30 posts tagged “book”
This is the second John Rebus book I have read (listened to). As with the other one, it seemed to be a good book, but I couldn't really tell you what happened. The narrator did a good job, and I adore his accent, but too much of the time I didn't quite get what he was saying. I think Scottish English is just enough different from American English that it actually requires a bit of translation effort. And it didn't help any that my listening time was kind of choppy. With a 14-disc book, that makes it hard to keep track of who is who and what is what. And maybe I should try reading the series from the beginning and get a better sense of the characters.
I have been given two later books in this series, and my understanding is that this is a series that must be read in order. So I picked up the series debut's audiobook at the library and listened to it. After reading the cover blurb, I was not expecting great things. And I did not get great things. I will admit that this was better than I anticipated. But that isn't saying a whole lot.
Lieutenant Eve Dallas is a New York cop in (IIRC) the year 2057. She is assigned to the high-profile homicide of an expensive whore whose grandfather is a conservative prude of a Senator. (You now have enough information to solve the case.) Real coffee is even rarer than firearms, and when billionaire and prime suspect Roarke offers Eve a steaming cup of joe, she tumbles for him and compromises the investigation. That's mostly what the book is about. It fails as mystery or science fiction, but if all you really want is some Nora Roberts soft porn, this is the book for you.
This is (not counting the prequel novel and stories) the second Wallander book, and I find myself really enjoying the series despite the inconsistent quality of the translation. I listened to this on CD, and even though I didn't care for some of Gordon Dickson's voicing choices, I think it helped to draw attention away from flaws in the translation. This story takes place in early 1991, a time of much political upheaval throughout Europe. I was a student in London at the time, and I recall the tension I experienced even at that far remove. I can only imagine what it would have been like in the Baltic states.
In this book, Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander doesn't have to imagine it. When Latvian corpses wash up on his turf, he befriends the Latvian detective sent from Riga to assist with the investigation, and just when Wallander is certain the case is firmly back in Latvian hands and on Latvian soil, his presence is demanded in Riga. What he finds there is a complex criminal and political situation that he can barely begin to comprehend. In short order he is having to behave like James Bond, and it is fascinating to watch him adapt his police training in ways he had never previously considered.
Mankell does an excellent job of making this story fantastic and realistic at once, placing Wallander in over his head yet making it believable that he finds within himself what he needs to survive and eventually prevail. The combination of action and political analysis is also balanced nicely, reminiscent of a good Le Carré novel. I would recommend this to any fan of smart political thrillers and anybody with an interest in post-Soviet transitions.
I read this for a library book group, and I think I was the only person who didn't really care for it. Oddly enough, though, I can't really put my finger on what I didn't like. It has something to do with the incorporation of the supernatural into the plot. The story is a mystery set on the Southern Ute reservation, which is very near my home in New Mexico, and I've been driving through this part of Colorado a lot lately. So perhaps it's partly a reaction to the supernatural "intruding" on my daily life. I don't have an issue with Mario Acevedo's vampires hanging out in my new 'hood, but maybe his approach is fantastical enough that I don't feel like my territory is being encroached upon, whereas Doss seems insistent that the mystical is commonplace. I don't know.
But I do know that I thought the Hoover character was just far too over-the-top. And the whole thing with Benita....yeah, I won't go there, in case you do want to read the book for yourself. I did like a lot of the characters, though, and the book certainly had a strong sense of place. (BTW, the cover art is ridiculously inaccurate.)
I would recommend this book to anybody who enjoys Tony Hillerman's books or who is into mysteries with lots of supernatural goings-on.
I think this may well be the best book in the entire Kinsey Millhone series so far. Grafton uses a slightly different format this time, telling us immediately who the villain is (or at least who she claims to be at the moment) and occasionally shifting to the villain's POV. A less skilled author would remove any sense of suspense in doing so, but Grafton manages to heighten it by showing us what the villain has at stake and how efficient she has become at perpetrating identity theft. The 1986/1987 setting of this book makes it all the more interesting, as we can simultaneously see how much more we know now about preventing such fraud and how far we have yet to go.
I listened to this on CD, narrated by Judy Kaye, who I think has the perfect voice for Kinsey, and she does just fine voicing other characters as well. I would recommend this book not only to current fans of Grafton and Millhone, but to anybody interested in con artists and their motivations.
I first heard of Mario Acevedo last summer, when he was on a panel of mystery authors at the Mensa AG in Denver. Then he was on some panels at Bubonicon in Albuquerque a few months later. He's an absolute hoot, so I was pleased when this book, the first in the Felix Gomez series, was selected for the discussion group I belong to at the library.
The book begins with a human Felix Gomez fighting in Iraq and shows us the beginning of his transformation to Felix Gomez, vampire PI. Then it takes us to his current assignment at Rocky Flats, a US Department Energy Facility near Denver. They have had an outbreak of nymphomania among the female staff, and it is up to Felix to restore normalcy. It proves to be a challenge even for somebody of Felix's talents, and it is further complicated by vampire politics, vampire hunters, and governmental cover-ups.
I was a little surprised that the book, while humorous in tone, was not laugh-out-loud funny, but I still enjoyed it a lot and appreciated the sometimes serious undercurrents. It reminded me more than a little of Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden stories, and I would recommend this to anybody who enjoys those as well as anybody ready for a refreshing take on the vampire mythos.
This book had an interesting premise, but the execution was predictable and lackluster. It is a story, told in the first person by a character whose name already escapes me, of a young man who gets bored with life in Boston and takes his inheritance and moves to a remote village in Vermont. Or maybe it was New Hampshire. One of those small, rural states in New England. He strikes up a friendship with an old codger who, throughout the course of the book, relates his life story, complete with closeted skeletons, to the fictional narrator. Yeah, right. Our young friend also regales us with tales of his wild sexual escapades and wonders if the local barkeep's daughter will cure him of his commitment phobia.
I listened to the audiobook version read by Christopher Burns, and I probably would have liked it better if he had used regional accents. As it is, it's an okay way to kill several hours, but I wouldn't actually recommend it to anybody, with the possible exception of those who think The Bridges of Madison County is great literature.
This is the second novel in the Fethering series, which features Carole and Jude as a seemingly mismatched investigative duo. While hiking on the downs, Carole is forced to seek shelter from a storm in a barn, where she discovers human skeletal remains. A young woman has disappeared from the area, so before long, Carole and her neighbor Jude are looking into the case.
Though a little slow-moving, the story does have some interesting twists and turns, and the development of the characters is a nice follow-up to The Body on the Beach. I listened to this on unabridged CD, and Geoffrey Howard did a fine narration job. I would recommend this to fans of English cozies who don't mind a somewhat leisurely pace.
This counts toward the audiobook challenge.
I just finished listening to Meet Me at the Morgue this evening. I've read some Lew Archer short stories before, but this is my first novel from Macdonald. It's from the early 1950s, but it has the tone of a classic noir novel, and the story stands up to time well. The sleuth, LA probation officer Howard Cross, is drawn into a case when a four-year-old boy disappears with one of Cross's probationers. It isn't long before the trail is littered with corpses. The plot contained some nice twists, and narrator Grover Gardner's voice was perfectly suited to the material. I'd recommend this to anybody in the mood for some good old-fashioned LA noir.
This is my second book of 2009, and it also advances me in the 2nds reading challenge.
Show us the last book you read.
A while back, I was wandering through Hastings, and this book on the New Releases table caught my eye. "Whaddaya know," I thought, "There's an author with the same name as my old preacher." I picked up the book, flipped to the back, and there was the Reverend Joe Barone staring back at me from the dust jacket! Well, of course, I had to buy it, and I'll be sending it along to my mother now that I've finished it.
It's an interesting story, and not your standard cozy mystery. For one thing, it's set in a mental hospital in the 1950s, and the sleuth is one of the patients. So no, this isn't "a Roy Rogers mystery" in the sense that it has a real historical figure puzzling out some fictional mystery. The Roy Rogers solving the mystery just thinks he's Roy Rogers.
He's quite the character, our faux Roy Rogers. He has a talent for getting into restricted areas of the institution, and on one of his excursions into the record room, he stumbles upon a dead body. So he and a pal bury it in the stables. Other related events, though, lead to some awkward questions and fresh violence, so Roy uses his personal network both inside and outside the Sunrise facility to investigate. It's fascinating to watch from Roy's perspective as everything unfolds, especially as we learn more about Roy and what brought him to Sunrise. It's also a different look at the politics of mental health treatment and helps to put faces and personalities to what is still a very sticky social issue today.
