Memoir of a woman who has made her living playing in bars and restaurants.
The description sounded more interesting than the book turned out to be. I completely skipped the “when I was 9 years old” chapter. I read it for a couple of hours, put it down, and found myself with no particular interest in picking it up again.
Cal Schuyler is a Coast Guard ship captain and son of a U.S. Senator. Also featured are a lady astronaut and an intelligence agent, along with a Pakistani who hates the U.S. because Muslim extremists raped his sister to punish him.
I only got about a quarter-way through this before giving up. First, I eventually figured out this was a political thriller, which I generally find too scary for enjoyment. Second, the different characters’ stories were disjointed and difficult to follow. Finally, I just didn’t care about any of them.
Hannah’s customers defect en masse when Shawna Lee Quinn and her sister open a bakery across the street, complete with short, low-cut uniforms and mediocre baked goods. Hannah finds Shawna Lee dead in her bakery. Since nearly every woman in town hated the flirty Shawna Lee, and even Mike may have been secretly dating her, Hannah’s suspect list includes most of the town.
Even more red herrings than usual, and Fluke caught me with a couple of them. Well-plotted, and the reader learns clues as Hannah and Andrea do. Fluke is starting to place the murder later in the book, however, after detailed and irrelevant events.
Collection of short stories with a theme of mystery in a fantasy or science fiction setting.
One of the benefits of an anthology is to introduce the reader to writers she doesn’t know. The first story, “Cold Spell” by Donna Andrews, was wonderful, with a hefty dose of humor and a description that should be used in all fiction classes: “He was in serious danger of setting his slippers on fire again.” Wow! Just adding the “again” told the reader so much about the character. I liked it so much I headed for Fantastic Fiction to see what else she had written. My second favorite was “The Death of Clickclickwhistle” by Mike Doogan, another writer I had never heard of. Many of the rest of the stories were gloomy but well-written and involving, and I was able to follow the storylines even when I was not familiar with the series on which they were based. More important, they were solid stories with believable characters. There wasn’t a single story I gave up on before finishing.
Lynley and Havers tackle the murder of a cricket star. Prime suspect is the girlfriend, who has disappeared, but they also have a soon-to-be ex-wife, juvenile delinquent son, girlfriend’s husband, helpful mother-figure, and her disowned daughter to investigate. But an eventual confession doesn’t convince Lynley as he continues to unravel the tangled threads in search of the murderer.
George has fallen victim to the dual-storyline bug that has seduced so many writers over the past 10-15 years. She interrupts her usual third-person Lynley-and-Havers plot with first-person narrative flashbacks by whiny and self-pitying Olivia, the daughter of one of the suspects. Olivia is emphatically NOT an improvement to George’s usual tightly-written fast-moving stories, and I would have given up if I hadn’t so enjoyed George’s previous books in this series. I didn’t even dare skip the Olivia sections, knowing George would incorporate both legitimate clues and red herrings. I did guess one critical element but missed the killer, not difficult in George’s complicated plots.
When the bones of what appear to be Nadia’s abusive ex-boyfriend are found in a large urn shortly after she and Daniel marry, cop Will Richeaux manages to have Daniel arrested. Charlotte desperately tries to clear her nephew’s name while caring for Nadia’s son.
Not as strong as some of the other books in this series, and there were an awful lot of convenient events in the resolution – not quite deus ex machina but not strongly logical sequences either. And the title doesn't relate to the story.
New brainship Nancia comes from a noble Family and is eager to prove herself in the Courier Service. On her initial assignment, she overhears five obnoxious nobles bet who can make the most money by dishonest means.
I thought this was going to be another Helva book and was disappointed. Nancia and her brawns are okay, but the young nobles are thoroughly despicable characters that I wasn’t interested in reading about. I made it halfway through before giving up and skipping to the end.
Powder: writing by women in the ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq
Any collection of writing featuring so many diverse authors is going to feel somewhat disjointed, as this book certainly does. And it suffers from mixing too many experiences; different books from different wars would have been a better idea. But it certainly conveys the emotions experienced by women serving in combat areas.
When his love Cleone scorns his country ways, Philip learns to be a polished and jaded society fop.
Simplistic story with one-note characters, interesting only as the first of Heyer’s Regency romances.
Black Jack Pollock takes a starving London orphan to his Yorkshire home, where she grows up with his three children. Lally and her stepsiblings encounter World War I, the Twenties, the Depression, romance, travel, excitement, and heartbreak.
The very scope of this epic tale is what defeats it. The whole world lays down for Margaret over and over, same for Alice’s innocence and Lally’s self-sacrifice. The reader wants to stop the self-inflicted pain and tell Lally to get a life.
An old woman tells a group of kids how devils decided to make North Americans miserable by taking away their music,with lots of flashbacks to individual turning points.
I could not get into this book at all. First, I’m not a big fan of flashbacks, and they made up most of the story. Second, the old woman/flashback/old woman/flashback method was disjointed at best, and when one flashback darted between two contemporary story, it made even less sense. Just not worth it.
Col. Yana Maddock is medically retired on arctic Petaybee when the military boss there blackmails her into an undercover assignment to discover what subversion the locals are planning.
I couldn’t even get into this. It was so obvious that the planet was going to turn out to be sentient, and the characters were split between savvy off-planet people and naive locals – did I mention I also hate oversimple stereotypes?
Lynley, Havers, and St. James are all sent to Scotland when a young playwright is murdered and a peer is one of the suspects. Havers bristles at Lynley’s special treatment of the blue bloods and Lynley tries to prove Lady Helen’s new lover is the murderer.
I had a big issue with believability on this book. It simply defies possibility that Lynley would uncritically accept the story of the person who destroyed vital evidence, much less voluntarily stay on the case once his friend’s paramour became his prime suspect. If he charged a suspect, any defense attorney would shatter his testimony in court. Other than that, it was a nicely convoluted story with lots of red herrings and even (shock!) mistakes on the parts of the main characters.
Elizabeth Darcy’s plan for a quiet family Christmas explodes with Lady Catherine’s self-invitation and Mrs. Bennett’s inviting her remaining daughters to come also.
This is the first “Pride and Prejudice” sequel that I’ve found that actually seems true to the original characters. Its defect lies in piling disaster upon disaster on poor Elizabeth; Austen had the sense to resolve one problem before adding the next. Plus, frankly, I did not find it believable that Darcy would think he was conferring a boon on Elizabeth by receiving Wickham at Pemberley. Elizabeth would weigh the distress the visit would cause Georgiana vs. the delight with which her greedy sister Lydia would claim rights at Pemberley and find an excuse to keep Wickham away. After all the problems, the hasty resolution on the last page of the book was completely unsatisfactory.
Thomas investigates the murder of a young girl who is one of Emily’s neighbors. Charlotte eavesdrops on the vicious ladies of the neighborhood as Emily fears George might be involved.
As usual, a workmanlike and enjoyable mystery. The barbs flying between the ladies of Emily’s street show the real feelings that could underlie social conventions, although I got tired of the upper crust not bothering to hide their contempt for “mere policeman” Thomas. Hopefully, readers will be troubled by the assumption that the murdered girl did something to cause the killer to attack her, but that attitude was quite authentic for the period (and as late as the 1970’s). Nicely convoluted plot with enough red herrings to fill a grocery store, but somewhat slow-moving.
Sheridan ranchers hire attorney Mary “Mac” Macintosh to sue a methane driller who is poisoning the land and water, in violation of contract.
I wanted to like this book. It’s set in Wyoming and written by a native Wyomingan. But if there was a story, I couldn’t find it. It opened with Mac in the courtroom at the start of the trial, then a flashback to the previous year as the ranchers told her in detail how the methane drillers ruined their land, water, and air. There is no question that unscrupulous drilling can lead to negative consequences, and many authors like to use their books for a little preaching, but if the preaching outweighs the story, you lose the reader. And this book lost me.
Pregnant Kitty gets a phone call and hops on a plane, then the book becomes a long, not very interesting flashback to Kitty growing up with a self-centered painter mother who left Kitty in boarding school so she could move to New York to be near her guru.
It turned out that the title was the best part of the book. If there was a story here, I never found it. Flashbacks tend to be a weak story form, so an author who leans on this device has to offer a really interesting story to hold my attention. Dahl didn’t. I don’t enjoy reading about neglectful, selfish mothers either, so with no likeable characters (other than a ten-year-old girl trying to establish a relationship with the mother) and no enjoyable story, I didn’t finish this book.
Employees at an unnamed company anxiously await further layoffs.
Semi-stream-of-consciousness format, wandering between events and people’s thoughts about their chances of retaining their jobs. None of the characters were particularly likeable and the lack of focus was distracting. I couldn’t finish it.
In this “cozy” mystery, Peggy Lee (not the famous one) buries her grief at her policeman husband’s death in working at her garden shop. But when she finds a dead man, she can’t stay out of the investigation. I figured out the murderer about 20 pages from the end of the book, although the right person had been on my list of possibles (along with most of the other characters) for much longer.
Is plain old storytelling out of fashion? This book started like an upcoming train wreck -- horrifying to watch but you can't look away -- but became some odd, hard-to-follow mishmash covering at least two time periods (can't be sure, there might have been 3 or 4). It apparently was intended to be a ghost story, but the "story" part is so well-hidden I couldn't find it. If the author doesn't bother to make her points clear, what is the point of writing?
Classic new-girl-at-posh-school-desperate-to-be-accepted story, without the ending in which the girl decides to be herself. Reed will do absolutely anything the queen bees want in order to be in their society and winds up as their maid -- and accepts it. Pitiful example of the angst of high school. This is first in a series but I won't be wasting my time with any more of them.
A number of authors have written would-be sequels to Jane Austen's classic "Pride and Prejudice." This one, however, just isn't believable. Shy Georgiana mouths off to Lady Catherine, timid Anne de Bourgh hates her cousin Georgiana, and sweet Jane Bingley is thinking ill of her family? Not hardly. If an author is going to use another author's characters, she had better keep the character's attitudes and actions or provide the reader with a good reason they have changed. The plots themselves aren't too bad, as Mr. Darcy's neighbors and relatives continue to snub Elizabeth, and a handsome naval officer captures several ladies' hearts (including Georgiana's), but the idea of a respectable woman being arrested for theft shows a complete lack of understanding of that culture.
Moving story of a young widow who receives a list of things to do planned by her late husband. As she opens an envelope each month, she savors his care for her as well as gradually steps into her new life.
Some people who live boring lives write fascinating books; some people who live amazing lives write boring books. Sadly, this is an example of the latter. The author practiced as a nurse during the early and middle part of the 20th century, rode for the Frontier Nursing Service, escaped from a Pacific island barely ahead of the Japanese during WWII, and saw the astounding advances in health care firsthand. But the book is just another autobiography. It doesn't have enough nursing information to interest me as a nurse, and how much it cost her to attend a nursing course doesn't interest me, period. Extremely poor copyediting doesn't help.
Very depressing story of the various families that occupied a neighbor house to Knight's Acre. I'll give you a clue: none of them had happy lives.
A professional gardener disturbs a lot of old money when she finds a mummified baby buried in a garden. Cute and clever, other than yet another body-obsessed heroine. I figured out whodunnit as soon as the heroine met him but the red herrings left me wondering for a while if I was wrong. Enjoyable light reading.
Some children's books are simply wasted on children, and this is definitely one example. The plaintive ballad "Nobody Understands Me," the boogie title song, the ode to an out-of-reach cookie jar are all clever lyrics set to tunes that stick in your mind. And the performances are memorable: Patti LuPone sings the unashamed "I Like to Fuss" and Kevin Kline sings the Gilbert & Sullivan parody "Busybusybusy." Yes, some of the songs are really only of interest to preschoolers or early elementary ages, but there is plenty here to hold an adult's attention.