This is the first novel I've read by Woods. It's a very light mystery set in the small town of Orchid Beach, Florida. When they described Orchid Beach as "the way Florida should have turned out but didn't--no high-rises on the beach, beautiful neighborhoods," I wondered for a moment if this was going to be a crime novel in the vein of Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey, both of whom express sadness for the way Florida has turned out. However, though Blood Orchid was very light, it didn't approach the humor and mayhem that those writers achieve.
Holly Barker is the chief of police of Orchid Beach. She's ex-military, an excellent shot, and has a pet doberman pinscher. She inherited a beautiful beach home and a large insurance settlement the previous year when her fiance died, but she's lonely without him. One evening a gentleman strikes up a conversation with her, and then invites her back to his home to see his orchids. While there, someone shoots into the greenhouse, narrowly missing her new acquaintance. He is a retired land developer, and when she learns that two other developers were shot to death, she has to assume that the cases are related.
Her new friend, Ed, purchased a development that the government had seized from drug traffickers and auctioned off, and re-named it Blood Orchid. Meanwhile someone breaks into her home and bugs her phone, a dead man is found floating in the river, and the FBI places a very attractive undercover agent in the area but won't tell her what he's working on. She quickly falls into bed with the FBI agent, then goes running around investigating the dead man and periodically calling the Miami FBI office and being angry that the agent in charge won't share information with her.
Holly is amazingly indiscreet. She rages that people won't tell her anything, but she doesn't hesitate to babble everything she knows to people she's only just met. This turns out not to be a good idea, unsurprisingly. A bunch of people die, some of them killed by Holly. It's all very light and mildly entertaining. This certainly isn't a great book, or even a terribly good one, but it held my attention for a couple of hours.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo
The Murder Room is a work of nonfiction about the Vidocq Society, a group of detectives, law enforcement professionals, and crime experts who meet in Philadelphia and re-examine cold cases. It centers especially on three men who helped create the organization: Bill Fleischer, a federal agent; Richard Walter, a psychologist and profiler; and Frank Bender, a forensic artist. Though there are many more members of the Society, and many of them are mentioned, this book is mostly about the three men named above.
I picked this book up after my boss mentioned it to me. There was a double murder several years back in Hudson, the town where I grew up, and the Vidocq Society examined the case and helped lead to its resolution. In fact, the book's prologue is about the Hudson case, but the resolution doesn't come until almost the end of the book. I know how it came out, of course, but still was interested in what the book would say. And it certainly provided a good hook in the prologue:
Other than the case I was personally interested in, the book also focuses on other cases: an unidentified murdered child found in Philadelphia in the 1950s, a young man killed by his girlfriend in Texas, a college student murdered at school whose shoes were missing, a girl found murdered in a church, and many others. It makes for grim, if fascinating, reading. Though, frankly, I think the most grim thing about the book was the number of crimes that people get away with. Sometimes they discover the killer too late to bring them to justice, sometimes there isn't enough evidence, and sometimes local law enforcement or the DA are uninterested.
The book's narrative style bothered me a little bit, as sometimes happens with works like this. There is a lot of dialogue, a lot of conversations, that surely weren't recorded at the time, and I have to assume that the author recreated them based on what the participants later told him. Doubtless they are more or less correct, but still it always sets off little alarms in my head, thinking: Really? How do you know, word for word, what was said in a conversation 15 or 20 years ago? It's probably a minor thing, but it always jerks me out of the enjoyment of a work of nonfiction when I have to wonder how much of it is fabricated. The author also repeats things too much, like reminding us of what happened in a case we read about a few chapters earlier. Yes, I read the book. Yes, I remember that. No, you don't need to tell me again. And he has an irritating of habit of rarely using Walter's name, instead describing him again and again as 'the thin man.' I felt like at any moment we were going to step into a comedy featuring a rich drunk, a pretty airheaded bimbo, and a small dog. It doesn't irritate readers when an author calls characters by their name, but it can be irritating to readers when they try to think of ways to avoid calling characters by their name.
I was also struck by the way the local case was portrayed, which led me to wonder about the accuracy of the other stories. The account isn't substantially wrong, but there were problems: the town isn't as small as described, the local newspaper's name was wrong, and he relocated Wisconsin to place it west of Minnesota. Plenty was left out, there are broad generalizations that weren't entirely accurate--it's not exactly wrong, but also not exactly right. I understand that the author is more interested in a brief, entertaining chapter in a larger work than an in-depth exploration of this particular event, but it just seemed a little sloppy.
The Hudson chapter is near the end, and then we revisit a couple more cases the author had talked about earlier in the book, and the final chapter is very soppy and sentimental. (Ick, ick, ick.) However, though I see that in this review I have mostly expressed reservations about the work, it is still pretty readable and quite interesting. I don't actually believe the author's portrayal of Richard as always right and Bender as psychic, but I enjoyed it anyway.
I picked this book up after my boss mentioned it to me. There was a double murder several years back in Hudson, the town where I grew up, and the Vidocq Society examined the case and helped lead to its resolution. In fact, the book's prologue is about the Hudson case, but the resolution doesn't come until almost the end of the book. I know how it came out, of course, but still was interested in what the book would say. And it certainly provided a good hook in the prologue:
The profiler studied the case file and chatted with the police for three hours before narrowing the eleven suspects to one. "It's the priest," he told the police. "Of course, I know you don't want it to be the priest. Nonetheless, it's the priest."
Other than the case I was personally interested in, the book also focuses on other cases: an unidentified murdered child found in Philadelphia in the 1950s, a young man killed by his girlfriend in Texas, a college student murdered at school whose shoes were missing, a girl found murdered in a church, and many others. It makes for grim, if fascinating, reading. Though, frankly, I think the most grim thing about the book was the number of crimes that people get away with. Sometimes they discover the killer too late to bring them to justice, sometimes there isn't enough evidence, and sometimes local law enforcement or the DA are uninterested.
The book's narrative style bothered me a little bit, as sometimes happens with works like this. There is a lot of dialogue, a lot of conversations, that surely weren't recorded at the time, and I have to assume that the author recreated them based on what the participants later told him. Doubtless they are more or less correct, but still it always sets off little alarms in my head, thinking: Really? How do you know, word for word, what was said in a conversation 15 or 20 years ago? It's probably a minor thing, but it always jerks me out of the enjoyment of a work of nonfiction when I have to wonder how much of it is fabricated. The author also repeats things too much, like reminding us of what happened in a case we read about a few chapters earlier. Yes, I read the book. Yes, I remember that. No, you don't need to tell me again. And he has an irritating of habit of rarely using Walter's name, instead describing him again and again as 'the thin man.' I felt like at any moment we were going to step into a comedy featuring a rich drunk, a pretty airheaded bimbo, and a small dog. It doesn't irritate readers when an author calls characters by their name, but it can be irritating to readers when they try to think of ways to avoid calling characters by their name.
I was also struck by the way the local case was portrayed, which led me to wonder about the accuracy of the other stories. The account isn't substantially wrong, but there were problems: the town isn't as small as described, the local newspaper's name was wrong, and he relocated Wisconsin to place it west of Minnesota. Plenty was left out, there are broad generalizations that weren't entirely accurate--it's not exactly wrong, but also not exactly right. I understand that the author is more interested in a brief, entertaining chapter in a larger work than an in-depth exploration of this particular event, but it just seemed a little sloppy.
The Hudson chapter is near the end, and then we revisit a couple more cases the author had talked about earlier in the book, and the final chapter is very soppy and sentimental. (Ick, ick, ick.) However, though I see that in this review I have mostly expressed reservations about the work, it is still pretty readable and quite interesting. I don't actually believe the author's portrayal of Richard as always right and Bender as psychic, but I enjoyed it anyway.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Night she Died by Dorothy Simpson
I joined a mystery book group, and this was our first selection.
I used to read Dorothy Simpson, and I read this book about 20 years ago, along with all the others that were available at the time. At some point, though, I got frustrated with the author and stopped reading these mysteries. Reading The Night She Died again, I can remember what I used to like about these books. And I can also remember why I stopped reading them.
This is the first in a series of British police procedurals featuring Inspector Luke Thanet. He and his sidekick Lineham are called to the a murder scene where they find a young woman stabbed to death in her entryway. They eliminate the husband as a suspect, and begin to study the dead woman's life, because Thanet believes that the way to learn how someone died is to understand what kind of person they are, or something like that. They find her smarmy boss and her smarmy ex-boyfriend and her marriage counselor, and Thanet and Lineham spout all sorts of nonsense speculation about how she's a cold and frigid woman who is incapable of loving anyone.
And then Thanet goes off on a tangent. He sees that she owns a painting by a deceased artist from a nearby town, and wonders how she came to own it. So he does a little digging, and finds that the victim was born in the nearby town, and that on one horrible night her father died in a car crash, so her mother left the toddler with a sitter while she went to the hospital to be with him in his final hours, and that same evening someone came in and murdered the sitter before the child's eyes. And that her mother packed her up and they moved away, but that she (the victim) had recently been having nightmares that Thanet is sure are based on repressed memories of the night she witnessed a murder from her crib.
Sigh. What a load of bullshit.
Anyway, Thanet goes off on this tangent, and he thinks that, because our victim resembles her mother at the same age, and because she loaned her painting to an art exhibition and attended the opening, that someone might, all these years later, realize that maybe she witnessed the murder, and decided to silence her. So he spends some time interviewing very old suspects and speculating about that unsolved murder all those years ago---and it turns out that they had nothing to do with her murder. Except that Thanet believes that her repressed-memory nightmares put her on edge which led her to fighting with her ex boyfriend which led her smarmy boss to murder her. And that if she hadn't had those memories, it wouldn't have set that chain in action, and she would be alive if she hadn't attended that art exhibition.
Gack. That is so bad.
The Night she Died was written 30 years ago, and we were all struck by how the mystery genre has changed. For one thing, it's a 200 page book, though she packs a lot in. Mysteries these days tend to be longer, and at least in the police procedural subgenre, readers today expect that they be more realistic. Unfortunately one of the ways writers try to make them more realistic is to make them grim, frequently by making the detectives depressed alcoholics with miserable home lives who are often loose cannons constantly struggling against their superiors. Given those as examples, it is refreshing that Thanet has a happy home life that forms a major part of his identity. On the other hand, the home life was one of the reasons I stopped reading Simpson. I believe the final straw was the one where his teenage daughter was having panic attacks over her exams, and Thanet spent more time agonizing over his daughter's angst than he spent trying to solve the crime. And there were other ones, too, in which Thanet spent much too much time on family stuff to suit me. I'm reading mysteries because I want to read about the crime and how they solve it, not dozens of pages of the detective mulling over what to do about his obnoxious children.
However getting back to this particular book, it was fairly engaging and yet also fairly weakly plotted. A great deal of time is wasted on a wild goose chase (although a bit refreshing, in that in mysteries like this the wild hunch usually turns out to be correct), the resolution was a bit abrupt, and once they decided who the killer was, they had no evidence, so Thanet tripped the guy up on a really ridiculous ruse. Several of us also thought that given the situation, the character's motivation for killing her was not believable. We didn't believe, in that situation, that even that unlikeable jerk would have decided to kill her. Which isn't to say that we didn't enjoy the book, I think most of us did. It just wasn't that good when you really scrutinized it.
I used to read Dorothy Simpson, and I read this book about 20 years ago, along with all the others that were available at the time. At some point, though, I got frustrated with the author and stopped reading these mysteries. Reading The Night She Died again, I can remember what I used to like about these books. And I can also remember why I stopped reading them.
This is the first in a series of British police procedurals featuring Inspector Luke Thanet. He and his sidekick Lineham are called to the a murder scene where they find a young woman stabbed to death in her entryway. They eliminate the husband as a suspect, and begin to study the dead woman's life, because Thanet believes that the way to learn how someone died is to understand what kind of person they are, or something like that. They find her smarmy boss and her smarmy ex-boyfriend and her marriage counselor, and Thanet and Lineham spout all sorts of nonsense speculation about how she's a cold and frigid woman who is incapable of loving anyone.
And then Thanet goes off on a tangent. He sees that she owns a painting by a deceased artist from a nearby town, and wonders how she came to own it. So he does a little digging, and finds that the victim was born in the nearby town, and that on one horrible night her father died in a car crash, so her mother left the toddler with a sitter while she went to the hospital to be with him in his final hours, and that same evening someone came in and murdered the sitter before the child's eyes. And that her mother packed her up and they moved away, but that she (the victim) had recently been having nightmares that Thanet is sure are based on repressed memories of the night she witnessed a murder from her crib.
Sigh. What a load of bullshit.
Anyway, Thanet goes off on this tangent, and he thinks that, because our victim resembles her mother at the same age, and because she loaned her painting to an art exhibition and attended the opening, that someone might, all these years later, realize that maybe she witnessed the murder, and decided to silence her. So he spends some time interviewing very old suspects and speculating about that unsolved murder all those years ago---and it turns out that they had nothing to do with her murder. Except that Thanet believes that her repressed-memory nightmares put her on edge which led her to fighting with her ex boyfriend which led her smarmy boss to murder her. And that if she hadn't had those memories, it wouldn't have set that chain in action, and she would be alive if she hadn't attended that art exhibition.
Gack. That is so bad.
The Night she Died was written 30 years ago, and we were all struck by how the mystery genre has changed. For one thing, it's a 200 page book, though she packs a lot in. Mysteries these days tend to be longer, and at least in the police procedural subgenre, readers today expect that they be more realistic. Unfortunately one of the ways writers try to make them more realistic is to make them grim, frequently by making the detectives depressed alcoholics with miserable home lives who are often loose cannons constantly struggling against their superiors. Given those as examples, it is refreshing that Thanet has a happy home life that forms a major part of his identity. On the other hand, the home life was one of the reasons I stopped reading Simpson. I believe the final straw was the one where his teenage daughter was having panic attacks over her exams, and Thanet spent more time agonizing over his daughter's angst than he spent trying to solve the crime. And there were other ones, too, in which Thanet spent much too much time on family stuff to suit me. I'm reading mysteries because I want to read about the crime and how they solve it, not dozens of pages of the detective mulling over what to do about his obnoxious children.
However getting back to this particular book, it was fairly engaging and yet also fairly weakly plotted. A great deal of time is wasted on a wild goose chase (although a bit refreshing, in that in mysteries like this the wild hunch usually turns out to be correct), the resolution was a bit abrupt, and once they decided who the killer was, they had no evidence, so Thanet tripped the guy up on a really ridiculous ruse. Several of us also thought that given the situation, the character's motivation for killing her was not believable. We didn't believe, in that situation, that even that unlikeable jerk would have decided to kill her. Which isn't to say that we didn't enjoy the book, I think most of us did. It just wasn't that good when you really scrutinized it.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Monster Hunter Vendetta by Larry Correia
Vendetta is the sequel to Monster Hunter International. It again features the monster-splattering adventures of Owen Pitt and his buddies at Monster Hunter International.
This one is set almost a year after the last one. Owen is engaged to Julie, the woman of his dreams, and happily killing monsters. Things go wrong, however, on a trip to Mexico when he is attacked by a necromancer and then the hotel is overrun by zombies. This unfortunately brings him to the attention of the US government's monster-hunting branch, who are interested in the necromancer and the crazy cult he heads, and view Owen as the best way to find him. He isn't very happy about it, but becomes even more unhappy when his family are endangered. In the long run it turns out that Owen isn't finished with being the Chosen One who can save the world, though I thought we'd kind of worked through that in the first book.
As I noted with Monster Hunter International, this book isn't a sensitive and perceptive study of human nature, it's a first person shooter. Owen spots monsters, Owen tries to kill monsters, something gets in his way, Owen gets really mad and does stupid things. Lather, rinse, repeat. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the book--I did, actually. It's almost 650 pages, but it just flies by. It's a lot like the last one, really, and I don't have much else to say about it. I enjoyed it, though, and if a third book comes out, I will happily read it. It's just good, fun, mindless violence.
This one is set almost a year after the last one. Owen is engaged to Julie, the woman of his dreams, and happily killing monsters. Things go wrong, however, on a trip to Mexico when he is attacked by a necromancer and then the hotel is overrun by zombies. This unfortunately brings him to the attention of the US government's monster-hunting branch, who are interested in the necromancer and the crazy cult he heads, and view Owen as the best way to find him. He isn't very happy about it, but becomes even more unhappy when his family are endangered. In the long run it turns out that Owen isn't finished with being the Chosen One who can save the world, though I thought we'd kind of worked through that in the first book.
As I noted with Monster Hunter International, this book isn't a sensitive and perceptive study of human nature, it's a first person shooter. Owen spots monsters, Owen tries to kill monsters, something gets in his way, Owen gets really mad and does stupid things. Lather, rinse, repeat. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the book--I did, actually. It's almost 650 pages, but it just flies by. It's a lot like the last one, really, and I don't have much else to say about it. I enjoyed it, though, and if a third book comes out, I will happily read it. It's just good, fun, mindless violence.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane
Unholy Ghosts is the latest in my sampling of urban and paranormal fantasies as I try to figure out if my earlier impression that I don't care for them was correct. Regular readers will recall that I've had a streak of books I didn't care for, and I was nearly ready to give up this reading experiment and go back to books I'm more likely to enjoy. If I hadn't had such great success with Patricia Briggs, I probably would have already given up by now.
Anyway, I realized last night that Unholy Ghosts was due back at the library today, and I couldn't renew it because someone else had a hold on it. That meant I had to speed through this one to finish it and return it this evening. I started the book yesterday evening and struggled with it a bit as I was very sleepy. I occasionally have a night like last night, when I'm dozing off on the sofa by 8:30. That certainly wasn't conducive to my enjoying the book. However I finished it today, and then went back and re-read the beginning and found that it was much better when I was awake.
I am happy to report that Unholy Ghosts is pretty good. In fact, it's good enough that I will look for the next one. And after this last reading streak, what a relief it was to read a book I enjoyed!
Unholy Ghosts is set in the near future. The point of departure from our world happened in 1997, when the spirits of the dead rose and killed two-thirds of the population of the earth. Since then the world has come to be run by the Church of Real Truth, who collect taxes and keep the spirits under control and protect the population. It is not the Christian church or even a real religion--they do not believe in god, and do not believe in faith. Faith, they say, isn't necessary when you know the facts. The Church monitors the dead and protects the populace, and occasionally need to banish the odd haunting.
If a true haunting is found, the Church gives a large settlement to the property owners. This provides incentive for people to fake hauntings in the hope of getting a settlement, sort of like insurance fraud. Thus the Church has a category of employees known as Debunkers, whose job it is to investigate these claims and prove them to be either false or true, and if true to banish the spirit. Most claims are false.
Our protagonist, Chess, is a young Debunker for the church. She is quite poor, as Debunkers aren't paid much (though they get a bonus whenever they find a claim to be false) and what she does make she spends on her drug habit. Chess, you see, is an addict, and also has suicidal thoughts. She is currently in debt to a drug dealer named Bump, who says that she can work off her debt by looking into an old air field where he's been trying to land planes of drugs, but they keep crashing. Chess is sent off to investigate with Bump's enforcer, Terrible. She finds no signs of a manufactured haunting, but does encounter ugly black magic at the abandoned air field. Meanwhile she is also officially investigating a suburban family called the Mortons who seem to be faking a haunting.
Not surprisingly, the two investigations turn out to be connected. Someone has performed a dark ritual and summoned a supernatural creature that feeds off people's dreams. Chess is somewhat protected because she doesn't eat or sleep, she just pops uppers. She realizes that someone from the Church must be involved, and Kane drops two big, obvious clues on our heads. One points to a particular fellow, and then when it turns out he isn't the guilty one, she drops another big, obvious hint so that the reader can figure it out before Chess does. That part was perhaps a bit clumsy, but really I think it's the only misstep in the book, and it isn't really an important flaw.
The writing is quite good. One thing I particularly appreciated was the way some of the characters spoke. Chess was educated by the Church and speaks normal grammatical English, but she lives in a poor neighborhood and is dealing with various members of the lower and criminal classes. They speak in their own dialect, but it never felt forced or awkward or hard to understand. It read right--like the sentences were made in a way that could be spoken naturally. Though, on further reflection, the novel seems to take place approximately 20 years after the events of 1997, and most of the people she is dealing with were apparently born before then. I'm not sure that 20 years is long enough for people to forget normal grammar and develop a separate dialect. So it perhaps doesn't entirely make sense, but it read well and believably anyway.
I cannot help but compare Unholy Ghosts with Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. Chess is, really, almost as much of a loser as October Daye, and yet Chess didn't piss me off. I'm at a little bit of a loss to define exactly why I hated Rosemary and Rue and liked Unholy Ghosts, but I did. My experiment in urban fantasy isn't providing as many answers as I expected it would. I have concluded that I apparently do like urban fantasy, if it's the right kind, but defining what makes some novels the right stuff and others not--that's eluding me. I would have guessed, for instance, that the Harry Dresden novels would be the right kind--they're not that different than Mark del Franco's Connor Grey novels, which I like--and yet Dresden doesn't work for me and Grey does. Likewise Chess works for me and Toby Daye doesn't. And I really don't know why. But I'm glad I enjoyed it, and will track down the next one soon.
Anyway, I realized last night that Unholy Ghosts was due back at the library today, and I couldn't renew it because someone else had a hold on it. That meant I had to speed through this one to finish it and return it this evening. I started the book yesterday evening and struggled with it a bit as I was very sleepy. I occasionally have a night like last night, when I'm dozing off on the sofa by 8:30. That certainly wasn't conducive to my enjoying the book. However I finished it today, and then went back and re-read the beginning and found that it was much better when I was awake.
I am happy to report that Unholy Ghosts is pretty good. In fact, it's good enough that I will look for the next one. And after this last reading streak, what a relief it was to read a book I enjoyed!
Unholy Ghosts is set in the near future. The point of departure from our world happened in 1997, when the spirits of the dead rose and killed two-thirds of the population of the earth. Since then the world has come to be run by the Church of Real Truth, who collect taxes and keep the spirits under control and protect the population. It is not the Christian church or even a real religion--they do not believe in god, and do not believe in faith. Faith, they say, isn't necessary when you know the facts. The Church monitors the dead and protects the populace, and occasionally need to banish the odd haunting.
If a true haunting is found, the Church gives a large settlement to the property owners. This provides incentive for people to fake hauntings in the hope of getting a settlement, sort of like insurance fraud. Thus the Church has a category of employees known as Debunkers, whose job it is to investigate these claims and prove them to be either false or true, and if true to banish the spirit. Most claims are false.
Our protagonist, Chess, is a young Debunker for the church. She is quite poor, as Debunkers aren't paid much (though they get a bonus whenever they find a claim to be false) and what she does make she spends on her drug habit. Chess, you see, is an addict, and also has suicidal thoughts. She is currently in debt to a drug dealer named Bump, who says that she can work off her debt by looking into an old air field where he's been trying to land planes of drugs, but they keep crashing. Chess is sent off to investigate with Bump's enforcer, Terrible. She finds no signs of a manufactured haunting, but does encounter ugly black magic at the abandoned air field. Meanwhile she is also officially investigating a suburban family called the Mortons who seem to be faking a haunting.
Not surprisingly, the two investigations turn out to be connected. Someone has performed a dark ritual and summoned a supernatural creature that feeds off people's dreams. Chess is somewhat protected because she doesn't eat or sleep, she just pops uppers. She realizes that someone from the Church must be involved, and Kane drops two big, obvious clues on our heads. One points to a particular fellow, and then when it turns out he isn't the guilty one, she drops another big, obvious hint so that the reader can figure it out before Chess does. That part was perhaps a bit clumsy, but really I think it's the only misstep in the book, and it isn't really an important flaw.
The writing is quite good. One thing I particularly appreciated was the way some of the characters spoke. Chess was educated by the Church and speaks normal grammatical English, but she lives in a poor neighborhood and is dealing with various members of the lower and criminal classes. They speak in their own dialect, but it never felt forced or awkward or hard to understand. It read right--like the sentences were made in a way that could be spoken naturally. Though, on further reflection, the novel seems to take place approximately 20 years after the events of 1997, and most of the people she is dealing with were apparently born before then. I'm not sure that 20 years is long enough for people to forget normal grammar and develop a separate dialect. So it perhaps doesn't entirely make sense, but it read well and believably anyway.
I cannot help but compare Unholy Ghosts with Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. Chess is, really, almost as much of a loser as October Daye, and yet Chess didn't piss me off. I'm at a little bit of a loss to define exactly why I hated Rosemary and Rue and liked Unholy Ghosts, but I did. My experiment in urban fantasy isn't providing as many answers as I expected it would. I have concluded that I apparently do like urban fantasy, if it's the right kind, but defining what makes some novels the right stuff and others not--that's eluding me. I would have guessed, for instance, that the Harry Dresden novels would be the right kind--they're not that different than Mark del Franco's Connor Grey novels, which I like--and yet Dresden doesn't work for me and Grey does. Likewise Chess works for me and Toby Daye doesn't. And I really don't know why. But I'm glad I enjoyed it, and will track down the next one soon.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
I read this in my continuing experiment with urban/paranormal fantasy. I read one other Butcher, years ago, and didn't love it but didn't mind it. I then picked up the second one, and couldn't get past the first chapter. This is a later one in the series, featuring Harry Dresden, wizard-for-hire in Chicago.
I'm not going to bother to recite the plot. Harry gets into deep trouble, and then deeper trouble, and then deeper trouble yet. Really the only thing I have to say is, I'm quite surprised by how intensely I came to dislike this one. I wasn't expecting that. This reading experiment has led me to the conclusion that I sometimes like urban fantasy, if it's the right type, and I would have guessed that the Harry Dresden series might fit into the type I like to read. However, it appears that I was wrong, because I didn't like this at all.
I'm not going to bother to recite the plot. Harry gets into deep trouble, and then deeper trouble, and then deeper trouble yet. Really the only thing I have to say is, I'm quite surprised by how intensely I came to dislike this one. I wasn't expecting that. This reading experiment has led me to the conclusion that I sometimes like urban fantasy, if it's the right type, and I would have guessed that the Harry Dresden series might fit into the type I like to read. However, it appears that I was wrong, because I didn't like this at all.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs
This is the sequel to Cry Wolf. It takes place just a few weeks later. Bran, the leader of all the werewolves in North America, has decided that it's time for werewolves to emerge from the closet. He intends to let the word out that they exist, and has selected a few strong and respectable wolves to be the initial public face of the werewolves. The European werewolves are not very happy about this idea, as it will affect them, too. So a contingent of European Alphas have come to meet with him.
Charles, Bran's younger son, has a bad feeling about the meeting, and convinces Bran to send himself and his new mate Anna in his stead. They travel to Seattle for the meeting, where Charles introduces Anna to the major players of the story. The two most important people at the meeting are the French alpha, Chastel, who is a sadistic killer, and the British alpha, Arthur, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of King Arthur. Chastel has no intention of cooperating with Bran because they dislike each other, and he is dangerous enough that most of the others won't dare cross him. Arthur might take Bran's side, but if so it would be in order to thwart Chastel, as he and Bran aren't allies, either.
Things don't go very smoothly, as Anna is frightened of all the dominant wolves around her, and then she's attacked by a squad of vampires. She and Charles need to figure out what's going on, and to keep the peace among the others. Charles is going crazy at the threat to his mate, who he needs to protect. Anna has some growing to do, and I am happy to see that she toughened up and stood up for herself a few times. It's a good sign.
As in Cry Wolf, Anna is just sometimes a little too special to stomach. Nevertheless, this is more of an action book than a relationship book, and I enjoyed it more than the first one. It still isn't as good as the Mercy Thompson novels, but the series has some promise.
Charles, Bran's younger son, has a bad feeling about the meeting, and convinces Bran to send himself and his new mate Anna in his stead. They travel to Seattle for the meeting, where Charles introduces Anna to the major players of the story. The two most important people at the meeting are the French alpha, Chastel, who is a sadistic killer, and the British alpha, Arthur, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of King Arthur. Chastel has no intention of cooperating with Bran because they dislike each other, and he is dangerous enough that most of the others won't dare cross him. Arthur might take Bran's side, but if so it would be in order to thwart Chastel, as he and Bran aren't allies, either.
Things don't go very smoothly, as Anna is frightened of all the dominant wolves around her, and then she's attacked by a squad of vampires. She and Charles need to figure out what's going on, and to keep the peace among the others. Charles is going crazy at the threat to his mate, who he needs to protect. Anna has some growing to do, and I am happy to see that she toughened up and stood up for herself a few times. It's a good sign.
As in Cry Wolf, Anna is just sometimes a little too special to stomach. Nevertheless, this is more of an action book than a relationship book, and I enjoyed it more than the first one. It still isn't as good as the Mercy Thompson novels, but the series has some promise.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
I knew that I Shall Wear Midnight wasn't going to be one of the really good Discworld novels, because it's one of the YA ones, and I just don't enjoy them very much. Nevertheless, I will usually happily read even so-so Pratchett over a lot of other authors' best works, so I was delighted when it arrived yesterday.
I Shall Wear Midnight features Tiffany Aching, a teenaged witch who lives on the Chalk, even though conventional wisdom says that there can't be witches there, because witches need good hard rock underneath them. I enjoyed the first in the series, the Wee Free Men, (almost entirely because of the Pictsies, and they are best in small doses) but this series has not really grown on me. I've never really warmed to Tiffany, and don't really care about her problems. What can I say? I like adult books better. Always have. Nevertheless, I figured that I Shall Wear Midnight would be a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours.
I was wrong. I didn't like it at all. I abandoned it this afternoon. That has only happened to me with one other Discworld book: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. That, not coincidentally, is also a YA book. But other than that I have always finished them, even the two that I hated. I Shall Wear Midnight felt a bit to me like one of those two books that I hated, though. It reminded me a bit of Small Gods, a book about religious intolerance which many people like but I can't stand. This one drifts into similar territory, with some sort of chaotic creature going around turning people against witches and causing them to attack old women they suspect of being witches. It's almost certainly one of my hot buttons, something I can't find entertaining, even in fiction.
And so I did not abandon I Shall Wear Midnight out of boredom and uninterest, though I actually was finding it rather dull and slow-going. I abandoned it feeling vaguely pissed off, and it spoiled the mood of what would otherwise have been a very pleasant afternoon, lying in a patch of sunlight out in the grass with my second-favorite cat in the world at my side, soaking in the beauty and sadness of an October afternoon. And that fact that it hampered my enjoyment of what was otherwise a glorious day makes me even more pissed off. So I am quite annoyed with this book right now. And even barring the subject matter, it's just a dull trudge.
I Shall Wear Midnight features Tiffany Aching, a teenaged witch who lives on the Chalk, even though conventional wisdom says that there can't be witches there, because witches need good hard rock underneath them. I enjoyed the first in the series, the Wee Free Men, (almost entirely because of the Pictsies, and they are best in small doses) but this series has not really grown on me. I've never really warmed to Tiffany, and don't really care about her problems. What can I say? I like adult books better. Always have. Nevertheless, I figured that I Shall Wear Midnight would be a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours.
I was wrong. I didn't like it at all. I abandoned it this afternoon. That has only happened to me with one other Discworld book: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. That, not coincidentally, is also a YA book. But other than that I have always finished them, even the two that I hated. I Shall Wear Midnight felt a bit to me like one of those two books that I hated, though. It reminded me a bit of Small Gods, a book about religious intolerance which many people like but I can't stand. This one drifts into similar territory, with some sort of chaotic creature going around turning people against witches and causing them to attack old women they suspect of being witches. It's almost certainly one of my hot buttons, something I can't find entertaining, even in fiction.
And so I did not abandon I Shall Wear Midnight out of boredom and uninterest, though I actually was finding it rather dull and slow-going. I abandoned it feeling vaguely pissed off, and it spoiled the mood of what would otherwise have been a very pleasant afternoon, lying in a patch of sunlight out in the grass with my second-favorite cat in the world at my side, soaking in the beauty and sadness of an October afternoon. And that fact that it hampered my enjoyment of what was otherwise a glorious day makes me even more pissed off. So I am quite annoyed with this book right now. And even barring the subject matter, it's just a dull trudge.
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