Sean

I wish they allowed half-stars...it's not a five-star book, but it's not a four-star book, either. I love this book. The movie was very good, too. Irving is a great writer.

In the umpteenth book in the vaunted Pendergast series, a serial killer is targeting the ultra-wealthy in New York, and Lt. D'Agosta and Special Agent Pendergast must track the maniac down before the city loses its collective mind and the panicked wealthy citizens bring wrath down about the NYPD And FBI.

I have read all of the Pendergast series. Every year, I look forward to the new one. At this point, Pendergast is an old friend despite the many enigmatic elements of his character, even after all these years. There's something about his unflappable nature, refined tastes, and gothic charm that appeals to me, and I think he's one of the great detectives, up there with Holmes and Poirot.

Preston and Child make a formidable team. Their books always clip along easily, demanding page-turners. CITY OF ENDLESS NIGHT is no exception to that rule. The writing, as always, is crisp and fluid. The story is enthralling. Even with their usual standards met, this story surpasses many of their more recent books solely because it is almost entirely focused on the problem at hand. There is precious little of the Pendergast family dramas that have tainted many of the more recent books, and Pendergast is not as melancholy and moody, dwelling over Constance and/or Helen, or the possibility that Diogenes is out there somewhere. He's an actual FBI agent again, and he works with Vincent to actually solve a mystery.

I know that Doug and Linc probably won't read this review, but if they do: Give me more of that. I'm not really a fan of Constance. I could do without her. I like seeing Pendergast focused on a real, flesh-and-blood crime without any supernatural elements filtered into it. It is refreshing to see him back in his natural element, to see him with some levity, to see him actually doing his job.

I'll take more of this sort of story every year. It was the sort of tale that first attracted me to the Pendergast series, and it was told well. I'll be hoping that the next go-round will be more of the same.

5/5

I've been a fan of Craig's since I picked up the first book in the Longmire series. Each year since then, he's graced the shelves with another jaunt around Absaroka County, Wyoming, and I look forward to that book every year.

This year's installment is THE WESTERN STAR. The title refers to a steam train that takes all the sheriffs of Wyoming on a four-day run where they can get drunk, have a good time, and deal with general sheriff business.

The book leaps back-and-forth in time, telling a story about Walt Longmire in the present, and leaping back to tell the story of a young Walt, just two weeks on the job, taking the ride on the Western Star with his boss, the cantankerous Lucian Connally.

Young Walt purchases a copy of Christie's MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS at the beginning of the book. That should tell you where the story is headed.

In the present, Walt and his usual cast of Absaroka regulars (Henry, Vic, Lucian, Dog, Cady, and granddaughter Lola) are dealing with their own crisis. The situation in the present ties into the mystery in the past.

Craig leaps back and forth in time with simple grace and manages to weave both stories together. This is a trick he's done before, but it still works. It's always interesting to get more insight into Walt and why he is who he is. Seeing Walt and Henry as young men is a pleasant contrast to who they've become.

As always, Johnson's prose is effortlessly readable and charming. One of my favorite things about how he writes (and something I've been trying to take notes on) is the lack of dialogue attribution. There's probably only five, maybe six uses of the word “said” in the whole book. Instead, the dialogue blends seamlessly with the prose and there's never any doubt about who is saying what. The dialogue is sharp and witty, too. There are moments of laugh-out-loud humor balanced in among the seriousness of the murder. His descriptions are sparse as Wyoming prairie, but there is nothing left to the imagination. He peels back layers of description and gives you precisely what you need to know with only a few simple phrases. It's a gift to be envied, for sure.

I'm already looking forward to the next installment. They really can't come fast enough for my tastes.

Five stars.

The essays are what make this cookbook readable. Sure, the recipes are good, but the essays are a paean to food, hanging out with friends, and impressing girls–all things any dude would be proud to partake.

The food looks great, but I read it for the writer's sense of humor and easy relatability.

I've a confession to make: I'm a 42 year old man who loves football, swords ‘n' sorcery fantasy, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I've probably read the Little House books dozens of times. My favorite is THE LONG WINTER, and that single volume was probably one of the biggest reasons why I wrote AFTER EVERYONE DIED.

When I saw a book blurb on a Harper-Collins mailer about a novel called CAROLINE, and saw that it was about the Ingalls family's move from Pepin, Wisconsin to the Kansas Indian Territories, I was intrigued. This was a novel written for adults from the perspective of Caroline Ingalls, the family matriarch, and how she and Charles moved to Kansas with two young girls, while she was pregnant with her third. The book was a fascinating and insightful look at a a woman who doesn't get too much depth in the books (Laura's love for her father is evident often, but Ma is a steadfast icon in the background, kind and nurturing, but never really a deep character). I have the utmost respect for Charles and Caroline and how they handled their moves across the prairie, helping to settle this country. To really get inside Caroline's head was a wonderful treat for a fan of the Little House books.

Sarah Miller really dives deep on Caroline, bringing up the historical facts of her own childhood (losing her own father at age five and being raised by a stepfather) to process the relationships she saw between Charles and the girls. She really examines the relationship between Caroline and Charles, a very tight, loving relationship that any couple would envy.

All in all, it's a really interesting piece of historical fiction that I found riveting. It was nice to see the pieces of Laura's LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE show up in this book from Caroline's perspective–things like Mr. Edwards meeting Santa Claus, and the building of the home in Kansas with Mr. Edwards' help, and the malaria outbreak that nearly killed the Ingalls family. Laura was relegated to a squawky child in the background, while Mary was more of a focus for Caroline. Even in Laura's books, Laura was Pa's kid, and Mary was Caroline's.

If you're a fan of the Little House books, I'd recommend giving this one a go. You might enjoy it.

Having said all that, this is one of those books that I both loved and hated. I loved everything I saw that I wrote about above. Miller is clearly a good writer, and she has a love for the material. Her prose is elegant and vivid most of the time.

The things I hated are based wholly on my own tastes and opinions, not anything empirical. For instance, Miller's prose–to my mind–is often overwrought. Obviously, this being a major publication from Harper-Collins, it was edited by at least one or two editors who had no problem with this prose. It feels as though it fits Caroline's personality. It is a similar voice to how Laura wrote the initial books, and given that it's directed at adults and not children, the extra wordiness of the prose can be forgiven, but I found myself rolling my eyes at times.

One of the biggest issues I had with the prose was the proliferation of similes. It felt like there was at least one heavy simile per page, so much so that I started getting angry at every one. They were obvious similes that tried to capture a voice from 1870, and sometimes they were forgivable, but many times they felt so obtuse and clunky that they took me out of the moment.

Again, her editors seemed to have no issue with them, so this is purely my own editorial tastes in action. I'm not against similes. I use a lot of them, myself. But when they start battering down your door with obviousness, there's a problem.

I enjoyed the story greatly. It was a welcomed perspective to a book series I love. Even with my own issues with the prose, I'd still give this one 5/5 stars. It was an enjoyable and readable book, just a little heavy-handed at times.

Michael Connelly has an envious career–sixty million books sold, multiple series, and he crushes all of them. Now that Harry Bosch is retired, Connelly wasn't about to hang up his keyboard. He just keeps going. I'm pretty sure that Connelly could die and his corpse could still crank out a novella on muscle-memory alone. So, Connelly needs a new hero: Enter Renee Ballard.

Gritty, tough, and no-nonsense with a surfer's soul, Ballard is a worthy successor to Harry Bosch. “The Late Show” is a solid debut, and I'm excited to see more of her.

‘River of Teeth' by Sarah Gailey was one of the most unique books I've read in ages. A Western with hippos instead of mustangs and written to feel almost like a classic heist film. Highly enjoyable and a great premise.

I like Lincoln Child. He went to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnestoa. I lived in Northfield for several years. Never met Linc, but I still like him. He, with his writing partner, Douglas Preston, has turned out a prolific amount of pages over the years, namely the Pendergast series and the Gideon Crew novels. However, FULL WOLF MOON is the fifth in the Jeremy Logan series, which is Child's alone.

I enjoyed the rest of the novels in the series. The premise is always the same: Logan is a widowed professor and an “enigmalogist”–a guy who studies enigmas. Usually, Logan finds something bordering on the supernatural, and then he skulks around until he uncovers the truth of the matter (and truth is always stranger than fiction), and then there's a flurry of action at the end as the story comes to its climax. It's always page-turning good fun.

FULL WOLF MOON is no exception to this beat. Logan is at an artists' retreat in the Adirondacks to finish a monograph, but the deep forest has been plagued in recent months by strange, brutal killings, possibly done by a rogue bear? Maybe Bigfoot? As one would expect from the title, maybe it's a werewolf.

Although the story starts slowly, once it picks up, it clips along with a solid pace, as typical for Preston/Child novels. Child manages to paint a plausible scientific basis for hairy dog-men running through the forest and feeding on the flesh of the untainted (albeit, a bit of a stretch). Once you see how he sets up the sketchy science, if you let yourself buy into the theory, the rest of the book is a roller coaster that eventually comes to a satisfying conclusion.

FULL WOLF MOON is not breaking new ground in the Jeremy Logan series, and it suffers from a lack of character development, but it's a fun read, and I will be looking forward to the next one.

A tight band of memorable heroes.
An impossible quest.
Weapons of myth and legend.
Every notable beat from fantasy.
Erectile dysfunction jokes.

Sign me the hell up.

KINGS OF THE WYLD reads like Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride had a baby, and then that baby decided to get drunk a lot and play Nazareth records at full volume.

The great mercenary band Saga, long broken up, reforms for one last quest: To save their front-man's daughter from certain death at the hands of the massive Heartwyld Horde. Long past their prime and each battling his own demons, the five members of Saga join together one last time for the most epic battle of their lives.

Nicolas Eames, in his debut novel, has earned my adoration and praise. The pacing is tight. The characters are instantly memorable. The plot was fantastical, yet endearing. It was everything I want in a fantasy novel.

Although this book is a pure standalone novel, Eames is at work on a second book set in the same world with a couple of the peripheral characters from the first book. I'd definitely read that.

These four books are easily in my top five favorite book series of all-time. It was sad to see this jaunt come to an end.

We can only hope the Greatcoats will ride again soon.

A needless, plodding book. Only worth reading if you actually enjoy being caught up in petty he-said/she-said things...

Nick Petrie writes a good book. In the same vein as Lee Child and Brad Thor's high-octane adventures, the Peter Ash follows a similar formula but has a bit more of a literary feel to them. There is some artful wordplay and some interesting character development.

Good series. I'm looking forward to the next book, “Light It Up.”

I haven't been as taken by a series of books and a writer's abilities as I have Bledsoe and his Tufa novels in quite some time. There's something about the world Bledsoe has created in his fictional Cloud County and this race of displaced fairies, the Tufa, which makes me desperate to know more. I want to know all their secrets!

In the Tufa books, Bledsoe has a whole people to take stories from, a sort of Spoon River Anthology of backwoods rural folk. There's no central character to his stories, usually. Instead, the community of Needsville and the Tufa people become the protagonist. This means that Bledsoe can approach the community from any angle. There is a multitude of characters that can grace his pages, and endless wealth of stories to tell.

In GATHER HER ROUND, the fifth outing in Cloud County, the community of Tufa have been struck by a tragedy: a monster pig, bred and raised domestically but released and gone feral, has killed one of their own. Hard to think a catalyst like this could turn into a love story, but the Tufa say that all songs are love songs.

Like the other books, Bledsoe's prose is tight and effortless. It compels you to read more. His affection for his characters is evident, and his grasp on the community as a whole is total. The greatest travesty is that it takes a year (or more) for a new Tufa novel to emerge from this fertile landscape he's created and I'm stuck waiting, desperate for the next one, the images and ideas of the most recent book plaguing me like an earworm that gets stuck in your head and leaves you humming the same song for weeks.

All of these books are fantastic. GATHER HER ROUND is no exception, a five-star novel in every way, shape, and form. Alex has said that the sixth trip through Cloud County is on its way. I will have to wait patiently for it to arrive, because I'm sure it will be another must-read novel.

I love the Ranger's Apprentice series. I love John Flanagan's work.

I hate prequels.

There was no drama. We all knew who would live and die.

Prequels are rarely worth it.

I've read every book in the Pendergast series. While they've become somewhat predictable and formulaic, I still enjoy them. FBI Special Agent AXL Pendergast in one of those characters that starts as something original, and then becomes mysterious, and now–in many ways–sometimes seems of a parody of the original character, but I still enjoy reading about him. I enjoy his fastidious ways, his Sherlockian view of the world, and his upper-crust snobbery. I especially enjoy getting little glimpses of the past. How does someone like Pendergast exist? What made him join the Army? What made him opt for Special Forces? What makes him tick?

THE OBSIDIAN CHAMBER deviated from the paranormal slant that many of the Pendergast books rely up, and that made it feel slightly fresher. It was also a (potential) end to the Cain/Abel relationship between Aloysius and Diogenes.

While I enjoyed the book, I felt myself skimming pages because I didn't need to get bogged down in Lincoln and Child's endless descriptions of a world that only the wealthy and intellectually snobbish can pursue. There was precious little of D'Agosta in this book, and that was a bit of a downside. I think the relationship between D'Agosta and Pendergast is one of things that make the series more accessible to outsiders (reg'lar folk like us all...).

I hope that Lincoln and Child get back to the roots of the Pendergast series (i.e. Pendergast vs. Supernatural monsters) and just do it better. While I'm giving the book four stars, it's starting to feel rehashed and phoned-in. After sixteen books, I imagine it would begin to. Perhaps giving Pendergast someone to butt heads with, someone who will call him on his upper-crust antebellum better-than-thou attitude would enliven the series.

If you haven't read any of these books, I recommend them. They're easy reading with memorable characters.

Harry Bosch keeps working, and Connelly's quality hasn't dipped in the slightest. A worthy entry for #19 in the series.

Just finished this book, and while it wasn't exactly what I expected, it was certainly worth reading and I look forward to the sequel. I wish this site allowed half-stars. I'd bump my rating to 4.5 if I could.

SCYTHE is the closest thing to a Utopian novel I have ever read, but given that Utopia is unobtainable, the dystopia lurking beneath the perfect façade was fascinating.

SCYTHE takes place in a future where humanity has conquered everything–even death. People live for hundreds of years, getting gene therapy to take themselves back to their twenties when they get too old. If they die accidentally, a drone takes them to a revival center where they heal after a few days. (Bored teenagers hurl themselves off of buildings for fun–they call it “splatting.”) Nanites in the blood make sure a person can never be depressed or hurt. Break a leg–opiates in your bloodstream kill the pain and in the morning, your leg is good as new.

Humanity has also given themselves over to a massive AI system called the Thunderhead that keeps the Utopia progressing. It controls everything...except the Scythes.

The Scythes are agents of death. Long ago, the Thunderhead realized that permanent deaths would be necessary to maintain the Utopia on Earth, so the Scythes were created to cull (they don't “kill”–they call it “gleaning”) humanity when necessary. The Scythes are above the law, but not above petty squabbles and political maneuvering. They are, after all, only human.

Two teenagers, Rowan and Citra, are chosen to apprentice into the Scythehood and learn their ways. After their training, one of them will be a scythe, and the other will be gleaned.

All in all this was a fascinating book. The two main characters bordered on cliché at times, but given that it's a YA dystopian novel, they're allowed to. In fact, that's part of the point–the future provided so well that everyone is sort of the same and sort of boring.

The book's strength is that it raises some fascinating questions about mortality, about what it means to actually live, and it shows that even in a perfect system, there will always be utter douchebags who power-grab because people are fallible and petty.

I recommend.

This book got a lot of hype. It lived up to it.

After fifteen books, Joe Pickett has seen just about every bad guy you can imagine, short of an international terrorist cell.

So, let's have Joe and Nate Romanowski try to take down an ISIS fracture cell.

That's the basis of OFF THE GRID.

CJ Box is a great writer. He's not flashy, and he tells a good story, but like so many writers who do action-based mysteries, there is a tendency to get overrun with machismo and stretching the fabric of believability to a near-breaking point. Box takes this book to that breaking point and just about breaks into the eye-rolling, throw-the-book-across-the-room climax, but it's still a readable, good fun outing from everyone's favorite Wyoming game warden.

I'll keep reading Box because he's so good at what he does. And given that the fifteenth book in the series, ENDANGERED, was one of his best, I'll cut him some slack on OFF THE GRID. It's far from his best work, but it gets the job done.

Sort of like Joe Pickett himself.

One of my favorite non-fiction books.

Sometimes a writer hits a premise that's so brilliant, you get angry with yourself for not thinking of it first. Seanan McGuire did just that with this book. What happens to the protagonists in fantastical stories who journey through a portal to another land, live an entirely different life, and then get expelled back into the boring world, the world where they're no longer the savior of nations or the most beautiful, or the whatever-it-took-to-complete-the-story-in-their-portal-world. How do you come back from something like that?

In this book, they get sent to a special school/therapy home that tries to teach them how to be “normal” again. The home has varying degrees of success on its residents. Some acclimate back to the normal world and go off to work a 9-to-5 and have families. Others...don't.

When the main character returns from her Underworld adventure where she became the beloved of the Lord of the Dead, she has trouble fitting into the school, but clicks with a group of misfits (even in a home of misfits) and gets to the bottom of a murder mystery.

The book's premise is brilliant. The prose is graceful. The characters are interesting–familiar to those who have read fairy tales, but still with a hint of uniqueness. McGuire makes use of interesting cliched tropes, but spins them in a way that feels new.

I'll probably read the sequels, but the books are really geared more toward YA girls. My almost-15-year-old daughter is loving the book.

Finished Nicholas Petrie's THE DRIFTER last night. I enjoyed it. It was an action/mystery, very much in the Jack Reacher vein, but it had enough separation from Reacher that it didn't feel like a wanna-be or a copy.

In the protagonist, Peter Ash, Petrie created a flawed, damaged hero that was refreshingly different from Lee Child's uber-hero Jack Reacher. Ash is carrying some deep scars from his eight years in the Marine Corps and just trying to find solace in this world. He has severe claustrophobia as part of his PTSD and that makes everything a challenge for him.

In the book, Petrie manages to raise some serious questions about how the government treats its veterans, as well as throwing some shade at how the rich stay rich in the county.

It wasn't a perfect book, but it was very good. Some of the dialogue felt stiff, and it felt like the pace of the second act dragged a bit, but I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, BURNING BRIGHT, which just came out not too long ago.

My first go-round with de Castell's books were his incredible Greatcoats series. Now, I've been reading fantasy since I was six years old. (My mom got me the Dragonlance Chronicles for Christmas and I've been hooked since.) I have sampled all the realms, seen more magic systems than I care to count, and read enough pages about blood-soaked blades to last a lifetime. (Not mine...someone else's, though.)

The Greatcoats vaulted themselves into my pantheon of my favorite books. De Castell now sits on a shelf with Rafael Sabatini, Christopher Moore, Alex Bledsoe, Craig Johnson, Sherman Alexie, Terry Prachett, and Margaret Weis.

The Greatcoats had all the goods: wonderful characters, stupidly heroic stands against impossible odds, and some of the best dialogue I've ever read. Not to mention, the world building de Castell did was fantastic. The idea of Saints and Gods walking among people in a sort of pseudo-18th Century, pre-industrial revolution France-like place was incredible.

When TYRANT'S THRONE came out earlier this year, I pushed everything else off my reading shelf so that I could journey with Falcio, Kest, and Brasti once again. Now, sadly–that journey came to an end. De Castell promised they'd be back...someday.

Well, until that day occurs, we have a new hero in a different world in de Castell's new YA series: SPELLSLINGER.

Kellen is a young mage who is nearing the time of his trials. Pass them–he becomes a mage. Fail them, and he becomes a servant for mages. Only problem: Kellen has yet to spark any of the magical bands on his arms that help him focus his powers. His younger sister, Shalla, has sparked all six. She is growing to be a powerful mage, but Kellen has all but lost any power he once had.
In his quest to prove himself a mage of his clan, Kellen uncovers some hard truths about his people, and uncovers a mystery that threatens his family and society.

Like the Greatcoats series, this had everything I want: a solid hero who is too stupid not to take a punch, humorous banter, exciting set pieces where cleverness beats strength, and squirrel-cats.

I need a squirrel-cat.
It would all be fine and dandy if the book only had this going for it, but like a lot of YA literature, it doesn't stop there. Something YA often does better than stuffy adult fiction is to touch on themes that important to today's society, particular to the YA readership.

In SPELLSLINGER, de Castell finds the time and genius to make us think about oligarchy, about slavery, about living up to our parents' expectations, about what family really means, and about what it means to be true to yourself and accepting of who you are. In this aspect of the book, he delivers the best magic.

In the opening salvo of a new series that's sure to be another hit, SPELLSLINGER paves the way for a grand adventurer into a world that has just begun to be built. The second book in the series is already on the way, and it is at the top of my to-be-read list.

Five stars.

A surprisingly good book. I liked this comedy autobio more than many other comedy bio books out there. Really solid work.

Spade knows he's not everyone's cup of tea, and it's important to note the difference between the Spade you see on TV and in movies, and the real guy who is nothing like his stage persona. It was nice to hear the stories about Farley and Spade's time on SNL.

He doesn't really touch on much about Sandler, though. Found that a little strange.

Get the audiobook. Worth a listen.

CJ Box writes a good mystery. He has a simple story-telling style that I enjoy greatly. He's not going to drown you with fluid, unnecessary descriptions. He's not going to insult your intelligence, either. It's a very fitting writing style for a series of novels centered on a very blue-collar detective, Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett.

In the first novel in the Joe Pickett series, a trio of murders lead to Joe getting embroiled in an investigation concerning the unstoppable force of land development running into the unmovable object of the possible discovery of an endangered species. Add into that the difficulties that come with being the new guy in the county, a pregnant wife, a narcissistic mother-in-law, and two precocious daughters, and clearly, Joe has his hands full.

I don't know who came first, CJ Box or Craig Johnson (turns out, it's CJ Box), but both write in similar styles about the same general area of Wyoming. Both are very skilled with sparse prose and solid, interesting characters for whom the reader is instantly compelled to become invested.

Through both of their books, a deep-seated desire to move out to Wyoming has bloomed in me, something I never thought could happen. But, through the beauty of their books, I harbor a great need to relocate to the wide-open countryside of northeastern Wyoming. Maybe someday I'll be able to make that happen. Until then, I will continue to read about it.

I will definitely be checking out more of the Joe Pickett series. The second book in the series is called SAVAGE RUN. It will be worth a look-see, definitely.

www.cjbox.net