Depraved Heart - Patricia Cornwell
Read any Scarpetta novels lately? Well, I have—but I haven’t bought one in years, and don’t intend to buy any in the future. In fact, I’m not even sure I want to read another one, because… well, because they just keep getting worse and worse. I did read the latest one, Depraved Heart, however; and I’m here to warn you not to bother.
“Why?” you might ask. Well, mainly because it was lousy. No, it was worse than lousy: it was an overblown and bloated complaint that, frankly, says a lot more about author Patricia Cornwell’s mindset than it does about her writing skills. While her two most recent volumes (Flesh and Blood and Dust at least featured some fairly interesting forensic investigations, the 23rd installment in the Scarpetta series devolves into nothing but a 466-page rant about the FBI. At the risk of getting distracted by the tabloid descriptions of Scarpetta’s messy personal life circa the mid-1990s, we have to ask, “What is your problem with the FBI, Patricia?”
Weird Indiana - Mark Marimen, James A. Willis and Troy Taylor
When we moved back to Indiana after nearly forty years, reacquainting ourselves with our surroundings ranked pretty high on our to-do list. In fact, it was right below recycling about a ton of moving boxes. We’re not the kind of people who are content with typical tourist sites –like museums, amusement parks or state parks: we tend to be more attracted to the kind of places that show up in the “Weird U.S.” series. So once we’d finished our move to Indianapolis, we picked up a copy of Weird Indiana; written by our fellow Hoosier Mark Marimen and a neighbor to the east, James Willis (Ohio), and one from the west, Troy Taylor (Illinois).
Weird Indiana is available either as a trade paperback or an eBook. On its 250-plus pages you’ll find details of more than a hundred Indiana legends (“The House of Blue Lights” in northern Indianapolis), roadside oddities (giant “muffler men” in Indy and Yorktown), and – naturally – haunts, like the Stepp Cemetery near Bloomington. The “haunt” section is to be expected, since all three authors have written their own books about the haunted places of the Midwest and beyond.
The Fate of Ten - Pittacus Lore
Even as the giant ships filled with Mogadorian soldiers loomed over two dozen human cities, John Smith (title character of I am Number Four) and his faithful friend Samwise… err, Sam bring the powers vested in them by the elders of Lorien to bear against the evil Setrakus Rá. As the two BFFs battle pasty-faced Mogs in the streets of NYC; Six, Seven (aka Marina) and the trueborn Mogadorian Adam who channels One find themselves in a pitched battle with other Mogs at an ancient temple in the Central American jungle. That leaves only Five and Nine, the remaining Garde, who battle against each other high above Manhattan.
Sam’s beloved Sarah and his high-school nemesis, Mark, have joined forces with The Navigator in what looks as though it will be a losing cause: ten or so teens and one adult, arrayed against a gazillion evil aliens led by a shape-changing ghoul who can blank the Garde's legacy powers with a twist of a wrist? But wait… suddenly, teens (and only teens – this is, YA, after all) around the world have suddenly begun developing Legacies of their own.
But why? How? And more to the point, is it too late? Read The Fate of Ten and perhaps you’ll find out…
Avenue of Mysteries - John Irving
Almost no one had ever heard of John Irving before The World According to Garp. After Garp, almost every English-language reader seemed to know his name. They eagerly awaited the release of subsequent novels such as A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Fourth Hand, and looked backward to older works like Setting Free the Bears. All that’s to say that this reader, at least, has had a thirty-plus year relationship with Irving. Some novels have pleased – the aforementioned Meany or A Widow for One Year, for instance – while others (think The Hotel New Hampshire and Last Night In Twisted River) seemed to miss the mark. Irving, it seems, gets on a “kick” once in a while, though he hasn’t written about wrestling in several decades.
Irving’s back, with Avenue of Mysteries, and the question of the day is “Hit? or Miss?” I’m afraid that I, at least, must lean toward the “miss” end of the scale. But first, let’s talk about the book…
Saturn Run - John Sandford and Ctein
Spotting it was a happy accident, on the order of the discovery of penicillin – maybe even better. The deck of photographs of Saturn, taken at half-hour intervals by a telescope in Earth orbit, shouldn’t have shown anything interesting – but they did! A gigantic ship had entered our Solar System from interstellar space, decelerating to a halt in the sixth planet’s ring system. And although the ship soon departed without ever bothering to visit Earth, that planet’s two major powers immediately started a race to get to the tiny moonlet the ship had visited and collect the “alien tech” that surely must be there.
