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It’s every parent’s worst nightmare… Aragon Urrea came home from an errand and found his 18-year-old daughter Angelina gone. Kidnapped by a business rival, sort of; but when that rival is the head of the most brutal narcotics cartel in northern Mexico, you cannot call the Feds. What’s a father to do? Urrea picked up the phone and dialed 1-800-NOWHERE… and Evan Smoak answered with that signature phrase, “Do you need my help?” |
…but the main characters of Kurian’s debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, are pretty close to 100% psychopathic. That’s because they’re members of the seven college students enrolled in a study run by renowned psychologist Leonard Wyman; youngsters who’ve received full-boat rides to a DC-area college so he could study them in the wild. Well, actually, one’s faking it – a rather strange twist given that psychopaths usually fake being “normal.” Anyway, protagonist Chloe Sevre – 18, gorgeous, smart, psychopathic coed – is really there so she can murder Will Bachman. Truth be told, he kind of deserves it…
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When you read at least fifty mystery or thriller novels a year, you can’t always depend on a half-dozen or so favorite authors to have a new release ready for you when you finish your latest. As a consequence, I read a lot of novels written by authors whose work, to be kind, I will probably not seek out again in the future. The latest in my string of one-and-dones is Allison Brennan, who released The Third to Die – Quinn & Costa Thriller Book 1 last year. Given the pace of Brennan’s work, she’s probably already finished number four. Here’s the plot in about 115 words: |
 
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I received a free copy of Charles Wachter’s The Twin Paradox in return for my honest review. Well, they asked for it. Here's the book:
Begin by constructing a skeleton of “the hero’s journey” overlain by a skin of LOTR, stir in heaping helpings of Robert Ludlum’s The Holcroft Coventant, Nancy Freedman’s Joshua Son of None, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Coat the entire recipe with pseudo-science too weak to fool a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fan and sprinkle the result with word-usage errors and desultory research. You got yourself The Twin Paradox.
The Holcroft Covenant reference is to Ludlum’s sonnenkinder; children of the Third Reich born in secret to take over the world forty years after Hitler’s demise. Joshua Son of None gave Wachter the idea for cloning a dead world leader decades before Dolly. The reference to Jurassic Park will become clear, and the rest? I’ll explain. |
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In case you hadn't noticed, Lisa Scottoline hasn't written a Rosato & Associates novel in years. The last time, she tells readers who make it to her afterword, was more than four years ago. Four years... could it have been that long? Well, when you consider that in those four years she gave us Cate Fante (Dirty Blonde), Vicki Allegretti (Devil's Corner), and Natalie "Nat" Greco (Daddy's Girl) in lieu of the amazonian women of Rosato-land, it's pretty easy to forget that the last time Mary DiNunzio dithered her way across the page was in 2004's Killer Smile. Problem one being, nothing much's changed: DiNunzio is still a ditz, and Bennie Rosato still only makes cameo appearances. That's too bad: Bennie is the Philadelphia equivalent of V. I. Warshawski, and Mary... Mary... well, suffice it to say that the world does not need another Stephanie Plum... |
 | There's no question whatsoever of "nature vs. nurture" in the Underwood family. Given that papa Underwood - the name "Paine" is on his mug shot the local sheriff's department - named his daughter Abbey "...after one of his favorite writers, some weird old bird who's buried out west in the middle of a desert," it should come as no surprise that he's been known to perform a wee tad of monkey-wrenching¹. And getting caught - which is his most recent problem. With Dad in jail and Mom walking around mumbling the dreaded D-word², young Noah Underwood is having himself a heckuva bad summer. |
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It’s a dog owner’s worst nightmare: the pet that shares your life has attacked someone. In this case, it was worse… far, far, far worse. Morgan Prager came home to her Williamsburg apartment that afternoon only to find her three dogs – a Great Pyrenees and two rescue pit bulls – covered with blood. In her bedroom she found the body of her fiancé Bennett, so savagely mauled that the funeral could only be closed-casket. One of the pitties didn’t survive the arrival of the patrolmen who responded to Morgan’s frantic 9-1-1 call; the other two dogs were bundled off to the local pound’s version of death row. The only reason they stayed alive at all was that they were evidence in a homicide… |
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When I read a mystery novel, I generally find myself comparing it to some of my favorite thrillers in the genre. Come on, you do the same thing. Maybe a character sounds familiar, perhaps the setting rings a bell, heaven forbid that the plot follows something I’ve already devoured. The first novel in a series can be critical, because if you don’t like the protagonist, it’s hard for you to come back for another helping. And then again there can be other, structural problems… …which is what happened with the first novel in Alan Jacobson’s Karen Vail series, The 7th Victim. You’d like to identify with Vail, a hard-charging FBI profiler, but Jacobson makes it pretty hard. Let’s get to the plot, and then we’ll explain. |
When you've been given the name Hiro Protagonist, you're typecast from the day your birth certificate was completed. Luckily for our hero Hiro, however, he fits the name quite nicely: he's a world-class swordsman when wielding the katana his father left him, not to mention being a world-class hacker. On that last point, he's one of the original founders of the virtual-reality world known as the Metaverse — which means he can get into its most famous virtual nightclub, the Black Sun, any time he wants. In real life, Hiro's found that freelance hacking jobs are sparse and swordplay doesn't pay at all, so he's employed as a deliveryman for the Mafia. A pizza deliveryman...
Like the Bushes and the Kennedys in politics and the Barrymores in theater, there are dynasties in fiction. Some are more successful than others: think Steven King and his son, Joe Hill (ignore Tabitha, though…) in the world of horror; or James Lee Burke and daughter Alafair if your taste runs to mysteries. And then there are the Ephron sisters… everyone knows Nora for such films as “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Silkwood,” but did you know that her sister Hallie Ephron is also a writer? Neither did I, at least before I picked up a copy of Careful What You Wish For… and I’m still not sure.
Boston Homicide's D. D. Warren is not about to let a case of the postpartum blues slow her down, no, not one step. But this latest case is… just plain weird. Oh, one more dead pedophile is nothing new; but the woman she meets at the murder scene, a woman who's come to see the cop she expects to investigate her own murder? Now, there's a first. |
By now, I suppose you've figured out the format for The Great Fantasy (---)logy. It used to always be "Trilogy" in homage to LOTR, but I think some authors are now up to more than twenty volumes per "story." Anyway, the standard set of tropes is a battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil, some sort of "fellowship" that invariably splinters, an arduous journey (usually across mountains) and a talisman that must be rescued/destroyed/captured so that Evil can be held at bay – at least until the next series begins. Oh, and there's one more convention: medieval weaponry. It wouldn't do to have this particular saga's version of Frodo picked off by a sniper who's hiding behind a boulder high on the slopes of this particular saga's version of the Mountains of Mordor. Yeah: that's fantasy. |
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Here's a sad observation: if prospective parents had to pass a qualifying test to have children, as they must do to get a driver's license, there'd be a lot more childless people among us. In one specific case I can think of, the book The Glass Castle would never have been written, because no one in his right mind would have allowed Rex and Rose Mary Walls to breed. But breed they did, not just once but four times – and second-eldest daughter Jeannette (freelance writer and one-time commentator on MSNBC) has captured a strange and sorrowful childhood within the pages of her memoir. |
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It's been said that "armies prepare to fight the war they just finished," which seems borne out by recent history: WWII vs. Korea; Korea vs. Vietnam; Vietnam vs. the "War on Terror"... perhaps the military mind can only learn the hard way. We can forgive the military this time, though, for there was never a way to prepare, at least not for a war like World War Z. After all, how can you prepare for an enemy that knows no fear? for an enemy that can't feel pain? for an enemy that can't die, because he's already dead?
That's the story of World War Z, where "Z" is for "Zombie." |
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On the one hand, we have harried ER physician Kate Morrison, MD. On the other hand, we have upright RCMP sergeant Andy Wyles. They just happen to be in love. Great love life or not, Kate’s work life is miserable right now, so when Andy’s superior officer asks for her help with a case in which a medical question may be tangentially related, the good doctor jumps at the chance to spend a couple of days in a wealthy enclave in British Columbia’s primo ski country. |
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Since there are just the two of us, we chose the small InstantPot cooker; the 3-quart size. Lo and behold, the recipe booklet packed with the cooker was for the 6-quart size (InstantPot "help"¹ took six weeks to explain to me that they didn't have recipes specifically for the mini). After a couple of abortive attempts to use the pressure cooker – we ended up having to dump everything into a saucepan and cook it on the stove – we relegated the Mini Lux to making rice on days we forgot to use our regular rice cooker. |
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Spenser Q. Collins made his way from the mean streets of South Chicago to the ivy-covered halls of Harvard on the strength of his valedictory address and his jump shot. Now in his sophomore year, the young African-American premed student is flabbergasted to be “punched”¹ by a “final club”² - in fact, the finest of them all, Delphic. Upon hearing he’d been punched, Spenser’s best bud, filthy-rich Dalton Winthrop some number-or-other, informed him that Delphic is not just the best Harvard club, it’s also the most mysterious: some kid disappeared into their palatial clubhouse one night in 1927 and has never been heard from again. Ooooh: a mystery. |
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It used to be that libraries had a section they called “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” but most libraries and bookstores now separate the two. I don’t know the official difference (Wikipedia probably does), but in my world, fantasy is derived from “sword and sorcery” and Science Fiction involves speculation about how the scientific advances will change humanity’s future. Ignore Steampunk and VampRom for now – that’s what I do. Fantasy demands the willing suspension of disbelief; good SciFi is a prediction. We aren’t likely to develop into sorcerers and magicians any time soon, but progress marches on: that’s why we have more computing power on our wrists these days than could be developed in a middle-sized room in the era of punch cards. That may be why the best science fiction authors are scientists themselves… not people with English and “multimedia” degrees like Kelly Robson. |
