A co-worker from Sam's policeman past turns up claiming to be tracking down a massive international conspiracy. His alleged suicide sets Sam on the dangerous trail of the same companies and men, and he may meet the same fate.
Not quite as sharp as the other Sam Holts I've read, and the ending had a feel of "I've written enough pages, let's wrap this thing up" that wasn't really satisfying. But it was still a mostly enjoyable story.
Tito Amato has just finished his training and returned to Venice to sing in the opera. He also desperately wants to know why his father permitted him to be castrated as a boy to preserve his magnificent soprano voice. He encounters kindness and cruelty, but when a murder is committed and his friend is accused, he is determined to find the real murderer.
Slow start, but Myers’ tale of Tito leaving school and returning to his hometown kept me reading anyway. Vivid portrayal of the complicated business and political rivalries that ran rampant in 17th century Venice. I finished it, but I didn’t particularly like it. The few sympathetic characters seemed one-dimensional, and most of the characters were slyly self-obsessed, probably authentic to the period but not likeable.
Bookseller comes to Notre Dame, ostensibly to donate some Chesterton papers but actually to hopefully find and steal an unknown Chesterton story, and a young woman is killed.
I hate books that start off with an exciting scene and then go into a long flashback to explain what happened, and McInerny falls back on this in the first chapters of this book. In fact, when I had waded through 10 chapters of flashback and still found no story, I quit the book. I wasn’t even curious enough to skip to the end.
When the daughter of a Conservative MP and an anti-Conservative newspaper editor is kidnapped, the father reluctantly asks Simon’s and Helen’s help to find the girl rather than pay a ransom that would end his marriage and the mother’s career: public acknowledgment of the girl. But the mother is convinced the father is actually holding the girl and focuses on calling his bluff rather than saving her daughter. When the girl’s body is found, Lynley has to not only investigate but cope with the realization that Helen knew about the missing girl before she was killed. Meanwhile, Havers is thrilled to be put in charge of the Wiltshire part of the investigation, even though it means supervising a misogynist local DS and tolerating a lovestruck DC, and the killer decides to up the ante.
Long but convoluted and involving story, and no deus ex machina ending. I wish George didn’t endanger children so often; as a mother, that deeply bothers me. But her stories are so tautly written that I keep reading anyway.
Short story collection thematically related to growing up.
Almost stream-of-consciousness narrative and utterly boring. I’m not sure I managed to finish any of the stories before I gave up on the book.
Narrative of the author’s trips through Australia with historical information.
I just give up on this author. His style combines travel info with historical info, and while it’s interesting enough to start it quickly palls. He also tends to find something to harp on, that gets old even faster than his style. In this case, it was the large quantity of lethal native life in Australia, including several kinds of snakes and spiders as well as sea creatures like the jellyfish. I’m very interested in Australia and fantasize about visiting there someday, but even that wasn’t enough to keep me reading this book.
Small, short book about a woman who uses crystals to arrange her family’s and village’s lives as the men head off to fight an invader.
Only 85 pages long and rather predictable.
Short story collection. “Exposure” is a major revision of a previously published Thomas Lynley story. The others are mostly well-written suspense stories rather than murder mysteries. The title story is possibly the weakest, as George includes a tediously detailed account of why she thinks Richard I couldn’t have murdered the little princes in the 15th century, and the ending is fairly predictable.
PC Peter Lassington desperately wants to be promoted to CID. His friendly rivalry with CID Detective Jack Spratt leads him to follow a mysterious letter delivered to a beauty contest promoter who is soon murdered. Scotland Yard sends Charles Ironside, about to retire, to investigate this one last crime, and both Lassington and Spratt are assigned to assist him. Under Ironside’s alternately sharp and casual direction, Lassington and Spratt wander down investigative dead ends and watch their initial beliefs shattered.
This book kept me reading, and I’m not sure why. None of the characters are particularly appealing, and I’m not generally a fan of police procedurals (although there are exceptions). Ironside's pretense of only being interested in the rabbits he would shortly breed quickly became irritating. The author did some very subtle misdirecting and I fell for it completely.
Xylina is not a typical Mazorite. She treats slaves (men) as people and is loved by a demon. She is also an extremely powerful conjuror and has acquired the Queen’s enmity. When she is unable to pay a mortgage she was tricked into, the Queen sends Xylina, her demon, and her reluctantly-faithful slave Faro on a quest for a crystal shard that may remake their world.
Confusing and unfocused if inventive storyline. The first part features Xylina’s winning her woman-trial and trying to build a new life for herself and her slave. The quest doesn’t come up until the middle of the book. The matriarchal society is believable enough, but the loving demon is a distracting contradiction in terms. I pretty much lost interest when a quest started halfway through the book – the final confrontation with the Queen was too predictable.
Advice from a veteran police officer on how to avoid receiving a traffic ticket. Mostly common sense (don’t mouth off, be polite and cooperative, don’t argue) but as he points out, common sense isn’t very common. He also agreed with me that calling a vehicle mishap an “accident” is incorrect, there is nothing accidental about them.
Moderately amusing and well-enough-written, if a bit too close to speaking format rather than writing. However, it’s one of those books that I wonder if there is a market for. People like me already know it; people that are going to do stupid things like tell a police officer they didn’t commit the infraction he just saw them make, aren’t likely to have the brains to realize they need a book like this.
Short-story collection featuring Indians and people of Indian ancestry, mostly in the U.S. The title story involved a man who worked as an interpreter for a doctor, hired as a guide by an American family come to visit their Indian relatives. Other stories featured an American woman having an affair with a married Indian man, an old door-keeper, and an expatriate grieving for her lost Indian home.
These stories mesmerized me, and I’m not sure why. Many of the characters were rather unlikeable, most of the stories did not have happy endings, and adultery was fairly common. Lahiri indulges in frequent flashbacks, which I dislike and have criticized in other books. And I don’t have a special interest in India or her people. But I could hardly put the book down for wanting to see what happened next. I guess they are just good stories. My favorite was the last story, a narrative of an Indian immigrant waiting for his wife to arrive, and the effect of his ancient landlady on their marriage.
Ahern’s stories are getting stranger and stranger, but that is not necessarily bad. This one features an invisible friend (Ivan) who attaches himself to both Luke, a young boy with a wild and neglectful mother, and his aunt Elizabeth, a super-controlled interior designer. As Ivan becomes more involved, he helps Elizabeth overcome old scars and face the future.
Although a bit slow-starting, Ahern neatly avoids the stereotypical mythical-being by giving Ivan limitations and telling part of the story in his voice. Except for an unrealistic denoument between Elizabeth and her father, the characters and situations were believable and worth getting through the slow start. Ahern even avoided several hackneyed resolutions. I did want to shake some sense into Elizabeth to get her to quit letting her sister ruin her life, though.
Collection of chick-lit short stories, by various authors and of varying quality.
I thought the best was “Moving,” a woman comparing memories of an ex-lover to her current life with husband and babies. Also excellent was “The Twenty-Eighth Day,” chronicling a woman suffering from acute PMS (which is apparently called PMT in Ireland). Promiscuous sex and casual drinking is assumed in most of the stories, which I dislike. About half the stories were worth reading; the remainder were too bitter and cynical for my taste.
This slim 64-page book tarts with a section of inspirational photographs showing possibilities, from elaborate room designs to small items used as a room’s focal point. Then it offers instructions for water-related items from simple aquatic plants in pots to make-your-own tabletop pot fountains, with sections on maintaining water clarity and cleaning the equipment.
The instructions are simple, but I haven’t made any of the items so I don’t know whether they are adequate or not. It seemed to be more of a starter book than a complete reference.
Semi-humorous advice from a father to his newborn son. Mildly amusing but heavyhanded.
amazing careers. One constant question among the homeschoolers I know is how to expose their children to career possibilities. This book is one answer. Although painfully PC (the author makes a point of showing some of the women are lesbians) and aimed at young women, it wouldn't hurt young men to see the variety of careers featured.
Moderately interesting whodunit featuring a bunch of typical New York fashionistas and a dead nanny. It would have interested me more if there had been less food & clothes details -- did it really matter that Bailey ordered a chicken salad sandwich? But it was well-enough written and the only detail the reader didn't have going into the finale was not relevant to solving the murder.
Excellent true story of a girl with anxiety disorder, written in free verse. Really takes the reader inside the protagonist's head.
This is another book I didn't finish. I got about halfway through and realized I didn't care what happened on the next page -- very bad sign for a novel. It took me a while to figure out that the characters were all one-dimensional and didn't feel like real people. Rather than a true story, this "Four Seasons" entry is simply a vehicle to promote Chapman's marriage counseling philosophy. As counseling, it might or might not work; as fiction, no question.