2009 book log

In the last of my Elizabeth Lowell Summer 2009 Marathon, I’m jumping out of the historicals and into a contemporary, Remember Summer. I was hoping that I’d get closer in general flavor to the sorts of suspense novels Lowell’s been writing for much of her recent career, and at least in some ways, that’s what I got; it was easy to see the progression from her historicals to this novel and on up to her later work. Still, this one’s got its feet planted way more on the romance side of the fence than on the suspense one.

I’ll give it props for the setting, though: it’s the Summer Olympics, and our heroine Raine Chandler-Smith is on the US equestrian team, aiming for the gold. But OHNOEZ, her father is a government official of Unspecified but Incredibly High Rank, and there’s an assassin on the loose! Our hero, the obligatory Operative of Unspecified Rank but Suitably Dangerous and Broody Competence, and who for purposes of this assignment is going by the name of Cord Elliott (side note: seriously? CORD? What kind of a name is CORD? A romance novel name, apparently), is on the case to keep Raine from getting shot right off her horse by way of being the appetizer for her father.

Definitely the sort of thing Lowell sank her teeth into with later work, but here, there’s way less suspense than I like and way more angsting about how OHNOEZ, Cord’s job is dangerous! And he’s all tired of it and burned out and Raine is all beautiful and stuff! Which was acceptable character fodder as it went, but after pages and pages of it, I was all “ENOUGH ALREADY now get to the shootings and suspense and stuff”.

Which the book did, eventually. With suitable suspenseful shootiness, and even a bit of a bittersweet ending that was appropriate given the Unspecified nature of Cord’s secret-agenty job. All in all, though, for Lowell suspense? You’ll really want to go to her later work. Two stars.

This is another of the books I’ve read in my marathon charge through a bunch of Elizabeth Lowell’s older romance works, and it’s the last of the “Only” quartet and related duology. Unfortunately, it’s also my second to least favorite.

Lowell’s writing here is certainly about on par with the other works, but the biggest beef I have with this story is a hero who really needs to be punched right in the jaw. Right out of the gate, Hunter Maxwell is convinced that Elyssa Sutton is the “town flirt”, which is code for the “town’s rampaging slut”, and he has no real evidence to believe this whatsoever: just the flimsy word of one minor NPC who’s an ass anyway. He gives her constant shit about it, up until the obligatory “but I’m going to go at it with you like rabid coyotes” scene, and all I could think through most of the story was “wait, and there were readers that found this behavior sexy? Da hell?”

Bah. It’s a shame, because as with the other stories, this one’s not without decent suspense. Sure, the Culpepper Clan is providing stock Bad Guys right out of central casting, but okay, even given that, the whole scenario with their trying to take over the ranch next door and how they’re holding an important side character hostage is entertaining enough. But our so-called hero Hunter’s behavior to Elyssa all throughout the story, even given how he’s all bitter and stuff because the Culpeppers murdered his wife and child and his wife was an actual rampaging slut anyway, really was more annoying than sexy. Lowell’s done quite a bit better since this book, fortunately. For this one, two stars.

Deborah Grabien’s Still Life With Devils is an esoteric little novel, one part police procedural, one part paranormal mystery, and one part romance. Leontyne Chant is an artist with an unusual gift: the ability to walk into her paintings. But her brother Cassius, chief of Homicide in the San Francisco PD, must call upon her for help to solve a string of serial killings–and soon Leo discovers she not only has seen the killer before, but that she’ll have to call upon her unique ability to help her brother bring the case to a close.

This book’s sensibilities are elegant, and it’s refreshing to read a murder mystery that doesn’t lavish gory detail upon the killer’s activities. Rather, Grabien brings a quiet, suspenseful sophistication to the table. Four stars.

(P.S. I know I said I was going to try to be impartial with Drollerie Press reviews, but hey–this one was really, really solid, and I’m really rather proud to be associated with the press that produced it. The same will be said of the next couple of Drollerie books I’m about to review!

Also, it is worth noting that this book is one of the ones Drollerie has out in print. So if you’d like to see what we can do with a printed work, ask your favorite local bookstore to pick this one up today!)

Silent on the Moor, the third of the Lady Julia Grey novels, is not as awesome as Book 1–but it’s better than Book 2, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

The scenario’s a time-honored one straight out of Gothic romances: i.e., our heroine heads out to a remote location, in this particular instance to the manor that our hero has recently acquired, and our hero spends a lot of time being mysterious and brooding. There are mysterious household denizens with mysterious secrets, as well as the obligatory May or May Not be a Ghost. There are salt-of-the-earth villagers who have their own takes on the mysterious secrets of the great house. There’s even a gypsy wise-woman who has all sorts of interesting background on Brisbane. And, of course, there’s the moor, lonely and haunting and full of Gothic atmosphere.

What actually gets Lady Julia out there is the very straightforward motive of wanting to confront Brisbane about the state of things between them, as of the tail end of Book 2. She pulls this off accompanied by her sister Portia (who has love life issues of her own, for things are not well between her and her beloved Jane) and brother Valerius (who’s there as chaperone, since Julia chasing after Brisbane is Shockingly Improper and such). Enough is made of Julia’s intentions and how she’s basically bowled her way into a house full of strangers to remind you of the morals of the time, yet, this hardly stops Julia from going about her business. And once Brisbane’s on camera, the book comes together. There’s a murder attempt, investigation of creepy Egyptian artifacts with creepy mummified babies, and a host of intriguing questions about why exactly Brisbane bought this mansion in the first place.

Good fun overall. I have no idea whether there will be more of these, due to how the book ends, on a nice stopping point. We’ll have to see if Raybourn takes these characters any further. Four stars.

I’m a long-standing Rachel Caine fan, and after recently getting my iPhone I wanted to check out another of her books I hadn’t read–a romantic suspense novel she’d written as part of the Athena Force series. When I picked up Line of Sight I didn’t realize that it was part of a greater continuity, and that in fact it starts off a third line of continuity in the overall series. But that said, the novel stands pretty well by itself and in fact is the launch book for that third continuity line.

And yeah, this was fun. The Athena Academy trains young women in various secret-agenty type skills, and certain of the girls have paranormal abilities as well. But someone has kidnapped two of the Academy’s students, and FBI agent Katie Rush–herself a graduate of the Academy–takes on the task of finding them. She’s thrown an unexpected complication in the guise of Stefan Blackman, a man who’s been living an easy life as a “network psychic”. Problem is, Stefan is genuinely psychic, and he’s getting visions from one of the kidnapped girls.

Caine’s traditional fast pacing is very much in evidence here, as is her ability to whip up some fun chemistry between her lead characters. Plus, she fits very, very well into a line of novels that seems geared for more suspense than romance per se, and it was a very strong introduction for me to the Athena Force. I’ll be looking for more of these novels. Four stars.

So to continue my burst of Elizabeth Lowell romance reading, I jumped from the Only quartet over to the duology she did about the Maxwell brothers, Autumn Lover and Winter Fire. As it happened I read the latter first, but it didn’t make much difference; after all, this flavor of romance does follow a predictable formula, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know that the gunslinger and girl du jour in the first book would get their happily ever after, and most likely show up in Book 2.

But all that aside, I rather liked Book 2 better than Book 1. The premise is interesting to start with: the Maxwell brothers, Hunter and Case, are tracking the Culpepper clan all over the West following the Culpepper attack on their family, an attack that resulted in the deaths of Hunter’s wife and child. This book focuses on Case, and how after the Culpeppers nearly kill him, he’s taken in by the young widow Sarah Kennedy–on whose ranch the Culpeppers of course have Nefarious Designs, Oh Noez!

Okay, yeah, I’m a sucker for Wounded Hero plots, but it also helped that as the heroes of these things go, Case was pretty alright. There is of course the obligatory angst between him and Sarah as they fall in love, but this time around there was no Holy Crap! She’s a Virgin! going on, nor any real Big Understandings. This left the field open for Sarah to be overprotective of her little brother Connor instead, and he was a nice side character; meanwhile, Case’s big angst point was that he’d adored his brother’s kid and so Oh Noez! Everything he loves dies, blah blah, shoot another couple of Culpeppers already, you’ll feel better.

All in all though not too bad a read. Three stars.

It is entirely the fault of the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books that I picked up an ebook copy of Patricia Gaffney’s Wild at Heart, which showed up on Smart Bitch Candy’s list of books with Schlocky Premises But Good Executions. And let’s face it, folks, “boy raised by wolves” is a pretty schlocky premise to start with. But yeah, Smart Bitch Candy is right. Gaffney pulled off a surprisingly charming little novel here.

It’s 1893, and Sydney Darrow, after the death of her young husband, has come back to her family home in Michigan to find that her absent-minded anthropologist father is involved with an astonishing discovery: the so-called “Ontario Man”, a young man who’s been found in the Canadian wilderness, apparently raised by wolves. Her father and his assistant Charles are caught up in researching whether a man in a feral state can exhibit true altruism, but Sydney is appalled that they’ve given him a churl of a guard to keep watch on him and that they’ve given him only the rudiments of interaction with his own kind. With her little brother’s help, Sydney soon discovers that “Ontario Man” can actually talk–he just needs to be reminded of it–and she coaxes him into revealing that his name is Michael MacNeil.

Once Michael starts talking, the story gets its feet under it. We learn he was lost as a boy, late enough in his childhood that he’d not only learned how to talk and read, he’d even clung to a treasured book on gentleman’s etiquette that his father had given him. All of which is Oh So Convenient for explaining why he’s not really feral, but it does actually work, and it also sets Michael up for having some very unsophisticated, innocent sensibilities–which is a bit of a switch for romance novels. There’s quite a bit of sweet mileage with Sydney’s younger brother, who is himself a boy, introducing Michael to the city and teaching him things more easily than the adults, since Michael’s forgotten many things that only a child would think to have to explain. His chemistry with Sydney is equally straightforward and refreshingly innocent, and that went a long way to my enjoyment of the plot. (I was particularly amused by one scene where he laments, “Why do you have so many clothes on? Can’t you take some off?”)

Things come to a head when the family makes the mistake of trying to introduce Michael to a zoo, and he flips right out, deciding to singlehandedly release every animal he can get to in one night and thereby causing an uproar in the city. Sydney has to juggle resolving that uproar with tracking down Michael’s long-lost family, and there’s quite a bit of nice tension around that. There is of course a happy ending; this is after all a romance novel. But all in all the trip getting there was quite satisfying. Four stars.