A revolutionary group takes a Lake Erie cruise boat hostage. An imprisoned don offers his connections in exchange for a parole hearing, then assigns contract killer Peter Macklin to help.
First, the “hero” is a contract killer. Second, it’s a thriller and I generally dislike thrillers. I gave up less than a quarter of the way through the book.
A young girl lives in a Mennonite colony in Tsarist Russia.
If there is more to the story, I couldn’t find it. There is a brief report of a number of people being killed by bandits, then a switch to a farm scene described in detail that would have satisfied Dickens. Since at least one of the people mentioned as killed is here alive, presumably this is a flashback, but with no story to follow and no characters interesting enough to keep me reading, I didn’t.
With a group of 11th century crusaders besieging Antioch, Lord Bohemon assigns Demetrios to investigate the murder of a Frankish knight. Handicapped by internecine rivalry and hatred, Demetrios attempts to solve the murder, but Lord Bohemon’s interest wanes and Demetrios is sickened by the Franks’ behavior. As the siege progresses and the besiegers become the besieged, Demetrios finds heresy and support in unlikely places.
It’s easy for a lover of history to let the setting overwhelm the story, and sadly Harper let the crusade take over the book. Power struggles, treachery, church seeking temporal power – while I do not know which particular events actually happened during this particular crusade, I doubt Harper came up with any theme that didn’t occur during one crusade or another. Meanwhile, the question of the murdered knight was ignored while Demetrios worried about being a good Christian. I started skipping clumps of pages about 2/3 of the way through. The solution to the murder was anticlimactic and the reader wasn’t given adequate clues, although I suppose some missing information could have been buried in the pages I skipped. The first book was good enough that I intend to try the third, but this one was quite a disappointment.
in Bedlam’s Bard (omnibus)
An irresponsible street musician plays a perfect tune at a Renaissance Faire and inadvertently summons an elf who wants to keep developers from razing the Faire site.
Slow-starting, tedious, and left me with a “jeepers, another big bad developers story” feeling. The most interesting part was the title. I couldn’t get past the first 50 pages.
In this sequel to “The Friday Night Knitting Club,” five years have passed since Georgia’s death. Dakota is reluctantly attending NYU, Darwin is finally pregnant, KC is an attorney, Lucie is in demand as a director but feels like a failure as a mother, lonely Catherine’s store is a success, and Peri is running Walker and Daughter.
Writing a sequel is always a bit tricky because of the need to cover the history for new readers without losing the old readers to boredom. Jacobs takes what I consider the worst approach: the first pages of the book bring the reader up to date, delaying the start of the story and meaning nothing to new readers. Once that is over, the story takes off nicely. With a couple of exceptions, Jacobs avoids the predictable and surprises the reader with events in the women’s lives. I wanted to smack some of the annoying characters, but at least they weren’t boring!
Kelly comes back to Ft. Collins CO after her aunt is killed and finds holes in the official police theory that a vagrant committed the murder.
None of the characters seemed real and the story wasn’t interesting enough to hold my attention -- the titles in this series were cleverer than the actual stories.
The trials of Sir Godfrey as he leaves home to participate in a great tournament and his loyal wife Sybella as she keeps the home fires burning. The historical details of medieval life make this a very unromantic story.
I'd given up on Kingsbury because I was tired of the sappiness and poor writing, but I thought Even Now was an interesting enough story that I was curious about this sequel. It was more of the same -- endless telling us what each character is thinking -- but mildly interesting, would have made a great novella. Try reading 2 pages and then skipping 5-10, you'll get all the story but miss the pointless dragging out of each scene.
Written for young adults, but don't let that put you off. An involving story featuring a twelve-year-old girl whose husband dies, it sets the experiences of one young widow against Indian culture and mores at the beginning of Gandhi's world-changing career. It would be a great way of introducing a non-Western culture in a light but educational way.
Involving mystery about a forcibly retired young dancer who takes over her aunt's Scottish-themed store just as a neighbor is murdered in it, not too hard to guess whodunnit but likeable characters and I recognized most of the tartans.
I borrowed this first book in the Inspector Rebus series because I thought it was a murder mystery, which I enjoy. It isn't; it's a crime thriller, as a conflicted police detective "with a history" (don't they all?) tries to stop a serial killer preying on preteen girls. This particular one seemed to be trying for a noir feel without noir's campy element. I got about 1/3 of the way through and then skipped to the end.
While the premise was intriguing of a murder committed with a knitting theme, Kruger does not follow the rules of a good mystery: while red herrings are legitimate and in fact desirable, all of the facts necessary to solve the mystery must be presented, no matter how casually or obliquely, before the ending. Kruger's ending is unsatisfactory for this reason, which makes the rest of the book less than satisfying as well.