2010 book log

If you love you some zombies, especially in a story with a hefty helping of lulz and satire, you can’t do much better than Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. I had great fun with this one, the story of a man who has come back to life as a zombie following the car accident that killed both him and his wife. He’s now living a miserable existence in his parents’ basement, barely surviving on the consumption of formaldehyde and his attendance at the meetings of an undead support group. But he’s growing more and more drawn to fellow zombie Rita, and more and more interested in standing up for zombie civil rights. All of which comes to a head when his support group meets Ray, who shares with them his jars of “venison”–after which they find that the death wounds they sustained are healing, that their hearts are beginning to beat again, and that…

Well. You can probably figure out what the “venison” actually is. Muahaha.

General points for not only achieving a story with zombie protagonists, but doing it in such a way as to make you totally want to root for them munching on as many of the nearest brains as possible. Mark Henry has pulled this off equally well in his Amanda Feral books, so it’s fun to see it here, too. Four stars.

Oh my, I’m really of two minds about this book. Going into it, even aware that I’d seen some poor reviews of it before, I was hopeful about the prospect of a plot that asserted that the Scarlet Pimpernel had been real and had in fact set off a trend of flower-themed spies during his era–and that the heroine of the meta-story, graduate student Eloise, was researching the identity of the mysterious Pink Carnation. It sounded like fun and I decided to give it a shot anyway, even knowing going in about poor reviews.

And now that I’ve read the first book I won’t exactly say that the poor reviews are justified–that wouldn’t be fair. But I will say that the book wasn’t nearly as strong as I would have liked. The meta-story involving Eloise wasn’t nearly as the story she was researching; aside from a few cliched conflict scenes she has with her future love interest, she honestly doesn’t do much, and it’s kind of surprising that the author bothered to put a framing story around the more entertaining actual story at all.

As for the main story, this is where the interest is, yes. Although here, as well, there wasn’t as much strength as I’d have liked. I have three major issues with it. One, both our hero and heroine make critical errors of judgment that should have gotten them killed. Our heroine doing so is more forgiveable, as she is a young and inexperienced girl full of her own ambition, and not nearly as trained at being a spy as she thinks she is. Our hero, on the other hand, is supposedly an experienced spy and has no excuse. Two, there’s a near-sex scene about three quarters of the way through that I found jarringly out of place with the overall flavor of the novel, not to mention the time period it was set in. And three, the final confrontation scene with the bad guy was unfortunately farcical, to the degree that the bad guy was only caught because he literally tripped over a convenient dropped object rather than any real skill on the part of our heroes.

Despite these flaws, I actually enjoyed the read. The chemistry between heroine Amy and hero Richard was fun (even given the jarringly out of place scene previously mentioned). And even though both of them were being stupid in places, there were other scenes where they achieved a rhythm that actually did hearken back to the actual Pimpernel and Zorro novels. Amy has some nifty supporting characters backing her up in the persons of her cousin Jane and their chaperone Miss Gwen, the latter of whom is a force of nature.

All in all, flawed but fun, and if you go in, go in expecting lightweight fluff. Three stars.

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.

I have been buying a BOATLOAD of ebooks lately, so I decided today that since the redoutable Third Place Books is having a sale (20 percent off EVERYTHING), I should go show the print books some love. And here’s what I walked out of the store with!

• Heart of Veridon, by Tim Akers; fantasy
• Acacia, by David Anthony Durham; fantasy
• The First, Third, Fourth, and Sixth Books of Outremer, by none other than (somewhere I’ll have to find books Two and Five); fantasy
• An Autumn War, by Daniel Abraham; fantasy
• Dragon in Chains, by Daniel Fox; fantasy (which should also please !)

So fear not, print-side authors, I’ll still love you too even if I get a lot of ebooks these days!

Books thus far purchased in 2010: 8