildflower Bride, by Mary Connealy

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

Barb and I discovered evangelical Christian author Mary Connealy through her Sophie’s Daughters trilogy, partially set in Montana in the years from 1878 to 1884. Several characters who figure in her earlier Montana Marriages trilogy, of which this novel is the third, also play important roles in the later one. So we were interested in their back stories; and when I found this book in a thrift store, it was a natural purchase! (We’ve also just started reading the second installment; long story!) This means we’re reading the trilogy in reverse order; so we started with much more knowledge of the characters’ future than the original readers would have (the read was more like a visit with old friends). However, I’ll avoid spoilers in this review. (Obviously, though, it might contain “spoilers” for the earlier Montana Marriages novels.)

This tale opens in late spring/early summer, 1877, as young Wade Sawyer is awakened by gunfire as he’s sleeping in his small cabin high in the Montana Rockies. The shots come from the nearby small Indian village, which is being massacred by four masked whites. Arriving too late to prevent the deaths of most of the inhabitants, Wade manages to wound one of the fleeing murderers, and finds Glowing Sun, a young woman raised for the past dozen years by the Salish (called Flathead by the whites), ever since they found her alone at about the age of eight after disease killed her white family, still alive. (One of the killers had tried to abduct her, but she slashed his face with her knife and escaped.) Her white name, as she recalls, is Abby, and she and Wade have met previously (as recounted, apparently, earlier in the trilogy), last fall –and were in fact attracted to each other; but she had an Indian fiance at the time, through an arranged engagement. He’s now dead; and when she’s cast out by a surviving matriarch who never liked her (and who blames her for attracting the massacre, assuming that the attackers’ motive was rape), she’s left alone in the world again. Soon after, Wade’s summoned to the bedside of his estranged rancher father, injured and maybe dying; and since he won’t desert Abby, and she believes responding to the summons is his duty, she comes along with him.

Like all Connealy novels, this is a clean “romance” (in the modern-day book trade sense); but it has more going for it than romance (otherwise, I wouldn’t have read and liked it!). For one thing, it’s a perceptive exploration of cross-cultural romance, of the specific clashing cultures of whites and Indians in the late 19th-century West, and an ethically-aware indictment of the former’s treatment of the latter. (Abby doesn’t have much use for the attitudes and practices of a white culture she’s mostly long abandoned, though she hasn’t forgotten the language, and a lot of her criticisms strike home.) It’s also a hard look at the dynamics of a dysfunctional, abusive family –because Wade’s estranged from his dad for good reason!– at co-dependency and how insidious it can be, and what does (or doesn’t) contribute to familial healing. There’s also a decided helping of Western-style mystery, because there’s intrigue afoot on the Sawyer ranch. Who’s behind the outbreak of cattle rustling in the area? And who were the attackers of Abby’s village, and what was their real motive?

Connealy’s a Christian author, whose world-view influences her writing. Christian characters are common in her novels (Red Dawson, a supporting character here, is a lay preacher as well as a rancher). Wade has a sincere Christian faith, as does Abby, fostered in her case by the missionary activity of real-life Jesuit Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801-1873) and his colleagues, who really did have considerable success in their work among the Salish, and whose treatment here is very positive. (The author’s approach to Christian faith is –commendably, IMO– nondenominational, though sectarian rivalries and animosities weren’t nonexistent in the real 19th-century West.) It’s seen here as a genuine source of moral reformation, courage in adversity, and guidance and help in daily life; but though it’s referred to more here than in the later trilogy, I wouldn’t describe this one as “preachy.”

Christian ethics, with its basis in the love commands, also raises a serious issue for reflection, when it needs to be lived out in a violent environment, among people some of whom are perfectly willing to kill you, and others, to get things they want. Wade wrestles with this some, as does Abby –in fact, more so, since while Wade wears a gun and can use it, she’s considerably more combat capable than he is. (She’s also a stronger-willed personality than he is, and the more dominant partner in the relationship –okay, that word’s not a spoiler, any reader knows these two are destined for each other!– and Wade’s willing to recognize that there’s nothing wrong with that.) While she’s not into guns (though if she slugs you in the head with one, you won’t get up for awhile), she’s handy with her knife, and it doesn’t leave her person –unless she needs to throw it. Her personality could best be described as hot-tempered and fierce. The conclusion she comes to is that forcibly defending yourself and others IS morally right, but relishing the damage done isn’t; and she’s honest enough to admit that she needs to work on her attitude in that area. So when the chips are down here, the main question may not be, will our hero rescue the damsel in distress? Given their respective skill sets, it might be, will our tough damsel rescue her guy in distress? :-)

Author: Mary Connealy
Publisher: Barbour Publishing; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Gears of a Mad God, by Brent Nichols

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

Early 20th-century pulp-fiction author Howard Philips Lovecraft created a substantial corpus of writing, mainly in the short story format and mostly in the form of horrific science fiction which in many ways reads like classic supernatural fiction. The most enduring body of his work has been the novellas and stories making up what has come to be called his Cthulhu Mythos, based on the premise that the prehistoric Earth was dominated by the Great Old Ones, or Elder Gods, malevolent and repulsive, but very powerful and dangerous, alien beings who were ultimately dethroned by another alien race, and whose hidden remnants want to regain their past dominance. A number of Lovecraft works present the idea that these beings have an evil and often murderous cult of human worshipers, handed down from the dawn of mankind, who seek to further their return to power. Numerous later writers have been inspired by HPL’s example to create their own pastiches and spin-offs of the Mythos. Brent Nichols’ self-published Gears of a Mad God novella series (there are six in all), of which this book –set in Canada in May 1921, mainly on Vancouver Island– is the opener, is one of these spin-offs. One of my Goodreads friends gave this one a favorable review; and since I’m a Lovecraft fan and the novella is free for Kindle and relatively short at 98 pages, I downloaded it.

An important point to note is that, while HPL’s Mythos supplies the premise here, Nichols’ prose style is nothing like the older writer’s “purple prose;” his diction is modern, straightforward and direct, with no stylistic embellishment and a minimum of description. Another is that the focus here is exclusively on the cultists of the Great Old Ones, and the effort to counter them; the sinister objects of their devotion are strictly off-stage. (For all that we see here, the Great Old Ones could just as well be figments of the cultists’ imagination.) Also unlike Lovecraft, even though there are a couple of instances here of characters driven mad by exposure to the cult’s secrets, Nichols eschews existential pessimist sermonizing and “morals of the story,” and doesn’t harp on the idea that unvarnished exposure to reality would actually be enough to drive virtually anybody insane. Of course, our protagonist/viewpoint character here is female, something which is never found in HPL’s own work. So despite the inspiration, the effect of reading this is much different from the works of the original Cthulhu canon. The title also misuses the term “steampunk” (it features a heroine who’s mechanically oriented, but that doesn’t make it steampunk!), and the phrase “Gears of a Mad God” makes no particular sense –some machinery here has gears, but they aren’t owned by any Elder God, mad or sane, and they aren’t focal to the story.

On the positive side, the tale is fast-paced, held my interest, and is frequently exciting and suspenseful; I felt that Nichols handles action scenes well. There is a clearly-drawn moral dimension to the conflict; Colleen makes choices that involve putting protection of others before self-interest, and her moral struggles with lethal force are realistic for a young woman with no combat training or experience. She does pick up fighting skill by use, and her mechanical ability is a nice touch (though clock-making and repair actually isn’t as credible a source of physical strength and knowledge of large-scale mechanical processes as say, auto repair would have been).

The plot is linear, with no particular twists (I actually envisioned one I was sure was coming, and was quite surprised when it didn’t materialize!). On the negative side, the character development is not deep (Colleen is the best-developed character, but she’s still not very fully realized), there’s not a lot of texture, and I wouldn’t say there’s a strong sense of place either in her native Toronto or in Victoria. (I did learn that Vancouver, British Columbia is NOT on Vancouver Island –but Victoria is!) But unlike one reviewer, I didn’t find the U.S. Bureau of Investigation agents and their Canadian liaisons ineffectual; and I didn’t have a problem with squaring the arrival of characters on the island with the ferry schedule –I made the assumption that their appearance in the story was not necessarily always virtually identical to their landing time. (But I did have a quibble with the idea that the U.S. President had contacted the Canadian Prime Minister “last year” –the President in 1920 was Woodrow Wilson, who was then pretty much non-functional due to his physical and nervous breakdown.) IMO, the emphasis on the boyfriend’s “antediluvian attitude” (to quote one review) near the end was necessary to set up a significant choice by the heroine.

Overall, I liked this tale. But even though it’s obviously only the beginning of a larger story arc, and the ending, while not a cliff-hanger as such, is clearly meant to lead into further confrontation with the cult, I’m still not captivated enough by the characters or the story to invest in buying the sequels.

Note: There’s no sexual content (Colleen and her boyfriend, at one point, lay down on a bed with their clothes on and get some needed sleep, but they don’t do anything else), and no bad language beyond a d-word and two h-words.

Author: Brent Nichols
Publisher: Self-published; available through Amazon, both for Kindle (free!) and as a printed book.
Book 1 of 6 in the Gears of a Mad God Book series
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Chinese Woman: The Barbados Conspiracy, by Brian N. Cox

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

Though just called “Brian Cox” on the book, it’s probably wise to begin by distinguishing the author here from his more famous namesakes, both the actor and the “rock-star physicist.” That said, this is a brisk if not particularly memorable spy novel. The main outstanding feature is that the heroine is neither American nor British, but Chinese. Rather odd to be reading this very positive portrayal of Communist state security personnel, during the protests in Hong Kong.

She goes by a couple of different names in the book. As a 12-year-old kid, she’s Zhen Xiaomei, and watches her mother and family get brutally slain by gangsters Wu Xing and Meng Hong, due to an unpaid debt. [If you’ve seen Kill Bill Volume 1, you’ll be aware of how this is going to work out for them…] A quarter century later, she works as an agent for the Ministry of State Security, Second Bureau, when she is given a mission to travel to the United States and bring back a fugitive to stand trial in China. Initially, Xiaomei is reluctant – but her tune changes, when she discovers the fugitive is Wu Xing.

Under the guise of PhD student Li Mei, she begins trying to track Wu down in Seattle, by befriending his girlfriend Han Xia. She also encounters FBI agent Sean McNamara, and begins a relationship with him – initially as a source of information, but it’s never that simple, is it? Complicating matters further is the titular plot, in which a rogue faction of hawks in the Taiwanese and American military, are plotting to launch a nuclear missile at Taiwan, and blame it on China. A jaunt to the Caribbean? Don’t mind if Li Mei does. Though it’s kinda awkward when she bumps into Sean there.

These plots never quite mesh, and it would probably have served each of them better, if they had been handled in their own volume.  There’s also a thread about a serial killer, which doesn’t appear to serve much purpose, and the split of the story between Xiaomei and Sean sometimes makes it feel like the author was uncertain who was really his central character. Cox also tends to go overboard on the descriptive aspects of his characters, beyond what is necessary, and certainly what is interesting. A couple of well-written facets are more effective than a head-to-toe description: we don’t need to identify them in a police line-up.

The main positive is the heroine, who is a strong and effective agent, smart and thoroughly competent in her actions. Her background makes her considerably more interesting than McNamara, and I was left wanting to know more about her further adventures. While not a great work of literature, it is an entertaining one, and I ripped through it quickly. The second volume is free, through a link in #1, in exchange for your email address. At that price, I’m almost tempted to sign up.

Author: Brian N. Cox
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in The Chinese Woman series.

Merciless Charity by Wayne Stinnett

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

To be charitable (pun not intended), this might perhaps have come across better if I were familiar with the “Caribbean Adventure” series by the same author, featuring the exploits of ex-marine Jesse McDermitt. That long-running franchise saw its sixteenth(!) entry published in November, and this volume appears to be the first in a spin-off series from the same universe. This may be why the early going is really tough. Explanations of who people are and their relationships, are notable by their absence, and if it’s tacitly presumed you know them from his other work, that would make sense.

In particular, there’s an early plot thread where our heroine, Charity Styles, help track down kidnappers on their boat. But it’s a while before we discover who was abducted, and the whole thread seems to go absolutely nowhere, with Charity dropping people and then flying off. Only after then do we get to the main story, where she vanishes off the grid, in order to sail a boat from Miami to Mexico, make her way up the side of a volcano, and take out the terrorist cell who have set up a training camp there, preparing for an attack in Texas. None of which makes a great deal of logical sense. Why sail, rather than fly? Hell, take a submarine. And why is the US government pussyfooting around with an ocean-going sniper, when a well-placed Hellfire missile or two would be just as effective, and considerably quicker?

Regardless, this means that more than half the book is taken up with the 1,200 nautical mile sailing trip, including a particularly irrelevant side mission to rescue some Cuban refugees. As ocean-going travelogue, it’s actually not bad, and almost makes me want to buy a yacht. But as action-heroine fiction goes? It’s mild stuff indeed, and until she reaches the terrorist camp, the sole incident of note is an encounter with a would-be mugger. It seems a bit of a waste of a violent background, which saw Charity captured after the helicopter she was piloting was shot down in Afghanistan. She was held by a Taliban group, and brutally violated by them, over an extended period, before escaping, taking revenge and being rescued. That’s an entire hold’s worth of baggage which could potentially be unpacked into her character, yet it never happens.

Things do perk up in the final battle, where we finally see the unleashed savagery of which Charity is capable, living up to the title of the book. The terrorists don’t have a chance, to put it mildly. Though they’re not just up against a lethal sniper, but what can only be described as a volcano ex machina. It’s too little, too late, and I must confess I was glad this was a quick read, coming in at only 224 pages. There’s nothing here to make me want to delve any further into these warm waters.

Author: Wayne Stinnett
Publisher: Down Island Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 5 in Caribbean Thriller Series.

No Shelter, by Robert Swartwood

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

“Meet Holly Lin. Nanny by day, assassin by night.” That was the tagline here, and you’ll understand why it jumped off the Amazon page and onto my Kindle. I was expecting something like Mary Poppins crossed with Atomic Blonde [“A spoonful of C-4 helps the terrorists go down…”], which is a great concept. However, I guess I’m going to have to write that book myself, because this isn’t it. I suppose, technically it is, though may be closer to like “vaguely nannies some times, assassin at others”. It certainly helps in terms of workplace schedule flexibility, that she nannies for her government boss. So it’s apparently fine when she has to abandon her charges and jet off from Washington to Las Vegas to assassinate someone selling a flash drive, on which is… Well, we’ll get back to that.

Holly also had a tendency to go off-mission, riding off into the Nevada desert on her own to rescue a bunch of sex-trafficked women. That’s a decision that comes back to haunt her later on, though it’s extraordinarily convenient how all the bad guys seem to know and work with each other. They must have a villains’ Facebook group or something. The other major issue is the shift in focus. In the second half, the main antagonist becomes someone who was only mentioned in flashback/passing in the first. There’s little or no emotional resonance to the conflict as a result. Though if you can’t guess the identity of the mysterious figure who spares Holly’s life in an alley, you probably need to read more of this genre.

Swartwood has a better handle on the action, with a number of well-written and fast-paced set pieces, and a heroine who has no problem using brutal violence as a tool. However, the underlying logic on both sides is often questionable. The climax occurs after Holly’s charges are kidnapped and ransomed, held in exchange for that pesky flash drive. Yet the way in which she goes about retrieving it, seems more designed for spectacle than good sense – and she needn’t even have bothered, since the villain agrees to meet her without requiring any kind of proof she has it. These kind of missteps bedevil the story. Though I did appreciate the final, savage payoff to the running thread about the elevator in her apartment building being slow or out of order.

There just isn’t enough here to make it stand out from the pack of other assassins-with-a-heart-of-gold-and-a-troubled-past books. If it had played up the “double life” concept – making Holly some kind of bad-ass baby-sitter – this could have been a novel angle. Instead, it hardly gets much of a look-in, and as a final insult [probably a spoiler, but I don’t care] Swartwood can’t even be bothered to tell us what is actually on the flash drive to cause such mayhem and bloodshed. It’s a complete McGuffin. Unfortunately, this author is no Hitchcock.

Author: Robert Swartwood
Publisher: RMS Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Holly Lin series.