Anita Blake

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I read the first 5-6 Anita Blake novels a while ago and I had to stop and change tracks. Not that I don’t like the books, since I’ve read up to Cerulean Sins now, but I just needed something different. So I did something I try hard not to do and I left Blue Moon in the middle of the book. I think I was just tired of Anita’s quirky sort of self righteousness. She kills monsters, she sleeps with monsters and yet…she hates them.

She’s got several men on the hook and but she can’t decide which one to stick with. I find that a bit selfish, especially when she started out going “no sex EVER” (a now broken rule) and “not human=monsters” (also a now broken rule). She’s got a bazillion rules for a guy who either wants to sleep with her or date her. And some how it is always the man’s fault when he trips up over one of the rules. Which I find unfair. How is a man supposed to know not to do something when you don’t tell him not to?

On the other hand, it is nice to see a competent woman in the main character role. She knows her strengths and her weaknesses. She knows how to kill the bad guys (she is the Executioner after all) and is more than willing to do so. And yet we’ve seen her hurt and squeamish. She isn’t super human. She isn’t vapid. And I like that. It always seems that when the main character is a woman, she’s absolutely clueless as to what she is and/or what’s going on.

So Blue Moon is basically Anita coming to the rescue of her then boyfriend (one of two at the moment) Richard when he gets framed for rape in Tennessee. She has to get him out, face down the local pack and local vamps and figure out why he was framed in the first place. Not bad as a book, good enough for me to read the next book, Obsidian Butterfly.

I really liked Obsidian Butterfly. It features the character Edward (a.k.a.-Death, Ted Forrester). He’s a sociopath bounty hunter who kills exclusively monsters or interesting prey. He has made appearances before and he was Anita’s teacher. I like Edward because I like a lot of the bad guy characters in books and because he’s entertaining in his way. He is what he is and he really doesn’t care what you think of him. But he has a monster program where his alter ego, Ted Forrester, lives in New Mexico. Anita is a monster expert and possibly a friend. I find this one the best I’ve read so far simply because Edward was a main focus.

So all in all, I’d rate Blue Moon about a B- but Obsidian Butterfly an A.

Sherlock Holmes

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So I’m eagerly awaiting the US release for the second season (or series to you Brits) of BBC’s Sherlock and it got me in the mood to read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. I have been, since before the Guy Ritchie movies, a big ACD Holmes fan. He’s a Victorian detective House (very simply put) but oh so much better.

Some time ago I bought the Complete Sherlock Holmes for both Kindle and paperback. It contains, so far as I know, all of Doyle’s original Holmes stories, including the novels of A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles. I’m really very hard pressed to choose a favorite story as I find most all of them entertaining on some level. Sherlock is a master detective and a master at the back handed compliment.

So, I won’t try to summarize all the various stories. There are far, far to many to do so in a single post. I will, however, pick a few of my favorites to recommend them to you.

-A Study in Scarlet: This is a full novel of Sherlock Holmes. It introduces him and Dr. John Watson. It gives a bit of back story for Watson and include their first case together. I was a bit confused when I first read it because I thought that it suddenly broke into an entirely different story with entirely different characters. But if you can stick with it, it’s well worth the read.

-A Scandal in Bohemia: This story introduces The Woman, Irene Adler. A bit of a warning for you Ritchie fans, she isn’t quite like the lovely Rachel McAdams portrayed. She certainly outwits Sherlock at every turn but I believe she had only one ‘spoken’ line in the entire story. It is one of the more fun stories in the Holmes verse.

–The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle: Sherlock solves a Christmas time mystery involving a felt hat, a dead goose and a blue carbuncle (a garnet related gem). This is another fun one.

–The Adventure of the Speckled Band: It’s an engaging story with a woman who is not quite the typical helpless Victorian lady. She’s in some what of an abusive relationship with her step-father but finds the courage to ask help from Holmes and Watson.

–The Final Problem: This is the one where Holmes faces down the dastardly (good word that, one hardly ever gets to use it) Professor James Moriarty. I believe I read somewhere (probably on the net so beware the ‘facts’) that Doyle so despised Holmes’ popularity at this point that he had killed off the detective in this story hoping to never return to writing him. Didn’t quite work out as planned.

–The Adventure of the Empty House: Holmes makes his triumphant return to London and his old friend Watson. I love this story because Watson has such a visceral reaction to Holmes’ return and yet I’m a little disappointed that Watson didn’t pop him one. I’m hoping that the BBC Watson will do that during the updated version of this story. 🙂

–The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot: This one features a Holmes’ that is less than the ‘superman’ that he was portrayed as previously. His poor habits during (and between) cases had left him on the verge of a break down and Watson takes him to recover in the country. Of course, life isn’t that simple for the pair and a murder mystery finds them.

–The Adventure of the Three Garridebs: Holmes investigates the story of a will with the strange stipulation that the inheritance be split between three adult men with the unusual last name of Garrideb. I like this one because we finally see a glimpse of just how much Watson means to Holmes.

There are many other stories that I enjoyed but these ones stick out most in my mind at the moment. I’m not sure what I’ll move on to next but this was a good break from my usual fare of urban fantasy. If you haven’t read Sherlock Holmes before, I highly suggest the stories. A+

A Perfect Blood

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**SPOILERS**

So I just plowed through Kim Harrison’s latest Rachel Morgan novel, A Perfect Blood. It was good and yet in parts of it I wanted to wring the main character’s neck. We’ve had quite a few of these books and apparently Rachel Morgan still goes off half-cocked with no plan and no back up only to be surprised when she gets captured by the baddies!

In this book, she’s essentially spayed herself magically speaking because she’s afraid of how people will treat her as a full powered demon. Not to mention she doesn’t want to live permanently in the ever after with Al and the other wacko demons. So for half the book or so we watch Rachel trying to continue working as she had before…but without any of her demon abilities because while she’s come out as a demon, apparently she just mentally has not accepted that her life will change.

And now we have a new group of bad guys who, while clearly focusing on Rachel for something, are more into the destruction of anything non-human rather than Rachel specifically. This makes a nice change from the previous books where the bad guys seem intent on wiping Rachel out simple because she’s Rachel.

At any rate, her life is changing and she’s getting frustrated that she can’t keep up. Ivy and Jenks are moving on with their respective others and Rachel is just a bit jealous because she doesn’t have one. She’s trying to talk herself out of a clear crush on elf Trent Kalamak and I’m note entirely certain why. He’s a bit of a dick, sure, but he’s also helped her out of quite a bit of trouble. Those two need to shag and get it over with already.

Eventually Rachel reaches a breaking point where she HAS to regain her demon powers by removing her charmed silver bracelet. From there, she ends up kicking her ass in her usual Three Stooges way. Let’s face it, she can fight and she can spell but she really has little common sense. She never waits for backup and she purposefully limits herself by dampening her powers. I really do like these books but sometimes Rachel Morgan just seems a little too cliche to me.

Rating: B–B+

Doubletake

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**SPOILERS** Do not read if you don’t want to have some plot revealed!

Rob Thurman is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. I really like her Cal Leandros and Trickster books. I just finished the latest Cal Leandros book, Doubletake. It starts out with our favorite brother Cal and Niko (I love this name by the way, don’t know why) getting hired by everyone’s favorite puck Robin Goodfellow to act as bouncers at apuck family reunion. If you think think your family reunions are awful, just imagine having 75 physical identical men, all con artists, trying to kill each other in the midst of an orgy. Yeah…just a bit disturbing and yet, funny as hell how it was written.

After that, we get introduced to Niko’s long lost father who is trying to get the brothers to help with some ancient Vayash (Romany clan) burden. No one believes that he’s here to reconcile with his son and everyone treats him quite like a leper. What is this man really after…? Read the book! Since it’s brand spankin’ new, I won’t give away the end! 😀

And then we find out what was in the empty cage at the end of the last book. A half Auphe who named himself Grimm who is trying to connect with Cal as a brother/fellow half-Auphe. Grimm is a total psycho who is bent on world domination. Yeah, a little cliche but its less that he wants to rule the world and more that he wants to tear it down and dance on the ashes. VERY good book and I can’t wait for the next one on either this series or the Trickster series. Rating: A+

Audiobooks?

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Okay, so I love James Marsters voicing the Dresden Files audiobooks but I’m looking for some ideas for some other audiobooks in the urban fantasy genre. Can anyone out there recommend a good audiobook? I’m thinking about Stephen Fry reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or possibly one of the Nightside novels. Suggestions for iTunes welcome (I don’t have Audible)!

500 Kingdoms-The Fairy Godmother

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And I’m back! Its been a while, I know but  its been busy, busy so far this year! Both good and bad I guess. 🙂 At any rate, I just plowed through Mercedes Lackey’s 500 Kingdoms novels recently. Normally I don’t go for the sort of pure fantasy novels. I prefer urban fantasy with guns and cars and pop culture jokes. Shallow of me perhaps but there you are. But I could not put these books down! These six books are new retellings of classic fairy tales that we all grew up with such as the Snow Queen and Sleeping Beauty.

Each book can be read on its own, which his nice, but they all tie together as well. The 500 Kingdoms are affected by a force called the Tradition. The Tradition is basically what happens when a story gets told and retold so often that it starts affecting the lives of people. Little girls with a nasty stepmother and two nasty stepsisters will find herself in a Cinderella type situation. Unfortunately, the Tradition isn’t perfect and doesn’t really care what the people themselves want. Sometimes the potential Cinderella will be a young lady who lives in a kingdom with an infant prince. She can’t have a happily ever after like that so what happens then? Why the Fairy godmothers of course! Godmothers are just very powerfully magic human women (though there are some real fairies in these tales) who are Tradition scholars and can manipulate it into a happy ending. They can transform a Cinderella into a Sleeping Beauty if that’s what it takes to get a happy ending.

The first book is The Fairy Godmother and it starts out with a sort of traditional Cinderella tale. The main character Elena Klovis has the nasty, wasteful stepmother (think Baroness de Ghent in Ever After) and the two nasty stepsisters and the deceased father. And, as hinted above, the prince in her kingdom is an infant. But Elena is far from helpless. She’s smart and determined to escape her currently life and make a better one for herself. She gets her chance when the stepmother decides to run from her creditors with her two daughters and try to marry them to quality in another kingdom.

Once the stepmother leaves and the creditors ransack the house, Elena goes to the town square to try and set herself up as a housekeeper. Everyone in town knows that Elena can clean, cook and mend and yet at the end of the day not one of them offers her a job. Just as you start feeling sorry for Elena, the ubiquitous ‘mysterious woman’ comes along and snatches her up. Of course, this woman is the Fairy Godmother for Elena’s kingdom. Since Elena was in a failed Cinderella story, the Tradition forced so much magic into her trying to make her fit a set path that Elena has the opportunity to become a Godmother and not just a mere servant. So the woman takes Elena to train

There is quite a bit of cliche in these books but I suppose one can only do so much to refresh well known fairy tales. Most of us could probably recent at least the gist of these stories in our sleep by the time we reach adulthood. Lackey keeps it from being a really yawner by throwing in a bunch of monkey wrenches at once to the newly minted Godmother Elena.  At this point you’re wondering if Elena will keep her cool and fix things or break down like so many typical female characters in a variety of stories and media. Well, you’ll just have to read it to find out!

I think this is definitely aimed more towards women than men. Not that there isn’t good fighting and puzzles but really, it’s fairy tales. I’m pretty sure my husband would find these stories dreadfully dull. 🙂  All in all, I’d rate this book a B+ and I really think that they get better from here, since this book really had to lay out the whole world Lackey created.

Hellworld

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Right, well, I’ve read quite a few books since the last review but I’ll start with the one I just finished, Simon R. Green’s Hellworld. This is one of the Deathstalker lead ins. It features a squad of the Empire’s least finest being sent down as the first colonists on a newly discovered world, Wolf IV. They’re referred to as a hell squad and they are expendable. They are fodder in case the new world contains an alien presence. Otherwise it’s their job to get the planet ready for the proper colonists.

The squad is lead by Captain Hunter, a former Rim commander. The squad contains two Imperial Marines, Lindholm and Corbie, an esper named DeChance, one Doctor Williams and an Investigator named Krystel. All of these people have done something to seriously piss off the Empress, which as established under the Deathstalker novels is not a good idea.

There is nothing known about Wolf IV when this squad is sent down other than it is capable of supporting life. When they land, it’s a situation of ‘a little too quiet’. There are no nature sounds like birds or insects. The ground is hard and cracked and the whole planet has quite an active volcanic area some miles from the landing zone. It looks like it’s going to be a very boring time on the planet until the ship’s sensors pick up what is very definitely an alien city some fifteen or so miles from the landing site.

The decision is made to investigate the city in case there is a current alien presence on the planet. First though, they have to make it through the forest that is between them and the city. Only it isn’t a forest as we know here on earth. This forest is sentient and hungry. In the end, they have to go around rather than through, meaning the group gets split in half.

After a harrowing night and a couple more alien attacks, both groups make it to the city where they apparently lose contact with each other due to outside interference. Turns out that there is a building, a machine really, in the middle of the city that is the cause of pretty much everything. It’s power runs the aliens, so to speak, and it is quite definitely insane.

I’d forgotten how good this book is. I hadn’t read this or the other two pre-Deathstalker novels in years mainly because I didn’t own them and they were out of print until recently (Kindle is awesome!). The only one of the books I really remembered was Mistworld so I went into this book with a blank slate as it were and I was not disappointed. I’m a huge Simon R Green fan and this was a very good book. Get it. A.

Break Time

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Okay, so the folks are out for Thanksgiving (US holiday for anyone outside the country). And due to someone trying to hack my debit card a few days ago, I might not have any new review materials for a week or so. I am still looking for recommendations. Urban fantasy and steampunk in particular. If anyone has suggestions, bring ’em on! 🙂

Whitechapel Gods

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Whitechapel Gods by S.M. Peters. It is very steampunk. But it’s not a comedic steampunk like I’m used to reading. I’d say it’s more like a 40s pulp or film noir type steampunk. So, some spoilers below I’m sure.

The area of Whitechapel (where Jack the Ripper wen on his infamous rampage) in London has been cut off from the rest of Britain by a wall and two mechanical gods, Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine. I don’t think Peters ever said for sure how these creatures came to Whitechapel or what exactly their purpose was. Other than making the residents of Whitechapel miserable that is.

The book focuses on the rebellion against Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine. The humans that aren’t cowed and whipped into submission (for whatever reason), are trying to destroy the two so-called gods. There are severe health problems among the residents of Whitechapel that includes lung disease (from breathing the severely sooty air) and a condition called the Clacks, where humans are invaded by mechanics because of the two Gods. Humans are also, apparently, the fuel for Mama Engine. Yum.

At any rate, the book follows various groups of rebels and collaborators as they attempt to either bring down one or both of the gods. Peters tends to jump around from group to group but he does fairly well in keeping it from getting confusing, which I appreciate. Not every writer can do that.

Over all, I rather enjoyed the book. I think the grittiness and seriousness of the story was very much in tune with how the lives of Victorian industrial workers would be. Some steampunk books ignore the fact that Victorian England was a gritty, sooty place where fog turned yellow from coal dust and where there was a severely huge gap between the haves and the have nots. Peters didn’t do this.

However, I would have liked to know where these two so-called gods came from, what it was they were working toward and what the British government’s response was to suddenly losing a portion of it’s city. So Whitechapel Gods is certainly worth the read but don’t go expecting those sorts of answers. B-

Archangel’s Consort

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I rather like the Archangel books by Nalini Singh. They’re a very novel take on vampires and angels. One of the latest books is Archangel’s Consort. The plot is intriguing but I was rather disappointed by all the sex. Yeah, that’s right. The first book was rife with UST (unresolved sexual tension) between Guild Hunter Elena and Archangel Raphael. It took them a long time to get to the sex. In the second book, they were constricted because of Elena’s injuries. In this book, there wasn’t any constrictions and the sex didn’t move the plot along. At all. There could have been much, much less of it and the book would be better off.

That being said, it was interesting to see the introduction of Raphael’s mother, Caliane. Caliane, and an unknown number of ancient archangels, are in a state called Sleep. Yes with a capital S. It seems that when these immortals get bored they basically hibernate until they’re no longer bored or have cured whatever injury or madness has ailed them. And unfortunately, Caliane was mad when she hibernated.

When a Sleeper awakes, the power of the individual will set off calamities around the world. Strange weather patterns, earthquakes, tidal waves and even aberrant behavior in vampires and angels. Even archangels.  Since it is impossible for anyone to know who is waking with certainty, Raphael fears that it is his mother and that she is still mad. If she is, he would have to try and kill her. In this arc, no maddened angel or vampire is allowed to live. The trouble being, how does one kill an archangel who is a good fifty thousand years old an immeasurably powerful.

That is why fellow archangel Lijuan tries to convince Raphael to kill his mother before she wakes, in violation of one of angel kind’s deepest and oldest taboos. Unfortunately, Lijuan has ‘evolved’ into something that is far more demonic than angelic and therefore does not exude trustworthiness.

In any case, the story itself is quite interesting. If the sex had been toned down, I’d have given it an A, as it is I’ll have to give it a B because it annoyed me. There is more to urban fantasy than just sex. Look at The Dresden Files or The Nightside books. Sex is sprinkled in sparingly and they are awesome.