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Book Review – Sinner or Saint, by Brenda Donelan

Sinner Or Saint

Sinner Or Saint by Brenda Donelan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sinner or Saint is the first installment of Brenda Donelan’s University Mysteries that I’ve had the pleasure to read. I’m not generally a cozy fan, but I must say that this one has all the elements that true aficionados seek. Criminology professor Marlee McCabe is an interesting and engaging protagonist, and her hometown of Elmwood, South Dakota and it’s Midwestern State University are well-drawn. The book has plenty of offbeat characters – Marlee’s Supper Club of her college cronies, as well as old boyfriends, cops and townspeople. The mystery is puzzling with many twists and turns, and the solution is unexpected but satisfying as an evildoer gets his (or her!) just desserts. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and to future installments. I did drop the rating by one star because of the slow pace and lack of tension.



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Book Review – The Dog Thief and Other Stories, by Jill Kearney

The Dog Thief and Other Stories

The Dog Thief and Other Stories by Jill Kearney

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An excellent book about broken people and their animal companions. The stories tell of life, and life is not always pretty, or elegant, or even worth living sometimes. You will find pathos here, but the author is well aware that there is beauty in pathos, even though it may be difficult or uncomfortable to notice. Her message is that there is primal bond between people and their pets, and sometimes an animal can give a person things that another human cannot, or will not. Some of the stories also depict the cruelty towards animals of which humans are capable, and it is hard to read these passages, but it is noteworthy that there’s never any cruelty towards the people from the animals. There’s a lesson in that.



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Book Review – Triptych, by Karin Slaughter

Triptych (Will Trent, #1)Triptych by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Karin Slaughter loves broken characters. Maybe too much. And maybe that’s why I can’t give five stars to this book. There’s a lot of good in it–the plotting, the pace, the wordsmithery and the suspense. But the characters, especially those in law enforcement, are so broken that I just can’t suspend disbelief enough to imagine they’d even be there. The characters’ flaws end up taking me out of the story again and and again, distracting me from the rest of the good about the book.

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Book Reviews – Blue Moon, by Lee Child

Blue Moon (Jack Reacher, #24)

Blue Moon by Lee Child

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series is suffering the fate of too many long-running series. It’s becoming predictable. Of course, that may be exactly what Reacher’s fans want. In this installment, Reacher wars against the Albanian and Ukrainian mobs in an unnamed American city, to right wrongs done to an elderly couple who are fighting to save their daughter from cancer. Early on, Reacher finds a sweet young thing working in a bar to share his bed and adventures, and we’re off and running. Fine if you like that sort of thing.
My biggest problem with the series these days is that all the suspense is gone. Reacher’s not only gonna win, there’s no one or nothing that’s even gonna challenge him. He just mows through the bad guys like they’re not even resisting. It’s pure catharsis, again, which may be exactly what Reacher’s fans want. Will I buy the next one? I swore after I read the last book that I wouldn’t, but guess what? At least I didn’t pay full price for it. Child’s still doing something right, but I wish he’d take a chance and change the formula.



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Book Reviews – Faithless, by Karin Slaughter

Faithless (Grant County, #5)

Faithless by Karin Slaughter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Faithless is the penultimate book in Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series. When I began this series, I really wanted to like it, but each successive installment keeps hitting me as meh. Slaughter is a superb writer–her plotting, pacing, scene construction and word choice are all very good. She is a master at building suspense. I think I’ve finally identifies the problem I have with the stories–I don’t like the characters. All of them are flawed, which seems to be the trend these days, and I’m a romantic at heart, so that rubs me the wrong way. But they also make poor decisions vis a vis their work–decisions that would likely get one severely reprimanded, if not fired, had they occurred in real life. Naturally, the results such decisions are responsible for many of Slaughter’s plot twists, and her characters don’t seem to learn from their mistakes. I just can’t gin up much sympathy for people like that.
In Faithless, protagonists Police Chief Jeffery Tolliver and county coroner Dr. Sara Linton discover the body of a young woman who was entombed alive in a box with an air pipe attached, only to be killed later by cyanide poured down the pipe. The investigation leads to a rural religious cult. However, as much or more of the action in the books come from the characters personal demons–Jeffery and Sara’s on-again, off-again relationship, Detective Lena Adams abusive relationship and Sara’s sister’s involvement with the cult. I figured out the mystery pretty early on, so most of my reading was done just to prove I was right while shaking my head at the characters’ ill-considered actions.
I’ll read the last book in the series just to finish what I’ve started, but I don’t hold out great hope. Of course,these problems might be why the author chose to end the series after just six entries.



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Book Review – The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After many years, I’ve reread this classic P.I. novel by Raymond Chandler, and it did not disappoint. Yet I wonder if if it was submitted to an agent today whether it would even see the light of day.
The Big Sleep breaks many of the so-called rules for good writing so popular today. It does a lot of telling rather than showing, and contains many info dumps – Chandler’s impeccable descriptions of 1940s Los Angeles for which the book is justly famous. Protagonist Phillip Marlowe is a man’s man, and the female characters exude sex, decadence and duplicity – surely such a lack of political correctness would never make it into print today. The language is chock full of period slang that you’d encounter in a noir film – did the average person really speak like that in 1939? The plot is somewhat contrived, the characters larger than life. But somehow, it all works so wonderfully! Thank goodness Raymond Chandler did not have to adhere to today’s publishing standards.

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Book Review – The Fisherman, by John Langan

The FishermanThe Fisherman by John Langan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wanted to like the Fisherman more than I ultimately did. I enjoyed Langan’s conversational style, which added the intimacy that a successful horror story must have. I enjoyed his imagery, and how he related those images to his characters’ personalities. I found the imagery very Lovecraftian, because it dealt with issues much greater than individual human lives, and tended to illustrate how universally insignificant a human life is. Langan’s principal topics, death, grief and the hereafter, were the perfect ingredients to evoke terror.
Then why didn’t I rate The Fisherman at five stars? Because it was too long, and it was fractured. The bulk of the story was historical, and did not directly involve the protagonist. It was a good story, a great story,but it was in fact, a prologue, and it took up more of the book than the protagonist’s story did. So when we finally got to that, it felt anti-climactic.
That said, I still think the book is worth reading, and I recommend it.

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Book Review – A Test of Wills, by Charles Todd

A Test of Wills (Inspector Ian Rutledge, #1)A Test of Wills by Charles Todd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Test of Wills is as fine an English country mystery as I’ve ever read. Inspector Ian Rutledge is an enigmatic protagonist, broken by horrible experiences in the Great War, voices speaking in his head, now returned to Scotland Yard to pick up the scattered threads of a life he once had. An envious superior has Rutledge assigned to a case that is a political minefield, hoping it will bring him down once and for all. But of course, Rutledge proves equal to the challenge.

The best part pf the book is the author’s meticulous characterization of the village of Streetham and it’s inhabitants. Everyone has a secret and all of them are revealed over the course of the story. The identity of the culprit is clear, but if Rutledge arrests him, he dooms himself. The author neatly resolves the conundrum his hero faces.

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Book Review – Dead End Girl, by L.T. Vargus and Tim McBain

Dead End Girl (Violet Darger #1)Dead End Girl by L.T. Vargus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a quotidian account of a hunt for a serial killer, who dismembers his female victims, by two FBI agents and a host of police officers in rural Ohio. By and large, the writing was good, but the major flaw in the book was that it was much, much too long. Every minute of every day of the investigation is chronicled, sometimes from multiple POVs, and, as in real life, much of it is unnecessary or fruitless. It seems like the authors forgot the first principle of storytelling-leave out the uninteresting parts. For example, a memorial for one of the victims, conducted to lure the killer, was described in excruciating detail over several chapters. He didn’t show. There is a difference between suspense and reader frustration. The authors also left some plot points unresolved, notably, a romantic liaison between the main character and one of the police officers. Ultimately, I had to struggle to finish the book.

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