Tag: novel

Girl Vs. by Xela Culletto

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

While a quick read, at 205 pages, after slogging through a couple of what can only be described as “chonkers”, I really didn’t mind. It’s briskly-paced, hits the ground running and largely doesn’t stop thereafter. I have some concerns about where things might go in subsequent volumes, so will probably stop here, just to be safe. However, I enjoyed what I read well enough.

It opens with an alien invasion having taken place, and humanity not getting the best of the subsequent war. The Vela, as the creatures are called, have taken over most cities with brutal force, scattering the surviving population to remote areas. One of these is Rhyan, whom we first meet living in a cave, as part of a small group. She lost the rest of her family to the Vela, and hates them with a passion. Rhyan puts that into effect with her blades, getting rid of any aliens that stray too close to her hide-out. However, circumstance forces her on the road, and she ends up at Springfield, a human stronghold with plans to take the fight to the Vela.

It was only while writing this, that I realized I didn’t actually know much about what the aliens looked like. I know they have claws. But beyond that? Here’s about the only meaningful descriptive passage: “It looked the same as them all—four long legs, bent into a ‘z’, supported the plump abdomen. Rising above that was a middle section from which taut appendages shot forth long serrated claws. The swiveling head, with its unblinking black eyes, was perched on top.” It has to be said, they also die very easily – I lost count of how many a teenage girl took out of the course of the book, with even a dozen being dispatched in one fight – to the point you wonder how they managed to defeat Earth’s armies.

Despite the heroine’s single-minded devotion to the cause, there are suggestions the aliens’ motives may be not as genocidal as they seem, with a theory they were looking to save the Earth from humanity by “thinning the herd.” I did notice the author’s page on Amazon says, “Aliens have always held her fascination, and she hopes to meet one someday,” which makes me wonder if these ones could indeed turn out to be benevolent-ish. To be honest, that’d kinda suck. I much prefer my alien invasions without moral ambiguity.

This is better when it’s not hinting at such things, with a laudable body count on the human side too, and a heroine who is easy to root for, even when some of her acts are morally dubious. There’s hardly a dull moment to be found, as we head to a climax where Rhyan and her colleagues are the only thing stopping a call for alien reinforcements going out. Bit of a helicopter ex machina there, yet I can’t complain about the heroine finally catching a break, after all she has been through to that point.

Author: Xela Culletto
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 2 in the Sinister Skies series.

Shadow Eclipse: Voyage, by E.M. Gale

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

After a brisk and entertaining start, this gets increasingly bogged-down in its own universe as it goes on. And, boy, does it go on. At a thousand pages in the print version, this became a severe slog, and ends in a unsatisfactory way. A second novel seems promised, but this came out in 2019, and has yet to be forthcoming. Maybe the writer got bored of the whole thing too?

As mentioned, it opens promisingly. Florentina Clarke (who hates her first name so much, she insists everyone just calls her Clarke) is having a really bad day. First, she has been turned into a vampire. Then, she and her grad student friends are thrown through time and space when an experiment misfires. They end up two hundred years in the future, on a far-off planet, and have to learn how to come to terms with a whole new way of life. Clarke is best-suited, and ends up getting them passage on a smuggling ship, where helped by her new vampire skills, she becomes part of the mercenaries who defend the ship. However, it turns out her future self – vampires being immortal – is rather famous and/or notorious, and she finds herself having to cope with that, and the resulting threats to her life.

Which all sounds considerably more exciting than it is. There’s a lot, and I mean a lot of agonizing over whether or not to look herself and her pals up in the history books, to see their fates. It’s a painfully responsible approach to time-travel  which really doesn’t do much for the reader. The same goes for her relentless angst about whether or not to tell her friends about her vampiric status. Do or don’t, then move on. Matters aren’t helped by a clunky structure in which it fells like every conversation becomes a three-way dance with Clarke’s internal thoughts chiming in after every single sentence. A long way before the end of the book, I was mentally screaming “STFU!” at her inner monologue.

The action components also seem to decline over the course of the book. There’s a point where the ship – which may not be quite what it initially appears – seems to be under almost constant attack, keeping Clarke and her merc colleagues very busy. However, this fades away and a vampire duel is about all it feels like the second half has to offer. I did like Gale’s world-building, with different races kinda-somewhat getting along, and some thought has clearly gone both into the vampires and the time-travel aspects. However, it’s not clear what Clarke’s eventual place in the universe is going to be, and her friends are also rendered increasingly irrelevant as the story progresses. It ends with her vampire boyfriend getting the chance for revenge he has been seeking, though this felt almost painfully foreshadowed and doesn’t provide much satisfaction in terms of tidying up the threads. Can’t say I’m too bothered whether or not volume 2 ever appears.

Author: E.M. Gale
Publisher: Lightbulb Works, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of, uh, 1 in the Shadow Eclipse series.

Sin, by J.M. Leduc

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

Sinclair O’Malley, known to everyone as Sin, is a bit of a wild card. She was initially an FBI agent, but was released by the agency, largely for her refusal to stay within the lines. In particular, she went off-book to end a human trafficking ring in Nicaragua. She is the kind of person whom we first meet interrupting a funeral, by rolling up to it late, on a Harley. But this is just the book’s first misstep. For rather than demonstrating her bad-ass credentials, it just made me feel she was a selfish and egocentric narcissist, shrieking “Look at meeeeeeee!” everywhere she went. Subsequent actions did little to disavow me of this belief.

Anyway, inexplicably, the agency now desperately want her back. For a number of their agents have turned up dead, after being sent to investigate the corpses of young Latin American girls, which have turned up along the coast from Florida to Louisiana. The bodies showed evidence of torture and sexual assault. But Sin in particular is needed, because the agents were found near Tumbledown Bay, the small community in the Florida Keys where she grew up – and which she, quite deliberately, left. Convinced to return, in part due to her father being terminally ill with cancer. She discovers the community has fallen under the thrall of a sleazy preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Heap. He just happens to have opened an orphanage, catering to Latin American girls. Might this be connected?

Oh, of course it is. There’s a paedophile/snuff movie ring, streaming their acts over the Internet to an elite clientele. Quite why they bother importing children from South America (to borrow an infamous movie tagline, “where life is cheap”) rather than… Oh, I dunno, streaming from there to begin with, is never clear. But then, the international criminal masterminds here are basically brutish thugs. The rule here in Tumbledown Bay is: the stupider and uglier you are, the more likely you are to be involved in the ring. Sin is neither, to be fair. But I found most of her character traits thoroughly off-putting. This quote resonated: “Some of us can change, Sin. And some of us are still the bitter, nasty-mouthed, bitch they were seven years ago.” That’s your heroine, folks.

It’s clear the kind of persona Leduc is aiming for. A take-no-nonsense woman, prepared to do whatever it takes, and unconcerned about whose toes she might stomp on in the process. But it needs more finesse and balance; there’s nothing, for instance, to explain her dedicated squad, who leap to her every need. Why do they have such loyalty to her? ‘Cos she’s hot? Might as well be. There’s also a pacing problem: the storming of the orphanage feels like it should be the climax, yet the book rattles on for a further twenty percent, tidying up loose ends. These should probably have been shifted into a further volume, this one ending with the line, “I am the Pearl Angel of Death, she thought, and I will hunt and find each and every one of those people.” Instead, it’s all downhill from there.

Author: J.M. Leduc
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Sinclair O’Malley Thriller series.

Hidden Dragon, by Trudi Jaye

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

This version of the world is more or less identical to our own. Except, several hundred years ago, there was a catastrophe in which massive dragons rampaged around, with humans being collateral damage. A secret society called the Earthbound managed to end the thread, partly through the invention of the Spell Web – basically, an Internet for magic users. Now, the Earthbound and a secret government organization, the Supernatural Intelligence Group, operate to keep a largely oblivious population in the dark. Though everyone knows dragons are extinct… aren’t they?

Well, for whatever reason, someone seems very keen to take out Mei Walker, who has grown up under the protection of the SIG, before she comes into her supernatural powers at age 20, which will be in a few weeks. There have been over 530 assassination attempts made against her in the past 12 years. While the Earthbound and the SIG are supposed to be allies, it’s clear there’s a faction of the former intent on getting their hands on Mei, and using her talents for their own ends. Fortunately, she’s not exactly defenseless. Beyond those magic abilities, allowing her to manipulate the element of water, she has also been brought up to be able to take care of herself. She’s forced on the run with SIG agent Seth, unsure who she can trust – even her long-absent father – or how far up the plot against her goes.

I think my main problem is that Mei is almost entirely in the dark as to why she is so important. She (as well as, by proxy, the reader since it’s all told in the first person) and Seth seem about the only people oblivious to the specifics of her situation. It’s a conceit which seems there solely to generate a sense of mystery – not least because of her being left a mysterious box which is built up as being a serious Macguffin, but contains basically nothing of significance. It feels as if, especially after 500+ attempts on her life, the story would have made more sense for her to be aware of the situation from the beginning, rather than running around blind. By the end, we finally know what’s about to happen, though the book ends before there’s any conclusion as to exactly what that means.

Outside of that (admittedly, fairly major) flaw, this is okay. Mei is pitched at a nice level of ability: competent, without being super-powered, and there’s a lack of significant romance which is pleasant. There is a spell in the middle which edges towards the dreaded urban fantasy love-triangle, before it backs off – at least, for now… Jaye does a decent job of building a world lurking just beneath ours, with the standout scene perhaps being Mei’s retrieval of the box from a pawnbroker, who is also a collector of magical artifacts and… things. But safe to say, I think I prefer my fantasy considerably less shrouded in mystery.

Author: Trudi Jaye
Publisher: Star Media, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 4 in the Dragon Rising series.

Avenging Angels: The Wine of Violence, by A.W. Hart

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

Like “Franklin W. Dixon” and “Carolyn Keene,” “A. W. Hart” is the house pen name assigned by the publisher to all the various authors of individual books in the series of which this novel is the seventh installment. In this case, though, A. W. is actually my Goodreads friend Charles Gramlich (that’s no secret; he’s credited in the “About the Author” note at the book’s end). Although I’d read and liked a couple of his short e-stories previously, I’d never tried any of his long fiction. So, when I saw this novel mentioned in one of his blog posts last year, I was intrigued enough to buy a copy. (Barb and I read it together, since she’s an avid Western fan, and I knew this would be right up her alley.)

In choosing to read this installment by itself, I guessed correctly that it can be treated as a standalone. The series premise is explained in passing near the beginning, without needing any burdensome long exposition. Just after the end of the Civil War, then 16-year-old twins George Washington (nicknamed “Reno”) and Sara Bass were orphaned when a band of renegade ex-Confederate soldiers raided the family’s Kansas farm and brutally slaughtered their parents and siblings. The twins’ father, a Lutheran pastor as well as a homesteader, had brought the two up as Christians familiar with the Bible, and also trained them both to handle firearms very capably. He lived long enough after the attack to charge his two surviving kids (they’d been out on the prairie when the raiders struck) to avenge the outrage, and to rid the world of murdering evildoers. After serving justice on their family’s killers in the series opener, they went on to become successful bounty hunters, despite their youth, with their ensuing adventures in the subsequent books each apparently episodic and self-contained (so the series doesn’t have to be read in order).

We’re not given an exact date for the events of this installment, but I’d guess it to be roughly 1867, and the twins’ age by now to be about 18. Our setting here is western Missouri and the Arkansas Ozarks, a region genre fans might not associate with Westerns; but in fact, in real life, this area was as much a frontier as the contiguous Kansas and Indian Territory countryside, there was a lot of movement and economic interchange across the state lines, and lifestyles and attitudes didn’t differ much on either the western or eastern sides. The tale begins in medias res, with our Avenging Angels stealthily closing in on the camp of a band of train robbers. Early on, one of these outlaws will drop the name of Rev. Eli Cable. He’s an apparently mesmerizing and charismatic preacher who’s building his own settlement, New Kingdom, in the Ozarks –and who may or may not be the mastermind behind this train robbery. It’s up to our hero/heroine to find out the truth about that; and naturally, it won’t be a simple matter of just riding up to his door and asking him.

This is a well-plotted, ably written novel, with a fast pace and a lot of action. (There’s no “pornography of violence,” but the body count is high, and gun/knife fight scenes, etc. are described simply and straightforwardly.) Some factors give the book a bit more depth than run-of-the-mill Westerns. Eli Cable is a highly complex character; the author looks realistically at the hatreds and grievances left on both sides in the aftermath of America’s bloodiest war, in an area where the fighting was often up-close and personal guerilla war, without justifying hatred or demonizing all ex-Confederates; and the faith of some of the main characters gives a spiritual dimension to the story. (Gramlich himself isn’t necessarily a Christian now, but he was raised as a Roman Catholic and treats faith sympathetically; the book, and evidently the series as a whole, is Christian-friendly.) What we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder also gets some scrutiny. Besides the Western elements, elements of the mystery genre are also deftly incorporated. Bad language is very minimal; and though there’s mention of rape and prostitution, there’s no sex as such. (Reno’s faithfully given his heart to a young lady back home in Kansas.)

My impression of series written by multiple authors is that the main characters can tend to be drawn quite blandly, with a minimal profile that’s not expanded on, so as not to confuse new-to-the-series writers. (After well over 100 books, for instance, all we really know about the Hardy boys is that Frank’s blonde and Joe’s dark-haired. :-) ) Here, though, both the Bass siblings come across as three-dimensional characters whom we do get to know as persons, not as stock roles; and while they’re twins, they’re not clones of each other. In this particular episode, the demands of the plot give Reno more “screen time” in the middle chapters that make up the longest part of the book; he’d have to be described as the main character. But Sara’s role isn’t negligible; she’s a full (and lethal) participant in the many fight scenes, recognized by Reno as smarter and deadlier than he is, and I’d also judge her to be faster and more adept with a pistol than he is (though she admits he’s better at handling a long gun). Both are likable, but she comes across as the more reserved of the two, and also as the one who still has the most anger over the tragic fate of their family.

This would be a quick read if you had a normal amount of time for reading (with our “car books,” of course, Barb and I don’t, hence the long time it took us!), and I think most genre fans would find it enough of a page-turner to make their reading sessions as long as possible. I’m not looking to get drawn into another long series right now, and investigated this volume only because I know the author (electronically); but it made enough of a favorable impression that, if I had handy access to other books in the series, I’d definitely check them out too!

Author: A.W. Hart
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
7 of 12 in the Avenging Angels series.

Wild Justice, by Kelley Armstrong

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

With this 2013 novel, Armstrong brings her original Nadia Stafford trilogy to a satisfying conclusion (although the two later novellas carry on the story in a rewarding way). Again, six months have passed since the previous installment, so our chronological setting is the latter part of October, 2007.

By the end of the second novel, Nadia had recognized that her true romantic feelings are for Jack. But she also concluded that her taciturn and seemingly unemotional mentor didn’t return them (although readers might be less sure of that). So in the intervening months since, she and Quinn have added a sexual component to their long-distance relationship (they get together about once a month). For readers who view sex as expressive body language for a total self-giving in life-long love and fidelity, it’s not hard to predict that introducing it into a situation where both parties profess no hurry to be committed (and one is in love with someone else) is likely to end in emotional disaster.

That’s what happened here, about a month ago,with Quinn wanting to move in the direction of engagement and marriage and Nadia not willing to, leading to a messy breakup that left him very hurt and her “feeling like [vulgarism deleted].” :-( On top of that stress, when this book opens, she’s in rural Michigan on a job (of the kind that she doesn’t advertise). That quickly results, though through no fault of her own, in a traumatic event which has her on the point of meltdown. But before long, she’s in for a moral and emotional ordeal which will make her present distresses look relatively mild.

Both previous novels have made us aware of the formative event of Nadia’s life, which happened when she was only 13. That was the night she and her beloved 14-year-old cousin Amy (with Nadia along because, as usual, she was trying to keep the headstrong older girl out of trouble) got taken to a lonely woodland cabin by a budding psychopath in his early 20s named Drew Aldritch. Nadia was able to escape and run for help, but Amy still ended up raped and killed. At the trial, Nadia wasn’t called to testify; and it didn’t help that Amy was a bit of a “wild child” with a reputation as a flirt.

The defense exploited that to claim that the sex was “consensual,” and that Aldritch strangled his victim to death “accidentally.” So the jury acquitted him. (Yes, this is fiction; but sadly, even in real life, there are jurors who would actually be that idiotic.) He left town immediately; and Nadia hasn’t seen him since. But the horror of the tragedy, and the survivor’s guilt, has stayed with her for 20 years, shaping her into the adult woman she became, and leaving her with intermittent nightmares from which she still wakes up screaming.

Jack knows something about the baleful influence of teenage trauma (and we’ll learn something, in the course of this book, about his past and how it shaped him –our leading lady here isn’t the only character with painful baggage). Early on, Jack discloses that, on his own initiative, he’s tracked Aldritch down to where he’s now living in Ohio under his latest alias, and working, of all things, as a small-town cop –and there’s good reason to believe that his behavior and proclivities haven’t changed for the better in the ensuing decades. So Nadia now has to decide what to do with this knowledge. Whatever happens, this trip down Memory Lane is not going to be a pleasant stroll; and it will prove to be a dark, harrowing, twisty and dangerous one, with more than one major surprise.

As usual, there’s a genuine mystery (actually, more than one) at the heart of this tale; and solving it, and surviving to the point of solving it, will be a challenge. (Luckily, Nadia’s tough and resourceful.) In terms of style, this book is much of a piece with the preceding ones in most respects, including the language issues. Again, there’s no explicit sex, but there is some unmarried sex that takes place, and some scenes are steamier than some readers might want. Romance, and related angst, doesn’t take over the plot, but it plays a more important role than it has up to now, and there will be a significant development in that area. (The books definitely are best read in order.) At one point, a character imparts a crucial piece of information that later developments show that he wouldn’t have known, but that’s the only logical slip; in the main, the plotting is impeccable. For any readers who liked the first two books, this one has to rank as a must-read; and I don’t believe any of them will be disappointed with it!

Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Penguin Group; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Witness Protection, by Holly Copella

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

This is one of those books where the cover (right) feels at odds with the synopsis: “After witnessing an execution, a resourceful young woman attempts to disappear while being pursued by a hitman and a handsome federal agent.” Having read the book, the reality sits somewhat uncomfortably in the middle. It might have been better if the author had committed to writing either an action novel or a romance; the combination of them here is awkward and clunky. Naturally, my preference was for the former. But it seems that every time the book got into a rhythm there, the heroine would start lusting after one (frankly, close to all) of the male characters, and the energy would be derailed.

The central character is Jackie Remus, a helicopter pilot who is ferrying the Governor to an event when he invites her to his mansion. There, she stumbles into a murder committed by his right-hand man. Dexter Smyth, a situation from which she only narrowly escapes. As the sole witness, she’s placed into protective custody, under the guardianship of FBI agent Holden Falcone. But when the lakeside house in which she’s hidden, is stormed by the Governor’s men, Jackie decides she’s better off on her own. For she has a very particular set of skills, being a military brat whose late father was commander of a Navy SEAL platoon. So Jackie is quite capable of taking care of herself, much to Falcone’s consternation.

The bulk of the book therefore becomes a bit of a chase, with Jackie making her way across the country towards the mysterious Monroe, one of her father’s former soldiers, whom she believes offers her best shot at safety. Falcone is in pursuit of her, while Smyth is seeking to intercept Jackie, and make sure she is never able to testify against his boss. Mixed in with this, is a lot of unresolved sexual tension, especially between Jackie and the FBI agent. Though it ends being thoroughly and repeatedly resolved, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. This begs the question of what the FBI thinks about an agent having sexual relations with a star witness in a high-profile case. The book clearly doesn’t care.

There’s also a sense of too much stuff happening for no adequate reason, such as the bizarrely irrelevant home invasion during a hurricane, which occurs at Monroe’s house in the Florida Keys. If this was a film, I’d say it was added in order to get it up to feature length, but a novel surely has no need for such padding. And, of course, there’s the way both sides stoically decline opportunities to shoot each other in the head. There’s not much here that comes across as convincing, though Copella does a good job of keeping things moving forward. There’s never a dull moment here. Just too many implausible ones.

Author: Holly Copella
Publisher: Copella Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 9 in the Witness Protection series.

Made to Be Broken, by Kelley Armstrong

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

Although I first experienced this series through the two sequel novellas, this second installment of Armstrong’s Nadia Stafford trilogy would be best read after the series opener, Exit Strategy. References are made to events in the first book, and to parts of Nadia’s backstory which are detailed there, and these are much more meaningful if you’ve read the first installment. Even more importantly, Armstrong really introduces Nadia’s complex character and current circumstances in depth in the first book; the development she undergoes here presupposes that foundation. (That’s also true for other characters from that book who continue to play roles here; you need the full-orbed picture to understand them.)

Some six months have passed since the events of the earlier novel. Nadia’s kept in contact with Quinn, a U.S. federal cop who secretly moonlights as a vigilante assassin. He’s romantically interested in Nadia; her feelings about him are more ambiguous (even to her), but she values his friendship. As a teen, she came close to qualifying for Canada’s Olympic distance shooting team. That gives her very formidable skills with a sniper rifle; and when this book opens, she’s peering through the scope of one from a belfry in downtown Toronto. Quinn’s solicited her help with one of his hits. That particular episode, though, is over quickly and painlessly for all concerned. It serves mainly to remind us (and to clue in readers who skipped the series opener) that as fictional female sleuths go, our protagonist is not nearly so law-abiding a member of that sorority as, say, Nancy Drew. She is, however, one who has some investigative know-how, which she’s willing to use in a good cause if it’s needed –and it’s soon going to be, sorely.

Even with her off-the-books side income, Nadia can’t afford to pay more than a tiny staff at her guest lodge; but out of kindness, she’s given a job as assistant housekeeper to a 17-year-old girl from the nearby small town of White Rock, Sammi Ernst. Sammi’s foul-mouthed, barely literate, and has a chip on her shoulder; the latter isn’t surprising, given her life situation. She’s the out-of-wedlock daughter of Janie Ernst. Both women are widely looked down on in the community –Janie because she’s a drunken, mean-tempered, self-centered deadbeat, and Sammi mainly because she has Janie for an (abusive) mother. Also a single mom herself, Sammi’s not promiscuous like Janie (she had a single affair, with a visiting rich college kid who wasn’t interested in marriage or fatherhood, and left her to bear his unacknowledged daughter alone); and also unlike her own mom, she genuinely loves baby Destiny, and wants to work to support her, rather than making a dead-end career out of welfare dependency as Janie has.

When, soon after Nadia’s return home, Sammi and Destiny don’t come back from their usual evening walk in the woods, there are things that strongly suggest to our heroine that their disappearance wasn’t voluntary. But White Rock’s police force is small, not especially competent, and has other priorities; and the two senior officers despise Nadia because of the way she was kicked out of the force years ago, so aren’t disposed to take anything she says seriously. As far as they’re concerned, Sammi obviously just ran off; because, hey, that’s what trashy teens can be expected to do, right? Most of the townsfolk are quite content with that explanation. (Janie’s only feeling about the matter is anger at losing the rent money she charged the girl.) Of the few who aren’t, Nadia’s the only one actually capable of looking into the matter. But though Jack’s been out of touch for about six months, he’ll soon be at the lodge recovering from a broken ankle. (And don’t forget about Quinn, either.)

This is a gritty, page-turning mystery, reflecting the violent stylistic school associated mostly with American writers (rather than the more cerebral traditional school of Doyle and Christie). A number of people are going to die here, not all of whom deserve to, because we’re dealing with ruthless villains with no consciences. (While this is fiction, it looks at a dark underbelly of anomic modern society in a way that could easily be true.) And Nadia being who she is, the mode of dealing with some of these types may be with the business end of a pistol. As another reviewer commented, her ethics and moral compass may not be something all readers endorse (I don’t, as such –and Nadia doesn’t claim saint status for herself, either).

But she does HAVE ethics and a moral compass; and for me, the way she sincerely tries to grapple with balancing it with the realities of a very grim world, in which the law doesn’t always serve justice or protect the helpless, is one of the great strengths of the series, and a source of its considerable emotional power. That’s as true of this book as of the others. Despite the body count, there’s no wallowing in blood and gore, and no sex as such, though there are a few “sexual situations.” Romantic feelings and angst are not a major strand of the plot here. Nadia’s narrative voice, IMO, is perfect for these books. The one negative is the amount of f-words and profanity from some characters, especially Jack. I admit that this is “realistic” for speakers who are steeped in this milieu, and have the backgrounds that some of them do; but I don’t really need that much pedantic realism. But the strong character portrayals and serious moral reflection here earn the book its stars despite that factor.

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

Pablo’s Apprentice: Where Romance Meets Revenge, by Richard DeVall

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

The author said “I became disillusioned with thrillers that used a formula… and wanted something fresh.” The concept here is certainly a novel one. It begins with a robbery carried out by two women, Rose Alvaro and Little Bee, in California, which leads to the death of a police officer. The cop’s fiancée, Brandy Bednarz, is destroyed by his death, and moves across country, eventually beginning to rebuild her life over the following years. But in one of those “nobody would believe it if it was a novel – oh, wait it is” coincidences, when Rose and Little Bee pull of their next heist, it’s right in Brandy’s neck of the woods.

Only, this time, she is instrumental in the death of Little Bee. Rose knows it, too, and vows to go after Brandy, making her pay by killing everyone associated with her. Brandy, however, is not going to sit idly by, and by the end, takes the fight to Rose, in her hiding place on the other side of the world. The subtitle on the book (as opposed to the cover), is “Where insane meets intellect”, and that may be more accurate. As noted, it is an original concept, even if plausibility is stretched thin, almost from the get-go.

The main problem is execution that is flat out painful, to the point where it overwhelms the positives. First off, there are an embarrassing number of typos and other errors here. The very first sentence refers to the helicopter manufacturer “McDonald Douglas”. D’you want fries with that ‘copter? I also suppressed a derisive snort at someone “shooting heroine”, “marring Brandy” (instead of marrYing), “a celestial seen of a galaxy” and “a social click”. But where typos and bad research finally had to give way to a poor grasp of English, was when somebody was described as “Hiding in plane site.” Really? I would have been embarrassed to write that at age 11.

To a large extent, the same goes for the characterization, particularly of Rose. Now I am not a minority woman: as far from it as imaginable, in fact. However, even to me, it was highly obvious that neither was the author, to the extent it felt as if he may never have met one. I was thoroughly unconvinced that Rose’s thoughts, actions or dialogues had any degree of authenticity to them. Brandy was a little better in this area, and her reaction to the multiple traumas did feel credible. Though even here, the author throws a brutal sexual assault at her, which doesn’t seem to serve any purpose except for being another unpleasant experience for her to go through.

Given that, it would have been nice if the book had finished with her being able to obtain closure, in the form of Brandy personally delivering her revenge to Rose. No such luck. She gets eaten by a crocodile. Whoops, I’ve spoiled it. What a shame.

Author: Richard DeVall
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Stand-alone novel.

Fury of a Phoenix by Shannon Mayer

  By

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

Bea is living a quiet life, far out in the Wyoming countryside, with her husband Justin and young son, Bear. However, this isolation is an entirely deliberate choice in order to escape from her past.  For in her previous life, she was Phoenix Romano, an enforcer and hit-woman for her mob boss father. After deciding she’d had enough of that life, she liberated several millions of his money, and vanished, hoping never to be found again. Naturally, things don’t quite work out like that. Justin and Bear are killed in a car crash, but Phoenix has reason to suspect it wasn’t an accident, and that instead her past life is catching up with her. But why did whoever was responsible for that go after her family, and leave her alive?

Alone, this would have potential for a story of revenge. However, Mayer also lobs in a helping of magic, in the form of “abnormals”, who have certain skills that can be used for good or evil. To be honest, this was not an idea which felt developed adequately – barely at all, in fact – and seemed almost a sop so that the book could be sold in the urban fantasy genre. For example, the fact that her father had entered a pact with the devil for his fortune, didn’t make any particular difference, and could easily have been entirely left out. He could simply have been a powerful gangster – except perhaps for the three hellspawn guardians protecting him. And only one of them see action in this first volume. I did like her talking guns, though again this is an idea which feels underdeveloped. Perhaps later books explore these in more details? On the other hand, there’s something to be said for a heroine without any magic ‘get out of jail free’ talent cards to play.

The good news is, there’s enough going on in the mundane world to make for a solid enough read. There really can’t be much better motivation for revenge, than a mother having to watch helplessly as her child’s life is torn away. Just about everything thereafter develops in a fluid fashion from this, as she reconnects with her old life and finds out the unpleasant truths about… Well, quite a few things, in fact – not least that Justin wasn’t exactly the innocent winter sports professional he appeared. I did have some qualms over her wanting to tell the perpetrator she was coming for them; it seems like bravado, making Nix’s task needlessly more difficult. But I guess, if it’s good enough for Beatrix Kiddo, it’s good enough for any vengeful action heroine. Despite (or, probably more likely, because of) the blatant cliff-hanger, this is probably not a series I’m going to bother delving any further into. However, I can’t say I felt like I wasted the time spent reading it.

Author: Shannon Mayer
Publisher: Hijinks Ink Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 4 in the Nix series.