Very busy

Saturday is the grand opening of the Hudson Public Library, and I am on the committee that is organizing the event.  I am finding that there is a lot to do, and consequently I haven't been getting much reading done.  Doubtless I won't be posting another book review until after the event is over.

Now I need to see if I can figure out how to make a magic wand and a crown.

Embers by Laura Bickle

This was another in my continuing paranormal experiment.  It probably isn't fair to include this in my sample, as it is a first novel and it's too soon to know how the author will survive the test of time.

The protagonist, Anya, is a fire investigator in Detroit.  She has a salamander familiar, who is fairly cute.  She is investigating a series of arsons, with limited success, and gets in over her head.  The arsonist turns out to be magical like her, and she is strangely drawn to him even though he intends to raise a dragon to burn Detroit to the ground.

I'm not going to bother to explain in any detail why I thought this wasn't very good.  It's not terrible, it doesn't piss me off, but it didn't engage me enough to go to the effort to analyze it.  It's not bad, but it's really not too good, either.

Zero History by William Gibson

Zero History fits together into a trilogy with Gibson's two most recent novels, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. It again features Hollis Henry, a retired rock singer who was in a band that was once pretty popular. Hollis isn't the sort of person who manages to keep regular employment, and her net worth dropped by half when the market fell, so now she's trying to figure out what to do about money. Her friend Inchmale, a former bandmate, suggests that she again go to work for Hubertus Bigend, a Belgian businessman who set her a project that formed the plot of Spook Country. She is reluctant because she doesn't really like her like to be too exciting or dangerous, but she agrees.

Bigend has gotten interested in fashion. His interest appears to be twofold: first, he is interested in designing military apparel to sell to the US government, because it's very lucrative. And second, he is interested in the producer of a brand of denim clothing that's so underground they only sell to people they already know in some way. Hollis is instructed to try to track down more information about the clothing line, known as Gabriel Hounds. In many ways, her task is quite similar to the task Bigend assigned to Cayce is Pattern Recognition: to track down the mysterious creator of an unusual line of popular culture, apparently so that he can learn from it or profit from it.

As well as Hollis, Bigend also has employed Milgrim, another character from Spook Country. In the previous book Milgrim was a drug-addicted Russian translator (a translator of Russian, I mean, not that he is Russian himself). Bigend found him interesting enough to send to treatment for his addiction and to hire. At the beginning, Milgrim has been sent to South Carolina to photograph and examine a garment that may or may not be intended for government military wear. It's not entirely clear where this garment came from, or how Bigend's company came to find out about it without knowing what it was or where it came from. At any rate, Milgrim is committing industrial espionage: looking at a competitor's product in the hope that it can give his company an edge. We travel back to London with him, and are introduced to the bizarre world that is Milgrim's life.

Hollis conveniently gets a good lead on Gabriel Hounds, as the second person she asks (someone she knows slightly and bumps into in the street) knows someone who knows something about the deisgner. Milgrim, meanwhile, realizes that someone has followed him from South Carolina, and tries to figure out what to do next. Bigend sets the two of them to working together, and soon they are being chased around London and Paris by an enraged clothing designer, which is actually more dangerous than it sounds.

The thing about Gibson novels is that, even though they are full of unbelievable coincidences and larger-than-life people, and I, at least, have trouble following all the things that are apparently happening behind the scenes, and despite the fact that many of the characters are just soooo cool it makes me want to punch them, as I'm reading I don't care about those problems. As I'm reading I just keep turning the pages, as fast as I can, because I want to know what happens next. As it happens, I'm not able to turn the pages of a Gibson novel very quickly, because I find his writing style a bit difficult. He writes very much about visuals, and about stuff. No one owns objects, they own brands. Hollis doesn't have a phone, she has an iPhone. Milgrim doesn't have a phone, either, he has a Neo. They don't get around in a pickup truck, they are always in a Toyota Hilux. Gibson's habit of referring to everything by its brand name is probably largely why I think he thinks he characters are just much cooler than the rest of us. Brand awareness is such a teenage thing, and most of us grow out of it, and yet their lifestyle is apparently being described by telling us what they own or use. On the other hand, I'm someone to whom possessions aren't very important, so it's possible I place much lower importance on these things than the average person.

Gibson spends quite a bit of time setting the visuals of the setting, and as I've said here before, I rarely make pictures in my head as I read, so I find this sort of description slow-going to read. However he does it in a sufficiently interesting way that I'm willing to try. For instance, here is a description of Hollis waking up:

She woke to gray light around multiple layers of curtains and drapes. Lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche, smaller and more distorted the closer to the ceiling. Shelves with objects, Wunderkammer stuff. Variously sized heads of marble, ivory, ormolu. The black round bottom of the caged library. 

She checked her watch. Shortly after nine. 

She got out of bed, in her XXL Bollards T-shirt, put on the not-velour robe, and entered the bathroom, a tall deep cove of off-white tile. Turning on the enormous shower required as much effort as ever. A Victorian monster, its original taps were hulking knots of plated brass. Horizontal four-inch nickel-plated pipes caged you on three sides, handy for warming towels. Within these were slung sheets of inch-thick beveled glass, contemporary replacements. The original showerhead, mounted directly overhead, was thirty inches in diameter. Getting out of the robe and T-shirt, she put on a disposable cap, stepped in, and lathered up with Cabinet's artisinal soap, smelling faintly of cucumber. 

She kept a picture of this shower on her iPhone. It reminded her of H.G. Wells's time machine. It had probably been in use when he began the serial that would become his first novel. 

Toweling off, applying moisturizer, she listened to BBC through an ornate bronze grate. Nothing of catastrophic import since she'd last listened, though nothing particularly positive either. Early twenty-first century quotidian, death-spiral subtexts kept well down in the mix. 

She took off the shower cap and shook her head, hair retaining residual stylist's mojo, from the salon in Selfridges. She liked to eat lunch in Sefridges' food hall, escaping through its back door before the communal trance of shopping put her under. Though that was all it was likely to do, in a department store. She was more vulnerable to smaller places, and in London that could be very dangerous. The Japanese jeans she was pulling on now, for instance. Fruit of a place around the corner from Inchmale's studio, the week before. Zen emptiness, bowls with shards of pure solidified indigo, like blue-black glass. The handsome, older, Japanese shopkeeper, in her Waiting for Godot outfit.

I enjoyed Zero History very much, even though it was slow-going for me. Gibson's descriptive style doesn't flow easily for me, I have to really concentrate to absorb it. I frequently found myself having to re-read paragraphs because I realized it hadn't sunk in properly. I don't really mind, though, as I think the stories are worth the effort (Unlike, for instance, Cherryh, who also writes in a way I have trouble processing, but I usually don't enjoy it enough to have justified the effort). Gibson characters live in some sort of alternate universe that is weird and alien to me, but that's half of what makes it entertaining. Like the others, this has a MacGuffin plot, but so what? The trip is enjoyable, even if the reveal at the end isn't that interesting.

The Hollow by Agatha Christie

Last night I went to see The Hollow at the Phipps Center.  It's a stage play adapted from an older novel featuring Hercule Poirot.  I read the book a long time ago and had forgotten that Poirot was in it, but I've always remembered who the murderer was.  Even knowing who did it, I found it quite entertaining.

The Hollow is the country home of Sir Henry and Lady Lucy Angkatell.  For the weekend, they have various relatives to visit them: Edward, a cousin who now owns the much-loved family estate where Lady Lucy grew up; Midge, a poor relation who refuses to let her relatives support her; John and Gerda Christow, a rather arrogant doctor and his fumbling, nervous, stupid wife; and Henrietta, a sculptor who is having an affair with John.

The various guests arrive and we get to know them.  Sir Henry is an old diplomat, and Lady Lucy is very charming and very, very eccentric.  Edward lives a quiet life and wishes that Henrietta would marry him (as Midge comments early on: "The Angkatells have always been close--so much so that they marry their cousins").  Henrietta isn't interested in Edward, she is quite entangled with John.  And poor Gerda, who tries so hard to be a good wife and win her husband's approval, but he clearly doesn't respect her and frequently snaps at her.

John Christow is not a particularly likable character.  He is a doctor, but complains that he hates sick people.  It is the challenge of working to cure complex diseases that he enjoys--and the money--but not particularly helping people.  He is having an affair with his cousin Henrietta, and apparently has been serially unfaithful to Gerda for years.  He reveals to Henrietta that he was once in love with an actress, but their careers took them in different directions, so they separated.  He later married Gerda because she was the opposite of his first love, and he thought--incorrectly--that he would be happy with her.  His first love then walks in the door that evening, a movie star who is staying at a nearby cottage and wishes to borrow some matches.  The whole family watches as she hooks him and reels him in again.  He goes to her cottage to "talk" and is there most of the night, a fact the entire household is aware of.

It is hardly surprising that the next day someone shoots him.  The family rush in and find Gerda standing by him holding a gun.  They all assume that she did it, but try to protect her from the police.  As Lady Lucy says: "It is bad enough for children to have their father murdered, without having their mother hang for it."  The police arrive and investigate, and despite the red herrings and conflicting stories the family gives them, manage to figure out who the killer was.

The Hollow was a long play, running 2 hours and 45 minutes, but it didn't drag at all.  There is a lot there--a lot of characterization, a lot of clues, a lot of dialogue, and a good deal of humor.  Lady Angkatell is so charmingly vague and eccentric, but the butler also had some good moments.  There is also a side plot in which Edward realizes that he is wasting his time on Henrietta, and turns his attentions to the much more solid and likable Midge, who would make a far better match with him.  Christie was always a romantic, and liked to throw story lines like that into her works.

The production I saw was really very enjoyable.  It moved along at a good pace, there were some good comedic moments, and the reveal of the killer was dramatic and well done.  I left the theater smiling, and so did most of the other people I saw in the lobby.  The set was really impressive and the costumes very, very good.  As is always the case with community theater, the performances were not all of equal quality, but the most important characters were very solid.

Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia

In a nutshell, Monster Hunter International is a mildly humorous first person shooter.  Parts of it feel very much like a video game, and the epilogue felt like it could have been ripped straight out of DOOM.  Now, I used to play DOOM, and I enjoyed it, so I don't necessarily think this is a flaw.  But this isn't a deeply insightful and nuanced look at human nature, it's a first person shooter.

Owen Pitt, our protagonist, is a 24 year old accountant.  His father is a former military man who raised Owen and his brother to be warriors.  Owen used to be a competitive shooter, and he loves guns, and is very adept with them.  One day Owen's asshole boss turns into a werewolf and tries to eat him.  They struggle, and Owen manages to kill him.  When he recovers from his injuries, he is offered a job with Monster Hunter International, a firm that hunts down and kills dangerous supernatural creatures.  He accepts.

Owen excels at the training, and he is also having disturbing dreams in which a Jewish man keeps appearing and showing him visions while hinting about his fate.  There are powerful evil creatures on their way, and Owen will somehow be needed to stop them from destroying the world.  There was a prophecy about the head evil guy, who was destined to be able to open a door between the worlds.  It is immediately obvious to the reader, if not to Owen, that the prophecy also describes Owen, and that he, too, is able to wield these powers.

There is a lot of talk about guns in this book.  They certainly do love their guns, and they don't just use their guns, they compare them and talk abut them too.  This, combined with certain other things in the text, (Government = Stupid and Evil fools getting in the way of the real experts, for instance) read as a certain type of conservatism that will rub some readers the wrong way.  Personally I wasn't particularly bothered by it, but the book felt a little dated to me, and I think their attitudes were part of it.  The book was published in 2009, but it's set in 2001, and I have to wonder if the author spent many years finishing it, or if it sat around for quite a while before it sold.  There are still people who have the attitudes espoused by the novel, but still, they feel a bit ... dated.  Political discourse moves on, and people's attitudes and the way they express them change over time, and just as I recently read an SF novel that I could tell, without looking, was written by a British writer during Bush's second term, so too does this feel like it's caught the attitude of a time that is no longer current.  But for all I know, I could be wrong about the work's age.  The only thing about the guns that bugged me a little was their blind reliance on them.  They shoot at dangerous creatures, and discover that it's not very effective.  So what do they do?  Keep shooting.  I realize that guns were what they had at hand but come on, when it's clear that shooting a master vampire doesn't work, why do you keep shooting at it?

I also thought that the story escalated faster than it needed to.  It could have been perfectly entertaining to write stories about Owen and his adventures as a monster hunter without it having to become a struggle in which he is the Chosen One who is the only one capable of saving the world from the Evil Overlord.  Because, really, what can you do after that?  What adventures can he have that aren't going to be a big letdown after saving the world?  The epilogue sets it up so that there can be another book, but perhaps we should have held off on defeating the evil overlord until book two or three, anyway.

That said, I really enjoyed Monster Hunter International.  It's pretty light hearted, at least a first, and even though it's 700 pages, they just fly by.  I like Owen and his band of misfit monster-hunting friends.  There were a couple of laugh-out-loud lines.  It's sort of refreshing, given the staggering level of violence in the work, that the author chose not to make it too dark or gritty, which seems to be the current fashion.  On the other hand, that made it feel a bit safe.  I was quite comfortable in the knowledge that Owen and his love interest would survive, and fairly comfortable that the other characters we know and like would make it, too.  But I didn't mind that, sometimes it's nice to have a nice safe adventure.

Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

Rosemary and Rue is another urban/paranormal fantasy.  I picked this one up because it got some good comments on rec.arts.sf.written.  The protagonist, October Daye, is the child of a human father and a fairy mother.  In this book these mixed-race people are fairly common, and are known as changelings.  They live fairly uncomfortable lives, not human enough to be able to live easily among the  humans, but too human to be accepted among the fae creatures.  They are looked down upon by the full-blooded magical creatures, and they find magic much more difficult than the full-bloods, while still needing to use it every day, whether they live in the human world or the fae world.

The prologue begins with October, who is a private investigator, tailing a powerful fairy who is suspected of being responsible for the disappearance of the wife and child of October's fairy liege lord.  Though she is far outclassed, she is determined to follow him and rescue the missing woman and child.  She walks into a trap, and spends 14 years as a fish.

Fourteen years later October is free of the spell and back in the human world.  She was pretty traumatized by her experience, and lives sunken in self-pity, barely scraping by working as a night cashier at a grocery store and refusing the help offered by her fairy friends.  While she does have some reason for her depression she is, nevertheless, not very likable at the beginning.  Though actually for me, she never became likable, which was a problem.

One of October's friends, a very powerful, very old pureblood fairy, is murdered, and just before she is killed she places a spell of binding on October: she must find the killers, or the spell will eventually kill her.  This forces October to get off her ass and start interacting with the world again, and thus we have a plot.

I didn't like Rosemary and Rue very much.  I don't actively dislike it, like I did Kitty and the Midnight Hour, but it kind of left me cold.  The writing is quite competent, though I thought the pacing at the beginning was a problem.  There is a lot of infodumping at the beginning as we are told about fairies, and about October's experience of getting free of the fishpond, and a dream sequence in which she remembers a formative experience from her childhood.  It occurred to me at one point that I was awfully far into the book, and she still hadn't really dug into the problem and started working on it yet.  My main problem with Rosemary and Rue, though, is that October is too stupid to live.  And not only is she stupid in the way that causes her to nearly die several times, she's the kind of stupid that gets other people killed, too, which makes her pretty hard to like.

I'm going to have to get spoilery to talk about this in more detail, so consider yourself warned.

October spends a lot of time running around from place to place without really thinking things through.  The author knows this, and has several characters point out to her that she ought to stop and think more.  She's impulsive and stupid and seems to be really unaware of what other people think of her, which means she's a bad judge of who likes her and who doesn't.  I could tolerate this, but there are other things she does that I can't tolerate.

The dying fairy's curse requires October to find out who killed her and why.  She finds out, but then instead of calling on her allies to help her out, she goes off alone and underprepared to try to kill him herself.  But when she get there, instead of killing him she gets into an argument with him for long enough to allow an ally of his to sneak up behind her and stop her.  This directly leads to the death of another character who tries to help her.  October is apparently no smarter than a Bond villain

Fairly early on in the book October decides she needs an ally.  She considers a couple of her friends and discards them, and decides instead to seek help from a man she was in an abusive relationship with when she was younger.  He used her and abused her, and she eventually got free of him and made a new life for herself, and now she's going back to him?  WTF?  I repeat: WTF?   And she feels good about it, safe and cared for, even though she can see that he's still treating young people the way he treated her.  WTF? 

I can read a book with a character who makes mistakes, but it's pretty damned hard to enjoy a book with a protagonist who is that stupid. 

Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs

Cry Wolf is by Patricia Briggs, who writes the Mercy Thompson novels I have been reading recently.  This is in the same general setting, and has characters in common, but is not about Mercy.  In Moon Called, the first Mercy novel, they discovered that something was fishy with the wolf pack in Chicago, and Charles, a big Alpha wolf, was sent to deal with it.

Cry Wolf takes place immediately after that.  It starts at a rather odd place, and apparently follows a novella that was in a multi-author collection.  (Can I take a moment to note how much I dislike collections like that?  Inevitably the work is not all equally interesting to me, so I've bought a whole collection for the one story I wanted, which I suspect is what the publishers are hoping I'll do.  One of the great things about ebooks is that you can sometimes just buy the one freaking story you wanted.)  Anyway, I didn't really mind the odd starting point, but it was certainly an abrupt beginning.  I deduce that Charles went to Chicago, found out that the pack was badly run and a lot of the wolves were being badly abused.  He was apparently helped in some way by an Omega wolf named Anna, and their wolfy halves decided they were mates.  Charles killed the head of the Chicago pack and was seriously injured in the process.  His dad, Bran, the Alpha wolf of North America, showed up to help with the cleanup.

Cry Wolf begins with Anna in the car with Bran, afraid because she's learned to be afraid of male wolves because she's been abused for years, on the way to her apartment.  They are going to get her packed up so she can go back to Montana to be with Charles.  Some of the male wolves from the pack are there to help, and one tries to beat her up with the Alpha of all the wolves standing there watching, which is pretty stupid but gives you an idea of why she's so traumatized.

They take the badly-injured Charles and go back to Montana, where Anna feels insecure and uncertain of her relationship with Charles, or anyone else, for that matter.  It's a little creepy, in a way.  Anna is 21 or 22 years old, quite inexperienced and ignorant about wolves, and has been living in constant fear for years.  Charles is over 200 years old, very calm and powerful, but is very reserved and has never been mated before, so this is all new to him, as well.  Still, there's a real power imbalance between them that kind of squicks me out, even though Charles is a good guy.  They try to adjust to the new situation and deal with Anna's fear, and go through some agonizing of the sort that happens in romance novels when characters misunderstand each other's motives.  The two of them turn a corner when they're sent out snowshoeing in the mountains to try to track down a rogue wolf, and of course it turns out to be a lot more dangerous than anyone expected.

Cry Wolf is more of a romance novel than the Mercy Thompson stories, which is probably why I didn't like it as well as those books.  It was interesting to spend more time with some of the characters we've met before, and to get insight from seeing things through their eyes.  Knowing more actually adds depth to the Mercy books, and that's pretty cool.  I like Charles and don't mind Anna, even if she's just a little too special for words.  I believe there is a second book, and I will track it down, but I will do so in order to learn more about the characters Mercy knows, not because I'm interested in the romantic developments between Anna and Charles.  This wasn't as good as the Mercy books, and if I hadn't read those I probably wouldn't have liked this one very much.  It's competently done, it's just not a sort of story I particularly enjoy.

The Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri

I find mystery novels harder to blog about than other genres, I suppose because my expectations of them are different.  I read mysteries quickly, like candy, and they don't need to be great to satisfy me so long as they do what I expect of them.  I usually enjoy mysteries, but it's very rare for me to love one.  They do different things for me than the other fiction I read, and I probably expect less of them.

The Patience of the Spider is part of Camilleri's series about Inspector Montalbano, a policeman in southern Italy.  He's a crotchety fellow who does things his own way and isn't all that concerned with the law.  He has a somewhat frustrating long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Livia, who is a pain in the ass.

In The Patience of the Spider a young woman has disappeared, apparently abducted on her way home one evening.  Her mother is an invalid and the family are quite poor, so it is puzzling why she was chosen for abduction.  The family and the media receive communications from the kidnappers, and their intention eventually becomes clear: the girl's parents are poor, but her uncle is rich and can pay a large ransom.

Montalbano is on medical leave recovering from a gunshot wound, but gets called in to assist on this case.  He floats around under his own initiative, and every evening Livia is angry with him for one reason or another.  The young woman is eventually released but the kidnappers are not caught.  Montalbano figures out what happened and who did it, but chooses not to take action.

I figured out who was behind the kidnapping plot about halfway through the book--in fact, it seemed fairly obvious.  They accomplished what they wanted to do, the only person seriously hurt was not a very nice person, and so they got away with it.  It was not a particularly fascinating read, nor a particularly interesting mystery.  But it was sort of okay, which is all I usually expect of a mystery.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn

I've read some urban fantasy and paranormal works over the last ten years or so that I didn't much like, which has led to me mostly staying away from the field, concluding that it just wasn't really my thing.  But I realized that I'd recently read some urban fantasies that I liked.  I've been reading Mark del Franco's Connor Grey novels (male author, male protagonist) and Harry Connolly's Twenty Palace novels (male author, male protagonist), and enjoying both.  That led me to wonder if I've been a bit closed-minded, either because I apparently do like urban fantasy if it's the right type, or if a few bad experiences had led me to discriminate against urban fantasy by female authors.  However, in my defense, let me say that I've also read urban fantasy by male authors that I disliked, and that those works were included in the calculation that this subgenre wasn't really my cup of tea.

So, in the interest of examining what might be a blind spot, I decided to give urban/paranormal fantasy another shot.  It occurred to me that it might be safer to try authors that are very popular and/or I have heard to be better than average, so that I'm not judging the genre based on weak examples.  Having already in the past sampled Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, and Jim Butcher, I decided to try Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson novels.  I've read a couple now, and I really like them a lot.

Carrie Vaughn was my next experiment.  She seems to be popular, and I have heard that she is good, so it seemed a good direction to go.

I really disliked it.

Kitty is a werewolf who hosts a late-night radio show.  One night they get talking about supernatural creatures, and it was so popular the station asks her to continue talking about that.  She does the show once a week, taking calls and dispensing advice to the supernatural, people who want to be supernatural, and people who are interested in the topic.  It's a hit, and goes into syndication.  But Kitty's life off the air isn't so great.  She is still a fairly new werewolf, and still fairly young.  The dynamics of her pack are creepy and gross and she's often afraid and often threatened.  Neither the werewolves nor the vampires approve of her show, and they send someone to assassinate her on the air, and he calls her to let her know he's coming so that the whole thing can unfold before the thousands of people who are listening.  Kitty is thus outed on the air as being a werewolf.  There is a rogue wolf killing people and the police call her in to help solve it, she befriends the werewolf hunter, and she begins to get a bit of a backbone with the wolves, which leads to all sorts of complications.

I didn't like it.  The biggest problem, I suppose, is that I disliked the main character.  I also hated her situation, didn't like the way she dealt with it, thought the on-air assassination attempt was tacky and immature plotting.  I thought most of it was tacky and immature, actually.  Kitty and the Midnight Hour is, ultimately, a story about how the radio show and its success led Kitty to develop the confidence to extract herself from a bad situation and get her life on track, so perhaps I am supposed to forgive the fact I didn't like the situation or the plot.  But it's not enough--I didn't like the situation, or the plot, or the way the story was told, or the protagonist.  Which is far too much to forgive.  So, Carrie Vaughn?  Not my thing.

Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs

This is the second in the Mercy Thompson series, after Moon Called.  Mercy is a skinwalker and auto mechanic who was raised by werewolves.

In Blood Bound, Mercy is called upon by Stefan, her Scooby Doo-loving vampire friend, to pay back a favor he did for her in the previous book.  He intends to go visit a vampire who he believes to be very dangerous, and he wants Mercy along as a witness to what happens, because Mercy is immune to certain types of vampire magic.  She goes in disguise as his pet coyote, and when they arrive Stefan is quickly overpowered and Mercy witnesses the other vampire doing horrific things.

This brings Mercy into the sphere of vampire politics, because Stefan calls on her as a witness to the events of that night.  Moon Called is a book about Mercy dealing with dangerous werewolves; Blood Bound is about Mercy dealing with dangerous vampires.  As in the other book, she is seriously outclassed by the other supernatural creatures.  Mercy isn't as strong or as old or as powerful as the werewolves or vampires or many of the other fey creatures.  But she's fairly clever, and has somewhat different skills that sometimes allow her to succeed where others don't.

Mercy's social life has become more interesting in Blood Bound.  She lives next to Adam, the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, and it's clear that he's interested in her.  Samuel, an even stronger Alpha werewolf who she grew up with and had a teen romance with, has moved in with her, though not in a romantic way.  His wolf side is clearly still interested in her, too.  These are both very attractive men she is attracted to, and it would be very easy for her to allow them to take care of her, but Mercy would rather not.  She knows that any sign of submission would lead to them stepping in and taking over her life, with the best of intentions, and so she's very careful not to lean on them, even when she could use the help.  In this book it now begins to look like Stefan also cares for her as more than just a friend.  Mercy is unwittingly acquiring a harem of very powerful men, without encouraging them in the least.  And, oddly, it doesn't annoy me.  Seriously, I have never been able to relate to the literary heroine who is the object of desire of all the most eligible bachelors, and has the quandary of trying to pick which one she wants.  (Unless it's a Laurell K. Hamilton novel, in which case she bangs them all)  I suppose that some people actually have a life like that, but the overwhelming majority of real people do not, and it's a story type that defies my willing suspension of disbelief.

That said, nearly anything can be good in the hands of the right writer, and Mercy's situation interests me rather than making me roll my eyes and throw the book across the room, so Briggs is doing something right.  I'm not sure I liked the situation in Blood Bound as well as Moon Called--the vampire stuff is nasty and icky in a way that the werewolves are not.  And I suppose it's inevitable with series that they must escalate--in every book, the situation has to be even worse or harder to solve in the last one, because who would write a book about a situation that they were are well-equipped to handle?  I really enjoyed this one, too, though, and am anxiously waiting for the third volume to become available at the library.

Moon Called by Patricia Briggs

Moon Called is the first of a series featuring Mercedes Thompson, who is both an auto mechanic specializing in German cars and a Skinwalker who can change into a coyote and has some other magical abilities she's just learning about.  I have been hearing for some time that these are above-average works in the urban fantasy/paranormal field, so I decided to give one a try.

Mercy was raised by a pack of werewolves in Montana.  She now lives in eastern Washington state, where her nearest neighbor is the alpha of the local werewolf pack, and her best friends are another werewolf and a gremlin.  In Mercy's world, some of the supernatural creatures are out in the public, and others are not.  Her gremlin friend is out, and lives on a reservation for the fey.  On the other hand, the public still does not know that werewolves or vampires are real.

Mercy meets a young, homeless werewolf.  He is newly turned, and doesn't know much about his new condition.  She gives him a job and plans, in time, to introduce him to the local pack.  But he is on the run, and his pursuers find him at Mercy's garage.  She drives them away and calls Adam, the local Alpha, to assist them.  It turns out that her new young friend is involved in something very big, and it seems to be dangerous to wolves far more powerful than he.  And who's going to save them?  Why, Mercy, of course, who is not nearly as big or strong as the werewolves, but has a different skill set and knows enough about them to be able to help.

I don't mean that last paragraph to sound sarcastic, I just don't know how to summarize the plot without too many spoilers.  Moon Called is actually quite good.  Mercy has a real job, which I appreciate, and she is not a jerk (most of the time, anyway), nor does she have Sooper Mad Skillz.  She is very aware of her relative weakness and her status as an outsider, not part of the pack.  There is also a nice supporting cast, including Stefan the vampire whose van is painted to look like the Mystery Machine, Warren the gay werewolf, and Adam's teenage daughter Jesse.

I really enjoyed Moon Called, and plan to get hold of a copy of the next one ASAP.

Hurricane Punch by Tim Dorsey

This one is a re-read, actually, but I see that I didn't blog about it the first time I read it.

Hurricane Punch is the ninth in a series of comedic novels set in Florida featuring Serge Storms, hyperactive serial killer and Florida-phile.  Serge is crazy, and in Hurricane Punch he is seeing a psychiatrist, even though he refuses to take the medication she prescribes.  It is hurricane season and Serge loves hurricanes, so he and his stoner friend Coleman go out chasing them.  Serge likes to travel with the hurricane, driving across Florida (not-so) safely tucked away in the eye of the storm.

There is a second story line involving a very unhappy young reporter at Tampa Bay Today, a newspaper owned by a Rupert Murdoch-like character.  They also have television and radio stations, and try to leverage that into better sales for all three.  Hence the radio station has a fellow in a parrot costume who shows up and dances around in the background of news reports on the TV station, much to their disgust.  Jeff McSwirley is a very successful, very unhappy crime reporter.  He desperately wants to be removed from the crime beat, but management refuses because he's good at his job, and that increases their sales.  Jeff starts getting letters from a second serial killer calling himself Eye of the Storm, who kills assholes whose death will improve society, actually much like Serge does.  But Eye of the Storm is becoming obsessed with the young reporter, who finds it all rather depressing.

Serge decides to help Jeff out and protect him from the other serial killer.  They have wild but fun adventures.  I really can't say more without spoiling it.

I love these novels.  Some of them riff on aspects of Florida, such as hurricanes, cruise ships, and spring break.  They're all good, but I think Hurricane Punch is one of my favorites.

Minnesota State Fair

Yesterday I went to the Fair.  This is the second year in a row, which is very uncharacteristic for me.  My prior Fair experiences have been kind of mediocre--so many people love the Fair, and think it's fun, and I always wander around the Fairgrounds wondering what I'm missing, because I'm not really having that good a time.

The Minnesota State Fair has a long and proud tradition of serving lots of fried foods on a stick.  I've never thought this was something to be particularly proud of, but after yesterday I get it now:  there is almost nowhere to sit down at the Fair.  There are a few benches, and very few tables to eat at.  You need food that you can easily eat while standing or walking around, and food on a stick makes that convenient.

I didn't get to a lot of things I thought I would, but the place is pretty big and there's a lot to see, and you spend a lot of time just getting from one place to another.  Especially yesterday--it was a record-breaking day, with 234,000 people in attendance.  When it's that crowded, just walking a couple of blocks can take 15 minutes, because there are simply too many people in the way to be able to make any progress.  I hate crowds, so by the end of the day I was exhausted and determined that I will never, ever again go to the Fair on a Saturday.

The coolest thing I did at the Fair was at the health fair.  I got my blood tested to determine its type.  I've always wondered, but never knew.  I was not surprised to discover that I am O positive, the most common blood type.  Still, nice to know.

Other than that, it might be easier to list the things I didn't do:  I didn't make it into the animal barns, though I meant to.  I didn't spend any real time looking at the arts & crafts, though I thought I would.  I didn't sit down and listen to any of the bands that I passed, though some of them were good and I would have enjoyed it.  I didn't visit Heritage Square--not that I really care, just that it's about the only part of the Fairgrounds that I missed.  I spent less time at the booths of various radio & TV stations than I thought I might.  I did pick up an MPR sticker at the Minnesota Public Radio booth, but nothing much else was going on there, or at most of the others I passed.

Oddly enough, though, this is the first time I didn't leave the Fair feeling that I had missed whatever was supposed to be fun about the place.  Perhaps because I was too exhausted and my feet too sore for the usual ennui I get from the Fair.

Game of Cages by Harry Connolly

This is the second in the Twenty Palaces series. The first is Child of Fire.

This novel takes place months after Child of Fire. Ray has settled into a dull life working the night shift in a grocery store, waiting to be called back into action by his boss, Annalise, or her employers, the Twenty Palace Society. His patience is rewarded when he is picked up by a researcher from the Society named Catherine. A dangerous supernatural creature is about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. She is going to investigate and needs backup, and Ray is the nearest Society employee.

When they get to the estate where the auction took place, they find that the auction is over, the creature has escaped, and the bidders are trying to kill off one another. Catherine and Ray try to sneak around without being spotted, and soon the unsuccessful bidders are trying to kill them, too. There are gratuitous action scenes, some people die, and they eventually escape to the nearby town. Catherine calls for a specialist from the Society to come deal with the escaped creature, but Ray and Catherine find it's not easy to walk away. The creature is running loose, the townspeople are going crazy and killing one another, and the bidders are all still out there, trying to kill one another as well as Ray and Catherine.

I started Game of Cages fairly late last evening, intending to read a couple of chapters before I went to sleep. Instead, I stayed up later than I wanted and read it straight through. It's a very high-action story that sucks you along. Ray is, again, remarkably fearless, as I noted in my review of Child of Fire. He keeps plunging into extremely dangerous situations without hesitation and usually without a plan. It seems to work for him, though, as he gets out alive even as everyone around him is getting killed. It's beginning to seem that this is not just luck. Ray's job is to act as cannon-fodder, to throw himself into the fray and distract the bad guys so that Annalise can do the serious killing. But we've had two novels now where Ray is successful when more powerful members of the Society are not.

I would happily grab the third book in the series, if it were available. I want to know what happens next. I'm curious to see how Ray's career progresses. I want more, darn it! But we're probably going to have to wait a year for the next one. Sigh. This is the problem with reading series as they come out, instead of picking them up after they're well-established.

Overall, Game of Cages is an absorbing, high-action romp, and a hell of a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Claudius Bombarnac by Jules Verne

When I think of Jules Verne, I think mostly of science fictional tales like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon. I see, however, that he authored 54 novels, and most of them apparently were not science fiction. Verne wrote a series of novels collectively called Extraordinary Voyages, and Claudius Bombarnac was one of them.

The novel came out in 1892 and was translated into English in 1894. The copy I read probably dates from around 1895-1900, but the publisher did not put a date on the work, nor do they name the translator.

The title character, Bombarnac, is a correspondent for a French newspaper. He is fluent in several languages, including Russian, and is dispatched to ride the railway from Tiflis (modernly known as Tbilisi, Georgia) to Pekin (modernly known as Beijing) and report back anything of interest to his newspaper. Based on my very limited knowledge of Verne I was hoping that this trip would lead exciting adventures, but I'm afraid it turned out to be a fairly dull Nineteenth Century travel narrative.

Bombarnac, too, is hoping that the trip will lead to exciting adventures, as he hopes to have something to report back to his newspaper. I think Verne intended it to be humorous that he was hoping they would be attacked by bandits or some of his fellow passengers eaten by tigers. Unfortunately for Bombarnac, and the reader, most of the journey is without excitement. Things pick up after page 200, but up to then it is a rather dull slog. He eventually gets his wish as they are attacked by bandits, and later the train is hurtling toward an incomplete railway bridge and they are all in danger of plunging to their death on the rocks below. This should have been quite a thrilling read, but in fact was surprisingly dull.

I did not read the book in its original language, so it is difficult to know if the dry and lifeless text was Verne's fault or the translator's. The first 200 pages of the book are used to introduce Bombarnac's fellow passengers. They recite railroad trivia to one another, and Bombarnac lists all the cities they pass. When he disembarks to explore the cities, they all sound quite a lot alike. Bombarnac likes everyone he meets, except the fat German who is trying to travel around the world and the Englishman who never speaks a single word the entire two weeks of the trip. I suppose they were supposed to be humorous, as well, but Verne was really vicious in his contempt for the German character.

Claudius Bombarnac is not a long book, but it took me an unusually long time to read. It's dry, and dull, and my mind kept wandering so I had to re-read passages several times. And I kept dozing off while reading it. I do not regret reading it, but I'm glad that I am done with it.