Mike

Five Stars for everything

Revisado: 05-02-23

Why aren't star ratings enough any more?

Why do Audible keep trying to bully me into writing a review rather than thanking me giving a rating?

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Good start to a new series

Revisado: 04-05-23

I don't have a good history with books about Game Wardens. Three years ago, I abandoned 'The Poacher's Son', the first book about Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch because I found Mike so nice and so calm that he bored me. This year, I abandoned 'In Plain Sight' the sixth book in the series about Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett because I decided I really didn't like Joe anymore.

Still, I like the idea of stories about Game Wardens so I decided to try 'Hollow Beasts', the first book in a brand new series about New Mexico Game Warden Jodi Luna. Now, I have a Game Warden I can look forward to reading about.

'Hollow Beasts' was a breath of fresh air. What a difference it makes when your Game Warden is a Hispanic woman in New Mexico rather than a white man in Wyoming. 

'Hollow Beasts' is also a real page-turner, As soon as I started it, I wanted to sit down and read it until it was done.

Some of it, especially the start, is a tough read. The plot involves a White Supremacist terrorist group that behaves like a cult. Their hate and acts of violence against women were graphic, credible and repugnant. I spent a lot of the rest of the book waiting for these guys to get their arses kicked. I wasn't disappointed.

This is an entertaining and engaging book. It's also one which seemed to me to have a clear agenda: expose the twisted thinking and behaviour of white supremacists fighting their 'war' against The Great Replacement', to remind people of the history of New Mexico, including how it became part of the United States, and to show how strong, well-armed, women can work together to put an end to violent men. Most of the time, that agenda provided more energy to move the action forward and to help to define the characters and the culture that they live in. Once or twice, it felt more didactic than that. If it wasn't so closely based on the reality of the current situation, it might have felt like propaganda.

It was rescued from that by two things: I liked Jodi and her daughter and the newly-returned-to-town police detective she was working with; the clever way that Valdés built tension throughout the book, keeping me focused on the action and the risk rather than on the bigger political picture.

Parts of the plot did involve some remarkable co-incidences, mainly with regards to things that establish key relationships for Jodi Luna. I was happy to swallow these because they didn't mess with the main action of the plot or its resolution and because the relationships that were established set up the potential for some interesting twists and turns in the next few books in the series.

I'll certainly be back with Jodi Luna in New Mexico when the next book comes out.

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you want a heading?

Revisado: 04-04-23

it used to be enough to give star ratings. Now you want an essay. Aren't you interested in star ratings any more or do you only want to hear from the small number of people who will take the time to write a review?

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Stick with the text version

Revisado: 09-16-20

This is an excellent book with a terrible narrator. He takes muscular prose and turns it into a limp-wristed luvvy-fest filled with inappropriate pauses and stresses that ignore the texture of the text and mutilated its rhythm.

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High impact novella starting a new series (I hope)

Revisado: 01-06-20

"Junkyard Cats" is a new departure for Faith Hunter. She's freed herself from the super-nat saturated universe that both the Jane Yellowrock and the Soulwood series take place in; moved from Urban Fantasy to Science Fiction and broken with the tradition of bringing out the print version first and gone straight (and only) to audiobook.

I think all these changes are good.

It seemed to me that I could taste the energy and excitement freeing herself from the complex world she built and populated in thirteen Jane Yellowrock novels and four Soulwood novels (with a fifth being published this summer) gave to Faith Hunter. This novella crackles with energy and is stuffed with ideas.

Faith Hunter has embraced Science Fiction in a way that makes it her own. There's the same level of weapon's lust that was a constant in the Jane Yellowrock series but THESE weapons are truly scary. Set a few decades in the future and with the intervention of scavenged alien tech to speed things along, Faith Hunter has imagined AI Hive-Mind directed Nano-technology-enabled weaponry that is both plausible and innovative. Then she's rolled in biker culture with the Motorcycle Clubs becoming a line of defence against the invading machines sent by the Chinese. Finally, she's come up with a kick-ass heroine, this time one trying to live a quiet life, who is no longer quite human (nothing supernatural - think tech mutation) and a pride of junkyard cats with enhanced sentience and the ability to share what they're seeing with each other.

So: great weapons, biker culture, more than human female fighter and spookily smart cats. What more could I want? How about two or three major threats, a pressure cooker deadline, dizzyingly rapid and complex worldbuilding, a full-on assault and a huge body-count. Yep, I got all of those too.

The icing on the cake was the decision to go straight to audible. Normally, I have to wait a while after the publication of a Faith Hunter book before I can have Khristine Hvam's narration bring it alive for me. This time, I was able to start the book the day that it was published.

I enjoyed "Junkyard Cats", consuming it in two days and finishing it with a "Wow, that was good* feeling that was rapidly followed by, "When do I get more?"

I would have prefered it if this had been a full-length novel (the audiobook is five hours long (so about 140 -150 pages). I enjoyed the intensity of the novella but I'd have appreciated a little time to breathe and to get to know the characters a bit more. There were also a couple of clumsy I'm-being-briefed-on-the-war-by-my-computer bits of info-dumping that might have been avoided with a little more space BUT these are minor things. This is a remarkable, action-driven, near-future Science Fiction story and I want more of it.

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Just didn't care what happened to these guys

Revisado: 11-08-17

There are some good things in the "The Rooster Bar", enough of them that I read the book right to the end in the hope that it would be worth my time. It wasn't.

"The Rooster Bar" starts well. John Grisham quickly got me immersed in the pressure cooker lives of four for-profit Law School students, groaning under a mountain of debt and with little prospect of getting a job that would enable them to pay it back. He used the instability and obsession of the most charismatic of the four to lay-out the "Great Law School Scam" without making it feel like a clumsy infodump and then added a trauma to hook my emotions and make me care.

I relaxed and waited for some kind of clever and cathartic revenge to be extracted in a sort of "The Firm 2.O" way.

Grisham kept my attention and my emotional involvement by adding in a plot about how ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) the Storm Troopers of Homeland Security works.

This felt real and got the point across without sounding preachy. The shame of failing to treat people with dignity was made clear.

After that... well, the whole thing fell apart but slowly enough that I never quite gave up hope.

My main problem was that I didn't like and couldn't bring myself to care about the two emotionally distant, testosterone-driven, arrogant and amoral white boys who were positioned as the heroes of the piece.

Their reaction to having let their greed ensnare them in a potentially life-ruining scam was to scam everyone else. They commit crime after crime to make money, sustained by a sort of frat-boy belief that guys like them will never suffer the consequences of their actions. They were called Todd and Mark and I couldn't really tell them apart except that one (I can't remember which) was more willing to help a friend in trouble.

It seems that I was supposed to be cheering for these two would-be alpha male lawyers to out-smart the authorities, get revenge on the bad guys and ride off into a Tequilla-sustained sunset. Personally, I'd have been happy to see them both take their punishment.

Todd and Mark are the moral vacuum at the heart of this book. They're clever, resourceful, hard-working, brave but ruthless and willing to break any law to get their own way.

I could have lived with the moral vacuum if the book had ended with a great reveal or a clever, Mission Impossible slick finish but It didn't. Instead, it slid gently to a stop as it ran out of momentum and I ran out of sympathy.

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Redeemed itself at the end but only just

Revisado: 12-15-15

“Skipping Christmas” is a short novel ( 3hours 42 minutes / 256 pages ) yet, by the time I was halfway through, I was tempted to skip the whole thing.

The book is about the tribulations of the Kranks, a middle-class American couple in their fifties, who decide that, as their daughter is away from home for the first time, they will skip Christmas and spend the money on a cruise instead.

I struggled in the first part of the book because Luther Krank is so hard to like. He is a man who resents spending money on Christmas but doesn’t dare stop because his neighbours will disapprove. He is shallow, cowardly, seems to have little emotional connection to family or friends, is unconsciously racist and complacently privileged. Krank’s motives for skipping Christmas are venal and hard to embrace. The way he treats his neighbours as he executes his plan is unpleasant and childish. After a while, I began to realise that, if he got what he deserved, there would be no happy ending.

Even though it was first published in 2001, it feels more like something from a 1970’s sitcom. The neighbours are ruled by what others might think of them. The women plan charity events but don’t have a job. The men play “my salary is bigger than yours”. Christmas parties are a licence for married Partners in the firm to get drunk and grope “the homeliest secretaries”. When a daughter in one of the families declares her intent to marry a foreigner, her parents are relieved that his skin is not as dark as they expected. Surely this can’t be modern-day suburban America?

There is a twist in the second half of the book that rescues the story from completely failing and redeems at least some of the characters but this is not “A Wonderful Life” but rather “A Life Slightly Less Awful”.

It didn’t fill me with Christmas cheer but it did make be very glad that I don’t live in the Krank’s neighbourhood.

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Are all David Baldacci's books this bad?

Revisado: 12-12-15

"The Christmas Train" is the first of four books I've bought to try and read myself into the Christmas spirit. It didn't go so well.

The start of the book was so sickly sweet, I thought it might raise my blood sugar enough to push me over into type two diabetes. I persisted because it's a Christmas book and a certain amount of schmaltz was to be expected and I hoped things would get better when the book go into its stride.

The book never got into its stride. It stumbled along from scene to scene, clumsily structured and underwritten.

David Baldacci seemed to be trying to do some kind of homage to Mark Twain but ended up simply emphasizing the gap between Twain's storytelling ability and his own.

I could have forgiven the cardboard characters in the supporting cast and the inept attempts at some kind of magical realism, and the over-long info-dumps and pro-Amtrack propaganda that sat in this under-cooked Christmas Pudding of a book, as indigestible as a sixpence, if only the main character, Tom Langdon had been worth caring about. Instead I got an implausible, inconsistent, cipher of a man who, it seemed to me, was a self-absorbed, immature, manipulative, prankster who didn't seem up to the task of being the romantic lead.

The book is narrated by Tim Matheson. He did the dialogue reasonably well but the prose dragged him down with its mediocrity no matter how much seasonal cheer he tried to inject.

The only thing that made it worth trudging through the slush of this book for seven hours were the insights into the, to my European eyes, peculiar attitude of Americans to passenger trains. I use trains for long journeys all the time. These days, the high-speed, high-tech trains are a viable competitor to planes for many business trips, yet here they were presented as a dying anachronism. Still, given how bad the rest of the book was, I'm not sure I can rely on this information.

This was my first David Baldacci book. I assume, as the book cover declares him to be a "Number One International Bestselling Author", they can't all be this bad but my experience of "The Christmas Train" doesn't encourage me to find out.

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slow, frustrating, dark and ultimately pointless

Revisado: 11-18-15

I bought this book because it was being hyped (and reduced in price) by audible and Fox have made a series from it called “Wayward Pines” so, why not?

“Pines” is competently written and well narrated. It just didn’t do it for me.

Other than being persistent, dangerous and extraordinarily tough to kill, the main character is not very interesting. I really didn’t care what happened to him.

The town of Wayward Pines is spooky and the “What the hell is going on here?” question kept me moving through the chapters.

The more I read, the more violent and depressing the whole thing became.

I’ve seen “Pines” compared to “Twin Peaks”. I don’t think the comparison stands. In the end, “Twin Peaks” was a series of cool scenes that made no sense. “The owls are not what they seem” – who cares? “Pines” does make sense. There is a compelling, if somewhat far-fetched, premise that explains everything.

The problem I had was that, while the premise explained everything, it justified nothing: not the actions of the main villain, certainly not the actions of the delightful citizens of Wayward Pines, not even the ultimately pointless struggle of the main character. This is not one of those occasions where the truth will set you free. I found the whole thing anticlimactic.

I could have lived with that, except that Blake Crouch put me through scenes of extreme violence and cruelty to get me to this, for me, unsatisfactory outcome. Crouch writes well enough that I will remember those scenes, even though, in retrospect, I understand them as exploitative.

Still, he’s not to blame for me reading the scenes, nor how I reacted to them.

There are two more books in the series. Someone must love them. Probably the same people who enjoyed “Prison Break” and “The Sopranos”.

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Kitty gets tangled with a Senate Committee

Revisado: 11-18-15

“Kitty Goes To Washington” rolls straight on from “Kitty And The Midnight Hour” but with a change in pace and tone. Kitty seems a little more certain of herself than she did in the first book. She has left her home and her pack and taken her radio show, “The Midnight Hour” on the road across America. She is starting to build a life for herself in the human and the supernatural world.

The plot revolves around what happens to Kitty when the Christian Fundamentalist, supernaturals-are-an-offence-againt-God Senator that we met in the last book, summons her to testify at a Senate Committee which is allegedly investigating state-sponsored research into the super-natural.

Of course, all is not what it seems. The Senator has an evil plan and Kitty is at its centre. This plot premise could have produced a political thriller with Kitty cast as the heroine, saving the world with her awesome werewolf powers. Thankfully, Carrie Vaughan avoids this and continues to present Kitty as a young woman, recovering from a trauma but becoming reconciled with who and what she is and is gaining confidence from the popularity of her show. Kitty goes to Washington with no political or social agenda and does not see herself as leading anything.

She quickly discovers that this I’m-just-a-talkshow-host stance is not credible in Washington, where everyone expects something of her. This shows the nature of Washington but it also makes Kitty reflect on what role she should play and what it means to be a supernatural.

In Washington, Kitty finds a club that offers a haven for shape-shifters, allowing association without the restrictions of a Pack and promoting good music, good food and good company. Although the freedom and the pleasures this affords, especially in the form a Brazilian were-panther who becomes Kitty’s lover for a while, initially appeals to Kitty, as the book progresses she finds that she cannot adopt the passive, don’t-get-involved, live-for-moment way of life. Her loyalties, sense of duty and belief in doing what she can to make things better, pull her in a different direction.

While at the club, she meets with, solitary, taciturn, old werewolf that everyone believes is an ex-Nazi. When he finally shares his bleak story with her, Kitty is pushed further along the road of thinking that being a werewolf does not obviate the need for choosing how you will live but perhaps makes the choice more pressing.

One of the things I liked most in the book was the new vampire that Kitty meets. It was refreshing, almost startling, to meet a vampire who is not a narcissist but rather has a desire to protect and nurture. Kitty’s relationship with the vampire, testing limits, earning respect, building a mutual loyalty and obligation, speaks to many of the things that Kitty needs that the shapeshifter club does not provide.

“Kitty Goes To Washington” continues with a number of the characters from the previous book: we discover the true nature of the mysterious cult-leader who claims to be able to “cure” supernaturals, we meet Kitty’s “Deep Throat” research scientist and understand what he wants from Kitty, we see how far the Senator is willing to go for his cause and we see Kitty starting to build a network of friends and supporters.

Although more thoughtful than the first book, “Kitty Goes To Washington” has a least three strong action scenes that have major plot consequences. The political aspects of the book a credible and all the more threatening for that. Like politics in real-life, the day-to-day can seem a little anti-climatic but the issues are real and the stakes are high.

As with the first book, I enjoyed Kitty’s talkshow. It opens up the book, adds some humour, but also shows how these shows can take on a life of their own when they provide a space for the voiceless to be heard.

By the end of this book, it is clear, even to Kitty, that she cannot be just a talkshow host any more. She is a symbol, an ambassador, a target and may become a leader.

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