2011 book log

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have to admit, the blurb line of “Even in Grundy, Alaska, it’s unusual to find a naked guy with a bear trap clamped to his ankle on your porch” went a long way to seizing my interest in How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf, by Molly Harper. So did the Goodreads header of “Northern Exposure”, which made me grin with the inevitable comparison, and the cartoony cover art. As to whether the book lived up to that promise? Mm, well. Kind of.

This is yet another one of those romances involving an out of town girl moving into a remote small town, having to get accepted by the locals, and solve a crime while resisting the inevitable advances of the local brooding hero type–but in this case, the local brooding hero type’s a werewolf. And given that this is a paranormal romance on the lighter and fluffier side, one has to avoid taking that notion too seriously.

I did very much like Cooper, the aforementioned broody werewolf, who’s an atypical alpha werewolf as alphas go–he very, very, VERY much does not want to lead his pack, and he’s got issues remembering what he does when he’s in wolf form. Problem is, something in wolf form–maybe Cooper–is going around killing people. (And this is what helped keep the plot from getting too goofy for me; towards the end, when enough serious things have happened, the main characters treat this with the gravity it deserves.) Mo, our heroine, has the usual modern romance novel heroine attributes to recommend her: she’s perky, she’s decisive, she’s willing to deal when she discovers werewolves are real. Nothing terribly unusual here, but Harper’s heroine fits the expected role entertainingly.

And, as is always the case with a romance novel, we have the obligatory character who starts off as a foil for the current protagonist and who is clearly meant to be the protagonist of her own later book. This time, it’s Cooper’s sister Maggie, who’s way more of a typical alpha wolf than he is. She is in fact one of the few rather cool aspects of Harper’s worldbuilding here–i.e., that the female werewolf is way more of an alpha than the male one is, something I still haven’t found much of in urban fantasy. The politics of the pack have the refreshing bonus of putting more emphasis on the werewolves being people than on them being wolves, too. So I’ve got to give the author high marks for that.

If you come into this expecting urban-fantasy-level worldbuilding, you’ll probably be disappointed. But if you don’t mind a lighter-hearted tale where none of the characters are terribly stupid, even the obligatory colorful parents, you’ll probably get an amusing read out of this. I did, and I’ve got Book 2 queued up to read, too. For this one, three stars.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tana French came highly recommended to me, and I am pleased to report that that recommendation spoke truth and wisdom. I initially checked this book out from the library, only to decide partway through that yeah, I wanted to actually own a copy. So I returned the library book and promptly bought my own.

French’s command of language and imagery was part of the initial recommendation, but what also drew me to this book was its being a police procedural-flavored mystery set in Ireland. And then there’s the plot itself: a young boy who was the sole survivor of an assault that caused the disappearances of his two friends has grown up to be a police detective. Rob Ryan’s changed his name and worked hard to groom himself into a more refined persona, doing everything in his power to distance himself from his childhood. But a child has been murdered in his old town, and he and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to the case. Ryan must therefore choose between revealing his past and risk being taken off the case–or struggling through his own memories as he and Maddox pursue the girl’s killer.

There’s a great deal to like here. First and foremost I very much respected that Ms. French struck the exact right balance between making her protagonist unreliable and keeping him compelling. Rob is often not a very likeable character; he’s selfish in many ways, and his motives about keeping his past secret are tied more into that than into his desire to bring their young victim justice. He makes multiple bad choices, leading me more than once to want to smack him hard. Yet even so, he was vividly portrayed, and at no point did I not want to know what happened to him next.

Cassie Maddox, his partner and best friend, goes a long way to keeping him in check through most of the plot. The chemistry between them–even when it is still at a platonic level–is excellent. It’s clear that these two are well-matched as partners, each having attributes the other lacks, making the two of them together stronger than each one alone. Yet I cannot mention Cassie without also mentioning the third major character, Sam O’Neill, who works the case with them. Sam’s clearly interested in Cassie, and yet that interest takes second chair to the much more intense relationship she has with Rob. Trust me when I say, too, that Sam’s presence in the plot ultimately proves critical.

The book’s resolution is hard-won, be warned, and our trio of detectives do not come through unscathed. It’s the ending, too, that makes me pull this down to four stars rather than five, just because while I did continue to find Rob a compelling character, in the end I did still want to smack him. Still, though, I very much enjoyed this read. Four stars.

ETA: Correcting the title of the post from Into the Woods to In the Woods. Oops! Thanks, mamishka!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trick of the Mind, the third book of Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons series of mysteries, was actually the first one I bought thanks to finding a hardcover copy at a local used bookstore–but I didn’t want to read it till I swung back and covered the first two. I’m glad I did that, because as of the this installment, the series starts feeling to me like it’s really gotten its feet under it. Jack Gibbons has been shot in the line of duty, much to the alarm of his good friend Bethancourt as well as Bethancourt’s girlfriend Marla. But to Phillip’s further alarm, Jack can’t remember who shot him. And so it’s up to Phillip to track down the details of his last case.

I am of course a documented sucker for amnesia plots, and even though poor Gibbons loses only a couple of days out of his memory, they are nonetheless critical. And it’s a perfect crisis to let not only Phillip and Marla but several other significant characters as well–like Jack’s boss and Jack’s parents–show their true mettle. I particularly liked that Marla, despite her previous acrimony about Phillip’s engaging himself with police work, nonetheless gives him quite a bit of support as he hastens off to his wounded friend’s side. There’s quite a bit of mileage from the point of view Jack’s boss Carmichael and Carmichael’s wife Dotty as well, and between them and a few other characters, the reader is given quite a decent picture of all of Jack’s colleagues working feverishly to figure out who shot him and why.

Bethancourt is no Peter Wimsey, and yet he does carry on Wimsey’s tradition of the nobleman investigator very well. The personal stakes of his friend’s being threatened give this particular investigation a keener edge for him, much to the story’s overall benefit. I quite enjoyed every bit of it. Four stars.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Village Affairs, the second in Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons series, is the first to show signs of the series seriously getting its feet under it. It’s not quite as strong yet as the third and fourth novels, but the pieces are all in place here, and all of them are starting to work well together.

This book kicks in not terribly long after the events of the first book–and Gibbons, unfortunately, is in sad straits. (More than that I won’t say, so as to avoid spoilers.) But Bethancourt’s girlfriend is doing a photo shoot in a small town in the English Cotswolds, and it just so happens that a murder has taken place there, providing Jack with an excellent opportunity to enlist his friend’s aid. A nice tangled little murder investigation ensues, complete with the obligatory cast of colorful characters. In particular, the vital young vicar and his beautiful wife stand out for me as memorable.

Overall the actual murder investigation–which, at first, doesn’t even necessarily seem like a murder–takes second place to me behind the characters. In particular, Bethancourt’s stormy relationship with Marla holds a lot of interest, as Marla highly disapproves of his participating in murder investigations. Set off against Jack’s depression over the events that have happened between the last book and this one, it makes for great character development fodder for all three characters. You should definitely read the first one before reading this one, though, to pick up on the proper context for Jack’s state throughout the plot.

Three stars.

ETA: Corrected “second and third novels” to be “third and fourth”. Thanks, ariaflame!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I saw Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons mysteries recommended on LJ and decided to check them out–and wound up being very glad I did. The style of the series is very akin to Dorothy Sayers, enough that unless you’re paying attention it’s easy to mistake these books for period mysteries; they aren’t. That it takes a bit to realize this in Book 1, even with such obvious technological markers as cell phones and the Internet, is one of the reasons the series takes a bit to get its feet under it. But hang in there, because there’s a lot to like here.

The foundation of the series is the friendship between Phillip Bethancourt, a son of British nobility who’s dabbling in assisting police investigations, and the sergeant Jack Gibbons. Bethancourt gets away with participating in Gibbons’ investigations because his blue-blooded father has expressed strong interest in his son’s being able to productively occupy himself, and because he has an aptitude for it. For his own part, Gibbons is the more prosaic, earnest foil to Bethancourt’s elegance. The two men have an excellent chemistry to their friendship, even in this first book; I found myself a bit regretful that it’s already in full swing when the story starts, because it would have been great fun to see how these two characters meet and establish their relationship.

The case in The Young Widow gives them plenty to work with, at any rate. Wealthy Geoffrey Berowne has been poisoned, and the prime suspect, his young third wife Annette, is disturbingly alluring to Gibbons. The two friends uncover the expected pile of dark family secrets in their investigation, but what really drives this plot is the chemistry between Gibbons and Annette. It’s important character development for Gibbons that affects him throughout the succeeding books.

Three stars for a decent start to a series.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a few fundamental constants about my reading tastes. One of those is that any book with a decent treatment of the Sidhe is guaranteed to appeal to me. The other is that any book by C.E. Murphy is guaranteed to do the same. Combine these, and the result is a tasty little urban fantasy that pretty much has “read this, Anna” written all over it.

Lara Jansen has a strange gift: she can always, always tell when someone is lying. Compared to many high-powered, badassed urban fantasy heroines this days, this may not seem like much–and neither does Lara’s quiet profession of tailor, when you put her up against all the bounty hunters and detectives and assassins and whatnot that populate the genre. But her ability proves to be of critical importance when the Seelie prince Dafydd seeks her help in clearing him of a charge of murder.

And, unsurprisingly given that this is in fact a C.E. Murphy novel with the Sidhe in it, I enjoyed the hell out of this. It’s not a hundred percent perfect; the relationship between Lara and Dafydd started closing in on True Love a bit fast for my tastes, for example. That however is a fairly small quibble against all the things I liked about the story.

One, the heroine is indeed refreshingly not a high-powered badass at combat, either magical or physical. Her truthseeking gift has interesting character connotations for her; I liked that it made her shy away from reading fiction because it parses as “false” to her (even though, as a voracious reader, I have a hard time understanding people who don’t like to read for pleasure!), and I liked even more that it let her ramp up very quickly to accepting the truth of the existence of the Sidhe, thereby neatly sidestepping the whole traditional OMG MAGIC IS REAL?! reaction that also inundates the genre.

Two, I also like Dafydd as a hero, and I find it fun that his cover identify in the human world when the story starts is that of a TV weatherman. His relationship with the brother he’s accused of murdering is well drawn, as are his reactions as the consequences of his enlisting Lara’s aid start mounting.

To wit, three, there are indeed good strong consequences to Lara’s discovering Faerie. I particularly liked that the old-school difference in flow of time between Faerie and the human realm is used here, to very good effect and with distinct consequences for the major characters.

Given that this is a duology, the story is not resolved as of the end of this book, so be prepared for that if you go in. But fortunately, Book 2 is out later this year! And I will, of course, be reading it. For this one, four stars.