Thursday, June 30, 2005

Black Rose

Black Rose by Nora Roberts

Second in her In The Garden series, this is pretty good.

It's a Nora Roberts though - so if you've read one than you've read them all. Although, not quite true. If you've read a recent one - than you know. If you only know her through her older stories - you should pick up one of her newer series. She's one author who has stuck with what works for her and yet still managed to grow in to a stronger writer.
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Something about Emmaline

Something about Emmaline by Elizabeth Boyle


Read this book this morning. Or, half read and half skimmed. I've read other books by Boyle - and remember some of the characters in this book - but I just could not dredge up any interest in Emmaline or Alex nor their relationship

Not sure why.

Maybe I shoud have went with the contemporary suspense romance I was debating on reading.

Posted by Amme :: 6:01 PM :: 0 comments

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Monday, June 27, 2005

Update

Busy, busy lately so I've not finished any books yet - although I'm currently reading:

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

and

November Mourns


I am also browsing over a writing book I have called Fast Fiction. With my current attention span, the five minute exercises are sounding just about my speed for the time being.

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Monday, June 20, 2005

Single White Vampire

Single White Vampire by Lynsay Sands

Never has a book made me want to stake something so badly before. Preferably my eyes so I would not have to read any more of it.

Where did it go wrong? Let me count the ways.

1. The characters.

It appears that the author felt they needed to be dumber than sh*t in order to make the story funny. The hero - a 600+ year old vampire - should have been killed off long, long ago if he was truly this stupid. Not only does he leave the door open for the heroine but he then goes and immediately starts drinking out of his bag of blood in the kitchen which leads us to "big, funny scene" #1 with her walking in and him being startled enough to tear the bag and have blood splash all over him. Our heroine, no smart cookie in her own right, thinks he banged his head and is bleeding to death before her eyes. Does she rush him to the hospital? No, he talks her out of it and eventually they end up going grocery shopping. Of course later, when our heroine needs a reason to be out and about at night, the "head wound" is once again remembered by our two characters.

Our vamp also seems to have a problem with control and tending to lose access to his blood supply- which he seems to need a lot of when he can't get it but when he has it he's not running around taking sips from it ever hour or so.

2. The story events

I made it through his standing up in front of the RT convention getting ready to sink his teeth into the lady standing beside him in front of all those people. I made it through the ridiculous scene in the bathroom where our heroine lets him get her all hot and bothered to suck her blood - and in which stupid interruptions that were supposed to be funny kept cropping up.

But, I could not make it through the costume ball scene where his codpiece gets stuck under the table and she has to go under and try and unstick it. Of course plenty of people come along to offer advice - or take pictures (like I couldn't see that one coming a mile away).

I just felt like things were happening to be "funny" but really they did nothing to advance the plot or make the characters show off to any decent advantage. Nor were they in fact - funny.

I wanted to finish this book - just to see how bad it could get - but I couldn't. I skimmed over some more of it but the situations just got stupider and stupider. Finally, I had to just call it quits.

Posted by Amme :: 6:59 AM :: 0 comments

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Sunday, June 19, 2005

Oceans of Fire

Oceans of Fire by Christine Feehan

This is part of her Seven Sisters series which are about seven sisters with magical powers. Here we have Abbey who is more at home in the ocean with her dolphins then really with people. She's had a bad experience with her magic and is uncertain of her future with it. Witnessing a murder pushes her into a desperate intrigue and reunites her with the man who knows about her past experience - is, in fact, the cause of it.

With Russian spies and assassins running around she finds Sasha is still bent on the two of them having a future together.

The plot is a bit out there, but when you're dealing with strong magic - you really shouldn't be expecting exact realism in your story.

The two characters were well drawn emotionally and it made the story a satisfying read.

Posted by Amme :: 7:19 PM :: 0 comments

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---------------oOo--------------- Absolutely Captivated

Absolutely Captivated by Kristine Grayson

One word - boring.

That's pretty much it.

I made it to page 179 before giving it up. It's billed as a contemporary romance. It's not. It's more paranormal chick-lit than anything. The romance had taken up about 5 pages of the 179 that I read and, granted I had not read the others in the series, the story line really had no grab to it. The characters themselves were bland and unlikeable. Once I realized I just did not care what happened to any of them - I gave up on it.

There's too many other books waiting to be read to waste time on something I'm not enjoying at all.

Posted by Amme :: 7:08 PM :: 0 comments

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Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Cross Your Heart..

Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die - Nancy Martin

Fourth Blackbird Sisters mystery. Tricky mystery, further development of the relationship between Nora and Michael, and lots of fun.

Now....it'll just feel like forever before the next one comes out....


All well, back to November Mourns and some old Nora Roberts that I've been rereading.

Posted by Amme :: 6:05 PM :: 0 comments

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Monday, June 13, 2005

Some Like it Lethal

And....third one in Nancy Martin's Blackbird Sisters series - Some Like it Lethal - is done.

On to the next one!

It's in hardcover which means:

1. Its the newest one and it'll probably be a year before the next one. *sigh*

2. Too awkward to carry back and forth to work, even though it's a smaller hardcover, so I'm also reading November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli which I recently received from Amazon. It's a paperback and much easier to slip into the purse and carry around with me.

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Sunday, June 12, 2005

Dead Girls Don't Wear Diamonds

Second in the mystery series, The Blackbird Sisters, by Nancy Martin is Dead Girls Don't Wear Diamonds.

I'm really diggin' this series so far. Nora is a very likeable character and Michael is - well definitely intriguing with his crime family background.

In this book, Nora once again gets tangled up in a murder mystery this one involving the wife of an ex-boyfriend of hers. Suspicion falls upon Nora herself, although the tale does not carry that part of it too far.

A light, witty, read.

Now, I'm on to the third one in the series. Then there's one more. Then I'll have to wait for a new one which brings up the one problem with finding new series - sooner or later you catch up to the author's latest and then you're forced to wait for more.

Posted by Amme :: 5:53 AM :: 0 comments

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Friday, June 10, 2005

Christina Dodd's Contemporary Novels

Thanks to thunderstorm last night, I squeezed in another book.

Almost Like Being in Love by Christina Dodd is the second in a series of books about siblings separated after their parents apparent theft of church money and death in a run to the border with it. This is the main mystery sitting behind the series - and there was really nothing new added to it in this book.

This book features Pepper, the second daughter, and her ex-boy friend Dan who she ran away from years back.

All in all, this book was pretty cliched. I liked Dan - although I don't think the author quite accomplished what she was trying to do with his alpha attitude.

Pepper was a mess character wise - which sort of fit her background - but there really wasn't a lot of justification given for many of her attitude problems.

Add in a terrorist plot, a traitor General, and a reunion for Pepper with a couple members of her family - you can see this was a bit over the top.

The first one in the series (which I read a couple days ago and forget to mention here) - Just The Way You Are is the better of the two, although it also falls prey to some of the more over used cliches in contemporary romance. In it, Hope works at an answering service where she meets Zack over the phone and assumes he's the butler/manservant/whatever instead of the millionaire boss himself. He lets her keep this assumption as they develop their relationship.

Hope, gets messed up with a criminal - learns the truth- and hates him for it. After he rescues her from being kidnapped by another criminal - they work out their differences for the HEA.

I'm not quite sure what made Dodd decide to try out contemporary settings. She's much more at home with the Regency and Medieval settings and there she manages to come up much more believable characters - or likeable anyway.

I'll keep reading the series as the books come out...but they are not on the "must buy the instant they hit the shelves" list.

Posted by Amme :: 5:53 AM :: 0 comments

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Thursday, June 09, 2005

Thunder Creek

Thunder Creek by Jill Gregory is a suspenseful romance in which the main character, Katy returns to her home town after a divorce and takes up her aunt's diner which was closed when the aunt got sick.

It starts out a bit slow, but when she happens upon a notebook in her brother's room (who died in an accident when she was a teenager) with an entry from the night he died - she starts to think that something else might have happened and goes out in search of answers. Her brother's old friend is back in town as well and after she gets over her habit of blaming him for her brother's death - a romance starts to build between them.

In the end the mystery wasn't that much of a mystery. Pretty standard - although I do think the author was a bit lax on the sprinkling of clues as to who the villian in the story was.

All in all though, not a bad story to spend a couple of hours reading. I'll definitely check out the next book that takes place in Thunder Creek as well.

Posted by Amme :: 4:13 PM :: 0 comments

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Wednesday, June 08, 2005

City of the Dead - Keene

City of the Dead by Brian Keene is a sequel to his amazing book The Rising which helped relaunch my interest in horror books after the blahness of the 1990s when King and Koontz were about the only horror authors you could find on the shelves at the bookstores and their styles were changing so much that, in my opinion, what they wrote rarely could be considered horror. At least not horror as I like it.

The Rising tells the tale of a father's journey across several states to reach his son after the dead rise and start attacking the living. Along the way the father, Jim, picks up a couple others who join him on his trek. In Keene's zombie vision not even the less populated areas are safe because animals too are becoming zombies focused on killing and eating the living. Here, we learn the truth behind the Zombies and what they want. They are lead by Ob, and it is in City of the Dead that Ob truly takes control of the story.

The characters are fleshed out in The Rising and the beginning of City starts out with what amounts to the end of the first book. Our lucky, or unlucky in that they still are alive, characters travel further into New York City where they are rescued by a group who have made their home in a skyscraper built after 9/11 with the aim being to withstand any such attacks again.

Needless to say, Ob leads his Zombie army to this fortress and.....well, the rest would give it away. *grin*

I loved The Rising and am quite satisfied with City. It's not quite as good as the first one - but this could be because in the first one you are still unaware of what exactly is behind the Zombies - and the suspense leading up to that revelation is powerful stuff indeed.

Definitely, the two books together are a must read for horror fans. And those of you who like the dark fantasy stuff....well, I think you'd like these books too.

Go forth and buy The Rising and City of the Dead - and see just what the possible fate of the world could be....

Posted by Amme :: 7:33 PM :: 0 comments

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Friday, June 03, 2005

Night of the Triffids by Clark

I tried reading this book over the past couple days. I've enjoyed Simon Clark's other books. In fact he's one of my favorite horror writers.

This book though, is a sequel to Day of the Triffids by another author written quite some time ago. I've never read the book - although I am aware of the story itself.

The style of this story must be similiar to the previous one - because normally I don't have a problem with Clark's writing. In this book however I've reached page 30 and have no bond with the character at all and the 1st person account is just boring me to tears.

So, onward to the next library book on my pile.

A Penny Urned by Tamar Myers which is part of her "A Den of Antiquity" series of mysteries.

Posted by Amme :: 5:49 AM :: 0 comments

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