Loch Ness Revenge

Loch Ness Revenge by Hunter Shea
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When she was a child, Natalie McQueen watched the Loch Ness monster kill and eat her parents. Now, she's back at the Loch to get some payback!

As I've mentioned in other reviews, I spent a lot of my pre-teen years reading about cryptozoology, although I didn't know the term for it at the time. I spent countless afternoons reading about weird monsters, usually in books written by Daniel Cohen. Hunter Shea must have read some of the same books.

Loch Ness Revenge is just what the title says it is, a bloody tale of monster-hunting and carnage. It's also a hell of a lot of fun.

Natalie, plagued by night terrors, has been wanting to get revenge on the Loch Ness Monster for most of her life. Now, with her twin brother Austin and his monster hunter friend Henrik, she gets her chance.

This book was a hell of a lot of fun. Natalie and her friends have no idea how ill-equipped they are or even the number of monsters they face. Hunter references a lot of Loch Ness lore and theories, like the debunked surgeon's photo and the ideas that Nessie is some kind of plesiosaur or new form of seal.

While there's a lot of bloodshed, there's also a good amount of humor, although never when it would detract from the horror. Shea's writing has quite a punch to it and the story never feels like it's overstaying its welcome. While it's not a long book, it was the perfect length for what it was.

This was my first Hunter Shea book and now I'll probably be reading the rest of his cryptozoological horrors. Four out of five stars.

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The Last Place You Look

Kristen Lepionka
Minotaur Books
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Summary

Sarah Cook, a beautiful blonde teenager disappeared fifteen years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend Brad Stockton - black and from the wrong side of the tracks - was convicted of the murders and sits on death row, though he always maintained his innocence. With his execution only weeks away, his devoted sister, insisting she has spotted Sarah at a local gas station, hires PI Roxane Weary to look again at the case.

Reeling from the recent death of her cop father, Roxane finds herself drawn to the story of Sarah's vanishing act, especially when she thinks she's linked Sarah's disappearance to one of her father's unsolved murder cases involving another teen girl. Despite her self-destructive tendencies, Roxane starts to hope that maybe she can save Brad's life and her own.

With echoes of Sue Grafton, Dennis Lehane and the hit podcast Serial, The Last Place You Look is the gripping debut of both a bold new voice and character.

My Review

Thanks to karen for bringing this to my attention and making it possible for me to get a copy from NetGalley. Because I forgot my password and took too long to get a new one, I decided to grab it from the library instead. Amazingly, I was the first to get my hands on a brand-new copy. Curses to Trump and others who want to defund our public libraries!

Despite the high ratings for this story, I expected a conventional crime novel with a badass PI who could do no wrong. Roxane Weary is nowhere near that perfect. Though she’s smart and competent at her job, she drinks way too much and has difficulty with relationships. She’s also grieving the death of her cop father, a man Roxane had a stormy relationship with despite their likeness in character.

Roxane takes on a difficult case involving a missing teenager and her black boyfriend, Brad Stockton, whose time on death row is fast running out. What seems like a cut and dried case turns out to be far more complex and connected to an earlier case her father was involved in.

This story explores racism, small-town secrecy, and family relationships that are not so harmonious. It was easy to pick up and difficult to put down. I was ready to be disappointed at figuring out the villain so soon and instead encountered more twists and surprises. The tension and excitement became so overwhelming at times that I forgot to breathe!

I liked that Roxane was in a relationship with Tom, her deceased father’s former partner, and Catherine, a woman who drifts in and out of her life. Her bisexuality was very positively and realistically portrayed. It was organic, treated as one of many aspects of her life and not just added in for titillation. Roxane is not promiscuous, indecisive, or just going through a phase. Kudos to Kristen Lepionka for helping to dispel ugly myths about bisexuality and creating such a fascinating character.

Can’t wait to see where Roxane’s life will take her next.

JLA: Earth 2

JLA: Earth 2 by Grant Morrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A mirror world exists, it's antimatter to Earth's matter, evil prevails over good, and life isn't fun for anyone. Welcome to Earth 2.



I've near been a dedicated comic reader so until recently I knew next to nothing about Earth 2. Season 2 of the Flash revolves around breaches to Earth 2 being open so I decided to read about Earth 2. It's basically what I expected, but things are a bit more convoluted. Evil wins over good on this antimatter Earth and people's hearts are on the other side of their bodies. The characters aren't simply the opposite of one another for the exception of Lex Luthor and Superman/Ultraman. Even then Ultraman's origin differs significantly from Superman's.

Earth 2 is a cool concept, but the storytelling was just OK.

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CADILLAC JACK BY LARRY MCMURTRY

Cadillac Jack by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.”


Larry McMurtry or Cadillac Jack

Cadillac Jack derives his name from the transportation he preferred to use for travelling all around the countryside, a ”pearl-colored Cadillac with peach velour interior.” He is a retired rodeo cowboy who has found his true calling in life, chasing down antiques along with a series of women in every port of call. Love and lust are indistinguishable, whether he is talking about a gold leafed, quadripartite, Russian icon or a long legged, curvy, antique store owner. He does sometimes play up his ancestry from Texas, especially when he is seducing women in, say, the Washington D. C. area.

”What I supposed, when I finally set off for Georgetown, was that even a lady who owned three trendy stores might derive a faint buzz from the combination of doeskin jacket, yellow boots, albino-diamondback hatband, and Valentino hubcaps, not to mention six feet five of me.

In the event, Cindy hardly gave the combination a glance.

‘It was a little over-studied,’ she said later, with characteristic candor.”

Over-studied or not, Cindy, though engaged to be married, does the be bop bang with Cadillac Jack.

He has an ex-wife, Coffee, who calls him nearly every day. He is never far from a woman he knows he can spend some time with, whether he is in Spokane, Washington, or Hope, Arkansas, or Montpelier, Vermont. If he thinks he will lack for company, he can always talk some woman into going on the road with him in search of the next great find.

Needless to say, Cadillac Jack has impulse control. If it sounds good, he doesn’t hesitate. If he could just find one new object or meet a new interesting woman every day, how could he ever die?

”One of my firmest principles is that those who sell should not keep. The minute a scout starts keeping his best finds he becomes a collector. All scouts have love affairs with objects, but true scouts have brief intense passions, not marriages. I didn’t want to own something I loved so much I wouldn’t sell it.”

You might have to get Jack good and drunk before he would ever admit it, but he feels the same way about women. He is romantic, but to keep the blush alive, he has to drift in and out of their lives and keep searching for that next woman with object issues of her own. The women who are in the trade, whether they are sellers or buyers, are most likely to understand him, however briefly, anyway.

Jack also makes a lot of lifelong friends along the way. One of them I felt an instant affinity for, as well. ”On nights when he wasn’t too drunk to hold a book, he read himself to sleep with Thucydides, Livy, Suetonius, Gibbon, and Napier. Every ugly suit he owned had a raggedy Penguin paperback in the inside pocket, always history.”

When Jack finds out that the Smithsonian is selling off warehouses full of objects, so much blood goes to his groin so quickly that he nearly passes out. He spends a good part of the book trying to get a line on a score to beat all scores, but at the same time, if he swings a deal like this, will he ever be satisfied with a pair of boots once owned by Billy the Kid or with a set of Rudolph Valentino hubcaps? Climbing the mountain to the top just might ruin his life.


Larry McMurtry

It has been a long time since I’ve read a Larry McMurtry book. He came into my mind the other day because I was thinking about one of the times I met him. He was doing a signing in Tucson. I brought up a first edition of All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers. He was tickled to see a copy. He offered to buy it from me. I said I might be more interested in selling it to you after you sign it (author signed it would at least double in value), which made him laugh. As I was reading this book, I couldn’t really separate the man that I had met on a few occasions with the man in the pearl-colored Cadillac.

McMurtry was known through the book industry as a wheeler and a dealer for books, as well as anything unusual or rare or beautiful. He was more a collector than a seller, but I’ve known of at least once when he sold off part of his book collection. Unique objects are wonderful to own, but sometimes they get used up, and one must depart on an odyssey for something new, something special.

I just briefly glanced through some of the reviews regarding this book before I started reading it. Like with most of his books, the reviews always seem to say something along the lines of, I’m not a prude, but the sex just got to be too much. I think anytime anyone starts a sentence with I’m not a prude followed by... but... they are defining themselves as a prude. Nothing wrong with that, but it is interesting that they don’t just say the amount of sex in the story made them uncomfortable. They are uncomfortable with their uncomfortableness.

I will close with a few lines that I really liked from the book that couldn’t be worked into the review. ”But a lot of hard-drinking, fast-fucking grandmothers had lost their hero.” Quite the visual McMurtry has placed in your mind, but how about this one? ”The juice of many men would stain her lips for a time, before she reduced them to mulberry-colored pulp.” Stain just really makes that line shudder worthy, or how about the bored, Rubenesque youngsters he meets in a hot tub whorehouse? ”That why we work at the Double Bubble. I’d rather suck off Congressmen than sit around the house.”

Consider yourself duly warned. If you are looking for a book that shows off his literary capabilities, grab a copy of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove. For me, I’m going to be thinking about Cadillac Jack for a long time. He might just pull up someday in my driveway with a book so perfect that it cleans out my bank account.

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"S-M-R-T!"

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Isn't it amazing that a person can read a book like A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and come away feeling both smarter and dumber than before he started? What a universe we live in!

It's quite short and generally a quick read. Not every page is filled with mind-numbing theories and brain-busting equations. Some of it is just history, say on Newton and such. However, there were a few pages worth of passages where my wee brain felt like it was getting sucked into a black hole...mainly during the black hole segment.

I've forgotten so much since I left school, and since school was such a long time ago, some of what was taught back then is now outdated, so it was nice to read this refresher/cleanser.

I came away with a better understanding of the Big Bang theory and why it's plausible. I'm trying to sort out the time/space quantifiability thing. That's going to require a reread...and probably further study elsewhere.

Surprisingly, I also came away with the idea that God and science can coexist. I didn't expect that. I figured someone like Hawking would be like, "God? Pssh, whatever." But that's not his take at all, or at least that not the impression this book left me with.

A Brief History of Time was written with accessibility in mind, knowing full well idiots like me wouldn't buy it, read it or recommend it if it were impossibly dense. Hawking's sense of humor even comes through on occasion, which is always appreciated in these sciencey texty thingies. So, I'll probably move on to his Briefer History... next and I'd be quite willing to read others as well!



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Marple on a Mystery Train

4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An enjoyable quickie. Fittingly, it's the sort of mystery quick-fix you could finish on a train, say London to York...or better yet, London to Paris!

In 4.50 from Paddington an old lady witnesses what she believes is a murder on another train traveling alongside hers. The police have nothing to go on besides her story and they're disinclined to believe her. In steps Miss Marple, that aged busybody. With the help of a young acquaintance, Marple strings together the evidence from the sidelines.

In fact, Marple appears in this book very little. Scenes play out, red herrings are dropped about the reader commingled with the real story, and Marple stitches them together or assists with helpful advice from afar before arriving on the scene to deliver the decisive blow in the end.

I believe this is only my second Miss Marple and as I said, it was quite enjoyable. Sure, it's a tad quaint in a "Murder She Wrote" way, but it's a nice change from the bloody-minded crime novels. I'd give it perhaps 4 stars if it had a touch more depth and ingenuity. But the premise is good and on the whole it's a perfect diversion for a short journey.

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Bait

Bait by J. Kent Messum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Six heroin addicts wake up on an island in the Florida keys with no idea who they wound up there. The only thing standing between them and a top quality heroin fix on the next island is an expanse of shark-infested water...

When J. Kent Messum hit me up to review an ARC of this, I hesitated at first. Until I read about the sharks and the heroin, that is! Who doesn't like grim death sports? Welcome to the Heroin Games! May the odds be ever in your favor...

Jokes aside, this was pretty bad ass. While the characters weren't super-detailed, who the hell expects them to be? They're chum for a bunch of sharks!

The structure of the story added a lot to the experience, using shifting viewpoints and different points in time to tell the stories of the unwilling contestants before they wound up being shark bait for some sick bastards' amusement.

I felt like I was sitting right alongside the spectators on the boat, wondering who would be devoured next. I was wrong about who the last person standing would be, a nice surprise.

There's some serious gore in Bait. I let out a few audible groans during this, disturbing my dog. The suspense of the shark attacks was masterfully done. The ending was good and, as I said, a nice surprise.

Bait is a chum-spattered good time, a lot of fun in a time when we could all use some. Four out of five stars.

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"Dark Sky" Stuck in a Revolution Story Drowns out Fun Vibe of first book

"Dark Run", the first book in Mike Brooks "Dark" series was a blowout fun read.

A scamp spaceship captained by Ichabod Drift, a rogue and ex-privateer, not afraid to step across the legal line, and crewed by a likable set of characters, including Tamara Rourke, an ex-spy, who thwarted a plot to drop a nuke on Amsterdam, and then went after the potential perpetrator by conniving and fooling the military that they were a select crew employed by Rourke's old spy organization, it had all the great elements of old style science fiction spaceship books. I re-read it again just before reading Dark Sky, the second book in this series, and it still held me in thrall.

"Dark Sky", not so much.

Although readers may clamor for more of the same thing, its not unusual for a novelist to try to do a different story. But this story, is just not that much fun. Revolutions are not fun and when our fun crew gets " stuck on planet during a revolution" all the fun bits that we liked in the first story disappear.

We all know the story, although Brooks re-tells it slightly differently. The setting is interesting, the planet is subject to intense storms so all of the people live underground. The planet was settled for its ore and the miners are treated horribly by the governor and the far flung Russian empire that runs the planet for the ore.

The miners start the revolution to oust the government just as Drift and his crew arrive on planet to smuggle information off planet to the system's strongman and casino owner. Naturally the crew ends up split up, with Drift and two of his crew, Jia Chang, his pilot and her brother Kaua, the ship engineer, stuck fighting for the local security forces, while Jenna, their computer slice (hacker) and Apirana, (their muscle) end up separated when Apirana gets wounded and Rourke lands with the revolutionaries.

While Drift ingratiates himself with the outnumbered chief of the security forces by helping them in a gun battle, Rourke convinces the patriots of her worth (based on her knowledge of security forces protocol). Meanwhile Jenna and Apirana soon join Rourke, but Apirana is hurt. Making matters worse for our crew is that another spaceship is on planet as well, this one led by Ricardo Moutinho, a bad apple, whose only redeeming quality is the size of his equipment. Moutinho's crew has also been separated during the early days of the revolution, so he and Rourke end up working together with revolutionaries.

In the end, the two split crews have to work together to get off planet before government forces come to put down the revolution. Its all very predictable.

Fun crew, some good dialogue. Tired story.

I am hoping that Brooks finds a fun story in the upcoming third book.

Art in Transit

Keith Haring & Tseng Kwong Chi
Random House Publishing
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

My Review

I left New York in 1976, so I never had the pleasure of seeing Keith Haring’s subway drawings.

As someone who was brought up never to deface public property, I have mixed feelings about graffiti art. The closest I’ve ever come to practicing the art form was the childish drawings I did on our apartment walls in colored pencils. As I got older, and graffiti proliferated on every public space in New York City, my dad always told me he’d break both my arms if he ever found out I was drawing or hanging out with kids who did.

So you can imagine how daring I felt when my best friend and I drew on buildings and sidewalks using colored chalk. Knowing the drawings would be washed away with the next rain kept me from feeling guilty about defacing public property. Our art was nowhere near as sophisticated as the colorful drawings made by experienced practitioners using spray paint, but I get why people enjoy doing it. It is a way to express oneself and prove our existence by leaving a mark.

I hated the scribbling, the crude stick figures, the hearts with initials inside. To me, that is graffiti vandalism. What I do enjoy is the colorful art that engages the viewer.

Keith Haring’s subway drawings were done in chalk on the empty black paper panels used for advertising. They were artistic, imaginative and confrontational. They had to be done quickly, as he faced fines and arrest if the transit police caught him.

The chalk drawings didn’t last very long, so Keith’s friend, Tseng Kwong Chi, volunteered to photograph the works.

One of my favorite drawings is next to the movie billboard advertising Amin: The Rise and Fall. The radiant babies drawn on the 1982 issue of Penthouse featuring Morgan Fairchild made me laugh.

While this is a wonderful documentation of Keith’s art, it also does a nice job capturing the diversity of the people who ride the subways and shows a glimpse of 80’s culture. I had forgotten how skanky the NYC subway system was in those days.

Sadly, Tseng Kwong Chi died of AIDS complications in 1990, just weeks after Keith did.

I’m glad this book exists.

The Core

The Core by Peter V. Brett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Warded Man Arlen Bales and the Shar'Dama Ka Ahmann Jardir in their passion to rid the world of demons have unintentionally triggered a swarm which threatens to devour mankind. All hope is not yet lost as Arlen has a plan to exterminate the Mother of Demons by going to the Core.

Peter V. Brett saved his best for last as The Core is an exceptional novel and ending to the Demon Cycle series. All the characters from the series seem to have a part to play or a mention from Rusco Hog to Arlen's old sweetheart Mery. The tensions are high and every character displayed their true selves by the end...for better or worse.

The fear of the night returned in The Core. Humanity thought the night was terrifying before the return of the combat wards, but they didn't know what terror truly was yet. The mindless demons were never far from a Mimic to lead them when the Mind's were away. The Mind demons made their former battles look like a warm-up act as the true show was displayed in The Core. I didn't imagine just how devastating or sadistic the Mind's could be.

The true strength of The Core and the series as a whole was it's characters. The main stars lovingly grew from page to page and book to book until they were warriors worthy of the great demon war. My pulse raced as I devoured the book and anxiously sought to know what happened to everyone especially Arlen and Jardir.

The Demon Cycle couldn't have ended in any finer way than it did in The Core. This book is now one of my all-time favorites. In fact I think I'll flip to page one and start reading it again.

5 out of 5 stars

I received this ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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