Tag: novel

Infinite Waste by Dean F. Wilson

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

This initially seemed like a borderline entry, which I kept reading purely for entertainment. It’s about an exploratory star-ship, the Gemini, out on the very edge of known space, which comes across a giant barge, packed with nuclear waste and populated by a race of rat-humanoids, the Raetuumak. The Gemini is an appropriate name for the craft, as it’s effectively two separate ships, each with their own captain and very different approaches. Maggie Antwa, commander of Gemini Right, is a cautious scientist who abhors violence in any form, and was compelled to take on this mission after being involved in a environmentalist rebellion against the ruling Empire. Over in Gemini Left, on the other hand, Skip Sutridge is a square-jawed believer in shooting first and asking questions… well, never, to be honest. He has been sent to the fringes, probably to try and keep him out of trouble.

It doesn’t work. Skip finds himself captured by the Raetuumak, leaving Maggie to strap on the battle armour and rescue her co-captain. That’s not the end of the matter though, as they discover the barge is an interstellar weapon, aimed at the heart of the Empire. Worse still, is the creature made of pure shadow that stalks the corridor of the ship, absorbing the energy of anyone it touches: this is one of the Umbra, long since considered to be no more than the bogeymen of fairy tales. Not only is this belief incorrect, they’re now apparently returning from their exile to take on the Empire. Maggie and Skip will have to put aside their deep philosophical differences to deal with both this massive dirty bomb, and the Umbra.

It’s Maggie’s character arc which eventually qualifies this for here: she and Skip are complete opposites, who initially share only mutual loathing. Yet they eventually realize that neither one of their approaches will be sufficient to defeat this threat. As the book states, “He was sword and she was shield. Separately, they were vulnerable. Together, if they could ever find a way to really work with each other, they would be powerful beyond measure.” That’s really the core of the book here: the convergence on a middle ground which is able to make use of both their undoubted talents. It’s Maggie who drives this, with the solo rescue of Skip proving her courage and audacity, and forcing him to admit her abilities. Yet, she also finds that her long, deep-held pacifism has limits: after realizing the need to deal with the Umbra, “Perhaps for the first time in her life, the thought of killing something didn’t upset her at all.”

I have to say, the way in which it is eventually dealt with, was more than a little weak: if they’re so easily defeated, it’s hard to see how the Umbra could be any kind of threat to the galaxy. Yet, except for that moment, this was a strong page-turner. As mentioned at the start, kept me interested even in the early going, when its action heroine credentials were in doubt. Both Skip and Maggie are capable of carrying the story on their own, and the pairing of them is an effective combination. I’m intrigued to see where they go from here.

Author: Dean F. Wilson
Publisher: Currently only available as part of the Dominion Rising collection for Kindle.
Book 1 in the Infinite Worlds series.

Girl Fights Back, by Jacques Antoine

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

I’ve come to the conclusion I prefer bad films to bad books. A bad film can be appreciated and offer entertainment in unexpected ways. I’ve rarely found that to be the case with literature, which just… lies there, dully. If a movie sucks, then you can at least allow it to drift into the background, while you check your phone, play with the cat, or do household chores. A bad book, on the other hand, requires every bit as much effort as a good one: the return on that investment is just a great deal less.

Not that Girl Fights Back is truly bad. There are few books that are the publishing equivalent, say, of Plan 9 From Outer Space. But it is strikingly mediocre, with a heroine whose name might as well be “Mary Sue” rather than “Emily Kane”, since she’s so idealized. I mean, five minutes in the company of this teenage girl, and a hardened professional espionage agent melts like butter: “He must have glimpsed in her eyes just then the immense wellspring of compassion and forgiveness that made its home there, and sighed as his shoulders visibly sagged, perhaps under the weight of the knowledge that she could indeed forgive him.” Damn. That’s a sentence and a half. He’s not the only one: Everybody Loves Emily, it appears, whether it’s her school-friends or lethal ex-CIA operatives.

She is the daughter of George Kane, a man with a murky past, who works as a chauffeur/bodyguard for a former government executive, who also appears to have been involved in his share of previous shenanigans. To cut a long story short, their past comes back to haunt them: the estate where they live is attacked one night, by a group seeking information about a research project into “super soldiers” with which both George and his employer were involved. The attackers think Emily is part of it; fortunately, she is out in the woods that evening, and is able to return later and rescue her father, who clues her in to the situation. So, what does she do, after overcoming the shock of all these traumatic events, to foil those hunting her?

If you guessed, “Return to school, as if nothing had happened,” you are the author of this book.

Seriously. I know she’s a martial arts wizard, and there’s such a thing as “hiding in plain sight.” Still, this ranks as among the most baffling of decisions I can remember a character making. She could have hidden out with the rest of her family, or gone on the run independently. Nope. Back to class and hanging out at the dojo it is. There’s also the striking way in which a major character is suddenly disposed of: “____ died that night, having never regained consciousness.” Well, that’s a shocker, especially since they had been quite chatty over the preceding hours.

The martial arts heavy nature of the action is also somewhat problematic, since this kind of things is hard to describe: reading about kung fu, tends to be a bit like reading about juggling. It’s nowhere near as exciting as seeing it, unless the writer is particularly good. Antoine is not, and we get sentences such as, “Emily slid one hand along her arm, until it became a ridge-hand strike to the side of her headgear, and in the ensuing confusion jabbed to the center of her chest.” Not exactly painting a thrilling word-picture, is it?

The book does possess a philosophical tone, which occasionally hits on some nuggets of interest. I particularly liked this one, on gender differences: “Boys fight for dominance, she thought, which means that at some level they understand they must preserve their defeated enemy. Otherwise dominance will not have been achieved. But girls fight to injure or eradicate. They have no use for a defeated enemy, which makes them much more malevolent than boys, she concluded.” Overall, however, that’s the exception rather than the rule, and I reached the end with absolutely no interest in seeing what happened next.

Author: Jacques Antoine
Publisher: Amaterasu Press, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback.
Book 1 of 7 in the Emily Kane Adventure series.

BloodLust, by Auryn Hadley

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

Three millennia previously, the Terrans landed on the planet of Ogun, and took it over. The native Iliri, though in many ways superior to the new arrivals in both mental and physical ability, ended up subjugated. They are now very definitely second-class citizens, only remembering vague legends of their once-proud past. One such is Salryc Luxx, a rare pure-bred Iliri who is a private in the army. Despite the fierce prejudice against “her kind”, she gets a try-out for the Black Blades, the military’s elite special forces. Which, it turns out, is a haven for Iliri and their supporters. Sal becomes the first woman in the unit, and her talents – including the ability to shape shift – quickly become an essential part of the team, allowing her to become one of their top covert assassins. However, her presence also causes significant static, not least her relationship with the Black Blades’ commanding officer, Blaec.

Oh, dear. Who knew there was a market for thinly-veiled identity politics crossed with soft porn? But let’s start with the positives, such as the well-considered setting – I liked the way that metal is an extremely rare commodity, helping explain the lack of both firearms and vehicles (though it’s not yet quite clear how the Terrans got to Ogun? Wooden spaceships?). Hadley also has a good hand on the action aspects, with Sal’s missions being tense and bloody. However, Sal is a bit of a Mary Sue, being stronger, faster and just downright better than any man, even including the hand-picked soldiers of the Black Blades. It’s all a bit too obviously author wish-fulfillment.

Still, it is considerably less problematic than the relationships here, not least the idiocy of Blaec. For a commanding officer, he’s as dumb as a log, right from when he has a one-night stand with a woman, and lets her dictate a key element of the test Sal and her two rivals will go through the next day. For the woman is Sal, using her shape-shifting talents. Well played, it has to be said. But he then starts an actual relationship with her, in defiance of all (very sensible) military orders of officers bedding subordinates. And my eye-rolling reached epic levels when it turns out that Sal’s post-operation reaction is to go full-on nympho – hence the title, I guess – in particular, getting sweaty with colleague and fellow assassin, Cyno. Which makes Blaec go all sad puppy.

Everything about these aspects feel just… wrong, on so many levels. From the Goodreads reviews, it appears this is an entry from the “reverse harem” fiction genre, in which, according to UrbanDictionary.com, a single girl is liked and followed by a bunch of handsome men. You learn something new every day, I guess. If this had been mentioned a bit more in the Amazon blurb, rather than being described as, “a powerful and intriguing female lead, the likes of which the fantasy genre hasn’t yet seen,” I might well have skipped it.

Author: Ella Summers
Publisher: Spotted Horse Productions, available through Amazon as both an e-book and paperback.
Book #1 of 7 in the ‘Rise of the Iliri’ series.

Gia in the City of the Dead, by Kristi Belcamino

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

Gia Valentina Santella is the daughter of a rich Italian family in California. She doesn’t seem to do much with the bountiful hand fate has dealt her: drinking, casual sex and designer labels appear to be her main interests. But her easy life is rudely disrupted after her parents die in a fire at their estate in Switzerland (!). In the aftermath, she is sent a letter from the man who carried out their autopsies, confessing that he was paid off to conceal the real, much less accidental cause of death. As Gia starts to dig into the past, seeking the truth, it soon becomes apparent that it was a good deal murkier than initially appears. And also, that someone has a strong, vested interest in ensuring it stays covered.

Goddamn, this is bland: I finished it only a couple of days ago, and am struggling to recall much more than the basic details. I do recall being rather annoyed, however, that the heroine endlessly quotes gobbets of Budo philosophy… but appears largely clueless when it comes to putting any of her allegedly extensive training into practice. She seems to have endless resources, for example, funding a rather convoluted scheme to make her adversaries believe she has left the company. But these are not matched by her resourcefulness – she then blows the gaff by a ridiculously ill-advised trip to a funeral home. [And don’t even get me started on that particular corpse, which also meets a highly-suspicious end, yet is all but ignored by Gia, at least in this volume]

It just feels as if so many of the incidents here were thrown in without sufficient thought. For example, at one point, someone sets the apartment building where Gia is hiding out on fire, when she’s not in it. Even at the end of the book, when the truth is finally revealed, there’s no logical motivation for this. If it was to get rid of a bit of evidence, then breaking in and taking it would have made more sense. The heroine… Well, she seems to have a good heart in there, somewhere, but this felt more like reading about the misadventures of one of the Hilton sisters: not exactly the smartest knife in the kitchen-block, shall we say.

According to the author, “Gia Santella is my alter ego, the woman I might have been in a different life.” And that apparently unrestrained wish-fulfillment is perhaps a good part of the problem here. For example, there is absolutely no reason why she needs to drive a red Ferrari, yet she does. We get sentences such as, “I spotted five Ferraris, including one Ferrari 458 Italia Spider, three Lamborghinis Gallardo LP 560-4 Bicolores, and even a McLaren MP4-12C.” If I wanted to amuse myself with an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, I would do so. At least The Grand Tour has Jeremy Clarkson being snarky about the sports cars.

Author: Kristi Belcamino
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book only.
Book 1 of 4 in the Gia Santella Crime Thriller series.

Rain Dance by D.N. Erikson

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

The saying, “You only live twice,” is supposed to be a metaphor, but for Eden Hunter, it ends up being very much a statement of fact. She’s a former con-artist, dragged back from beyond the grave by vampire warlord, Aldric. He puts her to work on a hidden island as his personal soul-harvester, with a strict quota per week. It’s not great work, but it’s steady – at least until Eden’s beach-front house is attacked by a werewolf with murder on its furry mind. She then finds herself seen by the FBI as their prime suspect after an old partner in confidence tricks turns up dead on her doorstep. But, wait! There’s more! She has to deal with the rain goddess – presumably, the source of the title – to whom Eden is also in thrall, and whose rules she just broke. A gang involved in robbing her boss of millions in gold bullion. Her dead sister. A serial-killer politician. Oh, and a talking cat.

Overall, the main problem is that this feels like Book 2, rather than Book 1. Rather than starting off at what might be considered the more logical point of Eden’s first death, it joins her career as a reaper, already well in progress, opening with the werewolf attack. There is a fair amount of information – and quite important data, at that – which is not provided to the reader until some distance into the story. As the paragraph above suggests, there’s not exactly a shortage of plot threads either: as a result, some of them inevitably end up feeling under-developed. The goddess, for example, seems to show up at the end, purely to provide an adversary for the heroine’s boss, and I’m still not sure about the point of the politician. Conversely, some things feel under-explained. The island is supposedly hidden… yet the FBI know where it is? Who delivers – oh, I dunno – milk to it? It has an awkward sense of being something which looked a good idea at the time, only was never thought through properly.

It’s probably not the book’s fault, but there was a sense of deja vu too for me. Only a couple of months ago, I read Fugitive of Magic by Linsey Hall. It was also a story told in first-person perspective, about a paranormal heroine accused of a murder she didn’t commit, who has to find the real perpetrator in order to prove her innocence. Having recently read that story, I didn’t find a revised version of it especially interesting. The main positive is Eden herself, who made for a decent central character. There was a nice moral sense of grey about her choices, with her trying to do the right thing, even though those choices were frequently constrained by the unfortunate circumstances which she inhabited. If we’d been brought along with Eden on her resurrection, rather than being dumped into the middle of it, this would likely have been a more worthwhile story.

Author: D.N. Erikson
Publisher: Watchfire Press, available through Amazon as both a paperback and an e-book.
Book 1 of 3 (to date) in the Sunshine & Scythes series.

Devour, by R.L. Blalock

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

Back when I was growing up in Britain during the eighties, I was a voracious reader of horror fiction. The two staples of my literary diet were the works of James Herbert, who occupied the more “literary” end of the spectrum, and Shaun Hutson, whose novels were about as subtle as a kick to the groin. This likely tends towards the latter end of the spectrum, being a straightforward tale of survival during the zombie apocalypse. It begins as Olivia Bennett is heading home from lunch with her husband, when the St. Louis freeway on which she is driving becomes one of the first killing zones.

With civilization rapidly imploding, and communications all but non-existent, Liv has to make her way through the increasingly dangerous cityscape toward Slag Stead, a farm on the outskirts which may (or may not) provide a safe haven, and where her husband may (or may not) be waiting. Making matters considerably more perilous, Liv also has to protect her toddler daughter Elli. On the one hand, Elli’s survival provides a considerable dose of maternal motivation. But on the other, she’s too young to understand that there are times when silence is not just golden, it’s essential for survival.

In the cyclical nature of horror, I can’t help wondering if we have passed Peak Zombie, as it were. The Walking Dead has now completed its eighth season, and seems increasingly to be struggling to keep things fresh. This goes back to the roots of the sub-genre: rather than man vs. man (or woman), against a zombie backdrop, the story here is almost entirely woman vs. zombie. Or, rather, zombieS, for the pack nature of the infected here is part of what makes them devastatingly lethal. They’re also fast, rather than the classic, slow-moving shufflers of the George A. Romero universe: zombie purists may be less than happy with that choice.

However, this approach does lead to a relatively repetitious approach to the story here: Sneak, slay, hide, rinse, repeat. There’s really only so many times you can describe Liv’s chosen weapon of a mallet, whacking a “feral” upside the head. While occasionally, Liv and Elli do cross paths with other survivors, I rarely felt that the subsequent interactions provided much in the way of additional depth: these additional characters felt dropped in merely to serve the plot. I did like Liv, and appreciated her relentless survival instincts – though for someone supposedly training to be a nurse, she seemed curiously squeamish, especially during the early stages [admittedly, she gets over it, and by the end is wielding that mallet with something bordering on enthusiasm].

Occasionally, Blalock does crib a bit too obviously from other genre entries. The sequence where the ferals attack and over-run a radio station closely parallels 1979’s Italian movie, Zombie, while the notion that they “sleep” at night was used in The Girl With All The Gifts. Admittedly, there’s precious little that’s truly new under the sun in the zombie world, but if you want to stand out from the rotting, flesh-gnawing masses, you need to offer something new, be it in content or style. This doesn’t do much of either, and while competent enough, is eminently forgettable.

Author: R.L. Blalock
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as both an e-book and a paperback.
Book one in the Death & Decay series

The Sheriff’s Surrender, by Susan Page Davis

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

Having started our acquaintance with the Ladies Shooting Club trilogy last year with the third book, The Blacksmith’s Bravery (long story), my wife Barb and I are now reading the other two volumes in order. Neither of us were disappointed in this one! My reviewing it here was a happy surprise. Although the covers of all three books feature gun-toting women, and a basic plot current of the trilogy is women learning to take responsibility for defending themselves and others, the heroine of the third book wasn’t actually called on to engage in any gun-fighting action. So I assumed the same would be the case here. But [at the risk of a mild “spoiler” –though for fans of this site, this will add interest rather than spoil it :-)], in this series opener, our heroine does need to step up to the plate with a Winchester. (Contrary to many fictional and movie depictions, rifles were used more for serious shooting in the Old West than six-guns). Despite that difference, though, both books have a lot of similarity in tone, content and style. Since I gave the concluding volume five stars on Goodreads, that’s a good thing!

In 1885 small-town Idaho, young Gert Dooley keeps house for her widowed brother, the town’s gunsmith. One thing she can do to help him is test fire the guns he repairs; and she’s gotten to be a crack shot over the years of doing this. When the town’s longtime sheriff is murdered in his office (the titular sheriff is his replacement), the usually quiet community is spooked; and a widowed storekeeper friend asks Gert to teach her how to use her late husband’s Colt, in case she needs it to protect herself or her business. There’s initially no thought of creating a club as such; but as other crimes follow and other women join in the lessons, the Ladies Shooting Club takes shape. Reactions among the community’s menfolk aren’t uniformly supportive –but not uniformly hostile either; stereotypical role expectations of female helplessness weren’t so ingrained in the late 19th-century West as they’d become later.

Despite the historical setting, the issue the novel poses is very contemporary, and hotly debated even today. Male chauvinists tend to see any use of weapons by females as transgressive of patriarchal norms. And while all feminists believe in “empowerment” for women in some sense, many of them either feel that pacifism is ideologically essential to true feminism, or believe that the State and its agents have an absolute monopoly on legitimate use of lethal force, which renders use of a gun for self-defense by ordinary citizens as nearly as bad as using it to attack an innocent. But another strand of feminism rejects that thinking, and views responsible and educated gun ownership as a legitimate tool of women’s empowerment. It’s not hard to deduce from this book what view of that matter Davis takes.

There’s nothing tract-like about this novel, however, any messages emerge naturally from the story itself. Christian faith plays a role in the lives of Gert and other characters, and of the town –the coming of a preacher and his wife to form a nondenominational community church is an important event, as it really was in many Western communities, where organized religion came more slowly than it did in the more easily-settled Eastern states– but the author isn’t “preachy” in her handling of this. The club is also a vehicle for creating female camaraderie and friendship that crosses social divides set by class, religion, and Victorian attitudes (it’ll eventually include both the preacher’s wife and a saloon owner and her girls), and some characters will have lessons to learn in that area.

But the main focus is on the question of what’s behind the sudden rash of arson and violence in the community. I’d describe this as a Western (and there’s horses, guns, a posse, and gun-play at the end), but it embodies very real characteristics of the mystery genre as well. (While I guessed the identity of the villain early on, I’m not sure many readers would –and you might have fun testing your own wits!) And in the background, we have regard and respect growing into love between a worthy man and woman.

Since this was the second book we read of the series, as Barb said, it was “like visiting old friends.” I’d recommend to new readers, though, that they read the books in order. And for us, it’s now on to our third book (which is actually the trilogy’s second), The Gunsmith’s Gallantry!

Author: Susan Page Davis
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Nightblade: A Book of Underrealm by Garrett Robinson

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

One of the common problems I’ve found with fantasy novels is establishing the universe. It’s clearly going to be very different from the reader’s, and the author needs to get them up to speed on how things work in the book’s setting. If this isn’t done quickly and effectively, the reader can be left floundering in a world they know nothing about. Robinson uses a neat trick to get around this. His heroine, Loren, basically knows nothing about it either, because she has been brought up in a remote rural area. Virtually all she knows about life outside the woods comes from tales told to her by an itinerant tinker, and her dreams of becoming a heroic thief seem no more than fantasies.

That all changes when she encounters a fugitive, Xian the mage. Fed up with her life – and given the severely abusive parents, it’s hard to blame her – she throws her lot in with him. That’s how everything starts: as she discovers the world around her has a lot more to offer than household drudgery and arranged marriages, so do we. She has a couple of advantages over the usual runaway: she’s “country strong” having been brought up to hunt, providing her with a skill-set which will putt her in good stead to hold her own in a more urban environment. And on her departure, she takes a dagger, a family heirloom of sorts, which for some reason, strikes fear into the subset of those she encounters, who recognize it.

Loren is, perhaps, a little too well-prepared occasionally: while I can see how running and climbing trees would translate into parkour-like city skills, her adeptness at picking locks was a little eyebrow-raising. However, this ia a relatively minor issue, and more than outweighed by the strengths of Robinson’s writing. He draws a world which is easy to imagine in your mind’s eye, populated by a range of memorable characters. I appreciated the almost total lack of the near-compulsory romantic angles, and that Loren is far from the only strong woman to be found in these pages. Already, we have met Auntie, the shape-shifting mage who runs the underworld in the city of Cabrus, and Damaris, a scarily well-connected smuggler who helps Loren, yet appears to have her own agenda.

As the introductory book to a six-volume series, there is rather less than a complete story told here, though neither is there one of those oh-so annoying cliffhangers. There are instead questions, which will presumably be answered down the road. Where did Loren’s blade come from? What is its significance? What about the mysterious gems Damaris is smuggling? And who is Jordel, the man who is also after Xian, yet seems to keep encountering and assisting our heroine? I was left feeling fulfilled by what I had read, yet also wanting more, and that’s a combination which is not as frequently found as you’d expect.

Author: Garrett Robinson
Publisher: Legacy Books, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback
Book 1 of 6 in The Nightblade Epic series.

Fugitive of Magic by Linsey Hall

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

It’s probably worth noting that although this is Volume 1 in the somewhat clunkily-named “Dragon’s Gift: The Protector” series, it follows in the wake of two other Dragon’s Gift threads by the same author, The Huntress and The Seeker. While you don’t need to have read those to enjoy this, it does explain a structure, which could seem somewhat odd. For the volume sets up a trio of treasure-hunting magicians – Cass, Del and Nix – then all but discards the first two and concentrates heavily on Nix. Turns out Cass and Del were the subjects of the Huntress and Seeker sagas respectively, and the Protector gives Nix her turn in the spotlight. This is why some aspects, such as the shop run by the three women, seems more than a bit undeveloped: I presume they were featured in the ten or so previous volumes set in the same world.

With that out of the way… Nix is chasing down a shoplifting pack of demons, when she stumbles across a murder scene. The killer manages to frame her for the murder, which is unfortunate because the victim was a close ally of the vampire race. Their top enforcer, Ares, locks a nasty collar around Nix’s neck to ensure she doesn’t skip out before her date in court, three days hence. Worse still, their court contains mind-readers, who will undoubtedly discover her secret [shared by Cass and Del]. For as well as her relatively mundane conjuring skills, allowing her to pull things literally out of thin air, Nix is also a FireSoul. That’s a very, very forbidden talent, allowing her to absorb the abilities of others. In order to avoid exposure, she needs to locate the real killer, a quest that will bring her into an uneasy partnership with Ares, and take her to a long-forgotten castle in France, St. Pancras railway station in London, and other locations both magical and mundane.

“Find the real killer in X hours to prove your innocence, or else” is a fairly well-worn plot, but Hall manages to add enough novel elements to keep it fresh. The same is true of several other elements: the incredibly handsome, brooding vampire with whom the heroine has unresolved sexual tension, for example, manages to be be somewhat less irritating here than usual. I think the first-person narrative helps there: Nix’s inner monologue is nicely self-deprecating, and was more often than not in tune with what I was thinking as a reader. Ares is clearly there to do a large block of the heavy action work. But I was pleased to see that Nix does not hesitate to wade in there, right from the opening sequence, which sees her and her two friends engage in what is basically a pitched battle in the middle of the street against multiplying numbers of demonic entities.

I suspect you probably would be better off not leaping in to the universe like this, ten volumes down, and must confess to being slightly miffed something described as “Book 1” is far from being that. However, this was devoured at quite a rate, and offers a fast (if not particularly challenging or thought-provoking) and enjoyable read. Though the story clearly leads on to volume two, it doesn’t cliff-hanger the reader to death, and I’d certainly consider reading further – by which, I mean earlier – entries.

Author: Linsey Hall
Publisher: Bonnie Doon Press, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and paperback.

The Housewife Assassin’s Handbook, by Josie Brown

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

My preferred format for reading is paper; and that’s the only format I support financially, since the only language Big Publishing understands is dollars and cents. Even for a reader like myself, though, e-books have their uses. Writers can offer particular books for free in that format, and that makes it possible to read them first in order to check the quality before you buy the paper edition. And sometimes that opportunity saves you money that would have been wasted if you’d taken a chance on the paper book to begin with! For me, this series opener (which Brown makes available free in e-book format on a permanent basis) was one of those books I was thankful I didn’t have to spend money on, which I’d have regretted.

The novel’s premise is intriguing enough, and the harrowing first chapter grabbed my attention effectively. We’re plunged into the action right away, with present-day events narrated by protagonist Donna in present tense. At the first opportunity, she drops back into a flashback (in past tense) that gives us an introduction to her childhood and family background –and yes, that’s relevant!– how she met her husband, their few years together, and her discovery, after he was identified as the dead victim of a car wreck on the night she gave birth to their third child, that he had a BIG secret: the corporation he worked for was a front that contracted to do wet work for the CIA, and he was an assassin, most recently assigned to help bring down the Quorum, a shadowy organization of ex-government assassins who’ve gone rogue and are out for profit. (They planted the bomb in his car.) We also learn how, needing to support her kids and wanting to better protect them (long story!), and wanting vengeance on the kinds of scumbags who made her a widow, she subsequently agreed to go to work for Carl’s employer, in his old job. (That’s not as big a stretch as it would be for some women –she learned to shoot as a kid, is naturally talented for and very good at it, and met Carl at a firing range.)

While I was reading the first few chapters, I expected this to be a four-star read. The body of the novel itself (we’ll talk about the italicized chapter beginnings below!) actually is more serious in tone than comedic, although it does have some deadpan humor that arises from the incongruities of Donna’s job responsibilities vs. her domestic ones. Her reflections about the ethics of what she does aren’t approached flippantly, and she’s a well-drawn character who earned my sympathy and respect –a very tough woman, morally and physically, but essentially a good and decent person and a caring mom (who intends to survive and be there for her kids). Brown creates a situation that’s fraught with moral and emotional complexity and shades of gray to start with, and then ups the emotional ante exponentially with a new development –followed by some more really compelling twists and turns, the first one of which I didn’t see coming. (I did suspect the second one.) None of the other characters are developed as fully as Donna, but they’re believable, and the author does conjure a sense of place with the southern California setting (in Orange County). And I liked the depiction of family life, and Donna’s relationship with her kids.

In fairness, I also need to defend Donna against the complaint of one reviewer, who regards her as a moral pariah because she lies to her kids, at a very serious level. Well, yes, she does (although she doesn’t like that situation). But as a reality check, these kids are 12, 10 and 5 years old, with big mouths, limited impulse control, and a child’s immaturity and deficient understanding of danger and the complexities of real-world situations. Even if the lies involved are extreme, telling them the truth in a life-and-death situation, where things they do and say could have disastrous consequences, is not a course I’d advocate.

The principal problem I had here was that the plotting is simply not well thought out, and not convincing. One could argue that the essential premise is far-fetched; but I was okay with suspending disbelief that far. (Whether or not black ops organizations would hire a single mom with kids is a matter of speculation, since real life organizations like this don’t publicize their personnel policies. :-) ) But even within the premise Brown creates, much of her plotting simply doesn’t stand examination. Some of the major actions by the villain(s) are at cross-purposes with some of their other major actions; several events that take place here would involve the police in the story, at a level that couldn’t be ignored, but there’s no indication of that here; Donna’s reasoning for one major decision is weak and unconvincing; and Acme (the company she works for) would be much more actively involved in the decision-making at the end, not passive as it is here. Also, characters could not realistically suddenly just shrug off previously incapacitating wounds (which happens here twice), and there are other significant logical slips that took me out of the story. The author writes prolifically, but she apparently wrote this novel too quickly to take her craftsmanship in plotting seriously, or to put any real thought behind it. (That’s a real shame.)

Finally, a word is in order about the titular “Handbook” aspect. As a gimmick here (and as nearly as I can tell, in the other 15 books of the series as well, though I haven’t read them) Brown prefaces each chapter with short, italicized snippets giving supposed household hints that blend home economics with mayhem. These are unrelated to the story-line (though some may have a passing thematic connection to something in the chapter), don’t advance it in any way, and don’t reflect any things that Donna might actually do. Instead, they’re intended to be humorous (often depending for their humor on exaggerations that are completely over the top). Some readers like these (one reviewer found them to be her favorite aspect of the book!); so as the saying goes, “Your mileage may vary.” Personally, though, their humor generally fell flat for me; it typically strains too hard, and comes across as weak (or nonexistent) and forced. I found them an irritating nuisance that the book would have been better off without. Good fiction doesn’t need gimmicks to appeal; and if the author had given us a tight, plausible, well-constructed plot, this novel wouldn’t have needed any gimmick either.

Ultimately, I gave this two stars rather than one, in consideration of its positive elements; and I did finish it (I had to see how it ended!). But I don’t plan to continue reading the series.

Note: The book includes several episodes of explicit sex –including one that’s very abusive and disgusting, although there’s a defensible literary reason for describing it– and other sexual situations (in the opening scene, Donna’s posing as a prostitute). There’s also some bad language, including the f-word (though in Donna’s vocabulary, the latter is only a verb used in unloving contexts, not an all-purpose adjective/adverb) and in the sexual scenes, vulgar terms for some body parts. Most of the other bad language here is strictly of the d- or h-word sort.

Author: Josie Brown
Publisher: Signal Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.