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On to book two of Sign of the Seven!

I definitely liked this one better than Book 1, for a couple of reasons. One, I liked Fox as a male lead character better than I liked Caleb. He's a more thoughtful character, in more ways than one; there's the obvious thing about his being telepathic, but also, in general, he's more analytical than Caleb and that worked better for me as a character trait. Also, I was quite charmed that he could juggle. And, dude, he plays the guitar. Automatic swoon points for a male lead who's a musician, what can I say?

(Though I have to take issue with a couple of the leading ladies asking each other: "Why are guitar players so sexy?" "It's the hands!" Not for me! It's the music.)

Layla as the female lead in this book is not nearly as much of a benevolent bulldozer as Quinn, yet I liked her too. She's more vulnerable, more fragile, and yet she also demonstrated her strength after having to wrestle around with her personal demons in the first bit of the book. She and Fox had some very charming chemistry together as well.

Plot-wise, things do kick up a notch, although we're still building to the main event of the Seven. Our heroes and heroines figure out a few critical background details, even as the Big Bad revs up its own strength and does a pretty decent job going after Fox early in the book and then after all six of the main characters later on. The final scene, where the six of them need to accomplish a specific ritual task to prepare themselves for the forthcoming confrontation, has some suitably powerful description going on.

Though, really--I think Nora's handling of the supernatural elements of this trilogy is more effective when she's not pulling out all the stops. For example, one bit that really stood out for me for how evocative it was is this one: "The demon in a child's form laughed. Then it opened its mouth, wide as a cave, and swallowed itself."

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing how she does indeed gear up for the main event in Book 3--and how Gage and Cybil take their turn at center stage. Gage the rogue, the gambler, the precognitive... I think I'm going to like him too. ;)

For this book, though, three and a half stars.

That I have read two Nora Roberts novels back to back I ascribe entirely to the fact that La Nora semi-regularly posts comments on smartbitches, and each time I see her post up there, the cooler I find her. Therefore, I felt obligated to pick up a couple more of her books.

The second of this last round of buying Nora was the first of her current paranormal trilogy, Blood Brothers, Book 1 of The Sign of the Seven. This was paranormal more in the vein of psychic/Gothic rather than fantasy, I note. In the hands of another writer, it might almost have been a horror novel plot. We have a small East Coast town where three young boys accidentally release a demon that proceeds to terrorize the town and drive everybody batshit every seven years--while the boys, who have been granted certain extraordinary abilities, have to figure out how to do damage control every time the demon strikes. Now, twenty-one years later, they're joined by three women who share their unique gifts, and all six are teaming up to face down the demon, hopefully for the final round.

(I'm pretty sure that Ms. Roberts wasn't thinking of the old Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons" when she wrote this thing--though I have to admit a little voice in my brain kept asking, "Are you one with the Body?" every time I read about the town's previous incidents of going batshit and otherwise perfectly normal people raping, murdering, committing wild acts of vandalism, killing themselves, etc., and the survivors not remembering much about what happened after. Aheh. But I digress.)

It's probably fairly pat and predictable that each of the men has a counterpart, ability-wise, among the women. Caleb and Quinn both can see the past. Fox and Layla are both psychic. And Gage and Cybil can see the future. Naturally, these pairings are also clearly getting set up romantically as well; in Caleb and Quinn's case, pretty much right out of the gate. However, despite the predictable pairings, the six lead characters are likable. Quinn in particular is very sympathetic to me as a reader--Nora gets points for a woman who cheerfully loves food, is aware that she needs to change her eating habits to stay healthy, and is productive about it rather than angstful. I also very much liked Quinn's very straightforward handling of not only her feelings for Caleb, but also the paranormal events at large. She pretty much poleaxes poor Caleb, and charmingly so.

Since we are dealing with a cast of six main characters, Book 1 is not surprisingly mostly devoted to bringing everybody on stage. There are initial low-level rumblings out of the demon, just enough to let the cast know that this time around it's more powerful than it used to be--and to let them all get used to the idea of facing it together. Other than that, though, not much happens; therefore, Book 1 leaves me very much with a prologue-y sort of "okay, now let's get to the main action" feeling. But it's a good enough feeling that I'll be seeking out Book 2. Three and a half stars.

I've seen this scenario before out of La Nora: tough cop chick meets rich guy, sparks fly, suspenseful things ensue. Only this time it wasn't a J.D. Robb novel; it was (I believe the) latest Nora Roberts paperback, High Noon.

The overall feel of this thing being akin to the J.D. Robbs, minus the futuristic elements, is not a bad thing in the slightest. Ms. Roberts has demonstrated that police procedurals are a strong area for her writing, and that's what this book is, albeit with the angle of hostage negotiation rather than homicide. Leading lady Phoebe and leading man Duncan have their share of angst in their respective pasts, and they aren't without their conflict. Overall I found their chemistry strong and pleasantly free of more than minimal angst, and the conflict that emerged between them was reasonably born out of the plot rather than being driven by stupid misunderstandings. But then, Ms. Roberts has demonstrated she's good at that, too.

And I must give her points for the mystery part of the plot surprising me, too. I called the initial red herring, of course, but for the longest time I was expecting the actual perpetrator to be a particular person previously mentioned in the story. Didn't go that way, which pleased me.

My one beef with the plot is that ultimately, Leading Man Duncan has little to do in this story other than wander around being Awesome Rich Guy, playing moral support while Phoebe does her thing. What actions he takes impact Phoebe's personal life, sure, but there's nothing he contributes to the main story, which lessens an otherwise perfectly acceptable character. Still, an otherwise good solid read. Three and a half stars.

Given that I started reading this book on the day I had surgery, and that I've finished it off in bits and pieces during my subsequent recovery, it could be argued that I haven't really given Shannon Butcher's No Control a fair shake. I mean, how coherent a picture can you get of a book when you read it in a Vicodin haze, hey?

That said, I have to admit that this book didn't work for me as well as her debut novel, No Regrets. It's not because the quality of her writing has changed--it hasn't--but rather, it's more because I couldn't buy the reasoning our heroine makes for an initial decision of hers that lays down how the rest of the plot goes. Since I couldn't buy that initial decision, I had trouble buying the rest of the plot.

Even given that, there are aspects of the book I did like. The heroine strikes a good balance between "emotionally devastated" and "able to deal when she needs to", generally. There wasn't anything particularly unusual about the hero; he was an archetype. But he was a likable archetype, nonetheless. And bonus points for mixing self-defense lessons and percolating hormones; whoof. ;) Two and a half stars.

The lesson I learned from reading The Witches' Hammer is this: just because it says 'Hitchcock' on the cover, no matter how much I may want it to, this does not mean I'm about to read a deliciously complicated mystery worthy of old Alfred. And this is my own damn fault, because a big part of why I bought this book is because the name 'Hitchcock' grabbed me. Sure, not Alfred. But once the name got my attention, I read the blurb and saw a review snippet that called the thing 'elegant', so I thought, okay, I'll give this a shot.

On the surface, the core of the plot is sound. We've got a youngish heroine whose book collector father is murdered when he acquires a notorious grimoire, and the blurb promises intrigue as she and her ex-husband and an occultist book collector track down what the deal is with this grimoire. We've got the obligatory Secret Society that's an offshoot of fundamentalist Catholicism. We've got the heroine wandering all over the world as she tries to put all the pieces together.

But here's where the book falls down: the vast majority of it is just people talking to one another. There's hardly any interesting action, and most of this is at the end, far too late to keep me from wishing that the characters would stop yapping to one another and get into a good ol' fashioned shootout or car chase or brawl in a dark alley.

Right in the wake of this is the other issue I have with this novel, which is to say, a lot of the aforementioned character dialogue is caught up with gender politics--as personified by the heroine and her ex-husband sniping at one another about how "you guys want this" and "you gals feel that". This got pretty tiresome to read after a while, and wasn't helped much by the description of how the grimoire equated women with evil, ravening succubi. Don't get me wrong, this is potentially powerful stuff to write about; for me as a reader, though, this particular story didn't handle it well. It came across more heavy-handed to me than anything else.

Now, all this said, I should also give this book credit for doing a few unusual things. It is unabashed in giving us a heroine who plain flat out does not care for sex, and the experiences she has towards the beginning of the plot don't particularly resolve this question for her. Neither do either of the main male characters, which surprised me, and which I rather respect--"I don't know if I like sex, but I certainly didn't like it with you" is a refreshing attitude to see in a novel. I was also rather startled by the final fates of the main characters, on which I won't elaborate here, since that involves spoilers.

All in all this was ultimately unsatisfying to me, though there's enough here that it could work for a different reader. For me, two and a half stars.

There are times when I read a book so well-put together, so deliciously complex, and so generally OH-MY-inducing that I despair of ever trying to write anything as good, much less sell it. The Queen's Bastard, latest offering from the redoubtable mizkit, is one of those times.

For starters, the setting is quite unusual for a fantasy novel. This thing is basically alternate history fantasy--all the names have been changed, but any reader will definitely recognize Europe of the 16th century here, complete with a queen on one of the pertinent thrones that we all should find very, very familiar. ;) And there's magic--or rather, I should say, very interesting telepathic and telekinetic abilities possessed by the most major characters, the source of which is hinted at to be something rather more appropriate to a science fiction novel.

And the sex... oh my yes, there's sex. But I am quite satisfied (aheh) to note that this novel has, hands down, the most effective use of sex I have read in quite some time. Our heroine cuts a swath through any number of men through this novel, from a lowly coachman clear up to a prince who turns out to share her secret abilities--and yet, every single sexual encounter is a means to an end, propelling Belinda through a web of increasingly complicated intrigue, and some of them come back to haunt her and hard. One scene in particular--you'll know it when you get to it--was quite intense, almost alarming, enough that I found myself genuinely challenged about whether I actually liked the heroine. (I'm still pondering that! Belinda is extremely effective as a character, but all throughout the book I was rather torn between cheering her on and muttering "Bitch!" at the page.)

It amused me, too--and this may well amuse Kit when she reads this--that I got a big Elfquest vibe off of this story. And in particular, a vibe of Belinda as a very young Winnowill. Particularly in that aforementioned intense and alarming scene.

I finished this thing up this afternoon, and am in awe. Awe, I tell you. Four stars!

Elizabeth Lowell's thriller Innocent as Sin continues her recent series of books featuring St. Kilda Consulting--her latest plot device for having studly, competent heroes run around with whip-smart, brave heroines, while things and people get shot at and other things explode and pasts get angsted over and crosses and double-crosses happen and oh yeah there's passionate smooching and sex, too.

In short, pretty much the perfect thing to read when you're sick. ;)

This installment has the studly competent hero embodied by Rand McCree, whose obligatory angsted-over-past is the death of his twin brother Reed five years before. The heroine is Kayla Shaw, a private banker set up to take the fall for laundered funds by her gun-running employer--who, of course, is the same person who caused the death of Rand's brother. Kayla throws her lot in with Rand, and they both throw in with St. Kilda to take the bad guy down.

Nothing terribly new or unusual here, not even for Elizabeth Lowell, but a well-executed and diverting read nonetheless. Three stars.

I gotta admit, I love me a good ol' skiffy novel with a hefty dose of romance on the side. And Ann Aguirre's first, Grimspace, fills that bill nicely. Linnea Sinclair blurbs it--and if you like Linnea Sinclair's books at all, this is a ringing good thing, because Grimspace is of the same ilk.

Sirantha Jax is a jumper, one of the few humans capable of taking a ship through "grimspace", working in mental concert with that ship's pilot. But she's accused of causing the crash of the last ship she worked on and the deaths of everyone else on board, and her very own Corps is seemingly bent on breaking down her mind. Before they can, she's sprung from incarceration by a small group of mercenaries who want to establish a new breed of jumper not bound to the Corps. She must decide if she trusts her new benefactors, even as she struggles to figure out exactly what happened with the destruction of her ship.

Grimspace is written in first person, present tense, which for me always lends a certain extra immediacy to what I'm reading. It's a style choice that works extremely well for Jax, who's quite brash and forthright, a prime graduate of the Han Solo School of Action Before Thought. ;) Her love interest March is suitably swoonable, complete with a psionic gift that gives Jax repeated strong immersions into his psyche, and this too works very well in first person, present tense. The only place the book falls down for me is towards the ending, where there's an unexpected interlude that knocks the pacing off--but fortunately, that interlude is short. Definitely looking forward to reading the next one in the series. For this one, three and a half stars.

The other day, editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted up on makinglight that he had several dozen ARCs of Cory Doctorow's forthcoming novel Little Brother to hand out to any readers of the blog willing to immediately read it and talk about it. He announced a specific email address you could contact to ask for one of the books, and all you had to do was provide an address to which they could send it.

I was one of those fortunate enough to get in an email before they ran out of copies, and mine arrived in the mail yesterday. Pretty nifty; I've never gotten an ARC before. And this was a hell of a novel to get in such a form. I feel privileged to have gotten an advance look at it.

Little Brother is simultaneously profoundly depressing and vitalizing. It's depressing because it paints an all-too-real picture of what could happen if another terrorist strike ever happens on American soil, and the terrifying part comes in not just with the thousands who die in San Francisco in the story, but also with the transformation of the city into a police state. And it's vitalizing, because it challenges the reader with the concept that if you feel that what your government is doing is wrong, you don't have to take it lying down. You can take steps to make it right again. You can act.

Marcus, a.k.a. w1n5t0n, a.k.a. M1k3y, is a seventeen-year-old high school student caught in the wrong place at the wrong time during the attack on the city. He and his friends are detained by the Department of Homeland Security and questioned for days; one of them isn't even released. The whole experience moves Marcus to found the XNet, through which he and thousands of other young people across the city begin to fight back against the brutal surveillance tactics imposed upon their city in the name of fighting terrorism.

There's some deeply disturbing scenes of a crowd of young protestors being gassed, and some even more disturbing ones later where Marcus is interrogated and, yes, tortured. Most disturbing of all is the ultimate government reaction to the entire crisis, furious attempts to sweep everything under the rug. But even then, Marcus and those who come to believe in his actions, both of his own generation and older, don't let it lie. The book does end on a note of hope.

Keep that thought of hope in mind as you read this book. Because you should read it, especially if you fall into the same generation as Marcus and his compatriots; the story's talking directly to you. For everyone else, if you happen to agree with its politics, it may depress the hell out of you for the realism of the story it tells. If you don't agree with its politics, you may wind up wanting to throw the book across the room. But it's a story that needs reading, and arguing about, and acting upon--as do each and every one of the points its story raises.

Little Brother's formal release date is this Tuesday, April 29th. I encourage you all to check it out. It'll probably be available for free download on Doctorow's site by then, as is his custom for his works; check it out that way if you wish. If you find though that this book does speak to you, buy a copy.

For what will undoubtedly be the most challenging thing I'll have read this entire year, four stars.

Consequences of Sin calls itself an "Edwardian Mystery" that introduces the character of Ursula Marlow. It's a very period-looking novel; even the author's name seems to fit the look. (Seriously: Langley-Hawthorne? Can you possibly get any more British? ;) )It seems oddly appropriate, too, that the story is as short as it is. I could easily imagine an author of the time (which is to say, 1910-11) producing a book this short.

That said, half of me feels that the story was actually too short. There's a whole lot of story woven into 250-odd pages here, and the experience of it was different for me than reading, oh, say, Charlaine Harris' Lily Bard books. Here, particularly in the latter half of the book, I kept wanting to see some expansion on interesting concepts that were barely touched upon--such as Ursula up and deciding that she was going to scamper off disguised as a young man to try to track down the guy everyone in the cast is presuming is responsible for the murder that starts the book.

On the other hand, there's a certain elegant sparsity to Langley-Hawthorne's prose. And while the romantic sucker in me felt vaguely cheated by the relative dearth of expounding upon the sentiments blooming between our heroine and the obligatorily dashing Lord Wrotham, there is nevertheless a certain refined sweetness to the brief exchanges they do have.

I think that for my ideal reading experience, though, this book could have stood to be slightly--but not much--longer. The latter half in particular felt quite rushed to me, with Ursula rushing from event to event, with barely any space to describe the transitions between glimpses of this situation and that. One character in particular, the skeevy fellow Ursula's father is anxious for her to marry, is given short shrift; he is quite important to the plot, and yet he barely gets any camera time at all. As a result, he comes out reading almost like a caricature.

All that said, though, I did like the writing, and Ursula and her Lord Wrotham are interesting enough that I'll probably check out the next book; I'll be quite interested to know whether Wrotham pulls off being able to marry a girl whose father was the son of a miner, and how he'll continue to deal with her blatant suffragette beliefs. In the meantime, for this book, three stars.

Jenn Reese's Jade Tiger is not a book to be taken seriously, but this isn't a bad thing. It reads very much like a lighthearted martial arts flick, and there are certainly times when that's exactly what I want to read.

It didn't hurt in the slightest, either, that the love interest in the book was a skinny, geeky scientific type with sticky-uppy brown hair, brown eyes, narrow features, and a prominent nose. And there were also several scenes towards the end where he was running around in a tuxedo. (Not that this reminded me of anybody, mind you. Nuh uh. I was purely coincidentally interested in that mental image, I swear.)

Ahem, where was I? Right! So, half-Chinese, half-American chick who's one of the last surviving members of a martial arts order, check. Stolen sacred jade artifacts, check. Aforementioned geeky yet attractive love interest, check. Gallivanting all over the world to exotic locals, check. Ass-kicking every twenty pages or so, check. Yep, definitely the text form of a kung fu flick. ;) It's got the occasional problem--for example, I caught one bit in the initial meeting between heroine Shan and love interest Ian that read weird, as if a line had been left out of the prose, and I couldn't really buy Shan referring to herself even in jest as a "kung-fu badass". But, it was fun for a super-fast, lightweight read nonetheless. Three stars.

Well, this was a lot of fun!

Succubus on Top is Book 2 of the series starring succubus Georgina Kincaid, who continues to amuse the hell (aheh) out of me as possibly the most ethical succubus who ever lived. In this installment, we have Georgina having to investigate mysterious goings-on with friends and fellow employees at the bookstore, helping out her incubus pal Bastien with his latest mission--seducing a right-wing talk show host--and, of course, trying to figure out how exactly to handle her relationship with author Seth Mortensen when she can't risk putting her hands on him.

I think I actually liked this book better than Book 1 in several ways. Seth is more assertive than he is in the first story, which plays off quite fetchingly against his intrinsic decency--and he has refreshingly non-stereotypical reactions to a couple of curveballs Georgina winds up having to throw him through the course of this plot. It's fun as well to see blue_succubus's take on an incubus, and in particular some of the backstory that defines Bastien's and Georgina's history as pertinent to the plot. I figured out where the subplot with seducing the talk show host was going about halfway through the book, but this wasn't a bad thing; it actually let me wind up feeling a bit for the poor woman by the end, which I think was part of the point. And I'm very amused by the (aheh) workaround that Georgina and Seth find to their relationship dilemma by the end of the story--and how the most effective sexual scenes in this series continue to be the ones that leave the best bits to your imagination.

All in all, highly enjoyable, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing if certain suspicions I'm harboring about Seth play out in future volumes. For this one, four stars.

Super-quick double post, this, to cover having knocked off the two recently released J.D. Robb paperbacks.

Three in Death: This is actually an anthology of three Eve & Roarke novellas, and one of them was previously released in the Out of This World anthology that came out ages ago: "Interlude in Death". I'd completely forgotten that story, though, so I didn't mind buying it again. The other two installments therein were "Midnight in Death" and "Haunted in Death", and of the three, I think I actually liked the one I'd read before the best. "Interlude in Death" is a rarity for the Eve & Roarke stories, as it actually takes them off-planet, and plays interesting games with the motives of an old, corrupt cop. "Midnight in Death" plays the card of "criminal Eve put away three years earlier escapes and comes back after her", but we've seen that before, and we see it again in the new full-length paperback, in fact. "Haunted in Death" was fun, though I think I'd have preferred less of the flirting with whether ghosts are real and more with a solid proof either way. ;)

It is kind of fun to see Eve & Roarke tightened up to novella form, though. It pares the setting down its essentials, and if you're a long-time reader, at this point, that's really all you need. Three and a half stars.

Creation in Death: Meanwhile, over in full-length story land, Creation in Death is the latest Eve & Roarke novel out in paperback. This one's a doozy, with a serial killer that Eve and Feeney had failed to nab nine years before resurfacing and going on another rampage through New York. Right out of the gate this plot ramps up the tension, and keeps it going until the end. Familiar territory, pretty much, though the territory continues to be satisfying.

Notable bits about this installment for me were improved amounts of Eve and Roarke really understanding each other, the general wtf-creepiness of the bad guy, and minor recurring characters even getting to contribute significantly to the manhunt--such as Trina, of whom Eve otherwise lives in terror. It is familiar territory, though, and unlike that clone story a few books back, didn't really bring anything new to the overall series. So I'm calling this one three stars.

I have come to the realization that although I would never live in the South again if you paid me, this does not mean that the South has left me. I apparently seriously dig me some Southern Gothic-flavored stories--well, I kind of knew this already, what with having read Charlaine Harris so much, as well as Ivy Cole and the Moon last year. It was however with great pleasure that I tackled cmpriest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds, especially after I discovered that she used to live in Chattanooga.

'Cause y'know what? So did I, for about six months. Seattle is the land that I've Recognized, to swipe a concept from Elfquest--but Kentucky and Tennessee? That's still the land of my birth. And there's so much fucked-up family history all over the South that it's a gold mine of story fodder, especially if you write dark fantasy or horror.

So yeah, I dived quite happily into Four and Twenty Blackbirds and enjoyed it quite a bit. The plot's not complex--pretty much Girl Sees Ghosts, Girl Delves into Her Mysterious Background, Girl Must Deal With Seriously Creepy Shit That Goes Down as a Result. But what drives this story for me is the atmosphere and the characters. As one who hails from that land, I'm here to tell you--this book gets it right. Which makes the aforementioned Creepy Shit that much more effective.

This is also exactly the kind of horror novel I like. There's no gratuitous gore; blood is made that much more unsettling by how sparingly it appears. The tension comes from the uncertainty of Eden's explorations into her past--as well as her own nature--and the murkiness of the motives of those she comes across. Threads of history both recent and far past weave together into what for me was an excellent payoff at the end as the appropriate secrets are revealed.

And just for a kicker, I was so entertained by this book that I only realized today, a couple days after finishing it up, that there wasn't a breath of romantic entanglement anywhere in the plot. This doesn't happen very often at all in my usual reading fare; when it does, it always leaves me vaguely disappointed, romantic sucker that I am. But for this story? This wasn't a flaw. There just was no need for such things here; it was great the way it was. Four stars.

I went from Book 1 of the Jade del Cameron series right into Book 2, since I had it immediately handy--and I had much the same reaction to the second installment as I did to the first. To wit, this series is still riding a fine line for me between being fun and being too cutesy for my tastes.

Let's start with the cutesy. As of this installment, one of the heroine's friends has decided to start writing novels about her adventures--seriously romanced up, of course. And, of course, the dude that shows up in this episode--and who is clearly the Actual Love Interest, as opposed to the guy in Book 1--has fallen in love with Jade because of having read the friend's book. This entire situation does not quite make me go "gak", mostly because the writing is solid enough to save it. But in a lesser writer's hands, this wouldn't have been the case.

Problem number two I've got: Jade gets it into her head, because of events in Book 1, that the guy she was ogling in that story is a scoundrel. From what I saw in the story, though, she's got no evidence to base this on, and nothing to go by except suspicion that's probably fueled by the fact that Harry was hitting on her and she was enjoying it. She spends way, way too much time ranting about what a louse Harry is, though. This too does not quite make me go "gak"--if nothing else because Jade's friends chide her for that very ranting, and to her credit, she shuts up about it.

Now for the good stuff. Plotwise, I liked this story better than Book 1's, actually, since Jade was out on an adventure to photograph animals, not shoot them. The scenes where she comes across the savage work of poachers are effective, and there's just enough of a hint of the supernatural going on this time around as well to land the entire storyline well and firmly in the realm of the fantastic.

Sam, the new love interest, was clearly identifiable to me as such the instant I hit his first scene from his POV; we never got any scenes from Harry's POV in Book 1, I noted. ;) And as he's a lot closer to Jade's age, a fellow WWI vet, a pilot, and American, yeah, he pretty much had LOVE INTEREST flashing over his head in neon letters. He's not a complicated character, but he proves both a good foil for Jade's impulsiveness and decent enough to not press his interest too hard once he fesses up to having fallen for her because of her friend's book. What happens at the end of the story leaves things between them wide open, of course, with plenty of room for the relationship to develop.

And I enjoyed reading about Jade and Sam enough that okay, yeah, I'll be coming back for Book 3, too. For this one, three stars.

Out of SF/F mode for a while, and jumping over into mystery/vaguely paranormal, I have just finished off Suzanne Arruda's first Jade del Cameron novel, Mark of the Lion. Jade has just survived a stint as an ambulance driver in WWI France, and has promised the pilot she loved to carry out his dying wish: to go to Africa and finding his long-lost, heretofore unknown brother. Complicating the matter is a mysterious laibon who has been sending beasts he controls to carry out attacks around the countryside--and who soon targets Jade herself. And there is of course a love interest, the rancher Harry Hascombe, who may well be of dubious motivations himself--yet who is percolating Jade's interest despite her still mourning her lost David.

I've got a few stylistic quibbles with the book, along the lines of "I really didn't need you to tell me four or five times throughout the initial stretch of the story that Jade has short black hair and that Harry is powerfully built, y'know". The ending fell a little flat for me--though I will also give it credit for making me uncertain about the eventual identities of pertinent characters until they were finally revealed. I'll also admit that it gave me a bit of a twinge to see otherwise great characters going on safari to shoot random creatures for purely trophy purposes, too--though that was hardly out of character for a bunch of Europeans in Africa just after WWI.

And I will say that the overall atmosphere of the setting is very evocative in Arruda's hands, especially the descriptions of Mount Kilimanjaro. Moreover, there is a promise of a complex relationship to build between Jade and Harry, as this book ends on a very uncertain note with him--and the next one, which I'd actually bought first, brings in a rival for her affections. I'll be reading that one next. For this one, three stars.

House of Cards, Book 2 of mizkit's Negotiator series, took me a bit to read. It has less overt action than Book 1 of this series, and a lot more emphasis on the politics between the various Old Races as well as the shifting relationships around the heroine, Margrit. It's not an easy book to read when you're not at the top of your game, since there's a lot to keep track of in here--and with me having the Martian Death Flu going on, I spent quite a bit of time going "wait, what?" and having to double-check what I'd just read.

That's not a bad thing, though. The plot does take a while to build, and spends a lot of initial time on Margrit testing the new status she holds among the Old Races--as well as what her exposure to them will mean for her human relationships. There are casualties both literal and figurative; there are accords reached and accords broken. And there are interesting actions all around from the major power players among the Races, all of whom do a decent job of being intriguingly murky without being evil, a tough job to pull off in an urban fantasy with a cast of this size. Well done, Kit! Four stars.

Between the Martian Death Flu and Norwescon, I got thrown fairly hard off the reading as of late. But I was in the mood for a light supernatural-y, suspense-y sort of story--inevitable, after re-reading some Barbara Michaels. This time, though, I wanted one I hadn't actually read yet. So I turned to Holly Lisle and Night Echoes.

This was a perfectly enjoyable little novel, though there is nothing terribly surprising in any of its elements. Plucky Young Heroine impulsively purchasing Spooky Old House is a plot we've seen before, as is the reincarnation of ghosts never laid to rest. But Lisle does a pleasant job with them, and I give her extra points for her heroine being a painter of cover art for science fiction and fantasy novels. That is, I admit, a profession I haven't seen portrayed much in books. ;) Three stars.

Doing this as a two-for-one post because I'm behind thanks to the Martian Death Flu, and trying to get caught up! And also, because this is a pair of Dark-themed titles. You get that a lot in Barbara Michaels titles.

The Dark on the Other Side: This, hands down, is perhaps the strangest read of the entire Michaels set for me purely on the grounds that it spends almost more time in the hero's POV than it does in the heroine's. This is unusual for Michaels books--and for the Peters ones as well, with the notable exceptions of the large stretches from Ramses' POV in the Amelia Peabodies. And as of the time this book was written, I'm not entirely convinced that Michaels had the knack of writing from a male POV down. The scenes from Michael's POV in this book feel way more awkward to me than the Ramses ones do in the much later Amelia Peabodies.

And really, that's my overall perception of a lot of the elements of this book: all the right pieces gathered together, but not quite managing to fit smoothly yet. The book can't decide what exactly's up with its bad guy: is he a Satanist? A werewolf? An emotional vampire? All three? Elements that are much more deftly handled in later Michaels works feel stilted to me here, as if she hadn't really found her voice yet. Overall, I give this one two and a half stars--minus two for the overall stilted feel of the plot, but plus a half again for trying to spend some time in the hero's POV as well as the heroine's and therefore expanding the story's range a little.

Into the Darkness: This one, by contrast, is a later and much more smoothly executed Michaels. Once again we're back into the realm of paranormal-free plots, with Meg Venturi inheriting one half of her grandfather's jewelry business--with, of course, the catch that the other half has been left to his mysterious, taciturn, and extremely gifted young protege. But who is sending Meg creepy death-themed rings? And leaving threatening phone calls at her grandmother's mansion? And trying to run her off the road?

Generally fun all around, with Meg a nice balance between hardheaded and brainy, and love interest Riley striking fun, familiar Michaels-esque notes of being usually stone-faced and taciturn--except when he unleashes a smile on Meg. Michaels seems to have a thing for that, and guys with proud noses, too. ;) Four stars.

With House of Many Shadows, I jump pretty far back along Barbara Michaels' bibliography, from the mid-90's back to the mid-70's. Despite this being one of her older novels, it's actually not terribly dated; it helps that the setting is in the obligatory Creepy Old House in the Country, and that there are exactly two technology references that really date the book (a tape recorder and a dictaphone). Reading it, then, is a pleasantly timeless experience.

Meg Rittenhouse is suffering from hallucinations thanks to an accident, and so she's sent by a rich relation off to a quiet house in the country to recover. Ever so conveniently, the house is under the care of Andy Brenner, who used to antagonize the hell out of Meg when they were children--indicating to the wise reader, of course, that they were destined for True Love with the very first crabapple he ever threw at her. Not that Michaels makes it an easy road for them to follow, though. Meg's got her hallucinations, Andy's got his own emotional problems, and the frequently caustic chemistry between them is a nice change of pace from simple attraction. The creepiness du jour is suitably creepy, and although the subplot of a couple of shady characters who got displaced out of the country house by Meg's arrival never provides any real sense of menace, there's a good showdown to resolve it at the end. All in all, fun. Three and a half stars.