When a building is blown up and a million-dollar ransom is demanded or more people will be killed, a police captain and architect try to track down the demolitionist.
It kept me reading, and the people were realistic enough, but it was more of a gritty police procedural than any book style that I like.
Young Vetch goes from being an unvalued serf to a cherished dragon boy when Jouster Ari takes him away from his selfish, cruel master. When a pregnant female dragon is neglected by her dragon boy, Vetch seizes his chance to hand-raise a dragon egg and become a Jouster himself.
Interesting idea but could have been a much shorter book if Lackey hadn’t taken so much of it to describe Vetch’s miserable life with Khefti-the-Fat and his subsequent life at the dragon compound. Then the tedious description of practically each day he waited for the egg to hatch dragged on nearly as long as the time being described. Obviously, this is the story, but it wasn’t interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention. I skimmed through the last quarter of the book, barely interested enough to want to know the rest of the story but definitely not enough to read all through it.
Julia escapes from her abusive fiancee and runs to her Aunt Lydia, who likes to use good Anglo-Saxon words and free psychic readings. Yes, it was just as boring as it sounds.
Young and beautiful Charlotte Heywood makes an extended visit to the new seaside resort of Sanditon and becomes involved with the characters there: proud but mean Lady Denham, romantic and impoverished Sir Edward Denham, poor relation Clara Brereton, and her hosts the Parkers. I’m always leery of modern authors “completing” fragments started by other authors, and was particularly concerned because Barrett did not make it clear where Austen’s part ended and hers began. But clearly Austen’s fragment ended before the Assembly; subsequently there was more exposition than Austen allowed herself and characters contradicting their earlier behavior, such as formerly cool Miss Brereton suddenly professing love for Sir Edward. I tried to wade through the rest but it was too clearly not Austen and not worthy of her notice.
Icelandic police procedural about Erlendur, a divorced detective estranged from his grown drug-addict daughter, investigating the murder of an elderly rapist.
Gloom pervades the story, and Indriason surprises the reader with who turns out to be sympathetic and who turns out to be evil. The convoluted plot reminded me of Charles Todd’s Inspector Rutledge series, and I stayed interested in spite of his detachedness. The weakest part of the book was Erlendur’s interactions with his daughter, which just slowed down an already leisurely-paced story.
Mick Sever is a famous rock journalist invited to interview an up-and-coming Jamaican band. At a party following their U.S. debut, Sever finds a groupie murdered, but he has doubts that the security guard found standing over her is the person who killed her. Usual elements: his ex-wife whom he still loves shows up, someone is trying to kill him, and the investigating officer doesn’t want him upsetting the nice neat answer the police have settled on.
I was surprised to find myself reading this. I don’t generally find druggies and rock groupies (most of the characters, IOW) likeable, and Sever isn’t really someone I’d enjoy having over for dinner. But he seems to have a brain (surprising, after frying it on drugs for so many years) and a conscience (even more surprising) and I kept reading because I wanted to know what happened next. There was a bit of deus ex machina in Sever not discovering a critical piece of information until almost the end of the book, and I did pinpoint the murderer – sort of.
Stories of a group of nursing home residents who are still fairly functional and don’t want to be there, so they decide to regress to what their lives were in the 1960’s.
Fabulous premise with some unusual characters, but it never developed a plot and consequently didn't hold my attention.
Jane Austen’s friend Countess Scargrave is shunned after her older husband dies and his heir shows his interest in the lady.
Frankly, I expected to dislike this series. I like Jane Austen’s books so much that I resent a modern author using a real person as a character, since she is dead and cannot object. I can’t tell whether the rest of the characters are also real; there are frequent footnotes placing Jane at Scargrave and being involved with people there, and it is not clear whether the footnotes are made-up or truly research-based. The prose is awkward; Austen’s own writing is formal but natural, since that was how she actually spoke. This is a modern woman trying to sound like she lived in Austen’s era and utterly failing. I only got about a quarter of the way into the book before giving up, it was just too painful to continue.
When Davey’s school bus driver is murdered, the police are stumped as to who would kill such a well-liked man. Aunt Peg decides to solve the crime and drags Melanie into it.
One of Berenson’s sneakiest: all the clues are there to identify the murderer but hard to recognize, and of course lots of red herrings as well. Nice light read.