Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Another Wild Ride With Coben


Missing You by Harlan Coben
2014
Reviewed by Diane K.M.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars


I have a weakness for Harlan Coben thrillers. Every time I pick up a Coben novel, I get gripped by the story and race through the book, ignoring everything around me.

"Missing You" was no different. It follows Kat Donovan, an NYPD detective, who is investigating the case of a missing woman, but she's also secretly trying to figure out who murdered her father almost 20 years ago. (Yes, yes, the proliferation of crime TV shows means it's become a cop trope that an officer is haunted by a parent's homicide, but just roll with it.)

Anyway, Kat is working multiple leads, one of which involves her ex-boyfriend, Jeff, who might be mixed up in something illegal. 

The plot sprints along, and I gobbled up half the book in one sitting. Three-fourths of the way through I texted my Coben-reading buddy and asked WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?? But I should have known that everything comes together in the end. Wowser.

Sorry this review is so light on details, but to give more would take all the fun out of it. If this is your first Coben, you're in for a wild ride. 

Favorite Quote:
"We all have our demons. But men? They have them much worse. The world tells them that they are the leaders and great and macho and have to be big and brave and make a lot of money and lead these glamorous lives. But they don't, do they? Look at the men in this neighborhood. They all worked too many hours. They came home to noisy, demanding homes. Something was always broken they needed to fix. They were always behind on the house payments. Women, we get it. Life is about a certain kind of drudgery. We are taught not to hope or want too much. Men? They never get that."

Ask the Bloggers - Greg from 2 Book Lovers

Today's guest is Greg from 2 Book Lovers.

What made you want to be a book blogger?
That’s easy, taxes, now the $1,000.00 per year we spent on books is a business expense and non-taxable income. Actually, my wife and I are both avid readers. We both love our books, but not each other’s. We were talking to each other all of the time about our books and not really being able to share the experience. We decided to start the blog so that we could share our book experiences with people who actually share the same book interests.

What have been your best book blogging experiences?
I have a couple. One of the first was after we set up our blog and we decided we needed to do some networking. We decided that it would be fun to do on a weekend evening. We set up our Facebook pages and our Goodreads users and then went following and friending our favorite authors. The Goodreads friend requests came back fast enough, but not much happened on Facebook. Then Monday morning when I was at work she sent me an e-mail, my Facebook page had gotten a like. One of my favorite authors, David Moody, had liked my Facebook page. We have had many good experiences since then, but that one has stuck with me.

What has been your worst book blogging experience?
That would have to have been an R4R (read for review) that I had done early on. The premise looked good, the author had very few reviews. I decided to read it, it was awful! I could not make it past 10%. I looked at my Kindle and I had another 9 hours to go. I could not invest another 9 hours of my life into something so bad. The worst part, and I am ashamed of myself for this, is I never got back to the author. I could not find a way to say how bad it was and to tear apart all of the hard work that author had done. I have since changed my tactics and have let them (not that there are many) know in a constructive and polite way. It’s a learning and growing experience.

How many books do you own?
On my Kindle 344. On our bookshelves, too many to count.

Who is your favorite author?
That is a loaded question. It really depends on my mood. George R.R. Martin is near the top of the list, but he frustrates me with how long I have to wait for the next book. Recently, I have taken a liking to Jussi Adler-Olsen. There are a couple of indie authors I have read this year and I am always looking for their next books: Tracey Ward, I was hooked on her Survival Series (it’s YA/PA), and Jason Brant’s Hunger Series, I ate it up.

What is your favorite book of all time?
The Odyssey, by Homer (not Simpson). There is a reason why that one survived over three thousand years.

What are your thoughts on ebooks?
I love ebooks. I read almost exclusively on my Kindle now. It allows more access to books for more people. Anything that gets people reading is a good thing.

What are your thoughts on self-publishing?
Some of my favorite authors are self-published. I would compare indie authors to cable television. They can do things and say things that the published authors cannot, self-published authors can push the envelope without the worry of offending someone and not appealing to the masses. And just like we have seen with cable TV, you get better quality when it is not vanilla.

Any literary aspirations?
Do I think that I have a story that I could tell? Yes. Do I think that I can tell it as good as the authors that I like to read? No way. I do not have the guts that it takes to give up the day job and put my 100% into it. With 2-3 hours in the car each day and 8 hours at work, I just do not have the time necessary to put out a quality product.

What's your favorite joke of all time?
If you run a family friendly blog and can’t put this on I’ll come up with a replacement, so here it goes.
Two fleas who had gone south for the winter were on the beach in Florida. The one flea noticed that the other was shaking and staggering around.
He asked his friend, “What’s the problem?”
The other flea replied, “Well, this year I was having trouble finding a ride down. So finally, I snuck into a man’s mustache and he came here by motorcycle. It was a bumpy ride and the wind tossed me all over his mustache. I had to hang on for my life.”
The first flea offered a solution, “You will have to try what I do. I go to the airport and find a flight attendant. I crawl up her leg and find a nice cozy spot, then curl up for a nap. Before I know it we are getting off of the plane and I’m here for the winter.”
“That’s a great idea! Next year, that is exactly what I will do!”
The two fleas meet again on the beach the following winter. The same flea was still staggering around the beach.
His friend asked him, “What happened? Didn’t you take my advice?”
“I did exactly what you said. I went to the airport, found a flight attendant, crawled up her leg and took a nap. The next thing I knew I was in a guy’s mustache, on a motorcycle headed to Florida.”

Ask the Bloggers - Nikki from Bibliophibian

Today's guest is Nikki from Bibliophibian.

What made you want to be a book blogger? 
Talking to people after my visit to Angry Robot HQ! Before that, I just stuck to Goodreads, and it was half just to keep control of my library. Now I spend more time on my blog than on GR or LT; it's nice to have a space that's my own, and to feel free from the need to catalogue everything there. Now I can just post selected reviews, and there's room for other bookish content as well.

What have been your best book blogging experiences? 
I don't think there's any one thing I could put my finger on, so far. I just love the sense of community, the fact that every week something I post will connect me to dozens of other people who want to talk about the same things. Pretty revolutionary stuff to the kind of person who was bullied in school partly because of their love of books!

What has been your worst book blogging experience? 
When I hosted an author for a Q&A and some troll who didn't like me came to comment on it, and said some awful things about her. I knew she'd see them, because she's a friend and reads my blog anyway, but I didn't want to delete them because I wanted my response to be right there, like, 'you don't bother me'. Ugh.

How many books do you own? 
Uh. Well, I know I own 600 on Kindle, and I own 20 or so on Kobo. (I'm trying to diversify, now. A lot of the Kindle ones were free ones, though.) Then there's Baen and Weightless Books, which are the bane of my reading list. Then add my print books... I know I've got at least another 500 here where I'm living now, and probably way more than that at home. Despite my obsessive GR cataloguing, I don't really know the answer, because I also catalogue library books, books I give away, etc. It's easier for me to say how many I've read: approximately 2,600, though that misses out tons of series I read as a kid like Animorphs (does anyone else remember Animorphs?!) and, uh, well. Sabrina the Teenage Witch books.

Who is your favorite author?
Probably Jo Walton, but I might be biased because I know she's a great person too. I've enjoyed everything she's written, or at least appreciated it. Of course, I could always say Tolkien, because I could read The Lord of the Rings over and over again -- as a medievalist to MA level, I think it's pure genius -- and his academic work was astonishing too. And then there's Dorothy L. Sayers, because Lord Peter more or less saved my life, or -- I'll stop now.

What is your favorite book of all time?
sfksbgkjskfb I plead the fifth. I'm not American, can I still plead the fifth? But no, I think maybe Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence has to go here, and if I chose just one of those, it'd be The Grey King. Bran bowled me over and I was so proud of my Welsh heritage and all the Welsh connections to King Arthur, etc.

What are your thoughts on ebooks?
Love 'em. As you can guess from my answer to number four. I like both ebooks and dead tree books, for myself; I don't see it as a dichotomy. And I've posted a couple of times about the benefits of ereaders when it comes to accessibility too: my mother has macular degeneration, and I volunteer in the local eye clinic, so I'm very conscious of how much people love books. It's often the major concern people raise with me when they're upset at the clinic: "But how am I going to read?" Thank goodness there's answers for that now.

What are your thoughts on self-publishing?
I think it's a model that works for some people and not others. Authors have to be ready to get behind their books and really push when they self-publish, and some of them end up doing that in a really obnoxious way. It's a learning curve, I think, too, so I tend to be pretty tolerant of people putting out their first books. The thing I can't abide is sloppy editing: self-publishing is a way to get your book to people to read and enjoy in the way that suits you, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean avoiding everything about traditional publishing, including professional editing.

Any literary aspirations?
Sometimes. It comes and goes! I'd love to write and contribute to the amazing amount of diversity that's out there in the book market, someday. But the fact that I say 'someday' does show that I'm really not in a hurry about that...

What's your favorite joke of all time?
Hm. I'm not actually very good with jokes. I'll leave you with a pithy piece of advice from my dad that's almost like a joke, back when I first went to university and had to live with people I didn't know well. "If two people live together and claim they never argue, either a) they're lying or b) one of them has a gun."

I hasten to add, my parents argue."