Calculated in Death, by JD Robb

TITLE: Calculated in Death
AUTHOR: JD Robb

COPYRIGHT: 2013
PAGES: 416
PUBLISHER: Putnam

SETTING: Futuristic: 2060 New York
TYPE: Police procedural & Romance
SERIES: By my count, 38th full-length title in the In Death series

On Manhattan's Upper East Side a woman lies dead at the bottom of the stairs, stripped of all her valuables. Most cops might call it a mugging gone wrong, but Lieutenant Eve Dallas knows better.

A well-off accountant and a beloved wife and mother, Marta Dickenson doesn’t seem the type to be on anyone's hit list. But when Eve and her partner, Peabody, find blood inside the building, the lieutenant knows Marta's murder was the work of a killer who's trained, but not professional or smart enough to remove all the evidence.

But when someone steals the files out of Marta's office, Eve must immerse herself in her billionaire husband Roarke's world of big business to figure out who's cruel and callous enough to hire a hit on an innocent woman. And as the killer's violent streak begins to escalate, Eve knows she has to draw him out, even if it means using herself as bait...

It's been a while since I've been truly excited by a new In Death, but they're dependably enjoyable comfort reads, and that's exactly what this new installment turned out to be.

When the body of accountant Marta Dickenson is found at the bottom of the stairs of a building in renovation, Eve and her team immediately know it's not the mugging gone wrong that it appears to be. It looks like a hit to them, but one performed by a not particularly professional hitman. Evidence points towards the reasons for the murder being somehow related to the Marta's work, so there we go, perfect opportunity to involve Roarke!

The case is more interesting than it sounds. Going through an accountant's workload could be a bit (well, a lot) mind-numbing, but Robb keeps it interesting by focusing on the people and personalities involved as much as on the business dealings they're involved in. I ended up really enjoying the investigation, even if I did think the ramp-up in violence at the end was unnecessary. I think the original case alone was strong enough to stand on its own.

I particularly appreciated that there was a very real sense of tragedy here. Marta never becomes just "the victim". She was a real person, and it's clear her death is felt as a huge blow by the people who knew and loved her. I came close to tears quite a few times.

The "personal" side of this book was nothing huge, but it was still interesting, and showcases the many ways in which Eve has changed over the series. The premiere of the Icove film that has been rumbling on for several films is coming up, and though Eve is not at all excited about going, she's a lot more chilled out and relaxed about doing so than she would have been at the start of the series. I also liked that through the case, she got a little bit of a better sense of what Roarke's everyday life is about. And as in previous books, we got to see more of Eve the manager and leader at work, advising Trueheart of career development. Again, it sounds boring, but when you know the characters involved as well as longtime readers of the series do, it's not.

MY GRADE: A B+.

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The Arrangement, by Mary Balogh

TITLE: The Arrangement
AUTHOR: Mary Balogh

COPYRIGHT: 2013
PAGES: 400
PUBLISHER: Dell

SETTING: Early 19th century England
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: 2nd full length novel in the Survivor's Club series, related to The Suitor novella.

A mesmerizing story of passionate awakening and redemption, Mary Balogh’s new novel unites a war hero consigned to darkness with a remarkable woman who finds her own salvation by showing him the light of love.

Desperate to escape his mother’s matchmaking, Vincent Hunt, Viscount Darleigh, flees to a remote country village. But even there, another marital trap is sprung. So when Miss Sophia Fry’s intervention on his behalf finds her unceremoniously booted from her guardian’s home, Vincent is compelled to act. He may have been blinded in battle, but he can see a solution to both their problems: marriage.

At first, quiet, unassuming Sophia rejects Vincent’s proposal. But when such a gloriously handsome man persuades her that he needs a wife of his own choosing as much as she needs protection from destitution, she agrees. Her alternative is too dreadful to contemplate. But how can an all-consuming fire burn from such a cold arrangement? As friendship and camaraderie lead to sweet seduction and erotic pleasure, dare they believe a bargain born of desperation might lead them both to a love destined to be?

The Survivor's Club series follows a group of characters who came back from the Napoleonic wars having suffered pretty bad physical and/or mental damage, and became friends when they sought refuge in the same place. The Arrangement tells the story of Vincent Hunt, Viscount Darleigh, who was blinded in his very first battle, when he was still very young.

Vincent finds himself in a bit of a pickle. Having grown up in relatively straitened circumstances, he unexpectedly inherited a title and a big pile of money. This, however, happened while he was still recovering from his injuries, and his mother and sisters took over his new estate for him. They did it with the best of intentions, but the result is that he's never been able to feel like he was in control of his new life. It makes it particularly hard to resist their unceasing efforts to get him married, especially because Vincent knows that if he dies without issue they'll all be back in genteel poverty straight away. Again, this matchmaking is done with the best of intentions. They feel it's the right thing for him to have a young woman to love and coddle him, just as they do now (which, understandably for someone who's made huge strides in adapting to his blindness, drives him mad).

Best of intentions or not, they pile on the pressure until Vincent snaps, running away when it becomes clear the young woman who's been invited to his home, her whole family in tow, has been led to expect a proposal from him (her story is told in The Suitor). But that's not the end of the marital traps, and there's one waiting for him when he goes back to spend some alone time in the house he grew up in.

Sophia Fry lives nearby, having been taken in by her aunt when she didn't have anywhere else to go. The aunt and her family make it crystal clear that she's only there because they felt they had to take her in or be badly thought of by others. She's practically invisible, referred to as "the mouse". On impulse, she intervenes when her cousin very deliberately tries to lead Vincent into a compromising situation so that he'll have to marry her. For her troubles, Sophia is kicked out and has nowhere to go until, resigned to the fact that he's going to have to get married at some point soon and he might as well marry someone of his choice, Vincent proposes a marriage of convenience.

This was one I liked ok, but very definitely did not love. Mainly, this hinges on my mixed feelings about Vincent. On the positive side, I liked that Balogh's portrayal of his blindness does not come from the Catherine Anderson school of writing. She doesn't portray him as a victim. It's clear that dealing with his new circumstances has been and still is extremely challenging, and he still has moments when it hits him, and hard, that he's blind, and will never, ever see again. The focus, however, is on what he can do in spite of his blindness and even on what he can now do because of it. That last point is made somewhat clumsily, with a fight, but at least it's made.

The problem is, he was a bit of a doormat at the start of the book, and that's never addressed. I understand all the circumstances, but his mother and sister really do love him and want the best for him, and they seem like relatively sensible people, not stupid at all. I'm not saying he should have gone all imperious and ranted and raved at them, but an honest discussion? Tell them how he feels, that he does want to marry, and understands why they feel it's so important, but "please do not ever invite a random young woman to the house and all but promise her I will marry her"? That seems pretty reasonable to me, but he runs away instead. And then, the second time he's almost trapped into marriage, he basically lets himself be led by Sophia's cousin into a compromising situation, knowing all the while that that's what she's doing, and that all it would take to stop it is dig his heels in and say "Best not, Miss March, I wouldn't want to compromise you", or something innocuous like that. It was all a bit hard to swallow, especially considering that he was otherwise portrayed as a man with immense strength of mind.

The romance was similarly mixed. The relationship itself was one I really liked. It starts out with respect and liking, and for all the right reasons. They like each other for who they are, and each likes how the other treats them. Vincent likes Sophia because she doesn't treat him like a victim. In fact, she doesn't think of him as a victim, and finds the way he clearly doesn't think of himself as one attractive. So that was great, and resulted in a relationship that felt health and good. The problem was that the conflict, the reason Balogh found to keep them from just declaring their love and arriving at their HEA, was very flimsy. For no very good reason at all, they agree when they decide they'll get married that after a while, they'll live separately. And then they keep having small misunderstandings where each thinks the other still definitely wants that, and can't wait until they can be in peace on their own. It was just silly and contrived.

Still, for all of that, it was a very pleasant read. I enjoyed the secondary characters (there was a fair bit of seriesitis, but not as much as in other recent Baloghs) and the developments in Sophia's need for a family, and I even liked the hints for the next book in the series.

MY GRADE: A B-.

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Man Booker reading 6 - The Lowland and wrap-up

Man Booker reading 1 - Harvest and The Kills

Man Booker reading 2 - The Luminaries

Man Booker reading 3 - A Tale For The Time Being

Man Booker reading 4 - We Need New Names

Man Booker reading 5 - The Testament of Mary

Finally, with only a week to go, I got to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. In it, we travel back to 1960s Calcutta to meet brothers Subhash and Udayan. Subhash is the older brother and a solid, dependable young man who gets dragged into scrapes by his more mischievous, daring younger brother. As they grow up, Subhash continues to be dependable and conscientious, while Udayan continues to be a daring troublemaker. Their closeness begins to fray when they enter university and Subhash concentrates on his studies while Udayan gets involved in a revolutionary movement and his life becomes all about bringing about social change, whatever the danger that brings him. The book then covers decades and 4 generations, moving between Calcutta and the US, where Subhash moves for his graduate studies and ends up staying.

It starts out well, with wide themes being embodied in the characters' lives, from social injustice to environmentalism, and including familial obligation and how that can be interpreted in the modern world. I was really excited about how those contrasting approaches of Subhash and Udayan might be developed and confronted. But after the death of an important character, the focus becomes much narrower, and we spend a lot of time looking at a loveless marriage falling apart and at a woman chafing against the roles life has imposed on her. Now, I actually love novels that focus on very domestic issues (I'm a romance reader, after all, and think there's little more fascinating than relationships) and I should have been captivated by that important female character, but this just wasn't done in a way I found particularly interesting or illuminating. It felt cold, like we were getting a bird's eye view of the characters' lives, without really getting involved. The way it was narrated didn't help, as the sections from several characters' points of view were done in quite an omniscient way, which felt a bit distancing.

There were several points where I felt the book could have ended, including about halfway through, and about two thirds in. Lahiri did reengage me in the story for short periods, but it all felt like it was being stretched a bit, possibly unnecessarily. In the end I wasn't sorry I'd read it, but was quite underwhelmed. A B-.

---

So, that is that. It looked for a while like I might not make it and I did wonder whether I even should, but it was just a (really long) blip. I don't think I would have picked up any of these books independently, and I think I would have missed something if I hadn't, so this project of reading the shortlist still looks like a good idea.

The winner will be announced tonight. And after all that reading, I suspect who I think should win and who I think will win might have different answers. The first question is easy to answer. A Tale For The Time Being was by far my favourite. I thought it was objectively really impressive, but I also really enjoyed it and thought it was very fresh and different. The thing is, it didn't really feel like the sort of book that would win. I don't know if I can put my finger on it, but that's my gut feeling. If I had to guess, I would go for Harvest. That was my initial guess, based purely on the fact that there is a perception that Jim Crace is due a win, and given that the book really is very, very good, I don't think it would be a tragedy if this did happen.

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Man Booker reading 5 - The Testament of Mary

Man Booker reading 1 - Harvest and The Kills

Man Booker reading 2 - The Luminaries

Man Booker reading 3 - A Tale For The Time Being

Man Booker reading 4 - We Need New Names

The next book was, yet again, something completely different (and its diversity is something I really liked about this year's shortlist): Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary. This is more a novella than a novel, at barely 100 pages, and the Mary of the title is Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus Christ. The book consists of Mary remembering the events of the last few years. She's being plagued by two demanding and disapproving men, who want to hear about her son, but she doesn't like it, so she won't talk to them. She'll tell us instead.

The point here is not 'was he or wasn't he?'. That's left ambiguous. What I found fascinating was the look at what it would have felt like for a mother to have her son become this powerful figure, someone who attracted adulation and admiration from followers who were convinced he was the Son of God, as well as the dangerous attention of the authorities, who saw him as a troublemaker they had to do something about. Mary's mixed feelings are believably portrayed. She loves her son, but part of her doesn't much like that he's become the centre of what she sees as a travelling circus, and she resents that. She often even resents him.

I was particularly struck by Tóibín's view of the crucifixion through a mother's eyes. It's something that has become so stylised and symbolic that the sheer brutality of it can get lost, but it's really brought to the centre here. I found that section harrowing and hard to read, exactly as it should be.

The book is beautifully written, with every word carefully chosen, and I enjoyed it. It didn't quite rock my world, though, and I found it interesting and good rather than brilliant and amazing, so it was a B+.

Tomorrow: The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri and wrap-up

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Man Booker reading 4 - We Need New Names

Man Booker reading 1 - Harvest and The Kills

Man Booker reading 2 - The Luminaries

Man Booker reading 3 - A Tale For The Time Being

After the enjoyable sojourn in Japan and Canada that was A Tale For The Time Being, I decided to move onto Africa, and picked up NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names. It tells the story of a girl called Darling, and starts when she's 10 years old and living in a slum in Zimbabwe circa 2007-08. We see what's going on from her eyes and her friends': the inflation, the elections and the violence that ensues, the expropriation of assets from whites, the epidemic of untreated AIDS. We then follow her as she's sent to the US to live with her aunt, and see her life as she grows up.

It was a very readable book (so much so that I polished it off in a couple of days) and I did mostly like it, but I don't really get what the Man Booker judges thought was so great about it. The writing is nothing particularly impressive. It was trying to do something interesting, gradually changing the register to reflect the narrator's changes in both age and circumstances, but I didn't think it succeeded. At the beginning, especially, it kept pulling me up short with sections which really, really didn't sound like a 10-year-old. I could see the seams a bit too often.

As for the theme and the story, well, it was a bit mixed. The first half, where Darling is still in Zimbabwe, is well done. The device of having a child simply describing what she's seeing, not really understanding it herself, but in a way that it's chillingly clear to the reader exactly what's going on, is a good one, and Bulawayo executes it well. Not extraordinarily well, though, nor is it particularly novel or revolutionary. And then, the second half was a bit of a mess, in my opinion. There were some things in it I thought were fascinating (the immigrant experience is something I'm particularly interested in), but it felt like the author didn't quite know what to concentrate on. She ended up just throwing in as many themes as possible, and as a result, the whole thing felt unfocused and confused. Also, it just stops at what felt like a random point, with no resolution of any kind. Unfortunately, I can't give this more than a B-, and I say unfortunately because I felt there was a lot of unfulfilled potential there.

Tomorrow: The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

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Man Booker reading 3 - A Tale For The Time Being

Man Booker reading 1 - Harvest and The Kills

Man Booker reading 2 - The Luminaries

Feeling a bit discouraged after spending so much time on books I didn't enjoy, I decided on my next to start on my flight back from Jordan (oh, how I love my kindle!). That was Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For The Time Being, and I knew within a few pages that it was going to be ok :)

Ruth, a writer, finds a diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the beach of the Canadian Pacific island she lives in. It was writen by Nao, a 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl, who says she doesn't have much time left, and she intends to write up the story of her amazing great-grandmother Jiko, a woman prominent in the Japanese feminist movement in the early 20th century, and who's currently a 104-year-old Buddhist nun. In fact, though we do get to know the wonderful Jiko, we get even more about Nao herself: about her difficulties in fitting into life in Japan after spending her formative years in Silicon Valley, about her struggles in school, where her sadistic classmates bully her in horribly inventive ways, and about her sucidal father, who is having as much trouble as Nao. As she reads the diary, Ruth becomes more and more involved in Nao's life and obsessed with finding out what's become of her, especially as Ruth suspects the lunchbox might have been washed away by the 2011 tsunami.

A Tale For The Time Being is a wonderful book. It's as much the story of Nao and Ruth, whose lives resonate with each other in unexpected ways, as an exploration of Zen Buddhism and quantum theory, and an intensely spiritual novel. I realise this might put off some readers; in fact, it might have put me off, because my immediate assumption would be that it's a show-offy, up-its-own-arse thing. But it's not, I swear. It's all done in a very, well, humble and loving way, a bit like the character of Jiko, Nao's great-grandmother. It also doesn't feel like an add-on, but it's intimately linked with the story itself. I really liked it. It was an A-.

Tomorrow: We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo

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Man Booker reading 2 - The Luminaries

Man Booker reading 1 - Harvest and The Kills

So after The Kills, I went straight for the book on the shortlist that sounded best, and that was The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Granted, it was another monster, at 850 pages, but I heard a few reviews on my regular bookish podcasts, and it sounded like it was absorbing and entertaining, as well as well-written. Having learnt my lesson, I didn't even consider trying to get the paper book from the library, and just bought the ebook. I started reading it on the flight out to Jordan.

The book starts with a young man arriving to a small gold-rush town in a remote corner of New Zealand, and interrupting a gathering of 12 men in one of his hotel's public rooms. The men have got together to share what they know about the strange events that have occurred in the past weeks, with gold appearing, gold disappearing, and people doing more or less the same thing.

There is a lot of stuff going on here, and it did move along. Unfortunately, the book utterly failed to connect with me. There are a lot of characters and there is a lot of plot, but none of these really made me want to continue reading. I can enjoy a book purely emotionally and I can enjoy one purely intellectually (the best, of course, are good in both ways), but neither worked here. I didn't care a whit about any of the characters, even though (or because?) there were many of them, and they were really diverse. I didn't care about what was going on with the gold. And though I thought the writing was at times lovely, the structure felt like the author was trying to be too clever for her book's good and the book felt sprawling, and not in a good way. It could have lost about a third of the section I read. And I did read quite a bit of it: I got to the halfway point (yup, a further 400+ pages with no joy), and that might have been only because I was reading in relatively short snatches, while travelling. Enough; it was another DNF.

Tomorrow: A Tale For The Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki

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Man Booker reading 1 - Harvest and The Kills

The winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced next Tuesday . I mentioned when the longlist was announced that I was planning to read all the books on the shortlist (or at least, read enough of each to get a feel of what they are like and how I like them). I loved doing that last year and, although there was a period where I wondered at my sanity, I've enjoyed it just as much this time.

I got started straight away. Obviously, at the time I didn't know which ones would be on the shortlist, but I had a bit of a guess, purely based on prejudice of which ones sounded more like "Booker books".

My first guess was Harvest, by Jim Crace, because everyone was saying he was due for a win, and we all know how that works with the Booker sometimes. It was also one my local library had. I was immediately absorbed by this tale of a small, insular English community in an unspecified past time, confronted by the outside world. I've done a longer review of it here, but to summarise, I adored the first half. The writing was beautiful and in a way that felt appropriate for the relatively uneducated narrator, and the themes really resonated (especially seeing what I interpreted as the point of view of an immmigrant who's been there a while and has become an almost-local, contemplating the arrival of new immigrants). I thought the book then went in a direction that I found a lot less original and interesting, and things went a bit vague and overly "dreamy" on the writing department, but on the strength of the perfect first half, this was a B+.

That one was a pretty quick read, so I was feeling confident. Plenty of time to read several before the shortlist was announced!, I thought. And then The Kills happened. This book by Richard House was one I wasn't sure would get on the shortlist, but it sounded pretty experimental and like it was hard work, which I thought the judges might value after that whole "readability" row a couple of years back. Plus, my library system seemed to have only a single copy, so I thought I'd best order it immediately, in case it took a while. It didn't; in fact, it arrived pretty much as soon as I finished Harvest, before anything else. I started it, and got totally bogged down.


I thought initially that this was purely due to physical reasons. It's a 1,000-page beast, and the actual act of reading it was a complete pain. It was such a heavy book that I couldn't carry it around and say, read it during my commute. Fine, I could read it on those relatively few evenings I spend at home, maybe daytime on the weekends. If I put a cushion on my lap and rested the book on it, it would be ok. Well, it took me a whole month to read 400 pages. Blame Sybil the cat. If I'm sitting on my reading sofa, she's become accustomed to curling up on my lap. And obviously, if Syb was there, I couldn't use the cushion, and holding the book in the air was impossible. Syb does go off to do stuff (like sit on the cable box and jump at nothing at all) in between snoozes, though, and then I'd pick up the book, but it felt like every time I did that she'd immediately come back, leap onto the back of the sofa and look at me balefully until I put the book aside and let her climb back on. She'd sleep for 5 more minutes, then rinse and repeat. I may have told her off a couple of times. I ended up biting the bullet and just buying the ebook, even though it was quite expensive. And then I realised it wasn't just a problem with the format.

Backtracking a bit: the book is made up of 4 independent but connected 250-page books. The first one, Sutler, is about a man on the run from one of those behemoth civilian contractors who work for the US military in Iraq. When he absconded after an explosion, under instructions from the man who hired him, he thought he was doing something only mildly dodgy, but it turns out he's been set up as the fall guy for a multi-million dollar embezzlement. The second book The Massive, goes back to Iraq with a bunch of civilian contractors, whom the same shadowy figure who hired Sutler has arranged work for at a remote burn pit. The third book, The Kill, changes tone and setting radically, and moves to Naples, where a strange murder takes place. Several of the characters in books 1 and 2 are reading a book about a murder based on a book based on a murder (I think I got that right!), and this is apparently that first book I mentioned.

I honestly don't know what the 4th book is about, because I never got that far. I struggled up to page 650, not caring much about any of the characters and only mildly curious about what was going on. I did have a bit of curiosity about if and how book 4 was going to tie it all together, but not much. And then the shortlist was announced, and The Kills wasn't on it, blast it! I immediately put it aside, thinking maybe I'd come back to it after reading the other 5 books, but I can say now that I'm not going to do that. I don't mind working hard, but during the big chunk I read, I got no joy at all for all that hard work, and have no great faith it's going to be such a great ending that it'll compensate for that. So, a DNF, and it really should have become one sooner.

Tomorrow: The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

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Deadly Decisions, by Kathy Reichs

TITLE: Deadly Decisions
AUTHOR: Kathy Reichs

COPYRIGHT: 2000
PAGES: 368
PUBLISHER: Pocket Star

SETTING: Contemporary Canada (Montreal) and US
TYPE: Suspense / Mystery
SERIES: #3 in the Temperance Brennan series

When innocent blood is spilled, she deciphers the shattering truth it holds.

Nine-year-old Emily Anne Toussaint is fatally shot on a Montreal street. A North Carolina teenager disappears from her home, and parts of her skeleton are found hundreds of miles away. The shocking deaths propel Tempe Brennan from north to south, and deep into a shattering investigation inside the bizarre culture of outlaw motorcycle gangs -- where one misstep could bring disaster for herself or someone she loves.

In this, the third book in the series featuring forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan, Montreal is in the grips of an all-out war between outlaw motorcycle clubs. Tempe's first instinct is to think they can just kill each other if they want, but the gangs' activities have a way of drawing in innocents. Tempe's autopsy of a young girl who died when she was caught in the crossfire during a tit-for-tat killing fills her with the need to be involved in the case, and she's seconded into the task force investigating the gangs.

At the same time, all is not well in Tempe's personal life. Andrew Ryan, the cop who's started to become something more than a colleague, has been arrested, and all evidence points to him being a dirty cop. Also, Tempe's nephew Kit has come to stay for a while after a fight with his father. He's obsessed with motorcycles, and Tempe gets really worried when he starts hanging out with some shady characters.

This one did not work for me at all. On the plus side, some of the forensics were interesting, and I was intrigued by some of what I saw of Claudel (Ryan's now-former partner, whom Tempe has always found rigid and unbending). We see some humanity there, and I'm hoping there will be more developments there. Other than that, nothing.

The "case" the plot concentrates on was a bust for me. We've all got our preferences when it comes to mystery or suspense plots, and in my case, I tend to stay away from stuff revolving around organised crime. I tend to prefer more of a whodunnit, or even a "howdunnit", which the plot here really wasn't. It's all about a bunch of nasty, brutish, stupid men behaving brutally, and I hated every minute spent with them. All I could think about was all these "motorcycle club" romances that have been coming out lately, and I honestly don't see the fascination. The investigation itself felt amorphous and unfocused, and therefore unsatisfying. Although Tempe has a couple of concrete cases she's looking into, it's never clear what would be accomplished by solving them. The bigger picture was too big, and there was no real resolution at the end of the book.

It was, however, the more personal that had me almost not finishing the book. Reichs has always had a tendency in this series to rely on Tempe behaving in incredibly stupid ways to move the plot where it needs to go, and there was a lot of that here. First there's the the way she deals with what Kit's doing. Yes, he's a total idiot for hearing some of the grisly details his aunt tells him about what's going on with motorcycle clubs and still thinking it's a good idea to hang around that scene, but Tempe's way of dealing with it rivals his stupidity. She basically stands there and wrings her hands. Reichs tries to tells us that she does try her best, it's just that there's no reasoning with a 19-year-old male when it comes to risk-taking, but I didn't buy it. I could think of all sorts of ways she could have spoken to him. How about sharing how she's been targetted herself, and that him being around those people puts her in danger? It was very frustrating.

The Ryan thing wasn't great, either. Tempe's reactions just didn't ring true. She's shocked when she hears the news and tries to contact Ryan, but then she just leaves it and hardly thinks about it. After those few phone calls, she barely tries to contact him. It's also a bit too obvious to the reader, right from the start, what's going on there, so the revelations at the end were more "duh" than "oh, wow".

MY GRADE: A C-.

AUDIOBOOK NOTES: This one was narrated by Lorelei King, who I though got Tempe right. She sounded like I picture her. The detailed forensic sections get a bit tedious when read out loud, but there's nothing Ms King can do about that!

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About Last Night, by Ruthie Knox

TITLE: About Last Night
AUTHOR: Ruthie Knox

COPYRIGHT: 2012
PAGES: 248
PUBLISHER: Loveswept

SETTING: Contemporary England
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: None

Cath Talarico knows a mistake when she makes it, and God knows she’s made her share. So many, in fact, that this Chicago girl knows London is her last, best shot at starting over. But bad habits are hard to break, and soon Cath finds herself back where she has vowed never to go . . . in the bed of a man who is all kinds of wrong: too rich, too classy, too uptight for a free-spirited troublemaker like her.Nev Chamberlain feels trapped and miserable in his family’s banking empire. But beneath his pinstripes is an artist and bohemian struggling to break free and lose control. Mary Catherine—even her name turns him on—with her tattoos, her secrets, and her gamine, sex-starved body, unleashes all kinds of fantasies.When blue blood mixes with bad blood, can a couple that is definitely wrong for each other ever be perfectly right? And with a little luck and a lot of love, can they make last night last a lifetime?

Cath Talarico spent most of her teens and early twenties making bad decisions she now regrets. Determined to turn her life around, she decided to move from Chicago to London and only make sensible, sober decisions from then on, and concentrate on building a career as a museum curator. It's been going relatively well. She's been good at resisting temptation, and has managed to get a foot into the really-hard-to-break-into museum world.

And then one night, against her instincts, she accepts a blind date. It goes as badly as she guessed it would, and after a couple ill-advised drinks, Cath finds herself on the train home pretty much off her face.

The man who comes to her rescue is another regular on her train journey every morning. Cath has come to know most of the passengers who travel at the same time as her, and has nicknames for each. This handsome, elegant man in a perfect suit she calls "City".

City is Nev Chamberlain (yes, I know, the name never stops being ridiculous, unfortunately, and neither is it a believable one, given what we see of his family). As Cath guessed, he is indeed a banker from a wealthy family and works in the City. But this is not the life Nev wants. He's let his family pressure him into the family business, but he hates every minute, and wishes he was back home with his paintings.

Cath is just as irresistible to Nev as he is to her. However, while he sees in Cath the right woman for him, she's convinced her attraction to Nev is yet another example of her wanting something that is bad for her, and thus is determined not to give in. The chemistry between them is scorching, and even better, you get a sense of them clicking together as people as well, as they spend time together.

I had only two issues with this, neither of them too bad. First, Knox brings in some only-in-romance-novels plot devices which would have fit better in a Harlequin Presents than in a book with such realistically modern characters. I did like what she did with those plot devices, how she played with them, but they still felt out of place here. Also, I felt some of Nev's dialogue felt a little bit off sometimes, like when he called Cath "love" right after they'd met. That's got some very distinct class markers here, and is really not something someone with Nev's background would say.

Still, this was a very enjoyable book, and I enjoyed it almost as much as Ride With Me.

MY GRADE: A B.

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Practice Makes Perfect, by Julie James

TITLE: Practice Makes Perfect
AUTHOR: Julie James

COPYRIGHT: 2009
PAGES: 304
PUBLISHER: Berkley

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: None

When it comes to the laws of attraction, there are no rules The battle between the sexes is about to make these two lawyers hot under the collar. Opposites collide when two lawyers try to make partner at the same firm. Payton Kendall is a feminist to the bone. Cocky J.D. Jameson was born privileged. But when they’re asked to join forces on a major case, they gain a newfound awareness of each other’s personal assets. The partnership spot will be offered to only one of them, though. The competition heats up. Sparks fly. Let the games begin.

Julie James has fast become one of my favourite authors. This one, however, took me a while to pick up. The plot, you see, has our lawyer heroine and hero competing for a partnership at the law firm where they work. Only one of them can make it, and it's understood that whichever of them doesn't will have to leave for another job, tail tucked between their legs. So, battle of the sexes, I thought, and my enthusiasm waned. Much as I love romance as a genre, this is not an issue it's tended to do well.

And then I bought my lawyer sister all of Julie James' books to date for her birthday, and after reading Practice Makes Perfect she a) was moved to write her first fan letter ever, and b) started badgering me to read it too.

Well, I liked this and enjoyed the read very much, but it's far from my favourite book by this author, and I'm still waiting for a romance which does the 'battle of the sexes' plot in a way that doesn't bother me (come to think of it, it's probably impossible).

So, anyway, Payton Kendall (this is our heroine, I feel like I should clarify, as the names are pretty androgynous) and JD Jameson (yes, the hero) have both worked their asses off to earn that partnership. Both feel they deserve it more than the other. Payton thinks (correctly) that JD's privileged upbringing and possession of a penis give him an advantage she has to work extra hard to compensate for. He (infuriatingly) is all resentful about the law firm's stated intention to have more female partners, which he feels unfairly gives Payton an advantage and amounts to reverse discrimination (fuck you, JD). Yes, JD can be quite the arsehole in the early sections of the book.

They start out as rivals, even pulling pranks on each other which end up being quite hilarious, mainly because James succeeds in presenting them as not malicious, just things that should be pretty minor and just annoying, but which accidentally end up being a lot bigger than intended. It helps that both are confident and brilliant enough to be able to cope with the consequences, especially Payton.

And then they're both assigned to work on the same project, and with enforced contact, they get to know each other better, and realise that beneath the confrontational façades they've been presenting to each other, and the superficial facts about their lives, they're a lot more similar in what really matters than they had expected.

So in the end, it does work as a romance. It's not perfect, and the ending left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. First, there's a revelation that comes out about something JD did long before he and Payton started getting to know each other. I thought that was much worse than characters in the book seemed to think it was, and I really didn't like what it said about JD's character. It would have required quite a lot more awareness on his part to satisfy me. Also, I wasn't completely satisfied by the solution to their rivalry. I suppose it did feel like it was a happy ending for both of them, but it's yet another romance where the expected happens, and I'm tired of that.

MY GRADE: A B.

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World War Z, by Max Brooks

TITLE: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars
AUTHOR: Max Brooks

COPYRIGHT: 2006
PAGES: 342
PUBLISHER: Broadway Books

SETTING: Near future
TYPE: Speculative fiction
SERIES: None

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

World War Z is one of the most fascinating, different books I've read lately, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The premise is we're now at a point where the Zombie Wars have been over for about a decade. The author (or rather, archivist, I suppose one might call him) was part of the team researching and writing the big official report on what happened. In the process, he interviewed hundreds of people and gathered their views and memories. The report, being what it was, only had space for the unadorned facts, but the author still felt these personal experiences needed to be heard, that they would enrich the account. So he published them separately, and this is that document, the oral history of the Wars.

This history is not told in a traditional, linear way, but through vignettes which feel almost like short stories. Together they tell a coherent story, and since we're talking of events huge enough that they changed the whole world, they range far and wide, both thematically and geographically.

The vignettes tell the story of what happened, the events: the panics, the evacuations, the battles. But they also explore how societies had to change as a result. What was required to set up an effective safe zone? How did the military have to change? How were criminals dealt with? Brooks really thinks through the what-ifs, in a way that kept making me go "oh, of course!". It was brilliantly done.

I also liked that, though there is a lot about the US and what happened there, Brooks does move around, and you get to see what's going on pretty much all over. All over the world, people are human, heroic and villanous. From a confessedly self-involved perspective, I was disappointed to see there wasn't much about South America. There's a vignette featuring a Brazilian surgeon at the beginning, and there's one where the archivist is talking to someone in Chile, but that one concerns an international conference which took place somewhere else. There were tantalising references to the fall of Buenos Aires a couple of times, and to a transmission of a singer singing some sort of lullaby that broke everyone's hearts, but that's it. Yes, even when zombies attack, we South Americans are completely irrelevant.

Anyway, moving on after that bout of self-pity. I was surprised at how engaged I was in the story, given the lack of a single person or group of persons for us readers to care about. I know that's been an issue for many readers (and it was the main criticism I saw of the movie which came out earlier this year), but it really wasn't a problem for me. It was the story of humanity, and I was fine caring about humanity as a whole. Plus, the variety of views allowed us to get anywhere and see bits and pieces no single person could have seen. I also appreciated that it was a very varied mix of 'types' of people. There were the big personalities, the people whose actions and decisions were crucial in the different stages of the wars, but also random people and their experiences. Someone who lived in a particular camp, a random soldier who was in a particular battle. It worked wonderfully.

At the same time, it makes for a book that probably works best if you dip in and out of it. I'm not sure how I would have felt about it if I'd tried to read it straight through. Listening to it on audio, it turns out, was probably the best approach (although, more on the actual narration later).

I'll leave you with a list of particular vignettes that stick in my mind after closing the book. It won't mean much to those of you who haven't yet read this, but if you have, I'd be interested to hear if you remember them as well:

- The early two centred around Israel: the intelligence guy who saw it earlier than anyone and the Palestinian young man whose father forced him to accept the Israeli offer of refuge.

- The conscienceless guy who got rich off selling a useless vaccine

- The Big Brother-type house, with the celebs, reminiscent of the last days of the Romanovs

- The feral child

- The Battle of Yonkers, where we saw just how useless it was to try to fight the last war against this particular enemy.

- Castles coming back to life in England (I listened to that chapter the day before I spent a day in Windsor, which features in a really interesting way)

- The chapter about the guy who ran the resource management organisation for the US government, with its exploration of how to set up this new society

- The Japanese shut-in teenager

- The adventures of the rebels in a Chinese submarine

- Cuba and the American boat people

- The Battle of Hope, New Mexico, where we saw what had been learnt from Yonkers

- The K9 units.

As you see, all sorts of things. It's a book I'd definitely recommend.

MY GRADE: An A-.

AUDIOBOOK NOTES: A friend lent me his audiobook, narrated by Jim Zeiger, but when I started listening, it wasn't very good. Mainly, the narrator makes everyone sound the same. There were so many different people interviewed in the book that he could have had a ball with it, done appropriate voices for each. It couldn't even have been that much of an extraordinary thing to do, given the performances I've listened to from good narrators. They can do different voices even when characters are engaged in ping-pong-type dialogue, which must be fiendishly difficult. This wouldn't have been required here. Mainly, each character speaks for good, long stretches, with occassional questions from the archivist, and sometimes asides to describe what the interviewee is doing or to read out the footnotes. So, a shame he missed the opportunity.

Also, I found it irritating that Zeiger paused and hesitated every time he said a foreign word or name, and then pronounced those words very slowly and gingerly. To be fair to him, he did try to pronounce each correctly, and they were a LOT of foreign words and names, but it felt very unnatural, and kept throwing me out of the story.

So anyway, once I realised it wasn't great, I went to audible to check whether there was another version, and there was: an award-winning multi-reader version, too, narrated by well-known actors. The problem is, that version is abridged (versions, actually, there seem to be two, one more abridged than the other). Some chapters are 'tightened', some are missing altogether, and so are the footnotes. I HATE abridgments. I want the actual book, not just part of it. So the original version it was. At least it was complete.

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September 2013 reads

This is going to be pretty short this month; unsurprising, given that I was travelling for a lot of the time. I did read more than it shows there, though. Much of the first 10 days or so of the month were spent on books I was still reading at the end of last month (including that massive doorstopper The Kills), and even my one DNF this month I abandoned after reading 400 pages.




1 - A Tale For The Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki: A-
review coming soon

On the Man Booker shortlist. Ruth, a writer, finds a diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up to her Pacific island in Canada. It turns out to have been writen by Nao, a 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl. The book is as much about Nao and Ruth's stories as about Zen Buddhism and quantum theory, and I loved every minute of it.




2 - The Arrangement, by Mary Balogh: B-
review coming soon

The hero is a veteran who was blinded in battle, and whose family is determined to find him a wife, whether he wants one or not. After a couple of close calls, he ends up in an arranged marriage to the young woman who helped him get out of one of them. Nice, but not particularly exciting or involving, unfortunately.




3 - Deadly Decisions, by Kathy Reichs: C-
review coming soon

Audiobook. Forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan investigates deaths related to an all-out war between rival motorcycle gangs. Too much willfully stupid behaviour in order to drive the plot in the directions Reichs needed it to go.




4 - The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton: DNF
review coming soon

On the Man Booker shortlist. The plot revolves around mysterious gold lost and found, and is set in the 1860s, in a remote corner of New Zealand. It's set among gold prospectors and the community that has grown around them. I read half of this 800-page book and decided that although a lot was going on, I hadn't the slightest interest in any of these characters or what on earth was the deal with the gold.




5 - A Monstrous Regiment of Women, by Laurie R King: still listening
review coming soon

Audiobook. Second in a series about Mary Russell, a young woman who becomes Sherlock Holmes' colleague, friend, and then something more. The mystery is centred on a feminist religious community, and there's also Holmes' and Russell's relationship coming to a critical point. So far, as good as the first one.




6 - The Crown of Embers, by Rae Carson: still listening
review coming soon

Audiobook. Second in a series, would probably not make much sense without reading book 1. Elisa is now queen, but before she can settle into her role, it becomes clear the danger is not over. I'm liking it so far.




7 - Married To A Bedouin, by Marguerite van Geldermalsen: still reading
review coming soon

The author visited Petra in the late 70s and fell in love with a man she met there, a Bedouin. They married, and she lived there with him and his family until his death, 24 years later. Interesting to read having just visited Petra, especially how it's changed over the years, but so far the writing itself is not that great, and I've sort of abandoned it as I race to finish the Man Booker books before the winner is announced.

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October 2013 wish list

Right, let's get back into it. Here's what I'm looking at for next month:


Books I'm definitely planning to get


Unbound, by Cara McKenna (Oct 15)

I adored McKenna's previous, After Hours, so I have high hopes for her next. From the description, it doesn't sound quite as unique as AH, but if done well, a heroine who's lost a serious amount of weight could be really interesting.





Dark Witch, by Nora Roberts (Oct 29)

This sounds like Roberts is going back to the sort of trilogies she was writing in the early 2000s, such the Gallaghers, or Three Sisters Island. Not sure how that will work out... I like Roberts' paranormals, but not so much when she goes all Irish mystical.





In Love With a Wicked Man, by Liz Carlyle (Oct 29)

Carlyle's latest have been disappointing, but it sounds from the description of this one that she has moved away from all the paranormal secret society crap. It also sounds a little bit like one of my favourite of hers, her first, My False Heart... a 'wicked' man and a heroine who falls in love with him without knowing his identity. I'm looking forward to it.




Books that interest me and I'll keep an eye on


Possession, by JR Ward (Oct 1)

I'm behind with this series, but I'll probably catch up with it at some point. Actually, I'm also behind with the BDB. I really need to be in the right mood to read one of Ward's books.





David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell (Oct 1)

I enjoy Gladwell's books. I find them thought-provoking enough to cope with his sometimes annoying voice (it's fine at the beginning, but it gets old really fast). This one is about "how we think about obstacles and disadvantages".





Running Back, by Allison Parr (Oct 21)

I still need to review Parr's previous NA book, Rush Me, but I quite liked it, enough to be interested in this novella. It sounds like it's along the same lines: pro athlete hero, brainy heroine (in this case, an archeology grad student). I just hope she's not as dismissive and snobbish as the previous heroine.





Wild Child, by Molly O’ Keefe (Oct 29)

If anyone can make this plot palatable (hero trying to run the 'scandalous' heroine out of town because he's trying to attract this nausating-sounding 'wholesome' business to it), then it's Molly O'Keefe.





The Sum of All Kisses, by Julia Quinn (Oct 29)

I haven't read a Julia Quinn for a while, must try one soon. This one sounds interesting, with protagonists who don't like each other (for what sounds like very good reasons) and are forced to spend time together.

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I'm back!

So, I'm back! I actually got back home late Monday, but I've been busy with all those pesky chores, such as unpacking and tidying up the house, which looked like a bomb site from when I packed. Turns out packing is especially messy if you're really not sure what to take. My instinctive response when it's hot it's to wear as little as possible (not quite the right approach when visiting a Muslim country, obviously), so I really had no idea how well my more 'modest' summer clothes would fare in the heat. Turns out, for most of them, not very well. I ended up wearing the same couple of very cool cotton tops several times, and buying some cotton trousers. Fortunately, one of the advantages of being in a really hot country is that if you wash something in the sink in the evening, it'll be dry by morning!

Thank you all for the good wishes in my last post. The trip was absolutely fantastic. My friend and I had a couple of days on our own in Amman (highlights included a visit to a local hammam, or Turkish baths, where we were pummelled and scraped on what looked like a marble slab, and some truly lovely food), and then we joined an organised tour with a company called Exodus.


It's not something I've done before, so I was a bit wary, but it turned out to be the best thing we could have done. It's nice to be an independent traveller, but it does take a lot of work to organise stuff (and it's usually me doing it, for some reason), so it was nice to just lie back and let something else take care of the details. We were able to do a lot more than we would have been able to easily arrange on our own (how on earth would we have been able to find out on our own that that Bedouin woman selling souvenirs in Petra had a little business cooking traditional dinners in a cave out in the desert?), and we didn't have to worry about sorting out annoying details like transport (taxi drivers trying to overcharge us was the only thing I didn't like about Jordan), or making a judgement about which boat captain would take us to good snorkeling spots off Aqaba. Also, the people we were travelling with were great, and I think 2 weeks of travelling with only 1 person might have been a little bit intense, much as I like my friend C.

I loved every single packed day of sight-seeing, exploring and culinary experimentation, but by far the best were the 3 and a half days which started with 2 full days in Petra, and then camping overnight in Wadi Rum. Beautiful, mind-boggling sights and we got to meet some great people. Fortunately we had been warned to pack walking boots, because it was all more active than I thought it would be. We spent pretty much all our time in Petra climbing and scrambling up and down rocks (our guide took us to some spots with truly amazing views, and pointed us towards good walks to do on our own), and there was a fair bit of sand dune-climbing as well.


It does make me a bit sad, though, that I suspect one of the reasons we enjoyed Petra so much was because there were so few visitors. Friends who've gone before have complained about the crowds, especially on narrow trails such as the way up to the Monastery, but it was nothing like that when we were there. Chatting with our guide and a few of the people who work there (including Salman, who learnt his Cockney-accented English from visitors staying with him and his family in one of the caves, back when the Bedouin were still allowed to live within Petra itself, and Rashid, the Jack Sparrow lookalike who owned the horse I rode out of the Siq on the last day), they reckon they're getting about a tenth of the visitors they got a few years ago. I know I didn't see a single American the whole time I was there (not unreasonable, since they'd probably be the first targetted if anything did kick off). So yeah, great for us to be able to enjoy the sights without the crowds, but not so good for the people who make their living from tourism. There was a definite whiff of desperation from some of the souvenir sellers, who weren't quite as laid back as those friends who went a few years ago had found.

When he said goodbye to us, our guide thanked us for coming during this scary time in the region, and asked us to tell people about our experiences in Jordan. Well, I hope this will do: on the last day, when C and I were having a last wander round Amman before catching our flight, we started climbing some steep, deserted stairs and a group of teenage boys appeared at the top. They started elbowing each other and whispering as they stared at us, C obviously being a Westerner. Normally I would have been a bit worried, but after a couple of weeks in Jordan, I wasn't. I knew what they were going to say as we went by, because that's what we'd got from pretty much everyone. And so they did: "Hello! Welcome, welcome to Jordan!"

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On hiatus

I'm very pleased to announce that the blog will be going on a hiatus for the next couple of weeks. The reason I'm pleased, is that it's because I'll be taking my first proper, non-family-visit holidays since I moved to England.

I've had plenty of time off in the last few years, so I swear I'm  not moaning and I recognise how lucky I am. I do a long visit back to Uruguay over Christmas, and then whatever leave I've got left (usually not much) is used up when family come and visit throughout the year, to spend time with them.

What I haven't been able to do since I moved here is take holidays where the focus is on discovering and exploring new places. I've taken a Friday off here and there to do city breaks, and they've been fabulous, but it's not quite the same.

Well, this year, I'm finally doing it. My friend C and I are flying off to Amman, in Jordan, tomorrow, and after a couple of days exploring the city on our own, we're joining a group doing a tour round the country. We'll be visiting Crusaders' castles and ancient ruined cities, floating in the Dead Sea, spending a couple of days in Petra, camping in Wadi Rum and snorkeling in the Red Sea. I can't wait!

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Dirty politics and clear stats

TITLE: Betrayed by Trust
AUTHOR: Ana Barrons

Catherine Morrissey is in Washington DC to see what the hell is going on in the investigation into the murder of her sister, a political aide. Right after the murder she thought she could trust Joe Rossi, a journalist looking into the murder, until he turned around and put some of her most hurtful, humiliating confidences in an article. She's angry with the man, but it turns out she might need his help.

This was a mess. Catherine is beyond stupid (I mean, seriously, Joe is a journalist, and she always knew it, and that he was investigating her sister's murder!), and their interactions felt faked and forced. Plus, I objected to all the slut shaming. There's a lot of contrasting of the purity and innocence of Catherine (She's a schoolteacher! She dresses modestly! She even looks pure!) against the sluttiness of Blair, culminating in a lovely spot of victim-blaming. On Blair: "From all accounts, it was here that her promiscuity had really taken off. And mostly likely killed her." Thanks, but no thanks.

MY GRADE: A DNF.



TITLE: The Norm Chronicles
AUTHOR: Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter

Risk and how people understand it, process it and react to it is a big part of my job, and I've often had the occassion to hear David Spiegelhalter speak about the issue (he's Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge). He talks good sense and is very clear and accessible, so I was glad to see he'd written a book with Michael Blastland, who makes some excellent programmes on Radio 4 (More or Less is a particular favourite, stats nerd that I am).

The book was good, I thought. The subtitle is "Stories and Numbers About Danger" and you pretty much get what it says on the tin. Starting with stories about prudent Prudence, average Norm and reckless Kelvin, they look at a number of different areas and explore both how people react to the risks involved and what the risks really are. The last point is the strongest element of the book. Risk is extremely hard to explain to people, but through the use of the startlingly clear concepts of MicroMorts and MicroLives, I think they've got it. The weak point was, in my opinion, the stories that opened each chapter about Prudence, Norm and Kelvin. They felt a bit off and like they obscured the issues rather than illuminated them. My reaction to them was more "WTF?" than "a-ha!".

Nothing new here for someone with a background in the issues, but as a primer, I think this would work really well.

MY GRADE: A B.

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The Bride Wore Scarlet, by Liz Carlyle

TITLE: The Bride Wore Scarlet
AUTHOR: Liz Carlyle

COPYRIGHT: 2011
PAGES: 384
PUBLISHER: Avon

SETTING: 19th century England and Belgium
TYPE: Romance / Paranormal romance?
SERIES: Fraternitas Aureae Crucis #2

Passion and secrets simmer behind the elegant façade of Victorian London in another deliciously intriguing novel featuring the mysterious men of the St. James Society.

Anaïs de Rohan has faced danger in her past, but never anything so great as posing as the new bride to one of the St. James Society's most magnetic—and ruthless—leaders. But Lord Bessett's bold challenge to prove herself worthy of joining his secret all-male society is impossible to resist. So she daringly agrees to travel with the enigmatic nobleman on a dangerous mission to save one of their own—a little girl with a frightening gift.

Soon intrigue swirls about them, drawing them ever closer. And Anaïs quickly realizes that the intimacy of sharing Lord Bessett's bedroom is proving a temptation impossible to resist. As for Bessett himself—well, he might be a soldier sworn to the Society, but he certainly isn't anyone's saint...

I was disappointed with the first book in this series, One Touch of Scandal, but this is Liz Carlyle we're talking about. Even though her latest haven't been great, she's written some of my favourite books, so I was willing to give the series another shot. As book 1, The Bride Wore Scarlet is centred around The St. James Society, the name of the recently reformed Fraternitas Aureae Crucis in England. The men who are part of it are Guardians, their mission being to protect the Vateis, mainly women and children who have got the Sight.

Geoff, Lord Bessett (son of the couple in Three Little Secrets) is a Guardian, and his latest mission is to go to Brussels to rescue one such child. Anaïs de Rohan (whose parents were in No True Gentleman) had a great-grandmother who had the Sight herself, and determined Anaïs would be a Guardian, in spite of being a female. She's devoted all her life to training for it, but the Fraternitas prove themselves stubborn about their arbitrary traditions. She is, however, offered the chance to help out Lord Bessett in his mission in Brussels, as a woman would be helpful in approaching the endangered child and her mother.

I read over a third of the book before I gave up. It just wasn't working for me at all. The whole deal with the fraternity felt off. It felt half-baked, but at the same time, ponderous and self-important, without really justifying to the reader just how it's so crucial to the whole world. I found it impossible to care about their missions and their traditions. It might be that the danger the little girl is in becomes more clear and present later in the book, but I was yawning.

Neither was I engaged with the characters. Geoff and Anaïs seem to be interesting enough, on description. He's taken on his responsibilities to the fraternity somewhat reluctantly, and there are intimations that he's got a bit of a Gift himself, and Anaïs is very non-traditional and kickass. They just never felt like real people, and I could feel no chemistry between them. Again, I wasn't interested in them.

Also, it made me uncomfortable that Carlyle chose to use as her main characters the children of couples from previous books that weren't paranormal (all right, there was a touch of it in No True Gentleman, but it was just that, the merest touch). It feels like rewriting history in a way, so when I now reread Three Little Secrets and No True Gentleman it will be in my mind that these people live in this world with secret societies and all sorts of paranormal powers, but they just don't know it.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

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Take What You Want, by Jeanette Grey

TITLE: Take What You Want
AUTHOR: Jeanette Grey

COPYRIGHT: 2013
PAGES: 113
PUBLISHER: Samhain

SETTING: Contemporary
TYPE: New Adult
SERIES: None

She needs an escape…and he’s exactly what she had in mind.

College senior Ellen Price spends every spare minute studying to get into medical school. Until spring break yawns before her, as empty as her wallet. With no money to hit the beach, she fills her empty to-do list with a plan: for just one week, she will become the kind of take-no-prisoners woman she secretly wishes to be, starting with the hot guy at the bar. It's a no-risk situation: at the end of break, he’ll head back to his campus, and she’ll go back to hers. No muss, no fuss.

At first, Josh Markley isn’t sure what to think when the quiet, intense beauty from his pre-med classes approaches him for a night of casual sex. Even more mystifying, she doesn’t seem to return his recognition. But if she wants to play “strangers in a bar”, he’s game.

Their passionate night is a welcome respite from life’s stress, but afterward, Josh realizes he wants more—from himself, from life, from Ellen. Except she still thinks he’s a one-off she’ll never see again. Confessing the truth now—before she figures it out on her own—could shatter the fragile beginnings of just what the doctor ordered. A forever love.

Ellen Price is in her last year of college. She dreams of going to medical school after that, so she spends all her time and energy on study. And then comes spring break. Her friends are all going off on a holiday she can't afford, so she decides that, since she's staying home, what she'll do is take a holiday from her usual serious, responsible self.

Ellen's plan is simply to dress up in sexy clothes (her serious attitude extends to her clothing) and pick up a stranger in a bar. The thing is, the stranger she ends up going for isn't actually a stranger. Josh Markley is actually in her pre-med class, and he's had his eye on Ellen for a while. Ellen doesn't recognise him (in addition to her being really focused when she's in class, there's the Clark Kent device of Josh having just started to wear contact lenses), and Josh is confused when she tells him she's a waitress.

Josh assumes Ellen's just doing some sort of sexy role-playing, and doesn't correct her when she assumes he's a student somewhere else, home for spring break. But then, after an amazing night, Josh realises she really didn't recognise him. He definitely wants more than just the one night, but how does he convince her?

This was a cute story. Josh and Ellen are likeable characters, and I was rooting for them. Also, the trope of having the hero desperately feel that he must make the sex so, so good that the heroine will want more with him is one that (somewhat guiltily) really appeals to me. So I mostly enjoyed this, even while realising that it just wasn't particularly great.

Mainly, the thing was that the story was very low conflict. Josh and Ellen were angsting away, but basically, the whole thing boiled down to each thinking 'oh, I want more, but I don't if he/she does!'. There was no real reason why they wouldn't want to be together, since they got along fine, liked each other and found each other incredibly attractive, not to mention that career-wise, they were quite well suited. Of course you can never be certain, but the angst was beyond that. It felt a little contrived, to be honest, like a faux-conflict.

I thought the story had too many sex scenes for such a short book. After the first few, they felt gratuitous. I would have preferred it if some of them had been replaced by Josh and Ellen actually talking and getting to know each other out of the sack. There was a bit of that, and it did seem that they were a good fit, but not enough, definitely not enough to be exchanging 'I love you's at the end.

Also, Josh was lovely, but he felt a bit too good to be true and his character didn't make complete sense. He's handsome, nice, sensible, good career prospects, and even amazing in bed, although it's never really explained how he got that way. There's no reason given why he wouldn't have a regular, health self-esteem, and yet he's spent 3 years obsessing over Ellen, not approaching her even though there was absolutely no reason not to, even if just to say hello and pretend to ask her something about the class. It felt contrived.

I did like the conflict about Josh's career plans. His father is a doctor and his heart is set on Josh being one as well, but he has come to realise he doesn't want to do that. He's got other plans, and he's very nervous about broaching the subject, and about his father's reaction. The thing is, again, it felt like much angst about not much at all. He acts like he's about to drop out of college, but actually, what he wants to do is in no way controversial and only a completely unreasonable asshole (which his father clearly isn't) would have major issues with it.

I realise I've been moaning for the last few paragraphs, but all these things weren't major irritants, and certainly didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book completely, just dampened it.

MY GRADE: A B-.

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Warm Bodies, by Isaac Marion

TITLE: Warm Bodies
AUTHOR: Isaac Marion

COPYRIGHT: 2010
PAGES: 256
PUBLISHER: Atria

SETTING: Near future
TYPE: Speculative fiction
SERIES: None

R is having a no-life crisis—he is a zombie. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he is a little different from his fellow Dead. He may occasionally eat people, but he’d rather be riding abandoned airport escalators, listening to Sinatra in the cozy 747 he calls home, or collecting souvenirs from the ruins of civilization.

And then he meets a girl.

First as his captive, then his reluctant house guest, Julie is a blast of living color in R’s gray landscape, and something inside him begins to bloom. He doesn’t want to eat this girl—although she looks delicious—he wants to protect her. But their unlikely bond will cause ripples they can’t imagine, and their hopeless world won’t change without a fight.

Warm Bodies is the story of R, a zombie living with a big group of others of his kind in an abandoned airport. We get an inkling from the start that R and, to a lesser extent, his friend, M (that's all they can remember of their previous lives, the beginning of their names) might be somewhat special amongst their fellow mindless, lumbering companions, who seem driven purely by their instincts (braaaaains!).

We get proof of that during a raid. A group of young humans are cornered in a ruined building outside of their stronghold, and the zombies soon overcome their resistance. As usual, they go straight for the brains, which allow zombies to vicariously experience the memories and emotions of non-zombie lives. Some of those memories involve the man's girlfriend, and suddenly, R notices she's in the room. And in a complete break with usual zombie MO, he decides to take her back to the airport with him, unbitten. It's rare enough for a zombie to have enough self-control to just bite a human and make them into a zombie (usually they just devour). To keep themselves from biting them at all, not to mention keep them close without attacking them, is unprecedented.

And the more time R spends with the girl, Julie, the more human he becomes. Gradually, the fog in his mind begins to clear, and he begins to feel. But if they want to change the way their world works, they'll face resistance both from humans and zombies.

Yep, this is Romeo and Juliet with zombies (I felt ridiculously proud of myself when I realised R's friend, M's name is meant to be for Mercutio), but the point is not so much the romance, but what it means to be alive and to be human. I found that quite interesting and well done, although at some points the author goes a bit overboard. Some of the sections in which R thinks deep thoughts and ruminates on state of the world came across as him being a bit up his own arse, rather than insightful. For the most part, however, it was interesting.

I also liked the humour here. There's a lot of grimness (and, to be honest, ickyness) here, but R's viewpoint makes it bearable. He's not a wisecracking comedian, it's all in the way his observations are wry and a bit off-beat. His descriptions of his fellow zombies, especially, made me giggle.

MY GRADE: A B

AUDIOBOOK NOTES: The narrator was Kevin Kenerly, and he was good. It must have been a challenge to do R's speech and show how it gradually got better, but he succeeded. I also thought the delivery helped emphasise the sly humour in the narration.

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