Tag: mystery

NaNoWriMo no, NaBloPoMo, yes!

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | blogging> NaBloPoMo

Everyone has heard of NaNoWriMo. It’s the month where people all over the United States commit to writing so many words per day, in order to kick-start themselves into writing their novel. It’s like a global support group for novelists. NaNoWriMo is a not-quite abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. But I’m pretty sure it’s expanded way beyond the U.S. boundaries, at least unofficially.

NaNoWriMo is held in November every year. And it’s a really neat idea. But I’m not writing a novel. I write pretty much every day, but so far, there isn’t a novel screaming to come out of me. Someday, maybe, but not today.

Today, I’m here to talk about NaBloPoMo, which does not quite roll as trippingly over the tongue as NaNoWriMo, but is way more relevant for me.

NaBloPoMo is National Blog Posting Month, and is organized by the terrific ladies at BlogHer. Signing up for NaBloPoMo is a commitment to post something to my blog every single day for an entire month. The absolutely fantastic thing about NaBloPoMo is that it’s NaBloPoMo every month!

Yes, I’m committed. I’ve signed up to be one of the Book Bloggers on NaBloPoMo for the month of February. The complete list of February bloggers is here on BlogHer, so please take a peek at my fellow inmates. If you are interested in joining us, the blogroll will remain open until February 5.

Because my primary focus lies someplace in the ebook and book world, defined as broadly as possible to include libraries and bookstores, I always have something to write about because NetGalley kindly provides egalleys for me to review. There is never a lack of material. I run headlong into the “so many books, so little time” conundrum more than anything else.

For participants without that, let’s call it a saving grace, NaBloProMo provides a writing prompt that bloggers can use for inspiration if needed. The February prompt is “RELATIVE”.

My mind went to “relatives” as in family. Not so much to my own family as to families in books. J.D. Robb’s Celebrity in Death is due out at the end of February, and I’m looking forward to slurping it up as soon after midnight as my iPad will process the download. Eve Dallas is an orphan, and as we find out during the course of the series, for damn good reasons. But she does have a family. The family she made, not her birth family. And yet, they are very much her family, and they love each just as much, if not more, than many families. After all, they put their lives on the line for each other every day.

How many series, especially mystery/detective series, do you follow just to keep up with the “family”?

 

Naked Heat

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews

Richard Castle books are a lot like potato chips–you can’t read just one. As soon as I finished Heat Wave (see review) I started craving another Castle book, and I caved in within a couple of days and started Naked Heat. It was pure indulgence, and I loved every sinful page of it.

This story starts with Lt. Nikki Heat and her two detectives Raley and Ochoa discovering Jameson Rook at the scene of a recent homicide, listening to his iPod, with the body of the victim in the next room. (Any resemblances between events in the book and episodes of seasons 2 and 3 of Castle are undoubtedly intentional).

Heat hasn’t seen her former shadow and occasional lover, journalist Rook, for a few months. Not since his article in First Press magazine about his “ride-along” with her and her detectives was published. That article made her the focus of the piece, and brought her a lot of unwanted attention. Nikki only wants to be a cop, not a media darling. And the article made her look like a one-woman crimefighter, totally shortchanging her team.

No one at the Precinct really wanted to see Rook again. He’d screwed all of them in that article, one way or another.

But the dead body in the next room was Cassidy Towne, mud-slinging gossip-raker extraordinaire…and Jameson Rook’s current subject. Without, as he explained to Nikki, the sex.

Even if none of the team wanted Rook back, they needed him this time. He was the insider, both in the publishing world, and on the subject of Cassidy Towne’s current projects and potential enemies.

So they were stuck with Rook after all, trying to charm his way into everyone’s good graces again, and back into Nikki’s bed. All the while, trying to help the police solve the case of Cassidy Towne’s death before the killer strikes again.

Escape Rating B: I was struck by how much Nikki Heat reminds me of Eve Dallas in the J.D. Robb In Death series. And through Dallas, Sigrid Harald from Margaret Maron’s series as well. The tough female detective with the damaged past who builds a family out of the members of her precinct house, and eventually finds love in a most unlikely place. Nikki, Eve and Sigrid are all sisters under the skin.

But if Nikki is an avatar for Eve Dallas, Jameson Rook is no Roarke. Not on Rook’s best day and Roarke’s worst. I like Jameson Rook as a character, but there’s no resemblance. The analogy just doesn’t stretch that far, in spite of the similar names.

Jameson Rook, unlike Richard Castle, is a magazine writer, and presumbly doesn’t make as comfortable a living. So Rook has to supplement his earnings by writing under a pseudonym. And what does Jameson Rook write, and as whom? Under the name Victoria St. Clair, Jameson Rook writes romance novels. And he’s not the first fictional hero to make his living this way, either. In Tanya Huff’s Blood series, Victoria Nelson’s vampire partner, Henry Fitzroy, also wrote historical romances. I keep imagining Henry and Rook meeting at a romance writers’ convention. It would have to be at night, of course.

I read this book just for fun. I’m posting this review in the middle of the ALA Midwinter Conference because there are a lot of librarians out there on the conference floor picking up Advance Reading Copies to read, just for fun. Even more importantly, a big part of our jobs is to select books that folks in our communities we hope will be dying to read, just for fun.

Naked Heat is one of those books.

Heat Wave

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

I read Heat Wave by Richard Castle just for fun. We’re in the middle of a Castle marathon and I just couldn’t resist the impulse. And this was definitely a case where an irresistible impulse turned out to be a totally excellent thing!

“It’s raining men.” What a great way to open a case. This is just the kind of snark that comes with any potboiler, whether on television or in police procedural-type mysteries. Because what makes these shows watchable, or these books readable isn’t just about the case, it’s about listening to the characters smart-off with each other.

It always begins with a dead body. There’s a victim. Matthew Starr. He was the man who rained down, in this particular case. And as his death is investigated, any superficial resemblance to a low-budget Donald Trump is strictly intentional, but that is one reviewer’s humble opinion.

In all murder mysteries, it’s the victim’s life that gets taken apart. Matthew Starr is dissected piece by piece, and not just on the autopsy table. When the story ends, the detectives will know more about the victim than anyone in his life. They have to so they can figure out who murdered him and why.

And the readers learn a little more about the detectives and what makes them tick. And a little more about how they tick along together.

And how well one particular pair are going to tick together outside of “work”. Whether that’s going to be a one time thing or maybe more?

Escape Rating B+: The mystery had plenty of twists and turns. The case threw out the usual school of red herrings and I fell for a couple of them. I had most of it figured out, but one thing threw me. I had fun. But I’ll admit I’m not sure how well it will work for someone who isn’t a Castle fan.

This book is the introduction to a police procedural mystery series. Whether you swallow the whole Castle-thing or not, it still has to do what the introduction to any cop-based mystery series has to do, which is introduce you to the cop shop characters and their dynamic and get you to like them enough to get the next book. It worked for me. I’ve already got Naked Heat and Heat Rises on my iPad for the next time I need a fun book to read.

If you are a fan of Castle and you like reading mysteries, just give into the impulse now and buy the book. You know you want to. Stop resisting. You’ll be glad you did.

The Black Stiletto

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews

What if you found out your mother used to be a superhero? That’s the premise behind Raymond Benson’s The Black Stiletto, and it makes for one amazing story.

When I say superhero, don’t think of the family from Pixar’s The Incredibles. It wasn’t that kind of book, and this isn’t that kind of family. Benson’s Black Stiletto is way more like a female version of the original Bob Kane Batman.

What do I mean by that? Unlike Superman, the X-Men or the Fantastic Four, Batman is an unmutated, grown on Earth, human being. Highly trained and highly skilled, and possibly obsessive-compulsive to the max, but completely human. In the original Bob Kane comics of the late 1930’s, Batman began by avenging the deaths of his parents.

The Black Stiletto also has revenge on her mind.

But the story begins with a middle-aged man named Martin Talbot reading his mother’s diaries from the late 1950’s. His mother Judy is in a nursing home in suburban Chicago with Alzheimer’s; she doesn’t recognize him, or anyone else, anymore. So her lawyer gives him a floorplan of her house which shows a secret room in the basement, and a key.

Behind that hidden door, Martin discovers a treasure-trove and a puzzle. His mother’s diaries are there, from 1958 onwards. All of the original comic books featuring the Black Stiletto, which are worth a fortune on the collectible market. Two Black Stiletto costumes. But the diaries are astounding. The diaries of his mother’s life in New York City as a young woman, when she lived over a gym and learned to fight.

Martin remembers his mother always kept in shape. There’s still a punching bag hanging in that basement. He remembers her practicing in every place they lived. He knows she lived in New York, but not with him. He was born in Los Angeles. But he never knew his father, the mysterious Richard Talbot. And reading the diaries, he realizes that he never knew his mother. But for the diaries, because of Alzheimer’s he never would.

But was she really the Black Stiletto? And was the Stiletto a hero, or a just a vigilante? Read along with Martin to find out.

Escape Rating B: What an astonishing book! Superheroes are always larger than life. To suddenly discover that one of your parents was one, how much would that rock your world? When Martin discovers that his mother was nothing like he thought she was, it makes him question the whole of his life.

The diary that Martin is reading only covers the very earliest period of Judy’s time as the Black Stiletto. Those early years do come back to haunt the present, but it’s those early years that I really want to know about. Martin has lots more diaries to read, and I’m dying to know what’s in them. Read The Black Stiletto and you will be too.

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand? 1-8-12

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> Virtual Nightstand

And it’s January! Post-holiday doldrums anyone?

I live in the Atlanta suburbs, so let’s call it the South, more or less. I have for the last four years. But I grew up in the Midwest, and spent most of my adult life either in Cincinnati (OH) or Chicago, with the exception of three years in Anchorage Alaska. To me, winter is supposed to be cold, and sometimes snowy. (It doesn’t actually snow lots and bunches in Cincy). Winter in the South is like autumn everywhere else I’ve ever lived. Not that I miss the snow!

The weather is just not as conducive to curling up with a good book as a Chicago blizzard. But I make do.

I have books from some very different sources this week. In December, back when I thought I had a breather (silly me!) I volunteered to become an occasional reviewer for Book Lovers Inc. I received my first book from them over New Year’s, and it looks really neat.

Past Tense by Nick Marsh is described as Doctor Who with a dose of Being Human, with a slice of All Creatures Great and Small thrown in for body. I’m wondering if that might be a literal furry body somewhere down the line, since the hero is a vet. The opening scene has the boring anatomy lecture he’s attending temporarily getting hijacked either into Alien or the Cthulhu Mythos. Howsomever, his return to the real brought my attention to the fact that this is book 2 in a series. I begged the author for book 1. He sent it.

Which means that I now have Soul Purpose by Nick Marsh to review for Reading Reality before I can finish Past Tense and review it for Book Lovers.

I am also on the hook to Book Lovers for Todd Grimson’s Stainless, but I don’t have a date for reviewing it yet. They only have print ARCs, and their last shipment seems to have been dropped in sake, so they don’t have any to send me. (I’m not making this up, that’s really what I was told)  Yes, there is a pun in there, and I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t able to refrain from making it to the publicist.

I have seen a absolute ton of reviews for Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened. I had to find out for myself, and this was available on NetGalley, so I grabbed it. None of the reviewers are neutral because there’s no way to be neutral about this one. Can you have a romance where the sex isn’t any good for the first half of the book? You can if there’s a reason for it. I’m more than halfway through, and it all does make sense. This is very character driven, and it is working for me.

Mea Culpa. I should have listed this last week. Stephanie Rowe’s Hold Me If You Can is on my list for January 1, 2012 and it got lost in the shuffle for the holidays. Almost literally. This is the third book in her Soulfire Series, which starts with Kiss at Your Own Risk and continues with Touch If You Dare. I have paper copies of both Kiss and Touch somewhere in a box, because I was able to get them cheap from Powell’s, but heaven knows which box. I was also able to get Kiss really cheap for my iPad, because Sourcebooks was having a sale on first books in series.

There’s one truly new book on the list. Don’t Bite the Messenger.

Don’t Bite the Messenger by Regan Summers is a Carina Press book I got from NetGalley about vampires living in Anchorage, Alaska, and one human courier who seems to be resistant to their charms. Vampires in Alaska? What do they do in the summer? Even in Anchorage it never gets completely dark, and believe me, I know. Fireworks on the Fourth of July are a real problem.  I read Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dance with the Devil. Zarek mostly suffered in the summer. I’ll have to read this book to see what these vamps do.

Looking back keeps me honest. Or it makes me suffer as much as those vampires in Alaska in the summer, take your pick. But I did make progress.

I found the box with Demi-Monde: Winter in it. I put it in one of the boxes marked for my office with “VIP Papers” marked on them. I obviously should have left myself better notes.

My new book from last week, P. Kirby’s The Canvas Thief, has not been doing terribly well on the review circuit. But I still need to get to it.

Looking back at the Christmas Nightstand, I finished Marissa Meyer’s Cinder. That review will be posted this week. It was pretty good, but I wish she hadn’t tried quite so hard to hit every single point of the Cinderella story. Or something like that. It didn’t quite live up to the hype.

A post at The Galaxy Express about Superhero romance reminded me that I had a book about superheroes, although not a romance, in my long backlog. The Black Stiletto by Raymond Benson is the story of the birth of a very human caped crusader. It’s fascinating the way the story is told. The woman’s son is reading her diaries, because the Stiletto herself is in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. And yet she lives again. See my review on Wednesday.

Well, that all we have time for this week. See you next week for another exciting edition of “what’s in that box?”

Don’t forget, tomorrow is Ebook Review Central‘s turn at the last of November 2011. We’ll see Amber Quill (really that’s Amber Allure publishing at the moment), Astraea Press, Liquid Silver and Riptide Publishing.

 

The First Rule of Ten

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

The First Rule of Ten by Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay is a surprise. It is surprisingly good. There are a lot of things about this mystery that are unconventional, including the detective it introduces, but I was hooked from the first page.

Tenzing Norbu (“Ten” for short) grew up wanting to become a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. The ambition would not have been that far out of the ordinary, if it weren’t for the location where Ten did that growing up. Ten spent his formative years in a Buddhist monastery in Dharamshala, India, where his father expected him to become a monk, just as he was. The fact that Ten was the product of his father’s impulsive middle-age marriage to an American college dropout attempting (and failing) to “find herself” on a trip through India (and Europe) didn’t seem to matter to his father’s plans. Nor did his father understand what role Ten’s mother’s wanderlust, or her influence, might have had in his makeup.

Not to mention, eight-year-old boys are lousy at obeying mindless rules, never mind teenagers. Ten just wasn’t cut out to be a monk. He wanted to be a detective, even if he had no real clue what that meant. But he tried to please his father.

An intervention from a lama when Ten turned 18 sent him to the Buddhist Cultural Center in Los Angeles on an exchange program. From there, his journey took him to a GED program, US Citizenship, and eventually, the LAPD.

But several years after making detective in the police department, Ten is no longer satisfied. He still enjoys police work, what he hates is paperwork, meetings and rules. Most of the same things he disliked in the monastery.

As The First Rule of Ten opens, Ten is wounded while trying to intervene in a domestic disturbance. For Ten, it is the last in a series of signs that tell him it is time to resign from the LAPD and become a private investigator. So he turns in his paperwork and does just that. Ten tells his partner Bill that the incident was a case of his “cosmic alarm clock” telling him it was time for his “job karma” to change. While this wouldn’t work for most people, Bill’s “job karma” is part of the reason that Ten is making the switch. Bill and his wife have recently had twins, and Bill wants to move into an administrative job and off the street. Their partnership is breaking up whether Ten leaves or not.

As a private investigator, Ten’s first case arrives before he has even hung out his “shingle”. A woman comes to his door, looking for the previous owner of his house. She’s not looking to hire him, she just wants Zimmy’s whereabouts, because she’s Zimmy’s first ex-wife. But Zimmy used to be a big rock-and-roller before he got clean and sober and left LA, and Ten doesn’t provide a forwarding address. He can tell the woman is hiding something, maybe a lot of somethings. But when she turns up dead the next morning — and not just dead, but tortured before she died — Ten feels like he owes her for not listening to what was wrong. He didn’t want to get involved, and now he’s involved. He has a case, even if no one is paying.

Ten believes that if he investigates, someone will eventually pay. And someone does, in more ways than one.

And if you’re wondering what the The First Rule of Ten actually is, it’s “Don’t ignore intuitive tickles, lest they reappear as sledgehammers.” Words to live by. Or die by.

Escape Rating A-: I started this one night, and re-surfaced over 100 pages into it. I was amazed at how fast I got sucked into Ten’s world and his point of view. He’s a fascinating character to follow. He retains just enough of his “outsider” perspective to make his perspective and internal voice different from the run-of-the-mill private eye. His choices work for him, but they wouldn’t for another detective. His screw-ups are definitely his own, too.

There’s a teaser for The Second Rule of Ten in the back of the book. I don’t want just a teaser. I want the whole book!

 

The House of Silk

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz is a new/old Sherlock Holmes story. And I’m an absolute sucker for Sherlock Holmes stories.

Why do I call it a new/old Holmes story? On the one hand, it is written in the style of the Conan Doyle canon. Watson is writing up one of Holmes’ cases. On very much the other hand, the case he is writing up is about a subject that proper Victorian gentlemen did not discuss. There are, after all, much worse things than prostitution.

So we come to the case of the House of Silk. This is purported to be a case that Watson is writing up very late in his own life, after Holmes has died in Sussex. It is written in the tone of a man reflecting back, and sometimes you can hear the nostalgia, and of knowledge of later times impinging on the then-present.  In “Watson’s” preface to the story, he states that the case was too shocking to appear in print and too close to the halls of power to appear during wartime. He purportedly left the manuscript with his private papers, with instructions to his solicitors to have the manuscript published in a century.

And so we have the adventures of The Man in the Flat Cap and The House of the Silk.

The story itself takes place in 1890, a year before that infamous affair at Reichenbach Falls. Watson is still married to his first wife, Mary Morstan that was, but she has just left to nurse one of her former charges through a bout of influenza, and Watson has taken up his bachelor quarters with Holmes at 221B Baker Street for the duration.

An art dealer named Edmund Carstairs engages Holmes (and by association, Watson) to investigate the man in the flat cap who is terrorizing him. It should be an open-and-shut case. Carstairs returned from America a year ago. While he was there, he agreed to sell four impressionist masterpieces to a collector in Boston. The sale would have made his gallery a fortune. The paintings arrived in the States, but, the four Turner paintings just happened to be caught in the middle of a train robbery that went horribly wrong, and were burned to ash. Insurance covered the loss, but the buyer in Boston decided to go after the robbers. The gang, known as the Flat Cap Gang, were killed by the Boston police. All except one. Carstairs believes that the one remaining member of the gang, Keelan O’Donaghue, has followed him to London and is now following him around, leaving messages and generally terrorizing him. The question is, “to what purpose?” Not to mention, “why wait a year to follow?”

Holmes is intrigued by those questions. He is on the trail of a case that is, as usual, more than it appears. But in the process of finding the man who is trailing Carstairs, Holmes employs his “Baker Street Irregulars”, the band of street orphans that he hires to watch out when he cannot be everywhere at once. A new boy, Ross, finds not just the man in the flat-cap, but something to his own advantage, or so he thinks. After he collects his guinea from Holmes, he tries a bit of blackmail of his own, and is not just killed for his trouble, but tortured first. And his body left for Holmes to find with a bit of white silk ribbon tied to wrist as a message.

Holmes takes the message to heart and the investigation takes a more personal turn. When Mycroft comes to 221B in person to warn Holmes off, the younger Holmes delves even deeper, because he knows he is on the trail of something that someone does not want him to find. And that’s when the situation becomes truly dangerous, possibly even for Sherlock Holmes.

Escape Rating B+:I enjoyed this visit with Holmes and Watson, but it didn’t quite fit for me. For one, I figured it out before the end. For another, the non-Conan Doyle version of Holmes that now lives in my mind is Laurie R. King’s, so any variant that has Holmes deceased, especially without Mary Russell, just sounds wrong to me. And the only time Watson survives Holmes is after Reichenbach, and we all know how that turned out.

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand? New Year’s Day 2012

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Virtual Nightstand

Happy New Year!  2012. Wow! I still want George Jetson’s car. The one that folded up into his briefcase when he parked. When will someone develop one of those? The future is not quite what it was cracked up to be. Transporters should be under development at the very least. I guess we’ll just have to settle for iPads. Cool enough beans for now.

I seem to have given myself a New Year’s reprieve. I’m not sure how that happened. There is only one new book being dropped on the pile next week. For once, I actually seem to have been thinking.

The Canvas Thief by Patricia Kirby looks like a paranormal romance. A comic book artist sees demons, and draws fictionalized versions of them into her comic books. The only problem is that either her comic book characters have come to life, or the world she has been drawing all these years is even more real than she imagined. This sounded really cool when I got it from NetGalley.

So, if there are no new books, what about the recap?

I’m doing better with this week than last week. If figures.

I finished The First Rule of Ten, and I’m really glad there’s going to be a Second Rule of Ten (no date set but the first couple of chapters were in the back of the first book). First Rule was good! This concept shouldn’t work, but does. Ten is a former Buddhist monk, and former LAPD cop, who becomes a private investigator. He’s not really good at obeying meaningless rules, which got him in trouble at the monastery, and bored him as a cop, but makes him a very interesting PI. Review this week.

I’m maybe a third of the way through Midnight Reckoning. And vampire politics are as convoluted as ever. This picked up where Castle’s Dark Awakening (reviewed here) left off, and so far, so good.

I finally finished Michelle Sagara’s Cast in Ruin, which completes the Chronicles of Elantra until Cast in Peril comes out. Ruin has been in my NetGalley backlog since September, so I’m both glad and sorry. I loved Elantra so much I put the entire series on my Best of 2011 list. I’ll miss Kaylin and Company until Peril. I have hopes for September 2012, but no certainty. Review this week, of course.

I still haven’t found the box with my copy of Demi-Monde: Winter in it. This is the problem with print books. They hide themselves.  Whatever it is you’re looking for, it’s always in the last place you look. Of course, that’s because you stop looking as soon as you find it!

Tomorrow will be Ebook Review Central with Samhain Publishing’s November 2011 books.

Next week we’ll be back with the post-holiday doldrums. And another edition of the Nightstand.

 

 

 

12 for 2012: My most anticipated books in 2012

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> books> ebooks

It’s very difficult to figure out what books I’m looking forward to most in 2012. I mean when I started to look at lists, I realized that most of what I was anticipating were the next books in series, or new books from authors I already knew. But when I looked at the list of my best reads from this past year, most of them turned out to be authors who were new to me. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?

This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the series books that I read. I certainly did. But it’s the discoveries that turned out to be the most memorable. Maybe that’s because they were such surprises.

Just the same, these are the books I am planning to stalk NetGalley for review copies. And if I can’t get a review copy? Well, then I’ll just have to buy a copy and review it anyway. There’s even a reading challenge about reading one book a month just for fun!

But the books I’m looking for in 2012 are…drumroll, please!

When Maidens Mourn by C.S. Harris will be the next book in her Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series. What Angels Fear is the first book, and St. Cyr is a detective of the amateur and aristocratic variety. He should be the hero of a Regency romance, and in other circumstances, he might have been. But his service in Wellington’s army has left him much too tormented for that. His personal life makes him a tragic hero; the demons that drive him make him an ideal detective, if only to keep him from becoming a criminal. March can’t come soon enough on this.

Celebrity in Death by J.D. Robb. This is Eve Dallas’ 34th outing. I’ve read all of them. Usually in one sitting. I still can’t figure out how she does it, but Robb/Roberts does it really, really well. This book means there will be one warm night in February.

Restless in the Grave by Dana Stabenow. I think I will always have a fondness for Alaska stories. Heck, I still tell Alaska stories, and it’s been 6 years now since I left Anchorage. But living in Alaska is something that changed my perspective, probably forever. The situations Dana writes about in her novels are always a tiny bit familiar, even the ones set in the Bush. Because Alaska is possibly the world’s biggest small town, and there weren’t six degrees of separation, there were three at most. Even for cheechakos like us. Dana writes damn good mysteries, but I always read them for a taste of the place we almost called home.

Master and God by Lindsey Davis. I love Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco series. The whole idea of a hard-boiled detective operating in Imperial Rome has always been utterly delicious. And Falco’s wife Helena Justina is made of awesome. Master and God is not a Falco book. It’s historical fiction set in the same time period. Davis wrote one other work of historical fiction set during the Falco period, The Course of Honor. I read it years ago and it was fantastic. If Master and God is half as good, it will be well worth reading. Come to think of it, I hope people re-discover The Course of Honor. It was incredibly good and I don’t think it got half the attention it deserved.

The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green. This one has been teasing me every time I look at Amazon. The recommender can figure out I want to read this, so it sorta/kinda looks like it’s available, but it’s not. January 3, 2012. Come on already. For those fans of the Nightside, John Taylor is finally going to marry his long-suffering (in more ways than one) girlfriend, Suzie Shooter. He just has one last job to finish up before he meets her at the altar. But no job in the Nightside is ever easy, especially not for John Taylor.

Redshirts by John Scalzi. This sounds like it’s going to be really cool. And really, really funny. And yes, the redshirts in the title are those redshirts. Like in Star Trek. The ones that always get killed at the beginning of the mission. What happens if a bunch of them figure it out? And decide that they are not going to let it happen to them? This sounds like something only Scalzi could possibly do justice to. In June, we’ll all find out.

An Officer’s Duty by Jean Johnson is the next installment in her series, Theirs Not to Reason Why. I loved the first book, A Soldier’s Duty (reviewed here), and I can’t wait to see where Johnson next leads her time-travelling heroine, Io, in her quest to save the human race from utter extinction. July 31 is way too far away for this one.

Copper Beach by Jayne Ann Krentz. I knew that someday the Krentz was going to link the Victorian era Arcane Society of her Amanda Quick novels to her contemporary Jones & Jones psychic investigations to her futuristic romances under her Jayne Castle pseudonym. I read them all, but the links make for an added twist that I love. In January Copper Beach starts a new subseries, Dark Legacy.

Crystal Gardens is the start of a second subseries, Ladies of Lantern Street, that Krentz is starting in April under her Amanda Quick name. That means it’s a Victorian era story, at least for the first book. All of the Arcane Society books, both contemporary and Victorian, have been excellent romantic suspense.

Tangle of Need by Nalini Singh is the 11th book in her Psy-Changelings series, and the first to be published in hardcover. Although her Archangel series hasn’t wowed me, the psy-changeling books have never failed to please. I only wish that the release date was earlier than May. And I wish the US version had a better cover. The UK cover is awesome. (UK on left, US on right.)

Dragon Ship by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I want to go back to Liaden. I want to catch up on the books in between (there are several) that I haven’t read, and I want to finally find out how things are going. Liaden is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, space opera science fiction romance universes of all time. Dragon Ship is due Labor Day. I think I have enough time to get caught up. It will be so worth it.

This last book is an absolute flyer. It sounds really cool, but who knows.

The Yard by Alex Grecian. What if, after Scotland Yard failed to capture Jack the Ripper, they started a Murder Squad? 12 detectives specifically charged with investigating the thousands of murders in foggy, grimy, crime-filled London. How much luck would they have? When one of their own is murdered, the Yard’s first forensic pathologist is put on the track of the killer. I love historic mysteries, and this sounds very, very cool. In May, I’ll find out.

 

These are the books I’m looking forward to this year. I wonder how many will end up on my “best books of 2012” list.

What are your most anticipated books for 2012?

11 for 2011: Best reads of the year

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | best book lists> book reviews> books> ebooks

2011 is coming to a close. It’s time to pause and reflect on the year that is ending.

There’s a lovely quote from Garrison Keillor, “A book is a present that you can open again and again.” There’s a corollary in this house about “not if the cat is sitting on it” but the principle still applies. The good stories from this year will still be good next year. Some of them may even have sequels!

These were my favorites of the year. At least when I narrow the list down to 11 and only 11. And even then I fudged a bit. Read on and you’ll see what I mean.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (reviewed 12/1/11). This book had everything it could possibly need. There’s a quest. There’s a love story. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s an homage to videogaming. There are pop-culture references to every cult classic of science fiction and fantasy literature imaginable. There’s an evil empire to be conquered. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Omnitopia: Dawn by Diane Duane (reviewed 4/22/11). On the surface, Omnitopia and Ready Player One have a lot in common. Thankfully, there is more than meets the eye. Omnitopia takes place in the here and now, or very close to it. The world has not yet gone down the dystopian road that Wade and his friends are looking back at in Ready Player One. On the other hand, any resemblance the reader might see between Worlds of Warcraft mixed with Facebook and Omnitopia, or between Omnitopia Corp and Apple, may not entirely be the reader’s imagination. Howsomever, Omnitopia Dawn also has some very neat things to say about artificial intelligence in science fiction. If you liked Ready Player One, just read Omnitopia: Dawn. Now!

The Iron Knight (reviewed 10/26/11) was the book that Julie Kagawa did not intend to write. She was done with Meghan, her story was over. Meghan is the Iron Queen, but what she has achieved is not a traditional happily-ever-after. Victory came at a price. Real victories always do. Meghan’s acceptance of her responsibility means that she must rule alone. Ash is a Winter Prince, and Meghan’s Iron Realm is fatal to his kind. The Iron Knight is Ash’s journey to become human, or at least to obtain a soul, so that he can join his love in her Iron Realm. It is an amazing journey of mythic proportions.

Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel (reviewed 10/18/11) is a story that absolutely shouldn’t work. The fact that it not only works, but works incredibly well, still leaves me gasping in delight. Dearly, Departed is the first, best, and so far only YA post-apocalypse steampunk zombie romance I’ve ever read. I never thought a zombie romance could possible work, period. This one not only works, it’s fun. There’s a sequel coming, Dearly, Beloved. I just wish I knew when.

Debris by Jo Anderton (reviewed 09/29/11) is the first book of The Veiled World Trilogy. It’s also Anderton’s first novel, a fact that absolutely amazed me when I read the book. Debris is science fiction with a fantasy “feel” to it, a book where things that are scientifically based seem magical to most of the population. But the story is about one woman’s fall from grace, and her discovery that her new place in society is where she was meant to be all along.

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny (reviewed 09/19/11). If you love mysteries, and you are not familiar with Louise Penny’s work, get thee to a bookstore, or download her first Chief Inspector Gamache mystery, Still Life, to your ereader this instant. Louise Penny has been nominated for (and frequently won) just about every mystery award for the books in this series since she started in 2005. Find out why.

I love Sherlock Holmes pastiches. (This is not a digression, I will reach the point). I have read all Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell books, some more than once. I almost listed Pirate King (reviewed 9/9/11), this year’s Holmes/Russell book instead of Trick. But Pirate King was froth, and Penny never is. A regular contributor to Letters of Mary, the mailing list for fans of the Holmes/Russell books, recommended the Louise Penny books. I am forever grateful.

The Elantra Series by Michelle Sagara (review forthcoming). I confess I’m 2/3rds of the way through Cast in Ruin right now. I’ve tried describing this series, and the best I can come up with is an urban fantasy series set in a high fantasy world. I absolutely love it. It’s the characters that make this series. Everyone, absolutely everyone, is clearly drawn and their personality is delineated in a way that makes them interesting. There are people you wouldn’t want to meet, but they definitely are distinctive. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in spots, even when it’s very much gallows humor. I’m driving my husband crazy because I keep laughing at the dialog, and I can’t explain what’s so funny. I would love to have drinks with Kaylin. I’d even buy. But the Elantra series is not humor. Like most urban fantasy, it’s very snarky. But the stories themselves have a crime, or now, a very big problem that needs solving, and Kaylin is at the center of it. Whether she wants to be or not.

If you are keeping score somewhere, or just want the reading order, it’s Cast in Moonlight (part of Harvest Moon), Cast in Shadow, Cast in Courtlight, Cast in Secret, Cast in Fury, Cast in Silence, Cast in Chaos, and Cast in Ruin.

The Ancient Blades Trilogy by David Chandler consists of Den of Thieves (reviewed 7/27/11), A Thief in the Night (reviewed 10/7/11) and Honor Among Thieves (reviewed 12/21/11). This was good, old-fashioned sword and sorcery. Which means the so-called hero is the thief and not the knight-errant. And every character you meet has a hidden agenda and that no one, absolutely no one, is any better than they ought to be. But the ending, oh the ending will absolutely leave you stunned.

Ghost Story by Jim Butcher (reviewed 7/29/11) is 2011’s entry in one of my absolute all time favorite series, The Dresden Files. And I saw Jim Butcher in person at one of the Atlanta Barnes & Noble stores. Ghost Story represents a very big change in the Dresden Files universe, where Harry Dresden starts growing into those extremely large boots he’s been stomping around in all these years. If you love urban fantasy, read Dresden.

Turn It Up by Inez Kelley (reviewed 8/10/11 and listed here) is one of the best takes on the “friends into lovers” trope that I have ever read. Period. Also, I’m an absolute sucker for smart people and witty dialogue, and this book is a gem. “Dr. Hot and the Honeypot” pretty much talk each other into a relationship, and into bed, while they give out sassy advice over the airwaves on their very suggestive and extremely successful sexual advice radio show.

My last book is a two-fer. Break Out (reviewed 8/4/11) and Deadly Pursuit (reviewed 12/6/11) by Nina Croft are the first two books in her Blood Hunter series, and I sincerely hope there are more. This is paranormal science fiction romance. Like Dearly, Departed, this concept should not work. But it absolutely does. And it gets better the longer it goes on. If you have an urban fantasy world in the 20th century, what would happen if that alternate history continued into space? Where do the vamps and the werewolves go? They go into space with everyone else, of course. And you end up with Ms. Croft’s Blood Hunter universe, which I loved. But you have to read both books. The first book just isn’t long enough for the world building. The second one rocks.

I stopped at 11 (well 11-ish) because this is the 2011 list. I could have gone on. And on. And on. My best ebook romances list was published on Library Journal earlier in the month. LJ has a ton of other “best” lists for your reading pleasure. Or for the detriment of your TBR pile.