January 2010

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.

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.

My last read of 2009 is my fellow Drollerie author Michael Stewart’s 24 Bones, a book that’s surprisingly hard to pin down into any specific genre. It’s set in the modern day world, and yet it doesn’t play out like what most readers would think of as “urban fantasy”; the feel of it is much more akin to a suspense novel, albeit with fantastic elements, i.e., Egyptian gods coming to life. You might be tempted to think Dan Brown when you think of how this book’s about the clash between two ancient Egyptian cults and how a professor from Toronto is pulled into it when he receives a cryptic coded message. Don’t. This book is simultaneously more and less complicated than a Brown novel, in all the correct ways.

We have the Shemsu Hor and the Shemsu Seth at each other’s throats as the time of Seth’s ascension is at hand, and Horus is on the wane. Set off against them both are the Sisters of Isis, keepers of the Balance, who are determined to keep both good and evil from becoming too dominant. And against this larger backdrop we have Samiya of the Shemsu Seth, raised to do evil, use the powers of the Void, and serve the Pharoah–while Taggart Quinn, hauled into this conflict by the mysterious message he’s received, learns that his place in the unfolding events is far greater than he could have imagined.

There were times when I had a bit of difficulty following the events of the story; the narrative jumps very quickly from one event to the next when there surely must have been a little time between them, particularly in the latter half. More than once I had a “wait, what?” reaction, and this kept me from finishing the story as quickly as is my wont, since I had to take the time to absorb what I’d just read. But, that said, I was genuinely surprised by some of the directions this plot took, and I have to give it huge props for that.

Props too for the final tying together of the plot threads involving Taggart and Sam, and for the moment of delicious irony when a TV evangelist’s flock, called to prayer during the climax of the plot, is not at all doing what they think they’re doing. Over all, four stars.

I am very, very glad that I finally got around to reading Morgan Howell’s King’s Property, Book 1 of his Queen of the Orcs series. The idea of a fantasy series with an emphasis on orcs for once sounded like a winner to me, even if it has to take the route of a young human woman being the protagonist rather than an orcish character.

Dar is a girl of the hills conscripted into serving the King’s army, a harsh and bitter existence, one in which she quickly learns that a woman’s only chance of survival relies upon her ability to secure the favor of a soldier who will provide for her. But the thought of abasing herself thus to any man–especially when she learns that the commander who’s interested in her is cruel and heartless–horrifies her. Instead, she takes the radical step of befriending a few of the soldiers of the regiment of orcs who are fighting alongside the human army. This puts her severely at odds with her fellow serving-women as well as the male soldiers, who are all pretty much convinced that she must be having sexual congress with the orcs. But only Dar makes any attempt to learn their language and rudiments of their culture, and to see them as anything other than brutal fighting machines.

And I’ll say this, it is quite a refreshing change of pace to see orcs be the good guys here, even if the orcish words Howell employs keep making me think they’re Japanese; this is what he gets for using “hai” as his orcish word for “yes”. There are times when I find their culture a little hard to swallow, though. These are orcs who, sure, deserve their rep as brutal fighting machines. In battle, that’s what they are. Outside of battle, though, there’s a lot of the orcs being surprisingly willing to go wherever humans lead them, to the point that they’re eventually willing to give Dar the same status that they accord females of their own species, and accept her orders accordingly. Soon enough the whole situation comes across as “the innocent orcs are being manipulated by the nasty humans”, with a heaping side dose of “human males suck and the only trustworthy ones are the orcs”.

But, that said, Howell doesn’t go completely in that direction, and for that I’m grateful. Some of the orcs do complain quite loudly at the influence that Dar has upon their commander, and one sympathetic human male not only gets Dar’s attention but starts contributing towards her eventual efforts to escape the army. And overall, I’m quite intrigued by the bigger picture Howell has set up here with the situation not only between the warring human nations, but how the orcs and their current queen play into it.

This is not a cheerful world, be warned. Quite a few dark things happen in it, including rape and needless murder, but to Howell’s credit he handles a lot of the darker events in an understated fashion. And even if I had some quibbles with specific details, overall I very much liked the story and am very much looking forward to taking on Book 2. Four stars.

If you’re on the hunt for a super-quick read, you can’t go too wrong with my fellow Drollerie author ‘s Over Her Head. I’m a sucker for stories involving intellectual women, and so this little tale of a young woman in the early 1900’s striving to pull off doing a dissertation on mermaids was quite a bit of fun.

Frances Schmidt has discovered that Garrett Hathaway has the most definitive collection of works on mermaid myths she’s ever seen, and so she’ll stop at nothing to get his permission to study his library–even if it means showing up at his front door on a bicycle, armed with tasty cookies. That she and Garrett eventually fall in love is not at all a surprise, nor is the fact that Frances discovers that he has an Astonishing Secret or that Frances gets a lot of flak for pursuing “unseemly” intellectual pursuits.

What makes this read fun and unusual is a nice little take on mermaid myths as well as a cast of vividly portrayed characters which benefit from the short length of the story; there are no extra words here, and extra words aren’t really needed. Four stars.

(P.S. Special side note to : the description of Frances totally reminds me of you!)