[Holiday shopping?  Check these inexpensive ebooks out as an online gift for your reading friends and relatives.  Or, any ebook in my catalog.  You can also give them one of my trade paperbacks.  Full Medical, Soldiers of God, The Midas Bomb, and Survivors of the Chaos are all available in paper.  The Midas Bomb, Chen and Castilblanco #1, will soon have a second edition in all ebook formats as well as paper.  All quality entertainment at a reasonable price!]

The Dante Connection (Genieve Lenard #2).  Estelle Ryan, author (Amazon Digital Services, 2013).  I read and reviewed the first book in this series too, but this one can stand-alone if you just want to jump in (the sign an author knows how to write a good series).  All the original characters are back, including the villain, but enough backstory is provided to bring the reader up-to-date.  Genieve is a functional autistic who retreats into a dark place and writes out Mozart opuses when she gets overwhelmed, but she possesses an uncanny skill for reading body language, from facial expressions (which many people can do) to small movements and muscle tensions.  There isn’t much mystery here—it’s more a suspenseful thriller.  It moves along with enough twists and turns to keep any fan of the genre interested.  It’s also better than #1.  Apparently an entire multibook series is planned, so if the author can keep this up, I’m hooked.

Dead Wrong (Blackmore Sisters Mystery #1).  Leighann Dobbs, author (Amazon Digital Services, 2013).  The price was right (a freebie), so I decided to try a cozy mystery!  What’s cozy mystery?  A story about ordinary non-pros solving a crime—the MC (in this case four MCs) are usually librarians, teachers, housewives, and so forth, living in out-of-the-way places, who lose patience with the pros and practice DIY crime solving.  The out-of-the-way place in this case is Ogunquit, Maine (it’s called Noquitt in the book, for some strange reason, but all the other local names are the same—I know them well, including Perkins Cove).  One of the pros is hiding something (not resolved in the book); another is romantically interested in one of the Blackmore sisters—Victorian-style romance is another characteristic of this fluffy subgenre.

I don’t get it.  I thought we were past Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher (also hiding out in Maine).  There’s not enough meat on the bones to call this turkey a real mystery (not disparaging here, because I love succulent turkey meat), whatever that might mean now, although it was a pleasant four-hour read.  Is the only difference between cozy and romantic mystery the length?  I’m thinking of Mary Higgins Clark and Carla Neggers, who write longer pieces of fluff (i.e. no earth-shaking themes).  Fans of this subgenre (librarians, teachers, housewives, and so forth?) will enjoy this pleasant escapist piece, and I’ll have to admit it was very well written with some complex twists (some of the mystery still remains after you finish, so call that a series cliffhanger).  (BTW, I know “fluff” sounds condescending, but just think of cotton candy or whipped cream in Irish coffee—fluff can be good in the right circumstances.)

Kill Switch (Angel of Darkness #1).  Steve N. Lee, author (Amazon Digital Services, 2015).  Very little mystery here.  Tess is the Angel of Darkness aka old-fashioned Charles Bronson vigilante, except that she’s female.  She has some agenda we’re not sure about associated with returning to NYC and wreaking revenge on someone, and she has enough creds from training in India and China to do it, but Poland is a stopover where she helps a distraught and dying mother find a daughter kidnapped for a sex-trafficking gang.  Not finding out what Tess’ mission is a bit of a cliffhanger—that’s a negative.

This is definitely not for squeamish readers.  In one scene, for example, Tess calls the mother on her threat to kill one of the kidnappers, and she can’t do it, so Tess completes the job by sticking the guy’s switchblade into his eye.  Tess is a bad ass, but she has a switch that allows her to go from compassionate, sensitive person to a dangerous assassin (learned in the Far East?).  She reminds me of Barry Eisler’s hero, in fact.

If you’re OK with all the violence, let me insist that this is a great story about strong, intelligent women defending themselves from unscrupulous men and their criminal abuses.  In some of the fight scenes, I found myself cheering Tess on.  I agree with her vigilante sentiment—taking out these SOBs, even if it’s a drop in the huge ocean of bastards who exploit women, makes the world a better place.  I’m a firm believer that the world would also be a better place if women were running things—in that case, we probably wouldn’t need vigilantes like Tess.

In elibris libertas….     

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Mini-Reviews of Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.