Daily Archives: January 4, 2010
Quickly
| January 4, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Bone Walker |
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Only a couple hundred words written tonight, but I am pleased nonetheless!
Written tonight: 212
Chapter 7 total: 720
Bone Walker total (first draft): 17,454
Book Log #2: Black Hills, by Nora Roberts
| January 4, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Book Log |
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As I’ve gotten accustomed to at this point, Nora Roberts turns in a decently entertaining and suspenseful little story with Black Hills, one of her most recent works. There’s nothing here that’s particularly unusual compared to all of her other works; she certainly utilizes a lot of her familiar tropes here, such as the hero being a former cop, and focusing less on surprising you with the identity of the killer and more upon the suspense involved with setting up where and how he will strike next and how the good guys will finally track him down.
This time around, what makes the story work for me is the fact that she takes the time to show us the childhoods of Lil and Cooper, following them from when they first met as youngsters, up through when they first consummate their blossoming affections as young adults, and on up through to the current day–when Lil has established a wildlife refuge and Coop is coming back to the Black Hills to look after his aging grandparents and to put his past as a cop behind him. There’s nice character development between him and Lil through the whole book, as the two of them strive to deal with the emotional weight of their past and the simple fact that they’re still in love with each other.
Since this is of course a Nora Roberts novel, there’s a killer on the loose to spice things up. And after all the romantic suspense novels of hers I’ve read, she’s pretty much got the formula down. Again, nothing terribly unusual in this book’s particular psychopath du jour, how he perceives our heroine, and what ultimately happens to bring about his downfall… but it’s all competently executed and an engaging read. Three stars.
Book Log #1: Too Good to Forget, by Marilyn Tracy
| January 4, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Book Log |
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This is a book I first read as a loaner from the fabulous (who knows me all too well), and she recently found it again and loaned it to me–and I cheerfully zipped right through it. Let’s face it, folks, Marilyn Tracy’s Too Good to Forget is about as fluffy as a romance gets. And yet? It’s cheesy in all the best cheesy romance ways. It helps a lot that it employs two of my favorite cheesy plot devices: a) one of the lead characters is a writer, and b) the hero has amnesia!
In this particular case, the hero happens to be a Treasury agent who’s out on a stakeout with his partner, who gives him quite a bit of good-natured ribbing about the fact that he’s got on a swanky suit and is carrying around a paperback in his pocket because his favorite author is having a signing he wants to attend. And by “favorite author”, I mean “hot writer babe he totally is in love with, despite the fact that she’s married”. But OHNOEZ! The agents discover their boss is the bad guy they’re trying to identify–and the boss promptly shoots them both, leaving the hapless partner to die in our hero’s arms, and our hero to stumble off in a frantic haze, because he’s been shot in the head and is all angsty that his partner just got killed and his boss is a bastard and stuff.
Raise your hand if you’re surprised that we have a jump cut over to the aforementioned signing, wherein our heroine is valiantly attempting to carry on the latest episode in her long-running game of Pretend She Actually Has a Husband Because It Helps Her Sell Books. Boy, is she surprised when a wounded stranger wanders into the bookstore, comes right up to her, calls her “Katherine”, and smooches her in front of her adoring fans and shell-shocked cousin! 
‘Cause it just so happens that our Treasury agent has the exact same name as her alleged “husband”, and he’s gone and decided he is in fact her Sam MacDonald.
You can probably figure out where the plot’s going to go from there, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Most of it has to do with Katherine and her loyal cousin frantically trying to figure out what to do with a Treasury agent who’s clearly off his rocker, and by “off his rocker”, I mean “Katherine secretly finds him totally romantic and wishes he really was her husband.” But the bad-guy boss of course resurfaces at the end, and, well, you can probably figure out what happens from there, too.
And in a lot of ways the flavor of the novel is archaic even for the year it came out, i.e., 1991; the fact that our hero could use the phrase “not worth a plugged nickel” without apparent irony made me wonder if he’d somehow gotten knocked back into 1935 or something when he got shot in the head. Yet, I didn’t particularly care; it added a sort of innocent charm to the whole thing, and made me glad to revisit it as my first read for 2010. If it were available in ebook form, I’d totally be buying it. Three stars.
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